Theater Review: Trying

                                                                     TRYING

A theatrical question: What do you get when you pair an irascible old judge on his last legs with a new, young secretary, meeting for the purpose of winding up his affairs before he dies?

That depends on the quality of the script and of the actors and production.

North Coast Repertory Theatre offers a smashing filmed production of Joanna Glass’ play “Trying,” highlighted by two brilliant performances by James Sutorius and Emily Goss as the principals. The show runs on demand through April 18.

The playwright was the secretary in question, serving Judge Biddle from 1967 to his death the following year. 

                                                         Emily Goss and James Sutorius

Judge Francis Biddle, 82, and 25-year-old recent college graduate Sarah Schorr face off in a riveting pas de deux between Biddle (best known as the principal judge for the Nuremberg trials in 1946) and the businesslike Canadian-born secretary who will not take any guff from this old geezer, no matter how important he is.

He is delighted to find that she “reads voraciously,” though he can’t resist a grammatical barb (“I prefer that you eat voraciously but read voluminously”), indicating that it will be a prickly relationship. But they find some joy in quoting poetry to each other.

As for work, Sarah believes in thoroughness, saying that friends in Saskatoon described her as “a bugger for work.”

He sets the schedule: from 9 a.m. to noon, noting that “I’m fairly certain this is my final year.” Then he fiddles with the gas heaters, warning her NEVER to touch them.

He barks at her until he realizes that she is as well-read as he and perfectly capable of giving as good as she gets, with this riposte (from E.E. Cummings): “There is some shit I will not eat.”

It’s a wonderfully amusing, touching, affecting play, with excellent direction by David Ellenstein and a fine set by Marty Burnett. It’s been well filmed by Aaron Rumley. Elisa Benzoni adds time-appropriate costumes. 

I would love to have seen “Trying” live, in the theater, but I’m delighted that this fine filmed version is streaming through April 18 on Showtix4U.com. Tickets can be purchased at northcoastrep.org.

Film Review: Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F—ker

Wojnarowicz: F--K You F-ggot F--cker 

Artist David Wojnarowicz’s works were chaotic, like his life. So it seems fitting that Director Chris McKim’s head-spinning documentary about him isn’t a flowing piece, but rather filmed in jumps and starts.

Wojnarowicz became a force in the New York City art scene of the 1980s despite (or perhaps partly because of) the battering he took from his father in New Jersey.

His mother moved with David and his siblings to Hell’s Kitchen when David was 11. The boy showed early interest in art and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan.

David was gay and not into pretty pictures; his works were unapologetically personal, often shocking, sometimes militaristic and, frankly, thought strange.

“I tried hard to be normal and accepted,” he says. “It was largely a waste of time.”

David met photographer Peter Hujar in the ’60s, and they became best friends.

Filmmaker McKim tells the story from the artist’s perspective, assisted by photographs, paintings and journals that Wojnarowicz wrote and recorded over the years. The result is a documentary that fascinates even as it shocks with its title: “Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F—ker.”

“All my paintings are diaries,” he says. Not surprisingly, he didn’t have much use for convention or rules. 

Wojnarowicz had some trouble selling his art to galleries, and consequently spent some time looking for places to display it. Most of the art at the time was located in SoHo, but the “anti-establishment” art was centered in the East Village, where Wojnarowicz lived. 

Gallery space was rare. One day he walked past a huge abandoned warehouse on the Hudson River, near the piers he knew as a gay cruising ground. Inside he found what he and his fellow artists had been seeking: space, the size of two football fields. He passed the word. They moved in on the sly and set up gallery and workshop spaces. That lasted until the cops came and tore the place down, but meanwhile Wojnarowicz had sold some art. He was even shown in a Whitney biennial exhibition.

This is a big thing to most artists, but Wojnarowicz was by then angry about the business of art. “The gallery system is one of the big obstacles to art,” he says. “Who owns it and where it’s shown, what’s that got to do with art? People are doing art that looks like art. It’s a product.”

Speaking of product, Robert Mnuchin (father of Trump’s Treasury appointee) and his wife Adriana commissioned a basement piece which turned out to be made of bug-infested trash.

Then the Reagan ’80s and the AIDS crisis arrived. Meanwhile Wojnarowicz and Hujar started taking illegal drugs – first ecstasy, then heroin – and David got a new boyfriend in Tom Rauffenbart. Life turns out badly for all of them, and in 1992 David is the last of the three AIDS victims to die. 

In a last salute he might have loved and hated in equal proportions, the Whitney did a retrospective of David’s work in 2018. The title of the show: “History Keeps Me Awake At Night.”

Thanks to Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's World of Wonder stable (whose documentary division has been a major source of queer culture commentary), who produced this film. 

 

"Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F—ker" opens March 19 at the Digital Gym. 

Film Review: F.T.A.

The U.S. has a sad history of involvement in other countries’ wars. The most memorable one for those of us who were, or were around the flower children of the 1960s was U.S. involvement in  Vietnam, which took some 58,000 American lives and solved no problems.

That war inspired noisy opposition at home and resulted in something much worse: anger at those not responsible – the draftees and volunteers who fought and survived – when they returned home.

Now comes a remnant of that struggle – a film called “F.T.A.” (“F*** The Army”), a documentary of a 1972 U.S. tour made by Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and several other entertainers who performed a satirical show designed to spark opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Now it’s been restored and is playing on demand along with a short preliminary interview with Fonda, who explains why they went and what they wanted to accomplish.

This wasn’t a polished show. The disorganized “hey, kids, let’s put on a show” troupe featured 10 actors (Fonda, Sutherland, Michael Alaimo, Peter Boyle, Len Chandler, Pamela Donegan, Steve Jaffe, Rita Martinson, Paul Mooney and Holly Near) and played near U.S. military bases.  The only base that gave them permission to perform was Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.

The show featured off-the-cuff comedy, goofy (or angry) songs, a bit of dance and whatever came to mind at any given moment. The point was the opposite of Bob Hope’s intent with his USO tours. The FTA gang wanted to sow opposition to a war they regarded as misguided at best.

This isn’t a real movie as we think of them; it’s a 4-K restoration of a black-and-white tape designed to amuse and infuriate its audience. I remember those days well, so for me this is nostalgia and a sad reminder that mankind hasn’t advanced much.

I never saw the show, because it was pulled a week after its U.S. release. That was the week Fonda made her controversial trip to Hanoi. Speculation is that calls from high up in Washington caused its disappearance. Sound familiar?

“F.T.A.” should be seen, if only to make sure our indignation genes are still intact. “The masses are asses,” they sing, and “The masses have been led by the asses too long.”

Because, after all, “They don’t have answer. They have a rule book.”

“F.T.A.” opens in virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee on March 5.