Stone Cold Pimpin'

My review of the latest production at SBCC, as it appeared in the News-Press:

Unfriendly Fire
Gulf War drama suffers script weaknesses
Mark Medoff's "Gunfighter: A Gulf War Chronicle," which opens Santa Barbara City College Theatre Group's fall theater season, is based on the true story of Lt. Col. Ralph Hayles, whose career was ruined in a friendly-fire incident during the 1991 conflict.

Despite the apparent culpability of others higher up, and the number of similar incidents that went unpunished, Lt. Col. Hayles was singled out, his life made miserable by the media upon his return home. Through the help of an investigative journalist, Rob Johnson from the Wall Street Journal, Lt. Col. Hayles was allowed to clear his name just before the Army reneged on his retirement funds.

It's a classic story of the little man scapegoated for the sins of the higher-up, and a mainstay of war drama.

Mr. Medoff, best-known for writing "Children of a Lesser God," wrote a screenplay based on Lt. Col. Hayles' story, and Jonathan Demme was set to direct. But Mr. Demme dropped out and the project went cold, leaving Mr. Medoff to turn the leftover script into a play.

Unfortunately, "Gunfighter" plays as exactly that -- a frustrated screenplay. It jumps and cuts hyperactively, covers the stage with a cast of nearly 30, throws up projected video screens, overlays sound effects and heavy metal music a la "Top Gun" over already chaotic scenes. Underneath all this, the story of Lt. Col. Hayles (renamed Jack Hackett and played by Pete Gifford) begins to slide away from us and becomes muddled.

Mr. Medoff has turned the male reporter who uncovered Lt. Col. Hayles' story after the fact into Erin Seidman (Tiffany Story), who follows the opening days of the war as a network pool reporter. It's her reporting of the incident, based on the army's lies and her own prejudice, that helps condemn Hackett.

But in the second half of the play she becomes an investigative reporter, who sets out to clear the name of the man she besmirched, centering on a black-box video recording that will show what really happened. The script gives Erin some father issues to deal with, as she can't play the romantic interest, Hackett being the good soldier and faithful husband to Anna (Julie Anne Ruggieri).

The bad guy here is Col. Wayland Patterson (Jon Zucker), who takes credit for the success of those under his command, and hangs the same out to dry when he makes a mistake. But he is so obviously bad from the beginning that we spend a lot of "Gunfighter" waiting for Erin and Hackett to realize who is really guilty here.

Mr. Medoff uses a "Thin Blue Line"-like structure, returning to the incident in question (the moment Hackett's Apache helicopter fired upon ground troops by mistake), but foregrounding different layers of sound each time, from the cockpit to the command center. It's an interesting device, but performed here in a gale of noise that makes each version more similar than different.

The director is Katie Laris, whose production last semester of "Real Women Have Curves" was a tight ensemble piece for five women in a small location. Here, on the large stage of the Garvin Theatre, she seems lost trying to direct this huge cast and force the audience's eye where it needs to go. Instead, we are often distracted by events elsewhere and miss vital developments in the plot.

Even allowing for the number of majors, colonels, lieutenants and other upright members of the armed forces in the cast, the acting is stiff and pained at times. But no wonder when Mr. Medoff's script gives us cardboard instead of flesh and blood, and only affords its minor characters one or two lines without any context.

These are character types, not characters: the alcoholic wife of career army man Col. Patterson; the "loose cannon" wingman "Lash" LaRue; the faithful wife and the TV special scenes of marital conflict. Mr. Gifford is believable as Hackett, while Ms. Story's character starts arch and condescending and has a hard time developing from that.

Neither anti-war nor pro-, the play supports the troops and seeks the truth, similar to the numerous calls to provide our current army with proper body armor and working technology in the face of administration stonewalling and a narcoleptic media.

"Gunfighter" is an interesting, though unsuccessful, choice to open the season, and the topic is betrayed by its screenplay shenanigans. But to paraphrase U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you go to theater with the script you have.

Posted by Ted Mills at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From this Sunday's News-Press:

Hot Young Thing: No, fans, I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about LibraryThing! If you like the Web and have a huge library of books, this may be the socializing software for you. Designed by Tim Spaulding, LibraryThing allows you to replicate your home library online. Once up, you can see people who share your tastes, post reviews, browse your collection and those of others, chat with people, and all sorts of things.

Before, I was about to catalog my collection with database software that would have resided on my computer only. But with LibraryThing I get the same functionality and the interconnectivity of the Web.

What I really like about the service is the ease with which I was able to build my library database. The easiest way to find your exact book is by typing in the ISBN number, but the site can also search by author and title, presenting an array of different editions. I pushed its search abilities a lot with my first 150 books. To my surprise, I only had to manually enter five. LibraryThing was able to find all my Japanese books and British books. I was impressed. Plus, if it finds it on Amazon, it will add cover graphics.

There is a little fee: After the first 200 books, it costs a lifetime membership of . . . drum roll . . . $10. I say this is worth it, just to thank Mr. Spaulding for creating this bibliophile's dream. Check it out at www.librarything.com and check out my own shelf at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/tedmills.

* * *

I managed to sneak in one last day at the Planned Parenthood book sale, now, a dim memory from that very warm September we had. In the company of my good friend Mr. C, we took one last trawl through the sale tables that still did not show any sign of depletion. With eight hours to go, what would happen to all these books?

Now, visiting the sale in the company of such a learned friend is a bit like visiting a museum with an art historian. Mr. C has years on me, and those years were spent compulsively devouring books. "This is excellent . . . you should read this . . . Just get this one, trust me. . . ."

In 45 minutes, I had a box filled with an eclectic winter reading list, books mostly wrapped in gloriously arty and artistic 1950s cover designs.

Comic observation of the day: There were a lot of copies of Bill Bennett's "Book of Virtues" kicking around. I didn't look to see if they had that new chapter on genocide, but nobody was buying anyway.

* * *

Finally. Thanks, whoever you are, for returning "The Ticket That Exploded."
Cheers!

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My review of Saturday night's performance of "Turn of the Screw" in Ventura just got published in ye olde NewsPress.

TURN, TURN, TURN
James' classic ghost story chills

For many of us who have encountered Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," it most probably was in senior-year English.
And for many of us, it was plodding, full of long, long digressive sentences that feel like the main verb has upped and left, tired of waiting.

Yet, in many ways, the story's influence continues to be felt a full century after its initial publication. Alejandro Amen‡bar's film "The Others" kept the main elements, but remixed them into a modern ghost story. The two-player adaptation at the Rubicon Theatre reintroduces this tale of madness, sifting out the story from the prose. It leaves the ambiguity of the original intact even as it introduces several more levels of unanswered questions.

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's tactic is to tell James' story through the restrictions of two actors. Faline England (last seen here in "All My Sons") plays "the Lady," a young, excitable governess employed by a mysterious bachelor to look after his niece and nephew at a remote estate called Bly. James O'Neil (Rubicon's artistic director) takes on three of the remaining roles: the hunched-over housekeeper, Mrs. Grose; the seductive bachelor; and the 10-year-old nephew, Miles. The mute niece, Flora, is indicated, assumed, and described. Being silent, she is more a manifestation of the Lady's mind.

There are two additional characters, whom we also never see -- the ghosts of the former governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover, Peter Quint. Victims of a doomed love affair, the Lady begins to understand they have returned to claim the souls of the two children.
The Lady compares Bly's estate to Hamlet's Elsinore, and so these ghostly visits have their classical antecedents. Depending on the interpretation, Hamlet similarly is given a mission that may look to outsiders like madness. So it is with the Lady, who must save the souls of the children. Only, we begin to wonder exactly who these children are and why the Lady's love for them seems overzealous.
For the Freudians, there is much to sink your analyzing teeth into, and I suspect director Moni Yakim is one with the cigar-is-not-just-a-cigar crowd. The Lady's repressed sexuality is apparent in her first scene, a seduction more than a job interview. She seems ready to bear children, not just look after them.

The bachelor sets the rules: no contact with him, no matter what happens. Yet, it's not long after meeting Miles that the young charge is insisting that the Lady request the bachelor come visit. From the ghostly couple to the strange sibling relationship, not to mention the allusions to Adam and Eve in the garden ("all stories start in the garden," the narrator says), the Lady is a character in need of a counterpart. But she has her own story to tell, one in which she is heroine and savior, selfless mother-substitute, fearful but righteous Christian. It's not one in which a man takes a central role.
Yet by casting Mr. O'Neil to act opposite Ms. England, (besides playing three roles, he delivers sound effects and narration), Mr. Yakim keeps the troubling male energy in the Lady's vision. Miles speaks beyond his years about topics he shouldn't know things about. The Lady believes Peter Quint corrupted the child unspeakably before his death, but then again. . . .
An impressive sound design by David Beaudry delivers the chills and creates echoing, sepulchral space in the rather comfy confines of the Rubicon. Designed to deliver frights, the play sometimes resorts to "boo" scares -- loud noises, screams -- but keeps the cheap effects sparse. Tom Buderwitz's minimal set design -- a few Gothic arches and a series of trees that look very Gahan Wilson-esque -- allows the actors free range.

It sometimes is a bit difficult to identify where they are in any particular scene, but we are never at a loss as to who they are. Both Ms. England and Mr. O'Neil are powerful forces, throwing themselves fully into their roles.

Rather than a cheap twist ending or a pat explanation, which we have come to expect from our ghostly entertainment these days, "The Turn of the Screw" ends with death, identity crisis, madness and unanswered questions that rise not out of bad plotting but perception and psychology.

(photo by NICK WEISSMAN)

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My latest column from the News-Press (sorry, their own links last for 7 days only):

BOOK CLUB CONFIDENTIAL

So we're kickin' into fall, or what the two-syllable crowd likes to call "autumn."

Your summer reading is finished. You got sand all over the dust jacket. You dropped "Anna Karenina" into the bathtub by accident and now the bleedin' thing has twice as many pages. You took a break from your book club because everybody was out on their brief American vacations driving, driving, driving somewhere. Or you went silly and added way too much to your towering "to be read" stack.

Don't feel bad. We all do it. In fact, I just cleaned up the house and found that I was subconsciously squirreling away books just so my stack wouldn't go so high. And now I've put them all in one place, I'm going to need a ladder. What was I thinking?

Indeed, what was I thinking when I attended the Planned Parenthood Used Book Bonanza, I mean, sale, at Earl Warren recently? Keep buying books, I said to myself, and one day my room will look just like this place.

I did, however, manage to snag a first edition of William S. Burroughs' "Interzone" (thanks to book sale organizer Stephanie Sada for looking out for me), which made up for the fact that, yes, someone in the county still has that copy of "The Ticket That Exploded" overdue at the library and I still have it on reserve. Come on, whoever you are, you broke my summer rhythm!

If you made an even better find at the sale, one that made you gasp in amazement, please drop me a line at the e-mail address below. I'll print the best one in the next column.

Now, if you're stuck with what to read this fall in your book clubs, UCSB's Arts & Lectures has a slew of literary people coming to town. Read a book, go interrogate the author. I guarantee you'll be asking the best question that night. The short list (author and book) for the season: Kathy Gannon, "I Is for Infidel -- From Holy War to Holy Terror" (Tuesday); Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States" (Thursday); Ha Jin, "War Trash" (Oct. 16; see Lin Rolens' review above); Marjane Satrapi, "Persepolis" (Oct. 17); Yvon Chouinard, "Let My People Go Surfing -- The Education of a Reluctant Businessman" (Oct. 19); Dava Sobel, "The Planets -- A Solar System Journey" (Oct. 26); Alexander McCall Smith, "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" (Nov. 5); Alan Lightman "The Discoveries -- The Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science" (Nov. 28).

Yes, Alexander McCall Smith is coming to town! Will the man be swamped by a mass convergence of book club members? I'm also looking forward to Marjane Satrapi's talk. If you liked "Reading Lolita in Tehran," Ms. Satrapi's graphic novel offers a similarly fresh insight.

Lastly, in a Guardian article recently, author Ian McEwan ("Atonement") gave out free books one afternoon in a park. While men acted like Mr. McEwan was trying to scam them or offer them crack, the women almost always stopped and took one, sometime several, books. They were even picky.

Says Mr. McEwan, "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

Ladies? E-mail me at bookclubguy@yahoo.com.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)