“Bart Sher's era: A closer look at Intiman Theatre over the past decade - Seattle Times” plus 3 more |
- Bart Sher's era: A closer look at Intiman Theatre over the past decade - Seattle Times
- From high jinks to handcuffs - Times-Argus
- Portland's Crystal Ballroom celebrates 96th birthday - Oregonian
- Chaos eases as Haiti food lines focus on women - YAHOO!
| Bart Sher's era: A closer look at Intiman Theatre over the past decade - Seattle Times Posted: 31 Jan 2010 07:09 PM PST Bartlett Sher's artistic reign at Seattle's Intiman Theatre was eventful and triumphant. It was also uninspiring at times, but bracingly adventurous, too. And at its outstanding best, it was a reflection of the impassioned, articulate and richly gifted, ambitious man at the tiller. One thing is certain: Sher was more than a figurehead even as he was shuttling between Seattle and points east in recent years. He stayed closely involved in fundraising and decision-making (by cellphone, fax, e-mail, perhaps carrier pigeon) through last year — when he made news by almost single-handedly engineering the hiring of his successor, Kate Whoriskey. All in all, Sher left a big shoeprint on one of Seattle's major resident theaters, lifting its national profile and often engaging his growing audience with a vision of drama as a vital intellectual and cultural force — an urgent conversation between a community and its artists. And, with colleague Laura Penn (Intiman's manager for 14 years, through the 2007 season), he sparked discussion, debate, criticism and other feedback at every turn. One should acknowledge that Sher also benefited from the path charted by his predecessor at Intiman, Warner Shook. Shook updated the company's repertoire with polished-to-a-gleam stagings of British and American works, including the eagerly anticipated Seattle debut of Tony Kushner's groundbreaking epic, "Angels in America." Like Shook, Sher is an impeccable theatrical craftsman. And he pushed Intiman's envelope further by investing in new and recent works by artists he fervently believed in (particularly playwright and artistic associate Craig Lucas), conjuring more abstract stagings, and instituting the multiyear American Cycle series of classic American literary works (which created more public dialogue via participating local libraries, community centers and schools). He also achieved broad success with such shows as the Tony Award-honored musical "Light in the Piazza" on Broadway, and the new play about the working poor, "Nickel and Dimed" (which has been produced by more than 40 other companies). An experienced and probing classicist before he took the Intiman job, Sher returned to founding director Margaret Booker's mandate by presenting Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov masterworks. One could argue (as some patrons did) with his visually bold, unsettling reframings of "Uncle Vanya" or "Richard III." But Sher's theatrical intelligence, the precise beauty of his stage images, his deep engagement with text, were always evident. More erratic were the shows that he tapped outside directors to stage. Attempts to pump up the box office, with tepidly realized comic fare like "Moonlight and Magnolias" and "The Mystery of Irma Vep, " rang false. And some directors seemed at odds with their assigned plays — as in disappointingly askew versions of Joe Penhall's "Blue/Orange," and Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing." But as some Intiman shows Sher guided himself traveled to other U.S. cities, and even to Britain's hallowed Royal Shakespeare Company, his fame spread and opportunities to work on Broadway and esteemed opera houses multiplied. Sher's increasingly long stretches in New York to direct sterling versions of Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing," the musical "South Pacific" and others were eased by his smart appointment of talented Seattle director Sheila Daniels as his artistic second at Intiman. Then, after Sher and family moved back East, he became too busy to direct Intiman's 2008 and 2009 seasons. Inevitably, there was Seattle backlash against an absentee impresario, and a realization by Sher it was time to hand over the theater he loves to another artistic regime. But the past decade at Intiman will largely be remembered for its high points — which have been numerous, and gratifying. Here's a personal selection of some of the most memorable shows of the Sher Era: New works:
"The Dying Gaul" (2001) and the world premieres of "Singing Forest" (2006) and "Prayer for My Enemy" (2007) — all by Craig Lucas, all directed by Bartlett Sher "Nickel and Dimed" (2002) by Joan Holden, adapted from a book by Barbara Ehrenreich — directed by Sher "The Light in the Piazza" (2005) composed by Adam Guettel and written by Craig Lucas — directed by Lucas (later restaged for Broadway by Sher) New Productions of Classics: "Cymbeline" (2001) by William Shakespeare — directed by Sher "The Servant of Two Masters" (2001) by Carlo Goldoni — directed by Sher "The Chairs" (2002) by Eugene Ionesco — directed by Kate Whoriskey "The Three Sisters" (2005) by Anton Chekhov (adapted by Craig Lucas) — directed by Sher "Richard III" (2006) by Shakespeare — directed by Sher "Native Son" (2006) by Richard Wright and Paul Green — adapted and directed by Kent Gash "A Streetcar Named Desire" (2008) by Tennessee Williams — directed by Sheila Daniels "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" (2009) by Robert E. Sherwood — directed by Sheila Daniels Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| From high jinks to handcuffs - Times-Argus Posted: 31 Jan 2010 08:28 PM PST From high jinks to handcuffs
By JIM RUTENBERG and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON The New York Times - Published: January 31, 2010 James O'Keefe III, the guerrilla videographer, advised conservative students this month that they needed to start taking more risks. "The more you put yourself out there and you take those calculated risks," he told the Web site CampusReform.org, which works to foster conservative activism on college campuses, "you're actually going to get opportunities." Just days later, O'Keefe, 25, took his own advice, but did not get quite the opportunity he expected. He and three other men — including a 24-year-old associate, Joseph Basel, who was interviewed alongside O'Keefe by the Web site — were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator's New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification. O'Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, "I could have used a different approach to this investigation." But that approach was precisely the kind that he and others have been perfecting for years, a kind of gonzo journalism or a conservative version of "Candid Camera." Those methods took root on college campuses in the latter half of George W. Bush's presidency, fostered by a group of men and women in their late teens and early 20s with a taste for showmanship and a shared sense of political alienation — a sort of political reverse image of the left-wing Yippies of the 1960s. They studied leftist activism of years past as their prototype, looking to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who laid down the framework for grass-roots activism in the '60s, and of gay rights groups and even Communist organizations. They held "affirmative action" bake sales with prices set based on the age and race of the buyer, posed as donors to Planned Parenthood seeking to contribute to the abortion of African-American fetuses only, and held a mock "Love Thy Prisoner" campaign to find American homes for Guantanamo inmates. O'Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group ACORN — eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become ACORN's undoing. He quickly became a cult hero among young conservatives who saw his work as path-breaking and sought to emulate him. Liberals have denounced his methods as dishonest, a form of entrapment, but national Republican leaders seized on them as revelatory, pressuring Congress into cutting ACORN's financing. O'Keefe produced his videos with a partner, Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute in them. Although he may be the most public face of this new approach, he is just one of a group of young conservatives who use political pranks and embarrassing recordings to upend what they view as overwhelming liberal biases on college campuses and in the culture at large. Path to New Orleans In the incident in New Orleans, several of the group's central players came together. They had met through a small community of conservative college newspaper editors that is fostered by advocacy organizations supported by old Republican families like the Coorses and Scaifes. One of those arrested was Stan Dai, 24, a former editor in chief of the irreverent GW Patriot at George Washington University, where he published an anti-feminist article lampooning the play "The Vagina Monologues." His version was called "The Penis Monologues." Another was Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like "Third World Countries Need SWEATSHOPS" and "I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts." The fourth was Robert Flanagan, 24, who did not know the others before roughly two weeks ago, when O'Keefe gave a speech for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian organization in New Orleans for which Flanagan works a few hours a week. Until then, Flanagan, a star athlete and son of a federal prosecutor, had not been provocative in his conservatism, though he had been sharply critical of Landrieu on the institute's blog. And then there was Ben Wetmore, 28, who was not arrested but who allowed Dai, O'Keefe and Basel to stay at his house in New Orleans this month. The authorities have not indicated that Wetmore, a Loyola law student, was connected to the incident at Landrieu's office, but he has nonetheless played a vital role in O'Keefe's career, as well as that of Basel and other activists. Wetmore helped introduce many of the activists to one another and inspired them through his take on attention-grabbing tactics. His often behind-the-scenes hand was detailed in a trail he left on the Internet, as well as in several interviews. "Benjamin Wetmore: a mentor of mine; a genius," O'Keefe said during an interview with The New York Times in September, after the ACORN videos were released. "He said, 'Take on the politically correct crowd on campus, satirically."' O'Keefe declined several interview requests, and Wetmore responded wordlessly to an e-mail message by sending photographs of Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who resigned after admitting to plagiarism and fabrication. The partnership between O'Keefe and Wetmore appears to have started in earnest in 2004. As a philosophy major at Rutgers University, O'Keefe came to believe that conservative-leaning students were being force-fed a diet of academic liberalism. As he put it at the time, they were "drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth." He and some friends started an alternative conservative publication called The Centurion with $500 from the conservative Leadership Institute's Balance in Media grant program, which was overseen at the time by Wetmore. The institute, founded in 1979, is based in Arlington, Va., and is best known for training campus conservatives to influence public policy. Before joining the institute, Wetmore had established his own bona fides as a college provocateur at American University. He drew national attention after being arrested by the campus police for breaking a prohibition against recording Tipper Gore during a speech she gave there in 2002 and refusing to surrender the tape. The incident became a cause celebre for First Amendment advocates and showcased what would become a standard technique of Wetmore and his cohort: taping classes, lectures and other campus events in the hopes of catching professors and others in moments of excessive political correctness or other embarrassments. He made headlines again two years later when American University's president, Benjamin Ladner, unsuccessfully tried to stop Wetmore from running the Web site BenLadner.com, which was devoted to criticizing him. Campus pranks have a long tradition, but O'Keefe and Wetmore were "among the early users of putting multimedia content online for the conservative cause," said Ryan Nichols, a grass-roots conservative activist and former colleague of both men at the Leadership Institute. "In that sense, they were pioneering." In the Times interview last September, O'Keefe credited Wetmore with giving him the idea for one of his most talked about video farces, which continues to draw attention on YouTube: a campaign to rid a dining hall of Lucky Charms cereal, because it was offensive to Irish students. In the video, O'Keefe quickly exhibited his absurdist improvisational style, telling a school official that the leprechaun on the cereal box appeared as "an Irish-American" who is "portrayed as a little green-cladded gnome or huckster." Making waves His first issue of The Centurion — with a mock New York Times front page with headlines like "Study Shows Mr. Bush Unfit for Presidency" — drew an immediate reaction, and a following. "Everyone was like: 'Whoa, what is this? Oh my goodness,"' said Gregory W. Levitsky, a friend and colleague of O'Keefe's at The Centurion. Anthony Gioia, another former Rutgers student, said he joined the newspaper after seeing that first issue. "Rutgers, like every university, is a very liberal institution, so we were a small group of friends trying to combat that atmosphere," Gioia said. "The way we went about it was very provocative and made people take notice, and we won over a lot of people to our way of thinking." But if The Centurion delighted fellow conservatives, it frequently left campus liberals flabbergasted. When it published an opinion piece titled "The Inequality of Black History Month," a student, Whitney Pennington, wrote in The Rutgers Daily Targum, "Honestly, in responding to this article, I do not even know where to begin." Tabitha Rice, who was in the College Democrats at Rutgers and who had numerous run-ins with O'Keefe, described him as "insufferable." "He always would do something that would get a rise, but he always knows how to work the system," she said. Around the same time, Wetmore wrote on his blog about a visit with another recipient of a Leadership Institute grant, Basel, who used the money to start his newspaper, The Counterweight. Basel became known at his newspaper for confronting faculty members and others on campus. After college, O'Keefe took a job with Wetmore at the Leadership Institute and began traveling the country to help students with their publications. He worked intensely, said Morton Blackwell, the institute's founder, remaining dedicated to his own projects. But eventually the institute developed some discomfort with the approach. Blackwell said he offered O'Keefe the choice between pursuing activism or working for his organization, " and he said he was committed to the activism." Things did not quite work out as planned. In the end, O'Keefe's Planned Parenthood campaign — in which some of the organization's workers were recorded accepting donations from one of O'Keefe's characters who said the money should go to abort only black fetuses — forced Planned Parenthood to apologize in multiple states, though officials also complained that some tapes were "heavily edited." The campaign caught the eye of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web publisher and a former editor of The Drudge Report. In an interview, he said he had admired the Planned Parenthood campaign but did not know who was behind it until O'Keefe and Giles approached him with the ACORN project. Breitbart likened O'Keefe's approach to that of Abbie Hoffman and Hunter S. Thompson. His business arrangement with O'Keefe to run the videos on his Big Government site is widely credited with giving them national exposure, and for making O'Keefe a star of his movement. By last fall, Wetmore seemed less involved in O'Keefe's projects, apparently because he had moved to New Orleans to attend law school at Loyola University. Nonetheless, O'Keefe, Basel and Dai showed up in town a few months later. O'Keefe had been invited to speak at a Pelican Institute luncheon on Jan. 21. The invitation had come about, said the institute's president, Kevin Kane, because the institute had done its own investigations of ACORN, albeit of the more traditional kind. The topic of the day was undercover video and new media, but O'Keefe made it clear to some who attended the luncheon that he had other, unspecified work to do in New Orleans. Also at the luncheon was Flanagan, who had worked as an intern in the offices of several Republican members of Congress. He moved to New Orleans last year, putting in a few hours a week as a blogger for the Pelican Institute. David Centofante, who was in a defense and strategic studies program with Flanagan at Missouri State University, said he had received an e-mail message from Flanagan a couple of weeks ago. "He said to me, 'You know the guy O'Keefe who did the ACORN thing?"' Centofante said. " 'We're working together on something kind of cool."' Things did not quite work out as planned. NYT-01-30-10 1452EST
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| Portland's Crystal Ballroom celebrates 96th birthday - Oregonian Posted: 31 Jan 2010 06:41 PM PST By Steve Beaven, The OregonianJanuary 31, 2010, 6:33PM Reed Gulick-Stutz, a member of Portland kid-rock band Still Pending, takes the stage at Sunday's Crystal Ballroom birthday bash. The venue marked 96 years with an all-ages party — and some history lessons. The tour started Sunday afternoon on the bouncing floor. It was, after all, a celebration of the Crystal Ballroom's 96th birthday. So it was fitting that historian Tim Hills began his talk with a little background on the old dance hall's most endearing -- and enduring -- quirk. But the floating floor is just a small part of the Crystal Ballroom's historical appeal. Dancers, artists, furniture-makers and musicians of every stripe have stopped in at 1332 W. Burnside at one time or another in the past 10 decades. And in some ways, the club's roller-coaster history mirrors the cultural life of the city it calls home. Now it's part of the McMenamins brewpub empire. "This place has one of those histories that is hard to comprehend," said Hills, who works for McMenamins. "It's just so deep." "This is a pretty young city, and anything that dates back carries weight," said Patrick Wohlmut, who was making balloon animals and other figurines for kids on Sunday. "They push that history. They very much present that as part of the appeal." Of course, Sunday's party included more than a history lesson. It was an all-ages bash with a full slate of bands, dozens of dancing toddlers, and beer. Lots of beer. Thus the history was easy to overlook. But it's rich and varied and includes the Grateful Dead, James Brown, square dancers, Jazz Age jitter-buggers and a host of musical acts, some still touring, others long gone. The club opened in 1914 and was operated in the early years by a fellow named Montrose Ringler. Back then, it was primarily a dance club. But, as Hills tells it, city officials found the dancing of the day immoral and banned some of the youthful gyrations. Later, during World War II, the Crystal was known as a family gathering spot. During the 1950s and early '60s, it served as a meeting place for Portland's young African American community. Performers traveling up the West Coast, including B.B. King, Etta James and Marvin Gaye, made the Crystal Ballroom one of their stops. Also in the '50s, the club was rented out for high school parties and Portland State University gatherings. It closed in 1965 and reopened in 1967 as the center of the city's psychedelic movement. It closed again in 1968, Hills said. Since then, it's become a cornerstone for the city's music scene. It's the kind of place that Eli Hirsch can appreciate. Hirsch is 15 and admitted he didn't know much about the Crystal Ballroom's history. But two of his bands played Sunday afternoon, and he understands the significance of a good gig. "It's kind of an elite place," Hirsch said. "It's a big deal to play the Crystal. For a band as young as we are, it's an incredible honor."
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| Chaos eases as Haiti food lines focus on women - YAHOO! Posted: 31 Jan 2010 06:48 PM PST PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The 79-year-old woman with a 55-pound bag of rice perched on her head gingerly descended concrete steps Sunday and passed it off to her daughter-in-law — who quickly disappeared behind the faded leopard-print sheets that are the walls of their makeshift home on the crowded turf of Haiti's National Stadium. That personal victory for Rosedithe Menelas and her hungry family was a leap forward as well for the United Nations and aid groups that have struggled to help 2 million people who need food aid after the Jan. 12 earthquake. Under a new targeted approach to aid, Menelas and thousands of other women across Haiti's capital no longer have to battle with men at food handouts that in recent days have been chaotic and dangerous scrums. "Every time they give out food there's too much trouble," said Menelas, collapsing into a small wooden chair as two grandchildren quickly scrambled into her lap. "Today, we finally got something." U.N. officials say they are still far short of reaching all of the quake victims estimated to need food. The U.N. World Food Program and its partners, including World Vision, borrowed an approach that has worked in other disaster zones. The agencies fanned out across Port-au-Prince, distributing coupons to be redeemed for bags of rice sites across the city. The coupons were given mainly to women, the elderly and the disabled. Men could redeem coupons for women who were busy taking care of children or who otherwise could not make it. "Our experience around the world is that food is more likely to be equitably shared in the household if it is given to women," WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said at the stadium, now a sprawling encampment of families left homeless by the quake. Officials targeted women because they are primary caregivers in most households and are less likely to be aggressive in aid lines. Many Haitians agreed. Chery Frantz, a 35-year-old father of four who lives in a ravine near one distribution center, said men are more likely to try to sell the donated rice. "Women won't do that because they're more responsible," Frantz said. Bags of rice will be given out daily for the next two weeks to hold the city until longer-term food efforts can take hold. Workers are handing out 1,700 rations daily at each location. Each bag is intended to help feed a family of six for two weeks with about half the calories they need each day. WFP said that by the end of the day it had distributed some 377 metric tons of rice to more than 100,000 at nine sites. Also Sunday, the White House said it was resuming the military airlift of critically injured earthquake victims, having received assurances that additional medical capacity exists in U.S. hospitals. The flights had stopped four days earlier, worrying doctors in Haiti who said hundreds would die without specialized care. Since then, relief groups were forced to use expensive private jets. The Boston-based aid group Partners in Health arranged for one such plane Sunday to fly a 5-year-old tetanus victim, a 14-month-old boy with pneumonia and a baby boy with third-degree burns to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. The White House said the airlift would resume in hours. "Patients are being identified for transfer, doctors are making sure that it is safe for them to fly, and we are preparing specific in-flight pediatric care aboard the aircraft where needed," spokesman Tommy Vietor said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been asked to build a 250-bed tent hospital to relieve pressure on the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort and on Haitian facilities where earthquake victims are being treated under tarpaulins in hospital grounds. Several Port-au-Prince hospitals were damaged or destroyed. An effort to help other Haitian children led 10 U.S. Baptists into the arms of police when they were caught trying to bus 33 children to the Dominican Republic. They acknowledged they had not gotten any permissions from Haitian authorities. They were being held without charges on Sunday. The church members, most from Idaho, called it a "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" to save abandoned children in the disaster zone. But they put themselves in the middle of a political firestorm over fears that overly quick adoptions could permanently separate children from missing parents — or that traffickers may be exploiting the quake to seize and sell children. There were some glitches in Sunday's food campaign. At least a dozen people didn't make it into the stadium before U.N. peacekeepers from Brazil shut the gates. They angrily waved their coupons outside. Inside, the Brazilians distributed sardines, corned beef and water when the rice ran out to separate lines of men and women. The crowd surged forward, prompting the peacekeepers to fire several volleys of pepper spray. Chris Webster, a World Vision spokesman, said his group needed more security before it could open two sites in the seaside slum of Cite Soleil. But a tour of several sites showed the project was largely successful. People hauled away their rice, often dividing it up among friends and family. Some women quickly turned their bags over to husbands and brothers, but most took it themselves to the refugee camps they call home. "Bringing food into a situation where people are desperate is always chaotic," Webster said at one site on the city's Rue J. Poupelard. "But this seems like it's going well." Aid workers worked with community groups and others to make the operation as smooth as possible. U.N. officials even sought the help of Voodoo priests, who urged people to stay calm, said Max Beauvoir, head of Haiti's Voodoo Priest Association. "Voodoo constitutes a large part of our culture and priests often help mobilize communities," Beauvoir said. Some recipients said it was their first aid since the quake. "I have a big family and we have nothing," said Nadia St. Eloi, 32, a mother of six who carried her rice bag on her head while holding her 2-year-old son by the arm. She said she still needs cooking oil and beans to make a meal but will make the rice last as long as possible. "We have no meat, so this is all we'll eat," she said. ___ Associated Press writers Paisley Dodds and Frank Bajak contributed to this report. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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