Speed the Wow! Masterful Mamet at Actors Studio

You know the type: Quick on the metaphorical zipper, ruler at the ready, eager (make that desperate) to show anyone not smart enough to flee before the display begins just how, um, huge they are — personally and professionally, of course. And that’s exactly what you get in “Speed the Plow,” David Mamet’s brutal, unflinching look behind-the-scenes in Hollywood, the so-called Dream Factory, which, as you might expect, is a bit of a nightmare, an alt-universe populated by blowhards and beancounters, gobshites on the make, loudly, desperately trying to prove something to somebody, especially themselves, Philistines, full of themselves — and worse — confident, convinced of their genius. And why not, since the bottom line bears them out, right? This is Mamet at his best: Observing men at work, their dreams, their insecurities, their camouflage. It’s a world he knows well, having played the game, writing and producing several screenplays there in the go-go '80s. The play, which examines the ugly confluence of art, commerce and power, is being staged in an irresistible, razor-sharp production at The Actors Studio of Newburyport.

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Straight outta NYC: A 'Screaming' fundraiser

You scribblers out there might want avert your eyes or turn the virtual page because this might be a little too much to take, this whole Jack Rushton situation. You know him. He’s an actor, among other things. He’s been in a lot of shows, but the roles that stick out are Mr. Lucky, a completely over-the-top operator, a French ladies man, Pepe LePew come to life, complete with the very European (and tres elegant) hand-lick, at the New Works Festival a couple of years ago, and Dan, the self-emasculated, late-in-life newlywed whose, um, penis gets up and walks away because he’s not getting any attention in “The Richard Cycle,” the centerpiece of Michael Kimball’s “I Fall for You,” a collection of short works the playwright staged at the Firehouse three years ago. He’s also a writer. He started scribbling seriously a couple of years ago after getting a seat with The Group, a Port writers’ group that includes Kimball as well as Joshua Faigen, whose most recent play, “A Book of Snow,” served as appetizer for this year’s Boston Theater Marathon, and Raymond Arsenault, who will be rolling out “A Secret Remedy,” his new play, at the Actors Studio in a couple of weeks. It’s a productive group that, as Faigen has said in the past, whose name is either cool or stupid, depending on your mood. And Group member Rushton is apparently hard-wired directly to the Muse, who is totally crossed off my Christmas list since she is spending way too much time with this guy. I mean, in the past two years, he’s written 50 to 65 pieces. Yeah, so many that the guy can’t even keep track of them — and they “keep coming out,” he says. And you thought you had problems, right?

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Onore: Busy guy with a new "Baby"

Jeff Onore abandons 'a profound sense urban loneliness'
for modern farce in 'Robotic Baby,' his new full-length.

Jeff Onore is a funny guy. Meaning, um, that he’s a little off his rocker.  Of course, that’s not quite the spin Bonnie Lake puts on it, is it?  No, the Port actress, who plays the Mom in “Robotic Baby,” Onore’s latest, says the guy has “a unique point of view” — and an equally singular way of getting that point of view across. Which means that he’s a little … well, it’s been said, right? Which is fine. At least he’s not still churning out work filled with a “profound sense of urban loneliness,” which is how one Canadian critic described “A Busy Guy With Lots of Problems,” his one-man show and entry to the 2009 Atlantic Fringe Festival, a play that’s about ... well, it’s difficult to nail down, but explores themes of obsession and failed relationships. “Got to admit it sounds pretty good, whatever it means,” he says, “but I think I’ve moved past that.” Which is a good thing, turning away from that profound sense of urban loneliness, that is, because, like existential dread, a little urban loneliness, profound or otherwise, goes a long way.

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Lesllie Powell: No rest for the weary

Port playwright Leslie Powell.

If you see Leslie Powell and she seems somewhat, um, unresponsive, don’t jump to the conclusion that she’s suffering from, you know, that well-known affliction of playwrights. Chances are that she’s not even lightly toasted, whatever a comfort that might be, no matter how loud a martini might be calling her name. No, she’s probably just taking a nap, whether her body agrees or not. The Port playwright hasn’t been sleeping well, hasn’t been sleeping through the night. She keeps waking up to deal with crises involving the new production of “The Way Life Should Be.” Whether they have actually happened or not. Stress. Everything that could go wrong, plus everything that has gone wrong. Like having two actors from the original production, people who know the work, pull out at the last minute. When she was 2,500 miles away, in Tucson, her winter hide-away. And the dreams — sleep-shattering nightmares about everything that could possibly go wrong. All these things banging around her brains. She’s thinking about hypnosis to help calm her down. She's not joking.  Stress: It’s a monster. You’d think the she would be used to it by now. After all, the Merrimac Street resident isn't exactly a rookie. She’s the one of the founders of North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative and Readers and Writers, INK. She’s a playwright who always seems to have something going on. Later this year, for example, she going to be attending a production of her play “Backfire,” about a young woman who seeks revenge on a man who bullied her in high school, at the Inspiration Festival in Toronto. Then she and her hubby, Ron Pullins, also a playwright — and owner of Focus Publishing in Newburyport — will be checking out “Ice Dancing” at the Last Frontier Conference’s New Play Lab in Valdez, Alaska.  But that’s different. Sitting in the audience, watching a play you wrote, the only real worry in the world is not being too deep in the wine line for intermission. That’s not exactly true, says Powell. She recalls Port playwright Gregory S. Moss fielding a question during a talkback session, someone asking what it’s like sitting in the audience watching someone do one of  your own plays. His response? “It’s like having your skin flayed off ... while you’re alive.”

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Babes in Boyland: Looking at women in jazz, pop

This is a tale of two photographs. This first shows a fresh-faced hippie chick with flowing hair and clothes, straight outta Left Coast counter-cultural lore, stubbornly naive, still not broken by the world. She's got an acoustic guitar. You can almost hear the soundtrack of the Great Folk Scare in the background. The second, taken in 1991, about a decade later, shows the Bangkok babe, a jazz singer, a girl singer, as they used to call Rosemary Clooney, wearing a slinky black sequined cocktail dress and an upswept hairstyle. She’s surrounded by a trio of local musicians. It’s taken at the Bamboo Bar in Bangkok, in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where guys like Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham used to hang, in another era, where she played four sets a night, six nights a week during a seven-month run. Very different scenes, worlds, right? So, then, what happened, Celia Slattery? “Some very serious drastic changes," says the Boston-based singer/actress, who will bring “First Ladies of Jazz and Pop: Voices of Change,” her one-woman show, to the Actors Studio this week.

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Schmoozing with a brash, bawdy singer

Linda Myer plays Sophie Tucker at the Actors Studio.

Sophie Tucker is on the bubble, historically, remembered as a brash and bawdy belter, a nightclub performer with a swagger and a repertoire of, well, playfully nasty songs filled with winks and double entendres. She was the self-styled Last of the Red Hot Mamas, performing in the heyday of the Vaudeville era in the early 20th century to the dawn of the rock age — in clubs, on the circuit, even on the big screen. But her historical profile these days is thinner than the physical, her girth, which, for better or worse, was another big part of her persona. A lot of people have heard her, but few know much about her. That she was a nice Jewish girl, an emigre from the Ukraine. Who was married and divorced three times. Who abandoned her family, which included her young son, to chase after a career, a dream. Who "made it" in blackface, racist but accepted in the day. Who was forced to go that route because club owners and talent handlers decided she was “so big and ugly" that they had to "black her up," says Linda Myer, who brings “Schmoozing with Sophie: Last of the Red Hot Mamas," her one-woman show about Tucker to the Actors Studio next week, black culture being the only one where such an, um, voluminous, talent would be accepted, or so the thinking went. 

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Miller time: Busy cellist back ... with some surprises

Kristen Miller kicks off Women's History Month at the Actors Studio.

Been a busy time for Kristen Miller, even by the Georgetown cellist’s crazy standards, all quite possibly explained by her previously undisclosed and apparently unquenchable jones for tea, although, granted, she did hint about that as far back as 2003, on "Later that day," her debut album: The past two years have been steeped in creative work.  She's released two albums — “Walk,” a distinctive solo release that mixes world beat rhythms and Eastern melodies with a rock attitude and a beat sensibility, something she calls "cellobrew," and “Winter Loves Company,” a collaboration with Port sound guru Tom Eaton that mixes cello and piano with a Windham Hill sensibility. She’s also written soundtracks for three Maya Deren films, fascinating, mesmerizing silent films that are stubbornly interior, with little in the way of linear plot, and even toured with them. She's also created an original score for “No More Gloomy Sundays,” a short film by Robert Newton documenting the history of the WPA murals in Gloucester, and kept up her own busy performance  schedule. And toured with Ken Bonfield, a Gloucester-based multi-instrumentalist who, like Miller, has developed a style that's difficult to pin down, combining elements of folk, Celtic, classical and blues for acoustic guitar.  And, considering the creative workload, Miller has decided to take a short break from writing,  to catch her breath and regroup before the next big thing, whatever that might be — and if she knows, she’s not telling. But it will be only a break of a sort, seeing how she’s got session work lined up with Liz Mitchell, Conor O’Brien and What Time is it, Mr. Fox? And, before that happens, she’s got something else going on, something that incorporates all the disparate elements in her work, and throws a couple more into the creative stew, for the Actors Studio celebration of Women’s History Month, four weekend performances putting the spotlight on wimmins. And she’s happy to report that a few days ago, when she sat down for, errr, a cup of tea, she “realized how insane that is.” Which, of course, is the first step toward recovery.

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Powell play adopts new look

Things aren't the way they should be and they're not what they seem in "The Way Life Should Be," the "new" Leslie Powell play that has been kicking around stages, on the east coast, in the southwest, in one form or another for about seven years and, recently opened the fourth season of North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative, a Port play development series, in a dramatically stripped down form that came after a major rewrite just days before the latest opening. Something the actors must have been really happy about. Hey, everyone loves last-minute rewrites, right? It’s a story with a very long history — like the play itself. It's about a much-delayed, much- anticipated reunion, a get-together Elaine has played out in her head thousands of times over the years. She has not seen Grady since he was a little boy  — 19 inches to be exact — when she gave him up for adoption. He’s 27 years old now. She knows it was the "right" thing to do, but that decision has cast a shadow over the rest of her life, which has been shrouded in doubt and guilt for as long as she can remember, although the emotional ramifications have mostly simmered below the surface. He is the "ghost baby," who has been haunting her all his life. Wherever that played out. She has waited for the call for years, not expecting to get it, because in her heart she feels guilty, she feels like she is being — and maybe should be — punished because, after all, what kind of monster would willingly give away her child? No, no. Nobody ever said it. To her face. But she has felt the scorn of icy imagined stares through most of her adult life. No amount of comfort, reassurance from Jess, her lovie-dovie, long-time live-in will change that. Okey-dokey? 

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Talking about a 'Conversation'

Google "The Dangling Conversation" and, naturally, you’re swamped with references to the Simon & Garfunkel song from the monster "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" album, but it’s also the name of an ongoing improvisational performance project by Port actor Brendan Pelsue and Natasha Haverty — a piece that is informed and inspired by the Simon song. Well, not really, but sort of. It’s not like something from the song jumped out at them, there was never that “aha moment” when the name emerged out of nothing, like grace, clarifying everything they were trying to do, says Pelsue, now living in Cambridge, but using his hometown as a staging area for productions of "The Dangling Conversation" at the Actors Studio, and “The New New England,” a show in Salem in which Latino youth from the St. Peter’s Summer Theater Project interweave their experiences with those of immigrants from the past. No, they’re “not totally crazy about the name,” says Pelsue, but it will have to do until inspiration finally shows up. Besides, the song, which is about a couple's inability to communicate, does bump up against what they are trying to do, which is ... well, complicated: It's about a nuanced relationship between two people that is created in the present — the actual present, at the very moment the show takes place, right before your eyes. The story continues next week on the Tannery stage.

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Get your 'Goat' at the Actors Studio

It's a tough production to talk about, and pretty intimidating — intellectually, emotionally, to sit through, let alone to talk about. Go ahead, call your Mom or, even better yet, drop in for a visit (you really should visit your mother, regardless) and try explaining it to her: Well, Mom, it's about a successful guy, an architect, a family man who loves his family and who, um, falls in love with someone who isn't his wife, who isn't even his species. Who is, well, a goat. Yes, a real goat — fur and all, bleating like Stevie Nicks. Well, not quite that bad, but you get the idea. And we're not talking about the way you love your little kitty cat either. We're talking tripping the lights fantastic, full-on romantic love, the kind of affair that will land you in jail in pretty much every place on earth — in addition to, at least in theory, result in the ugliest grandchildren conceived. And, assuming she doesn't slap your face or clutch her chest and keel over, she might ask what "this abomination" is called. That would be "The Goat, or Who is Silvia?" And the "pornographer" responsible for it? Well, Edward Albee wrote the play. You know, the guy who wrote another play whose name ends with a question mark,  "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" And before you say another word: Yeah, yeah. The one with "that hussy," the one who abandoned that delightful Eddie Fisher and threw herself at the Englishman. They're staging it next week at the Actors Studio. And, thing is, if you get past the initial inappropriateness, unpleasantness of the subject matter, you've got the rest of the show to deal with as you sit, increasingly numb, but riveted, as you watch what was once a happy family go up in flames. 

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Charlie Brown: No longer a clown

The kids from "Peanuts" have been taking it on the chin a lot lately, particularly at the hands of "The Family Guy," mostly notably when everybody's favorite blockhead shows up at a Peanuts reunion with a skanky crackwhore. He's got tats, multiple piercings and, more significantly, a major habit. Which is the reason that Snoopy isn't there with him. Old Chuck apparently supplied the drugs that did in both Snoopy and Woodstock. In other bits, we find out that Marcy and Peppermint Patty are lovers. No surprise there, really. That irritating Lucy van Pelt gets a well-deserved boot in the butt by both Peter and Lois in separate episodes when she tries to pull the football away at the last minute. We also learn the real cause of Violet's bladder infections, don't we, Pigpen? But Bert V. Royal's "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead," a so-called "unauthorized parody" that, word of warning, probably requires a longer attention span than "Family Guy" bits, imagines the iconic characters of Charles M. Schultz as students in high school, although the names have been changed to protect the innocent — or, at least, to protect the authors from copyright lawsuits. 

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Coming Clean: Pasternack polishes mask drama

It’s been more than a year since we last saw Brighina, the cheerful but obviously disoriented woman hanging out in the waiting room of a locked ward, trying to suss out the reason she’s there, on the ward, in Leslie Pasternack’s one-woman show “Clean Room,” and a lot has changed since the show ran at the Actors Studio in 2009.  The playwright and actress has gotten lots of feedback about her oddball character and, over the months, has reshaped Brighina — not the words she speaks or her "issues," exactly, but the ways she reveals herself:  her mask, costume, voice and physicality. Says Pasternack, who has a doctorate in theater history from the University of Texas and degree from the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre, these were the issues:

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Wheel Deal: What's it all about? Who knows?

The best advice for viewing Ron Pullins’ new play is don’t over-think it, just sit back and let it wash over you without getting caught up in the drama about what it’s all “about,” because there’s a lot going on in “Bicycle. Woman,” which gets its first spin around the literary block next week at the North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative. The full-length piece has three competing story lines, three possibilities about what is actually happening: Could be two strangers, a guy and a girl collide while riding bicycles. Or maybe they’re out riding together and grabbed by a couple of rightish thugs who hassle them because they’re obviously pinkos. Or maybe it’s just a guy trying to write a story and a woman who just wants to get him between the sheets. It’s conflates the political and psychological, it’s a medieval miracle play with a taste of commedia dell'arte, where “the ‘reality’ is floating somewhere between the competing story lines,” according to the playwright. He pauses. “You know,” he says. “I’m probably the worst person in the world to tell you what it’s about.”

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Silent is golden: Miller unveils Deren scores

Kristen Miller’s new obsession started quietly — appropriate, considering the media — seven years ago, even though nothing really came of it until last year. She had been hanging out in Gloucester with Brian King, from the band What Time Is It, Mr. Fox?, a band rooted in folk and blues, but filtered through cabaret and alt-rock, and a frequent Miller collaborator, working on a project — a long-form experimental piece. They had been at it all morning and decided to take a break. King told Miller, an innovative cellist with three albums under her belt, that he wanted to show her something, so he fired up the DVD player and played “Meshes of the Afternoon,” a silent film by Maya Deren, who famously said she could make an entire movie for what Hollywood spends on lipstick. This film, of course, was not Hollywood by any stretch. It is stubbornly interior, a film that inhabits the world of dreams and myth, attempting to tell a life story in less than 15 minutes with little in the way of linear plot and without a word being spoken. It “reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience,” Deren said in her program notes for the film’s premiere in 1943.  The experience was a revelation for Miller. “I was speechless,” she says. 

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Connecting the dots with 'Terezin'

There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you (re)turn to Old Faithful and, after you dust it off, put a shine on it and kick its metaphorical tires, and (re)discover that it still rocks and gets the job done even after all these years — or, as Anna Smulowitz, the Queen of the Scene, puts it, “that we’ve still got it.” And that is what’s happening with “Terezin: Children of the Holocaust,” her award-winning — and, especially given the current international situation and ... well, life as we know it —  much-too-infrequently produced play about life before death in Terezin, or what the Germans called Theresienstadt: a “showcase” concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, designed to con the world into believing the Nazis were treating Jews decently. The six kids in the play represent the 15,000 children who died at there, a fraction of the 97,000 Jews who died in this one camp, which, in turn, represents a fraction of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. Only 132 survived. But a new production, which pulls into the Actors Studio this week after a tour of local schools, is resonating in new ways, going beyond ”just” never again and  tapping into new hot-button issues like homophobia and good old-fashioned bullying,  “There’s been a vivid response,” says Smulowitz. “You can really feel the energy. They’re connecting the dots.” 

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Rocking Renaissance: Round, round, get around

Chances are you’re rock-solid when it comes to the 800-pound gorillas of the era, the rockstars of the Renaissance, the bigwigs of the arts and sciences of the period. Which is to say, chances are good that you’re down with da Vinci and Michelangelo and that old sourpuss Galileo — maybe even Raphael. But if the Jeopardy category was music of the Renaissance instead of superstars, you’d probably be wishing you were on Cash Cab and could use a mobile shout out, because, for most people, including your shout out candidates, the category is a virtual black hole. History has all but swallowed up the composers of the era, with the possible exception of William Byrd, and that’s a stretch. Even Josquin des Pres, who helped create the  polyphonic musical form that would influence the future of all musical harmony at the same time that Leonardo turned the worlds of art, science and philosophy on their heads, has washed up on the shores of who-dat?  “It’s true, I’m not sure why, but it’s true,” says Charles Bradley, a tenor who leads Primal Polyphony, a Renaissance singing group that  promises to get all medieval, musically, on the audience as it pursues its mission  — to open up the music of the period —  when it pulls into the Port this weekend for a benefit for the Actors Studio.

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In the Cards: Films to benefit stage

My favorite moment in a Charles Card film comes near the end of “The Good Samaritan,” when the vampire (Jack Rushton) bares his fangs, ready to feed, for better or worse, on the life blood of that vapid party girl (Nicole Foti) who had disgusted him a few minutes earlier when they met at a cafe that looks just  like Stella’s, the former Middle Street Foods, and little Miss Pretty (vacant) looks up at him and asks, “You’re not from around here, are you?” It’s not the first vampire flick for the Newbury biochemist-turned-filmmaker. That would be “Natural Selection,” a character-driven story about a sad, self-loathing and desperately lonely night stalker who is sickened by what he is and what he has to do to stay alive.  And it probably won’t be his last: He remains intrigued by the kind of “multilayered, tortured” characters vampires tend to be. Besides, the undead will never be dead. Not in this culture. Vampires — and zombies and the whole array of creatures that haunt the night — are huge and “will never lose their appeal totally,” he says. “There will always be vampire movies around in some form.” But, while intrigued by the genre, the filmmaker is not stuck on it, as anyone attending the screening of his work this weekend at the Actors Studio will see. He’ll show the vampire films, but will also screen two comedies, an action martial arts film and even a music video, now in post-production, for prolific Amesbury songwriter Andy Pratt, best known for his mid-'70s hit “Avenging Annie."

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Tip of the hat from Charles Van Eman

Busy guy, Charles Van Eman. He's flying up Route 95, trying to make a rehearsal for the Firehouse production of Mark Twain's “The Diaries of Adam and Eve" at the Firehouse. It's not quite clear whether it was a last-minute thing or whether it just got lost in the shuffle of his schedule. Doesn't really matter. He got the call, he made the rehearsal and, en route, was able to check off a scheduled press interview during the ride from his home in Middleton. Besides, the actor, whose credits over the past three decades include everything from a recurring role in the "The Colbys," the Dynasty spinoff, to his current gig as writer-director of "High Rise," a Melrose Place-like internet drama, had already accomplished the major task of the day: Making revisions to "Jack's Hat," a new play, which will be getting its first spin around the theatrical block soon, very soon, at the North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative. There's still the second season of "High Rise" hanging over his head, of course. Lots of pressure there, too, seeing how the show has been upgraded from bite-size eight-minute episodes to a full half-hour, and has been picked up by Fox 5 in Atlanta, where the series is filmed. 

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The Latin Quarter: Sambas, rhumbas, cha-cha-cha

It’s not like John Tavano really needs anything else to fill out his dance card. The guy's stretched pretty thin as it is. Performing with Rhina Espaillatt and Alfred Nichol in Melo Poea, the continuing music-meets-poetry series, and with soprano Ann Tucker, most recently in "The Ballad of San Isidro," a program also based on one of Espaillat's poems. He's also gearing up for a fall show with Polish pianist Malgosia  Smolarek, and preparing a new album of non-traditional Christmas music. And that's in addition to regular gigs as a classical guitarist, a staff musician with the Museum of Fine Arts, an instructor at The Musical Suite and as a portrait artist. But the way the Port guitarist figures it, what's the point of having a bunch of sweet sambas, rhumbas and bossa novas in your bag of musical tricks — and he's got them — if you don't have the means of getting them out there? So, about six months ago he assembled a team of local aces and revived the Latin Quarter, a Tavano project that had its last twirl on the dance floor about ten years ago. The ensemble, now a quartet, re-emerges with a new line-up for a weekend performance at the Actors Studio.

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Elinor Teele: Playing the 'Waiting' game

Elinor Teele thought she was finally done with old English literature years ago — and we are talking really, really old English literature, pre-Norman conquest, the language of Beowolf, which they call English, but barely resembles it — years ago, when she locked up the doctorate from the University of Cambridge, England. Her thesis was on the "Heroic Tradition in the Old English Riddles," a collection of evocative and bawdy — okay, let's just say dirty — poems in the so-called Exeter Book. But, as the Brits might say, there you go: The playwright, who had lived on three continents before returning to what had been the family's summer home in Annisquam, is at home, rifling through the old books and papers she thought she had "put away for all eternity" after her brain "all but imploded" from the sheer academic weight of her studies. But no. She's apparently not quite done with Seventh-Century England yet. She was happy to get away from the academic part of it, but the period "still fascinates me," she says. "Such incredible characters, such incredible stories ... " That's why she's writing a play set in that period. But that's not the point of this conversation. We're here to talk about "The Waiting Room," a new full-length play that gets its first spin around the literary block with a staged reading this weekend at the North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative.

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