What the Butler Saw

“Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century” at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

“Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century” at the Long Beach Museum of Art, an otherwise compelling look at identity creation, gets stonewalled by an installation that could do more damage than Michael Richards ever could.

More damage than a damnable spectacle broadcast worldwide?

Yes.

Because it’s more subtle and thus more insidious. Because it occurs in a place of refinement. Because, as custodian of culture, the Museum should have thought this through.

All that notwithstanding, it’s a lovely show. Seventy or so pieces cover all manner of media – photography, including some fascinating cartes-de-visite, sheet music covers, engravings, oil paintings, hand-colored lithographs, and, my favorites, hand-cut silhouettes. Large pieces, small ones, clustered with significance, isolated for effect.

With richly colored walls and selected spotlit pieces, the installation waxes respectful and reverent.

(With the exception of an annoying proclivity to list sponsor names on wall labels. Here they stand out in bold type face that begs the ironic question: is sponsorship - read chattel - more important that education?).

As narrative, the show thunders with drama; the liberation of people of color from the thralldom of slavery.

Subject matter includes the full spectrum of professions: businessmen, an 18th century woman poet, actors, a slave who led a rebellion, an aide to Lafayette in the Revolutionary war, preachers, and artists.

Premise-wise, the work depicts how people of color were seen in the 19th century. This it does in an honorable, tasteful way.

But ideas propagate agendas, some overt, some not. Here, the overt agenda is art’s contribution to the creation of a particular identity of a particular people. Exhibitions have done, or tried to do, the same thing with gender, race, and sexual orientation.

Nonetheless, if we’re going to use art as a political, identity-creating tool, then we have to hold museums – with, covert or not, politically charged installations - to the same standard. In this case the picture’s not so flattering.

Inadvertently, I’m sure, the show’s installation unveils hidden structures of what theorists call power. If you agree that representation can create identity, then installation can unveil societal structure. This installation denigrates whatever positive intent, latent or otherwise, informed the show.

You can’t deny that the first gallery was considerably darker than the second gallery. The gallery housed letters and other light-sensitive material.

Nor can you deny that wall pieces were hung at a lower than accustomed level. I have to think that, with their philosophy of marketing-informs-curating, the Museum had to account for the busloads of children for which material-thanked donors funded.

In the world of hidden, veiled agendas and power structures, the installation begets, subtly or not, the same master-slave relationship whose binds the show wanted to show as unbound: a gallery shrouded in darkness, wall pieces you look down on.

Sometimes a picture alone isn’t worth a thousand words. Sometimes it’s got to be well-hung, as well.

The show ran until November 26, 2006. The Museum is located at 2300 East Ocean Boulevard. For more information call 439-2119 or visit www.lbma.org.

"Scotland Road," Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theatre, Long Beach, CA

As a mystery and a thriller, Jeffrey Hatcher’s Scotland Road, directed by Martin Lang for the Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre, doesn’t float.

Lang wants us to experience the implausible but why not? story of a Woman (Brenda Kenworthy) found floating on an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic.

It aspires to a mystery – she’s allegedly mute with terror, she wears a period dress, she only utters one word, “Titanic,” and she hasn’t aged in 80 years. A true survivor, Miss Frances Kittle (delightfully played by Judy O'Dea) tries to call her out.

It aspires to a psychological drama, as events rip apart watertight delusions.

Appropriately, then, we confront a bleak white room, asymmetrical and disorienting, with numerous sudden lights-out scene changes, like something out of Kafka; an annoying security camera which had the inadvertent special effect of reminding me, of Orwell’s Big Brother; a so-called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest staff of deaf people; a psychologist, Halbrech (Emmelyn Thayer) who’s not really quite one; and an inquisitor John (Tom Killam) who claims to be a Knickerbocker but is really a colleague of Abu on the Simpsons.

But it doesn’t work. It could have, especially if Lang had set off “Scotland Road” a survivor code phrase, the way that Orson Welles set off “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane. But he didn’t. That knowledge, and the various revelations, was an anti-climax: the audience didn’t know when intermission began or when the play ended.

I won’t say that Killam is glib because he’s not but for this role he is too much the silver-tongued devil. He looks the part of an alleged descendant of John Jacob Astor who went down with the ship – tony, posh, and educated –but as an interrogator he’s too suave to be credible.

Were he more Cary Grant Gestapo-like, at the least at the beginning, we would have bought more readily into the very weirdness of how this individual was able to squirrel away this enigmatic woman and her doctor. And it would have made his keen transformation all that more amazing.

Having said that, the very instant his true identity was revealed, everything about Killam’s demeanor changed, his posture, his voice, and his movements. Nice.

Thayer’s Halbrech was great. She had that deer in the headlights look for a good part of the play. That made sense: she had been persuaded by the charismatic John to shanghai her charge from Iceland to Maine, her credentials were suspect, and was clearly out of her element.

But Kenworthy’s Woman, bravo! For the first third of the play, she didn’t say a word. Doe-eyed, nice Welsh accent, you wondered what had to lurk behind that face. She alone was sharp enough to keep the play on the edge it needed to be so-so effective.

Performances are Fri. & Sat., 8 PM, Sun, Dec. 3, Jan. 1 & 7, 2 PM. The show runs until Jan 13. Tickets are $18-20. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim St. For more info call 494-1014 or visit www.lbph.com.

Ellen Halloran: New Photographs, Long Beach Public Library, Long Beach, CA

Once I had a chum. She used to collect all manner of flower seeds. Not from packets but from flowers. She’d nick them from extant gardens, requisition them from floral tributes her roommates got from swains. She wasn’t beyond pillaging a flower shop. She’d throw these seeds over her second story balcony railing. “Wait until spring,” she’d say. “For what?” I’d say. “For spring,” she’d say.

Spring came. In her back yard was an overgrown, mish-mash, Crayola crayon garden of abundant color, texture, and shape. “It’s my blind date garden,” she said. “Blind date garden?” I said. “Yes. Blind date garden. I have spent all winter introducing these seeds to each other, hoping they would flourish in some grand manner. And they did.”

A blind date garden.

A recent exhibition of landscape and botanical photographs by Ellen Halloran at the Long Beach Public Library is like a blind date garden.

You come across them obliquely, not head-on. Off to your left. No formal introductions. It’s a library. Books, not art. You continue on through the security gate. Something resonates. What? You want to gain your bearings. First you must make the effort to retrace your steps, wend your way through the exit, back to where you started. If that doesn’t describe the burgeoning of love I don’t know what does.

At first glance nothing startles you, nothing compels you, about these thirty-one photographs. That’s their charm. There are no monumental points of view (This isn’t Caspar David Friedrich). No dramatic lighting (This isn’t Caravaggio). No miraculous compositions (This is not Piero della Francesca).

Halloran does not compose these pieces for some peak, climatic moment. She presents them in a staged untheatricality, as if you happened to come across them on a walk while you were looking at something else, at clouds, at birds, at a sunset. At anything but flowers. It’s this anything-but-flowersness that animates the work with spontaneity.

Something about the chance encounter that then causes pause and then reflection. Time passes. Feelings mature. Whatever it is that you’re not doing – posting to your blog, paying bills online, waiting in traffic – doesn’t carry the same significance as it did before this chance encounter.

You’re attracted to them in an immediate, visual way. Then you get to know them. It doesn’t matter which ones, but the flowers are my favorite. You exchange names. Make small talk. Then, along with Stephen Vincent Benet, you find that you have “fallen in love with American names/The sharp names that never get fat/The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat/Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.”

How can you not fall in love with pieces named “Plaleanopsis Orchid Close-up,” “Pink Stargazer,” and “Yellow Gerbera Daisy.”?

And “Yellow Zinnia,” “Magenta & White Cattleya Orchid,” and “M.E.’s Epiphyllum.”?

The random, unexpected encounter. Better by far than a Match.com algorithm.

Library hours are Tuesday, 10 – 8, Wednesday – Saturday, 10 – 5:30, Sunday, 12-5. . The Library is located at 101 Pacific Avenue. For more information call 570-7500 or visit http://www.her-works.com/.

"Doug Hawks: Black and White Long Beach: A Photographic Tour of a City by the Sea," Long Beach Public Library, Long Beach, CA

Spread out over two floors of the Main Library, Doug Hawks' “Black and White Long Beach: A Photographic Tour of a City by the Sea,” presents you with a spectacle of What-was and What-is.

Lucky us. Hawks creates the framework, visual, not verbal, to turn our city into a metaphor. Like Herb Caen turned San Francisco into Baghdad-by-the-Bay.

The moment you walk out those automatic doors onto the perpetual construction zone that is Ocean, though, you sample a What-will-be. Sounds like those Christmas Carol ghosts, doesn’t it? Tax revenue notwithstanding, we scrooged.

If you’re a local, if you don’t careen so fast down the street that landmarks blur, you can look at the work in a “Oh yeah, I know that” way. You can be a tourist in your own backyard.

With all the downtown construction, with all the inevitable renovation – Club Cheri on 4th, alas, is no longer with us (a wake was held, so I’m told) – these photographs will soon purr the patina of nostalgia. They already do for me.

Oh yeah, Acres of Books, a pain for allergy sufferers, a boon for bibliophiles; don’t step on the dog.

Oh yeah, that Engine House in Belmont Shore, one of those drilling islands smack dab in one of the most unhealthy beaches around, a view from the jetty.

Oh yeah, the Reno Room, the Silver Fox, and Club Cheri (R.I.P.)

But if you’re not a local, if you’re a new-transplant, a student, a bi-coastalite, or if you look at these things as art – sure, why not? - they offer another set of considerations. Aesthetic ones.

They’re black and white, for starts. Documentary, sure, like watching Walter Cronkite report the news: avuncular and authoritative.

Lined up in a row in both the upstairs and the downstairs galleries, they look like they should be permanent fixtures of the Library. Thick black frames make them appear more modest than they really are. Think the tv version Clark Kent and those glasses he wears before he ducks into the phone booth.

Another dynamic animates each piece. They present the viewer with a myriad of choices. These choices are not as black and white simple as you might think.

Take, for instance, East Village Crossing. An intersection, with arrows painted on the street that point one way. Steer straight ahead or veer? Intersections present opportunities if not causes for anxiety. Just ask Robert Frost what happened one snowy evening.

Tough Choice. A billboard that advertises a Snow White movie adjacent to a sign for a liquor store. That is a tough choice.

Room for a View. A gorgeous vista out to sea from the shore. Do nothing, like a good-for-nothing bohemian, or trundle one’s self back to that day job.

It’s the same old story: pave paradise, put up a parking lot. We chose wrong. Not cool. Not cool at all.

The show runs until December 31. Library hours are Tuesday, 10 – 8, Wednesday – Saturday, 10 – 5:30, Sunday, 12-5. . The Library is located at 101 Pacific Avenue. For more information call 570-7500.

"A Christmas Carol," Long Beach Shakespeare Company, Long Beach, CA

This Christmas season’s wonderful life begins with a flying start with the Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s just-right production of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, directed by Jeff Brown at the Richard Goad Theatre.

If ever the tone and color of a performance depended on an actor’s portrayal of one character, it has to be the actor who plays Ebenezer Scrooge.

Make him tall and weedy, stooped over so he looks like Don Quixote or Osama bin Laden, he resembles the epitome of self-abnegation. Make him globular, like Joe Six Pack, he looks prosperous. Make him Type A frenetic, he looks bipolar, more creepy than his nocturnal visitors.

Each is valid, of course; the role’s versatility ensures that the play’s enactment each year is not the stuff of cant and humbug.

My favorite Scrooge to date? This production’s Mark Aguirre. First of all, bless him for not making such a big deal of his “Bah, humbug!” It’s like the new James Bond not giving a damn whether his martini is shaken or stirred.

Aguirre’s Scrooge sets the stage for the rest of the production. It makes sense of the accompanying cast, the sets, the music, the crowd scenes. As a result, the tone of the play isn’t melodrama or angst, it’s just-right.

Aguirre’s blessed with the fact that, English or not, he looks English, a stolid, self-made man in a world of lords and ladies. Suspicious and cynical, without a shred of noblesse oblige, I can see him trudge through the City in London - richer than Midas but without the golden touch - and not bat an eyelash.

The fact that he looks spot-on like love-burned Colin Firth in Love, Actually who re-animates at the end is a bonus. Aguirre makes Scrooge strong and silent; his intense eyes speak volumes of joy-had, joy-lost and, finally, joy-regained. His transformation at the end, when he joins the human race, will warm the cockles of your heart.

The set, especially the houses in the background, cast in a peculiar scale and perspective, makes him larger than life. Ditto for the bed – a miracle of stagecraft carpentry - brought in a couple of times down the aisle. Just right.

The opening scene, in which holiday-gay Londoners go about their business, is not so much about hustle-bustle, which would set off Scrooge’s scrooge-ness, but more about the measured steps of the miser, as if walking with brio wasn’t cost-effective. Just right.

The music - recorders, violins, voices – is unamplified and spontaneous, just like a Salvation Army band. Just right.

Everything about this production screams, in sotto voice, just right. A message of love and redemption not crammed down our throats like Rachel Ray making fruitcake but which instead floats in like that feather in the opening scene of Forrest Gump, unbidden, perhaps, but a marvel to behold.

Performances are Thu – Sat, 8 PM, Sun, 2 PM. The show runs until Dec. 16. Tickets are $10-15. The Theatre is located at 4250 Atlantic Ave. For more info call 997-1494 or visit www.lbshakespeare.org.

"Biloxi Blues," Long Beach City College, Long Beach, CA

War may be hell but it’s also a helluva place to become a man.

Need convincing?

Then hurry see the short run of Long Beach City College Department of Theatre, Dance, & Film’s superb production of Neil Simon’s comedy Biloxi Blues, directed by Anthony Carreiro at the Studio Theatre.

Carreiro wants us to experience war, or at least it’s staging, as a backdrop, an abstraction, an occasion to learn, in short order, about love, sex, and bigotry.

He couldn’t have asked for a better script. Set in 1943, in the muggy but relatively innocent boot camp that is Biloxi, Simon laces his story with humor – flatulence, priapism (nice word, read the Viagra label), smelly feet, with bigotry - especially anti-Semitism, but also of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell variety, and with love – that which can be bought as well as that which falls out of the sky.

The one thing you don’t hear much about is getting blown to bits. Nice!

It’s the touching, coming of age story of one Eugene Morris Jerome (Adam Rosko), a not very worldly New Yorker. He wants to be a writer but first he needs some experience about which to write. That he gets, and then some.

Along with bunkmates Joseph Wykowski (Alberto Mendoza), Don Carney (Gabriel Robins), Arnold Epstein (Joseph Torres), James Hennessey (Rob Libeu), and Roy Seldridge (Thomas Helsper), Eugene must endure the irascible Sergeant Merwin J. Toomey (Alan Sewell).

Rosko is perfect as Eugene, especially in his spotlit asides to the audience and his first love-dance with USO Daisy Hannigan (Kalie Quinones). Tall and ungainly – herky, jerky, and perky - with a stoopy posture that makes him seem taller than he really is, he makes me think of Holden Caulfield in khaki. He’s got an impish face, expressive hands, and a voice that always seems on the verge of a Eureka! moment, all to great comedic effect.

First Sewell makes Toomey the stern taskmaster, a little too tightly wound, and then magnificently unravels him. Toomey was so whacked out – you could see the veins in his neck bulge, his eyes almost pop out of their sockets - that you wonder how he got the job of turning boys to men.

But the role that had to walk a couple of fine lines – and did, magnificently - was that of Epstein. Torres combined disdain and intellectuality, humor and resignation, and a bent to playing by his own set of rules and codes. The result? A character that was honorable but compassionate, made the more convincing by his Buddha calmness and measured tone of voice.

The script resonates with a particular timeliness: the Veteran's Day weekend, continuation of American casualties in Iraq, talk of bringing the troops home.

What relief, war as comedy, not a comedy of errors.

Performances are Thu-Sat, 8 PM, Sun, 2 PM. The play runs until Nov. 19. Tickets are $7-10. The Theatre is located on the City College campus at Clark & Harvey Way. For more info call 938-4563 or visit www.lbcc.edu/tdf.

W. Jason Situ at Segil Fine Art, Monrovia, CA

My dream ad...

Wanted: Tell it like it is landscape artist, master-skilled, soul of a troubadour. Must paint like an Arcadian (But not hail from Arcadia, CA) god. Must create lapidary scenes notable for bucolic atmospheres, cozy compositions, and dreamy vistas. Must create work that can morph without a seam from the specific to the general, from the literal to the metaphorical. Egotists need not apply.

Oops, wait, here he is, W. Jason Situ and his new body of work at Segil Fine Art Source in Monrovia.

Bless his heart, W. Jason Situ wants us to experience the same views he experiences. Gorgeous views, scrumptious views. He wants to remind you of places you’ve already been. He wants to tease you with places you have yet to see. The same clouds and leafy trees, the same seascapes and mountains, the same sprawling vistas and arroyos framed by trees.

But he doesn’t shove the experience in front of your face either literally – the pieces are dinky, for the most part, a foot square, their tone benign, the brushstroke invisible - or figuratively – the scenes are calm and frozen, timely and timeless – think landscapes, colored landscapes, in which a shepherd’s about to play a lute.

He frames the work to such an extent – in French an apt expression is called le mot juste; let’s call Situ’s compositions the visual equivalent of that – that you have the sense that he’s gone to great pains to situate you in some exact spot and, once you are there – “Almost, not quite, an inch to your right...bingo!” – he quietly steps aside and lets you view the scene unmediated by he-who-brought-you-to-the-spot-in-the-first-place. In this case it’s okay not to dance with the guy who brought you. Situ’s gracious that way.

A moment’s temporality – immortalized, ironically, in hardly-ephemeral oil paint - features with prominence in this experience. As much you could glean from the specificity of some of the titles that read like weather reports: “Brightening Morning,” “August in Utah,” “Morning Moon.”

Better, though, to consider how long those cotton candy clouds in “Laguna Beach Clouds" will maintain that particular configuration. And what will happen to the reflections in the windows when that “Sunrise in Maine” turns penumbral. And when “Quiet Sunday” becomes manic Monday.

Geographically, there’s a particular sense of place – Palos Verdes, Malibu, Point Lobos -that the artist contrasts nicely with a sense of placelessness, for lack of a better word. After all, you don’t have to visit Giverny to appreciate Monet’s exquisite water lilies.

Mostly, though, Situ wants us to acknowledge that vision is fragile, that moments are transitory, that life is precious. That beauty may be unquantifiable, heck, even useless, in a particular kind of economy but just try living without it.

Try not to be startled at these views. Be grateful to the artist for throwing them our way.

The exhibition runs until November 26. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 1 – 6 PM. The Gallery is located at 110 West Lime Avenue, Monrovia. For more information, call (626) 358-5563 or visit www.segilfineart.com/situ.

"Greetings," Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage Theatre, Long Beach, CA

In Tom Dudzick’s touching Greetings, directed by Michael Ross for the Long Beach Playhouse’s Mainstage Theatre, Guess Who’s Coming gets trumped by It’s a Wonderful Life and we get treated to an evening of calamity and epiphany, reconciliation and revelation.

Ross wants us to experience the discomfort of bringing home someone new for the holidays. And not any holiday but Christmas, in a Catholic home.

He does well.

Couple that with a fiancée who’s not just Jewish but an atheist, a brother, Mickey Gorski (Kenneth Lane) who’s retarded, a father who waxes bitter because didn’t make it to be big leagues because, so we thought, of an injury, and you’ve got the potential for Christmas Gone Awry.

Greg Fritsche decorates the set in an Archie Bunker mentality in which old habits die hard.

You have to think Ross had Edith and Archie in mind when he visualized the characters of Emily Gorski (Harriet Whitmyer) and Phil Gorki (Hugo E. Paez). Sweet parent, gruff parent.

On the flight from New York to Pittsburgh, Andi Gorski (Roger Shank) and Randi Stein (Rebecca Davis), make clear their commitment to each other; that they will ride out the storm of the holidays.

Thoroughly credible, Shank made me think of Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton: successful at work, successful at love, but then a bundle of nerves when it comes to waging war on the home front.

Ditto for Davis. She gave her the character the charm and brio of a dreamer who if, not yet a star, at least she has her dreams, she has her man. This she balances nicely with her own family issues - she hadn’t spoken to her father in three years – and the trepidation of meeting the family Gorski.

In short, Shank and Davis made their characters warm and fuzzy, compatible but, ultimately, oh so vulnerable. Aren’t we all?

Paez made Phil irredeemably loud and violent, bigoted and way-too-opinionated. Wait until you see him try to perform an exorcism.

Kudos to Whitmyer as Emily, the long-suffering wife of Hurricane Phil. The glue that holds the family together, the soft touch, the kind word: Whitmyer gives her a backbone, makes her exasperation into a work of art

And kudos plus one to Lane’s Mickey. Condemned at first to a few stock phrases, a limited worldview, so we thought, he was nonetheless joyous and ebullient, adorable and bubbly. He refracted the love his family had bestowed on him.

But then, when the bickering became too much, he was possessed, literally, not by the devil (hence the futile exorcism), not by God, but some benevolent life force that not only shepherded the family through their particular crisis but also reminded us that there are other ways to theatrically commemorate the holiday season than to dish up helpings of Charles Dickens.

Performances are Fri. & Sat., 8 PM, Sun,. Nov. 12, 19, 26, Dec. 3, 2 PM. The show runs until Dec. 16. Tickets are $18-20. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim St. For more info call 494-1014 or visit www.lbph.com.