The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page C04

C4 www.phill3r.com THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Review Theater Didactic telling of surreal life After decades of Mad, what, they worry? No Behind the Eye Despite its nudity and rough talk, "Behind the Eye" still feels like a lecture. Presented by Gas Electric Arts at Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre, 2111 Sansom through Nov. 18. Tickets: $16-626. Information: 215-407-0556 or Gasand El ectricArts.o rg.

ri till la 1 i A.T- 1--. IL. 1 Lt A' TOTALLY A 4 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity Satire, Stupidity a Stupidity Years 1 41 0 fA Alan Radway plays Man Ray, and Kittson O'Neill plays Lee Miller, a frequent model for Ray and a WWII combat photographer in her own right. WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN Cain Images By Wendy Rosenfield FOR THE INQUIRER Biographical drama is a tricky enterprise. When a biography centers on a pivotal moment in a life, (End of the Rainbow, The Mountaintop, Amadeus) it's perhaps most effective.

But when the approach to that life is a chapter-by-chapter memory play, as with Carson Kreitzer's frustratingly didactic Behind the Eye, receiving an equally frustrating production by Gas Electric Arts, the result despite nudity and R-rated language can feel an awful lot like a lecture. Lee Miller, the play's subject, was a fascinating character with more than a few pivotal moments upon which to hang a narrative. Aside from her career as a fashion model and, literally, the face of some of artist Man Ray's best-known images, she was a muse and icon of the surrealist movement. But her accomplishments before the camera paled beside her own World War II combat photography, on casters. Sometimes the props are effective, as when O'Neill and James Stover (as Miller's wartime photographer-companion Dave Scher-man) set the table on its side to depict a famous snap of Miller bathing in Hitler's recently abandoned tub.

But other times as when O'Neill ducks through a gauntlet of swiveling mirrors or flips the table upside-down, creating a gangplank that awkwardly, in two steps, transports her from Egypt to England they're just silly. O'Neill sweats through what she's been given, melodrama at the expense of drama, and creates a compelling figure with enough fire to burn through some of those excess pages of dialogue. It's just too bad this is such a conventional piece, because if any life lent itself to a suspension of realism, it was "Totally Mad" is a look at 60 years of parodies, satire, and cartoons from the magazine. her long-neglected work. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and Kreitzer expends far too many on editorializing Kittson O'Neill's Miller frequently addresses the audience about her compulsion to find external chaos to quiet the clamor in her head, about love, about her choices, as ex-lovers step forward to utter banal testaments to her uniqueness.

Director Lisa Jo Epstein adds busywork as well, with flipping mirrors and a table much of it retaining a surrealist aesthetic. Unfortunately, Miller's estate didn't authorize use of these pictures perhaps because her son Antony reserved them for his own Miller bio-drama, The Angel and the Fiend. Simon Harding's set cleverly recreates the image in Miller's photo Non-Conformist Chapel, a columned doorway filled with rubble from the Blitz, and piles it instead with cardboard boxes a nod to Antony's attic discovery of Tasty ICA art snacks By William Loeffler PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW It's not easy being a national disgrace for 60 years. If you stacked all the issues of Mad magazine that grade-school teachers and high-school principals have confiscated since its 1952 debut, you might have enough paper to house-train 20 million puppies. To add insult to injury, the editors of Mad have issued Totally Mad: 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity, and Stupidity (Time Home Entertainment, $34.95, Readers can relive some of their Maddest moments: comic-strip movie parodies like "The Oddfather," mock ads, political satire, the Mad "Fold-In," "Spy vs.

Spy," "The Lighter Side" and the cartoons of Don Martin, with their dementedly inventive sound effects like "Pshchlaff!" The book also includes 12 removable classic Mad covers, "suitable for framing or wrapping fish," as Mad's brain trust often said. John Ficarra, editor-inchief of Mad, also is to blame for editing Totally Mad. "Everyone's favorite time of Mad is that time when they first picked up an issue and read it and said, 'Oh, my God, I never knew this existed," Ficarra says. "It's the first time you'd think the magazine is speaking just to you and saying that everything people say to you isn't necessarily true and that your parents and teachers aren't always right." Generations of American children have grown up a lot smarter or a lot more smart-alecky thanks to the Usual Gang of Idiots, as Mad's editors and staff call themselves. Between these covers, a kid might see a shampoo ad that seemed real until they looked more closely and saw that the golden-haired "Breck Girl" was actually Ringo Starr.

Or the Sesame Street parody "Reality Street," in which Cookie Monster became ill from the chemicals in a cake mix. Or "Great Moments in History," with a mock oil painting of "Washington Cross-Dressing the Delaware." "Mad has always appealed to the smarter kid and the smarter reader," Ficarra says. "We ask so much of them. To get satire, you have to have a preexisting knowledge of something. If it's a Don Martin gag, you don't need too much knowledge for that.

But our political things, you need to be informed." In the '50s, Mad satirized Elvis, suburbia, and the mania for Frigidaires and Chevrolets. In the '60s, it made fun of the counterculture, Richard Nixon, conservatives, Richard Nixon, rock-and-roll, and Richard Nixon. It lampooned the energy crisis, Watergate, and the disco craze of the '70s, the Reagan years in the '80s, the Clinton scandals in the '90s. More recently, Mad covers have included "The 50 Worst Things About Facebook," a parody of The Walking Dead, and a send-up of Glee. No sports figure, celebrity, movie, or rock star has been spared not even Fred Rogers.

And however popular a movie or television show might be, it didn't truly make the grade until it was given the seal of approval with a parody in the pages of Mad. -4t itgl-- phoj gip qrlo-- 0c) 1 -Ato 4 I le lit, illt diltt---- 1-4) low 9 1 i 6.9 'IP i 111 "1-411 'll. 1 4S A vW, erdi will ift ily 0 3 1, MR i A ic' A i 1 iv 44111. A 0101r 11 ilt), 1 Lii A N-) 4 1 111 Irtfill t. lik A 11 trivilAqUIP V1t.f if tfl i ,1 11 Y.

1 iiiti Star Wars became "Star Bores." Harry Potter became "Harry Plodder." A Minneapolis schoolboy named Scott Dikkers fell under the pernicious influence of Mad around fourth grade. Along with his classmate, the future musician and New Yorker cover artist Marcellus Hall, Dikkers learned to draw by copying Don Martin cartoons from Mad. Years later, Dikkers became a founding editor of the Onion, the news-parody media conglomerate that he helped launch at the University of Wisconsin. Today, he's the Onion's general manager, an author, and a filmmaker. "Mad magazine taught me that it was OK to make fun of everything," Dikkers says.

"I grew up in a very conservative home and a very conservative culture. Humor was just not one of the things you did. I remember thinking it was not really that funny but I loved that they were doing it." Mad's founding publisher, William S. Gaines, originally had published Tales From the Crypt and other gory horror and crime comics under the name Entertaining Comics. When moral scolds imposed a comics code, Gaines and editor Harvey Kurtzman created Mad.

It was a comic book for the first 20 issues before switching to the magazine format. Kurtzman, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-born cartoonist, helped give Mad its unique satirical voice. Monty Python's Terry Gilliam and counterculture comic artist R. Crumb both cite Kurtzman as an inspiration. And without the magazine, it would be hard to imagine Doonesbuty, Spy, or The Daily Show.

Totally Mad features a foreword by Stephen Colbert, a Daily Show alum and star of The Colbert Report. Mad was more than just lowbrow humor, however. It promoted environmentalism, denounced drug use, and championed civil rights. One cartoon showed Tarzan putting a "For Sale" sign on his jungle tree house after seeing a black man swinging by on a vine. Totally Mad includes five essays about Mad's cultural impact, the origin of grinning mascot Alfred E.

Neuman, and the magazine's history, including its landmark Supreme Court win against Irving Berlin that established the right to publish satirical lyrics. To compete with cable television, the Internet, and, yes, the Onion, Mad now has its own website, www.madmagazine.com, and a daily blog, "The Idiotical." It allows the editors to keep pace with the 24-hour news cycle, Ficarra says. They've also developed a new app. Amy Sadao in front of a window drawing by Sumi Ink Club, part of the "Excursus III: Ooga Booga" exhibit at ICA. Below, she pours tea in "Valerie's Snack Bar," an installation by Briton Jeremy De Iler; staffers rotate as tea servers, and staff and public become infused in the installation.

The new ICA director is rather excited: "Come, come again, come often. We're doing so much." DAVID WARREN Staff Photographer i -42' I 1,, A V.k,)i. i lc it 1 i ICA from Cl art with social and political roots, art in communities and society. She was executive director of Visual AIDS, a nonprofit visual arts organization dedicated to HIV awareness and prevention. And she helped catalog, curate, and exhibit contemporary art all over Gotham.

While pursuing a bachelor of fine arts degree in the '905 at Cooper Union in New York, Sadao discovered something. "I realized I was a terrible artist," she says with a laugh. She was inspired by such artist-colleagues as Amy Cutler and Adriana Farmiga, but "I just didn't want to stay, all by myself, in some studio making work. I was having a better time helping other people curate and exhibit." Her eyes spark as she recounts helping artist Matt King bolt a house he'd made into the ceiling of a museum for an installation. There followed internships at the Whitney Museum (where she worked with then-curator Thelma Golden) and elsewhere.

"I had the best mentors in the world," she says. "Many became friend-tors. I really came to learn the business." That's yet another of her talents: She ties a mean set of purse strings, essential for the museum director of today, especially, as she says, "in not the best economy, for us or anyone else." "Anybody can support the arts and they should," she says. "It's part of being a good citizen, of taking ownership of your community. Donate to the ICA, or to Kelly Writers House, or the Print Center, to local artists, do open-studio tours, make purchases directly from local artists, buy independent books, go to art fairs." ICA throws itself open to outside public activity, too Occupy Philadelphia held meetings there in 2011.

With her social-political edge, she fits right in. But where did that come from? What radicalized her? "The experience of growing up in Huntington Beach California, growing up in overwhelmingly Caucasian surroundings," she says. "The local chapter of the KKK actually left my dad a little calling card at his office. Things like that make you think about what it means to be a citizen. "Art should be alive for the community, should talk about what's happening.

People should feel a sense of ownership of the art that's in this city the Claes Oldenberg Clothespin next to City Hall, or the Isamu Noguchi Lightning Bolt at the end of the Ben Franklin Bridge." How did such a New Yorker get to love Phi Ily so much? "When I was living in New York, I used to come down to Phi Ily as often as I could," she says. "To come here, to the institute. I think the institute is the best of its kind, up with any contemporary art museum anywhere." She admires the Penn Compact of Penn president Amy Gutmann way it takes so seriously the university's relationship with the and she followed the work of then-ICA curator Jenelle Porter and current senior curator Ingrid Schaffner. Plus she's an avid reader of Rachel Pastan's ICA blog titled "Miranda." "I was drawn to the idea of an institution that reaches out to the public and makes today's art available for people to experience." It doesn't hurt that Sadao's partner, poet and publisher Tom Devaney, "knows all the myriad poetry, writing, Rodriguez Booga). It involves a lot of different ways of rethinking what a museum space might do.

There's a "group affinity table" that assembles as a public workbench or hangout place or reading area. There's a slide-out flat file of institute clips and archives, much of it involving cats. Sadao says, "Wendy is fond of Thanks to Yao's love of zine culture and bookmaking, a bookshelf offers zines such as Jigsaw, the Exhibitionist, and the local Megawords. There's a lovely huge blue hammock. Also part of "Excursus III" is the Sumi Ink Club, a local chapter of a national effort in which Luke Fisch-beck and Sarah Rara join with anybody! to create group artworks on the windows of the institute.

Their band, Lucky Dragons, performs at the "Excursus III" closing on Dec. 16. On Wednesday, ICA will screen the winners of its Open Video Call for art videos, which then will be on view during the ICA winter season. In February, a show titled "White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart" will explore clothing and bodily adornment. "These are invitations to come and be, to linger," Sadao says, "to find different ways into the art.

And to make the experience your own." dance, fashion design, sporting events, music, and contemporary art, scenes and communities and institutions here. It's a gracious city." So how do you get folks to know you're here? How do you reach out? "OK, two things: (1) It's free. And (2) the Market-Frankford Line's 36th Street station is right there. Come, come again, come often. We're doing so much.

We cycle in new exhibits every four to six months, and we have so many public programs. Come as often as you like, and learn new things about the art." De Iler is definitely a multimedia artist, employing photography, video, painting, and found art. There's a film about the 1980s synth-rock band Depeche Mode, and how, bizarrely, it was adopted as an anthemic standard-bearer by young folks in communist countries struggling for independence. And there's Valerie's Snack Bar. Generous explanatory text on the walls helps beholders get situated.

Sadao's ICA is always experimenting with ways to involve visitors. In the series titled "Excursus," artists from all over the country come to create installations that, on one hand, involve the rich archives of the institute, and on the other, give visitors a range of things to do. "Excursus III: Ooga Booga," through Dec. 16, is by Wendy Yao of Los Angeles (she runs an art center called Ooga Continued from Cl fled onto stage wearing a gray suit, bolo tie, and his trademark floppy hat and sunglasses. All alone on the stage with his thin-bodied acoustic guitar, he launched into a cover of Peggy Lee's "Fever." Strumming nimbly, Rodriguez strung together originals (most from 1970's Cold Fact) and covers, including Lou Rawls' "Dead End Street" and Cole Porter's "Just One of Those Things," all interspersed with banter that was a cross between grandpa humor and Zen Buddhism.

The covers were a nice addition to his set, but it was the originals off those two magical albums, the extent of Rodriguez's studio work, that enchanted. Listening as he sang "A monkey in silk is a monkey no less" from "Like Janis" or "Papa don't allow no new ideas here" on "Inner City Blues," it was difficult to not wonder what if? What if these poetic, DylanDonovan-esque songs had met with even a modicum of initial success? What if Rodriguez had known he was bigger than the Beatles in Cape Town? Had he stuck with it, how many classics might he have written in the intervening 40 years? Of course, that game is a losing proposition, and one Rodriguez would likely answer with a joke like this one from Sunday night: "Want to know the secret of life? Just keep breathing in and out." Contact John Timpane at 215-854-4406 or jtphillynews.com, or follow on Twitter, jtimpane..