Weaving stories

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Twenty teenagers — 18 from Maine and two Palestinians from East Jerusalem — are still hard at work exploring themselves and weaving a Story Quilt, which they will perform at the Theater Project, in Brunswick, next weekend. At any price, it’s a must-see. Even better, it’s pay-what-you-want.

The show is the culmination of the Theater Project’s three-week teen theater camp, which for the past two years was a Shakespeare festival. This year, renamed the International Teen Festival, it took on an international flavor and included instruction by theater professionals from Poland and East Jerusalem, with classes in improvisation, storytelling, dance, and music. Theater Project mainstay Al Miller made the international connections, and fellow TP regular Barbara Truex composed music along the way.

They brought in Khitam Edelbi, a drama teacher with the Palestinian Counseling Center in East Jerusalem. Edelbi, who taught at last year’s teen camp, helps Palestinian teens write, develop, and perform theater pieces about their personal lives in East Jerusalem. Also joining the group in Brunswick was Robert Wyrod, who runs the "We are the World" Theater Company for orphaned teens and homeless adults in Cracow, Poland.

Wyrod was supposed to bring two of his students, as Edelbi did, but the US State Department’s terrorism sentries barred the way, freely allowing two Palestinian teens to come to the US, but preventing two Polish teens from doing the same. (Thanks for the help in Iraq, Poland!)

The 20 teens "get along beautifully," according to the Theater Project’s Frank Wicks. Any potential differences among them are "just no big deal," he said. "They’re having so much fun."

In the process of theater games and other exercises, the show is still in development. "I think they’re just exploring themselves," Wicks said. "They’re playing with ideas of their own personal stories."

Also, Wicks and Miller are looking for host families to sign up to house more international students next summer. Don’t miss the show, which is certain to be as unique a creation as are the people who are dreaming it up even now. "We’ll see what the kids come up with," Wicks said.

The show runs August 8 at 7:30 p.m., and August 9 at 11 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., at the Theater Project, in Brunswick. Call (207) 729-8584 to reserve tickets.

Leaders look out: Beware Election Day

Published in the Portland Phoenix

There are times when loyalty to a higher ideal must surmount loyalty to a leader, and when those "in the know" believe that the people must be saved from themselves. Witness, for example, the politically divided nation in which we dwell: For many dissenters against war and imperialism, against unrestricted police surveillance and ignored freedom of information laws, loyalty to liberty trumps any fealty to President George W. Bush.

They fear losing the foundations on which this country is built. They join a grand (if not conspiracy, then) alignment, to bring down King Dubya. And yet, as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar warns, the Bush-backing majority (though their numbers are falling), would take their own revenge on any successful conspirators, sinking the teeth of their ballots into the fleshy political careers of those who would gainsay the nation’s leader in a time of crisis.

Julius Caesar, at the Theater at Monmouth through August 22, is the most politically insightful play performed on Maine stages this summer, and it is brilliantly done.

(Enough about the distance. Monmouth is less than 90 minutes from Portland. You’d drive further to a Boston theater. Save time, see great theater, keep the money in Maine. It’s not that far. Really.)

In brand-new seats in the theater’s beautifully ornate surroundings, the trappings of power never seemed so real. This group of professional actors, most handling more than one role in the four plays TAM has running simultaneously, truly understand Shakespeare, his language and his characters.

The street scenes hearken directly back to the days of the Globe Theater, which it is believed opened for the first time with this show in 1599. Plebians among the audience look up at the aristocrats, catcalling and conferring among themselves. This is the raucous populism that made Shakespeare famous in his own time.

Julius Caesar himself (Mark S. Cartier) is excellent as the publicly adored citizen-king, who humbly refuses the crown thrice and arrogantly throws off the warning of a soothsayer (Jonathan Miller) to "beware the ides of March."

Cassius (Joshua Scharback) is also a victim of hubris — a particularly virulent sort — infecting as it does Brutus (Paul L. Coffey) and the rest of the conspirators.

The lessons of how power works are legion in this play. Brutus is vital to the plot because he can get close to Caesar, yet numbers are important for safety. The manipulation of information is clear, as is the flouting of substantive warnings. It all sounds painfully similar to the newspaper headlines, and yet these words are 400 years old.

Brutus issues a warning Bush and his cronies should heed: "The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."

All of the ensemble cast are top-notch, from Portia’s (Adele Bruni) impassioned wifely plea for her husband’s trust to the dream reinterpretation by Decius Brutus (Dennis A. Price). The staging is courageous, adding tableaux where Shakespeare had none, Caesar’s ghost watching the slaughter that follows his death.

The music (some taken from the Gladiator soundtrack), sound effects, and lighting all combine in a full, rich atmosphere that keeps the play moving and its central tensions close about the audience. Violin notes, as in Eyes Wide Shut, up the blood pressure, as sinister words disturb the miasmic air. Lighting illuminates the harshness and desperation. With the cherubim watching from the ceiling, the suspension of disbelief is complete.

Brutus and Cassius play well off each other, and Coffey, playing Brutus, remains in command of his character’s complex mind, switching immediately from the Quisling murderer to a man who can say with only a touch of comic irony, "Publius, good cheer," as a senator cringes in fright.

It is then that Mark Antony (Jeffrey Thomas) comes into his own with grand eloquence and great emotion. Thomas handles triumphantly the most famous speech of the play, his eulogy of Caesar, not just a tribute to a fallen leader but a call to arms. Ripe with scorn and sarcasm, his voice literally dripping with contempt, it is as if Thomas himself will go backstage and bring forth actor Coffey, out of costume and pleading for mercy.

Yet Antony’s motives are not without impure effect. The slaughter that begins as the factions split and mobs roam the streets is, in part, his doing, too. Caesar’s spirit’s most frightening act occurs when the mob seizes a poet who shares a name with a conspirator. Cinna the poet is beaten and carried off, echoing the fates of people like management consultant Asif Iqbal of Rochester, New York. His crime? He shares a name with a suspected Al Qaeda member now held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. The innocent young professional finds himself now on a government terrorism watch list.

Julius Caesar
Written by William Shakespeare. Directed by David Greenham. With Mark S. Cartier, Paul L. Coffey, Joshua Scharback, and Sally Wood. At the Theater at Monmouth, through Aug. 22. Call (207) 933-9999.

BACKSTAGE

• Check out Maine’s Civil War history on stage with Frank Wicks’ Soldier, Come Home at Brunswick’s First Parish Church, Friday, August 8, at 7:30 p.m. It’s based on letters between Wicks’s great-grandparents, Philip and Mary Pringle, as Philip fought with the Union Army. To reserve the $10 tickets, call (207) 729-6606.

• A reprise of The Food Chain by Nicky Silver raised some good cash toward better seating at the PSC Studio Theater, but they could still use more, so open your wallets or pay with your behinds.

Donations sought for beach wheelchair

Published in the Current and the American Journal

The story of a dutiful son whose car got stuck in the sand on Willard Beach while he was trying to help his mother get into the water has spurred city councilors to ask for donations to help the city buy a beach wheelchair.

William Scully of Beatrice, Neb., whose mother lives in the area, wrote to Dana Anderson, director of parks and recreation, on June 25, to tell his unusual tale and propose a solution to the problem. On a Sunday morning in early June, Scully wrote, he took his mother to Willard Beach to go swimming.

His mother, 85, has arthritis that makes it hard to walk. “It takes her a long time to get to the water’s edge,” Scully wrote. “So in a moment of lunacy I decided to drive the old Volvo onto the beach close to the water.”

His mother safely out and swimming happily, Scully found the car was stuck up to its axles. A tow truck he called also got stuck, and a second tow truck arrived to help.

“With the help of about 20 people digging and a wide-tire F 150 Ford pickup” the car was freed, but Scully doesn’t want to have to do that again.

In the intervening weeks, he has tried to think of a solution, and rather than build an expensive boardwalk for regular wheelchair access, he found a web site, www.beachwheelchair.com, selling a balloon-tire wheelchair made especially for beach use, able to stand up to salt water and sand.

They weigh about 40 pounds and will be used to get disabled people to and from the beach, rather than having one person use it all day, said Tim Gato, aquatics coordinator for the city.

Gato is looking at two models, which will cost between $2,000 and $2,500 delivered. Scully has donated $1,000. He hopes a chair can get here before summer’s end, but if not expects it will be here in plenty of time for next summer.

Councilor Linda Boudreau read Scully’s letter aloud at last week’s council meeting and asked the public for help raising the remainder of the money needed.

“We will essentially be providing handicap access to Willard Beach,” said City Manager Jeff Jordan.

To tell the truth: Opening eyes and hearts

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Tessy Seward and Caitlin Shetterly don’t want to entertain people with the theatrical performances they produce. Instead, they are returning art to its roots, of disturbing, informing, and creating social change.

"We want people to see things that will move them in a fundamental way," says Seward. Their new venture, Winter Harbor Theater Company, has put on two brief runs of the first act of Tony Kushner’s still-unfinished play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. Their last showing of this work will be at the St. Lawrence July 30 and 31. It is a powerful show, brilliantly performed.

But it is not Little Me, or Hedwig, or any of the other shows recently found at the St. Lawrence. Only We has a harsher worldview than even the Cast’s festival, delivering a political and humanitarian message while still exploring the inner workings of the human mind.

In it, an angel (Stephen McLaughlin) welcomes first lady Laura Bush (Tavia Lin Gilbert) to one of Mrs. Bush’s most common photo-ops, a reading to a group of schoolchildren.

But these kids are Iraqi children killed by American bombs in the 12 years since the end of Gulf War I. The angel gently flays Laura’s confidence in her husband’s rhetoric, revealing a human heart beneath her loyal chest.

It is powerfully eloquent, and even "changed" Seward’s dad, a marine-hardware store owner in Hancock County and Vietnam veteran nervous about the political bent of his daughter’s new venture.

Shetterly and Seward, neither yet 30, speak with a youthful idealism, tempered by practicality and pain: Winter Harbor was formed in the cab of a U-Haul truck heading from Maine to New York, to retrieve Shetterly’s worldly belongings at the end of a broken relationship in a broken, post-9/11 New York.

The two, best friends in nursery school who hadn’t seen each other in 21 years, quickly forged a commitment to speaking out. Shetterly, daughter of painter Robert, wanted to respond to the constant US bombing of Iraq, even before war broke out. Only We fit the bill.

Seward wants to be "a force for creating some positive change." She wants audiences to leave the theater and "see the world with new eyes," hoping they undergo "an emotional transformation" and become more compassionate.

There is also a hard line: "A time like this calls for drastic measures. It calls for courage and truth-telling," Shetterly says. Their productions will "get people to that vulnerable place where you’re so alive and open emotionally," that life literally flows through your veins, and perhaps your tear ducts.

Seward admits people may turn away before they even get in the door: "It’s the risk of absolutely transforming their life that’s terrifying." She believes something about theater, about being together in a space both public and private, "makes it okay to feel more than you might feel if you were alone."

There are economic challenges involved in this work, but Shetterly points to the success of controversial playwright Langford Wilson. Grants are in the works and a board is forming.

Tough pieces addressing sensitive issues may turn off donors, but they say they won’t sell out. "We’re going to do something that challenges people," Shetterly says. "We refuse to have anybody tell us how to do our thing."

They are starting slowly but steadily, planning a short run of one show in October, and a full run of another next spring. August 7, will see Cosy Sheridan’s one-woman show The Pomegranate Seed at the St. Lawrence for one night only. Addressing appetite, body image, and myth in modern culture, Sheridan tells her own story of learning compassion.

Seward and Shetterly saw it not long ago, and were both in tears for much of the performance, opening themselves the way they want others to open during their productions. Any trepidation the pair have is masked by an iron determination. Echoing her painter father’s message, Shetterly is adamant about one thing in particular: "I will tell the truth."

Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy
By Tony Kushner, with Tavia Lin Gilbert and Stephen McLaughlin. Shows at 8 p.m., July 30 and 31, at the St. Lawrence Arts Center. Free. Arrive early and see painter Robert Shetterly’s Portraits of Americans Who Tell The Truth. Call (207) 775-3174.
The Pomegranate Seed
Written and performed by Cosy Sheridan, at 7:30 p.m., Aug. 7, at the St. Lawrence Arts Center. $10. Call (207) 775-3174.

BACKSTAGE

• Michael J. Tobin has done it again. In a move he says has " guaranteed a secure future " for the five-month-old Cocheco Stage Company, he has closed its Dover, NH, home and will perform on various local stages, though with what is unclear. (Deathtrap had two last-minute cast changes, and was canceled in the middle of tech week. A reprise of Players Ring hit Gender Bender, slated to open July 25, won’t be happening either.) He initially blamed the closing on the landlord, but now says he’s choosing to avoid the responsibility of a permanent lease. It’s happened before: In the mid-1990s, Tobin opened and quickly closed the Portsmouth Playhouse, leaving bills unpaid. (He chalks it up to being " young and business-stupid. " ) A second try was the late-1990s MainePlay Productions in Portland. After moving locations because he wouldn’t up ticket prices to cover a rent increase, Tobin eventually left, claiming there was no arts support in Portland.

Fuel trucks kept out of Red Bank

Published in the Current and the American Journal

The South Portland City Council ruled Monday that the Portland International Jetport may expand, but may not truck fuel through the Red Bank neighborhood to get to a planned storage site.

The jetport’s proposal is to relocate private planes based at the jetport from one side of the main runway to the other, offering them space for hangar storage and opening more room for storage of planes only visiting the jetport for short periods.

Presently the roughly 60 private aircraft based at the jetport are parked on a paved area on the north side of the main airport buildings, according to Jeff Monroe, transportation director for the city of Portland. That location is also where visiting planes park, and it’s running out of room.

“We get a lot of people flying in over the summer,” Monroe said. As many as 30 to 40 planes a week are brought in by people who either own or rent vacation homes in Maine, he said.

The jetport wants to use a portion of a 70-acre parcel between the Red Bank neighborhood and the Fore River to allow plane owners to build hangars for indoor aircraft storage. As part of that complex, there would be at least three above-ground fuel tanks holding a total of 60,000 gallons of aviation gas and jet fuel.

To supply the tanks, the jetport had asked for permission to drive small fuel trucks along Western Avenue and Westbrook Street to get to the new area, at least until the planned Jetport Plaza Road is complete.

If that road is not complete by the time the complex is in use, the jetport argued, the only alternative would be to truck fuel across the airport’s main runway.

District Five Councilor Jim Hughes, who represents the area including the jetport and the Red Bank neighborhood, was worried about putting fuel trucks through a densely populated area and successfully lobbied his fellow councilors to limit fuel trucks to the Jetport Plaza Road.

While a timetable for the road’s completion is unclear – it is now just a short spur leading to the parking lot near the Staples store – councilors were confident that the road would be complete before the jetport space was ready. Hughes said the restriction would virtually ensure the road was built in time.

Mayor and District Three Councilor Ralph Baxter said his “worst-case scenario” was trucking fuel across the main runway.

Councilor-at-large Linda Boudreau was also worried about the dangers that could pose, mixing fast-moving aircraft with fuel trucks.

Hughes argued that limiting fuel trucks puts pressure on Portland, which must grant an easement for Jetport Plaza Road before it can be built. He said the restriction would not only improve safety but would bring the political interests of the two cities into alignment to get the road built.

District Two Councilor Thomas Maietta suggested that if the road was not complete, the private planes could taxi from the new space back to the present fueling point, keeping fuel out of the neighborhood and preserving airport safety.

In other airport business, Boudreau also noted that the next meeting of the jetport noise advisory group will be held Sept. 24. A report will be issued before that, and the meeting will discuss the report, she said.