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Theater: Theater: Poetry: Books: Outdoors:
Not
Playing, Reading According to Director Kirk M. Boyd, all you need to create theater is a platform, a script, an actor and an audience. So for the Willamette Repertory Theatre's final production of the 2004-2005 season, Boyd decided it would be nice to "get back to basics." Readings in Rep spans three days and features three different plays with three different casts and is an opportunity for local residents to experience theater in a more casual, intimate setting. The plays, The Big Knife by Clifford Odets, Cyber Serenade by Mia McCullough and A Bicycle Country by Nilo Cruz, were chosen in part because they have never been performed in Eugene. But unlike other Willamette Repertory shows, Readings in Rep will take place in Studio One at the Hult Center, not the larger Soreng Theater. And instead of having a set and props, the plays will be in the form of unstaged readings. Actors will sit in chairs and read scripts perched on music stands. A no-host bar will remain open for the duration of the performance. After the show, the cast will remain onstage for a post-play discussion. "One of the points of this program is to bring to Eugene some of these important voices that are difficult to produce," Boyd said. "These are the kinds of plays that Eugene doesn't get to see." The first play of the series, The Big Knife, was written in 1949. It reflects the bitterness of the playwright over the immorality, greed and ruthlessness of Hollywood, and was chosen for the readings in part because it requires a large cast. "It's about how Hollywood life is at odds with personal integrity and idealism," Boyd said. Cyber Serenade, in which Boyd will read the role of a cell phone-addicted suburban husband, is about technological changes and their impact on American society. Boyd, who doesn't own a cell phone, chose the play for its wacky humor. "It's a timely piece about a modern American family," he said. The last play, A Bicycle Country, is about three Cuban immigrants trying to reach the United States via raft, and was chosen in part to "raise awareness of the important voices out there in the world that don't get to Eugene," Boyd said. He hopes Readings will be a success and become a tradition. "It's a new adventure for us, and I'm excited to try this new program and see if people enjoy it." Readings in Rep 8 pm, Fri. & Sat., 5/20 & 5/21 2 pm Sunday, May 22 Studio One at the Hult Center, $10 for one show/$24 for all three
Reinventing
Kafka If you liked This Ship of Fools and don't mind being a little bit confused, you will appreciate Kafka Parables. Directed by John Schmor at the Robinson Theatre at UO, the play is an inventive, original portrayal of Franz Kafka's short stories, loosely entwined to create a surreal plot that does not offer the audience any definite conclusions. Like the parables for which it is named, Kafka Parables is cryptic, surreal and at times, abstract to the point of incomprehension. The show is also somewhat dependent on prior knowledge of Kafka, so some of its brilliance might be lost to people unfamiliar with the author. What the show does masterfully is capture Kafka's love for humanity despite his feelings of isolation and insurmountable hopelessness. Unlike other brilliant cynics, Kafka retained his affection for the world despite his disdain for government, society and many aspects of human nature. There were many instances in which the actors inserted understated, masterful humor to the show's overall somber tone. Unfortunately, these were often received with confusion by an audience that seemed unsure whether it was appropriate to laugh. A handful of truly stellar performances compensated for instances of mediocrity and uncertainty from other cast members, which may have contributed to the audience's bewilderment. The costume and set design do a great deal to enhance the performance. Black walls, a sparse, industrial motif and moveable metal staircases help to create a cold, mechanical atmosphere. This is emphasized by black and white film projections of gears and cogs, crowds of people, looming machinery, and a few of the Holocaust on the wall behind the stage. While the set is not meant to represent any particular place, the iron girders and black walls perfectly capture the industrial ugliness of Kafka's Prague. It also provides an excellent backdrop for the often-depressing social commentary in the foreground. But despite your best efforts, at the end of the play you'll be scratching your head, trying to figure out what to take away from the grand enigma that is Kafka Parables. This shouldn't deter Kafka fans or theater lovers from seeing the show, but be warned — it's not light entertainment. If you're looking for an escape from reality with a happy ending, Kafka Parables isn't for you. Because unlike most of the drivel we consume on a daily basis, it forces the audience to think. Showings of Kafka Parables are May 19-21, 27 & 28 at 7:30 pm, as well as a matinee on May 22 at 2 pm at the Robinson Theatre at Villard Hall on the UO campus. — Sara Brickner
Poets,
Pinot and Puddin' On Saturday night I found myself, along with perhaps 80 others, in a dark and gloomy warehouse, the home of Territorial Winery in Eugene. Our cause? The Eugene Poetry Slam Finals, with featured guest Mike McGee. "I like you similar to how pirates and frat boys like booty," says McGee in his poem "Like." "You're a pocket full of awesome." McGee, a nationally recognized slam poet, kicked off the event by performing poems that ranged in topic from cuddling to love to the love of pudding. Among the eight competitors, Samuel Rutledge spoke about Peter Pan and disillusionment. Jes Painter spoke about being a lesbian and the many ways to tie a tie. Jon Labrousse talked about fatherhood and Superman. The energy in the warehouse was electrifying — or maybe it was the Pinot Noir. Either way, the poets were on fire. Of the eight finalists, four were chosen to go to this year's Poetry Slam Nationals in Albuquerque, N.M.: Miranda Willette, Samuel Rutledge, Kitt Jennings and Jon Labrousse. Rutledge and Jennings were also members of the Eugene Slam Team for the 2004 Nationals in St. Louis. "Nationals in St. Louis was both one big disaster and one huge party," says Jennings, 23, who has been writing since she was five. The Saturday night event marked the close of the Eugene Poetry Slam's third season. Marietta Bonaventure, organizer of the Slam, says this year was different than previous years because the finalists were not only great performers but also "all real poets." The drawback to slam poetry, she says, is the audience doesn't respond as much to "well crafted poetry, but rather its flashiness" or the performer's ability to hit a punch line. The judges are made up of volunteer audience members, who don't necessarily know much about poetry. But that's the point. "This is the heart of poetry slam … the idea is that poetry should be accessible to the average person," says Bonaventure. The competitive aspect also adds a different dynamic to poetry slams than to a typical reading. It makes poets work harder, says Bonaventure. She says she's seen poets "become twice the poets they were at the beginning of a season." Bonaventure loves slam poetry because she views it as a vehicle for empowerment. Jennings loves it for its lack of rules. "It's raw, it's intense and anything goes," she says.
Solitude's
Gifts ROGUE RIVER JOURNAL: A Winter Alone, memoir by John Daniel. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. Hardcover, $26. At 52, writer John Daniel is a mountain man but not the hardscrabble, grizzled type. He winters-over in a tight, warm cabin in the Rogue River canyon at a homestead owned by mysterious brothers who lend the cabin to selected writers for occasional retreats. Daniel stays 134 days before returning to his home and his wife, Marilyn, in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range.
Daniel has trucked in plenty of food and enough wine to get by. The water's good, and it's piped into the kitchen and bath. He splits firewood from an ample supply. He plants and tends a vegetable garden that feeds him fresh greens most of the winter. The garden's biggest problem is a lone but ravenous wild turkey, "a lovely female with a blue fuzzy head, a bit of red on her throat, and a gorgeous gold, brown and black-barred carapace of feathers. She slips blithely through the bear fence into the garden every morning, then again in the late afternoon before she shuffles up the drive to her roost in the woods." Daniel reflects on his father, a professional union organizer, as was his mother before he was born. He has brought with him papers, letters, artifacts and extensive research about his father's life. He interviewed his mother about their life together, and he carries his own memories, dreams and emotions of his dad. That's a mixed bag of goods to process, as anyone who has tried to think and write about such personal feelings understands. Daniel doesn't haul in excess emotional baggage such as sentimentality or hero worship to cloud this cognitive process, but like many writers, he yearns to understand his father more deeply both so he can let him go and so he can find himself. Many times he must sort out the complicated feelings he's held for this enigmatic figure. Throughout the winding narrative of Daniel's own childhood, youth and early adulthood he interlaces stories of his father. He shows us he's vulnerable in their unstable encounters and ponders his father's progressive politics on one hand and his habitual drinking on the other. From various situations and musings, Daniel brings the story back to the cabin and grounds it in the writing task he has set for himself. "I thought I might become a morning writer here," Daniel confesses. "Alone in the rhythms of light and dark, I imagined I'd get up with the birds and have my workday finished by noon, as the writers I most admire have done, the afternoon and evening mine to nibble like a well-earned apple. No dice." Embracing his preference for writing in the evening and late at night, he names himself "Scrivener nocturnus" for these night-owl tendencies. Here Daniel launches into one of my favorite passages, a brief essay on darkness and its pleasures: "Silence gathers with the dark, even as the river whispers a little louder form the bottom of the canyon. Apple trees, fence posts, deer in the meadow, all singular things withdraw into the background, less and less present, insubstantial as fading memories. And then, with dusk, the pointed silhouettes of the trees, monuments of a mystery precisely stated against the glowing sky." Daniel's memoir is about letting the conscious, thinking mind find a resting place so that dim images from the past might come more clearly into focus and take on a lived, emotional reality that only the writer can evoke. John Daniel returns to Eugene for a reading at 7 pm on May 24 at the Knight Library Browsing Room. Don't miss him.
BOOK NOTES (May 19 – June 2): Cartoon concert and book tour with Eric Drooker, Keith Knight and Jon Longhi at 7 pm on 5/19 at DIVA. … Bill Sullivan (New Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades) shows slides at 7:30 pm on 5/20 at Chemetkan Outdoor Club, 360 1/2 State St., Salem. …"Book Works, Book Arts" explores book art with demonstrations by 15 members of the Emerald Book and Paper Arts Guild at 1 pm on 5/21 at Eugene Downtown Library, with an exhibition on the third floor of the library during May and June. In conjunction, an ongoing exhibition of Northwest Book Arts by 18 regional artists at White Lotus Gallery continues until mid-June. Other exhibits include the UO collection in the circulation area near the UO Knight Library Browsing Room and in the Architecture and Allied Arts Library. See related talk on 5/26, below. …Former Bookmark employees James Squires and Amelia Reising are opening a new independent bookstore, Books Without Borders, on 5/23, inside the Strand/Cozmic Pizza building at 8th/Charnelton. …Eric Bogosian (Wasted Beauty) reads at ?? on 5/23 in Powell's Books, Portland….John Daniel (Rogue River Journal) reads at 7 pm on 5/24, Knight Browsing Room, UO. …Nationally recognized book arts expert from University of Washington, Sandra Kroupa, explores "Books in the Middle; Books on the Margins" at 7 pm on 5/26 in Knight Library Browsing Room, UO. …Laura Notaro (We Thought You Would Be Prettier) reads at 7 pm on 5/26 at Borders Books. …Thais Mazur (Warrior Mothers) reads at 7 pm on 5/26 at Mother Kali's. … Poet, novelist, memoirist Lynne Sharon Schwartz (In solitary: poems) reads at 7 pm on 5/26 at OSU, Corvallis. …If you caught the NPR interview with Shannon Applegate (Living Among Headstones) on Sunday 5/15, you will want to hear her read about her new gig as Sexton of the Applegate Pioneer Cemetery in Yoncalla, Ore., at 7 pm on 6/6 at the Knight Library Browsing Room, UO.
A
Damplander in the Desert
Death Valley gets hot. The highest temperature ever recorded in North America — a staggering 134 degrees Fahrenheit — was recorded here. In the shade. It doesn't get much water, either. The valley averages 1.7 inches of precipitation annually, and some years there is no measurable moisture recorded at all. So I was surprised when I got an e-mail proposing a trip to this daunting corner of the Mojave Desert from my friend and colleague Jasmine. Like me, she is personally inclined and professionally dedicated to the soggy states. But the desert isn't so dry this year, and if the news reports were to be believed, there were once-in-a-lifetime experiences to be had east of southern California's smog belt. By the middle of March, Death Valley had received almost seven inches of rain. Seven inches of rain is not a big deal in Oregon. The steady drizzle grows lots of vegetation, which becomes a rich layer of humus soil that absorbs the water, releasing it slowly throughout the year. In the desert, the rains are an intense natural drama. The sparse vegetation can't drink fast enough. Mineral soils quickly become saturated, and torrents of water roar out of mountain canyonlands, depositing soil, gravel and giant boulders miles downhill. When the rains cease, the entertainment has only begun for serious devotees of the desert. Locked in the debris flows are the seeds of millions of flowers that transform the monochromatic tones of the valley floor. The record rains of 2005 have created not a riot of color, but a full-scale insurgency of brilliant hues that have jammed desert highways with tens of thousands of visitors from across the globe, all of them eager to witness the best wildflower season ever seen in the valley. Death Valley has always been a beguiling, if difficult, destination. One of the first books to popularize the area was Edna Brush Perkins' 1922 classic, The White Heart of the Mojave. Perkins and her traveling companion, Charlotte Hannahs Jordan, were unconstrained by convention. Both were wealthy, Perkins the daughter of an inventor living on "Millionaire's Row" in Cleveland, and Jordan the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer. Both were mothers and wives, and both were ardent activists for the suffragist cause. They picked Death Valley as a vacation spot because "The white blank on the map looked wild and lonely … like a tiger, terrible and fascinating." They were warned it was no place for decent people. Our friends drew a dismal picture of us sitting out in the sagebrush beside a disabled car and slowly starving to death. "You could not fix it," they said, "and what would you do?" We suggested that we might wait until somebody came along. They assured us that nobody ever came along. Undeterred, they descended into Death Valley in the spring of 1920, in a wagon pulled by two mules, with a laconic deputy sheriff they dubbed "The Worrier" as their guide. Their destination was "the white heart of the Mojave," the shimmering salt flats of Badwater Basin, almost 300 feet below sea level. Water flows into Badwater Basin, but it doesn't flow out. When it evaporates, salt compounds suspended in the annual floods collect on the valley floor. In some areas, like "The Devil's Golf Course," the pallid salt deposits have been carved into frightening shapes by the action of wind and water. Jasmine and I found the basin still covered with water, more water than anyone living can remember. Hundreds of vacationers are taking advantage, cavorting in canoes, kayaks, and inner-tubes, wading up to their necks, sinking into deep black mud. Death Valley is one of the most dramatic trenches in the world. Eons ago, massive tectonic plates collided, shoving trillions of tons of rock skyward. The bedrock between mountain ranges collapsed below sea level. Today, the snow-capped Panamint Range towers 12,000 feet above the chocolate waters of Badwater, just 20 miles away. Beyond Badwater and the salt flats are dusty, rock littered soils, broken by high golden sand dunes. Across the valley floor are scattered a hundred shades of green, from chartreuse sage to emerald mint and buckwheat. The oldest and most prevalent shrubs are the spiny tentacled creosote bushes, dotted with small yellow flowers. Most of the bushes are actually clones from a parent plant in the center of a slowly expanding "fairy ring" of plants. Some of these colonies are more than 9,000 years old. The long jagged canyons reaching deep into the Panamints dominate the view from the valley floor. At the base of these canyons lie broad alluvial fans, some hundreds of feet tall and almost a mile wide, where gravel ripped loose from the sides of mountains by flash floods have come to rest. The gentle arc of gravel is covered by a blanket of "desert sunflower" (Geraea canescens), a tall, fragrant yellow flower. Clinging to the sides of the canyons are purple primrose, the pale white sheen of the "gravel ghost" flower, and blood-red cactus flowers, resting like a glass of burgundy on a bed of razor sharp needles. The oddest sight are the dodder plants (Cuscuta denticula), a strangling member of the morning glory family that envelopes small shrubs with a spongy, orange mat. To us, the bright orange balls of dodder on the salt flats look like a field of pumpkins on an early morning frost. A record crop of wildflowers has bred a hoard of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui) that feed on the nectar of tall plants like the desert sunflower. We sip coffee at camp in the morning as clouds of the orange-tan butterflies drift over our heads, blown north to the rainy forests and meadows of southern Oregon to breed. In Perkins' time, a steady stream of hardy pioneers, miners, ranchers and farmers were trying to make a buck off the blistering white sands and shady canyons of Death Valley. Wildcatters even saw money in the mud, rich in ulexite and borax. Beginning in the 1880s, 20 mule teams made the 165-mile trek across the oven surface of the valley carrying loads of borax that were used in the manufacture of everything from soap to explosives. Today, only ruins record the broken dreams of miners, farmers, ranchers and missionaries. The scenery is the only thing that's ever paid. Today, more than a million and a half visitors clog California 190, a ribbon of pavement that bisects Death Valley. The valley itself is the centerpiece of a 3.7 million-acre national park, the largest outside of Alaska. Which is not to say that Death Valley is safe or comfortable. The visitor center at Furnace Creek is one big liability disclaimer: Drink water, don't touch snakes, don't put your hand anywhere you can't see, drink water, don't walk on sandy soil in the middle of the day (it can reach a temperature of 200 degrees), drink water, tell someone where you're going. Bring lots of water. In the spring and summer, sudden sand storms attack visitors, in Perkins' words "like an army of giants in bright armor." Swirling sand clogs camera shutters, air conditioners, nostrils and more. When the winds swirl through the valley, traffic slows to a crawl, and the host of tourists retreat to their vehicles. When Jasmine and I tried to beat the crowds by driving almost impassable roads into the canyonlands, 50 mph winds bent our tent poles almost double. There is payoff for the discomfort. On our last day in the valley, the storm clouds lifted in the late afternoon as the sun sank below the black mountains. We watched a shadow march swiftly across the valley. The bright yellow flowers glowed briefly before their luster was extinguished by the shadow. As the last rays of the sun threw shafts of devilish light across the valley, the gunmetal sheen of the black mountains to the east turned a fiery crimson. The empty sky was streaked with red as a ghostly full moon rose over the Funeral Mountains. We visitors from the damplands pointed our gasoline-powered wagon north to the land of demure rains and sedate scenery.
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