Still Pilgrim by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Put on your traveling shoes, comfortable for pilgrimage. Or take them off and be still a while. Both are proper for this collection of poetry.

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell created the persona of the Still Pilgrim for her latest collection of poems, aptly called Still Pilgrim, as a way of exploring passage and, in the monastic sense of the word, stability. The title on its own is ambiguous. A pilgrim who does not move? Still a pilgrim after all these years? As you read through the collection, you might be moved to answer yes to both questions---or no---at different points.

If you have read other writing (poetry or prose) from O'Donnell, you'll find familiar themes. Grief. The sensuality in life (and especially food). A sacramental outlook on life. The inherent hopefulness in each day.

In the poem, "The Still Pilgrim Makes Dinner," she deftly touches on all these with lines such as, "It’s Mother’s Day and I have no mother. / She left and took my daughterhood."  She goes on with details of the meal the pilgrim is cooking: frying oil, onions, the apron "soiled / by meals I've made for thirty years." Because I find hope in sacramental language, I am buoyed by the final lines (I recognize others may find them less so) as she concludes, "My mother, who is five years dead, / lives in this meat, these eggs I broke, / this dish she taught me how to make, / this wine I drink, this bread I break." In the 14 lines of this sonnet, we are given the way loss can lead to loss of self, but also how tradition and memory and, frankly, recipes can make that which was lost present again. Is it resurrection in the most literal sense? No, but I still find resurrection in this one poem. All these tangible things---chops, oil, flour, smoke---become so quickly "outward signs of inward grace."  All these sacramental items make present someone who is gone. I may be projecting but I am left with feeling that the pilgrim's dead mother both vanishes upon recognition and remains present in a meal.

(In case I need to be explicit, that one poem is possibly my favorite in the collection, and I've loved it since I read it on The Christian Century website, printed it out, and tacked it to my cubicle wall at work.)

The concerns of the Still Pilgrim span some distance, literal and metaphorical and metaphysical. She " . . . Invents Dawn" and " . . . Recreates Creation." She " . . . Sings to her Child" and " . . . Talks to her Body." She references other poets, considers sunrises and bird songs, wakes to the prayer of her beloved's breathing. She ponders perfection and the table manners of Jesus. The Still Pilgrim is ecstatic, sad, pensive, angry, forgiving, grateful, amused---in turn and simultaneously. She may "Sit back and enjoy the drama" or else run "like a woman catching fire."

The book opens with two epigraphs from T.S. Eliot (and a third from the Psalms), but I hope I will be forgiven if this collection brought to mind another, if perhaps too obvious, passage from Eliot:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, 
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, 
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, 
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.

I would suggest that this is a point the Still Pilgrim knows well. This collection invites us into the dance studio and the meditation room, to move into the mystery of life and death and joy and regret and to sit with it all in contemplation.

I will admit that, in order to get this review written in a timely manner, I read the collection too quickly, a sin against any poetry. What I will do---and recommend to you---is to take it slowly. As "The Still Pilgrim's Refrain" would teach us, there is satisfaction in " . . . again . . . again . . . again . . . "

_______________________
Full disclosure: Paraclete Press, the publisher of Still Pilgrim sent me a preview copy of the book for the purpose of review. The thoughts expressed in this review are my own and sincere.

The Revolutionists - Main Street Theater

I saw The Revolutionists, by playwright Lauren Gunderson, last week at Main Street Theater. I've been thinking about it since.

I went in part because it's billed as a feminist play about women in the French Revolution. I consider myself a feminist and the premise intrigued me. Gunderson takes three historical women and one of her own invention to give us insight to the state of being a woman in the period---while drawing our attention to how too many things have not changed.

Indeed, one of the most interesting things Gunderson does is introduce us to period playwright Olympe De Gouges, a writer I'd not heard of before. Played by Shannon Emerick with a conflicted enthusiasm, Olympe works to make sure that "egalite" refers to women in the new France. It's a matter of historical record that she stood before the all-male national assembly and read her Declaration of the Rights of Women. A fascinating person to learn about.

Also in the quartet of women is Charlotte Corday (Molly Searcy), the woman who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, and Marie Antoinette (Bree Welch), famously the last queen of France. The fictional woman is Marianne Angelle (Callina Situka), a composite of black women of the period that Gunderson created because of the scarcity of information for any women in the struggle to free the slaves of the Caribbean.

The conversations between these women are full of plans for revolution, arguments about best tactics, and accusations of weaknesses. There is sisterhood and there is division. Revolution isn't easy and even when the end goal is agreed upon, the road is full of peril and detours and arguments about routes.

Overall, the production is fine and everyone is more than capable in their roles. I was more than impressed with Welch who, as the alternately shallow and then surprisingly insightful queen, had quite a bit of heavy lifting in the show. Watching her work was amazing. It should also be said that the other women were never overpowered by Welch, but held their own admirably. It's seldom one sees such a strong ensemble working together.

There were things, however, that gave me mixed emotions about this production. For a play that is presented as a comedy, there were times when I felt the best comedic effect was not pulled out of the script. I found myself thinking, "that was funny, that should have elicited laughter." Whether downplaying some of the humor was a choice by director Andrew Ruthven or if the company just didn't find these moments as ripe for humor as I did, I couldn't say.

Another thing that sort of drew attention to itself to no real effect is that, while everyone spoke in modern English pronunciation, whenever a name was used, it was given the French pronunciation. It felt forced and didn't add anything. Had some hint of a French accent been used throughout, the names would have made sense, but as it was, it was as if we were hearing a translation of a play but some words didn't quite make it into English. I'm not sure what would have been lost if we'd heard Charlotte as we hear it in every other American context.

Other issues I have with the production fall under matters of taste and are really about the script itself. Lest you go in with the idea that this is an historical comedy, it really isn't. It's presented as a self-aware play (i.e., there are references when the characters let us know they're being watched by a 21st Century audience). It's a format that I generally don't care for. Along the same line, anachronistic expressions are thrown about. (For example, a quick Google tells me the word "feminist" wasn't in use until a few decades after the French Revolution.) Finally, a lot of the humor seems to go for the easy punch-line of things like Marie Antoinette saying the word "fuck" and "badass" and such. That can be funny and certainly the queen may have used whatever French equivalents she had at her disposal, but I feel like I've seen it before. I certainly have no issue with the word "fuck," employing it with some regularity myself.. As a comedic device, I find it wears thin quickly. It plays best in a skit but is hard to sustain in a full length play.

I fully own that most of these criticism are a matter of personal taste.

And so, I'm left to say that this is a production worthy of an evening of your time in a theater. The thought provoking themes within the comedic setting make for a fun evening in the theater that will give you something to chew on long after the final blackout.

At this writing, there are two more weekends of performances. Get your tickets here.

The Christians by Lucas Hnath at The Alley

The only theater pieces I've seen more than once are pieces I've been in or directed.

Until The Christians at The Alley Theatre, here in Houston, Texas.

This is not a review. It's a personal reaction. As a practicing, every-Sunday sort of Christian, theologically educated, and invested in how the church is represented in media, there is no way I couldn't take it personally.

If you haven't seen it and expect to, I'm not avoiding spoilers, neither am I purposefully revealing anything. Read on at your own risk.

So. Where to begin.

Pastor Paul (played with a delicious understatement by Richard Thieriot) has had a revelation from God that radically changes his theology. Without discussing it with anyone, not even his wife, he reveals this change to his mega-church congregation in a Sunday sermon.

Things unravel from there.

I think I'll not talk about that revelation (although I'm currently in the same place as Pastor Paul on this topic). I think I'll talk, instead, about Elizabeth, who touches one of the more tender spots in my religious history. She sits silently on the stage for an amazingly long time before she ever speaks, She has one speech in particular that sends a laser to the tender spot in my soul. I have a copy of the script (from the September, 2014 issue of American Theatre) but I think I'll not quote it. In essence, she is struggling with the idea that if she changes her mind about the issue at hand, she'll one day look back at her past and think she was stupid.

About 25 years ago, I entered seminary as a deeply closeted, deeply ashamed gay man, doing my best to not be gay. At some point in my seminary career, I wrote a paper on why gay and lesiban folk should not be ordained. I mentioned this to my friends where were with me at my first trip to the Alley for this show. Both expressed some surprise at this.

"Oh yeah," I said." Not many people know the Republican me."

So, dear fictional character Elizabeth (played by Emily Trask)---you are so real that you are me. And I don't look back at myself as being stupid, but I am frustrated with that person. I also feel badly for that person who was me. Since that person was me, I know how much you suffered with that self-condemnation. That sort of fear is what I connect to with Elizabeth. What if this new revelation is wrong? What if my old understanding is right?

One of us is wrong. The present you (or past me) or the future you (or present me). How do we deal with the notion that we might be wrong? How do we give up certainty?

Another character, the only other female character is a single mother named Jenny (a heartbreaking performance by Melissa Pritchett). She is timid. Her timidity is the result of some really hard knocks in life. The church has been her stabilizer. The church has been the place where she could connect and not feel alone. The schism that Pastor Paul's new teaching has created both makes sense to her but causes a rift in her social life. Haltingly, she asks Pastor Paul questions. Without using the word, she eventually asks, essentially, Pastor Paul if he's been manipulating them, the congregation. It's the crucial moment in this play. Religious leadership and power emerges as a dominant theme from this point onward. This is another tender spot in my life.

The associate  pastor, Joshua (a confident performance by Shawn Hamilton) (interesting choice of names, by the way---Paul, the main promulgator of the Christian faith in the first century, earliest and most prolific or at least most preserved shaper of earliest Christian theology, and Joshua, the successor to Moses who used military might to take over the Promised Land and sometimes conflated with Yeshua, the Hebrew name of Jesus) tells a moving story of his mother, an unbeliever, and how he is certain that he saw in her dying her descent into Hell. His conflict with Pastor Paul isn't so much a power struggle---refreshingly so!---but a question of how do we square our experiences with one church teaching or another? In him we come up against the struggle of wondering how we might come to know whether what we experience is true or what we want to experience. Do our experiences shape what we believe or do what we believe shape our experiences.

Elder Jay (Jeffrey Bean also delivers a great, subtle performance) raises the question of the corporate, as in the financial and legal, nature of the church. While this was the least tender spot for me, it still rang true.

So, this play, this Socratic dialog of a production, hits many many layers of life in the church and does so without resorting to satire. Granted, this presents a church that I wouldn't belong too---it's a mega-church that apparently doesn't have a very strong sacramental practice and I'm all about the smaller congregation and sacramental life---but the questions raised and, more importantly, NOT answered, are questions that I think a broad demographic of Christians could relate to.

Goodness, I don't know what else to say. This production has me in a jumble. I'm so so so so glad to see a play that presents Christians non-ironically, non-satirically, with serious attention played to the real, complicated life of faith. I'm so glad there are no heroes, no villains, just people of deeply held conviction, all of whom make good and poor choices because of their convictions.

It's all so real. As a Christian, I take it all so personally.

This production is going to haunt me for a very long time.

Lucinda Cobley - matrix - O'Kane Gallery, UH-Downtown

 First off, full disclosure: I work at the University of Houston-Downtown. In the nearly five years I've been there, I've been impressed with the O'Kane Gallery and the range of artwork it has presented. Up until now, it had been in a rather small space---which made the presentations all the more impressive, I think. Kudos to gallery director, Mark Cervenka.

On Thursday, February 4, 2016, the O'Kane Gallery inaugurated a new space, just yards from its previous location. The new space offered a new installation by locally working artist, Lucinda Cobley. It is an installation entitled matrix. 

I knew the first show in the new space would be an installation, which excited me---I do love the site specific, large scale works. What I hadn't expected was that this first exhibit would be so understated and subtle.

I do love understated and subtle, as well.

In her artist's talk, Cobley talked about her piece as being a response to the history and, particularly, the location of UHD. We are situated at a juncture of two bayous (White Oak and Buffalo). These bayous have served to shape Houston in a variety of ways, and so have been mapped extensively.https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5738266808396954868#editor/target=post;postID=3221669864198158684;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link

Cobley explained that much of her research for this piece involved looking at old maps, the way they were coded, how solid lines and broken lines communicated various information. As such the installation is built on a grid that is visible via the lighting underneath.

Moreover, she wanted to express something of the natural world that the bayous bring so close to this university. As someone who regularly explores the bayous on lunch breaks, I appreciated this aspect as well.

She further went on to talk about how she wished to bring into a busy university building a place of calm and quiet. Blue dominating the color scheme certainly speaks to that intention (and less to the bayous, whose waters are not exactly blue, but I digress).

I think this photo, even more than the others, gives an idea of the scale of the new space and the installation.

I will admit that the opening of an art show is not the best circumstance for experiencing all those things. I stood with the crowd at the opening and took it in, trying to listen to what Cobley was trying to tell me with her quiet work, but it was difficult to do with people milling about, chatting, eating hors d'oeuvres, and snapping photos with friends. 

So I returned to the space on Friday, when the campus is sparsely populated anyway. When I entered, there was only the gallery attendant and two friends who, while chatting about the coming weekend, did so in hushed tones---the effect of the installation? I wondered. I definitely found experiencing it with fewer people about to have a quieting effect, the illuminated blue speaking of sky even as the grid and lines and dots spoke of the earth. I heard more, I believe, in this quiet conversation than I had the night before.

It always seems a shame that the O'Kane Gallery is a bit removed from the usual paths of Houston art-goers. It is, it seems, a destination of it's own, not something people happen upon unless they are already on the UHD campus for other reasons. I certainly never knew of it until I began working there.

But I would hope this small write-up might encourage people---particularly those who like to take time to listen to an artwork---to make their way to the campus (most easily accessed via the MetroRail) and listen to matrix. The gallery hours are:
Monday - Friday
10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Saturday
12:00 - 5-00 p.m.

Venus in Fur - Main Street Theater

Sometimes, just standing in the right place at the right time gets you cool things. Today, after church, I was just kinda standing around when a fellow parishioner came to me, asking if I could use a pair of tickets this afternoon, since he couldn't. Not having anything especially pressing to do this afternoon, I took the opportunity.

The show was Venus in Fur by David Ives, co-presented by Houston's Main Street Theater and the Prague Shakespeare Company. The two theaters have a recent history (facilitated by two former Houston actors now living and making theater in Prague) of cultural and talent exchange, a recent production of Twelfth Night being another example.

Of course, if you've paid any attention to recent theater doings, you've at least heard of Venus in Fur. It was the most produced play of 2013. Until this afternoon, I'd not seen a production myself and had only a vague idea of what it was about.

Actors Guy Roberts (who also directed) and Jessica Boone play the two characters, Thomas and Vanda, at opening with a big, broad, loud style, setting up the situation of a frustrated director not finding the perfect actress for his play. As the play progresses, the characters get less broadly drawn (although sometimes louder) and Roberts and Boone brought us performances that barreled forward with comedic flair and occasional suspense. It was a remarkable thing to behold.

Boone has the heavy lifting of the script. Her character switches back and forth between a manic actress desperate for a role and the demure role she hopes to land. Having said that, both actors played Ives' script with skill and wit, offering surprises throughout the 90(ish) minutes (no intermission) of the play. The energy coming off the stage makes me certain they must feel like they just ran a marathon after a performance. As a sometime actor myself, I felt a little exhausted for them at the end.

The two actors gave a brief talk-back after the show, and they talked about the precision of Ives' script, how there was no room for ad libbing or misspeaking of a line. Having seen a few of Ives' shorter scripts produced over the last few years, I would say that is a hallmark of his writing---and I hesitate to say it, but it's also hard to find actors who will play a script with the sharp precision Boon and Roberts displayed.

While Roberts and Boone are on their way back to Prague, I hesitate to say much more about this production, as it seems it is something they will keep in their company's repertory for a while. Suffice to say, this was an afternoon well spent. If Main Street Theater and Prague Shakespeare Company continue to exchange work like this, Houstonians are advised to check it out.

Spotlight [Film]

I don't go to movies often. For the most part, I find the money that goes into making a movie requires that it make a lot of money and so I consider movies more of a commercial product than a medium of artistic expression (even though I recognize that personal skill and vision are found even in some of the most commercial movies). While I certainly enjoy the big blockbuster now and then (particularly anything with superheroes), I also don't usually go away with any deeper appreciation of the human condition. My favorite movies don't have action figures for sale in toy stores.

And with that snobbier-than-I-really-mean caveat, I turn my attention to the movie Spotlight.

Based upon the story of the Boston Globe's reporting of the Roman Catholic priest pedophile cover-up, it is a story full of potential for sensationalist story telling. Luckily, the filmmakers here are not interested in sensation. They're here to show us how a team of reporters took on a story, not of their own choosing, and slowly uncovered a far reaching conspiracy that ran deep into the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, not only in Boston, but around the world.

First, the cast is amazing. All of them keep the emotion under control, keep the characters human while still letting the enormity of the situation run over them. Even when Mark Ruffalo (who, I'm surprised to say, didn't recognize for the first few minutes he was on screen) is given a meltdown to perform, he gives us more humanity than histrionics. Rachel McAdams is heartbreaking in her understatement. And when Michael Keaton gives us a pretty big reveal towards the end of the movie, it would be easy to miss due to his subtlety (and I believe we all know how larger than life Keaton can get). The whole cast maintains this sort of even keel throughout, the heroes never too heroic, the villains never threatening in a cartoon way. It feels like an acting style that I haven't seen in movies for ages (but, again, I don't see a lot of movies) and that each actor maintains it is astonishing to me.

Second, the way they tell the story creates the uneasy feeling that there are no exceptionally good people here, just a few that are making a brave decision to get it right in this one moment. I don't want to say too much more about that, as I feel it is part of the pleasure/discomfort/human-condition-revealed-ness of watching. Let's just say that there is complicity to be shared beyond the immediate perpetrators of the abuse and its cover-up.

Third, on a personal level, I wonder where I am in this, where the people closest to me are in this. As a very pious, religious, gay boy in the 1970s (Lutheran, not Roman Catholic, but set that aside for now), would I have been a target for a religious authority who preyed on youth? I'm not sure. In a sense, certainly, but I could also be, to speak of it derogatorily, a "tattle-tale." It was part of my piety. Had a priest/pastor tried to seduce me as a 12 year old, I may have gone only so far before my own conscious had gotten to me (and hence would have blamed myself, not the priest) and I would have likely found a way to put a stop to it. Had I gone to my parents with it, as some children in this story did, would mine have been the sort to press charges or would they have kept quiet, told me to not mention it again, as some parents did? I don't like to think about that, which is saying enough.

This is the type of movie I would like to see more of, really. Quiet, subtle, dealing with big issues with a human touch. I hope Spotlight makes enough money and wins some awards to make it attractive to investors to make more.

Cédric Andrieux at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

This evening, I attended a one-hour performance at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston as part of their current exhibition, Double Life. The title of the show and the artist performing it are the same: Cédric Andrieux. I went not entirely sure what I would see, only that the little bit I saw about it on Facebook looked interesting. It involved dance, so I really didn't need to know much more.

Andrieux is a soft spoken man---in the relatively small performance space of the CAMH main gallery, he wore a mic and was still sometimes hard to hear---and he actually looks a little uncomfortable speaking on stage. His delivery is unrelentingly deadpan, devoid of emotion. He does have a sense of timing, so all of this played in his favor when he related something humorous (or even if it wasn't inherently funny, as when he announced he would go offstage to put on---and later take off---a dance belt and unitard). He was, in short, charming in his decidedly low-key presentation.

He relates his early interest and drive towards becoming a dancer, despite not having a natural talent for it (or so he says). From seeing French broadcasts of the tv series Fame to seeing local live performances, he worked his way into education and finally a career that involved eight years with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

This is the most fascinating portion of the presentation. He demonstrates the morning class the company took everyday, never changing, for eight years. He describes it as coming out of Cunningham's belief that everything is performed for the first time, there is no true repetition, and that he could occasionally find in it a sort of Zen meditation. More often, however, he found it depressing. He named the part he hated most, the one section he didn't mind too much, and described the ways his mind would wander. It is, in fact, a little boring to watch but a reminder of how much of preparing for art making is a chore.

He also notes that he joined the company after Cunningham was relegated to directing his company from a chair and was using the Lifeforms computer program to create his choreography. Andrieux demonstrated how this would work, which was painstaking, laborious, and often more than difficult for the dancer---it was sometimes an exercise in disappointment and perhaps shame that he could not always give what Cunningham asked for. Andrieux also noted that during these years, something always hurt.

These two sections, in his soft spoken, deadpan way, speak loudly to the hard, physical labor that goes into dance making. The tedious moments, the embarrassing moments, the painful moments that are invisible to most audience members are magnified here. For anyone interested, as I am, in seeing how an artist works to make art, it was riveting.

Throughout the performance, Andrieux shows us pieces of choreography, not only from Cunningham, but also from Trisha Brown, whose work he danced in his post-Cunningham Career at the Lyon Opera Ballet. He speaks to how her work was different from Cunningham, how it required him to find a more fluid way to move. Demonstrating it, I imagine, would be a revelation to anyone who things all modern dance shares a single style or vocabulary.

He performs all this without music except for the excerpt of The Show Must Go On by Jérôme Bel. The music is by The Police, "Every Breath You Take." The piece involved acting out the title of the song, so Andrieux stands close to the edge of the performance space and watches us, the audience, as lights come up on us. the fascinating part of this, to me, was that this was also the piece wherein he showed the most---any, really---emotion. He smiled. He seemed to enjoy seeing us. It stood out after all his neutral face performing. He had mentioned that in Brel's work, they were humans before dancers. His smile seemed to highlight that sentiment. It was good to see.

After describing all this, I have to close with the curious thing to me about all of this. Andrieux tells his own story, performs it all solo, but the show itself is credited to Brel. Part of the show is explaining how the show developed, much of, apparently, over emails between the two men, but it was Brel who shaped all the raw material that came out of Andrieux. That in itself was an interesting piece of process information for me.

I didn't go to this with the intention of writing about it. As the sparse postings on this blog demonstrate, I seldom feel the need to write about work I've seen. This show, however, had me humming throughout, fascinated by the stories, the demonstrations, and even by the efficacy of relentlessly emotionless delivery. As I said above, I was charmed by it all.

It compelled me to record these thoughts.