As Bees In Honey Drown A Play by Douglas Carter Beane

As Bees In Honey Drown

A Play by Douglas Carter Beane

Directed by Joey DeMita

January 25-27

F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Company

At the Factory on Tremont Street

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

This is my second encounter with The F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Company having first seen their production of Parade in October. The current production of As Bees In Honey Drown is a marvelous adaptation, directed by Joey DeMita who also directed Parade.

What DeMita brings to the performance is minimalist staging, the ability to work with few props and instilling a superb sense of timing by his actors. The play follows Alexa Vere De Vere deliciously portrayed by Linda Goetz. Alexa is a grifter

who seduces everyone with her English charm, runs up their credit cards and disappears from their lives as quickly as their credit card is maxed. She plies her unique talent on a number of fawning victims, the last of whom is Evan Wyler, a young somewhat naive writer. He has completed his first novel and is searching for new material when Alexa sinks her conning claws into his psyche. Even though Evan prefers men, he falls for Alexa – hook, line and credit card.

As the play unfolds, we learn of Alexa’s previous conquests: Kaden, the recording mogul, Mike, the artist and Illya. Each remains silent about being “sucked into” Alexa’s wiles because of their embarrassment. However, as wily as Alexa is, Evan, who has been educated about Alexa’s talents, exacts revenge by writing a tell-all book. As Alexa says in the play’s best line: “Maybe writers get the last word because they know so many of them.”

One scene is reminiscent of Donizetti’s spectacular sextet in the opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Various characters vent their anger until six soloists release their fury. In this play, the actors have a multi-line telephone conversation starting with one and adding until all are saying something different, all five speaking simultaneously. It takes talent to complete this without error, and these actors are more than capable of handling the difficulty.

As for the actors, Linda Goetz makes a perfect Alexa Vere De Vere, with English accent, body language and hand motions to match her delectable on stage persona. About eighty percent of the dialogue in the play is spoken by Goetz’ flawless and entertaining delivery. As the center of play she is terrific.

As I was exiting the theater I heard someone remark “Evan Wyler looks too young, so is not convincing.” But I would offer that is exactly the role Ryan MacPherson is supposed to play. Younger than Alexa, easily impressionable and captivated by a woman for the first time, he does a competent job as Wyler.

Frank Consolo is a true scene stealer. As the haberdasher, he plays the stereotyped gay with humor that even the most ardent opponent of stereotyping would enjoy. He flips from his gay role to ruffian portrayal in the manner of Bobcat Goldthwaite and finally plays Mike, a gay artist who lived with Alexa when she was Brenda, a New York nobody. Consolo brings a convincing earnestness to his roles.

Ross Brown comes alive as a big time recording executive talking realism to Wyler’s fantasy of Alexa. He tells of his own embarrassment and acts the way you would expect a thirty something seemingly big shot exec to act.

Julia Bailey has a certain grace, a dancer’s movement in the way she glides in and out of the scenes. Coupled with her winning smiles, she too fits her multiple roles enthusiastically and blends easily with the other actors.

Mimi Augustin provides facial expressions better than most well-known actors I have seen. Playing several roles does not mean she sloughs them off; on the contrary she is hilarious as the male physique-loving secretary to the record exec, and others.

Joey DeMita, whose direction I have seen twice, is a top notch director who pays attention to the message of the play, assuring the actors are well rehearsed with impeccable timing.

F.U.D.G.E. is one of the better acting groups in greater Boston, and perhaps they will bring back As Bees In Honey Drown so the play will be enjoyed by an even wider audience.

_____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

CERVENA BARVA PRESS READING SERIES Feb 20 Doug Holder/Steve Glines



Doug Holder





Steve Glines






IN THE

CERVENA BARVA PRESS STUDIO

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH

BASEMENT, B8, 7:00PM

ADMISSION: $3.00

Arts for the Armory

191 Highland Avenue

Somerville, MA

CERVENA BARVA PRESS READING SERIES

Readers: DOUG HOLDER and STEVE GLINES

Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press and the arts editor for The Somerville News. His poetry and prose have appeared in Rattle, The Boston Globe Magazine, the new renaissance, Endicott Review, Caesura, Long Island Quarterly and many others. Holder teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. He holds an M.A. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University.



Steve Glines has spent most of his career as a journalist with a reputation as an edgy technical writer. For five years he authored a monthly technical advice column titled Panic in Altos World Magazine. The column was written in the voice of a fictionalized, over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived, computer engineer working for the mob. He also wrote a column titled Famous Last Words for Unix Review about products that never quite materialized or never lived up to their promise. He is the author or co-author of five "trade textbooks," a travelogue about teaching in Fiji, a flash fiction/ poetry chapbook and a novel in search of a publisher. For the past eight years he has been the editor/publisher of Wilderness House Literary Review.

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The Center for the Arts is located between Davis Square and Union Square. Parking is located behind the armory at the rear of the building. Arts at the Armory is approximately a 15 minute walk from Davis Square which is on the MTBA Red Line. You can also find us by using either the MBTA RT 88 and RT 90 bus that can be caught either at Lechmere (Green Line) or Davis Square (Red Line). Get off at the Highland Avenue and Lowell Street stop. You can also get to us from Sullivan Square (Orange Line) by using the MBTA RT 90 bus. Get off at the Highland Avenue and Benton Road stop.

“If One of Us Should Fall” by Nicole Terez Dutton

“If One of Us Should Fall”

by Nicole Terez Dutton

Pitt Poetry Series

University of Pittsburgh Press

www.upress.pitt.edu

copyright 2012

75 pages

Review by Lo Galluccio

Not since I first came across Lucy Brock-Broido's “The Hunger,” has a poetry collection excited and challenged me as much as “If One of Us Should Fall,” Dutton's debut. In “The Hunger” Brock-Broido takes on the persona of different characters: baby Jessica who fell down the well years ago, a child in the cult group MOVE in Philadelphia and creates an idiom for each of them. At other times she writes with a plethora of images that are at times baroque, but each poem holds its own based on the character and the situation. This is different from Dutton's equally brilliant work. When a writer invents a new syntax and manages to keep a unified voice amidst different poems, it is always a fascinating achievement.

Whatever preconceived notions I had based on the title –that she was posing a moral question and would she, in fact, answer it? – vanished as soon as I plunged into the first poem, which like a bookend, is mirrored at the end of the work: Girl#1 and Girl #2. We are met with

“clear, coal-hot squares of disco” and “a Dopple” and an ending “like horses,” It is a poem with one declaratory sentence: “Listen, I am girl,” thus signifying herself in a general category of people, but specifying that she is indeed girl, female. Horses serve as an emblematic force throughout this work – and they seem to represent something American, some kind of independent motion, a grace of mobility and speed. We are dealing in some measure with a language poet, one more interested in playing with juxtapositions of images and objects, than in their literal meaning in a typical narrative poem. However Dutton does write in the first person quite often and in an abstract way, tells a story of place or relationship or disposition including the weather and the objects that together stitched form the vibe and ambiance of each episode. She is almost always traveling somewhere, to Austin, to Ohio, in an airport. It is a book about coming and going and how to signify what happens in between those poles. Dutton does pen some prose-poems in this work but all her poetry has velocity, mystery and concrete sensuality, as in:

“And guitars burning us up, quick,

as malaria, strapped into the hind bucket

of second hand Buicks, speeding

away, always, and always dumbstruck

by the drums trundled in our bones

the whole interstate home.”

p. 4 “Every Answer is Yes.”

These poems give us a sense of motion, take us from one place to another through unlikely brash metaphors that often tantalize.

In “Playing the Room” Dutton writes about the aftermath of a show or event of some kind. We seem to be in a bar. But her sense of the context is wild associations that transmute from one thing

to something vastly different. Like a good jazz improviser she takes us beyond the original key.

“behind the words,

the carcasses of steel mills

and rivers on fire. They try

to reassemble the logic the way

people interrogate suicide notes

cold trails that could lead

to the coordinates

where certain hearts lay

unspeaking buried

in the earth like gold.”

p.7

Her endings are always satisfying,usually providing some kind of closure in the positive vein

compared to the journey of the poem itself. It seems she is always looking beyond the present moment,

through a crystal ball of language. Traveling to Austin or to some other place along the interstate and yet describing a state of mind or a strange association of verbs that burst with action:

In Minor Key, she writes:

“Time swallows itself. We will

begin slow and tell the truth, Tomorrow

a world, ten fingers less, will move

forward. There will be more

soldered wires, more chords and flesh

held close with butterfly clamps”

p 14

Or, in Chaser, she takes the gerund lying and gives it a series of unrelated descriptions, a whole new story. It is a great poem, which ends with “shut up, shut up”

“Lying is many scavenger birds, knees

beneath dinner tables

crossed and uncrossed, a virus

fortressed in blood and spit,

a name you do not speak,

feathers left in the mouth,”

p18

Like beautiful black and white photographs, concrete objects are set against landscapes

and declarations and questions. In one sense every poem is a missive describing where the author is and what it may mean to you. Sometimes there's an episodic plot as in “Holding Us This Away” which is interlaced with arresting metaphors/similies, like:

“their clay ramshackles lining

the interstate like molars.”

p 11

The expansive vocabulary alone of these pieces is impressive, their apposition and fine line of both concrete identity and abstraction from their usual source. One would deduce hat Dutton

has created a poetic travelogue of a trip across America, but she never tells us that explicitly.. We jump from Austin to Nashville to Ohio and no place is depicted in any sort of predictable or stereotypical way. We are treated with the inebriation of alcohol and music and road signs, yet the poems are soberly constructed with a fine, if non-logical force. In “When we get there we are Gone,” she writes:

“We can only sing razorblades over the brim of Nashville.” and

“We know that language won't survive past Ohio.”

There are so many finely crafted and imaginative poems in this book it is difficult to pick out

the plums. The whole pudding is quite delicious as a kind of celebration of language and an American cultural experience. Both the titles and endings of her poems frame each experience of reading them in a brilliant and suggestive way. In “Many Kingdoms Toward You.” she begins with the image:

“The map in yesterday's suitcase, a river

whose name dropped vowels and feathers”

p. 45

referring back to the alphabet of a common language combined somehow with the silky ephemera of the object, feathers... and she ends with the bold declaration: “I avalanche forward.” Such are the turns and twists Dutton takes in the landscape of each piece.

The end of the book is mostly a collection of prose-poems and experimental pieces that are almost like Gertrude Steins list of objects and their qualities in such striking poems (about gambling)

called “City of Candy-Colored Light” or “Within these Squares of American Heaven” (about a tribal bonding of friends moving through time zones,) or “Welcome Home” (which celebrates “blackness” “with pulled-pork televisions, ““hammer shanks and cornrow,” and “Musicians, Mojomen” “Mamis”)

This is a truly arresting book, inspiring and highly original. I recommend it whole-heartedly. Or catch Nicole Terez Dutton at a Boston or nearby venue. While I haven't heard her read from this work, I'm sure it is a lyrically-charged rendering of the many “razzle dazzle” poems she's created. This book won the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Dutton studied poetry at Brown University and has won fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Artswork Center in Provincetown and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Lo Galluccio

Author of “Hot Rain,” “Sarasota VII” and

“Terrible Baubles.”