This weekend's cultural highlights June 5-7

Submitted by Seth Rogovoy on June 4, 2009 - 5:27pm

A week after Tina Packer’s stunning performance as Shirley Valentine, Penny Kreitzer follows in the Diva series of one-woman shows at Shakespeare & Company in the world premiere of The Actors Rehearse the Story of Charlotte Salomon, running June 3 to14 and September 12. The drama tells the story of an artist who fled Nazi Germany to France in 1939, only to be apprehended by the Gestapo in occupied Vichy in 1943. In the interval, as if aware of her impending fate, she busily created a startling artistic oeuvre: over 1,300 autobiographically themed, notebook-sized gouache paintings. She arranged 769 of them into scenes and acts, accompanied by textural narration and operatic musical cues, and titled this epic Life? Or Theater? (Leben? Oder Theater?). At the age of 26, shortly before she was arrested by the Gestapo, Salomon gave her works to a trusted friend, saying, “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” Soon thereafter she was taken to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

This play-within-a-play tells the true story of a group of actors who attempted to present Salomon’s story at the Jerusalem Festival in 1982. They struggle to present a truthful voice, in the face of the differing views of Charlotte’s stepmother, Paula Lindberg, a famous opera singer at the time. As the story unfolds, Lindberg is forced to confront truths about herself, her relationship with her deceased stepdaughter, and the artist’s responsibility in the world. The Actors Rehearse the Story of Charlotte Salomon is based on actress Penny Kreitzer’s real-life experience as a member of that troupe. It is written by David Bridel, Kreitzer and Jonathan Rest, and directed by Jonathan Rest.

Shakespeare & Co. ticket info: (413) 637-3353, www.shakespeare.org

[Image courtesy Shakespeare & Co.]

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On behalf of Berkshire Playwrights Lab, Matthew Penn will direct a staged reading workshop production of playwright Bill C. Davis’s new play, Sex King, on Wednesday, June 10 at 8 at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center (14 Castle Street, Great Barrington, Mass.). Admission is free.

Davis is the author of Mass Appeal, which premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club and moved to Broadway, where it received the Outer Critic’s Circle Award. Davis adapted the play as a screenplay, which was made into a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Charles Durning, and chosen as one of the ten best films for that year by the National Board of Review. His play, Dancing in the End-Zone, premiered at the State Theatre in Miami and moved to Broadway and to Los Angeles, where it received a Dramalogue Award and his play, Wrestlers, premiered in Los Angeles and won a Critic’s Choice for the LA Times.

His new work-in-progress play, Sex King, is about a character named Jeremiah Rockwell, who emerges as a confounding iconoclast: a sexually liberated pacifist, an activist, a family man, a romantic. Davis says, “I read an article in my local paper that prompted this play. Here in the hills of Connecticut, a man in his mid-sixties ran what he said was an escort service. The state said he was a pimp. During the trial, he was a local media darling who used his platform to express his long held pacifist views by speaking out against the bombing of Iraq in 1998.”

Matthew Penn has had roots in the Berkshires for over forty years. He began his career as an actor appearing in a half-dozen films and more than thirty plays. He started directing for the stage at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. Ed Sherin gave Penn the opportunity to direct Law & Order fourteen years ago. Since then he has directed over 50 prime time dramas. He directed the 200th episode of Law & Order starring Julia Roberts, for which he was nominated for an Emmy. He subsequently spent four seasons as the executive producer of Law & Order, during which time he produced over ninety episodes.

Founded in 2006 by theater professionals Joe Cacaci, Bob Jaffe, Jim Frangione, and Matthew Penn, Berkshire Playwrights Lab is dedicated to encouraging, developing, and presenting new plays. Through readings, workshops, and fully-staged productions, the Lab provides emerging and established writers with a professional and creative environment, while offering audiences the unique and provocative opportunity to share in the dramatic evolution of premiere works. For more information about this new organization, see www.berkshireplaywrightslab.org.

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Seasonal change and depictions of the natural world have formed a core in the repertoire of Japanese artists throughout the ages. The exhibition Through the Seasons: Japanese Art in Nature at The Clark Institute brings together screens and scrolls from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and displays them with contemporary ceramics, each work emphasizing the inspirational role of nature in Japanese art. Drawn from both public institutions and private collections, many of these works have never before been exhibited. Through the Seasons will be on view in Stone Hill Center’s galleries June 7 through October 18.

Morning Glories, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Also on view beginning June 7 is Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence. This Clark exclusive exhibition features Georgia O’Keeffe’s early works with those of modernist Arthur Dove, whom she credited as having the most significant role in the formation of her abstract works. Dove/O’Keeffe runs through September 7.

[IMAGE: Morning Glories, Edo period (1615–1868), early 19th century, by Suzuki Kiitsu; one of a pair of six-panel folding screens: ink, color and gold on gilded paper, 5 ft. 10 3/16 x 12 ft. 5 1/2 in. each; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Seymour Fund, 1954; Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art]

The Clark is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown. The galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm (daily in July and August). Admission June 1 through October 31 is $12.50 for adults, free for children 18 and younger, members, and students with valid ID. Admission is free November 1 through May 31. For more information, call 413-458-2303 or visit clarkart.edu.

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It’s tribute and humor weekend at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, which presents Bjorn Again, an ABBA tribute band, on Friday, June 5 at 8, and Forbidden Broadway, a Tony Award-winning satirical revue, on Saturday, June 6 at 8 in Great Barrington, Mass. Both shows are reserved seating: $45/ $40 members / $30 limited balcony. For more information, contact the Mahaiwe Box Office at 413-528-0100 or www.mahaiwe.org.

The Mahaiwe is located in historic downtown Great Barrington at 14 Castle Street, across from Town Hall. Tickets are available for Bjorn Again and Forbidden Broadway, online at www.mahaiwe.org and through the Mahaiwe Box Office at 413-528-0100. Members of “Friends of the Mahaiwe” receive $5.00 discounts per ticket. The Mahaiwe Box Office is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 6pm and three hours prior to all show times.

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Choreographer and performer Wally Cardona has been recognized nationally and internationally for creating vast yet intimate works that use the performance setting itself as an integral partner in the creation of movement. Brooklyn Magazine hailed Cardona as “one of the most adventurous choreographers of his generation, a master of passionate abstract dances.” After a six-day creative residency at MASS MoCA, Cardona will present a work-in-progress showing of his new piece, Really Real, on Saturday, June 6, at 8.

Really Real is a work about people, relationships and feeling in a complex world. With just a bare stage, dancers, and light and dark, it is simultaneously abstract and about nearly everything -- youth, beauty, love, death, sex and power. Created in collaboration with composer Phil Kline and lighting designer Roderick Murray, the complete work will feature a movement ensemble of a troupe of local people led by the Wally Cardona Quartet.

Phil Kline appeared at MASS MoCA in July 2004, performing Zippo Songs: Airs of War and Lunacy a song cycle drawn from Donald Rumsfeld's speeches and the poems that GIs inscribed on their cigarette lighters during the Vietnam War, among other unusual sources. Kline’s score for Really Real operates on two levels. Underlying everything is a flow of text, whispers, intoned pitches combined to make chords, wordless wails, moans, whoops and glissandi. Then, at crucial junctures, remnants of urgent anthems from the late 1960’s appear, reconstructed as if the singers had absorbed them via a slightly hazy collective memory.

Tickets for Wally Cardona: Really Real are $10. MASS MoCA members receive a 10% discount. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office located off Marshall Street in North Adams, open from 11 until 5, closed Tuesdays. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413.662.2111 during Box Office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.

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The Berkshire Bach Society presents its Spring Choral Concert, From England To Germany And Back, with James Bagwell conducting the Berkshire Bach Singers

Orchestra and Soloists in a program of works by Purcell, Telemann and Handel, on Saturday, June 6, at 8, at the First Congregational Church, 251 Main St.., Great Barrington. Tickets available through www.brownpapertickets.com . $30 for general public; $25 for BBS members. Students Free. More info at www.berkshirebach.org

Mel Brooks’ The Producers is at Pittsfield’s Colonial Theatre June 4-6. Tickets are $45-$25 and can be purchased in person at the Colonial Ticket Office at 111 South Street or by calling (413) 997-4444 or online at www.TheColonialTheatre.org

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Faith Healer continues its run in the Unicorn Theatre at Berkshire Theatre Festival through July 4. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at (413) 298-5576 x33 or online at berkshiretheatre.org.

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Shakespeare & Company’s Romeo and Juliet closes this weekend. www.shakespeare.org or (413) 637-3353.

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