I Am Woman
These Shining Lives at Center Stage, Apr 24–June 1
The Color Purple at the Hippodrome, Apr 29–May 18

When Melanie Marnich's play was chosen for a staged reading during the 2006/2007 Center Stage "First Look" series, she thought it was "done-ish." These Shining Lives, opening in the Head Theater on April 24, has come a long way, baby.

First Look is an opportunity for playwrights—some seasoned, some just starting out—to develop their scripts through public readings and workshops. Six plays incubated in the program have been produced at Center Stage, says resident dramaturge Gavin Witt. "It's easy to perceive us as the big institution in town," he says. "This is a way of expanding our identity for those who see us as staid."

These Shining Lives is based on the true story of women—mostly immigrants—who worked in watch factories in the 1920s and '30s, painting the faces of timepieces with glow-in-the-dark radium. As the shocking effects—including anemia and disintegration of the jaw—of their practice of dabbing paintbrushes against their tongues began to surface, a group of women rose up in protest. Eventually, the workers, from factories in Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois, inspired a class-action lawsuit and workplace safety legislation—although not until a terrible price had been paid.

After working with the actors and Center Stage staff, Marnich says the play "evolved and deepened." Witt says that Marnich's re-working included "elaborating and complicating various relationships within the play, clarifying the narrative throughline, and balancing the play's use of documentary history."

Another tale of female empowerment, The Color Purple, which ended its two-year Broadway run in February, will stop in at the Hippodrome beginning April 29 on its U.S. tour. Produced by Oprah Winfrey (who appeared in Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation of the Alice Walker novel), it's a story of Celie, an African American girl in 1930s rural Georgia who overcomes years of abuse by her father and husband to forge bonds with the women around her. In the last year of its Broadway run, the show had an influx of stars: 2004 American Idol winner Fantasia took over the role of Celie, and Chaka Khan and BeBe Winans joined the cast just before the show closed.

At press time the cast was undetermined, but this story of healing and hope—told with music inspired by jazz, pop, and gospel—will uplift the audience no matter who steps into the roles.

—Martha Thomas



FILM
Scare Tactics
Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story and My Effortless Brilliance at the Maryland Film Festival

Readers old enough to remember matinees at the Waverly Theater at 32nd and Greenmount will be familiar with the nervy oeuvre of William Castle, the breathless showman responsible for peppering each performance of his 1950s and '60s B-movie horror films with special- effect "enhancements" unlikely to win any technical Oscars. But younger theatergoers unfamiliar with the magic of "Illusion-O" (peer through a pane of red or blue cellophane to make the movie's ghosts appear and disappear) or "Emergo" (an inflatable skeleton dangles across the theater ceiling at the movie's climax) can content themselves with Jeffrey Schwarz's fantastic documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, screening at the Maryland Film Festival.

Castle's best gimmick, for the 1959 film The Tingler, was "Percepto," his deluxe term for wiring select theater seats with joy-buzzer-style vibrators. At the movie's climax, when the escaped Tingler (a lobster- caterpillar that attaches itself to people's spines) escapes into a movie theater, the film suddenly appears to melt in the projector and the seats start zapping patrons while an announcer bellows "Scream! Scream for your lives!"—thus triggering giddy, fourth-wall-busting bedlam.

For festivalgoers with more subtle tastes, there's also My Effortless Brilliance, a super-understated comedy about an effete, Dave Eggers- esque literati (Sean Nelson) spending an awkward vacation with his rugged friend (Basil Harris) in a backwoods Washington log cabin, where the hazards range from a cougar on the loose to vicious uncomfortable silences. The tenth Maryland Film Festival runs May 1 through 4 at various locations in and around Baltim—LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE TINGLER IS LOOSE IN THIS ISSUE OF URBANITE! ANYONE TOUCHING THESE PAGES MUST SCREAM! SCREAM FOR THEIR LIVES!

—Violet Glaze



MAGAZINE
Where's the Beef?
Meatpaper

In a city with neighborhoods like Pigtown and Butchers Hill, a publication like Meatpaper fits right in. Editors Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen describe Meatpaper as "an investigation into what we see as a growing cultural trend of meat consciousness," driven in part by the recent explosion of interest in local food economies and the environmental impact of industrial livestock production. In the first issue, the editors say this San Francisco-based quarterly magazine revolves around the apt neologism fleischgeist: the spirit of the meat. What follows is a delicious, bloody romp.

The winter issue (number 2, if you're counting) is a smorgasbord of carnivorous delights, opening with an illuminating interview with a meat inspector (and no, even after witnessing all manner of violations, he hasn't sworn off the stuff). Other pieces include a cinematic survey of animal flesh in film, a Slow Food advocate's quest for a more humane slaughterhouse, and one chef's paean to the joys and benefits of eating the heart (plus one of his recipes: Grilled Beef Heart with Roasted Golden Beets and Horseradish). But the fun hardly stops at the written word. Meatpaper contains a trove of high-protein art, including graphic forays into butchers' counters, kitchens, and bizarre Rockwell-like dining-room tableaux of families and their meat.

Fortunately, what could easily become a kitschy stew of words, images, and irony stays true to its founding premise: an honest appreciation of and inquiry into meat and our complex relationship with it. Whether you're into overstuffed corned beef sandwiches or tofu and sprouts, Meatpaper offers plenty to chew on.

—Michael Paulson

The spring issue of Meatpaper is available locally at Harbor News (1010 Aliceanna Street) and Barnes & Noble bookstores.



ART
Uncharted Territory
Maps on Purpose at the Walters Art Museum

In an era when MapQuest and Google churn out precise, digital maps like McDonald's does hamburgers, the community arts program Art On Purpose has turned cartography into a slow, thoughtful, and somewhat epic affair. The result is "Maps On Purpose," a local element for the Walters Art Museum's historic exhibition Maps: Finding Our Place in the World.

Art On Purpose artist and director Peter Bruun and his staff of four started work more than a year ago, enlisting leaders from twenty-three Baltimore neighborhoods. Each leader recruited citizen mapmakers and asked residents what they thought was worthy of inclusion in a community map. Then, paired with artists hired by Art On Purpose, they set to work. Over the course of about two months, hundreds of community activists, school kids, and ordinary citizens gathered for mapmaking sessions. They met in art centers, schools, and churches. (And sometimes right outside my door—Art On Purpose shares Urbanite's office space in Clipper Mill.) These were democratic and downright messy affairs: Participants worked with paints, photographs, silk screens, and fabric to create intricate, brilliantly colored, often mural-sized maps, each of which has ties to a map featured in the Walters show.

One mapmaker from Oliver produced two small maps, one showing the neighborhood as it is (vacant houses, painted gray, mingle with occupied ones in red), the other as it might someday be (all the houses are red, including a new senior apartment building). The inspiration came from the map of the Aztec capital that Hernán Cortés sent to the King of Spain in 1524. The Remington map, in which colored lines connect residents with the places they frequent on foot, was inspired by a map of the London Underground subway system. The Hollins Market/Union Square cartographers charted the neighborhoods' population growth and decline—a nod to Charles Joseph Minard's famous graphic of Napoleon's invasion of, and subsequent retreat from, Russia.

True to the message of the Walters exhibition, the maps did more than trace local geography. "These maps are catalysts for conversations about neighborhood issues," says Bruun. Cecelia Mckenzie, a community activist in Oliver, says the mapmaking workshops attracted people who rarely participate in community activities—young men in particular. "People came out religiously for eight or nine weeks," she says. "It brought us together."

Art On Purpose has arranged for buses to bring people from participating neighborhoods to see the maps, which are taking turns on a wall at the Walters. On May 10, the group will host a symposium aimed at creating map-based Web "portals" into Baltimore neighborhoods. And the project may not end there: Baltimore's new army of citizen mapmakers won't let it. "You can't just start this and then not do it again," says Mckenzie. "Tell them to start another one this summer."

—Greg Hanscom



BOOKS
Short Cuts
by Susan McCallum-Smith

Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (2008), edited by Larry Smith and Rachael Ferschleiser, has received a lot of press lately. It's a witty premise, true, but is its success reflective of our ever-diminishing attention span? Given that book columns are being squeezed in newspapers from coast to coast, could this be the dawn of the six-word review?


"All I talk about is me." (Black Hole by Charles Burns; Pantheon, 2005)

A cult classic for graphic-novel groupies, Burns' ten-years-in-the-making Black Hole has (almost) overcome my resistance to cartoons pretending to be novels. Reading it is a tactile experience, from its lipstick-red cover to the needlepoint-precise illustrations on paper so black you swear it's going to stain your fingers.

Black Hole is an allegory of teenage angst masquerading as a horror flick. A sexually transmitted disease menaces a 1970s suburb, with symptoms unpredictable and gross: boils, dismemberments, embarrassing new appendages, and, most frequently, strange fissures in the skin that split and yawn. One horny teenager after another succumbs, including Keith and Chris, often difficult to tell apart because of their identical part-n-curl bangs. Keith suffers unrequited love for foxy Chris but consoles himself with the bootylicious Eliza, whose many charms include a tail. The infected, ostracized by the community, flee to the woods, where murder stalks, by persons or things unknown.

This Armageddon unfolds with barely a parent or a doctor in sight. Left alone to deal with the hormone-churning misery of adolescence, the teenagers act in predictable fashion, through self-absorption ("All I ever talk about is me, me, me …") and escapism ("All I wanted to do was get loaded …"). Getting drunk, stoned, or laid is the order of most of their days.

Burns' craftsmanship is showcased in the larger-scale graphics: Chris lying in bed surrounded by the detritus of hobo-teenage life: Marlboros, Tampax, a gun; Jimi Hendrix's hair aflame in a poster hanging in the drug dealers' living room; fractured images of nightmares and hallucinations jostling for interpretation. Indeed, the whole book is slashed through with these metaphorical cuts (recognizable to anyone familiar with the floral art of Georgia O'Keefe)—cuts that encapsulate adolescence as concisely as that delicate compound adjective: c--t-struck.

"For love of God and Country." (Bringing Vincent Home by Madeleine Mysko; Plain View Press, 2007)

Kitty Duvall's life changes irrevocably when her son returns home from the Vietnam War with burns over 36 percent of his body. She spends weeks at an Army hospital in Texas while Vincent hovers in critical condition before beginning his torturous journey to recovery. Kitty's vigil tests her faith as she is forced to reflect on her actions (and inactions) regarding the war and her failed marriage.

Local writer Madeleine Mysko has written an assured and deeply moving first book, anchored by a complex and empathetic main character. Kitty Duvall is old-fashioned, believing her role and responsibilities lie safely within the remit of the home, as wife and mother. Her abusive husband, who left long ago, has sobered up and met someone new, and now clamors for a divorce. Kitty refuses him, perceiving it as a betrayal of her Catholicism. Our feelings for Kitty alternate between frustration over her political naiveté and stubborn marital martyrdom, and enormous compassion for her decency and circumstances.

Kitty's patriotism and faith are put to the ultimate test on those days when Vincent is taken to "the tank." The doctors submerge him in fluid to loosen any dead skin prone to infection and then literally peel it off. Vincent's sobbing during treatment echoes down the ward, while his mother sits, helpless, haunted by the old soldier's song, "Hail Mary, full of grace … box me up and send me home."

Kitty is joined in her vigil by her feisty daughter, Mary Kate, an antiwar activist who tries to goad her mother into political action, and by Major Trainer, the Army Chaplain. Slowly, tentatively, Kitty realizes that happiness may be more important than religious perfection, and that our leaders are no less fallible than ourselves, no less prone to errors of judgment, that even "my own beloved country, the strong and valiant United States of America, might be careless with its boys."

"Some bad shit happens in Arkansas." (Arkansas by John Brandon; McSweeney's, 2008)

Swin, a biracial, bookish gym-junkie, drifts into a crime partnership with the thuggish Kyle, an angry young man with melancholy foresight. They work as drug-runners for a crime boss called Frog, who provides cover by installing them as the management team of an obscure national park in Arkansas. After an unfortunate mishap with a middleman, Swin and Kyle keep the business going without telling Frog, spending their days weed-whacking, replenishing birdseed, and hollering at visitors to stick to the trails, and their nights doing deals all over the South in a cornucopia of tacky cars.

John Brandon's first book is, at first glance, easy to like. "The groggy plains of Arkansas, the flatlands, where there's no place to hide" provide a perfect backdrop for casual crime, and Swin, Kyle, and Swin's sensible, homey girlfriend, Johnna, are oddly attractive. "Arkansas had a cozy, tucked-away quality," Brandon writes, and this cozy quality pervades his tone. The author seems almost as surprised by the twists and turns of the plot as his characters. At one moment, Swin pauses and asks himself (like the Talking Heads), well, how did I get here?: "[A] mobile home, a refugee dog, a redneck nurse, a deranged white boy, and a shithole park with a Jewish name. Seemed like a good book, but right now Swin was living it …" Yes, Swin is living it, and we're reading it, but none of us is feeling it.

Brandon tends to overdo the details. A minor character is "allergic to olives and gum;" another has a girlfriend who "wears high heels that are too big for her and sprinkles glitter on her arms and shoulders." Such touches bear witness to Brandon's limber imagination, but the exhausted reader constantly files data away, thinking it may be important. (Do I need to remember that this gal digs glitter? Should I be spooked if a bowl of olives appears one hundred pages from now?)

"You have the eerie feeling of being in a movie," Frog thinks at one point. "You don't know your lines. You don't know what happens to your character." Precisely. Reading Arkansas is like watching a Coen brothers film: I have affection for these folks, but when really bad shit happens to them, I just shake my head, snicker, and go and get another beer from the fridge.




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