What is Avalon to Us?

Performance photo courtesy Opera House Arts.

Ah, Avalon. The magical Isle of Apples. Where King Arthur goes to heal, and from the mists of which he will come again. Sounds heavenly, no? Imagine the sweet crisp smell that is apple in salty, misty air.

The problem for us moderns, in this 50th anniversary year of Woodstock, is that we've yet to get ourselves back to this garden. When patriarchy crushed matriarchy, Christianity crushed the Druids, and life became about nothing so much as conquering and consuming to show who was right and called by God we lost an awful lot.

The newly commissioned, world-premiere, site specific performance "Avalon," written by Melody Bates in collaboration with the work of sculptor Peter Beerits at his unique sculpture park, Nervous Nellie's Jams and Jellies, and produced and presented by Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House, wants to remind us of what we have lost--and to what we still might get back.

Beltane: the celebration of the beginning of summer, when the cattle were driven to field, great fires were lit, and our ancestors danced around the May pole. This evolved into the Christian feast day of Pentacost, marked by the tongues of those same great fires signaling the arrival of the Holy Spirit in the apostles after Christ's death.

There's no question that something holy becomes visible to us as life is reborn in the blooming of the spring fields.

Our shadow selves -- Mordred in legend and play, he who is ultimately responsible for killing the King Stag, Arthur -- are very visible in "Avalon." How easy to indulge the adolescent, narcissistic shadow, how difficult to keep it at bay. Yet at the end of this play, it is Mordred whose speech holds the biggest moment of truth for attendees: it is not he, he points out, (or Trump) who is responsible for the blood tide of war in which we live. Our choices -- each and every one, small as well as large -- make the tide. Giving more life to Mordred, our shadow selves, is a part of our collective will -- or lack thereof. And Mordred (played smartly by Shawn Fagan) is real, and therefore loveable, as well.

Neither the wizards nor the Druids (nor later, the native Americans) knew how to defeat the bloody tide of the Anglo-Saxons. Their relentless, irregular warfare -- their ability to commit genocide and still consider themselves Christians, in combination with their hatred of women -- drove civilizations and their peoples into the ground from which we have yet to emerge. We are stuck in a blasphemy of unholy leaders: men who, like their slave-holding kin before them, will let no life go unscarred, no lie be untold, in their quest for power and personal gain. The sad, lost culture in which we try to honor each other and the earth is one of taking rather than giving.

We need, collectively, to dream a better dream -- and wake to join the dance that brings it to life.

"Avalon" points the way. And for those of you who simply want to be a child again, and play in the magical woods: come wander.

Avalon
an Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House world-premiere production
every evening at 5:30 p.m., now through August 25
Nervous Nellies Jams & Jellies
Sunshine Road
Deer Isle, ME

The High Performance Events of Summer

Summer in Maine displays the full diversity of the state’s many marvelous ecosystems—including the performing arts, which bloom with the energy and color of dinner-plate dahlias -- and, like dahlias, are extremely temporal. I’ve been lucky to immerse myself in a number of high quality, diverse performances in the last three weeks alone.

Vaudevillian Thom Wall at Celebration Barn's
Big Barn Spectacular in July.
Photo by Michael Menes.

I made the not-as-far-as-you-fear trek out to South Paris in western Maine to take in, for my second time, Celebration Barn’s Big Barn Spectacular. The Barn is a centerpiece of Maine performance history, founded by internationally-renowned mime Tony Montanaro and extending his legacy to generations of Maine mimes, jugglers, clowns, and eclectic performers who return here each summer to hone their crafts and delight audiences. This year’s Spectacular featured several Barn / Cirque du Soleil alumni, the most astounding of which was juggler Thom Wall, acclaimed as “a master of modern vaudeville.” Thom balanced stacks of many glasses and other breakable things (such as balloons) on the edges and points of knives themselves balanced on each other and held in his mouth…yeah. You have to see it. And personally, I fell in love with a new act by old Maine friends Mike Miclon, Executive Director of Johnson Hall; two of his sons, Shane and Collin; the Barn’s Executive Director Amanda Houtari and several others — The Buckfield (ME) Synchronized Swim Team. Again, its vaudeville: you have to be there. So head west, to Celebration Barn, before the summer is over!

Next I headed Down East to Stonington: also not as far as you might think (if you were a New Yorker with a summer place in the Hamptons or the Catskills, you’d be making trips of this length every weekend). There, at Opera House Arts at the 1912 Stonington Opera House, on the National Register of Historic Places (for which I was founding Executive Director until 2015), I took in an original performance of the nation’s longest running and arguably most beloved Off Broadway musical: The Fantasticks. The song “Try to Remember” is what most remember from this twist on several Shakespearean classics, notably "Romeo & Juliet;" and established Shakespeare in Stonington co-founder and director Julia Whitworth (who “moonlights” as an Episcopal priest) brought her usual smarts and a few plot twists to the show that gave it more of a feminist edge than you might expect.

Finally, in a two-for-one hat trick of a week to end July and ring in August, I caught both a staged workshop reading of Maine playwright John Cariani’s newest, cul-de-sac, at Portland Stage; and Bates Dance Festival’s original, site-specific commission, Mill Town, at the Bates Mill in Lewiston.

Playwright John Cariani and Director Sally Wood at the
Portland Stage workshop for John's new work.
Photo by Aaron Flacke.

The former - a typically-Cariani, fast-talking, dialogue-driven, humorous take on the American obsession with happiness (and its fall outs) — is a tribute to the work of Portland Stage and its Affiliate Artist Program in the development of original Maine theater. This is the only way high quality new plays come to us in a finished form - they must be workshopped: heard by and responded to by live audiences for the playwright to understand whether the script works or not. The staged reading, well directed as always by Affiliate Artist Sally Wood and with terrific acting by AA Abby Killeen, was followed by a lively feedback session with highly engaged (read: opinionated) audience members: just the ticket for John to work on the next iteration of his script, which will join Almost, Maine, Last Gas, and Love Sick among his published works.

A scene from the prelude to Mill Town in the courtyard
of the Bates Mill.

Mill Town, directed and choreographed by Stephan Koplowitz, holds the honor of being the finest all around performance I’ve seen in Maine in a long time. In a fitting tribute to outgoing 30-year Artistic Director Laura Faure, to whom it was dedicated, Mill Town used Lewiston-Auburn’s, and the Mill’s, history and artifacts to propel Bates Dance Festival dancers through and around the mill’s remarkable spaces. The original music, choreography, video, scenic and lighting design, and of course performances gave us, the audience, an extremely special and intimate way (despite there being more than 200 in attendance) to witness and experience this place. From the opening tableaux of young dancers, in costumes reminiscent of Bates Mill workers clothing, to the six small performances on the third floor and the grand finale on the fourth, this was an evening of magic that I was glad to have shown up for.

Still to come; Ragtime at the 85-year-old Ogunquit Playhouse; and Orgelfest 2017, a celebration of Portland’s famed Kotzschmar Organ with retiring municipal organist Ray Cornils and the Kotzschmar Festival Brass.

Yes, there are lobsters and lighthouses on the coast, canoes and camps on the lakes, hikers and hills in the west. And strung throughout all of these, like the glass floats on a Japanese fishing net, are Maine art, performance, and historic cultural venues. Be sure to add these to your summer collection. Remember, with live performance: you have to be there. Locate a place, travel to it, and experience it. I can guarantee that, like me, you won’t be disappointed. 

Front Page News

Some of the underlying topics in our upcoming winter production of Christopher Shinn's drama, "Dying City," made the front page of the New York Times yesterday in this story of the Army missing (or ignoring?) signs of potential suicide among its overburdened corps.

Shinn's taught, three-character play takes audience members into the rippling sea of violence which runs through and impacts all of our lives--whether we are privileged, Harvard-educated New Yorkers, hard-working fishermen (or fishermen's wives), or working-class suburban California boys who sign up for the Army Reserves. We don't know exactly how one of the protagonists, Craig, died while on his second tour of duty in Iraq; but the play suggests he may have been one of the record number of military personnel since 2004 who, like Craig, are "mentally exhausted and traumatized from repeated deployments to combat zones" and have committed suicide.

But Craig is only one-third of this play. The impact of subtle and not so-subtle family and cultural violence on him, his brother Peter, and his wife Kelly is what leaves audience members, at the end of 90 minutes with no intermission, gripping the arms of our seats and asking ourselves some important questions. Who do we become in coping with the everyday violence in our own lives? Can we see and touch the fear which underlies so many of our interactions? How do we prevent it from eating us up?

"Dying City" is constructed on the metaphor of Craig's understanding of his company's mission in Baghdad: "ordered to protect themselves from violence by actively doing violence, which leads to more violence to protect themselves against: no sane person could survive these tasks." Baghdad is dying, yes, but its not the only city that is, whether in reality (see recent news reports from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico) or in this play, in which each individual is his or her own "city."

Shinn prefaces his play with by an epigram from Aeschylus--"A lie sweet in the mouth/is sour in the stomach"--but more to the point for why we're producing it at the Opera House is this statement which comes about two thirds of the way through the play: "If you really care about the truth, you can't just speak to your own tiny group, you have to figure out how to speak to the community . . . People who may not be like you but that you still have--something in common with. A basic humanity."

"Dying City" by Christopher Shinn, February 3-13, 2011. Directed by Peter Richards. Starring Juri Henley-Cohn and Therese Plaehn. An Opera House Arts' Actors Equity production at the Stonington Opera House. Click here for tickets and additional information.