Critics' Picks
by Urbanite Staff
COMEDY/VARIETY
Hot Town
The Stoop's Baltimoored: Summer in the City at Center Stage, July 9–11
It's hard to be a fan of Baltimore in July. Those lucky enough to get out of town might gloat, but sweating it out means being able to take in the Stoop Storytelling Series' first radio show, Baltimoored: Summer in the City.
Normally, the Stoop consists of seven storytellers telling seven-minute stories about a theme (see Urbanite, Aug. '07). But for Baltimoored, five different storytellers—including novelist and former Simpsons writer Larry Doyle and Maryland First Lady Katie O'Malley—will take the stage on each of the three nights. Also promised are old-timey sketches written by Stoop co-creators/co-hosts Laura Wexler and Jessica Henkin and members of the Baltimore Improv Group, who will perform the sketches. Since late winter, the troupe has been doing something uncharacteristic for a Stoop production—rehearsing. "Much of the Stoop is ephemeral—what might happen when someone steps onstage," says Wexler, whose husband, Mike Subelsky, will perform sound effects onstage during the sketches. "This is very planned."
WYPR will broadcast highlights from all three nights on July 17 at noon and 7 p.m.; Aaron Henkin of WYPR's The Signal (and Jessica's husband) will host. "I always wanted to do a live radio show," Wexler says. "We have friends that are in radio, in improv—it seemed like a fun thing to do." Wexler says she and Jessica envisioned this as a variety show in the vein of Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor's long-running public radio program.
But Baltimoored will swap in real-life Mobtown for mythical Lake Wobegon. Topics of the sketches include blue crabs, police helicopters, and the Orioles. House band Caleb Stine and the Brakemen will be joined by locals ellen cherry, the 5th L, and Arty Hill. As Wexler says: "You have to do something pretty interesting to get people out in the summer."
—Marianne K. Amoss
For tickets to Baltimoored, call 410-332-0033 or go to www.stoopstorytelling.com.
BOOK
The Woman Who Wasn't There
Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg
(Hyperion, 2009)
Family Ties: Why did Steve Luxenberg's mother (right, with her mother), hide her disabled sister? | courtesy of Steve Luxenberg
A (very) rough parallel to Steve Luxenberg's Annie's Ghosts hit the paperback shelves last month: New York Times reporter David Carr's bestselling addiction memoir, The Night of the Gun, which was built around a superficially similar mechanism—veteran journalist trains the tools of his trade on himself. But instead of Carr's unsparing reconstruction of his lost weekend of a life, Luxenberg, an associate editor at the Washington Post and longtime Lauraville resident, offers a plainspoken inquiry into an extraordinarily well-defended family secret.
The story begins with a curious clue: Not long before her death, Luxenberg's mother, Beth, remarks to a social worker that she had a disabled younger sister who was sent away at age 2. This comes as news to her children, who had always understood that their mother was an only child. After his mother's death, Luxenberg discovers that this sister lived with his mother to adulthood. She'd been hospitalized at a vast Detroit-area mental institution at 21 and died there in 1972 at age 53. Her name was Annie.
Beyond her name and a fragment of her treatment records, little trace remains of Annie's existence. But Luxenberg, who oversees investigative projects at the Post, isn't one to pass up a reportorial challenge; he takes a leave from the newspaper to pursue the aunt he never knew, as if in her shadowed life he had found a chance to unravel a deeper mystery about family identity. The task before him is daunting: With both parents dead, the only family member who claims a firsthand knowledge of Annie is a little-known cousin, Anna, who seems to have had some mysterious falling-out with Beth decades ago. Even after months of reporting, Luxenberg says one publisher passed on his lengthy book proposal because the premise of discovering the truth about the title character seemed hopeless. "She told me, ‘I don't think you're ever going to find out enough about her to satisfy me.'"
Indeed, Annie remains both faceless (no photograph can be unearthed) and voiceless throughout, her life sketched by a heartbreaking cascade of misfortune and abandonment. She's born with developmental delays and a leg deformity, and her impoverished parents—Jewish immigrants struggling to stay afloat in Depression-era Detroit—and the nation's nascent mental health care system both prove utterly incapable of treating either condition. But Luxenberg resists the urge to over-dramatize key events or characters. Instead, Annie's Ghosts moves with the slow-gathering force of a police procedural; the author methodically gathers facts, unearths informants, and compares accounts from his mother's network of surviving friends, circling the terrible moment in 1940 when Annie was hospitalized forever. Luxenberg also puts on something of a clinic in old-school analog reporting techniques—there are lots of document-hunts in the bowels of Michigan bureaucracy. Like many a detective story, the book concludes with a triple-whammy of reversals as Luxenberg discovers that other family members harbor a few secrets of their own.
Most of these secrets, he finds, were closely guarded for good reason: One of Luxenberg's central points is that that the treatment of the mentally ill in the 20th century was a kind of collective national shame, one that characters such as Beth were complicit in. If Annie herself remains a cipher, Luxenberg succeeds in an equally difficult task—understanding, if not excusing, the devastating choice his mother made. "I feel closer to my mother now," Luxenberg says. "Toward the end of her life, I mentally pushed her away. But now I understand her. My mother was trapped by her need to keep this secret."
—David Dudley
THEATER
Last Lines
Slampooned!, July 9–Aug. 2 at Single Carrot Theatre
Baltimore Playwrights Festival, through Sept. 6
Word: Single Carrot parodies the slam poetry scene. | courtesy of Single Carrot Theatre
A send-up of the slam poetry scene set at a 1991 competition in Chicago, Single Carrot Theatre's Slampooned! promises to be Best in Show meets American Idol. The actors who wrote the show will interact directly with the audience and "break the fourth wall," says company member and director Aldo Pantoja. "There will be a different winner every night.
The young Single Carrot crew came here from Colorado in 2007 after hunting for a city to establish a theater company. They mix classics with original works, such as a recent production of Ibsen's Wild Duck, and have a way with the wacky: Last year's Sects and Violins, a series of comic sketches (featuring Samuel, the lactose-intolerant farmboy) was a great success. Poetry slams, says artistic director J. Buck Jabaily, provide a great template for parody. "There are always reliable types: the over-impassioned person, the militant one who uses it as a platform for revolution, the one with a million bad breakups." And there's also the element of surprise: "The MC can make up rules at the last minute," Pantoja says. "You'll feel as if you had a real slam poetry experience."
The Baltimore Playwrights Festival also offers plenty of different endings. This year's lineup includes ten plays and a first-ever musical: Unraveled in the Gravel, the story of a compulsive hitchhiker fleeing his past (Aug. 6–23 at Mobtown Theater). The series kicked off in June and will finish up with one-acts at Spotlighters Theatre (Aug. 21–Sept. 6). July productions include Lisa Hodsoll's Turducken, about a family as mixed up as the bird on its Thanksgiving table, and G-Man by Rosemary Frisino Toohey.
—Martha Thomas
For tickets to Slampooned!, call 443-844-9253 or e-mail boxoffice@singlecarrot.com.
For tickets to the Playwrights Festival, go to www.baltimoreplaywrightsfestival.org.
Hot Town
The Stoop's Baltimoored: Summer in the City at Center Stage, July 9–11
It's hard to be a fan of Baltimore in July. Those lucky enough to get out of town might gloat, but sweating it out means being able to take in the Stoop Storytelling Series' first radio show, Baltimoored: Summer in the City.
Normally, the Stoop consists of seven storytellers telling seven-minute stories about a theme (see Urbanite, Aug. '07). But for Baltimoored, five different storytellers—including novelist and former Simpsons writer Larry Doyle and Maryland First Lady Katie O'Malley—will take the stage on each of the three nights. Also promised are old-timey sketches written by Stoop co-creators/co-hosts Laura Wexler and Jessica Henkin and members of the Baltimore Improv Group, who will perform the sketches. Since late winter, the troupe has been doing something uncharacteristic for a Stoop production—rehearsing. "Much of the Stoop is ephemeral—what might happen when someone steps onstage," says Wexler, whose husband, Mike Subelsky, will perform sound effects onstage during the sketches. "This is very planned."
WYPR will broadcast highlights from all three nights on July 17 at noon and 7 p.m.; Aaron Henkin of WYPR's The Signal (and Jessica's husband) will host. "I always wanted to do a live radio show," Wexler says. "We have friends that are in radio, in improv—it seemed like a fun thing to do." Wexler says she and Jessica envisioned this as a variety show in the vein of Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor's long-running public radio program.
But Baltimoored will swap in real-life Mobtown for mythical Lake Wobegon. Topics of the sketches include blue crabs, police helicopters, and the Orioles. House band Caleb Stine and the Brakemen will be joined by locals ellen cherry, the 5th L, and Arty Hill. As Wexler says: "You have to do something pretty interesting to get people out in the summer."
—Marianne K. Amoss
For tickets to Baltimoored, call 410-332-0033 or go to www.stoopstorytelling.com.
BOOK
The Woman Who Wasn't There
Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg
(Hyperion, 2009)
Family Ties: Why did Steve Luxenberg's mother (right, with her mother), hide her disabled sister? | courtesy of Steve Luxenberg
A (very) rough parallel to Steve Luxenberg's Annie's Ghosts hit the paperback shelves last month: New York Times reporter David Carr's bestselling addiction memoir, The Night of the Gun, which was built around a superficially similar mechanism—veteran journalist trains the tools of his trade on himself. But instead of Carr's unsparing reconstruction of his lost weekend of a life, Luxenberg, an associate editor at the Washington Post and longtime Lauraville resident, offers a plainspoken inquiry into an extraordinarily well-defended family secret.
The story begins with a curious clue: Not long before her death, Luxenberg's mother, Beth, remarks to a social worker that she had a disabled younger sister who was sent away at age 2. This comes as news to her children, who had always understood that their mother was an only child. After his mother's death, Luxenberg discovers that this sister lived with his mother to adulthood. She'd been hospitalized at a vast Detroit-area mental institution at 21 and died there in 1972 at age 53. Her name was Annie.
Beyond her name and a fragment of her treatment records, little trace remains of Annie's existence. But Luxenberg, who oversees investigative projects at the Post, isn't one to pass up a reportorial challenge; he takes a leave from the newspaper to pursue the aunt he never knew, as if in her shadowed life he had found a chance to unravel a deeper mystery about family identity. The task before him is daunting: With both parents dead, the only family member who claims a firsthand knowledge of Annie is a little-known cousin, Anna, who seems to have had some mysterious falling-out with Beth decades ago. Even after months of reporting, Luxenberg says one publisher passed on his lengthy book proposal because the premise of discovering the truth about the title character seemed hopeless. "She told me, ‘I don't think you're ever going to find out enough about her to satisfy me.'"
Indeed, Annie remains both faceless (no photograph can be unearthed) and voiceless throughout, her life sketched by a heartbreaking cascade of misfortune and abandonment. She's born with developmental delays and a leg deformity, and her impoverished parents—Jewish immigrants struggling to stay afloat in Depression-era Detroit—and the nation's nascent mental health care system both prove utterly incapable of treating either condition. But Luxenberg resists the urge to over-dramatize key events or characters. Instead, Annie's Ghosts moves with the slow-gathering force of a police procedural; the author methodically gathers facts, unearths informants, and compares accounts from his mother's network of surviving friends, circling the terrible moment in 1940 when Annie was hospitalized forever. Luxenberg also puts on something of a clinic in old-school analog reporting techniques—there are lots of document-hunts in the bowels of Michigan bureaucracy. Like many a detective story, the book concludes with a triple-whammy of reversals as Luxenberg discovers that other family members harbor a few secrets of their own.
Most of these secrets, he finds, were closely guarded for good reason: One of Luxenberg's central points is that that the treatment of the mentally ill in the 20th century was a kind of collective national shame, one that characters such as Beth were complicit in. If Annie herself remains a cipher, Luxenberg succeeds in an equally difficult task—understanding, if not excusing, the devastating choice his mother made. "I feel closer to my mother now," Luxenberg says. "Toward the end of her life, I mentally pushed her away. But now I understand her. My mother was trapped by her need to keep this secret."
—David Dudley
THEATER
Last Lines
Slampooned!, July 9–Aug. 2 at Single Carrot Theatre
Baltimore Playwrights Festival, through Sept. 6
Word: Single Carrot parodies the slam poetry scene. | courtesy of Single Carrot Theatre
A send-up of the slam poetry scene set at a 1991 competition in Chicago, Single Carrot Theatre's Slampooned! promises to be Best in Show meets American Idol. The actors who wrote the show will interact directly with the audience and "break the fourth wall," says company member and director Aldo Pantoja. "There will be a different winner every night.
The young Single Carrot crew came here from Colorado in 2007 after hunting for a city to establish a theater company. They mix classics with original works, such as a recent production of Ibsen's Wild Duck, and have a way with the wacky: Last year's Sects and Violins, a series of comic sketches (featuring Samuel, the lactose-intolerant farmboy) was a great success. Poetry slams, says artistic director J. Buck Jabaily, provide a great template for parody. "There are always reliable types: the over-impassioned person, the militant one who uses it as a platform for revolution, the one with a million bad breakups." And there's also the element of surprise: "The MC can make up rules at the last minute," Pantoja says. "You'll feel as if you had a real slam poetry experience."
The Baltimore Playwrights Festival also offers plenty of different endings. This year's lineup includes ten plays and a first-ever musical: Unraveled in the Gravel, the story of a compulsive hitchhiker fleeing his past (Aug. 6–23 at Mobtown Theater). The series kicked off in June and will finish up with one-acts at Spotlighters Theatre (Aug. 21–Sept. 6). July productions include Lisa Hodsoll's Turducken, about a family as mixed up as the bird on its Thanksgiving table, and G-Man by Rosemary Frisino Toohey.
—Martha Thomas
For tickets to Slampooned!, call 443-844-9253 or e-mail boxoffice@singlecarrot.com.
For tickets to the Playwrights Festival, go to www.baltimoreplaywrightsfestival.org.
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