E-Mail This Article to a Friend And the winner is… The Elliot Norton Awards at the Cutler Majestic, plus Publick Theatre 2004 and more

The Elliot Norton Awards

The annual love affair between Boston-area critics and theater folk took place Monday evening at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, where the 22nd Elliot Norton Awards, named for the recently deceased dean of American theater critics and honoring the best on local stages, were bestowed. Raising the event from our city stage to the world’s was guest of honor and three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Edward Albee, who was awarded a citation declaring him "a titan of our theater" and praising him as artist and provocateur. Also receiving special tribute was long-time Boston actress Paula Plum, who picked up the Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence. In recent months, Plum has shaken up the sparkly in Noël Coward’s Private Lives and proved herself more than ready to take on the excoriating Albee with her tough turn in Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, both for the Lyric Stage Company of Boston.

Hailed as Outstanding Production by a Visiting Company was the exquisite Theatre Royal Bath staging of As You Like It directed by Sir Peter Hall and brought to the Wilbur Theatre by Broadway in Boston and the Huntington Theatre Company. The critics selected Trinity Repertory Company’s haunting rendition of Pulitzer winner Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home as Outstanding Production by a Large Resident Company and Gloucester Stage Company’s Collected Stories as Outstanding Production by a Small Resident Company. Outstanding Musical Production by a Large Resident Company was the North Shore Music Theatre’s splendid Pacific Overtures. New Repertory Theatre’s intimately ghoulish Sweeney Todd was named Outstanding Musical Production by a Small Resident Company. Two Outstanding Productions by Local Fringe Companies were honored: Company One’s Jesus Hopped the "A" Train and the Gold Dust Orphans’ Pussy on the House.

Among individual honorees, Kevin Moriarty was dubbed Outstanding Director, Large Company, for his rollicking modern-apartment-building staging of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor for Trinity Rep, and Rick Lombardo was deemed Outstanding Director, Small Company, for New Rep’s Sweeney Todd. Yi Li Ming was honored for Outstanding Set Design for the American Repertory Theatre’s blizzard-driven Snow in June.

The irresistible Julie White of the Huntington Theatre Company’s Bad Dates was named Outstanding Actress, Large Company, and the ubiquitous Leigh Barrett took home Outstanding Actress, Small Company, for her work in Gloucester Stage’s Jacques Brel, New Rep’s Sweeney Todd and Threepenny Opera, and Overture Productions’ concert staging of Follies. Paxton Whitehead, the deadpan tyrannical shrink of the Huntington’s What the Butler Saw, was named Outstanding Actor, Large Company, and the explosive Vincent E. Siders was chosen Outstanding Actor, Small Company, for his work in Company One’s Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s Monticel, and SpeakEasy Stage Company’s Our Lady of 121st Street.

Special citations were dispensed to Overture Productions for Follies in Concert and to the Puppet Showplace Theatre "for 30 years of keeping the ancient art of puppetry alive for audiences of all ages." The Elliot Norton Awards are presented by the Boston Theater Critics Association, whose members are the Boston Herald’s Terry Byrne, the Boston Phoenix’s Carolyn Clay and Iris Fanger, WBZ’s Joyce Kulhawik, the Patriot Ledger’s Jon Lehman, WBUR’s Bill Marx, the Boston Globe’s Ed Siegel, and the organization’s president, Caldwell Titcomb.

— Carolyn Clay

Publick Theatre 2004

In thorny political times, not everything can be happy picnics and light comedy by the Charles. This summer, in honor of the Democratic National Convention’s coming to Boston, the Publick Theatre will offer some scabrous public commentary. The venerable outdoor playhouse on Soldiers Field Road will also compete with Brad Pitt when it opens its 34th season July 8 with Steven Barkhimer’s staging of Shakespeare’s Trojan War–set Troilus and Cressida. In the Bard’s tale of warriors, lovers, hangers-on, and pimps, "deformed and scurrilous Grecian" Thersites serves up enough bilious cynicism to serve both conventions. Publick artistic director Diego Arciniegas adds that in the play, "the greatest military figures of classical literature and history debate the reasons for going to war, only to discover they cannot agree. As we debate who should lead our country, I believe Shakespeare provides considerable insight. His observations on war, ethnic hatred, xeno- and homophobia could be ripped from today’s headlines."

The Publick won’t skip from the political hot seat off into the Athenian wood, either. Evidently in a tough-Bard mood this summer, the troupe rounds out its season with the rich but problematic comedy The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock wheedles for his pound of flesh. Arciniegas will stage that one, which, opening July 29, will concentrate not just on "the plight of the Jew in Christian society" but with an eye toward "tensions between Christian and Muslim, husband and wife, father and child, rich and poor, hetero- and homosexual." The two sharply relevant 400-year-old plays will be presented in repertory through September 12. Individual tickets are $30; call (617) 782-5425.

— Carolyn Clay

The Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival 2004

If not for such new technology as digital cameras and the Internet, or so some commentators have argued, we might never have heard anything about Iraqi-prisoner abuse, or seen the hideous execution of Nick Berg, or heard or seen anything else that those in power find inconvenient to their purposes. Certainly the mainstream media, until now at least, haven’t made much use of new technology to uncover the truth and stir up the status quo. On the other hand, the Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival, on whose press jury I served a few weeks back, proved that the documentary can fill in what broadcast and print media usually leave out.

One of the most troubling entries, and the winner of the International Critics Prize for Best First Feature, was Juliano Mer Khamis’s Arna’s Children. Arna was a Jewish veteran of the Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and the filmmaker is her son. But the children of the title are Palestinian youngsters in refugee camps like Jenin. Although stricken with cancer, Arna ran a school for war-traumatized Palestinian youth from 1989 until her death in 1996, and she devoted her life to inspiring her charges with art and drama. Mer Khamis, himself a successful actor, was one of the instructors.

You would hope that this exposure to creativity and self-expression would motivate these kids to transcend their oppression. Perhaps it did. Shown in footage shot in 2002, nearly all the young students seen in the older shots — sad-eyed, angry, but still innocent — have become terrorists and suicide bombers. Are they evil? Are they victims? And the Jews? Why do these young men refer to Arna as their mother even as they set out to kill Israeli soldiers? And can art point the way to wickedness as well as redemption? Mer Khamis offers no answers, only the uncompromising facts and a detached, compassionate, and discerning ear and eye.

An equally grim look at the Middle East, though perhaps with a more hopeful ending, is James Miller & Misha Manson-Smith’s Death in Gaza. Miller, an award-winning documentarian, set out to make a two-part film about the children caught in the middle of the conflict — the first about Arabs, the second about Jews. He didn’t quite finish the first part. He was killed late one night by an Israeli patrol (manned by Bedouin Arab soldiers) in the Gaza Strip; the shots ring out of the darkness on the film’s soundtrack.

That, however, is not the most disturbing moment in the movie. Two of the children profiled, 12-year-olds Ahmed and Mohammed, have gravitated to a local band of Islamic paramilitaries. The boys enjoy the attention and the sense of power; the masked guerrillas treat them with affection and sing the praises of martyrdom. It’s like the past and future of Arna’s children meeting one another. But this time, the inspiration provided by the camera has a more positive result. By the end of the film, both Ahmed and Mohammed have renounced the goal of martyrdom. Instead, they want to become photojournalists like their friend James Miller.

If so, perhaps they will work for Al-Jazeera, the Arab news station that rose to prominence with its coverage of Gulf War 2, just as the now-embedded CNN did with its coverage of Gulf War 1. Does Al-Jazeera provide coverage of events "unfiltered" by the Western powers that be? Or is it, as George Bush has claimed, a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden?

Mostly the former, suggests Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room, a film that points up the documentary’s ability to reflect on and critique all the media, including itself. Employing the cinéma-vérité tactics of her colleague D.A. Pennebaker, Noujaim seems herself to be objective, especially when she shows that some of the US military flacks pushing the Pentagon message are idealistic and open-minded.

Less helpful is the tank crew that blew away an Al-Jazeera cameraman in a Baghdad hotel clearly marked as a press area, an incident never resolved and all but forgotten with all that’s happened since. Now, perhaps, people will remember. And that may be the biggest advantage that documentaries have over print, broadcast, and even Internet sources of the truth: the permanence of historical record.

— Peter Keough

Scissor Sisters: Visa restrictions claim another victim

The headline says it all: Scissor Sisters, one of our "Picks of the Week" in the May 14 Phoenix, were unable to make their scheduled May 16 date at T.T. the Bear’s after failing to obtain visas from the George Bush administration — this for a band who formed in New York! The band are proceeding with their US tour, but they had to miss the first few gigs, one of which was at T.T.’s. The club is hoping to reschedule the date; watch these pages for an announcement.