Theater Review: Middlebury shines in Washington

Published in the Mountainview

On the Theater Lab stage at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., another Middlebury College play was performed this year. This time it was Dan O'Brien '96 wo wrote the play "The Last Supper Restoration," directed it and acted in it. For his writing, he won the National Student Playwriting Award, sponsored in part by the Kennedy Center/American College Theater Festival.

The seats were filled to capacity, and hopeful attendees without tickets were turned away at the door. The re-staging of the play was impressive, given the time limitations and the fact that the original play had been so closely tied to the Middlebury College Studio Theater space in which it was first performed.

A significant revision of the original Middlebury production, this version was the one which went to the Irene Ryan Festival in Boston last autumn; the reworking succeeded at clarifying and simplifying a piece whose intellectual depth was matched by the quality of the company's performance. (Disclosure: the part of Caterina was played by my sister, Katherine Inglis '98.)

The cast and crew were in at least three countries and three states the week before the production went up at the Kennedy Center; airlines and car-rental companies no doubt rejoiced when they heard that O'Brien would be coming from Ireland, Coert Voorhees would fly in from Chile, Ted Dowling from Seattle, Nick Molander and Katherine Inglis from Vermont, and others from Vermont and New York City. The diaspora of the company is a testament to its level of ability; their capacity to perform the play for the first time in three months after only a couple of days of rehearsal is nothing short of phenomenal.

Dealing with three different time periods in the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the play is a detailed amalgam of the lives of Leonardo da Vinci, a restorer of da Vinci's "The Last Supper," and the son of that restorer. Blending the diverse threads of art, homosexuality, Nazism, Judaism, love, fear, and death (among others), "The Last Supper Restoration" is in itself a restoration of multi-level dramatic arts, when each speech had multiple meanings, and each character stood for something much more than just one person in a

story.

O'Brien's National Student Playwriting Award is actually a series of awards, including cash awards, professional memberships and development opportunities, and the publication of his play by high-profile drama publisher Samuel French, Inc. In addition to those awards, O'Brien is currently on a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship in Ireland acting in Irish productions and working on new plays of his own.

In attendance at the first national production of an O'Brien play were members of the Middlebury alumni community in Washington, D.C., an impressive contingent from the College (attending in both official and unofficial roles), and a large number of the general public. Comments in the audience afterward ranged from the confused to the congratulatory, though the reaction was unanimous to a scene in which an airline stewardess puts her hand inside a bag of a passenger's vomit.

O'Brien has made a promising beginning with a play which appeals to the intellectual and the emotional, combining history and conjecture in a story which entrances and intrigues. We will definitely hear more from O'Brien soon, and we congratulate him on his success to date.

The ICC/ACTF program is a national program for all dramatic arts, sponsored by academic institutions, businesses, and theater organizations nationwide. Awards are given for excellence in areas too numerous to name, and the prestige of such awards is great in the world of theater. Middlebury College has historically had good luck participating in KC/ACTT and its regional Irene Ryan awards; the theater department here is known for its strength and quality of acting, performance, and production.

Opinion: Women's Issues? Not quite.

Published in the Mountainview

It's time we had a talk. Just you and me. Man to man. (Women, you can read this, too.) The Report of the Task Force on the Status of Women was just issued, and it's time you sat down and read it. Yes, you. Yes, even if you read it before. Siddown.

The issues in this report are not women's issues. They are human issues, and they affect you and me as much as they affect the women with whom we share this campus and this town. Here are some very cold facts, which don't make me proud.

•           The woman sitting next to you in evening seminar doesn't feel safe walking home in the dark.

•           The woman just behind you in the line at Proctor is going to eat some salad and maybe an apple today. That's all.

•           The woman who lives across the hall from you is the only woman in her year who is majoring in her field. She's also found that all the classes she has left to take are taught by men.

•           The woman behind the counter at Proctor, serving your food, has three kids she hasn't seen since this morning. She'll miss seeing them tonight before they go to bed, because she has to work late cleaning up.

•           The faculty member who just walked past you coming out of the Crest Room is afraid she'll never get tenure. She gave up having a family to have an academic career; now she might have neither.

These are all real problems which are happening here and now. They are not problems without solutions. They are not someone else's problem. They are my problem, as an alumnus, and they are your problem, as a male student, faculty, or staff. It is your personal problem, and you, yourself, today, need to fix ii Here are some ideas, to get you started:

•           If you feel comfortable doing so, start talking to that woman next to you in class. Keep up the conversation after class and walk with her wherever she's going, talking all the way. Then go where you were going. She'll be safer, you'll have helped solve the problem, and she didn't even have to admit she's scared.

•           Have a look at what your friends eat, men and women. If your roommate is gorging himself on onion rings, point out that there are fresh onions over on the salad bar. If his girlfriend has a single chickpea on her plate, let her know you care about how she takes care of herself.

•           On course evaluations, say what you think would have been different if your class had been taught by someone of the opposite gender of your real professor.

•           Thank the woman who just put the food on your plate. At least let her smile once today.

•           When someone you think should get tenure is up for review, write a letter to the Committee on Review, or to the department chair. Qualified women and men deserve a shot a Middlebury careers; help them out.

You're going to ask me why you should do this. There are a couple of answers. The first is that the world can always stand to be a better place. If you work towards that goal, in whatever ways you feel comfortable, everyone will be a little better off. That's the "piein-the-sky reason," The other reason is that someday you will be a minority somewhere. You'll be the only white person on the street in Chinatown, New York, or you'll be working somewhere where everyone else behaves properly towards women and men. You'll need their help, and you'll have to earn it. Start now.

These subjects are not just women's issues. The fact that any human beings are in these situations demands our immediate action. Caring about others — women and men — and being respectful of their rights and responsibilities, is something you will have to do for the rest of your life. Middlebury is an excellent place to start; everyone can work on it together, and we can all help each other. But you, and you personally, have to do something about it today.

Alumni profile: Jennings aiming for the marketing moon

Published in the Mountainview

Marketing and business building have gotten Ryan Jennings '91 his own business and some rich opportunities, all the while living in Cornwall. He not only builds his own business, but sells his skills to others interested in enlarging their own markets.

Jennings spoke to The Mountainview about his work with a photography business based in Maine. Found by accident, the company has blossomed into an opportunity for Jennings, providing he plays his cards (and cornpany politics) correctly.

An initial conversation began with Jennings and one of the directors of the company, regarding marketing opportunities for prints of the unique wide-angle sports stadium shots which are the company's flagship products, turned into a series of exploratory meetings between Jennings and the company's founders.

He had a lot of ideas for them, and gained credibility with them almost immediately because he had some ideas for marketing their product which they had considered but not yet implemented. He also had some new ideas, which all agreed were good ideas. "They get so close to it," he said, explaining how the company's advertising plans had left out seemingly obvious marketing opportunities, so Jennings decided to explore his own ideas himself.

He sought and got permission to market the photographs himself, at his own expense, in exchange for a cut of the profits from sales he attracted. Jennings's basic philosophy is the classic marketing cliché, "The customer is always right." He said, "Business people think about what they want to do, instead of what the customer wants, or where the customer is." Jennings focuses on his intended customers, using what he calls "funnel vision," the opposite of "tunnel vision."

The son of an inventor, Jennings learned early on the opportunities and shortcomings of "experts." Those people, Jennings said, don't see opportunities the same way non-experts do; they are used to knowing what they do and how to do it. Creative marketing, Jennings argues, comes from saying "I don't know" and then discovering the answer. He also attributes his marketing success to the fact that he works in multiple industries and "cross-pollinates" with marketing ideas, taking an idea from one company or industry and applying it to another.

As the photography company ignored his advice for more and more time, his frustration with them grew. Eventually Jennings began marketing their material as an independent agent, acquiring prints for wholesale rates and using his own publicity ideas to sell the products.

He learned valuable lessons from his collaboration with this company: at a public collectibles show, they made nearly no sales. At closed industry trade shows (for restaurant owners, for example), sales were in the thousands of dollars daily. Picking events, publications, and locations for sales is vital to the success of a marketing effort, Jennings said.

Jennings notes that while he hopes for success with this project, he has placed himself at great financial risk, investing thousands of dollars of his own money to pay for advertisements in magazines, and for a toll-free phone number to accept orders. He is confident that his ideas will pay off, and estimates that he will gross twice his capital outlay within the next eight months.

He is concerned, however, because the photography company with which he is involved is very wary of losing control of their product. A unique product in the world of sports photography, and possible only with a camera valued at $150,000, the stadium panoramas are a sure seller. The photographer obviously wants to make the maximum amount he can from his work. Jennings notes, however, that success in business comes from a melding of two major principles: innovation and marketing. He concedes that the photographs are innovative and are. for the moment, selling themselves.

He notes, though, that the marketing effort put out by the company itself has been feeble and only a limited success. He is betting that his marketing skills can take the photographer's innovation and make it a commercial success. It is this risk which will determine the path of Jennings's career in the short term.

Opinion: Balance is the key

Published in the Mountainview

Technology maven Esther Dyson recently said, "The most important finite resource in the late 20th century is people's attention." Nothing could be more correct Information is flowing into our lives faster than ever before. Information about places and people previously unheard of is now meeting us for breakfast, in the morning paper and on the morning news programs.

Who a hundred years ago would have thought that the struggle for power of an overweening rich man, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, would headline world news? We are inclined to ask why this is important to Americans. It is clearly of importance to the people of Zaire and neighboring countries.

Don't we have enough to worry about? Social activists constantly remind us of human rights tragedies around the world and in the United States, Amnesty International makes a point of including the U.S. in its annual reports on the world's worst human-rights offenders. Don't we have enough to do, here at home? Shouldn't our attention be spent on cleaning our own house, rather than throwing stones at the glass houses others inhabit? Isn't that, even if a productive use of our own time and energy, distracting them from the pressing problems of their worlds?

Attention is something we must ration carefully; Dyson is correct. We have only so much time to spend on anything. only so much mental energy before we need sleep, respite, or a good beer. We must choose what we pay attention to; we cannot afford to choose unwisely, How, then, should we determine what to ignore? Or should we ignore nothing, sufficing with short blurbs about everything, reducing our knowledge to trivia and our understanding to mere chronology?

As individuals, we each have certain special interests. Mine may relate to technology and the communications revolution; yours may be in environmentally-aware architecture. Each of us follows a certain set of topics, from sports teams and academic disciplines to current events in the domestic affairs of particular nations. As a nation, we have certain collective interests. Health insurance for all Americans is something to which we should each bend an ear from time to time. We also need to know where our elected representatives stand on the Chemical Weapons Ban Treaty and nuclear non-proliferation. These indicate, however, that there is an overlap in individual, domestic national, and international levels of interest.

The line between what we pay attention to and what we ignore is fuzzy at best. It is no less clear for the fact that daily events occur which we could not have predicted but which directly affect our lives. Would anyone argue that Americans should ignore the threat to our own individual personal safety posed by the Oklahoma City bombing? Would anyone argue that Americans at large ever expected such an event to occur? We need to pay attention to people telling us things we haven't asked about, which we don't know about to be interested in them.

And so our attention is again stretched, unfocused, confused. Can we just shut off the world, even for a short time, and listen to the silence? In the age of digital timekeeping, silence is just that; there's not even a clock ticking to remind us of time passing. Silence can be wonderful, and relaxation, departure from this hectic world refreshing. It is imperative that, at the same time as we learn to take in, process, and comprehend more and more information, we also learn to take time for ourselves to remain in balance.

To do otherwise would be to invite disaster of a cognitive nature. The world closes in around us, and we must learn to escape it or risk being enveloped by it. Our attention must be focused on yet another subject: our own personal, societal, and human well-being: This is the area in which it is most imperative that we all pay attention. We must all confer upon each other the human dignities we ourselves desire; we must respect the space and time of others, and the fact that they, too, suffer from the same attention deficit we do. Our time here is limited, and to make the most of it some things must fall by the wayside.

Each of us must decide individually what to leave behind and what to carry forward. Those who strive to do too much or too little will risk failure and insignificance, both individually and societally. Balance is the key: our resources are indeed finite.

Concert Review: Final After Dark concert soars with Rogers

Published in the Mountainview

At the final After Dark Music Series concert of the 1996-1997 season at the Knights of Columbus Hall, a busy crowd, arriving before sunset for the first time, eagerly awaited the opening of the Friday night show.

Mustard's Retreat, a folk duo, opened. David Tamulevich and Michael Hough, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, began with "Leave in Jubilation." By the next song, the audience was singing along with the old ballad "I Owe My Soul to the Company Store." Their voiceslifted in smooth harmony, and the humorous introduction to "All My Incarnations" reminded the audience that "you can't take it with you, but with reincarnation, you can come back and get it."

Tamulevich and Hough, who also performed at a family show on Saturday, then told the story of "Brer Rabbit and Sandy Raccoon," complete with sound effects. It was a different sort of reincarnation story.

Subsequent songs had the audience remembering failed romances, and then congratulating the volunteers who make the After Dark Music Series not only possible but a roaring success. Even the opening act did an encore; everyone sang Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More."

Canadian folk guitarist Garnet Rogers then took the stage. He began with a medley of songs in his deep-throated baritone voice. Rogers is a powerful vocalist and guitarist.

Despite extremely nimble maneuvers on his fingerboard, Rogers' music retained a relaxed quality. The first four songs, all in the same key, covered emotions from loneliness through love, energy, and hope, to despair in the story of a drunken poor man, in "Poor Man's Dream."

His next song was about a woman's self-acceptance. Called "The Beauty Game," it reminded all present of the limitations of the human mind, heart, and form. Rogers's sensitivity is not limited to humans; he sang a ballad about saving an aging racehorse from the dog-meat factory.

He played a rare instrument, a mandoguitar, for which he wrote a song called "The Next Turn of the Wheel." An ethereal instrument, it complemented his baritone voice. The song, about places which hold bittersweet memories, showcased his mastery of the guitar nuances.

After the break, Rogers returned to deliver another guitar-voice counterpoint piece, "As Long as the Years Go By," followed immediately by a cover of Greg Brown's tribute to "the two icons of North America," Jesus and Elvis. Rogers's lively personality was clear from his stories. The first, about trying to find vegetarian food in Laramie, Wyoming, had the audience in peals of laughter. He talked about his career in folk music and likened it to "being in the Witness Protection Program: they know you're out there, but they don't know how to get to you."

He then turned right around and had us humming and singing softly to a lovely rendition of Cyndi Lauper's inspiring "True Colors," played on a six-string with an echo box, lofting the notes to the sky. A wrenching song about domestic violence, "Tommy," illustrated a story about a group of Canadian men who protest male violence against women.

Having explained how he began his folk music career, in the 1970s, trying to compete with the disco craze by playing maritime and traditional folk music in Canadian clubs, Rogers closed with two songs about driving across his native country between gigs. He warned that they were "written in real time." Long though the songs were, they were excellent examples of the magic Rogers can work with a guitar, and with the words of his songs.

The entire audience stayed up very late - near midnight - to hear the whole show. The music was wonderful, a tribute not only to Rogers's talents but also to sound engineers Mark Mulqueen and Richard Ruane, who managed to make the Knights of Columbus Hall sound like a professional concert auditorium.

Rogers's encore was a haunting cover of "Romeo and Juliet," by Dire Straits, one of the United Kingdom's foremost folk and rock bands. As the audience left the hall, tears, smiles, and sighs abounded. Another After Dark season has drawn to a close.