Half-lives: Mad Horse's cutting choice of Zindel's Gamma Rays

Published in the Portland Phoenix

When a group of tender seeds are exposed to toxic radiation, the ones receiving the smallest dose develop normally; those that are moderately exposed mutate into larger-than-life oddities, and the ones getting the heaviest dose wither and die. That's the finding of the science experiment that gives The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds its title.

It is also the heartbreakingly human lesson imparted by watching Paul Zindel's Pulitzer and Obie-winning play, produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company at Lucid Stage, under the direction of Chris Horton.

In an intricately run-down apartment converted from a former market (designed by Stacey Koloski), Beatrice (Christine Louise Marshall) is raising her two teenage daughters — shrinking-violet Tillie (Veronica Druchniak) and her older sister, the mercurial Ruth (Ruth Gray) — with an attitude that could easily be called radioactive. Self-absorbed, neglectful, and angry at the world, Beatrice is also mocking and belittling of her daughters — and, as written, even more darkly menacing when she's been drinking.

She blames her daughters for her life not turning out how she hoped: widowed, unemployed, and forced to take in elderly boarders on the brink of death for the pittance of cash it earns, Beatrice goes so far as to call her children "two stones around her neck."

In a play that is as allegorical as it is expository, it is the radioactive Beatrice herself who lives a self-professed "half-life," and condemns her daughters to the same. She cuts them in half with her mockery; she keeps the bright, science-fascinated Tillie home from school; she allows Ruth to discover one of the boarders dead — a trauma that gives Ruth recurring convulsions.

When Tillie is announced as a finalist in the school science fair, Ruth becomes her biggest cheerleader, berating her mother with excitement about the family's sole success. The revelation also ignites a spark of pride in Beatrice, brightening her countenance — until her past returns to haunt her, extinguishing the flame and sending the family into a deeper spiral as the play ends.

The contrast between Beatrice's moods, however, is not as sharp as it could be; Marshall's character is too upbeat at the beginning — and not in the "killing with kindness" sort of way that would end up making her creepier. She's also not dark enough in the middle and the end, leaving the menacing shifts largely in the audience's interpretation of the language, rather than in the emotional energy coming from the stage.

When Nanny (Muriel Kenderdine) appears, serving the play only as an early target for Beatrice's scorn and derision — the role has no lines, and only a couple of facial expressions: blankness, and a smile (twice) — Marshall's tone and face are too friendly to give weight to her biting threats and scorn. And a laugh line about murdering the family pet and causing Ruth more convulsions got some chuckles, but carried none of the sinister intimidation it should have dripped with.

Marshall has been darkly menacing to great effect many times on Portland stages; the choice to moderate her character's extremism has another casualty, too: flattening the performance of the only experienced actor on the stage for most of the play. Druchniak and Gray are high-school students, and talented ones: Druchniak's ability to utterly disappear on stage borders on Cheshire-like; Gray's flip-flopping moods seem very genuine teenager. While their characters have some irregularity written in, their inexperience accounts for some additional unevenness.

Mad Horse has chosen a play that is both strong and deep enough to make the production powerful, and the final scene, just after the dread moment arrives when the effects of the toxic radiation truly begin to blossom, is both poignant and pitiful — leaving the audience to ponder, after the blackout, what in fact remains of these half-lives.

THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS | by Paul Zindel | directed by Chris Horton | produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company | at Lucid Stage, in Portland | through April 1 | 207.899.3993
 

Driving forward: Behrens's solid second effort

Published at thePhoenix.com


If there is a male equivalent to "chick lit," Peter Behrens's latest novel, The O'Briens, is probably it, a detail-rich, character-driven historical novel that lightly touches issues of family loyalty and individual aspirations. Less weighty, and less gripping, than his 2006 debut novel, The Law of Dreams, the present tale follows Joe O'Brien, the patriarch of the title family, from childhood in the late 19th century into his dotage in 1960.

Industrial and military history appear almost as characters — as does New York City, regularly and sometimes jarringly — guiding the human players along their courses, which are more beautifully embellished straight lines than twisting paths of plot.

Sadly, the deep echoes of Joe's failure to make his peace with a merciful action taken in his youth require Behrens to shallow out other aspects of his story. An early metaphor serves as an example: Joe gets engaged and then, moments later, he and his fiancée literally watch two people die in a plane crash. The moment is beautifully drawn, though, with precision and grace amid the tragedy.

THE O'BRIENS | by Peter Behrens | Pantheon Books | 384 pages | $25.95

Living history: An object lesson in research as storytelling

Published in the Portland Phoenix


John Brown's body may now lie a-mouldering in his grave, as the song suggests, but in life the Connecticut-born Kansan settler who led an assault on a federal installation in Virginia almost never stopped moving in his passionate zeal to rid the United States of the scourge of slavery.

In Midnight Rising, historian and master narrator Tony Horwitz tracks Brown, who was the country's most famous domestic terrorist until Timothy McVeigh, on his tireless travels between the western frontier where he began his campaign, the northeastern cities from which he drew financial support, and finally to the all-out strike near the national capital that led to his hanging in 1859.

In a meticulously researched account, Horwitz demonstrates his first-rate ability to weave documents together to form a compelling, well-rounded picture of how Brown's life, actions, and legacy resonated such that two years after his execution, he achieved his goal: to spark an armed conflict that would sweep slavery from America's shores, an epic battle that ensures Brown's soul is indeed marching on, even up to the present.

MIDNIGHT RISING: JOHN BROWN AND THE RAID THAT SPARKED THE CIVIL WAR | by Tony Horwitz | Henry Holt and Company | 365 pages | $29

Press Releases: Distant view

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Of all the coverage of Olympia Snowe's decision not to run for re-election this year, the Maine media should have been expected to handle it best. Close to home, with insider knowledge available and solid connections to sources on the ground — that's the best preparation for a breaking political story.

Sadly, though, the in-state coverage was neither as thoughtful nor as comprehensive as were the news items produced by out-of-state outlets. As I've said before, the Lewiston Sun Journal, mostly in the person of tireless reporter Steve Mistler, has had the best coverage in Maine (see thePhoenix.com/AboutTown for more).

But the cost of the other papers' sluggishness (and Mistler's comprehensive updating of lists of people taking out petitioning papers from the Secretary of State's office) has been a lack of exploration of the mess all these prospective successors to Snowe are vying to get into.

POLITICO broke the story of intra-party warfare going from cold to hot about the same time as Snowe's announcement, with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch targeting Snowe in a mailing seeking support for his reelection campaign, suggesting her moderation was undesirable even to a longtime friend and Senate colleague.

North Carolina political scientist Jonathan Weiler noted in the HUFFINGTON POST that reporting of Snowe's complaints against partisanship unfairly placed blame for polarization across the political spectrum, when it squarely belongs in the Republican column, where "right-wing extremism has gone mainstream."

STATE OF ENLIGHTENMENT political blogger Joe Joffe observed that Snowe's decision came in the midst of a massive battle over women's health and related issues — a set of questions that had largely been settled in moderate ways under the George W. Bush administration but have resurfaced because of rabid extremists' opposition to Obama's continuation of those policies.

And Maine's media also refused to depart from Snowe's own narrative that she was successful at being a moderate and in creating opportunities for real progress. Jonathan Chait in NEW YORK MAGAZINE, however, argued that while Snowe has been given great power in many political debates, "She has used it, on the whole, quite badly." That piece specifically criticized her for using the concepts of moderation and centrism not as a means to a public-policy end, but as "a matter of political self-preservation."

It takes a broad media diet to uncover reporting on all the various ways in which Snowe's decision either changes the political landscape or sheds light on how that landscape has already been indelibly altered. But you won't hear about that from any of Maine's daily newspapers, who repeatedly act as if they can — and should — be the only places Mainers get their news. (Distressingly, they often are.)

• Also missing from the local media was much digging into WHY SNOWE MADE THIS DECISION when she did.

The best summary of that reasoning came in a single paragraph at the end of a front-page New York Times article by Congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman, published the morning after Snowe's bombshell. It's worth reproducing in full:

"Ms. Snowe may have just grown fed up. At raucous Republican caucuses in February, her name was greeted with jeers from some Tea Party activists. Republicans had seized control of the governor's mansion and the State Legislature in 2010, but for the most ardent conservatives, it was not enough, Ms. [Georgia] Chomas [a cousin and close confidante of Snowe] said. Ms. Snowe had turned 65. Ms. Chomas's mother, who was like a mother to Ms. Snowe, had died, followed by the mother of Ms. Snowe's husband, John R. McKernan Jr., and the mother of her late husband, Peter Snowe."

Elegantly presented, well-reported information with strong sourcing close to the senator. That's what Mainers got by seeking media from farther afield.

Rating the #Snowe coverage - print and online

Published at thePhoenix.com

In the hours and days following last Tuesday’s shocker announcement that US Senator Olympia Snowe will not seek a fourth term in the Senate, the breaking-news ability of Maine’s mainstream press has been stretched in ways it hasn’t been in recent memory. This was no disaster/fire/accident story, where flames are visible and the players all gather in one place.

Rather, it was a political story, touched off by an email blast, with players around the state (and around the nation, if you count the major parties’ senate-campaign power brokers). And much of the early reporting was gut reaction (the governor swore; Dems rejoiced) followed by speculation about what it meant for not only the US Senate race in Maine, but nationally for the balance of power in the Senate, as well as statewide, regarding Congressional seats, and legislative ones too, as every political climber in the state saw real daylight above them for the first time in many years.

As such, it was a prime opportunity for the daily newspapers to step up and embrace what mainstream media outlets still quaintly call “new media.” Which is to say, the power of the Internet to reach and engage their audiences.

Unsurprisingly, it was the Sun Journal, led by energetic “new media director” Tony Ronzio, that led the pack, posting an early collection of reaction and preliminary analysis on Storify. (It included the pair of tweets breaking the news, from former SJ political reporter Rebekah Metzler, now at US News and World Report.)

The day after Snowe’s announcement, he hosted a CoverItLive chat with various political-watchers and several readers. The conversation was kept moving by interjections of facts, often provided by Sun Journal political reporter Steve Mistler (who also blogged up a storm) and regional editor Scott Thistle, but also supplemented by UMaine Campus editor Michael Shepherd. It was also supplemented by a series of ongoing polls on thought-provoking questions — about who can win (Michaud and Cutler tied, then Pingree, Summers, and King; Raye’s got no shot ), who in DC will miss Snowe most (Collins over Obama, with Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid tied for third), and who Snowe’s announcement hurts most (GOP over Dems, independents not at all)

The Bangor Daily News came in second, with strong contributions from the political blogs PineTreePolitics and PollWays (though neither is written by a staffer, and PollWays writer Amy Fried, a UMaine political scientist, was in the Sun Journal’s online chat), and a rudimentary — and uninteresting — online poll asking if readers were “sad to see Olympia Snowe leave her Senate seat.”

The Press Herald had a weak online showing, with several reported stories and columns, but for online-extras, there was just a slideshow of file photos of Snowe through the years and MaineToday Digital executive editor Angie Muhs’s Storify collection, which started about five hours after the news actually broke, leaving her posting just a bunch of reactive and speculative tweets, though admittedly grouped by theme (“caught many off guard,” “political speculation,” “reaction from those already in the race,” “Snowe was quickly praised,” and the like).

In related news, the TV stations’ general managers just saw their finances perk up considerably. Whatever happens, there’s going to be a massive amount of money spent on TV ads. How much? Snowe herself had about $3 million in the bank — to defend a secure seat. Now that it’s open, the numbers will be astronomical.