On a Friday evening after a long week, we were not looking forward to a play about the London Plague. However, we were pleasantly surprised. This was an engaging and relevant play. The three key roles were all strong. Many “male” roles were played by women, but it didn’t really matter – it worked. Holden Harris played John Graunt, a pioneer statistician and epidemiology, with a halting delivery. It seemed odd, but he was an odd character, so that too worked.
When the doctors tended patients, they wore these strange masks with long “beaks”. These were in fact authentic, as I had visited the London Museum not too long ago where they had these in the London Plague exhibits. Very scary masks!
This was a new play at Northern Stage. Clever and well-acted, and close to home with the aging parent theme. The story primarily involves Cora, featured in the image, who has left her husband, and has moved back with her mother Julie. Both were strong roles, and had a good amount of humor. The back story about a high school friend seemed a bit much, but the play was smart and snappy.
Appropriate for the title of the play, the backdrop of the scene was a large depiction of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
This was an interesting set of snippets set in different barber shops between Africa and England, interspersed with short music and dance interludes when the scene changed.
Some of the stories seemed a little slow in the first part, but it all seemed to intersect towards the end. The stories were related through soccer and separation. The London barber provided the drama between the generations, and the resolution. There was lots of comic relief too, as people joked about their hair.
The show was done in Moore, and there was on-stage seating to the left and right which is always fun.
On Saturday, the related talk about community was very interesting. Moderated by a slow-talking Khalil Abdullah, guests were Brian Cook, Board Chair of JAG Productions, Charles Mhlauri, Director of Coaching from Lightning Soccer, Sean Taylor, barber at RVC, and Wole Ojurongbe, director of Dartmouth MALS. It was interesting how their discussion was linked to the barber theme in how they had been concerned about how their hair would get cut once in the Upper Valley. Fortunately Sean is there for that purpose.
An intriguing and unpronounceable name: it actually sounds more like clicks when said by a native speaker. Before the show, there was an introduction with the director, Saodat Ismailova, talking with Ted Levin. He is involved with the Aga Khan Music Initiative, which is intended to fund music projects in developing areas like Uzbekistan. The Aga Khan is actually a person, and head of a branch of Islam. The articulate and lovely Saodat had an interesting Q&A session with Ted, talking about how the project developed. We learned that the “40 girls” story is like our equivalent of a fairy tale: everyone in the region knows about it. Around the 4th to 6th century BC, a princess led 40 girls to defend her land.
The story has been transmitted by oral tradition (like the Iliad), but the last bard who had been told the story died in 2004. Saodat ended up researching archival recordings of that bard. She felt that a 300-page story that lasted all night would be too long, so she wanted to tell the story for modern audiences. Although a filmmaker, when she met with Ted, they decided to collaborate on a film with live music.
Ted is obviously very familiar with the region, and seemed to be able to speak to her in some language that I couldn’t hear (but not English). He had organized the Hun Huur Tu (throat singers of Tuva) concert in 2004 (?), from the same neck of the world
The concert proper was in Moore theater, and was well attended. Overhead, the movie was beautiful, with stark images from the Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan region. Ancient ruins, desert cliffs, and a young woman who played the princess Gulayim.
On stage, a group of young women sang plaintive songs accompanied by twangy guitar-like instruments or the eerie stringed ghirjek. The stage was dim, and the women entered and exited with slow and stately movements. The overall effect was strikingly beautiful. The music was composed by Dimitri Yanov-Yanovsky, based in Tashkent. The lyrics for the songs were traditional, along with the instruments. Languages included Kazakh, Uzbek, Karakalpak, ….
The movie followed the story via four elements earth, air, water and fire. Not really related to the story, but part of Zoroastrianism, which takes its roots in the region. Judging by the Q&A after the show, I think the audience didn’t see how all this tied in. One question was about the battle: should there have been one in the movie? The director explained that she wanted to get the feeling of a 16-year old girl, who hadn’t had children. How would she feel about war? Everything would be intense, and she would go all out. She chose to portray this as dancing in a disco. Lost on us I guess.
At the end of the film, the musicians then recited names, 40 of course. We learned afterwards that it was a who’s who of famous women from the region, including the director of course.
The percussionist and conductor Alibek Kabdurakhmanov, one performer, Saodat and Ted came out after for a Q&A. All spoke English quite well, which was a suprise. The conductor said it was a miracle to get all the girls performing together. Even though they were from the same general region, they were from all different countries, and communication was difficult.
This is one of my favorite books, so I really wanted to see the play. It was certainly a surprise to see it staged as a 1940’s radio show, to start with, and then shifting into different times, with the same cast playing the same parts.
I’m not sure how effective that all was – especially the radio play part. There was also the recurring excerpts from On Tyranny. Absolutely appropriate, so I guess the intent was to link 1984 to 2018.
The student cast did a good job, and the production was well done with effective and sometimes jarring lighting. However it was too much of a mixed bag for me.
