Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 53

7 Friday, October 15, 1999 THE HARTFORD COURANT D3 A EVERY FRIDAY STAGE CALL By STEVE METCALF Courant Music Critic he term performance art, especially as Which Williams Play Next? practiced by women, has come to imply anatomical naughtiness, unorthodox deployment of foodstuffs and chronic nervousness at the NE A. Robbie McCauley takes a more purposeful, though not necessarily less provocative, view. "I'm interested in creating a character, for one thing, and in the craft of being an actor," says In but also, if the spirit should so strike her, freely improvisational, its author says. "The improvisational part depends to a large extent on the kind of audience I see out there, and what kind of reaction they're giving me." The ideal audience, she says, would be a racially mixed one. "One of the things I do is to thank all the white people for all the work they're doing trying to make things better.

This is, of course, an odd thing to say, as both the black members of the audience and the white members instantly recognize." McCauley's none-too-conventional resume features an almost equal blend of academic work and performing. She has taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts. She has also worked as playwright, director and actor in a long string of New York projects, including both Broadway and off-Broadway productions, since the 1970s. She won a 1992 ObieAward for her play "Sally's Rape," in which she also starred, which was produced at The Kitchen. The play was subsequently seen in London, Prague and various cities across the United Sates.

McCauley has also appeared in a number of art films. But for all her impressive credits, and the willfully provocative nature of her material, McCauley is modest about her artistic aims. "My basic hope is simple. It's that people might be able to have a good time with material that's charged and uncomfortable." McCauley, 57, who has recently joined the faculty of Trinity College, in the theater and dance department. "But I'm also interested in breaking down planes.

So in that sense, I have no trouble calling myself a performance artist" McCauley will give Hartford its first taste of her performance artistry Wednesday night at Trinity, when she presents excerpts from her work-in-progress, "Love and Race in the United States Revisited." The "revisited" reflects a previous version of the work, seen last year at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. The new revised version will also be presented at that venue later in the fall. The piece, as McCauley describes it, is a one-woman riff on race relations, on relationships generally, on the artificial pretensions of the academic word and on the perversity of stereotypes. There is a minimal set, minimal props (clothes, primarily) and little in the way of, as they say, production values. Love uuuk uriu til live uf fueu States Revisited, written and performed by Robbie McCauley, will be presented Wednesday night at 7:30 at Studio Trinity College.

The performance will last about a half-hour. After that, the house lights will come up and the audience will be invited to ask questions or share responses to the piece. "It's all delivered by a character I've invented who doesn't as yet have a real name. I call her the Professor of Race. She's, in a sense, teaching the audience about these things.

But at the same time, she's poking fun at the whole idea of a lecture, with its academic conventions. The point, as it always is, is to get people to change the way they think about difficult things. There's a kind of silence between the races today, and it reflects an immobility that people have. People are too afraid of offending. We have to be civil, but we also have to talk." There "might" be small portions of singing and dancing in the performance, she says, but only for the purpose of exploding the myth that black people are intrinsically gifted at these disciplines.

"Those elements are in there, literally, as a joke. People think that 5) 6 I ROBBIE MCCAULEY RETURNS TO EARLIER THEMES IN HER NEW WORK if you have a theater background, you automatically sing and dance, but of course that's stupid." By FRANK RIZZO Courant Staff Writer With "Camino Real" over, the next question is what play might be next up for the third year of Hartford Stage's multiyear Tennessee Williams Marathon? Artistic director Michael Wilson hasn't decided yet, but right now he is leaning toward a "trademark," work with "The Glass Menagerie" or "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on top of the list (There are plenty of actresses already lobbying heavily for those classic plum roles and Wilson knows a lot of actresses.) Wilson says a major Williams title followed by one of the author's lesser-known works seems to be emerging as the rhythm of the marathon for the main stage. He also says he hopes to get the resources to do a second production during an upcoming marathon in another theater space in town. "My goal is to nave people seeing not only the Church street production, the readings, screenings and symposia but also another play." Sunday night's benefit at Hartford Stage for actor John Trevisan, who was severely injured in a car accident in New Haven earlier this month, was an emotional evening that raised more than $10,000 for his medical bills. More than 250 turned out for the event after the final performance of "Camino Real," where the 22-year-old actor was a member of the company playing a variety of small roles.

Two silent auction items brought in $1,000 each. Among the highlights were Betty Buckley and Novella Nelson singing "Amazing Grace;" Buckley singing "Meadowlark," a signature song from another diva, Patti LuPone; and Rip Tom performing a soliloquy from "The Glass Menagerie." The evening closed with everyone singing "You've Got a Friend." Hartford Stage reports that Trevisan shows some improvement (he opened his eyes for the first time that night) but is still in serious condition at St Raphael's Hospital in New Haven. Let the grants-giving begin: Remember that $6 million the state squirreled for special arts projects in June's last-minute budget deal-making? Well $750,000 was earmarked for Dance Connecticut from the get-go. But the $5.25 million remaining is now available, and the state Commission on the Arts is taking applications for small capital projects and special one-time project grants. The limit for any grant is $250,000, but most will be in the $5,00010,000 range.

Recipients will be announced in January. Nicholas Martin, who was named artistic director for Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, seems to be talking a page out of Michael Wilson's playbook by bringing in past hit productions and big name friends. Martin will open his first season in the fall of 2000 with a revival of Sidney Kingsley's "Dead End," which he staged at Williamstown last year and which starred Scott Wolf, Robert Sean Leonard, Hope Davis and Marian Seldes. He is also thinking of remounting "The Matchmaker" with Andrea Martin, as well as "Richard II" with Leonard and "Macbeth" with "Love and Race in the United States" is carefully scripted PROGRESS ROBBIE MCCAULEY is performing her one-woman show, "Love and Race in the United States Revisited," Wednesday at Trinity College, where she teaches drama and dance. i MOVIES FOR THE NON-MATERIAL GUY I Victor Garber.

By DEBORAH HORNBLOW Courant Staff Writer Mainstream cinema has declared war on ornamental, consumer culture. In "American Beauty," Kevin Spacey's downsized Lester Burnham comes to see beyond his wife's $3,000 couch and their finely appointed suburban home. "It's just stuff," he says. In "The Fight Club," which opens today, screenwriter Jim Uhls brings an explosive end to the kind of rampant accumulation that holds millions hostage to credit-card companies. Led by Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, Edward Norton's dweeby insurance adjuster, the film's narrator, is forced to abandon his Ikea-furnished condo and get in touch with his elemental self.

Tyler's solution is to create a "fight club" where men strip off their shirts and engage in mano-a-mano combat. This visceral bloody pastime amounts to ITS BACK TO BASICS like physical confrontation for Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in "The Fight Club." MERRICK MORTONTWENTIETH CENTURY FOX primal-scream therapy for a generation of corpora tized mouse pushers, button-down men whose hunger for war and combat has been subverted in a consumer culture where manliness is measured by the suit a guy wears, the car he drives and the house he can afford. According to Tyler, these men have been raised on pictures of the celebrities they'll never be. They've been promised happiness that is always out of reach, and as Tyler issues the fight call, they are really pissed off. Both "Fight Club" and "American Beauty" sell the intoxicating idea of freedom from material possessions.

They want us to get in touch with our elemental selves. In one scene in "Fight Club," Tyler threatens to kill a convenience store operator unless he goes back to studying to become a veterinarian the thing he intended to be in the first place. If "Fight Club" had more than one audience member thinking of Susan Faludi's new book "Stiffed," it is not a coincidence. Faludi's text is an academic analysis of similar themes, one in which traditional notions of manhood have been upended by seismic cultural shifts, including the rise of the Amex-made man. Although "Fight Club" is no match for "Beauty" or "Stiffed," it delivers another uppercut to our diseased culture.

Call Us Rinker Buck is editor of The Couranf Curtain page. He can be reached at 860-241-6468 or toll free at 800-5244242, Ext 6468. His e-mail address is fax 860-520-6927. 4.