Recently by Alicia Anstead

  Everyone knows that identity runs deep in Brooklyn -- and I confess that one of the reasons I like living there part time is that it reminds me of the willful neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was a kid in Anacostia and Hillcrest. But like all places of identity, you don't really get to claim ownership unless you were born there or somehow got there when the most mythical neighborhood-building activity was going on. By every definition, I'm a latecomer to Brooklyn. I'm a post-hipster, post-hardscrabble, post-we-did-it-our-way interloper.

All of this was reeling in my thoughts when I saw the recent Boston premiere of In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards at ArtsEmerson's Paramount Theater. In the spirit of The Laramie Project and journo-actor-writer Anna Deavere Smith, the Brooklyn-based "investigative theater" group The Civilians conducted interviews, residencies and research around politicians, activists and neighbors involved with the controversial development projects in their beloved community. They developed the script based on those stories. ArtsEmerson provided a residency to the cast last year and, after its Brooklyn premiere, brought it back to Boston -- where similar civic issues such as the Big Dig and Harvard's Allston project have also been contentious -- even as everyone seems to agree that the stunning Paramount renovation has been good for the city and the arts.

The Civilians piece is a primer about Brooklyn's spirit and acreage -- the neighborhoods -- and about the power of The Man. But I found myself distracted by another quality that I've come to associate with documentary theater: righteousness. That's the nature of political theater, of protest theater and (I guess) of investigative theater. It may even be the soul of a community done wrong. In some way that righteousness tells the story better than newspapers, but it rarely makes for a gripping night of theater. (And I've seen the Civilians do gripping.)

More importantly, the show left me wondering: What is the role of narrative in reporting-based theater? And why is theater increasingly taking on the documentary format? Is it our longing to see neighbors, rather than celebrity, depicted onstage? Is life really stranger than fiction?

In the Footprint has a scrappy, gutsy cast digging around at scabs that go beyond building a sports arena. The piece has much to teach us about standing up, acting out, fighting strong, and writer/director Steven Cosson makes sure there's a lot of humor amidst the anger, angling and displacement, particularly in Michael Friedman's original tunes. I wanted more story, but I did get the picture.   

PHOTO: In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards, presented by The Civilians. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Today the web magazine Edge published the answers to its annual "question of the moment." This year's heady inquiry was: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? I didn't read all of the 151 responses by some of our biggest brains, but I read many of them and was instantly reminded of a conversation I had last month with the musician Meklit Hadero (pictured here -- photo courtesy of her). 

Hadero and I were preparing for the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference, and I asked her about the new APAP program for artist fellows she was heading. My question was: What can the rest of us learn from artists, particularly in tough economic times?

Her answer could easily have been published in the Edge lineup, but instead it appeared in Inside Arts, the magazine I edit for APAP.

"We conduct so much experimentation in our everyday lives about how to be artists," Hadero said. "You do it creatively. You do it economically. You do it in terms of how you tour and the ensembles you want to play with. And you're always experimenting. Right now, we're in a place where we don't know what's going to happen in the arts, and we don't know how the field is going to change and develop and morph and shift. The thing that's going to get us through and help us adapt the most will be our creativity and our ability to take risks -- which artists are doing all the time. In order to survive, you have to constantly be experimenting, and that's the spirit of openness and willingness -- to embrace the not-knowing, the ability to be flexible and to be responsive creatively to changing circumstances. Artists are great at that."

At the conference, Hadero and I heard many attendees talk about the value of creative thinking -- the type artists and scientists do every day. I suspect arts journalists, particularly those of us who are freelance, have a special insight into this mode of thinking, too. In the process of problem-solving, the best in our fields are fearless about risk, open to discovery and dedicated to finding meaning in unexpected places.

You can read an analysis of the Edge "mini abstracts" in today's Guardian, but you might find stimulating and useful answers if you contact the artists in your community and pose a similar question: What artistic process would improve everybody's toolkit? My guess is that most of the answers will cite risk, discovery, letting go and, yes, embracing the non-knowing.

This weekend, I may stop by the Paramount Center's Bright Family Screening Room in Boston to see a free screening of "The Sound of Music." By my calculation, I've seen the film 20 times, as a child and again as the parent of a child. It showed up in my life around the same time as other movie musicals such as "Peter Pan" and "Cinderella" that were made in the 1960s and were on TV each year when I was a kid. That was before DVDs and Netflix (and VHS), so the annual showing was a fairly exciting family event. It was also before replay buttons on remote controls, and I feel sure I watched TV with far more focus and clarity than I do these days when I'm likely to also be tweeting or texting at the same time.

 

In other words, my little mind was taking in far more information with fewer distractions, and I memorized those musicals in the same way I learned to say prayers at Mass: It was all rote, but the practice with musicals was far more challenging given that they came on once a year and Mass was once (or more) a week.

 

In any case, it was a testament to just how deeply "The Sound of Music" was embedded in my long-term memory when I recently attended Doug Elkins & Friends' production of "Fraulein Maria" running through Oct. 3 at the Paramount Center in Boston.

 

Elkins is an award-winning choreographer whose creds come from the break dancing world. For "Fraulein Maria," he combines modern dance and ballet with his street moves and the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein's soundtrack featuring a full-throated Julie Andrews. Which means that when Elkins started popping and botting and ticking as the Mother Abbess in "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," he augmented the song from an operatic pep talk about dreams to a display of just how much tutting a righteous B-Boy can achieve within about a four-foot halo of spotlight. He wore a black and white hoodie - a kind of wimple for the hood couture - and embedded the symbols of the tune (his hands do an itsy-bitsy spider-like move when the refrain is sung) and of contemporary hand jive such as basketball shots and, for lack of a better term, the pinkie-and-thumb-connecting-to-the-mouth-and-ear "call me" action. His moves and the choreography throughout the show were utterly new to me and yet they made perfect satirical sense given my familiarity with the movie.

 

Elkins is a virtuoso. And he has surrounded himself with a troupe of virtuosic dancers who suggest what it must have been like in, say, Shakespeare's time or in the early years of traveling circuses when you had to be a polymath of artistic ability to be part of the company. Many of the Elkins dancers have had conservatory training. But they are also gymnasts, martial artists, trapezists, break dancers, actors and comedians. Their previous tenures are as varied as the Flying Karamazov Brothers, Bill T. Jones, the Metropolitan Opera and "trained Chris Brown." So there was 20-year-old Gui Greene defying gravity with his airborne power moves performing an "I Am Sixteen (Going on Seventeen)" pas de deux with David Parker, who was swan-like as a corporeal, middle-aged, cross-dressing Liesl. And there's Deborah Lohse who strutted on her tiptoes to connote the high heels her stridently bitchy Baroness might wear but suggesting in elegant slapstick the way Carol Burnett might have played the role had she been cast in the movie instead of Eleanor Parker. I wasn't exactly surprised even as I still gasped during the sentimental duet "Something Good" when Jeffrey Kazin, as Von Trapp, did a full-out run at Meghan Merrill, as Maria, and leapt into her arms for a traditional, though role-reversed, ballet catch.

 

It strikes me that Elkins takes his street aesthetic to the level of "cultural remix," which his company represents: a diverse group of dancers in terms of race, age and gender roles (plus five Emerson College students who join the troupe for one number). But he also engages in a form of remix in his use of varied dance genres that equally celebrate ensemble and individual talent. From this complicated pastiche emerges an appreciation of the American musical as a form so pliable it breaks down the high-low art rules - ballet meets graffiti dance - and becomes a trope about the elasticity not only of the human body but of a work of art. In other words, "Hamlet" is still becoming "Hamlet." "The Great Gatsby" is still becoming "The Great Gatsby." And thanks to Elkins, "The Sound of Music" is still becoming "The Sound of Music."

 

And I, for one, can't wait to see the movie for the 21st time.

 

Photos: Doug Elkins as Mother Abbess by Yi-Chun Wu; troupe photo and Robert Parker as Liesl by Christopher Duggan.

 

Rob Orchard stood on the stage of Boston's historic Paramount Theatre last week to announce the inaugural season of ArtsEmerson, a new initiative that will see him programming four venues -- three in the newly renovated Paramount complex and also the Cutler Majestic Theatre, all under the Emerson College umbrella. Last year, Orchard made a quieter announcement: that he was leaving his post as executive director of Harvard's American Repertory Theater in Cambridge after 30 years. He was retiring. I had visions of Orchard out on a sailboat off the coast of Maine basking in a career well done and a wind effortlessly ridden. But Boston had another plan for Orchard. Organizers at the Paramount, one of the last great movie palaces of the 1930s, took him on a tour of the $92 million renovation of the complex -- a 590-seat theater, a flexible black-box theater that can hold up to 150 seats, and a 170-seat screening room. That was the end of the sailboat fantasy. Orchard is now Emerson's executive director for the arts, and the lineup for the four spaces is a combination of new works, international groups and, eventually, a film series. Boston is experiencing an exciting stage in its arts identity, and ArtsEmerson is the newest cultural activation that combines academic mission with civic duty and a broad artistic vision. "This was not a career move on my part," Orchard told me. "There's something liberating about having a job you don't view as a stepping stone to something else. You can give yourself to it entirely." What follows is an edited version of the rest of our conversation.

This may seem like a crazy first question but what is the role of the performing arts in a city?

Whether it's a performing arts center or a facility, it's a crossroads. It's a place for people to get out there and experience great works and to be transported and to be better citizens. How idealistic do you want to get?

Well, how does art make someone a better citizen?

It's a democracy, and part of what art can do is communicate ideas and open up dialogue in a nonthreatening, non-ideological way. I don't think an artist should ever be burdened with the responsibility of changing society. The only thing you can ask artists to do is to tell the truth from their perspective. An audience knows when it's being told the truth -- whether or not it's a truth they want to hear. But they can sense sincerity and that gets the mind thinking in ways that are productive in a culture. Art does play that role of catalyst.

James Rainey's Los Angeles Times article on tepid press reception of Gustavo Dudamel's first U.S. tour as LA Philharmonic music director reminds me of a scene I'm watching unfold in Cambridge, Mass., where Diane Paulus is completing her first year as artistic director of American Repertory Theater. Both media and popular support of Paulus have been strong, but there's a less documented story on the street. Is she turning A.R.T. into an out-of-town stage for New York actors and other theater workers? Is her work serious or is it, as has been suggested of Dudamel's, a "publicity and fund-raising machine"? 

During her first year, Paulus has produced the biggest ticket-seller of any season at A.R.T. -- "Sleep No More" by England's Punchdrunk theater -- and her revival of "Donkey Show" that has been running nearly a year at A.R.T.'s smaller black-box space has a minor cult status locally. People love the work, or they don't. Critics love the work, or they don't. But the work keeps trucking, just as it does with the other theaters in the Boston area. Paulus' "Best of Both Worlds," a musical adaptation of "A Winter's Tale" staged in an inner-city vernacular, featured outstanding performances by an all-black cast -- a rarity at A.R.T. -- but the show didn't find the same kind of following as "Sleep No More," and the writing didn't cast the same spell for many who did attend. Same for another import, "Paradise Lost," Daniel Fish's update of Clifford Odets' play. Time will tell how Paulus assesses these two productions.

Paulus' newest work, "Johnny Baseball," is a musical about the Red Sox. The show opens June 2, and the local theater community is already noting that the cast is imported from New York -- even as the story is written by Massachusetts native Richard Dresser, stars Boston Conservatory graduate Stephanie Umoh, and features young Erik March, pitcher and infielder for the Newburyport Pioneer League. In previews, theatergoers wore Red Sox outfits and caps, and drank beer during the show. Can Fenway fans be far behind?

May 6 marks the 70th anniversary of John Steinbeck winning the Pulitzer Prize in literature for "The Grapes of Wrath," and I'm re-reading the book and re-watching the movie to see what resonance there might be between our time of recession and the Great Depression. No surprise that the squalor depicted in both the book and the film is shocking. Poverty is still shocking -- more than any other theme in the book, that one hasn't changed. But what really struck me reading the book this time was the uniquely American sense of judgement leveled at the "Okies" by other characters in the story. Not necessarily the bankers and land owners, who are depicted as outright monsters, but other working people along the Joad family journey -- waitresses, police, clerks, people who could quickly become disenfranchised themselves.

Consider this excerpt. Gas attendants have just refueled the overloaded jalopy the Joads are driving from Oklahoma to California. As the Joads pull away en route to cross the desert, the two attendants reflect on their unfortunate customers:

"Jesus, what a hard-looking outfit!"

"Them Okies? They're all hard-lookin'."

"Jesus, I'd hate to start out in a jalopy like that."

"Well, you and me got sense. Them goddam Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live like they do. A human being couldn't stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain't a helluva lot better than gorillas."

"Just the same I'm glad I ain't crossing the desert in no Hudson Super-Six. She sounds like a threshing machine."

The other boy looked down at his book of bills. And a big drop of sweat rolled down his finger and fell on the pink bills. "You know, they don't have much trouble. They're so goddamn dumb they don't know it's dangerous. And, Christ Almighty, they don't know any better than what they got. Why worry?"

"I'm not worrying. Just thought if it was me, I wouldn't like it."

"That's 'cause you know better. They don't know any better." And he wiped the sweat from the pink bill with his sleeve.

What I particularly like about this passage is the profane invocation of Christianity in the cussing and the absence of so-called Christian behavior at the root of their sentiments.

Steinbeck's book is about many things: the Depression, family life, hardship, survival, the Emersonian oversoul and even literary style. We journalists take special pleasure in the prominence of his work because, after all, Steinbeck was a journalist who made the risky leap into fiction. (He went on to win the Nobel in 1962.) But as I read his masterful story now, I find myself thinking not only about the face of economic poverty but about the emotional and social poverty that too frequently continues to hover when we confront "the other."  

We may be inching out of the recession. But scenes like the one above -- which is equally shocking in John Ford's 1940 movie -- make me wonder when we might truly inch out of the bigotry we as Americans feel entitled to employ in the face -- to the faces -- of people in need. Could be California. Could be Arizona. Could be our own back yard. Seventy-one years after the publication of "The Grapes of Wrath," I wonder what themes Steinbeck might record and excoriate from our own times.     

Elizabeth Strout has made her name as a fiction writer. Her three novels "Amy and Isabelle," "Abide with Me" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Olive Kitteridge" have each struck a deep note among readers. Strout is working on her fourth book, but between projects, she accepted the position of guest editor for the spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares, a journal of new writing published three times a year at Emerson College in Boston. What was it like for writers to be edited by a writer? "Liz was great," said Katha Pollitt, a journalist and poet whose "Angels" is included in the collection. "She very energetically extracted that poem from my fog of dithering. I'd probably still be revising it if it weren't for her. And in her comments she saw things I hadn't even realized were there!" And what was it like for Strout to pick up her pen as an editor? Her answers are below, but if you're in the Boston area next week, you can listen to Strout read from her work and talk about her editorial debut at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 15, at the Paramount Theatre at Emerson College.

What interested you about being a guest editor for Ploughshares?

Poetry. Obviously, I love the whole thing. But the truth is I love poetry. It's not like I ever studied it, but I read a lot of it including work by lesser known poets. I'm a member of all the poetry associations so I always have poetry coming through the door. I'm so interested in it. It was exciting for me to think of making some choices myself about poets. And I love literary magazines. Literary magazines were my food for so long. I read all of them endlessly.

"It's a two-hour version with no intermission, and it's very action-packed," said Mr. Burdman, who's directing the play. Audiences will be able to get in on the action to some extent by following the show as it moves around the center. "Wear comfortable shoes," Mr. Burdman said. "We've got seven flights of stairs." NYT 3/5/2010

This New York Times excerpt is from a story about a New York Classical Theater production of "Hamlet" directed by the company's artistic director Stephen Burdman. The show is in rehearsal for its opening in April at the World Financial Center, a sprawling space in Lower Manhattan. But the excerpt also tells us a little something about the increasing power of audience participation in live theater - in its process and performance. It's the age of the video games and reality TV, after all, and we want live theater to be engaging not only of our minds but of our bodies, too. We want to be stakeholders in the narrative. Theatergoers and even passersby who witness a sword fight between two Danes downtown should not be alarmed. It's just art. And on the night of the show, you can fully expect to use those comfortable shoes to "get in on the action."

Live theater is now a performance event for everyone!

In Cambridge, Mass., where I live, American Repertory Theater's artistic director Diane Paulus has put muscle into audience participation. Last year, she re-staged her crowd-inclusive "Donkey Show"; it's now running indefinitely in the theater's annex space where nearly nightly crowds turn out to dance alongside the "Midsummer Night's Dream"-cum-Studio 54 disco cast. One addict apparently has seen the show 30 times. (I've been three times.)

This is the first in a weekly series of interviews with editors.

Sharon Waxman made her name as a journalist in the print world. The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times and New York Times have carried her byline. She is also the author of "Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World," about illicit antiquities, and of "Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System," about the 1990s generation of auteurs. Now Waxman is editor in chief of TheWrap.com, which launched in January 2009 and covers the entertainment business. You've known editors like Waxman: high-energy, hardworking, forward-moving. She's not only editor at TheWrap. She's also a reporter and the CEO. I caught her between a celebrity funeral and a Los Angeles dinner party, at the height of Oscar season. As they say in her town: It was all good. And I got to edit her this time -- that is, what follows is an edited version of our phone conversation.

When you decided to make the leap from reporter to editor, what was that like?

Becoming an editor absolutely seemed like a natural thing to do at this stage in my life because it's very hard for young journalists to find a place to learn about how to be a journalist and to have someone who can teach them the things they know. And I'm in a stage where I would like to give over what I know. I'm also concerned about the fact that, as newsrooms disintegrate, there are very few places for people to learn the basics of journalism, to make mistakes and to have someone help them avoid some mistakes that can become career killers.