Laugh lines: Standing up for a thousand bucks

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It’s fitting, really, that a postal worker who mocked her own profession’s tendency to go ballistic was the one best able to get a rise out of the audience at the Comedy Connection last week.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. It was the final round of the Portland’s Funniest Professional competition, with six top laugh-getters vying for " fame, fortune, and one thousand dollars. " For a shot at one-fiftieth the dough you can get for eating cow innards on Fear Factor, these folks got up and did what strikes true fear into many people’s hearts: Talking in public, and trying to make people laugh.

The " host " for the evening was local funnyman Shane Kinney, whose warm-up banter involved personally insulting members of the audience. It made me wish he would take on the woman three to my left, who insisted on talking the whole night.

Amy — her friends told me her name — is a blond fortysomething surgical nurse who seemed to think she was on the stage. Not so, though her droning drunken monologue and four — count ’em — cell-phone conversations during the show made her the focus of attention for many in the back of the room. (And netted nearby paying customers apologies and gift certificates from the management.)

Amy, needless to say, did not win the competition.

Neither did Scott Davis, the first real competitor, who seemed to follow in the Kinney mold. Beyond laughing at his own corny jokes and sort-of-gross, but not-quite-dirty interjections, his best line was to describe rap music as " sneakers in the clothes dryer. " His audience — mostly white folks who appeared not to be rap fans — ate that one up. Amy, nonplussed, yammered on.

Next up was Tim Hofmann, who had a shot at winning, if only he weren’t so awkward on the stage. Clad in startlingly clashing clothes, he delivered funny laugh lines and showed deep, if offbeat, thought into the ways of the world. (An example: He told the crowd he tries to eat based on the FDA’s Food Guide Pyramid. He had a question: " How many mummies am I supposed to eat? " )

He also suggested a revolutionary diet that had the crowd in stitches and even momentarily drowned out Amy’s nonstop blather. It was the Tapeworm Diet. Simple in its application, and easy to adopt: Eat what you want. " With tapeworms, you’ll shit rivers. " No reaction from Amy.

Next up was Sheila Jackson, who went straight to work targeting her postal co-workers. Fortunately, it was with jokes about guns and not actual guns. Here is a woman who knows what she’s talking about and — forget poking fun — is not afraid to ram fun down people’s throats.

She had great presence and a wonderful " I’ll tell you the inside scoop " rapport with the audience, and everything she told us confirmed our worst fears about mail employees. A former postal worker walks into a post office with two pistols and 34 rounds of ammunition. The death toll? Two. " That’s what we call an underachiever, " she said, as the building nearly fell down around itself and Amy continued to discuss — something vital.

Jackson, who had a sizeable cheering section, far outshone last year’s champ, Mark Mathewson, a guy from New Hampshire whose " intermission " routine was slow and based on clichéd admissions of his shortcomings with women.

The first competitor in the second half of the show was either Ann Harvey or Ian Harvey — I’m still not sure. This strangely androgynous being played off the gender-swapping thing, making people laugh with discomfort when she said she was " the youngest of three brothers. " Amy was momentarily silenced, stunned or confused, it’s hard to say.

Next up was Tuck, a teacher who talked about chaperoning dances and violent games. " Remember Jarts? " he asked. " Now there’s a violent game. " He reached a wide group with his everyman humor, showing new twists on things we could all relate to, and won second place for his efforts.

He got big guffaws by taking on the old favorite, drug commercials. But he did his homework. Some legal prescription drugs have been found to cause renal failure as a " side effect, " he announced. Pot remains illegal. You choose, he said: " A taco and a nap, or renal failure? " Amy roared with laughter and clapping at this one. It made me wonder what those nurses are really smoking as they stand outside the hospital doors.

The last of the competitors was Karen Morgan, who had just a few days before graduated from the 11-week stand-up comedian class at the Comedy Connection. She’s a stay-at-home mom of three kids, aged 5, 3, and 2. A lot of her work was based on that, and while baby humor may seem bland, it was nothing of the sort.

Her biggest line came at the end of a story in which she related her role as arbiter of an incident in which her daughter, 3, played " doctor " and lightly bit the penis (which in their house, for reasons unexplained, they call a " tally " ) of the 2-year-old boy. Her final ruling, after a hilarious account of her own thought process on the subject: " We do not bite other people on the tally. " Her twist on potty humor was that it was inspired by people who actually still use potties. Amy, though, didn’t seem to notice. She had another phone call to make.

Swimming in ecstasy: Women and the Sea a trophy catch

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Free at last. This is how some women feel when they encounter the sea. And this is how audiences should feel when they encounter Women and the Sea. Anita Stewart and Portland Stage Company have done something important here.

Stewart, with playwright Shelley Berc, interviewed dozens of Maine women in their research for this show. These stories — of 17 women and two girls — are not just of women and girls, however, but of a community of fishermen (both male and female), their friends, and their families.

It is this play, filled with joy and heartbreak, wonder and worry, which Portland Stage should use as a model for its future endeavors. Why dilly dally around with the safe comedies and fan-favorites when it can produce something as truly special as Women and the Sea.

While many of PSC’s recent shows have lacked excitement and passion, Women and the Sea has that special something. It’s a new work, directed by one of its creators (Stewart), with all the color and energy newness can bring to a piece. There are no audience or actor preconceptions, no way "it’s always been done."

From its beginning, with silhouettes speaking from amid the waves, to the dockside tales and dual climaxes, this play has what PSC needs to find for all its shows.

In the creation of this work, figure not just Stewart, whose clear vision for the performance comes through powerfully, and Berc, whose writing skills keep what is essentially an action-less drama moving. The six actors on stage each night imbue their characters with real and palpable life. Each of the 19 characters — actors plays at least two, with three playing four people — is fascinating in her own way, and has her voice clearly heard.

Some of them — like aquaculture scientist Evelyn (Amy Staats) — are hilarious and well played, with nerdy dramatic pauses where the audience is meant to fill in the space with pithy remarks, but can find only laughter. Others, like Carol (Nicola Sheara) the Irish clam-digger, are hilarious but serve to remind us how many people find their calling in life only by accident. And still others, like Shirley (Moira Driscoll), are understated and reserved, but magical all the same.

The passions of life bubble from each of them, churning the emotional sea into a raging storm that calms into a placid lake before again getting rocky.

This is not a play about women, though it is through their eyes that we learn of the sea and the fishing life. Linda Greenlaw (Brigitte Viellieu-Davis) reminds us women who go out to sea in boats also prefer to be called "fishermen." The struggles of the seafaring life, and of their families back on land, are the same whether the captain is a man or a woman.

Fishing policy problems, government incompetence, bad luck, abusive relationships, and poor judgment are explored as fully and fairly as the triumphs and pleasures of working on or near the sea. Tears flow as freely as laughter, at the humanity of tragedy and of silly ignorance. It is as much a story of endurance as it is a requiem for times gone by. Fishing, these women confess angrily, is on its last legs in Maine, in part thanks to the governmental regulations that try to sustain it.

The closeness of the community is also made apparent, in the choice of several women who all know each other, and can therefore tell parts of each other’s stories. While the aftermath of the Julie N spill introduces this approach, it is taken full advantage of in the retelling of the loss of the Two Friends, which sank off Cape Neddick in January 2000.

This is where the threads begin to come together. In the first act, the line was reeled out, as the women told their own tales and began to relate to each other. (On the stage the group forms a mini-audience for each speaker.)

In the second act, especially as the Two Friends is caught at sea in a storm, Yuberquis (Viellieu-Davis) begins, but breaks down, still consumed by grief. Into the breach step her friends, Susan (Molly Powell) and Debbie (Sheara), to take up the story. With almost no props, no boat, and no visual image to go on but those in their heads, they paint a terrifying portrait of the last night two men ever spent on the water, and of the women on the shore.

Women and the Sea
Written by Shelley Berc and Anita Stewart. Directed by Anita Stewart. With Nora Daly, Moira Driscoll, Molly Powell, Amy Staats, Rebecca Stevens, Nicola Sheara, and Brigitte Viellieu-Davis. At Portland Stage Company, through May 23. Call (207) 774-0465.

Backstage

• The Center Stage Players, a theater company for older adults, will give an informal "chamber theater" performance of Different Paths, a new one-act by Edith Hazard of Topsham. The performance, a follow-up to a staged reading of the play, will be on Saturday, May 22, at 1 p.m., at the 55 Plus Center, in Brunswick. Admission is by donation. For reservations and further information, call (207) 729-0757.

• Concord, New Hampshire, playwright Doug Dolcino’s play Monument was given a reading by Generic Theater regulars Betsy Kimball, Helen Brock, Nancy Pearson, Alan Huisman, Steve Erickson, and Bruce Allen on Tuesday. The play is a broad-ranging spectacle about the possible future, including a civil engineer who redesigns civilization, an Orwellian postal inspector, and a wide spectrum of possible influences.

Hearts and minds: It's also a fight for bodies, and homes, and memories

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Bosnia is a forgotten place now. With Afghanistan — remember that one? — and Iraq eating up the headlines, it’s easy to forget — or never find out — that they’re still finding mass graves in Bosnia, still prosecuting war criminals, still sending US troops to keep the peace.

Feminist playwright Eve Ensler (who wrote The Vagina Monologues) has not forgotten. In the early 1990s, she went to Bosnia, seeking out the stories of women who had been cruelly treated in the sectarian fighting among the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats there.

Necessary Targets is one of the results of the interviews she conducted. It is a riskier play than many established Maine theaters might put on, but the Theater Project isn’t asking people to pony up 30 bucks a seat, which forces theaters to play it safe to avoid a box-office disaster. No, the Theater Project’s artistic wings have been freed by its pay-what-you-can ticket policy for every seat at every show.

The theater suggests donating $15 for a ticket, but they’ll take a penny if that’s what you’ve got. Artistic director Al Miller says the dollar income at the box office is about the same as before the policy began in January, and audience numbers are up.

The crowds still pack in for big shows, but more people come to risky shows than would if prices were higher. Most people who are new to the theater pay about $5, says producer Frank Wicks. Long-time fans often pay $15 or more.

Those who make it to Necessary Targets will find one of the richest, best-acted shows to appear on Maine stages in a year. It’s a pity the play itself is so choppy, because the acting is inspired and the stories riveting.

The plot serves as a vehicle to get Ensler’s experience on the table. A psychiatrist (J.S., played by Kathleen Kimball) who has never left the US, and a war-zone-junkie trauma counselor (Melissa, played by Heather Perry Weafer) head to Bosnia together, to help women deal with their experiences, which included gang rape among other, more unspeakable abuses.

The five women whom they encounter in a Bosnian refugee camp are a broad spectrum of the women Ensler must have met. There is Azra (Tootie Van Reenen), an old woman angry about the wasteful slaughter of her cows and goats; Jelena (Wendy Poole), a tough-as-nails Rizzo-type; Nuna (Reba Short), a gleefully America-crazy young woman; Zlata (Michele Livermore Wigton), a pediatrician who is both war-weary and suspicious of foreigners coming to " help " ; and Seada (Elizabeth Chambers), a young mother from the country.

One by one, the women begin to tell their stories, from the heartbreaking simplicity of Azra’s ouster from her home, to Seada’s graphic tale of being chased from her home and suffering abuses whose details had me nearly ready to vomit in the aisle.

The thoughtful one turns out to be combative Zlata, who comes to a deeper understanding with J.S., while still keeping her contempt for Melissa’s " parachute " style.

These stories demand our attention, our suffering. As Seada says from the depth of her grief, " Hurt. " And hurt we do. It’s crushing to hear what humans are capable of, and simple to think of how we might become that way. As Zlata asks, " What would drive you to violence? "

More often than not, it’s little things, piled on top of each other, that send people over the edge. It could indeed happen here. We are not more superior, more tolerant, or otherwise better. We are, perhaps, just luckier.

The staging is deceptively complex. It looks like a basic refugee camp, but becomes a river, a tent, a bluff overlooking a view, a grave, and a dark forest of terror.

Yet the choppy structure speaks of too much to say with too little organization, and the heavy ending falls into the same trap as many activist plays: It states outright, over and over, the point of the play, without giving credit to the brains and hearts of the audience.

Necessary Targets
Written by Eve Ensler. Directed by Christopher Price. With Kathleen Kimball, Heather Perry Weafer, Tootie Van Reenen, Michele Livermore Wigton, Reba Short, Elizabeth Chambers, and Wendy Poole. At the Theater Project, Brunswick, through May 16. Call (207) 729-8584.

Backstage

• It’s festival time! First up is the Little Festival of the Unexpected, when Portland Stage Company showcases the top three New England plays from the annual Clauder competition. It can be a great way to see shows that would otherwise rarely make it to PSC. This year’s festival starts May 11 and runs through May 15, with staged readings of Clauder winner Yemaya’s Belly (a Caribbean coming-of-age tale) by Quiara Alegria Hudes, and runners-up Remuda (a dark comedy) by William Donnelly and Wonderland (a satire of celebrity) by David Valdes Greenwood, a contributor to the Boston Phoenix.

• Then the Maine Playwrights’ Lab (formerly Amma Studio) will have a pair of new-play readings at the Stillhouse Studio, above the Katahdin restaurant on High Street. Admission is $5. At 7 p.m. May 16, the piece will be John Manderino’s play Stools, Benches, Ladders & Chairs, a series of short pieces. At 7 p.m. May 23 will be I Remember You by Phoebe Reeves, a personal family drama.

• And between June 8 and June 12, Acorn Productions will put on The Cassandra Project, a festival of female performing artists including 14 shows. All will be held at Portland Stage Company, either on the main stage or in the studio theater.

Behind the wire: Theater classes at Long Creek Youth Development Center

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It’s a Monday afternoon as I walk to the desk at the euphemistically named Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland. I surrender my wallet, keys, sunglasses, datebook, and jacket. I have a form that allows me to carry my notebook and pens through the locked doors, into where the children are held.

I’ve come to visit a class run by the Winter Harbor Theater Company, in an eight-week session of theater classes for 12 teens who have been locked up here.

Caitlin Shetterly (who writes "Bramhall Square" for the Phoenix) and Tessy Seward, Winter Harbor’s co-founders, along with technical director Chris Fitze, and local actors Chris Holt and Paul Drinan, arrive just behind me.

As the kids arrive in the classroom, there’s a barely contained tension. The kids are bouncing off the walls, and the teachers are uncertain what will happen that day.

First comes a bit of yoga. We stretch and move together, focusing their energy and helping them learn what their bodies and voices can do.

After a few minutes, it’s time for scene practice. Seward, Shetterly, and the others have chosen four contemporary plays to work from, selecting them and the scenes within them to be applicable and attractive to these kids.

"A lot of them have substance-abuse themes," Seward says. Most have characters between the ages of 16 and 20, a good fit for this group of kids, aged 15 to 19, from all over the state.

The center’s staff asked nothing be performed that glorified or romanticized violence, but they allowed plays in which "it’s clear that these behaviors are problems" for the characters, as Seward says.

The kids get "a chance to play a character that they might be able to relate to." It’s their first foray into theater, and given the embarrassment and playful shyness they exhibit during the warm-up session, the kids could use a little familiarity.

One student, whom I’ll call Keith, announces that he has written a short scene during lockdown. Rather than work on the scene he was assigned, he and his scene partner, "Jim," explore Keith’s own work.

It was inspired by an experience in his own life, attending the funeral of a friend who was stabbed to death in a fight. The minute-long scene offers glimpses into Keith’s life and our society.

Keith and Jim play young men at the funeral, talking over the body, asking what the death was for — why their friend sought out the fight. They mourn the loss, empathize for the mother of the dead man, and invoke the feelings of honor and camaraderie that bind young people together. They laugh that if only the fight hadn’t happened, the three of them would be hanging out with "half-naked women, drinking forties."

This is a playwright who has found his voice. Keith acts and directs, exploring his feelings and explaining them to Jim in the process.

At the end of the eight-week class, the students perform for their fellow inmates, as well as parents, guards, and a few visitors. One student is in the infirmary, and can’t be there. His scene partner bows out as well, instead being the stage manager and hamming it up between scenes, as if to show his parents he did participate.

The show, under a basketball net in the Long Creek gym, is a moving hour of amateur theater. Kids who have been told to go away from society explore their feelings of hurt, rebellion, and anger safely, with no parents or guards in their faces and no peers jeering.

The performance is a tribute to the power of human faith, and the strength of theater. In heartbreakingly expressive voices, these kids — many of whom speak too fast and too quietly, most of whom read their lines rather than delivering from memory — open their hearts through the words of others.

Keith plays a dead-on Vietnam vet with an alcohol problem. An expressive kid who knows the hard side of the world, he describes hitting a girl until she stops moving. It is a riveting portrayal, no doubt made deeper by Keith’s own life experience.

One set of scene partners and a solo actor have scrapped the original, modern scripts they were to have performed, choosing instead to bring Shakespeare to life in this lockdown.

"D.J.," one of the shyer kids most of the time, delivers the chilling gallows speech of Aaron, a Goth prisoner in Titus Andronicus.

He is nervous as he approaches the seats, directing his words and his venom at individuals in the audience, but he pulls off a powerful and heartfelt delivery that earns him props from his friends at the end.

Later, D.J. and "Anne," also one of the quieter of the group, have memorized their scene. At one point, distracted by his buddies, D.J. loses his line entirely. It’s clear from his face that it’s gone. Not giving up this time, he fights — the effort is visible — to reclaim it, and does so, finishing the scene with a large grin of pride.

"Evan" and "Carol" do a scene together, in which both appear shy but impassioned. They, too, have promise in the theater.

Jim and Keith are together in the next scene, in which they again explore the consequences of youthful misdeeds. This time it is a part of The Outsiders, in which two young men seek refuge from fate. Keith delivers a strong performance here as well, struggling for but managing to recite Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay and holding the crumbling character together by force of will.

It is a wonderful thing that Keith and "Wyatt" return in the final scene, as Benvolio and Romeo, from Romeo and Juliet. While their voices are a bit too quiet for the gym, Wyatt demonstrates a mastery of the language that few actors achieve so early in their careers.

Shetterly and Seward are now raising money for a second effort to throw a theatrical lifeline to kids behind the wire.

Folding, not breaking: Kabuki shows the strength of a paper crane

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Take a seat. Sit mute, without moving. Watch. Listen. Feel. Sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts.

Lights brighten as a girl steps forward from a delicately painted set full of robust colors. They are hues of life, of unbridled energy, of unconquerable power. Youthful vigor and atomic fury collide on the walls.

The girl begins to run, already racing towards a future of untold promise, and trying to elude a past that is close behind her and catching up. She is Sadako Sasaki (Michele Lee), now 12, who was a two-year-old girl when, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan.

In a 40-minute performance heavily influenced by the Japanese kabuki style of theater, Sadako’s story is retold at the Children’s Theatre of Maine.

Kabuki plays often deal with the conflict between humanity and a larger system or social structure, such as a wartime government’s impossible choice between the death of millions or merely hundreds of thousands.

This play combines the two main types of kabuki plays, historical dramas and stories about normal people. It includes ritualized gestures and line-delivery that is more singing or chanting than speaking.

There are also amazing masks with bright colors and strong designs, which clarify character elements in this three-actor, multiple-character show. At the same time, the masks slightly obscure speech — not enough to matter, but enough to anonymize the speakers, as when masked doctors report on Sadako’s condition.

Nancy Brown and Richard Gammon play the roles of doctors, parents, and friends, as well as Sadako’s grandmother, felled instantly when the bomb struck. Brown’s presence on stage — and Lee’s — is a significant departure from kabuki’s no-women-actors tradition, but the adaptation is more than appropriate. While the break from tradition would raise eyebrows in Japan, in the US, having men play the female roles would be worse than distracting.

Brown and Gammon work well together, often separated by an entire stage and not even looking at each other, but moving and speaking together and in counterpoint. Their movements and lines are precisely delivered, with just enough passion to have meaning without losing the strict composure and reserved aspect possessed by many Japanese people.

Even Sadako’s lament, when she is struck down by "the atom bomb disease," leukemia, is subdued.

"I don’t have any scars from the bomb. It didn’t touch me," she cries, not understanding that the bomb’s real blast was invisible. It was not just a bomb that leveled her house, killed her grandmother, and seared her neighbors’ shadows on the walls.

As the dead of Hiroshima later tell her in a vision, "The bomb continues to fall, Sadako. It is falling even now."

Youthful innocence attempts to triumph in this tragedy. Sadako’s friend Kenji (Gammon) arrives with a legend and a message of hope: A person who folds a 1000 paper cranes will have her wish granted by the gods.

Sadako wishes for her grandmother to live, for herself to be well, and for no bomb like that ever to happen again. (She forgets it already did, three days after the bomb came to her hometown.)

As Kenji demonstrates folding the crane, he is turned away from the audience — and toward Sadako. It means we can’t see the nimble fingers and intricate movements that for nearly two full minutes are the only action on the stage. Turning slightly toward those watching would show the skill required in executing a flawless crane under stage lights and dozens of watching eyes.

It is with the crane-folding that the play differs from the story told by the World Peace Project for Children, the real-world organization inspired by Sadako’s story. The play says Sadako did not manage to fold 1000 cranes before she died in 1955, at age 12. The Peace Project says she folded more than that number.

The disparity is important. Either she did not manage to appease the gods in time, as the play suggests, or the gods chose which wish to grant — and it wasn’t her grandmother’s resurrection or Sadako’s own survival. Whichever is the case, the story is an inspiring one, simply and powerfully told.

It ends with the description of a statue of Sadako erected in 1958 by Japanese children in the Hiroshima Peace Park. In her outstretched arm she holds an origami crane. On the base is inscribed, "This is our cry, this is our prayer — Peace in the world."

A replica of that statue in the Seattle Peace Park was vandalized in December. The arm holding the crane was chopped off.

A Thousand Cranes
Written by Kathryn Shultz Miller. Directed by Pamela DiPasquale. With Michele Lee, Richard Gammon, and Nancy Brown. At Children’s Theatre of Maine, through April 18. Call (207) 828-0617.

Backstage

• Correction: After a review in the Phoenix, director Michael Howard did not attend the following performance of Macbeth by the Stage at Spring Point last summer. It was not a rehearsal he missed. Backstage apologizes for the error.

• Starting April 23, Pontine Theatre in Portsmouth will be performing an original production inspired by and based on the New Hampshire ties of e.e. cummings. Pontine artistic directors Greg Gathers and M. Marguerite Mathews created and will perform the show, called Silver Lake Summers: an e.e. cummings revue. Cummings spent many summers, as a boy and as an adult, in the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains. Call (603) 436-6660 or check "Listings" for details.