Thanks for a Finely-Crafted Play

The stage is dominated by a big white bed and by a huge, selection of bright-colored clothing hanging high up all the way along the back of the stage. Those clothes and a long shelf of books fairly loom above you, at least from the fifth row, suggesting not only their owner's glamour and wealth but also her ability (need!) to shift rapidly among roles and moods. The big bed – just a white sheet on it, no blankets, ready for action – also tells you a little about its owner.

Sixty years ago, that paragraph might already be making you think of Marilyn Monroe, the subject of Mark Medoff's excellent Marilee and Baby Lamb. The well-conceived and well-crafted set might also suggest (accurately) you were in store for an absorbing play. If you missed its recent five-day run at the Rio Grande Theater in Las Cruces, I'm sorry.

I should also stress, as Mark has consistently done in his facebook posts and conversation, that this was a collaboration. With a fine cast, partly local but featuring two leading ladies who came to Las Cruces to do this play. With an extensive design and production staff. With producer Dennis D'Amica. But above all with Lena Pepitone, whom Mark never met.

D'Amica, a former student of Mark's at NMSU, met Ms. Pepitone seven years ago. Ms. Pepitone had worked extensively with Ms. Monroe during the last several years of Monroe's life. She was Monroe's intimate confidante, and they were friends. She observed a lot, and D'Amica interviewed her on video over the course of the next three years. Much of the play's material comes from those interviews. Sadly, Pepitone died in 2011. She can neither elaborate on her story nor enjoy the fruits of her conversations with D'Amica.

Both two leads (and five local actors) give excellent performances in what doesn't seem the easiest play to act in. Two men play multiple roles, which adds to the difficulty – and perhaps unconsciously supports the suggestion that here men are secondary. The two women are the story.

Some of that story you may know: that Monroe was a lot smarter than she let on, but playing the “dumb blonde” – a role the world forced on her – was convenient and profitable; that she was both magnetic and insecure; and that her involvement with politicians and at least one mafioso were dangerous to her health. The play shows us the Marilyn-Lena love story convincingly and keeps us highly interested; and without necessarily sharing Pepitone's certainty (which the interview tapes themselves might lead us to do), we certainly accept the possibility/probability that Monroe was murdered.

Years ago it seemed to me that Mark's strongest work was his collaboration with Phyllis Frelich to portray the angst and frustration of a deaf person in Children of a Lesser God. Mark's skills, wit, and humor stirred her unique and sometimes painful experiences into an excellent theatrical cocktail.  Frelich had something that desperately needed saying, and Mark had the ability to tell it with just the right touches of drama and humor. 

 

Now we are older. Mellower, maybe. Mark has thought (and been taught, by his wife and three daughters, among others) a lot about feminism and about being a woman in this particular world. In Marilee and Little Lamb, he expresses movingly what he's learned, along with what Lena Pepitone had to teach us about some of our misperceptions, stereotypes, and perhaps prejudices. 

 

I'm guessing the play will get a much longer theatrical run in a much bigger city soon. Certainly it should.

                                                 -30-
[The column above appeared today, Sunday, 25 October in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and will appear later in the day on KRWG-TV's website.]
[Thinking further about this, ten days after we saw the play, I think the column doesn't stress sufficiently how Mark Medoff seems to me to have grown as a playwright.  This play is marvelously written; but Mark could always do that; and it's well-directed -- which it would have been decades ago, although I'm sure he's deepened his command of that craft over the years.  What I appreciate also is the entire complex task of staging the play.  It's not merely the clever words or the actors' delivery of dialogue and their nonverbal contributions.  The set.  The lighting.  The different ways we're taken quickly from one scene or issue to a very different one, from Marilyn with Joe DiMaggio or Arthur Miller to Lena with her husband, Joe.  The use of space.  The interesting decision to use the same actor to play Miller and DiMaggio and a gangster, while Algernon D'Ammassa plays both Kennedy brothers and Frank Sinatra.  (I don't know why Mark did that; but it seems to work.  It doesn't detract; and I see a benefit in it, as noted in the column, although I don't know that that's one of the benefits Mark saw in it.)  What I think I'm struggling to express is that plays are staged now in new ways, and Medoff has broadened and deepened his sense of what's possible and what works.]

The Play's the Thing -- and I Enjoyed it!

May I take a break from drought and recall and be playful?

Last Saturday evening we saw “Recreational Living” at the Las Cruces Community Theater.
David Spence's play won a contest among former students of Mark Medoff. The prize was this production at LCCT directed by Mark.

I expected a good evening, because I know and respect Mark; but the performance was more fun that we'd anticipated.

Let's admit first that I'm an old curmudgeon who often leaves the theater growling.

Instead, I was more attentive than usual, with a smile on my face, and laughed a lot. So did my wife and our friends.

Spence and Medoff took risks in both play and staging – and were rewarded with constant audience attention and a lot of laughter. The actors, many of them high school kids, did a great job – a credit to themselves and to Mark.

Sure, some of the material was a little overdone, if you thought about it; but you didn't think about it,you just laughed. It was just plain fun, but also a useful reminder of how seriously we take our foolish selves and how diligently we build the personae we show our peers. Stick to those personae slavishly enough for long enough and we become them. Or we convince ourselves we're they, unaware that most everyone sees through them.

The play opens with an impassioned conversation in which a very mortified kid relates that he's just fainted in class and exposed the crack in his butt, and his best friend tries to reassure him the world hasn't ended.

My wife confessed at intermission that she'd worried we might be in for an evening of butt-crack humor that could become tedious, but was soon reassured on that score. My own reaction was that though the subject was patently silly, the two kids cared about it a whole lot, which made the opening a lot more engaging, a lot more quickly, than many plays in which the actors sort of mark time at the start, letting us get used to them.

It's a goofy and very human play. Thinking about the concept of “willing suspension of disbelief” I wonder this morning whether plays aren't even better when the “suspension of disbelief” isn't so “willing,” but is commanded by the production. Guess that's a long-winded way of saying I liked the play.

And I liked the day. A morning spent at the Farmers' Market acquiring fresh local food for the week and talking with friends. A delicious supper at SI Italiana (which buys local food, a plus for us) before the play. I like it here.

We'd also recently seen – and enjoyed – The Hothouse (directed ably by Algernon D'Ammassa) as well as Other Desert Cities. Algernon put his people through an exceptionally long rehearsal period for the potentially difficult Pinter play, and it paid off. Other Desert Cities is a good play, although we felt a couple of performances could have been better. 
 

Las Cruces has a rich pool of theatrical talent. (A stray shout-out to Douglas Hoffman in Deathtrap and Claudia Billings in Other Desert Cities.) Not every show's a winner. Too many musicals for my taste, and some other plays I'd rather have missed. But a lot to like, too.

I like the energy and imagination in Las Cruces Community Theater, the Black Box, and the ASTC at NMSU. All three are friendly and push each other's work – not cliquish, jealous rivals. The Hermans, who own and run the Black Box, are also Lifetime Members of LCCT. Actors appear in an LCCT show today and a Black Box production tomorrow.

Besides, recall and drought make one long to escape.

                                                              -30-

[The column above appeared this morning, Sunday, 29 March, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and will also appear on the KRWG-TV website.  It represents my views, not necessarily those of the newspaper or the television station.]
[I feel almost guilty neglecting all the bad news worth discussing in my Sunday column: the continuing misconduct of the folks pushing to recall three city councilors; the news that someone wants to build a new 90,000-personn city near Albuquerque, when we're in a savage drought; and much more.  I will note that it's highly possible that someone will file suit against the City of Las Cruces, perhaps as early as this week, regarding the Recall matter.  The City Clerk is due to issue her opinion on whether or not the folks seeking to recall Gill Sorg have turned in enough valid signatures to trigger a recall election.  It seems likely that if they haven't, they may sue her; and it seems equally likely that if she decides they have, but some of those signatures were fraudulently obtained, forged, or from unregistered voters who signed the petitions, or from folks who later learned it was a recall petition and asked the Clerk to withdraw their names, the folks who oppose the Recall could seek a court order that the City follow state law and the city charter.]
[Oh -- and I should mention the panel discussion this coming Thursday -- 5 p.m. Thursday, April 2nd, on NMSU's campus on the third floor of Zuhl Library -- and parking's free after 3, I think. "Police, Public and Press -- Shining Light on Officer-Involved Shootings" will look at the battle over release of relevant information after a police shooting.  Panelists should include District Attorney Mark D'Antonio, Walt Rubel of the Sun-News, Mike Kenney from DASO, NMSU Police Chief Stephen Lopez, lawyer Michael Stout, and Executive Director Susan Boe of NMFOG (a state non-profit fighting for open government),  I'll moderate.]

Teachers, Actors, Time

Late one sunny August afternoon as I drove across campus, watching returning students wave to old friends, it was hard not to recall another August when I was one of them. 1969. I’d driven here from New York to resume my education, after two years working with kids in Harlem and driving a cab.

That first semester I took film-making classes with Orville "Bud" Wanzer, a New York City cop’s son shooting films and photographs in the desert.

I took a poetry workshop with Keith Wilson, a bearded fellow who mixed his New Mexico roots, his Korean War service, and a bit of shamanism into a unique poetic brew.

I also took a fiction-writing workshop with a charismatic young fellow from Miami. He held the class in an open area on the second floor of Corbett Center, where there were a couple of couches, a few chairs, and a decent carpet to sit on. When old Herschel Zohn staged War and Peace on campus, this young writing instructor played Andrei. Very effectively, as I recall.

He was also an athlete. Immediately we started playing tennis twice a week. He had a devastating left-handed spin serve. My memory may exaggerate this, but it feels as if he won every set at love.

We also played in a Sunday touch football game that was competitive enough that a couple of Aggie wide-receivers joined us now and then; and our softball team won campus championships. Slow-pitch. One year we signed up for the fast-pitch league too. We had no fast-pitch pitcher. So we played with our regular guy lobbing up slow ones, while we hit against guys throwing hard. Even so, we went deep into the playoffs. And had a lot of fun.

Our youthful selves grow stronger and more graceful with the years, as x-rays of our knees start looking like junkyards littered with rusted parts of unknown origin.

In 1972, I went to the New York opening of "When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?" by my old fiction instructor, Mark Medoff.

Last weekend at the Community Theatre, we saw "When you Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?" Directed by the playwright. Well-acted, and as engaging as it was forty years ago – except that this time, before the play started, they showed slides from the late 1960's and early 1970's. Some members of the audience (and cast) hadn’t been born yet. At one point a character says, sarcastically, that it might take $50 to fill up a Cadillac with gas, whereas today we all wish we could fill the tank for so little.

So now the play is also a piece of the past.

Past and present mingle more and more these days.

Before supper and the play we visit Bud Wanzer, now 81. His mind’s sharp, but he can’t move around too well. (He retired in 1984, moved up to our land on the river, built a solar-powered home, and lived alone there until a few months ago, making beautiful stained-glass pieces enjoyed mostly by his five dogs.) When I stop at Milagro’s to buy a brownie for Bud, the owner responds with a special smile when I tell him whom it’s for. He took two memorable film-making classes with Bud just before he went to ‘Nam.

We have supper with Heloise Wilson (Keith’s widow) and Grant and Tenya Price, who arrived in Las Cruces the same month I did, and immediately became my close friends. Grant, who also played in those Sunday touch football games, is wearing a very faded T-shirt commemorating the opening of the play – forty years ago, when he and David Apodaca built the set. (Another of the Sunday football players was Bill Diven, whose younger brother Bob designed the excellent set for the present production.)

I tell Heloise that twice recently, when a man learned in conversation that I knew Keith and Heloise, he grew emotional telling me how much Keith had helped and inspired him. I’ve seen similar glows on the faces of folks telling me about poetry workshops they took with Joe Somoza, ten or twenty years ago.

I marvel at the many lives these teachers and artists have affected over the years, sometimes deeply. Keith has left us. So has John Hadsell, who helped start the community theater, helped start Mark on his career, and worked with Bud to initiate and run for decades the Campus Film Society.

It’s neat to see Medoff still working creatively and mentoring other writers and actors – and that students like those I saw that day in August will study in a building named for Mark and Stephanie.

More compelling is the legacy that Mark and the others have left living in the heads and hearts of men and women who write or act better, or live better, or feel better, because of them.
                                                             -30-
[The column above appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News this morning, Sunday, 30 September. ]