The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 131

INSIDE: Georgia Chamber Players 6J Strength of the short story 10J Arts calendar filling up 12J section $fre Mania Sternal the Atlanta constitution sunday, January 4, 1987 i ffiloffi 1H "V- 2 'ft if I '(I CHARLIS SHEEN: As Taylor in 'Platoon' describes war the way it was fought Oliver Stone just may have made the war movie to end all war movies. In "Platoon," which is based on the writer-director's own experiences in Vietnam in 1967-68, Stone takes us to hell and back and back again. "Platoon" is the first war movie to be made about that war. It is the first non-political film to be made about a tragedy that has heretofore only been treated within a politicized pro-waranti-war context. Stone comes not to bury Vietnam nor to praise it He isn't interested in the hallucinatory meditations of "Apocalypse Now" or the "Give Peace a Chance" posturing of "Coming Home." Nor does he indulge in the absurd, insulting retro-macho fantasies of "Rambo" or "Missing in Action." "Platoon" is, quite simply, about the way it was one day at a time, over there, at ground zero, when the JOHN SPINKStaff NEW SITE: Michael Stauffer Oeft) and Frank Wittow in front of the new Academy building in the heart of the Midtown theater district.

Newest theater a joint venture that spans years i 15 only tning a grunt worried about was getting back to base camp alive. Though it has its share of heroics and adrenalin-pumping scenes of jungle warfare, the film is less a battle hymn than a battle dirge for a battered republic. Appro- iriately, it begins with a ament Samuel bar's "Adagio for Strings" as some impossibly baby-faced recruits are disgorged from the yawn Eleanor Rngel i CIW. I I mi i I 'mil rririH'M iwnnit i I i'mHh WIGHT ROSS JRVStatf By Paula Crouch Stiff Writer In his book "The Dramatic Imagination," American theater designer Robert Edmond Jones describes a theater as essentially "only an arrangement of seats so grouped and spaced that the actor the leader can reach out and jtouch and hold each member of his I audience." Jones went on to say that while modern architects have learned how to add convenience and comfort, the idea of reaching out and touching never changes. I A certain telephone company (knows this.

So it is appropriate that BellSouth, parent company of Southern Bell, has made it possible for Academy Theatre actors to make that magical connection in a sparkling new $4.2 million building at 173 14th St To give the city its first new theater in nearly two decades, BellSouth joined forces with the Academy, Carter and Associates (developer of BellSouth's Campanile, the 20-story office tower rising next to the new theater) and the Metropolitan Atlanta Community Foundation. When the announcement of the cooperative venture with the Academy Theatre was made in May 1985, BACKSTAGE: Actresses hi 'A Christmas Carol' toast the final performance at the theater's old location. It started with military check, bucket of ice ing maw of a transport carrier. "You're gonna' love 'Nam," mutters one passing vet as they stare wide-eyed at the massed body-bags waiting to take their place on board. These are the remains of last year's new recruits or perhaps last Stone's autobiographical stand-in, Taylor, is played with extraordinary skill and sensitivity by Charlie Sheen (son of Taylor is a middle-class white kid who dropped out of college and enlisted because he wanted to serve his country and because he thought it was wrong that the privileged found ways to get out of the draft while the poor did not.

When he relates his egalitarian rationale to a comrade-in-arms, the man laughs, "You gotta be rich in the first place to think like that" With Taylor as our guide, we're plunged into the tropical hell of this war. First, there's the jungle itself, where everything bites or stings or blows up. Then there's the enemy silent deadly, every red-blooded American's cliched dread of the inscrutable Oriental, with ways to torture and kill not known to more "civilized" enemies (those orderly Nazis, say). Finally, there are the men themselves an all-too-human mix of heroes and horrors, heads and hoochers. Some, like Sgt.

Elias (Willem Dafoe in an exceptional performance), have found themselves in this war. Elias By Linda Shrbrt Staff Writtr don't know whether it did." During the next 30 years, the Academy often coped with similarly makeshift conditions as it moved seven times to a former film studio, a one-room house, carriage house, Baptist Church in Buckhead, Center Stage Theatre, the Erlanger (now known as the New Columbia movie theater) and, for the past four years, a former pornographic movie house and bordello converted into a legitimate theater was their first show. "We didn't have air-conditioning," recalls Wittow, producing artistic director of the company all of these years. "Somebody suggested we get a large bucket of ice and blow a fan across it I started working on It in early afternoon and by the time our first audience arrived, the ice had melted. The audience ended up sitting in six inches of water, the place was still as hot as befort but now it was humid, too.

"That taught me to be a little better prepared it should have taught me that," adds Wittow. "I It all started with $325 and a bucket of ice. On June 20, 1956, Ohio native Frank Wittow, a 25-year-old U.S. Army psychologist with a master's degree in psychology from Columbia University, used his military discharge pay of $325 to found the Academy Theatre. Wittow and about a dozen friends converted a television studio at Pharr Road and Boiling Way into a 200-seat theater.

"The Importance of Being Earnest" 2J See ACADEMY See WITTOW 2J See RINGEL 4J Storytellers' gathering a fantasy island By Halan C. Smith Staff Writer i 1 -1 I -4t 5 m- v- tr-- r- iimiimniif i'i ininii i iii.ii ries for years at birthday parties and other events, she had not, up to that point, considered storytelling as a career. "I had never heard of such a thing," recalls the vivacious Mrs. Wylie. "But the minute I got in that class I told myself, This is it This is what I want to It tapped into all my childhood memories of my paternal grandmother, who had had a stroke but was still a big talker, sitting up in bed her hair blue, her arms covered with bracelets and telling us funny stories.

I would sit by the hour and listen to her." The class was the catalyst that began Mrs. Wylie's full-time career (she now tells stories on the average six days a week). It was only a three-week affair, but the eight people who took it were so infatuated they begged for more. Mrs. Cooley obliged by giving them two extra weeks of free classes.

By adults alike on fascinating journeys through her stories. In her various personae she is Serena, Cinderella's Fairy Godmother; Battina the Friendly Witch; CoCo the Clown; Aunt Betty Bunny, and her latest creation, Merry Christmas Mouse. They're all nice, not a mean one in the bunch, though Battina has been known to tell mildly scary stories at Halloween. Mrs. Wylie is.

one of SO local, regional and national storytellers who will take part in the fifth annual Olde Christmas Storytelling Festival Friday through Sunday at Cal-lanwolde Fine Arts Center. She is, in fact, one of the co-founders of S.O.S., which has grown exponentially since it mounted its first festival in 1983. that was the year after Mrs. Wylie, then a pre-school teacher at St Anne's, took a storytelling class from from Loralee Cooley, now S.O.S. president in order to enhance her classroom skills.

Although she had told sto Betty Ann Wylie has a quick and easy recipe for turning a fairy godmother into a witch. Wash the fairy godmother's honey blond wig in hot wdter and then subject it to the scorching heat of a dryer. Volla. A friz-tied mess, just right for a witch, good variety. Change white gown for black cape, switch wand for broomstick, and there you are, quite transformed.

Mrs. Wylie, a storyteller and vice president of the Southern Order of Storytellers, is a woman of many wigs. Her own salt and per jer hair is short and stylish. In this mode, she's Buckhead matron, wife of architect-landscape architect James Wiley, mother of four children, part-time librarian at St. Anne's School.

But don a wig, or pile on makeup, and she's off in fantasy land, taking children and RICH ADDICKSStaff 7J See STORY ilTTY ANM WYLIS: Storyteller as friendly witch and fairy godmother..