Eugene Weekly : Culture : 02.12.04

Thread of Truth

UT's Second Season opens with retold myth.

BY ARIA SELIGMANN

Phaedra (Margie Kment), Ariadne (Erica Smith) and Nurse (Connie Hymer).

University Theatre opened its second season with a delightfully staged A Thread In the Dark, Dutch Playwright Hella Haasse's 1962 play that reworks the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to examine the "truth is the first casualty of war" motif.

Ph.D. student Elizabeth Helman directs the student cast, which includes one graduate student, Connie Hymer as Nurse, and the rest undergraduates in this exploration of love, loyalty and lying.

Helman's production uses classical style. The costumes and lighting are pastel-hued, props minimalized, the staging simple and direct, a wise choice in the small Arena Stage playing area. Thus, the story becomes the soul focus, its themes disturbingly relevant to now.

Ariadne (Erica Smith) is a peace-loving seeker of truth, also a bit headstrong and proud, who begs her father, King Minos (Jon Sharpy) to quit offering human sacrifices to the Minotaur god who resides deep inside a labyrinth-entered dungeon.

The people live in fear of who will be chosen to feed the god. But Minos refuses, saying keeping the Minotaur appeased is crucial to the success of the kingdom. Minos has a big lie, a super secret he's keeping, and tells Ariadne he must hold onto it for the sake of his kingdom's happiness and safety, despite the fact his subjects remain in fear. Meanwhile, Ariadne's nurse (Connie Hymer) tells her to keep quiet to keep the peace.

When Theseus (Eli Levine), a Cretian prince, disembarks from his ship only to be chosen as a sacrifice, Ariadne freaks. Theseus has captured her attention: He's noble, smart and brave — and looks hot in his little leather tunic. She devises a scheme to help lead him out of the labyrinth, from where no one has ever escaped.

Yet when Theseus escapes, he fails Ariadne. He tells a lie to attest to his bravery, and he's convinced, like Minos, he must keep his secret for the good of his own kingdom.

Justice-loving Ariadne begs and pleads with him to tell the truth, yet he holds on as their arguments grow and they alienate each other. Meanwhile, younger, opportunistic sister Phaedra (Margie Kment) sucks up to Theseus as they make their way back to Crete. In the end, Ariadne is tempted by Dionysos (also played by Jon Sharpy) and given the chance to replay her role and choose a different path — if she so chooses.

Helman had each cast member do some political research for their roles, and each chose a quotation they found in their reading that fit each character. Some comment on the defense budget, some on fear, control and history. During a talkback after the Friday night production, the students said working on the show opened their eyes to the current political situation in our own country, and how they believe they've been lied to.

I wonder if they knew it was Peg Morton, who will serve three months in prison this spring as a prisoner of conscience for crossing the line at Fort Benning Army Base, who asked them to clarify the quotation about freedom and its yoke.

Meanwhile, the students and director ought to be commended for offering a fine example of political theater and what it's meant to do: raise questions and provoke thoughtful discourse.

A Thread in the Dark runs through Feb. 14 in Arena Theatre, UO.

Of Sinners and Saints

Rollicking Sordid Lives explores gender.

BY KAUKAB JHUMRA SMITH

The feisty characters in the over-the-top comedy Sordid Lives live in gossipy Winters, Texas. They're brought together by a funeral amidst the most embarrassing of circumstances: an elderly mother has tripped over her lover G.W.'s wooden legs in a seedy motel room, hit her head and died. The situation begs for lame jokes, but instead, this play is surprisingly vulnerable and side-splittingly funny.

"God, even white trash feels sorry for me," moans Noleta, G.W.'s betrayed wife, as news of her husband's unfortunate rendezvous sweeps the town. To make matters worse, the "tramp" whom G.W. (pronounced gee dubya) was carrying on with is the mother of Noleta's best friend LaVonda (Marla Norton).

Director Michael Watkins pairs an intrepid, experienced cast with pitch-perfect comic timing. In one of the play's funniest scenes, Noleta (Emily Gilbert) and LaVonda barge into a bar like Thelma and Louise, vowing to take revenge on G.W. (Chris Pinto) and his friends. They round them up and emasculate them with great glee, smearing them with lipstick, strapping one in a bra, and pinning bows in their hair. Each man's transformation is documented with a Polaroid snap. The whole episode is so therapeutic, "I feel like I just been to church!" exclaims LaVonda with great satisfaction.

For all its humor, Sordid Lives explores gender identity with immense sympathy. Each scene opens briefly with Ty (Benjamin Newman), a young gay actor in session with his 27th therapist in three years. Newman plays Ty with impish charm, flicking his wrists, passing naughty asides, and sitting with his knees pressed together like a stereotypical urban gay man. The son of the uptight Latrelle (Sharon Sless), LaVonda's older sister, Ty has not yet come out to his family. In self-exile in New York, he doesn't think he can go back to Texas for his grandmother's funeral. After all, his family has left his cross-dressing uncle Brother Boy (Gerald Walters) to be "dehomosexualized" in a mental asylum for the last 23 years.

As the funeral approaches and action churns, Sordid Lives zips through several scene changes with deliberately restrained sets. A quick furniture move here or there and the stage transforms from a rather shabby living room to a stately but spare funeral home. A sassy country singer (Carol Horne) strings scenes together with her passionate lyrics. "Who's to say who's the sinner and who's the saint?" she croons at play's beginning. "Ain't it a bitch sorting out our sordid lives?"

Ultimately, Sordid Lives is really not very sordid at all. It's about the haste with which we love to slap labels on others, and which are easily slapped back on ourselves. After all the travesties in the play, the most touching, dignified figure of all ends up being Brother Boy, a middle-aged transvestite sporting a blonde curled wig and a killer sequin dress a la Tammy Wynette. Sordidness, like much else, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Written by Del Shores, Sordid Lives appears at the ACE Annex through Feb. 21.

Remedial Pruning

Damage control after the big snow job.

BY RACHEL FOSTER

This English laurel was pruned in March 2002 and filled out nicely by April 2003.

Last month's snow did plenty of damage to trees, shrubs and hedges around town. Pines, old arbor-vitae hedges and broad-leafed evergreens were hit particularly hard. Trees and slow-growing rhododendrons that lost big limbs may be slow to recover their beauty. If the main structure remains intact and seems worth saving, the best thing is to remove all the damaged branches at their origin on the trunk or a sound limb, shape up what's left as best you can, and be patient.

Many a broad-leafed evergreen shrub, however, will recover quickly and more uniformly if the whole thing is cut back to a low framework of sound woody stems. February and March are good months for this kind of remedial pruning, whether you are repairing storm damage or simply bringing an old laurel or overgrown Mexican orange blossom back in scale with the garden.

When a hedge of some coniferous plant like arbor-vitae or hemlock gets too big for its boots (or sustains serious snow damage, for that matter), there is really nothing to do but remove it, because most conifers (redwood and yew being notable exceptions) will not sprout from old wood. Coniferous hedges need annual pruning to keep them useful over a long lifetime. Other hedges benefit from regular pruning too, but many broad-leafed evergreens, especially the laurels, hollies and photinias most popular for hedges, are more forgiving, and even huge specimens can often be re-habilitated by radical pruning.

Over-grown English (or cherry) laurel is a good example. These days, gardeners and landscapers are more likely to plant a dwarf or slower-growing cultivar of Prunus laurocerasus than the kind with big, shiny oval leaves that can grow to 30 feet, but even dwarf laurels get too big eventually. Cutting back your hedge or screening bush to stumps once in a while will bring it back in scale and make it much easier to prune.

Hedging plants are deliberately chosen for their vigor and quick growth, but they are not, of course, the only evergreen shrubs that grow too big. They are not the only evergreens that tolerate drastic pruning, either. Camellia, choisya, native Oregon wax myrtle and evergreen huckleberry, skimmia, leucothoe and most evergreen viburnums can all be cut back hard with a reasonable expectation that they will spring right back again. Strawberry arbutus, wax myrtle, ceonothus and escallonia will occasionally be killed to the ground by severe winter freezes and rise again within one to two years. This behavior tells you that they will probably survive drastic pruning, too.

Rhododendrons vary in their response to pruning. I would get expert advice before cutting down a tree-like specimen and expecting it to grow back from the stumps. If the main stems look nice and stand up unaided, it is often better to prune away the lower growth and plant something else underneath. Lax-stemmed, bushy rhodies that have a tendency to lie on the ground or contain twisted, intertwined interior stems are another matter: They usually respond well to hard pruning.

The best time to cut back any shrub really hard is late winter or early spring. Plants are all set for growth at this time of year, and they should respond by making a lot of strong shoots that will continue to grow until mid-summer, then harden up before winter. Drastic pruning later in the year might result in the same lush growth, but there is a risk that the soft new leaves will be scorched or shriveled by intense sunlight, and summer growth may not have time to mature before cold temperatures arrive. October freezes are not uncommon, and they can kill soft growth that developed late in the season.

To ensure timely re-growth after you prune, it is a good idea to feed plants lightly now and again in late spring. Don't feed later than June, however, because you don't want to encourage continued growth too late in the year (see above). Make sure heavily pruned shrubs get plenty of water through the first summer, and if you are pruning something that is under the eaves or on greedy tree roots I would begin watering right after pruning.

Da Lingo d'Vino

Sometimes the descriptions get outta hand.

BY LANCE SPARKS

I was slip-sliding around, tracking Cheapo Vino in all the usual haunts — PC, Sheldon's, Broadway Market, Kiva, Cornucopia, Jiffy, Grape & Grain, even Big Boxes — checking for bargains, post-offs, close-outs, under-priced jewels located through researches in wine mags, newsletters, colleagues' columns, word of mouth from wine chums. Got to Sundance, was lurking in back corners, eyeballing Chilean, Portuguese, Argentinean, South African, other sources still sporting cheapo tickets despite big recent jumps in quality of grapes and winemaking. Just snagged a likely candidate to match Asian stir fry upcoming, felt tug on my jacket, spun around, fight or flee?

Lanky dude, casual duds, longish hair, friendly eyes, sez to me, "Dude, I read yer columns, y'know, 'n, like, I gotta question." I get ready for possible source, possible attack, possible (rare) praise, might necessitate sudden aw-shucks; try to fix a face to meet his face. "Like, y'know when ya write, like, that some wine's got, like, cherries 'n blackberries 'n stuff, well, like, dey don't put that stuff inta the wine, do they?"

Sigh of relief; shoulda seen this coming years ago: "Nar, mate," I come back to him, "dat's all jes' vino lingo. See, when ya try ta describe aroma or flavor, ya gotta go to metaphor. Like when you say 'like,' right? Like dat. Wines got good flavors 'n bad flavors, 'n wine biz pros gotta know dat, say, pinot noir's supposed ta smell 'n taste like strawberries or cherries, sometimes wit' mebbe a whiff o' violets, so descriptors 're like code, see? Black cherries in pinot noir, dat's good, right? OK, usually, unless some scammer dosed da vintage wid some other grape but di'n't let on, get it? It happens, but rarely, but then we gotta call it, clue in the punters. Sure, wines're made from grapes — unless they're wines made from other fruit, which is possible, see, 'cause ya can make wine from lotsa fruits, even flowers like dandelions, OK, but winepros also get deep with chemistry, know that, say, cabernet sauvignon, gets a nice zing of chocolate, say, or butterscotch, 'cause of mebbe this one particular ether or ester or mebbe the oak — American or French, toasted a lot or not — that was used, or ...."

Dude breaks in, I'm just gettin' warmed up, ready to plunge down to the dark soul of wine, comes in, "So, like, it's jez grapes, huh? Not stuff thrown in, like cherries, t' make wine taste good, yeah?"

"Yeah, grapes only."

"Awesome, dude! Glad ya, like, cleared that up." He fades. Takes me a while to close my jaw.

So (some of) the rest of the story is that wine gumshoes and writers speak this pretty common lingo to each other and to readers, assuming that everybody's hip to the code, knows the wine words straight up. Pro wine tasters and winemakers even go through rigorous nose and palate training, actually sniffing aroma and flavor components, mints, flowers, fruits, spices, even stuff like petroleum, licorice, in fact almost anything, so they build aroma and flavor memories, what's good, what's not. And mostly it works and is a sorta more sensible jargon than was used back in the old days (still see it some), like: "This wine is vigorous but not overly aggressive, innocent yet agile, forward without being presumptuous, might emerge from its youthful immaturity ..." and ad babbling nauseam. Helpful? Naw, except maybe for folk geeked on wine for many years. Most folk want info on scents, flavors, acid/alcohol balance, viscosity, like that.

Take this Gini 2002 Soave Classico: Retails at $14.50, so we want to know is it gonna taste real good with that Asian stir fry we're gonna cook up, with fresh crab, baby bok choy, baby zucs and such. Now, the Italians used to give short shrift to white wines, considered them, yeah, better than water but not red so not really wine. For decades soaves were OK, little bit of citrusy fruit, sometimes a little almond note, OK for picnics. But Marc de Grazia at Gini apparently decided that Soave could be really tasty, so put together a bone-dry vino that bursts open with pretty aromas of flowers and citrus tanginess, goes smoothly into the mouth and just erupts with pretty flavors of lime and limestone, some orange blossom, yellow Jujubes, silky-textured balance of acid and alcohol, in a word, wowsers. Dynamite with that crab. Or chicken. Or cheeses. Whatever. Get it? Gottahaveit.

While we're on dry whites, let's linger on Villa Maria 2002 Sauvignon Blanc ($12) from the Marlborough region, New Zealand. Sauvignon blancs can be really nice with seafoods, veggy dishes, sometimes chicken. In France, they're usually white Bordeaux and blended with a little (or a lot) semillon to add fruit and heft. Some of sauvignon blancs can be really thin, acidic, really grassy, not much fun. But this Kiwi wine is beautiful, dry but mouth-filling, flavors of pineapple, banana, melon, tingle of eucalyptus, lemon. YUM, DAMMIT!

OK, sometimes the descriptor lingo also gets outta hand. Paging through wine words from one of the recognized oracles (no names), caught him on a (really good) Australian shiraz, with flavors "like roasted, scorched earth." Check. Sure, I'm a pro, think I've tasted dirt enough to know the flavor, but never had it roasted, much less scorched — is that over-roasted? Clue card is blank.

So, all clear? Unless otherwise noted, WINE IS GRAPES. Flavors, aroma notes are all figures of speech, tropes, metaphor, appeals to analogues, and NOT MY FAULT. And thanks for listenin'.