“A Thousand Words“
Late in the first act of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s “A Thousand Words“, photographer Walker Evans (Josh Aaron McCabe) and writer Shirley Hughes (Molly Rhode) are on a train clattering toward the dust bowl of 1930s Oklahoma. They are an awkward couple, brought together by the Works Progress Administration to document rural poverty, and by each one’s necessity to have a job. The fictitious Hughes has written for an East Coast literary magazine. Evans, of course, is today known as one of the great American photographers. But on this train, they are two people with different artistic styles and ideas. Evans is driven and cocky, Hughes is inexperienced and a bit uncertain.
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| Josh Aaron McCabe as Walker Evans & Molly Rhode as Shirley Hughes Photo by Nick Berard |
He asks her to describe a woman sitting across them on the train, and she tentatively unleashes a string of airy adjectives and metaphors. “What do you see?” Evans asks her, like a kindly but demanding editor. And she speaks again, this time capturing the frail tenacity of an impoverished woman who is likely traveling to a more hopeful tomorrow.
It’s just one of the many cannily rendered scenes in Gwendolyn Rice’s new play, which is receiving its world premiere in a joint production by MCT and Madison’s Forward Theatre.
The story of artists struggling to capture truth and beauty is only one side of Rice’s play, however. For as we witness the evolving personal and artistic relationship between Evans and Hughes, we are also see how their legacy is bought, sold and bargained for in the museum world of the 21st century. For Brian Walters (T. Stacy Hicks) and Sally Quinn (Sarah Day)—cell phone slinging officials with the Metropolitan Museum of Art–art is about lawsuits and totebags, politics and sponsorships. When Quinn articulates the boilerplate mission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—to preserve and disseminate the best of…blah, blah, blah—she does it first to take the high moral ground with her demanding and craven boss. But when she repeats it, she has become as cynical as her mentor, intoning it as a sarcastic joke.
Rice, director Jennifer Uphoff Gray and her actors push the poles of these two stories away from the midline of “real life” (Georgina McKee and Libby Amato round out the terrific ensemble cast). Despite his pathbreaking genius, the real-life Evans was a bit of a twit—here, McCabe gives him an engaging matinee idol charm. If David Mamet ever writes about the art world, Walters would be a good start, and Hicks gives him a hilarious blend of Tim Gunn elegance and Simon Cowell bitchiness. But making the artists a bit more noble and the execs a bit more craven sharpens the play’s satiric edge, and allows Rice’s main ideas to jell. Creativity and capitalism have long been odd but necessary bedfellows. And that will continue as long as art can be valued in words, spirit and dollars.
“Sexy Results“
Even though I interviewed the two significant players behind “Sexy Results”—Cedar Block wiz-kid Brent Gohde and Alverno Presents’ director David Ravel—I still wasn’t sure what I would see last Saturday at Turner Hall. Gohde told me of his fascination with the Tevatron accelerator and its quest to prove the existence of the Higgs bosun, a subatomic particle that would explain the fundamental concept of mass. And his idea to “discover” the particle through music and art, now that the Tevatron had been closed down. Ravel told me of his interest in helping create work that wasn’t limited by the usual generic conventions—the dance performance or the music concert. And hence Gohde’s idea for an “event” that brought artists together to explore one of the conundrums of the universe.
And now that I’ve been to “Sexy Results,” I’m still not sure what I saw. Variety show, sure. History lesson about United States’ sub-atomic research, uh huh. Happening in the 1960s tradition, I suppose. Part of the show’s charm, of course, was its uniqueness. And it’s heedless, “Hey, how’s it going” vibe. With Gohde as emcee, “Sexy Results” had a loosey-goosey improv feel, as if he was hosting a night of Karaoke at a friendly neighborhood bar.
But your average Karaoke night isn’t dedicated to quantum physics, and “Sexy Results” wasn’t without substance. Gohde is an engaging presence who chronicled his fascination with the Higgs bosun quest in a way that made you share in his obsession. And the performers he recruited for this evening came through with material created only for this event. The poet Lunaversol9 set the stage with an eerily evocative song about the buffalo grazing above the underground four-mile-wide Tevatron collider. The noise-pop outfit IfIHadAHiFi delivered both noise and pop, with pun laden lyrics that occasionally hinted at universal mysteries. There was some hi-jinx courtesy of ComedySportz actor Tim Higgins, and folksy, seemingly improvised self-reflective songs by Lisa Gatewood.
But nothing approached a brush with the quantum sublime until the guitar duo of Chris Rosenau and Jim Warchol took the stage. Using looping software (and a recorded passage that audience members could play via their cell phones), the duo created a gorgeous, pulsating soundscape that evoked all the mysteries of subatomic attractions and collisions. Behind them were projected slides of atomic trails made in cloud chambers. But it was the sound alone that made one think that “Sexy Results” might have actually done it—found something tangible, mysterious (and beautiful) in the great empty space of the universe.
