AR Morning

I'm ripping CDs to MP3/128 for assorted reasons having to do with mobile entertainment. I need to be at the theater in Palo Alto by about 1:45. My target is to be done with this ripping session by noon. Had the choice of not doing the last 2 Barbara Cook CDs and being sure to be done in time, but since I had already ripped her first CD, I just couldn't do that.
:-(

My tweets

• Sat, 18:18: @plutokiller you need this T-shirt:http://t.co/SKYkZKj
• Sat, 18:22: Were those Zambonis on the Belmont Stakes track just before the race?
• Sat, 21:44: Reading Origin of Species. Darwin was waaaaaaay ahead of his time.
• Sat, 23:49: I'm just a ripping fool tonight. Jann Arden, Liz Callaway, Jim Croce, The Cure, The Cyrcle.. and more
• Sun, 09:25: Still ripping. Barenaked Ladies now. Beatles next.

Tongue of a Bird

Went to Dragon Theater in Palo Alto this afternoon for the talk-back performance of Ellen McLaughlin's play Tongue of a Bird.  The title comes from an obscure line in the play which makes very little sense, and has nothing to do with the story. This was a clue. Another clue was, when I looked through the program, director Lessa Bouchard's director's notes consisted of two quotes and a poem. Nothing about the play, nothing about the cast, nothing about directing.

The story is simple, the play is complex. It is the story of a female search and rescue pilot who is hired by a distraught mother to find her kidnapped 12-year-old daughter.  Where it gets complex is the pilot is haunted by her own mother's image, and the image of a girl who might be the kidnap victim or might be the pilot's 12-year-old self.

The play is an actor's nightmare. It is monologue after monologue after monologue, with perhaps two actual conversations in the whole course of the play. Though there are only four locations: the plane cockpit, grandma's livingroom, the pilot's bedroom and the search and rescue canteen, the playwright is constantly switching between them, and cast members are used to rotate the small set (it's on a lazy Susan mounting) every few minutes.

It's very intense. We watch the mother, Dessa (Heidi Kobara) go from borderline frantic all the way to full-blown insanity as the search continues. Pilot Maxine (Kateri Rose) starts out as the self-assured rescue pilot and has her own series of emotional demons to fight, including the dream ghost of her mother (Kerry Michelle Smith) who committed suicide when Maxine was a child, and the ghost of the kidnapped girl - or maybe her own younger self (ably played by 14-year-old Leah Kolchinsky). The only one who is not going through a crisis is grandma Zofia  (Sandy Pardini Cashmark) who escaped the Polish holocaust as a child and has been slightly insane and mostly unshakable ever since.

Highly emotional performances, the five actresses did the best that they could with largely incomprehensible, gargantuan blocks of lines. Understatement - this is like saying the Giants did the best that they could with last season.

The play is an attempt to explore mental illness caused by extreme pain and loss. The cast makes it succeed.

During the talk-back session, the cast and director echoed my concerns about the play's writing, and added that the transitions are awkward, and the playwright seemed to be going for high poetry rather than dialog.

One technical note: there were far too many light cues, and they happened too quickly.

Tongue of a Bird
Dragon Theater
Alma near University, Palo Alto
Free parking in the garage next door - do NOT go to CalTrain parking across the street if you can help it
Thurs-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm Through June 19