 
|
|
|
|
Performance
Politically Committed Art: Primitive World explores destruction and hope.
Gardening
Seizing Sunlight:
A well-designed greenhouse.
Morsels
Crusts & Chowders: Mini-reviews of area dining spots.
Politically Committed
Art
Primitive World
explores destruction and hope.
By James
Johnston
So let's change our lives
For a change let's make our world
Beautiful. So let's change our world
For a change let's make our lives
beautiful!
-- Woman, Primitive World
 |
|
Iran Parker in Primitive
World.
. |
|
Lord Leebrick Artistic Director Corey Pearlstein had only been in
town for about two weeks when he sidelined me at a theater event and handed me a
well-worn copy of avant-garde plays and poems that had been produced at New York
City's Nuyorican Poetry Café. Spoken-word poetry, one-person shows and new
music-theatrical collaborations were the buzz the summer of 2000, and as we talked
about the country-sweeping movement, Pearlstein rapidly drummed his finger on the
cover of the book and said, "This is it. This is what I want to bring to Eugene."
Since then, Pearlstein has produced a few late-night performances
of experimental theater, but what happens this weekend and next is what he came here
to do. Combining jazz, blues, funk, poetic verse and dance, Primitive World: An
Anti-Nuclear Jazz Opera by Amiri Baraka, exemplifies the cutting-edge art that
marks the more progressive direction the Lord Leebrick is taking with its first-ever
second season.
Amiri Baraka is the Obie-award-winning playwright (Dutchman,
1964) who spearheaded the Black Arts movement of the '60s, has produced volumes of
poetry, plays and anthologies and has formed his own theater companies in Harlem
and in Newark, NJ. He hung out with the beat poets in the late '50s and formed Totem
Press, which published Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. A blues musician as well
as gifted writer, his words are infused with musicality, the rhythms of Black English
and the gritty, direct, often confrontational attitude associated with fighting one's
way out of oppression (for more on Baraka, see story, page 12).
His 1982 play, Primitive World, which has only been staged
twice before (the second time was at the Nuyorican), merges music with poetry in
an apocalyptic vision of nuclear war. Baraka says the play confronts the way "the
money gods extort, contort and abort our lives."
|
--Amiri Baraka will have a post-performance talk with the audience
after the Thursday, Jan. 10 opening of Primitive World.
--Baraka and Peter Mulvey will give a music and poetry performance
at 10 pm Friday, Jan. 11 at the Lord Leebrick Theatre; tickets for that event are
$15 each, or $25 for the play and performance.
--Baraka will also speak on "Opposing Terrorism and Bushwacker
Policies at 5 pm on Thursday, Jan. 10 in EMU's Gumwood Room, UO, and will give a
lecture on Friday, Jan. 11 in the Political Theatre class, 229 McKenzie, UO. Both
events are free.
--Peter Mulvey will give a solo concert at 8 pm Sunday, Jan. 13
at the Lord Leebrick Theatre. Tix are $10 adv., $12 dos, and $25 for front row seats
and post-show reception.
.
|
Baraka calls the play one of his "Boperas," that would
be bebop and opera and uses African-American music "because that music and
expression speaks to me and through me at a more penetrating level," he says.
Pearlstein chose the play before Sept. 11, and that is only one
of many serendipitous events surrounding the realization of this production.
Director Sherman Johnson, a New York City director and dramaturg,
whom Pearlstein met when both lived and worked in New York, had come across Baraka's
writings when he was in college at the University of Michigan. Johnson met Baraka
when he lectured in Ann Arbor, and looked him up when he moved to New York. The two
became friends.
Johnson finds Baraka appealing because he's outside the "usual
canon of the black literary experience." He's not Langston Hughes or Baldwin,
but uses Black English in an "elegant and flexible way, and looks like me and
sounds like me," he says. As a student at Michigan, Johnson found that imminently
appealing.
"As I learned more, I got intrigued by his struggle as a fish
out of water who acclimated and also evolved into someone and something ultimately
himself," says Johnson.
For Johnson, Baraka was a gateway into a broad range of literature.
Through him, he discovered the beat poets, the whole world of pan-African writers,
the use of art as a political tool.
Johnson had long wanted to mount a production of Primitive World,
and was looking to do so when Pearlstein called him last spring. Pearlstein told
Johnson he was planning this year's season and asked if he wanted to direct PW.
The timing was perfect.
A few years earlier, the script was sitting on Johnson's coffee
table in his New York apartment when good friend and musician Will Calhoun of the
Grammy-winning band Living Colour noticed it. Calhoun, who'd composed many musical
numbers (and had also dated one of Baraka's daughters), wrote a score to accompany
it, and that is what Eugene audiences will hear. Peter Mulvey, national touring musician
and another Pearlstein friend, will perform the music.
"As it happens," says Pearlstein, "Baraka is an
influential figure for Peter, too, and by that time it was clear that this project
was destined. Everyone involved in this show is passionate about it."
In addition, Pearlstein contacted the UO Multicultural Center,
which agreed to collaborate and bring Baraka here to speak during the Martin Luther
King, Jr. Celebration week.
Pearlstein says that as an arts presenter he feels a responsibility
to bring diverse voices and views to the stage and that he's interested in the political
and social ideas the play puts forward. "They are direct, radical and beautiful."
In Primitive World, three individuals are bent on destroying
the world. "Compare that to what's going on today. It's a group of individuals
really dictating the way in which the rest of the body of people go," says Johnson.
"It's just as absurd. Our administration is dictating the direction of the country.
It dictates where the money is being put. For a war."
The play's theme of the desire to destroy the world struck Johnson
as space age, but it also explores the primitive quality of humanity. "Primitiveness
is not something you go back to," says Johnson. "It's always an element
of everyone's lives. By nature, you're primitive when you're going into the unknown.
When the bomb drops, you're not suddenly primitive and naked you always were."
Baraka adds, "We are always in search of Truth and Beauty,
to paraphrase Keats and W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois said, 'The seeker of Beauty must,
of course, become the seeker of Truth.'"
The show opens Thursday, Jan. 10 and runs two weekends only at
the Lord Leebrick Theatre. See calendar for details.
The following weekend, Jan. 18 and 19, Those Guys Productions will
present a late-night performance of Are Not Pajamas, an experimental music
and theater piece by Mario Tucci, after PW.
Back to Top
Seizing Sunlight
A well-designed greenhouse.
By Rachel
Foster
Most gardeners I know have fantasized about owning a greenhouse,
but only a handful ever acquire one. Springfield artist Nancy Karp not only has a
greenhouse, she designed it herself, and her husband, Gary, built it. It is tucked
into the southwest corner of their roomy but intensively cultivated garden, and you
can't tell it's a greenhouse as you approach it. With a colorful door and siding
of natural cedar shakes, it might be a small studio, or an exceptionally nice-looking
shed. But step through that door and you find yourself in a bright, cozy space filled
with flourishing plants and the scent of soil.
The south-facing wall, largely unseen from the garden, is made
of glass. This is a solar greenhouse: it relies on the sun's energy not just for
light but for heat as well. Technically, it is "passive solar." No additional
energy or energy-requiring heat transfer device is involved in its operation. On
the north side of the space are five large, black plastic pickle barrels filled with
water that store heat when the temperature rises and release it as the temperature
falls. More heat storage is provided by brick paving that forms a path between the
heat-storing barrels and an in-ground planting bed next to the glass wall.
The pickle barrels are cast-offs from Emerald Valley Kitchen, and
they are far from being the only recycled material in this project which, it seems,
began with a used door. "We went to Bring one day and saw this dilapidated door,
and I told Gary I had to have it," Nancy says. Its panel of colored glass is
a simple but striking decorative element that defines the character of this artful
little building. Outside the door, a sturdy iron grille, once part of a city tree
grate, prevents moisture accumulating and keeps the floor free from mud. It shares
the threshold with a jubilant mosaic Nancy made from brightly-colored pieces of broken
dish ware and other found objects.
Inside, above the barrels, an exceptionally solid metal mesh bench
provides space for propagation. Originally store shelving, this too came from Bring
Recycling, as did the tree grate and the windows that make up the south side. Two
windows form a vertical wall, three feet high. Above them are four tall ones, set
side by side and angled to meet the sun. "I consulted books to find the right
angle for the windows so they get maximum sun in winter," Nancy told me. "In
December, afternoon sun reaches the back of the bench. In summer it stops short of
the front of the bench, so the bench is shaded."
It is possible to buy greenhouses locally, including one-of-a-kind
affairs made with recycled materials, but those I've seen are not built as solidly
as this one. The 10 x 12 structure (the largest you can put up in Springfield without
a permit!) has a properly constructed foundation of concrete block set on gravel
in a trench. The walls that have no windows are built of exterior grade plywood with
fiberglass insulation and a Visquene vapor barrier. The interior walls are painted
white to reflect light. A small double-vent window (probably from a camper) in the
west wall provides some ventilation.
Since the greenhouse was built in 1997, winters have been mostly
mild. But thermometers dipped to 10 degrees during one week-long cold spell, and
the greenhouse never went below 40. Even more remarkably, thanks to the design and
the insulation, it stays cool in summer. On the mild November afternoon of my visit,
when it was a pleasant, even seductive temperature, Nancy claimed "It never
gets warmer than it is now." The moderate temperature and strong indirect light
makes it easy to root cuttings on the bench.
Nancy has ripe tomatoes by the end of May, and they keep coming
until late fall, when the humidity rises too high for tomato health because of limited
ventilation. This is Nancy's only complaint: aside from the little camper window,
the only ventilation comes from opening the door. One day, she says, she would like
to install a self-opening vent and temperature-controlled fan powered by a solar
panel in the roof.
When Nancy was designing her greenhouse, she consulted The Solar
Greenhouse Book edited by James C. McCullagh (Rodale Press). It is available
from Eugene and Springfield public libraries. Another useful reference is A Solar
Greenhouse for the Pacific Northwest by Tim Magee (Ecotope Group), in the Eugene
Public Library.
Back to Top
Crusts & Chowders
Mini-reviews of area
dining spots.
Sy's Pizza
1211 Alder St. 686-9598.
11:30 am midnight M-SA, 3:30 pm midnight SU. $
In high school we'd save Sy's receipts and $15 worth got you a free slice. Sometimes
a customer would forget a receipt on the counter. When the chefs, next to the ovens,
caught us eyeing it, they'd turn their heads back up to the squawking television.
These days Sy's has upped the bid to $25, and though we no longer collect receipts,
the 'za's good as ever. Thick crust or thin. And hot, boy. You know how to cool a
steaming slice, you just put you lips together and blow. Practically dripping with
tasty grease from the cheese, you sprinkle on more mozzarella, a shake of garlic
salt, more oregano and maybe a few pepper flakes. Then you fold it lengthwise and
crocodile it. Saves on the cost of a bib. Extra toppings are doled out like parade-thrown
candy. I get olives, diced into hyper-fine cubes. When you bang through the glass
door on a cold night, close it behind you. You'll let out the smell of satisfied
hunger and a well-treated tongue. Damn, my mouth is watering. I need a slice. Call
for delivery, or dine on the spot. BF
Sharks
Original Seafood Bar & Steamer Co.
852 SW Bay Blvd., Newport, (541) 574-0590
4-9 pm F-SA, 4-8 pm SU-TU. $$-$$$.
This tiny restaurant at the west end of Newport's Historic Bayfront is a quiet
marvel. The fare is relatively simple, but fresh as locals in a fishing town require:
oyster, shrimp or combo pan roasts, steamers and a few pasta choices. The peak experience
is a cioppino that tickles all your tastebuds. You can get something similar down
the street for less, but the couple bucks you save in exchange for a lesser meal
among tourists isn't really a bargain. A locals' note on seafood: Your chowder shouldn't
require endless chewing. At Sharks, it won't. OI
West
Brother's Barbecue
844 Olive St. 345-8489.
11:30 am-closing daily. $-$$$.
Not for the faint of heart or palate or pocketbook, West Brothers is consistently
voted Eugene's best barbecue house. The space in the restaurant is set up fishbowl
style, big windows and wide open. It's a like an upscale McMennamins, but with more
ambition and creativity in the menu.
The food is darned pretty: colorful sweet coleslaw, heaps of mashed
potatoes, spicy Cajun blackened catfish, pumpkin enchiladas for the vegetarians.
And there's plenty of it you'll wake up full tomorrow. The brewery makes a good
rich porter and a Creamsicle of an orange wheat beer to wash it all down.
They've got a great kids' menu, too. Kids eat free on school nights,
which is great after the sticker shock on some of the other dishes. It's hard to
pay $12.95 for fish and chips, even if they're a la Ritz and oh so tasty. Ask them
about their new e-mail club; they offer some good coupon offers and special deals
for gourmets on a tight New Year budget. MT
Leftovers:
Changes in the salsa scene in Eugene. Groucho's is now the Rumba Room.
You can now find D.J. Mario Mora at Señor Frogs teaching the salsa,
merengue and afrocuban dance craft.
Williams Bakery celebrates 100 years of that doughy smell
in Eugene this year.
Pisma's Tasty Thai Kitchen opens in her new location at
29th and Willamette Jan. 14th. The Kitchen will be where Dragon Gate once was.
Morsels tries to capture the atmosphere as well as the cuisine
of some of our favorite places to eat in and around Eugene, all in 100 or so words.
Suggestions? Call Ben or Marina at 484-0519 or e-mail cal@eugeneweekly.com
Back to Top
Table of Contents
| News | Views | Arts & Entertainment
Classifieds | Personals
| EW
Archive
|