by Karen Tortora-Lee on October 31, 2009
War is a difficult thing to understand, let alone encapsulate no matter which military conflict is the focus. This is probably why each generation has seen its share of movies exploring war, its heroes, its casualties on the battlefield (and at home) and its paradigm which sends strangers on a journey that brings them out the other end as something we have yet to find a word for, so “brothers” tends to suffice.
As society and even combat itself evolves it leaves it almost impossible to weave a parallel between, let’s say, a WWII Vet and a Vietnam Vet. But what hasn’t changed is the core of the men who fight to defend their country: there are stories attached to each soldier who serves, there are hidden injuries that destroy families who appear whole and subtle innuendos that tie these men to each other that outsiders can never understand. When these “outsiders” turn out to be their own families, well … then the conflict to home can almost do more damage than any tour of duty.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on July 25, 2009
Bird House (Photo by Marcus Woollen)
Lewis Carroll did it with Alice in Wonderland … L. Frank Baum did it with The Wizard of Oz: gave us stories of fantastical worlds where innocent girls stumble backwards into their watershed moment and grow up from the inside out. Now, playwright Kate Marks brings us another place of fantasy where not one but two girls on opposite sides of the same world struggle with the same journey. This is Bird House. (Directed by Heidi Handelsman and currently playing at Theater 3.)
Just as Wonderland begins with young Alice bored on a lovely day sitting near her sister, her life nothing so confounding as the frustration of trying to read a book without pictures, so begins Bird House … innocently. Young (or rather, of indeterminate age… but “childlike”) Louisy (Cotton Wright) is excitedly sitting in wait with the more grown-up (and therefore completely underwhelmed) Syl (Christina Shipp) for the clock to strike 8, for that is when Kook (Anthony Wills Jr.) and Ooo (Ora Fruchter), the two puppet birds who live in the cuckoo clock, will come out and announce the hour. Louisy is beside herself with excitement. She’s baked biscuits. Syl is bemused by Louisy but calmly reading the paper … (a book without pictures). It’s all so idyllic. So charming. So … safe. You can just see a rabbit hole and a tornado on the horizon.
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