Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 16, 2000)
New Voices to spotlight student playwrights Laura Smit Emerald Mitra Anoushiravani (left) and Windy Borman star in ‘Speaking Through the Flowers,’ part of the showcase ‘New Voices,’ which will start tonight in the Arena Theatre. Burton • Santa Cruz • Ride • Rossignol * Salomon *K2 YOUR SNOWBOARDING HEADQUARTERS tttkllnrace • En|eae • 613-1311 • VMJtfinHihipxw 010681 Want to learn to make your own CD and get credit at the same time? Then cheek out Special Studies: Beginning Recording Techniques MUS 199 Mon & Wed 17:30-18:50 at Crescent Studio (irading Option=(iraded Only Credits=3 Kee=$300 CRN 26671 How to Register? = DUCK CALL ONLY cull Don Latarski 343-8184 or email latarski@oregon for more information. IVIeJVIenamins * &. BR£U/£t> A Place for Families & Friends Delicious Pub Fare Handcrafted Ales and Wines East 19th Street Cafe 1485 E. 19th Street 342-4205 North Bank 22 Club Road 343-5622 High Street Brewery & Cafe 1243 High Street 345-4905 All food, ales and wines available to go WWW.MCMENAMINS.COM ■Two student plays will be featured this weekend in an Arena Theatre production By Mason West Oregon Daily Emerald People listening for some new voices need not go any farther than the Arena Theatre. The showcase “New Voices” opens Friday night. The two student-written one-act plays make up the performance. The scripts won last year’s annual short play contest held by the University. The short play contest is open to all students at the University who wish to enter. Scripts must be no longer than an hour in production and must require minimal design and tech work to produce. “Speaking Through the Flowers,” was written by Jenni Hellesto, who graduated last year with a degree in theater arts. This is actually not the first time her script has been staged; she directed it last year in the Pocket Playhouse. But directors Elizabeth Helman and Eric Lewis, both gradu ate students, have taken Hellesto's show further than was possible in the Pocket Playhouse because of the increased budget and flexibility with the space. “Our production is very different from hers,” Helman said. The one-act is set on the wedding night of a young couple who have gotten married after knowing each other for only a week. When the show was produced in the Pocket Play house, there were the two speaking actors and also two people who rep resented shadows of the characters. These shadows would engage in a kind of dance/pantomime during im portant parts in the script. Helman and Lewis have extended the idea of shadows and added one more for each character, creating a cast of six. Also, the directors have di vided the script so the shadows actu ally take over the dialogue of the two main characters at times. “The shadows represent all the pieces in us that make up our past,” Helman said. Lewis explained that when the show was cast, the script was not yet divied up among the six actors. The exchange of lines developed as the directors began to understand the strengths of the actors. “It was a very organic process, the way the actors came to their parts,” Lewis said. An organic process was also used in the other one-act, “Ewen,” but in a different way. Unlike Hellesto, the playwright of “Ewen,” Rowan Mor rison, is still a student here and was able to work with the director, grad uate student Rich Brown,during production. Brown said that this has allowed him some freedom with the script, which has actually been changed in the process based on decisions made between him and Morrison. In this way, the script has been almost cus tom tailored to showcase the actors’ interpretation of their roles. “For both of us, it’s been our first opportunity to work with the direc tor and playwright during the process,” Brown said. “But, we’ve been very careful to give an accurate portrayal of Rowan’s work.” This one-act production revolves around a psychiatrist and one of his patients. The patient possesses some mystic ability and ends up switching the roles of who is helping and who is being helped. Brown said that in the end, it deals with the danger of peo ple handing out answers to complex problems in neat little boxes. Like “Speaking Through the Flowers,” “Ewen” externally repre sents the inside of the characters, but instead of using shadows, “Ewen” uses the set. “Nothing in the set is complete, to reflect the inner state of the char acters,” Brown said. “New Voices” runs today, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $4 for University students and are available the EMU ticket office or at the Arena Theatre in Villard before the show. The power of understatement ■The Alder Gallery features the work of two local artists who show that less is more By Mason West Oregon Daily Emerald The visual arts abound in Coburg at the Alder Gallery where two lo cal artists are showing their new work. The show features Mike Pease’s watercolor and colored-pen cil works and Christine Sundt’s unique art jewelry. Pease has been creating this art since his departure from commer cial architecture almost 20 years ago. His work is almost entirely open landscape scenes, and they are all made by observing photographs or by physically observing a natural scene. He has gained the mosi noto riety for his colored-pencil draw ings, not only for their craft, but for their concepts. In his colored-pencil works, Pease only uses the primary colors: red, yellow and blue. Much like a computer printer overlaps the three colors to create others, so does he to portray his chosen image. “It’s always interesting to get peo ple to understand how much they can do with just primary colors,” Pease said. “The fewer colors you have in your pallet, the more likely you are to look at the object for the real color.” Pease teaches workshops in his three-color technique. He actually developed the concept while trying to teach design students how to think about using color. “Drawing is first and foremost a tool for seeing,” Pease said. His use of the watercolors, which represent much of his newer work, is another attempt to teach himself. Because of the nature of the differ ent media, he has to learn how to use them differently. He said pencil is a very forgiving medium that is well suited to detail, whereas water color is the exact opposite. “You really have to have a con cept of the whole thing instead of the details,” Pease said. “I tend to use the watercolor as a way to help me understand what the overall meaning of the image is.” Often, Pease will recreate a scene using different media to make sure * that he gets everything he can out of it. Sundt, on the other hand, is more concerned with a different type of „ Turn to Alder Gallery, page 8B ‘KillingTime’ doesn't quite compare Caleb Carr‘Killing Time’ Random House ★★★☆☆ By Josh Ryneal Oregon Daily Emerald Caleb Carr’s first two novels, “The Angel of Darkness” and “The Alienist,” were intricately plotted and suspense-filled detective tales set in 1920s New York. Carr earned rave reviews for his excellent char acters and acute sense of historical accuracy, as well as for his grisly and compelling depiction of the Roaring ’20s. With “Killing Time,” his latest novel, Carr looks forward to the year 2023 where corporations rule the government, the environment has been thoroughly decimated and the Internet is both an infor mational tool and a pacifier of the people. Carr seems less sure in the fu ture of 2023 than in the gritty, grimy past of the 1920s. His char acters are less solid than in his pre vious efforts. His hero, criminal profiler Dr. Gideon Wolfe, is a mere shadow of Dr. Laszlo Krie zler, the star of his two earlier nov els. Wolfe is merely a spectator in the dark and complicated machi nations that surround him, contin ually asking “why?” as the reader struggles along with him to under stand the labyrinthine plot. The plot has something to do with a band of futuristic pirates who fly around the globe, creating havoc in the hopes that the popu lace will rise up and overthrow their corporate overlords. In the process, they kidnap Wolfe and make him an accomplice in their schemes. Their reasons for this are never exactly clear, and their motivations behind forging historical docu ments and causing general may hem aren’t either. But Carr knows how to pace a good story, and read ers will keep turning the pages un til the book is finished. Carr seemed more at home with the straight-ahead classic detective stories of his earlier books; his de scriptions and characters were grip ping and real. Here, he falls into the trap that snares many science-fic tion authors and struggles to create a believable alternate reality that is still grounded in events happening today. “Killing Time” is not a bad book. It’s just simply not the equal of “The Alienist” or “The Angel of Darkness.” While readers hung onto the climax of those two tales, waiting for the suspenseful conclu sion, they will be sorely disap pointed with the time-machine-en abled resolution of this one. Perhaps Carr should take a time machine back to the 1920s, as he was obviously more at home there.
