THREE STAGES

posted by James Reel

    This being Thursday, I’m off the hook in terms of original blogging while I point you to my contributions in the latest Tucson Weekly. Three items this week. First, a review of Crowns at Arizona Theatre Company. Here’s a taste:

    First it was shoes; now it's hats.
    Last fall, Arizona Theatre Company presented Bad Dates, in which our heroine tries on a closetful of shoes. This month, it's Crowns, in which six women (and a man) bring us a milliner's dream, a musical play about the hats that African-American women wear to church.
    No doubt purses will be next. Crowns is the latest offering in what seems more and more like a season of accessories, a lot of attractive but light plays with no real couture at the center. Crowns is a rousing show, at least, with strong performances that distract you from the script's stray weaknesses.

    Next in line, a surpsingly effective, even-keeled treatment of Christopher Durang at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company. For openers:

    The beautiful thing about Beowulf Alley's production of Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You is that the nun in question seems quite reasonable--dogmatic, but reasonable--right up until she starts shooting at former students who have strayed from the tenets of Catholicism.
    If you know much about Christopher Durang, you know that his plays usually veer madly in and out of various levels of absurdity. All right, a play in which a nun sets out the core beliefs of the Catholic faith is already flirting with theater of the absurd. But you just know that Durang is sooner or later going to push the proceedings into absolute lunacy.
    In Beowulf Alley's production, which opened last weekend, the absurdity comes later. Actress Lesley Abrams and director Jonathan Northoven introduce Sister Mary Ignatius as a hard-core traditionalist who goes along with the reforms of Vatican II with the greatest reluctance, but she's no nut. Even when she's pulling the trigger near the end, she seems entirely cool and reasonable.

    And finally, just in time for Mozart Week, a preview of the latest staged-reading-with-music masterminded by my friend and cello teacher, Harry Clark. The teaser:

    For the latest play with music presented by Chamber Music Plus Southwest, writer-cellist Harry Clark is counting on the animal magnetism of an actor in his 80s.
    In Clark's Mesmeric Mozart, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., best known as the star of the 1960s-'70s TV show The FBI, will take the part of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century faith healer of sorts who theorized that sickness was caused by an interruption in the natural flow of the "psychic ether" that pervades everything. Magnets, he claimed, could help correct the ether's flow in patients. Because the human body has its own magnetic properties--this is the origin of the term "animal magnetism"--Mesmer himself could adjust the flow of the ether by fondling the bodies of his patients, who tended to be attractive young women. (He is also credited with early use of hypnosis, hence our word "mesmerism.")
    One of Mesmer's patients was an attractive young Viennese pianist named Maria Theresa von Paradis. She'd been blind since early childhood; her blindness may have been psychosomatic, or it may have been caused by a detached retina; at any rate, Mesmer's treatment seemed to allow Paradis to regain her sight--though not with the happiest of results.