a&e | THEATER REVIEWS
The Uncut Hair of Graves The Spoon River Project. At the Dos Pueblos High School Elings Performing Arts Center, Saturday, November 16. Reviewed by Charles Donelan
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GIOIA MARCHESE
n the original, Edgar Lee Masters’s sprawling poetical sequence Spoon River Anthology includes 212 characters and 244 separate accounts of their lives. Imagined as expansive and candid versions of epitaphs, these individual poems vary considerably in RIVER SPIRITS: Dos Pueblos’ production length, subject mat- of The Spoon River Project had characters ter, and tone, but surrounded on all sides by the audience. they cohere through a unifying vision that puts small-town life, with all its terrors and pleasures, at the heart of America’s identity. Masters follows in the central tradition of American literature that comes down to him through Walt Whitman, who wrote in Leaves of Grass that “to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” The Spoon River Project, which just concluded its run at Dos Pueblos High School, was a drama with music that was conceived and performed by students under the direction of Gioia Marchese. The show began outside the auditorium as a procession, with the white-faced students solemnly guiding the audience around the building and through the stage door to seats arranged in the round and onstage. Through an imaginative blend of folk songs, recitations, movement, and dance, the large cast wove together Masters’s strange tapestry of greetings from beyond death in a way that was fresh and interesting. The dance sequences, which blended square-dance moves with more contemporary music in the idiom of Mumford & Sons were particularly effective, as were the individual monologues that audience members walked around the space in order to hear. Here’s to continued experimentation with new texts and new ways of creating plays at this level of education.
Monotonous Cupboard Wesley Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders, presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. At UCSB’s Campbell Hall, Wednesday, November 13. Reviewed by Joseph Miller
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he NPR podcast episodes of Cabinet of Wonders might leave you suspecting singer/songwriter and novelist Wesley Stace has reinvented A Prairie Home Companion for a younger, edgier East Coast crowd — a variety show before a live audience; music, comedy, and readings by well-known artists and writers; and no Lutheran jokes or rhubarb-pie spoof-mercials. But for various reasons, the electricity at City Winery in New York City didn’t arc in Campbell Hall on Wednesday. Part of the problem seemed to be the midweek doldrums, further exacerbated by the fact that the event went on for more than three hours, with a steady loss of audience during the last third. But clearly there were other issues. The variety was not varying enough, weighted too heavily toward folk acts that sounded too similar. Originally conceived as a meeting ground for musicians and writers, with comedians providing a buffer between, Wednesday’s performance showcased only one reading, by Matthew Specktor. And then there was gender monotony; there was only one woman (singer Britta Phillips) amid the 13-performer lineup, and too much male below-the-belt joking. Stace, who stocks his shows with friends, risks tipping the scales at times from professionalism to self-indulgent familiarity onstage. Yet it is difficult not to like Stace, a witty and affable emcee, and a gifted lyricist in the vein of Bob Dylan (his former stage name was John Wesley Harding — the title of Dylan’s 1967 album). “The Dealer’s Daughter” and “Making Love to Bob Dylan” are tightly crafted songs and were delivered with assurance in Stace’s mellow middle range (the rare male songster who does not shove everything into upper voice). Even better was singer/songwriter John Roderick, who sang the most inspired set of the night, including his upbeat, syncopated jewel “Shapes.”
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THE INDEPENDENT
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