THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013 OUR TOWN www.nypress.com PAGE 15

Edited by Armond White CityArtsNYC.comNew York’s Review of Culture .cityArts

Cicely Tyson brings realness to The Trip to Bountiful

By Armond White

Broadway’s new Black (or non-traditional cast) production of Th e Trip to Bountiful comes alive when Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly

Texas widow longing to return to her titular hometown, stands up and sings a church hymn in a desolate bus station. It is the chestnut “Blessed Assurance” and as Tyson prances and sings, the audience spontaneously joined in.

Was it a response to the actress and her legacy of cultural landmarks (Sounder, Roots, Th e Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, East Side/West Side) or gospel’s call-and-response tradition that veteran Black performers and audiences bring to Broadway? It was a surprising—and unexpectedly satisfying—moment; unscripted by playwright Horton Foote whose synthetic Southern doggerel treats the human condition like bolts of preprinted fabric. Familiar ideas about family, aging and the passing of time are cut and stitched into ready-made, second-hand drama—the half-tragic equivalent to a sitcom.

But there’s Tyson as Carrie Watts, the role that originated by Lillian Gish and that won Geraldine Page an Oscar. Th is occasion forces one to realize the paucity of roles for older actresses (Tyson is 80), especially black actresses. Tyson seizes the vehicle to communicate her principled talent to a culture that has forgotten what that means.

When Carrie cries “I want to go back to Bountiful,” Tyson gives it the yearning of a woman who feels existentially stranded in a debilitating, non-nurturing place, a cramped two-room Houston apartment with her son Ludie (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and his frustrated, harpy wife Jessie Mae (Vanessa Williams). Th e

situation parallels the lack of mobility faced by black actresses toiling in an unwelcoming or restricting profession.

Tyson‘s career milestones have always happened against the odds yet her successes are impressive because their always demonstrate moral integrity. Not the worse legacy, it puts Tyson in the same league as Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte–powerful performers who also stood for something. In this case, the memory of a bountiful artistic and political calling in which personal artistry illuminates mere professionalism.

Th at Tyson’s lack of sentimentality—her defi ning quality—fi ts Carrie Watts is ironic. Foote’s determined yet nostalgic crone is utterly average, suff ering typical old-age dilemmas. Not exactly a warm matriarch, Tyson makes her stubborn, self-obsessed drive to return to her roots seem vital, (her subtle anger recalls Tyson’s Rebecca in Sounder). She works Foote’s threadbare, pseudo-homey clichés for all they’re worth. Th ere’s no richness in Foote’s writing, the fl at, naturalistic language resists poetry; Geraldine Page gave the fi lm her hammy but great emotionalism to stave off Foote’s unintended yet unavoidable bleakness. In the last act, director Michael Wilson lets Tyson nearly transform Carrie Watt’s dotage into principle: “I found my dignity and strength” she says looking at her girlhood home with the symbolic name, (a bland version of the yearning psychology William Inge expressed better in Come Back, Little Sheba).

Th at line isn’t quite believable but we know what Carrie/Tyson means: Th e search for stronger values and desire to restore personal heritage are clear. Th e sympathetic audience provided a Tyler Perry response, giving more implicit Christian fellowship than Foote intended. (Singing “Blessed Assurance” also recalls Tyson’s very excellent Peter Bogdanovich TV movie Blessed Assurance.) With Tyson’s presence, this production’s new

ethnic focus evokes the Great Migration history of blacks relocated to urban living yet retaining ambivalent memories of the South as home. Jeff Cowie’s set, superlatively lighted by Rui Rita, recalls the Hudson River School of bucolic radiance; creating a visible, nearly cinematic passage of time.

Th e years since Tyson performed in the legendary 1961 production of Genet’s Th e

Blacks have seen the once-thriving Black American theater movement pass. In this not-good-enough play Tyson’s richness and will makes one nostalgic for Black theater’s forgotten bounty.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Recall and Response

Tyson and Candola Rashad in A Trip to Boun ful.

PAGE 16 OUR TOWN www.nypress.com THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013

R E S E R V A T I O N S2 1 2 - 2 5 8 - 9 5 9 5 / 9 7 9 5J A L C . O R G / D I Z Z Y S

L I V E J A Z Z N I G H T L Y

‘The Best Jazz Room in the City’

—Tony Bennett

CITYARTS MUSIC

A revived orchestra comes to Carnegie Hall with its maestro, Leonard Slatkin

By Jay Nordlinger

From May 6 to May 11, Carnegie Hall will present a festival called “Spring for Music.” It off ers fi ve orchestras in six concerts. Th e orchestras come from around the country, and one of them was to have been the Oregon Symphony. Th e Oregonians

found themselves short on cash, however, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) will play two concerts (May 9 and 10).

Th e fi rst DSO concert consists of Sergei Rachmaninoff , Kurt Weill and Maurice Ravel. Th e second one is devoted to Charles Ives—his four symphonies. Th e concerts are conducted by the DSO’s music director, Leonard Slatkin.

I say to him, in a phone conversation, “I’m glad to be hearing Ives. But it’s a shame not to hear Walter Piston—he’s never played.” Slatkin informs me that he himself conducts Piston. But it’s true: Th e mid-century Americans are largely ignored. Music follows fashion, and Piston, William Schuman, Peter Mennin and the rest of those guys are out of fashion. A young conductor, says Slatkin, should make a project out of reviving them.

A young woman named Caroline Shaw has just won the Pulitzer Prize, notes Slatkin. She does not call herself a composer, interestingly enough. But performers will naturally want to perform what music she has written, or will write. What they’re unlikely to do, says Slatkin, is unearth, say, the Seventh Symphony of Roy Harris. (Th at composer’s Th ird was once well-known, but has faded from the repertoire.)

Slatkin grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a famous musician: Felix Slatkin, the violinist, conductor, arranger and so on. In and out of the house trooped even more famous musicians: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, yes, but also Art Tatum, the jazz pianist, and Frank Sinatra. Felix Slatkin died in 1963, when he was only 47. Leonard was 19.

He is now doing what his father wanted to do but did not live quite long enough to do: head an orchestra. His father wanted an orchestra of his own to conduct, somewhere. He was on the verge of getting one when he died. Leonard Slatkin has held many music directorships in his career. He started in Detroit fi ve years ago.

Th e DSO has come through a rocky period. Before there was a national recession, there was a “one-state recession”: Michigan’s. Th e DSO was not immune. Th en, toward the end of 2010, the musicians went on strike, for six months. Th e orchestra is now back on its feet, reformed and fl exible.

Th e musicians took a pay cut—22 percent, on average. But they can earn more with optional work. Th e orchestra’s main home is still Orchestra Hall, downtown. But they are also out in the suburbs, in six diff erent venues. Occasionally, the musicians break out into smaller ensembles, such as string quartets. “We don’t do fl ash mobs yet,” says Slatkin, “but that may come.”

Ticket prices have fallen, and ticket sales have increased. Also, concerts are streamed live on the Internet. “We are

redefi ning the word ‘audience,’” says Slatkin. Th e webcasts are free of charge. Doesn’t this keep people from going to the concert hall? On the contrary, says Slatkin: Th e webcasts whet their appetite for the live-and-in-person experience.

Th e DSO is even developing an audience abroad, says Slatkin. “So, when the time comes to resume international touring, we have a head start. People not only know how we play, they know what we look like.”

You can buy all nine Beethoven symphonies from the DSO for a mere 20 bucks: Th ey are downloadable. Slatkin fi gures we will have compact discs for another three or four years and then yield entirely to new technologies.

Th e DSO also has a number of programs designed to provide music education to young Detroiters—this used to be the job of families and schools. Slatkin himself enjoyed an excellent music education in the public schools he attended. He may have come from a spectacularly musical home, but “I cherished that hour when the music teacher came in with an autoharp.” Our society has changed, though, as we all know.

In short, the DSO has found a way to keep itself afl oat, and moving forward. Th ey are coping with the challenges of today, and also taking advantage of opportunities—such as the Internet. Slatkin is a particularly good ambassador for music. He is not only a fi ne conductor, he is one of the best talkers about music you’ll ever hear. He has some things in common with a conductor he much admired, Leonard Bernstein. And aft er all these years, he still loves music as much as ever.

“I have the best job in the world,” he says. “It is an honor and a privilege, as well as a responsibility.” He continues, “I stand in front of a hundred musicians and give a downbeat. To this day, I’m not 100 percent sure why that sound comes out”—the hard-to-beat sound of an orchestra.

The Detroit Way

Leonard Slatkin

Suspending RealityBurning Man collaborative art comes to Wan-Der-Lust

By Elena Oumano

The six artists behind “Wan-Der-Lust,” a month-long, (now through May 15), mixed-media pop-up exhibit on the ground fl oor of 72 Wooster Street,

announces its mission in a black painted scrawl over the entrance:

“Wanderlust is about the primal impulse for exploration. Th e work assembled expresses a freedom pulsing through the body blood.

Th e collective narrative in this exhibition is informed by journeys unknown; inspired by the moment. Th e work is meant to inspire a state of constant fl ow and transformation. Th rough these works on paper, canvas, photography, sculpture and furniture, we express the human craving for discovery.

Welcome to Wanderlust. We invite you to suspend in your reality.”

Since art of necessity involves exploration, transformation, and discovery, perhaps more to the point is photographer Peter Ruprecht’s observation that this show embodies the “Burning Man ethos of collaboration brought into the real world.” Photographers Reka Nyari and Ruprecht; artists Jody Levy and Arten Mirolevich; sculptors/furniture makers Dara Young and Yarrow Mazzetti; along with Harlan Berger of Centaur Properties, the developer hosting “Wan-Der-Lust” before 72 Wooster is sold, met at Burning Man and

formed a camp that creates art alongside others as part of the pop-up community that takes over Nevada’s Black Rock desert every year. Over the course of a few weeks, they’ve transformed a rough, rubble-strewn NYC space lacking electricity into a gallery in order to showcase the individual works that oft en bear traces of each other’s fortuitous interference.

All the contributors here evidence imagination and skill, but Ruprecht and Mazzetti show the strongest. Mazzetti’s powerfully authentic heart of pine and stainless steel furniture includes a sleekly gorgeous dining table and a chest with 5 theme drawers, each crammed with objects and opening to a fl ood of music. Ruprecht, a former Olympic skier and fi nancial consultant who’s untrained in photography, fi rst bought a camera in 2006 and a few years later, had a billboard looming over Times Square. His richly-colored, high contrast images are not framed. Instead, Mazzetti’s aluminum backings extend the images’ space beyond four corners, underscoring their generosity and excitingly alive quality. A series of meticulously rendered etchings by Mirolevich, a visionary artist also working in water color, pen and ink here stands out as well. He’s the only Wan-Der-Lust artist with professional representation, But galleries are currently circling Ruprecht. Th ree of his photos were snapped up at the opening night party attended by 2000 people gathered mostly by internet word-of-mouth—further evidence of Burning Man’s infi ltration into the real world.

THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013 OUR TOWN www.nypress.com PAGE 17

15 ways tore-useoldyour newspaper

1 2 3

4 5 6

7

10 11

14 15

12

13

8 9

Use it as wrapping paper, or fold & glue pages into reusable gift bags.

Add shredded newspaper to your compost pile when you need a carbon addition or to keep flies at bay.

Use newspaper strips, water, and a bit of glue for newspaper mâché.

Crumple newspaper to use as packaging material the next time you need to ship something fragile.

Make your own cat litter by shredding newspaper, soaking it in dish detergent & baking soda, and letting it dry.

Stuff newspapers in boots or handbags to help the items keep their shape.

Tightly roll up sheets of newspaper and tie with string to use as fire logs.

Wrap pieces of fruit in newspaper to speed up the ripening process.

Dry out wet shoes by loosening laces & sticking balled newspaper pages inside.

Roll a twice-folded newspaper sheet around a jar, remove the jar, & you have a biodegradable seed-starting pot that can be planted directly into the soil.

Make origami creatures

After your garden plants sprout, place newspaper sheets around them, then water & cover with grass clippings and leaves. This newspaper will keep weeds from growing.

Use shredded newspaper as animal bedding in lieu of sawdust or hay.

Make newspaper airplanes and have a contest in the backyard.

Cut out letters & words to write anonymous letters to friends and family to let them know they are loved.

a public service announcement brought to you by dirt magazine.

GALLERIES CITYARTS

Wan-der-lust by Peter Rupprecht.

Media short sides with American aristocracy—and dishonesty

By Armond White

The worst Steven Spielberg production ever is, without doubt, his Barack Obama homage, Steven Spielberg’s Obama. Unlike his disingenuous

Obama-in-disguise campaign feature fi lm, Lincoln, this two-minute second satirical short looks artless and slapdash; it was made for last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner—an annual event for fatcats that contradicts the United States’ supposed allegiance to democracy by gathering the nation’s most empowered people (media celebrities) to gently lambaste but mostly celebrate their empowered peer, the President, as the most casual, supercilious, inviolable and narcissistic cat of them all.

Newscasters have disgraced their profession and politics by making cameos with apparently no qualms that news is just another form of celebritized fi ction. Th ere’s an unholy alliance between the news industry and Hollywood. No matter the deprivations Americans across the country still suff er from Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, West, Texas and the economy—the Correspondents’ dinner is a ritual for the privileged, the ruling class that Americans like to think doesn’t exist. Th at’s one reason they go to the movies, (the most shameful reason), and Spielberg made this short to further that ends of mystifi cation, misguidance and manipulation.

Th e mockumentary’s unfunny jokes start with Spielberg asking “I mean who is Obama, really? We don’t know. We never got his transcripts.” Th is would only be amusing if it weren’t true. Th ere’s obscenity in joking

about the media’s protection of Obama’s image and its implicit lack of decorum which began (negatively) with the media’s assault on George W, Bush’s presidency. But Nevermind. (Th at might have been a more clever title for the short—what, was Tony Kushner too busy reading Entertainment Weekly?).

Steven Spielberg’s Obama was made redundantly, to disguise the euphemistic Beltway metaphors of Lincoln, (such as that despicable moment when Abraham Lincoln, arms outstretched, mendaciously emulates the scales of justice—but politicking with his right hand and prevaricating with his Left ). Yet, those who care about the honor of Spielberg’s best work have to pay mind to this short’s dishonesty. It gainsays the fact of Obama’s media-based mythifi cation by joking about it.

Spielberg pretends in the short to be thinking about doing a fi rst fi lm about Obama and smirks, “Picking the right actor to “play Obama that was the challenge. So I needed someone who could dive in and really become Barack Obama. And as it turns out the answer was right in front of me all along: Daniel Day Lewis.” Th is plays the movie going public cheap, as if they weren’t smart enough to catch that Obama was already the subtext of Lincoln. Spielberg knew this, he let screenwriter Tony Kushner go forward with the rhetorical ruse which Th e New York Times only cottoned to aft er the fi lm’s release.

In an analysis titled “Confronting the Fact of Fiction and the Fiction of Fact,” two thumbs-up reviewers chimed “Lincoln isn’t just about how President Lincoln navigated the passage of the 13th Amendment; it is also about President Obama whose presidency could not be imagined without that amendment.” So much form the limits of Times critics’ imaginations. Th ey fi nally admitted that Spielberg and Kushner’s

fabrications were rooted in the dark heart of millennial White Liberal fantasy, not historical fact or African American dreaming.

Because Obama has become the fulfi llment of White Liberal dreaming, his mythifi cation in Lincoln and throughout the mainstream media is accepted without vetting—so much so that even Spielberg can contribute to the mythifi cation, attempting to sway an election and then kid about it.

His short’s suggestion that the Obama myth required an actor of Daniel Day Lewis’ stature is inadvertently revealed. Spielberg boasts about Day Lewis’ method of ”becom[ing] his character: Hawkeye from Last Of Th e Mohicans, Bill the Butcher in Th e Gangs of New York and Abraham Lincoln from Lincoln. And you know what, he nailed it.” Nailing it is the correct, crucifying term for the Washington Correspondents Dinner’s deprecation of American history.

Spielberg’s litany accidentally links Obama’s presidency to questionable representations of American history: James Fennimore Cooper’s White fantasy that Leslie Fiedler once explicated, (in Love and Death and the American Novel) as the embodiment of Eurocentric fears and the basis of America’s racial delusions, (a critical thesis now forgotten in the Ebert age); Scorsese’s post-Vietnam imagining of America’s hostile social legacy and immigrant brutality. Spielberg ties all that to Lincoln, not to absolve it but to unconsciously root it to the racial and political confusion about slavery and identity that the unvetted Obama represents.

But, wait! It gets worse! Obama himself takes part in Spielberg’s charade. Aft er once claiming “I have a lot on my plate,” Obama generously took the time to complete Spielberg’s fantasy by showing how he prepares for public performance: Looking into a mirror, Obama preps “Hello, Ohio! Hello, Ohio!” “I love you back.” “Look, look, let me be clear about this.” Th e only thing that’s clear is that the gathered media aristocracy,

(including the low-down yet highly-placed of Hollywood and Manhattan), approves this disingenuousness. It’s all right with them. Th ey want a President as lacking in dignity as they are, so they reduce him to their level—morally, professionally, politically.

Th is short is Spielberg’s most Brechtian comedy: he gets the President of the United States to ridicule the supposedly sincere reasons his constituents support him, undermining the prestige of offi ce that even his opponents are obliged to

respect. (One could argue that the media’s out-of-control disrespect

the presidency began with George W. Bush or maybe our lapdog media was born during the Clinton administration). For Spielberg, Obama willingly portrays a performer in the act of deceiving the public. (Only Bill and Hillary Clinton taking on the roles of the mafi a gangsters Th e Sopranos was as off ensive.)

It is not funny when Obama-as-Day-Lewis confuses things, saying “Th e hardest part? Trying to understand his [my] motivations. Why did he [I] pursue ‘health care’ fi rst? What makes him [me] tick? Why doesn’t he [I] get mad? If I was him I’d be mad all the time. But I’m not him, I’m Daniel Day Lewis.” It’s as bad as a Saturday Night Live skit. Or a Jon Stewart Early Show skit. Or a Real Time with Bill Maher skit. (Or a Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow skit, I mean, “newscast.”) Th at’s how low the producer of the terrifi c early Zemeckis-Gale comedies has sunk.

For the past seven months I’ve personally been fi elding questions about why I didn’t like the movie Lincoln. Going through the unpleasant eff ort of explaining the fi lm’s basic inaccuracy and unfairness to people who were prepared to love and defend it simply because it was customized to their political sentiments, made my explanation all the more frustrating. (When die-hard Spielberg scoff ers praised Lincoln, I knew their commendations had nothing to do with esthetics or history, only with the fi lm’s slanted politics and strenuously forced contemporary parallel to Obama’s lame-duck presidency.)

Now, aft er the disappointment of the Kushner-Spielberg Lincoln, we get its unfortunate sequel—actually a coda. A coda ought to reinforce a work’s preceding revelations but it’s become apparent that aft er his previous great fi lms showed the humane aspect of the human experience, Spielberg has taken up the partisan view. Now that Spielberg shows us what Lincoln actually meant, one can really, rightfully rue it.

PAGE 18 OUR TOWN www.nypress.com THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013

SATURDAY, MAY 18 AT 8PMSaint Jean Baptiste Church, 76th Street at Lexington

Tickets: $60, $40 at (212) 866-0468 or at canticumnovum.org

Harold Rosenbaum conducts The Canticum Novum Singers

Mozart’s Grand Mass in C Minor

F E AT U R I N GHeidi Grant Murphy, Jennifer Johnson Cano,

Frank Lopardo, Clifford Derixand The Artemis Chamber Ensemble

Program also includes Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpusand Bach’s Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

“Chamber choruses don’t comeany better.” — The New York Times

CITY ARTS FILMS

Steven Spielberg’s Obama.

Spielberg’s Shortcomings