The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I got in a bit ago from a performance of An Iliad at Portland Center Stage. It was incredibly moving, and I'm feeling a bit wiped out by it.

It's a one-man show. He comes in, drunk and dirty and disheveled in layers of clothes and a knit cap, carrying a bottle of tequila and a battered bag. He's mumbling to himself. The set is a series of what look like concrete or stone slab walls with the graffiti of ages carved into them in every language.

He begins chanting in ancient Greek, drunkenly, then switches to English and starts talking about how he doesn't want to tell this story anymore, but he hears the voices of Muses and is compelled.

He undresses, down to a white shirt and white jeans. He starts to tell the story.

It's the Iliad, partly in Homeric verse, partly in colloquial English, broken up and reassembled and explicated along the way as if by a man who was there, and who has been telling war stories for hundreds of years.

It builds and builds until he is acting out the feral, raging bloodlust of Achilles in avenging the death of Patroclus, and says, "And that is why I can't keep telling this story," and little by little you start asking yourself, "Why war?"

When Hector is dead and Achilles has dragged his body around for a while, the storyteller seems to lose sight of which war he's talking about. He says that it must have been...and then spends fully five minutes naming every major and minor war from that day to this.

I was bawling my eyes out by the end. The beautiful dead young men, the waste, the widows and orphans, the baby dashed on the paving stones, the funeral pyre, the white bones, the burial.

He puts all his coats and jackets and scarves back on and wanders away again, and you don't quite know whether he was an immortal bard of war, or just a homeless, traumatized vet of some one of the dozen or so recent wars he mentions.

It was brilliant. The text demands a tour-de-force performance ranging from near-Shakespearean declamation of verse lines to sweating, crazed street person, and actor Joseph Graves delivered.

Well, I'm not, but I saw the touring re-re-re-revival of "South Pacific" last night at the Keller, and contrary to my expectations, I enjoyed it a lot; some beautiful melodies are stuck in my head today as a result.

It's a 60-year-old musical that was (according to my mom, who went with us) hugely talked about, nationwide, at the time, for its forward view of racism and its controversial stance on the recently-ended war in the Pacific. It won pretty much ALL the Tony awards in 1949.

I can kind of see why--and why it keeps being revived. Unlike many revivals of classic Broadway musicals, the story of "South Pacific" was serious in its time, and more than just a framework to hang songs and dances from, so it has aged reasonably well. I suppose it doesn't hurt that Hammerstein and Logan adapted it from James Michener stories rather than from tabloid headlines or something.

Sure, the characters all act out of a World War II era sensibility, and it wouldn't pass Bechdel. But it does have a major character, Bloody Mary, who is both a woman and a person of color, and who acts from realistic motivations rather than being a mere comic-relief stereotype (though she's also darkly funny). There's even a gender-swap scene. (I know, that was always a staple of the musical stage.)

And the songs are still beautiful. "Younger Than Springtime," "Bali Hai," and "Some Enchanted Evening" have some of Richard Rodgers' best melodies and most lush orchestrations, and even though the tenor lead does sing "Gayer than laughter am I", I managed to bite back the 12 year old snicker as he soared up to the high notes.

I retrieved Clyde from River City Bicycle this morning, where he's been stranded since the day I got the flu more than a week ago. I was able to ride all the way home, though I didn't break any records getting up the riverbank, and a certain amount of coughing did ensue.

My chain fell off on the way up from Rose Quarter--my first time! Fixed it, no problem. Go me! Note to self: a pair of latex gloves would be a handy thing to have on board because, damn, greasy.

I haven't lost as much muscle-power as I feared, and what's more important, I haven't lost any of my desire to ride. In fact, if it's not pouring down rain, I'm going to ride to the theater tonight to see Ragtime at Portland Center Stage.

Also, I got all my hair cut off today and I'm now Judi Dench. Only without the pretty tilted eyes. Or any perceptible acting ability.

On the principle that all work and no plays makes Em a dull girl--and because avventura1234 gets free tickets--I attended the theatre last night.

The play was R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe.

It's a one-man show, Buckminster Fuller's life and ideas in the form of a long reminiscence-slash-lecture by Bucky at the end of his life. So the fact that it was fabulous is darn near astonishing.

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