The Black Monk, l to r: Jonathan Brooks, Stefanie Tovar, Shannon Kearns-Simmons, Bruce DuBose

• Audio clip – Pesotsky (Bruce DuBose) explains “The Angel’s Serenade” by Gaetano Braga, sung by Stefanie Tovar:

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• Audio clip – Korvin (Jonathan Brooks) debates the Black Monk (Newton Pittman):

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• Ed Townley’s review at Pegasus News

• Lawson Taitte’s review at the Dallas Morning  News

• Mark Lowry’s review at Theater Jones

• Critical Rant & Rave

Happy news: Playwright David Rabe’s adaptation of the short story, “The Black Monk,” may be the closest thing we have to a “newly discovered” Chekhov stage work — at least since Chekhov’s early play, Ivanov, was significantly revised/adapted by David Hare (1997) and then Tom Stoppard (2008). “The Black Monk” (1894) is a highly unusual story for Chekhov because of its title figure, a gothic manifestation that haunts Kovrin, the main character. Chekhov was a doctor, a clear-eyed realist, and although playing with ghosts or hallucinations was very popular at the time, they hardly suited him. This seems to have been the only time.

In a nightmare, Chekhov saw a black monk floating over the land, reappearing again and again. But if the figure seems to intrude into the playwright’s work from another world (or his subconscious), the monk does visit a classic Chekhov character. Kovrin is an ambitious young author-intellectual who believes his philosophical studies will improve our lives but who, not surprisingly, comes to comic frustration. As critic Eric Bentley wrote, the “might-have-been” character is Chekhov’s idee fixe. He appears in play after play.

In fact, whole chunks of The Black Monk, handsomely staged by the Undermain Theatre, are unmistakable precursors to Chekhov’s masterpieces-to-come. Much of the play, like The Cherry Orchard (1903), is set in a provincial estate with a working orchard fussed over by the landowner, Yegor Pesotsky, who adopted Kovrin as an orphan. Kovrin himself recalls Treplev in The Seagull (1896), the dreamy poet who wants to create new forms. And the pointless family arguments between Pesotsky and his daughter Tanya are pretty much endemic in Chekhov’s plays from Uncle Vanya (1897) to The Three Sisters (1901).

But what truly makes The Black Monk Chekhovian is its deft, intertwining of comedy and drama. Chekhov diagnosed each of his characters with no illusions about them, no judgments. Each is allowed to be ordinary and eccentric, profound and foolish. Kovrin is clearly a satire of the Romantic artist-thinker who is certain he’s wiser and more sensitive than us simple, crude folk . His inspirations are so profound, so otherworldly, they may even be a form of divine madness.

Or so he’d like to think. One of the sly bits of destabilizing humor in the play comes when Kovrin encounters the legendary ghost he’s read about. The black monk, Kovrin promptly discovers, has come just for Kovrin. Kovrin is a genius, Kovrin is a man of destiny.

Newton Pittman as the title character in The Black Monk

Kovrin, of course, is crazy. The monk is an hallucination, flattering him with what Kovrin already believes about himself. Even so, Kovrin is not a repellent egotist. He’s an appealing egotist (at first). In actor Jonathan Brooks’ hands, he’s eager, handsome, well-intentioned and full of promise.

But it’s this Chekhovian balance of satire and drama that the Undermain gets a little off. The Undermain has staged a  Chekhov play before (The Seagull in 1998), so David Rabe’s adaptation is sort of a back-door second opportunity, a fresh way of getting at some very familiar turf. Rabe has amplified Chekhov’s story in significant ways. To make it more theatrical, he’s expanded the character of Pesotsky, for instance. That may have been partly because the actor Sam Waterston was one of the instigating forces behind the adaptation, and the role was enlarged to suit the star.

But it’s just as likely that Rabe sought to triangulate the play, making it more of a characteristic Chekhov ensemble piece, complete with comic, dottering servants. The short story is almost entirely about Kovrin, his desires and delusions, while the play is more about the trio: Kovrin, Pesotsky and Tanya. Kovrin’s dementia, for instance, is now more clearly matched by Pesotsky’s own obsessive-possessive behavior toward his orchard. But in compensation, Rabe has also underscored Pesotsky’s nature as an energetic, cultured paterfamilias. He oversees a convivial salon (greatly expanded from the original story) — with a musical performance of Gaetano Braga’s “Angel’s Serenade” (aka “La serenata”), a song which Pesotsky translates from the Italian. (Listen to the first audio clip, above.)

On opening night, Bruce DuBose’s performance as Pesotsky was spirited but broad and loud, not as comfortably inhabited as many of his other stage characterizations. It’s as if, uncertain of the comic elements in Chekhov, director Katherine Owens pushed them a little hard.

A similar imbalance (but in the other direction) affects Brooks’ handling of Kovrin by the end. In contemporary terms, Kovrin is manic-depressive. When he first converses with the monk, he’s filled with such excitement and energy he impulsively proposes marriage to Tanya (Shannon Kearns-Simmons). This is the same woman he privately rejected as a marriage prospect only moments before. Then when their marriage goes sour and he is frustrated in his hopes as a philosopher, Kovrin turns angry and despairing. He complains about his fellow academics and insults his wife.

But by the end of the play we find Kovrin in a third emotional state. He recognizes that he is neither soulful genius nor utter failure. He is like most of us: ordinary,  medium-talented. The story says (and much of this is spoken onstage) that “to gain the position of a mediocre learned man, he, Kovrin, had had to study for fifteen years, to work day and night, to endure a terrible mental illness, to experience an unhappy marriage, and to do a great number of stupid and unjust things which it would have been pleasant not to remember. Kovrin recognized clearly, now, that he was a mediocrity, and readily resigned himself to it, as he considered that every man ought to be satisfied with what he is.”

This moment of clarity is also very Chekhovian — think of Uncle Vanya recognizing how much of his life has been in vain. Yet Brooks delivers these lines with the same ranting bitterness that he earlier directed toward Tanya and his co-workers. When last we see Kovrin he is shouting Tanya’s name with a smile on his face and with the monk whispering to him that he really is a genius.  He may be freshly wrapped up in his delusions, but Kovrin did have that moment of clarity before sinking back into his life-as-it-was — exactly like Vanya.

I’ve gone at length on these subtle points because Chekhov is a subtle playwright, an author of minute emotional calculations and layered, sometimes contradictory characterizations. It’s actually a testament to the precisions of Katherine Owens’ production that these slips are apparent — many stagings of Chekhov are just some beef Stroganoff muddle.

Overall, the Undermain’s show is dark and rich and splendid looking, thanks to costumer Bryan Wofford, lighting designer Steve Woods, sound designer DuBose and set designer John Arnone. They make the Undermain basement pass as Russian salon, frosty orchard, Moscow apartment and Sebastopol suite, and they make the actors look resplendent, notably Maryam Baig as Kovrin’s second wife, Varvara. A provincial family might not have had things quite so rich — a little more worn or shabby — but the overall twilight feel of this production is one of its great, appealing accomplishments.

So, too, is its most haunting character. Newton Pittman plays the monk with a calm, offhand presence. He seems perfectly real, perfectly human and sympathetically interested in Kovrin — which makes him all the more fascinating. He’s not some ghost-story apparition or wigged-out fantasy. This hallucination whispers his advice. Pittman’s monk is precisely the kind of quiet, otherworldly authority Kovrin might conjure up — a kind of Zen mirror, an empty vessel, an echo of his own dreamed-of better self, a self he’ll never fully realize.

• The New York Times has more on that 2011 Spring into Music festival at Carnegie Hall to which the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was invited: “First made public last June, the series is intended to encourage orchestras to program imaginatively, without regard to marketing considerations. … The main idea is for the orchestras to present programs that have special meaning for them and speak to their individual missions.”

A prime example of the imaginative programming? The DSO’s August 4, 1964, the single work the DSO will perform. “In sharpest contrast, the Albany Symphony will present a program of 10 works, with George Tsontakis’s “Let the River Be Unbroken” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” framing eight pieces from its Spirituals Project, contemporary settings of spirituals for baritone and orchestra.”

• The collaborative classic: Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Edward FitzGerald’s famous poem, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is now online — with the five different versions of the text that the author wrote, plus visitors can “tag the poem and leave comments, almost as though FitzGerald had blogged his work, rather than publishing it on paper.”

• Remember the report that Jerry Jones hopes to add some art and art-like stuff to that very large and expensive building in Arlington that people refer to as Jonestown (OK, I call it that. I’m trying to start a trend here. “Jerryworld” is far too cute and friendly for that looming alien saucer). “One of the things we wanted to do is involve artwork in this stadium. Contemporary art,” Jones said. “We’ll be featuring some of that in places that is about motion and about strength and about a lot of those kinds of things.”

Well, that sounds an awful lot like what they’ve done at Nationals Park in D.C., right down to the “motion” and “strength.” They’ve put up colorful mobiles by Walter Kravitz and monuments to Washington baseball greats, done by an Israeli-born sculptor named Omri Amrany who specializes in sports art:

“Rather than zooming, however, his bronze appears to glop. It has the unfortunate effect of making his players seem covered in tumorous growths. They also get multiple arms. . . . As for the grace and power we expect from significant art, forget about finding it in any of these works. Translated into baseball terms, a team would have to place dead last in the major leagues to rank as low as this work does as art. Come to think of it, these four pieces may count as the Washington Nationals of art.

• The Texas Ballet Theater has announced its plans for the Fly Ball on April 18 — “Destination Paris ” — in the Fort Worth Ballroom in the new Omni Fort Worth Hotel.  It’s one of the TBT’s largest annual fundraisers, and this year’s honorary chair? Lyle Lovett.

• And the DMN Arts Blog has a review of comedian Dennis Leary’s performance last night at the Nokia.

But not for two years.

Spring for Music, a new independent annual festival of North American orchestras, has invited the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to perform at Carnegie Hall as part of their inaugural festival May 6-14 — in 2011.

Two cool things about their appearance, though: It will be conductor Jaap van Zweden’s Carnegie debut. And it will also be the New York debut of Steven Stucky’s August 4, 1964, the oratorio with a libretto by Gene Scheer that was commissioned by the orchestra to commemorate the centenary of Lyndon B. Johnson’s birth last year.  The DSO debuted it last September at the Meyerson.

Olin Chism wrote for Art & Seek: “Stucky has done something rather unusual in contemporary music. He has composed a lengthy work for large orchestra and very large chorus, plus four vocal soloists. There must have been several hundred people on the stage and choral terrace of the Meyerson Center. This could have been a group gathered to sing and play the Verdi Requiem. … Devoting an entire concert to a single, brand-new work takes guts. It’s becoming clear that Van Zweden isn’t your ordinary music director.”

AUDIO:

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“The Blistering Price of Power” by Eric Lyon

The flute is a classical instrument. The flute belongs in an orchestra with other woodwinds. If the flute is feeling particularly randy, it will join a marching band. But one day in the 90s, a flute played by Elizabeth McNutt, then a graduate student at the University of California – San Diego, discovered interactive music. The school had hired a musician who was also a computer programmer, and McNutt’s flute discovered it could not only play music by living composers, it could play music interactively with a computer as its duet partner.

Now in her fourth year as University of North Texas music teacher, Elizabeth McNutt has pieces written for her by contemporary music composers, and she is flown into places like Belfast, Seoul and Switzerland to debut new works. On Monday evening (April 13), Elizabeth performs with The Tornado Project in Denton – a trio for flute, clarinet and computer.

Art&Seek: What are all the different functions you perform at UNT?

Elizabeth McNutt: I’m an ensemble director – I direct the music ensemble NOVA, I teach flute students, I coach chamber music, and then I’m also on the composition faculty and I lecture in courses pertaining to contemporary music.

A&S: Do you compose specifically for the flute?

E.M.: I don’t consider myself a composer. That’s what’s strange about me being on the composition faculty – I’m technically not a composer. Publicly, I’m not a composer.

My favorite class is a graduate seminar in contemporary music performance practice. So that’s really good for performers and composers, and very practical, because it’s coming mostly from the point of view of someone who mostly only plays contemporary music. I also teach a class about music after 1945 – recent trends in contemporary music.

A&S: Tell us about this concert you have coming up.

E.M.: The Tornado Project is me and a clarinetist from New York named Esther Lamneck.

We had shared dressing rooms at festivals and had a friendly relationship backstage, but we had never worked together until two of the composers cooked up this idea. And they literally cooked it up – they were in one of their kitchens. They got this idea that we should get a bunch of composers together – and these were people in the UK, so there they were in Ireland – and they were thinking, “we should write for Esther Lamneck, who’s in New York, and Elizabeth McNutt, who’s in Texas.” We have had, so far, five pieces written for the two of us, but our trio is with computer. We’re flute, clarinet, computer.

A&S: Is there improvisation involved?

E.M.: Many times. In the case of this concert, four of the five pieces have a lot of improvisation.

A&S: How is playing with the computer different from playing with people?

E.M.: It’s often guided improvisation; there is a score that the composers write, then they also do the programming, so they have some kind of model in mind for what’s going to happen. I’d say the relationship with the computer changes based on the piece and the composer and the style. It can be a purely passive model, where the computer is just imitating. But in other cases, like in one of the pieces by Andrew May, the computer is doing a lot of interacting with us based on what we play. We don’t know how to manipulate the computer. In a way it is like playing with a person. We’re interacting with the sounds; it’s also hearing us and responding in a certain way. And it’s very fun, and you never know what to expect.

A&S: You’ve been all over the world with the “cyber-flute repertoire.”

E.M.: I have traveled quite a bit doing this.

A&S: Is the response different in different places?

E.M.: You never know. I can be playing a concert somewhere and think no way will anyone be interested in this tiny town of 500 people, and you can have people who love it. It was sort of odd when I played in Seoul. I was signing autographs in the bathroom. One of the great things in working with technology is that there can be tremendous stylistic variety in the music itself. That helps appeal to a wide audience, because every piece has a drastically different mood and character so it stays really interesting and fresh.

A&S: Were you familiar with Denton before coming here to teach?

E.M.: Absolutely. UNT is so well known as a college of music. I had been here a couple of times, once recording and once to do a festival. I had no idea I would someday be working here, and I remember being so impressed by the facilities and the people here. So when I went back home I actually brought a brochure to show my husband. It’s amazing.

The Art&Seek Q&A is a weekly discussion with a person involved in the arts in North Texas. Check back next Thursday for another installment.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL: When you spend more than $300 million constructing a pair of buildings, there are lots of details to consider. One of them is how you are going to inform people about the building they are entering. Signage takes all forms, from the chest-thumping grandeur of a team logo on a football field to the blink and you might miss it subtlety of an office building. The designers for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts are leaning toward the latter, according to a story today on GuideLive. The reasoning? “When this center opens, no one is ever going to mistake what building is the Winspear Opera House and which building is the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre,” says Doug Curtis, vice president for design and construction for the DCPA. “There are no other buildings in North Texas or maybe in the state of Texas that look like these buildings.”

A DEAL FOR DIONNE: If you want to see a music legend and benefit a good cause, I’ve got a deal for you. Dionne Warwick will be in town on April 18 for Curtain Call, a benefit concert that helps the Dallas Summer Musicals teach the kids about theater and music. The DSM sends word that they have set aside some tickets in the Music Hall at Fair Park for $35 and $50. Not bad, considering ticket packages for the night run up to $500. If that sounds like something you might be interested, you can purchase tickets here.

TURN, TURN, TURN: There’s plenty of arts jobs that we don’t ever take much time to consider. One of the more interesting ones is the page turner – the hands that must somehow get into the mind of the soloist and know the precise moment to flip to the next page of the score. The Wall Street Journal talked to some page turners for this informative and very funny piece that ran this week. You would think that the ability to read music would be mandatory, but as it turns out, sometimes that just mucks things up. “I don’t even need page turners to read music just as long as they look at me and see me nod that it’s time to turn the page,” says pianist Joseph Kalichstein. “The page turner gets involved in the score and I get totally ignored.”

… but has anyone mentioned the company’s Art Deco-y new sign? The black box on the bottom is a programmable electronic display for the name of the current show.

Rosson Crow in front of Queens Butcher Shop, 1910 -- oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 2008

• KERA radio story:

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• Expanded online story:
  

Rosson Crow paints big canvases – often 8 feet by 12 feet. She generally paints interiors, interiors of rooms that may be empty of people but they’ve clearly been lived in, often riotously. These are rooms at peak moments of consumption. Hollywood nightclubs. Wall Street offices. Grand butcher shops. Luxury suites.

Rather than just celebrations of excess, however, Crow’s rooms are caught after the partygoers have left but before the maids have cleaned up the carnage. A typical image in her Focus show at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth is a painting of a San Francisco saloon — depicted after the 1906 earthquake wrecked it. There’s this double-sided feel of  lush exuberance and wretched hangover in her work.

CROW: “It’s a presentation but it’s also a critique. It’s like the sobering morning after the orgy of decadence. [Laughs.]”

Crow says she’s long been fascinated by historical rooms. She recalls growing up in Plano and going on field trips there to the Heritage Farmstead Museum. It’s a preserved 19^th-century farmhouse.

CROW: “I’d just been fascinated by that. So I’ve always really been into kind of old spaces. I remember when I was really little and playing house with my friends, we always had to play it, like, set in the 1800s.”

WEEKS: “So a sort of Victorian home.”

CROW: “Yeah, we didn’t play regular house. It was always a historical thing. And then we had to do it with British accents.”

Crow is only 26. That’s incredibly young to be getting the kinds of attention and prices she’s earned.  She’s had gallery shows in New York, London and Paris. But she’d already hit upon her signature style and subject when she was only an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She became obsessed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms. These are historic recreations of different cultural moments. They’re not real, Crow says, they’re more like stage sets. Which is one reason her own paintings are so big.

CROW: “I’m making these spaces that I want to seem so over-the-top and so much of a spectacle. I almost want the paintings to seem like theatrical backdrops that you can enter into.”

Crow currently lives in Los Angeles and enjoys going to the public library to pore through old photos and clippings for inspiration. But her period research does not mean Crow’s paintings are historical dioramas. She emphasizes their painterly nature by working fast, her brushwork deliberately splashy and loose. And she finishes by covering the picture with drips and slashes of paint. Paradoxically, these lend her canvases a sense of energy — and dissipation.

CROW: “And also I like the way that the paint sits on top of the image. I like the play of feeling like you can go in the space but then you’re stopped.”

The Modern Art Museum’s exhibition in Fort Worth contains only four canvases by Crow, but she’s selected these brown and blood-red canvases with Texas in mind. Collectively, the paintings are darker, more violent than her usual work.  She’s not chosen any of her gaudy, color-saturated images of Hollywood interiors, but she has included a rare landscape, a view of the Spindletop oilfield after the gusher blew. The cluster of derricks look like so many wooden barricades.

Jukebox at Tootsie's, 1972 -- oil, enamel, spray paint and acrylic on canvas, 2007 -- NOT in the Modern show

The Fort Worth exhibition may be small, but it is Crow’s first museum show. A notable event. And it is on her home turf.

CROW: “It’s really strangely validating in some way and really amazing just to be able to have my parents come and my family and friends. It means a lot; it’s really cool.”

For all of her consideration of the past and of artistic influences like painter Francis Bacon (see her Queens Butcher Shop, above), Crow only belatedly realized one source of inspiration for her rooms – an inspiration close to home. Her mother, Peggi,  once designed interiors for private jets.

CROW: “It took me a shockingly long time to make the connection. You have that moment where you’re, like, I’m turning into my mother. But um, I have a lot of the photographs of things she worked on. They’re amazing. So it’s there, it’s in the back of my head. It’ll probably happen sometime.”

Congratulations to Susan Chadbourne, the winner of the Flickr photo of the week contest!  She follows last week’s winner, Ezekiel Bierschank.

If you would like to participate, all you need to do is upload your photo to to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took previous to the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves another facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Monday to Sunday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Monday afternoon. We’ll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We’ll post the winners’ photo on Wednesday and Gini Mascorro will read your name on the air at the end of her daily arts calendar.

Now, here’s more from Susan:

Susan Chadbourne
Title of photo: Pecan Tree
Equipment: Canon Powershot SD 800 IS
Tell us more about your photo: I was sitting under the pecan tree in my front yard trying to take some shots of flowers. The flower shots weren’t working out for me, so I looked up and saw these fantastic limbs. Inspired by the angle of the branches against the brilliant sky back drop, I placed my camera against the tree and starting taking some photos. It was a gorgeous day for taking pictures.

A DEAL IS STRUCK IN RICHARDSON: The economy has made it hard out there for a theater company these days. So a pair of them in Richardson made a smart move – they joined forces. The Labyrinth Theatre and Richardson Theatre Center had already partnered to produce a recent production of The Foreigner; now they will merge and move into a new, larger space. So how was this marriage made? You can get all the details over on the neighborsgo.com blog.

U2 DATE SET: The rumors swirling around if and when U2 would bring its latest tour to North Texas can finally be put to bed. The band announced Tuesday that it’s packing its giant, 360 degree stage into the new Cowboys Stadium on Oct. 12. Tickets go onsale April 20; you can get all the details on how to buy them at the band’s Wed site.

THE BIRTH OF ROAD AGENT: You might remember Christina Rees’ name from her days as the art critic for the Dallas Observer. That was about 10 years ago, though, and in the meantime she’s held other jobs that have led her to her current post as the owner of Road Agent gallery in Deep Ellum. So how did she get from there to here? Pegasus News profiles the gallery owner and finds that in a time when others were fleeing Deep Ellum, she felt right at home.

Following the embarrassment of the George Steel “era” and with only six months to go before the company opens at the Winspear Opera House, the Dallas Opera has promoted from within. Jonathan Pell, who has been with the opera for 24 years, now assumes the role of artistic director, a position last held by co-founder Nicola Rescigno. Pell previously served as the director of artistic administration.

Pell has been with the Dallas Opera for 24 years.

“In an industry that thrives on extraordinary performers, Jonathan has consistently demonstrated the artistic integrity, business acumen and day-to-day personal commitment that makes him one of the best in the business,” Dallas Opera President Dr. Kern Wildenthal said in a news release.

The company is still searching for a new general director to replace Steel, who left in January to become general manager of the New York City Opera.