This is one of three Potomac News reviews that won me a first place Virginia Press Association award in the Critical Writing category for medium-size newspapers in January 1998.
There’s no way around it: “Mourning Becomes Electra” at the Shakespeare Theater is a stinker.
It’s not as though there aren’t solid performances in the production of Eugene O’Neill’s classic of near-incest and revenge. Ted van Griethuysen, as Civil War Brig. Gen. Ezra Mannon, turns in a solid performance, as do Franchelle Stewart Dorn, as his wife Christine, and Emery Battis as Seth Beckwith.
And the set is something to see: An enormous tomb-like estate, rotating to reveal an inner, dingy heart.
Although the play’s language sometimes feels a little dated or stilted, it’s still a powerful piece.
No, the problem is a startlingly over-the-top performance by Kelly McGillis as Mannon’s daughter Lavinia.
Never mind that yet again McGillis is yet again playing a character she’s absolutely unsuited for. McGillis, as she has in several other Shakespeare Theater plays this season, plays a character almost a third of her age, prompting audible sounds of disbelief from the audience the first time Lavinia’s age is mentioned.
And the argument that there were no mature roles available doesn’t work here, either: Christine’s role is one of the play’s meatiest.
For whatever reason, McGillis and director Michael Kahn have made this play the latest in their string of vanity productions for the actress, but this time there’s no hint of the subtle, nuanced performer who made her name in the film “Witness” over a decade ago.
Deprived of her mother’s love growing up, Lavinia is obsessively fixated on her father, to the point of trying to “become another wife to him.” When he returns home from the Civil War, she’s quick to try to dominate his time and attention, and holds a blackmail threat over her mother’s head (mom has been consorting with a seaman, Mannon’s long-lost nephew).
When Mannon dies, his heart medication replaced by poison, McGillis leaps onto his bed, roaring with agony, cradling his dead body against her. But instead of seeming tragic, it’s a performance that draws chuckles from the audience, and drove some for the exits during the play’s two intermissions.
And this isn’t just a momentary lapse: Every scene McGillis is in is infected with what might diplomatically be called “energy,” although “gross overacting” seems more accurate. Even Dorn and van Griethuysen give broader performances when onstage with her, either trying to keep the scenes on an even keel or simply trying to keep up.
“Mourning Becomes Electra” is the Shakespeare Theater’s first full-out failure in memory. If you need your classics fix, try to hold on for two weeks: the Shakespeare Theater will return to the Carter Bannon amphitheater for outdoor performances of “Henry V” on June 1.
Originally published in the May 15, 1997 edition of The Potomac News.
The propeller didn’t need anyone to give it a spin. It sputtered to life on its own as the engine roared with a sound like that of a 450 horsepower lawn mower.
The three other planes, buzzing in unison, taxied along behind the first Stearman A-75 biplane down the Manassas Regional Airport runway. Models once used for World War II training flights, then for crop-dusting, the Stearmans were promoting Red Baron frozen pizza.
Monday was a day for promotional flights: The Brut blimp bobbed in a nearby field, its nose winched to a mooring post.
The planes taxied to the end of the runway, bright sunlight making pilots and passengers in the two-man planes slip on sunglasses or aviator goggles. The pilots paused a moment, waiting near the intersection of the busy runway. Then, with permission from the tower, they were off.
The planes rode down the runway in “V” formation, closer together than most pilots would ever dream. But the Red Baron Stearman Squadron does this sort of rule-breaking for a living at air shows around the country.
Pilots must have several thousand hours of air-time logged before they are hired by Red Baron and begin doing these sort of dangerous maneuvers.
“A lot of it is discipline. You have to get the kid out first,” pilot Sonny Lovelace said. “You’re going against eveyrthing you’ve learned. … I fly every day for four hours in a close call.”
The pilots are on the road about 200 days a year, flying in air shows or in promotional events like the one in Manassas 160 of those days. For six weeks a year, they train in Arizona, practicing new maneuvers and sharpening skills dulled by a winter away from the promotional circuit.
“Rest assured it’s a job,” Lovelace said. He’s been flying light aircraft for 28 years. “The worst part is being away from your family.”
On a recent phone call home to Nebraska, he and his wife figured he’d been on the road 2,300 days in the 10 years he’s worked for Red Baron.
The planes seemed uncertain in the first moment they took off, wobbling, then buzzing angrily into the skies, tucking in close to one another with less than a wingspan seperating them.
Flight inside the open cockpit is relatively calm. The passenger compartment is forward, near the engine, and is quite warm, although cool air whistles around the small windshield.
The squadron was in town for one day, bringing frozen pizza to the airport and free flights to contest winters from as far away as Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Before loading passengers into the cockpits, strapping them into the parachutes, then buckling the seat belts around the chest and thighs, the pilots had asked “You don’t get airsick, do you?”
Pilot Bryan Regan, in the lead plane, spoke into his microphone.
“Let’s do it.”
He pulled the stick back, the plane going into a steep climb. The Nokesville farmlands fell away in a hurry, as Regan took the plane into a loop and a barrel roll. Then, he pointed the plane straight up.
“Look over your left shoulder,” he said. The plane fell back and to the left, rolling in a controlled tumble back toward Manassas in a “hammerhead” maneuver.
At this point, one of the passengers discovered she wasn’t as brave as she thought. One biplane broke away from the pack, which had reformed into another tight “V,” arrowing back toward the Manassas airport.
For Regan, the desire to become one of those magnificent men in a flying machine goes back a long way.
“I dreamed about this kind of stuff when I was a kid,” he said. Visions of Snoopy and the Red Baron dogfighting stayed with him until he finally acted on them while he was a pre-veterinary major in college in Louisiana. He ran into an old friend who was now a flight instructor. “I had a couple thousand left in the bank of my college money,” he said.
And the rest is history.
“Opportunity just kept falling into my lap,” Regan said. One such opportunity was to fly the Red Baron planes from site to site, where stunt pilots would fly them in the actual shows. After three years of that, he got his shot at the big time.
And he doesn’t regret the path not taken.
“It’s become a way of life,” Regan said. “It’s what comes natural to me. I think being a vet might be a lot more work.”
As with flying all light aircraft, landing is the trickiest and most frightening part. The planes dropped toward the runway, then hovered a second as the pilots all but killed the power to the engines, dropping wheels to the tarmac.
The planes hummed along toward the hangar, parking in formation as neatly as they flew. Passengers unbuckled and climbed out.
Two small boys ran up to one Andrews Air Force Base woman.
“Hey, Mom, did you like it?”
She grinned, clearly a little unnerved.
“Yeah, I did. I really did.”
This is one of three Potomac News reviews that won me a first place Virginia Press Association award in the Critical Writing category for medium-size newspapers in January 1998.
Skip to the end of this review. Find the phone number for tickets to “Sylvia” at the Studio Theater. Call it. Buy some tickets. Go. Trust me.
You haven’t called yet, have you? Fine. Read the rest of the review first, but don’t call the Potomac News in a huff if the tickets are all sold out by the time you finally do call.
“Sylvia,” to snatch an ad slogan from the television world, is must-see theater.
This smart, funny four-person play spotlights the stray dog Manhattanite Tom brings back from a walk in Central Park one day, after having yet another fight with his boss.
Sylvia and he make an immediate connection, and she’s the first person in his life in a long time to give him unconditional love, without the Machiavellian manipulations present in so many of his other relationships.
Oh, yes, Sylvia is a person, brought to hilarious life by Sarah Marshall, last seen as Oliver North’s maniacal devil-on-the-shoulder in the Signature Theater’s “Three Nights in Teheran.”
Part of the fun is that the characters are able to converse with Sylvia, fleshing out the human-canine relationship quite nicely:
“I love you, Greg!”
“I know, Sylvia, but sit.”
“Gladly, Greg.”
Marshall bounds around the stage with convincingly canine body language and a refreshing lack of human modesty.
While Greg finds Sylvia to be just the right thing for his midlife crisis, his wife Kate, sees things differently. She’s just beginning an ambitious new career adding Shakespeare to the middle school curriculum, and doesn’t think a dog fits into their lifestyle.
Greg and Kate have passed their “doggie years,” as Kate puts it, with their kids in college and their home in the suburbs traded for a chic in-town apartment. But Greg, who increasingly feels his job isn’t “real,” finds Sylvia speaks to a deep-seated need in him.
“A man and his dog is a sacred relationship,” a fellow dog owner on Central Park’s Dog Hill tells Greg. “What nature hath put together, let no woman put asunder.”
“I feel like I’m up against something that’s gone of for hundreds of thousands of years,” Kate says, “Ever since the first wolf came out of the woods and hunkered down next to a caveman by the fire.”
Kate and Sylvia circle each other warily throughout the play, each trying to get the upper hand in their tug-of-war for Tom’s soul.
“I want you to know that all you are is a male menopausal moment,” Kate tells the canine at one point, not inaccurately. The question, of course, is whether Sylvia’s appearance marks a sea change in Greg’s life.
Kate is determined that this, too, shall pass. Sylvia, on the other hand, is determined that she’s here to stay. Their battle takes up the rest of the play, and draws in innocent bystanders and consumes the marriage, threatening to break it apart.
Although “Sylvia” is charming and often cute, the dog is, well, earthy, and the play isn’t necessarily family fare.
“Nice crotch here, nice crotch!” she announces as a visitor struggles to get the dog away from her lap. “This is just my way of saying ‘hello!'”
Scatological humor, a fact of life in the doggie world, also gets some play.
“Excuse me, I have to go check my messages,” Sylvia says at one point, then scampers off to sniff a telephone pole.
Of particular note is a cryingly funny scene where Sylvia spots a cat and launches into a profanity-strewn invective that would make a Navy SEAL blush.
Families sensitive to foul language or doggie romance might want to stay away. But it’s all very much in character for the dog, and Sarah Marshall gives an award-worthy performance.
In any other play, J. Fred Shiffman, who plays a trio of characters, would have stolen the show. He morphs from book-quoting dog owner in the park, to Phillis, a Vassar classmate of Kate’s, to the ambiguously gendered marriage counselor Leslie. Shiffman seems to be channeling Carol Burnett, making all his characters funny and memorable in their own right.
Almost another performer is the clean, even austere set, especially the furniture that moves on and offstage seemingly by magic, thanks to near-invisible tracks hidden in the wooden floor.
This story originally appeared in The Potomac News.
MALHALA, BOSNIA — In a lawless and dangerous land, where most people solve their problems with a gun, he’s one of a small band of lawmen dedicated to bringing justice and order. He wears a pale gold star on his chest.
The land is Bosnia.
The badge Bob Mosier wears is a Fauquier County Sheriff’s Department badge.
He left the sheriff’s department behind to become a member of the United Nations’ International Police Task Force.
On a chilly, gray Friday afternoon, four infantrymen of 2nd Platoon, Company C, 1-26 Infantry walked into a mess. Two dozen angry residents in the Muslim village of Malhala — smack-dab in the middle of the demilitarized Zone Of Separation between the Croat and Muslim federation and the Serbian portion of Bosnia — waved their hands, sobbed and shouted angrily.
The Bosnian Serb police who patrol the area were holding a villager. He hadn’t been seen since he was picked up, and villagers suspected the worst, and not without reason.
Several months ago, the police held an elderly villager’s arms and legs down and beat his genital area with a baseball bat. He went into a coma and later died.
Through the unit’s translator, the villagers explained their fears. Officially, the village has 316 residents. But the U.S. soldiers of checkpoint Sierra-10, who patrol several of the neighboring villages, have counted only 47 residents. The rest are dead or too afraid to come back home.
The villagers angrily denounced the Serbian police. Although officially inside the Serbian sphere of influence under the General Framework Agreement for Peace (the working blueprint springing from the Dayton Peace Accords) the Serbian police didn’t begin patrolling until late last year. Now, the soldiers tried talking the villagers down from their hysteria, just as they had last August, when the first police patrols began.
“We just talked to Bob,” Staff Sgt. Gary Farrington said to the villagers, gesturing to his radio man, Spc. Russell Hargrave who had just broken contact with Mosier. “He’s coming. You know Bob; he’s a good guy.”
The white U.N. Nissan pickup rolled up through the ruined village. It stopped near the knot of villagers and soldiers, and Bob Mosier stepped out.
Mosier, a former captain in the Fauquier County Sheriff’s Department, has been a member of the International Police Task Force since October. The Woodbridge High School graduate works with the various Bosnian police forces, acting as a liaison between them, helping with training and monitoring for human rights abuses.
He held his hands up, smiling and shaking hands with all parties present. He had been speaking to the Serbian police, alerted by radio of the situation. Malhala has been a persistent trouble spot and is closely monitored by the U.N.
The man was on his way back, he explained. This led to another round of hand-waving by the villagers. If the Serbian police station was only 20 minutes away, the villager had better be here in 20 minutes, they explained.
Farrington sauntered over to Mosier.
“You know they’re going to be timing this to the second,” the infantryman muttered.
Mosier led the translator off to the side, beckoning the village leaders over, one by one, explaining to them quietly the importance of keeping the situation under control.
Fortunately, a few minutes later the villager did arrive, brought by a Serbian police officer and an Austrian U.N. observer. The prisoner, much to the villagers’ dismay, had dried blood trailing from his ear.
The yelling and shouting began anew. Mosier and the soldiers spent the next half hour talking to the villagers, using words to head off violence.
“If this can happen to him, it can happen to me,” one elderly woman exclaimed. “They are going to kill us all!”
Farrington sighed, pulling a cigarette from his pack.
“Welcome to Bosnia.”
The situation was a bit more complicated than it initially appeared, Mosier explained later. The villager, Mahmet, had a history of run-ins with the Serbian police and had threatened to kill them several weeks ago. When pulled over and asked for his identification earlier in the day, he became belligerent and began to verbally abuse the police once more. They brought him in to determine what sort of threat, if any, he posed. And it wasn’t clear who worked him over or what organization they represented. All that would have to be determined for the human rights report on the incident.
What could have happened in Malhala is not clear. The villagers were forced to give up their weapons under the conditions of the peace plan, although they probably have a small cache of weapons hidden somewhere. But the town’s graveyard is full of defaced tombstones and several of the houses under repair have been destroyed. And, of course, everyone remembers what happened to the old man.
In the midst of armed Bosnian police, American soldiers and likely armed villagers, the only definitively unarmed participant is Mosier.
“Unarmed,” Mosier said earlier. “An unarmed mission, mind you. Unbelievable!”
The International Police Task Force’s neutrality doesn’t make it beloved: Mosier’s station in Zvornik in the Republic of Srpska, the Bosnian Serb portion of Bosnia-Hercegovina, was held hostage for several days in August.
“It’s been quite an adjustment, not being armed. I’ve been armed for, what, 15 years? So it’s been adjustment,” Mosier, one of the 161 Americans in the 1,750-man IPTF, said later, racing down the darkened road toward the electric lights of Zvornik. “I tell you, I’ve used every bit of my police skills.”
Mosier has sacrificed more than just his gun. He had to quit his job as a department captain, receiving a “special deputy” status instead. And he left his wife and three young children behind for a year.
“I had gone through some executive development and it was suggested that I put out some resumes, just to see what I was worth,” he said. “Anyway, I sent out a resume [to the United Nations], just to see what I was worth. … Then a letter came back that I was accepted.”
Mosier quit at the height of his career for a one-year stint overseas. It was his first time away from American soil other than a Bahamas vacation. And he was going to a war-torn country where he didn’t speak the language and would go unarmed.
“I prayed about it,” he said. “When this was offered, I had a peace about it. And what a rewarding experience.”
He gives a lot of credit to his wife, Cindy, herself a Fauquier County deputy.
“I kind of couldn’t believe him. I said ‘you’re not really going are you?’ I said that right up to when he got on the plane. I did not want him to go, to be honest with you,” Cindy said by phone from Fauquier County. “But as his wife, I felt I had to be supportive of him.”
At their Bealeton home, the Mosiers keep a running countdown of the days Bob has left in Bosnia on the kitchen calendar and there are two big yellow ribbons outside.
Cindy Mosier visited her husband at Christmas and will do so again in April, on their 10th anniversary. The December trip, her first outside the U.S., opened her eyes.
“I was so happy that I’m an American. I guess that’s the best way I can describe it. I guess I just took it for granted the way we have it here,” she said. “My heart was just broken.”
Being a law officer herself, she knows and understands the risks involved, and worries about her husband’s safety.
“He kind of doesn’t tell me too much, because he doesn’t want me to worry.”
Mosier’s base of operations in downtown Zvornik seems almost normal, compared to the devastated towns near the demilitarized zone. Smiling young dark-haired couples stroll down the street, arm in arm. The electricity is on and the hotel bars are filled. The gas heat was just restored after being out all winter and the economy is still shaky at best. And the glass wall of the stairwell that leads up to the IPTF office in Zvornik, above the Hotel Drina bar, is laced with bullet holes.
“The phone lines don’t always work,” Mosier said, “You can’t call from the republic to the federation. I finally figured out a way for my wife to call Belgrade and get the call transferred to me.”
He carries pictures of his wife and children in his wallet, pulling them out unbidden.
“I look at them often.”
But the job at hand is an important one, especially when he considers the differences between Bosnia and America.
“I used to think we pay a high price for freedom. I don’t think that anymore,” he said. It’s hard to feel Americans have their rights infringed when there’s one police officer in the United States for every 2,000 citizens, when in Bosnia, the ratio is one police officer for every 75 citizens. “This is a police state. I don’t ever want that to happen.”
And the police have a very different outlook on their jobs than American officers, something Mosier is trying to help soften.
“I guess the most important thing that’s happened over here is the interpersonal relationships and introducing Western democratic styles of police,” he said. Too many police still have a Cold War-era “beat first, ask questions later” mentality. “Once you break the ice of ‘yeah, I’m a monitor, I’m here to watch you,’ they start asking you for advice.”
The republic and federation police forces’ human rights violations seize all the headlines, but Mosier says that’s not the whole story.
“It’s the same thing as in the United States, if one person in uniform does something wrong, all they see is the uniform. … They’re all bad guys. But I’ll tell you, that’s not the case. I’ve worked with some great policemen in the federation and the republic. There’s bad guys on both sides that have to be vetted. And that’s where the IPTF comes in.”
His assignment ends in October, but Mosier believes his tenure in Bosnia has been time well spent.
“I’ve had several dreams in my life — be a policeman, get married, have a family, build a log cabin — and I can honestly say I’ve accomplished them all. What do I do now?” Mosier said, in the small U.N. office. “I had people coming to me and saying ‘you’re crazy, quitting your job, you won’t have anything when you get back,’ but doors open in your life and you have to go through them.”
This story originally appeared in The Potomac News.
SIMIN HAN, BOSNIA — The convoy of Humvees rolled into the schoolyard in a cloud of dust.
A horde of children, between the ages of 4 and 10, swarmed the vehicles, offering clumsy high-fives to the GIs, calling out for “lunch box” — prepackaged Army rations known as Meals Ready to Eat.
The soldiers tumbled out of their cars, grinning at one another and the children. Those giving out candy were almost at risk for their lives, with children tugging at their sleeves, shouting out mysterious requests in Serbo-Croatian and waving their hands frantically at their benefactors.
On the surface, the students at the school in the village of Simin Han, just east of Tuzla, seemed like any other children. They pushed and laughed and sang silly songs to the visitors.
They wear “Aladdin” T-shirts and “Lion King” jeans. Teachers had to herd the students, who were easily distracted by the soldiers in their Kevlar vests and helmets, from class to class.
A dozen little girls played jump rope with found string tied into longer strands as older boys lounged on the fences, watching the soldiers’ arrival with an elaborate show of nonchalance.
But across the driveway from the school was an equally large building, a shelter for families whose husbands and fathers were dead or missing. Other students in the school have moved with their families into other Muslims’ houses, where most of them now live one family to a room.
The Psychological Operations unit from Eagle Base in Tuzla was here for a number of reasons: to discuss the school’s facilities and safety, to buy shelter-made crafts for resale at the Eagle Base Post Exchange and to distribute food and books as aid.
Taking advantage of the situation was Sgt. Roy Caldwell, of the history unit, who brought a video camera along to record answers to questions posed by a fourth-grade class in Helena, Mont., where his son goes to school.
Although the Bosnian school system numbers the academic levels differently, he found a class of comparably aged students and an amenable teacher.
“Hi,” Caldwell said, standing at the front of the room. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and was filled with the sounds of students and soldiers in the driveway, outside its windows. Students sat side-by-side at two-person desks. “First, I want to say thanks for letting us to come to your class. What I want is to ask some questions asked by a fourth-grade class in America.”
As translated by Vildonna Halilovic, one of the Army’s Bosnian civilian employees, the idea was met with enthusiasm. The children leapt out of their chairs, arms raised to tell that they play soccer, volleyball and basketball when asked what games they enjoy.
Caldwell put his hand to his head, thinking about which question to ask next.
“Oh, this is a kid question: How many kids have TV?”
About three-quarters of the class raised their hands.
“How many have phones?”
Only two of the 30 students raised their hands. Phone lines were one of the early targets during the civil war, and even today communication throughout the Tennessee-sized nation can be hit or miss.
Caldwell consulted his crib sheet and grinned.
“What happens when you misbehave in class?”
Halilovic listened a moment to the replies, then gestured at the teacher standing next to her.
“She is yelling at them a little bit,” Halilovic explained. For more severe infractions, students get demerits in the teacher’s book.
For the most part, the Bosnian children’s questions were similar to the Americans’: Do American kids play soccer? Do they have to learn math? Do American children have their own rooms?
But as familiar as the classroom scene was, there were telling differences: The students’ history books include graphic depictions of the Bosnian civil war, including photos of concentration camp prisoners and dead bodies.
One of the students, a blond girl of 11, sat at a desk by herself on the left side of the classroom, blowing bubbles with her gum and listening to the proceedings. One of the better students in the class, she eagerly answered questions, her hand waving frantically for attention. But she’s also one of the students most touched by the carnage that swept through the former Yugoslavia five years ago.
Smaida is one of three students in the class who also live in the shelter. She, her mother and her two sisters, ages 3 and 14, have lived there for a year. Two years ago they fled the worst civilian massacre since World War II. Nearly 8,000 people are missing in the wake of the ethnic cleansing that swept the Muslim community of Srebrenica.
When she mentioned the flight from Srebrenica after class, Smaida’s face went pale, her light green eyes began to water.
“She says it was really bad when she saw all those people wounded,” Halilovic translated.
Life in the shelter is “nice,” she said, but “it was better there” in Srebrenica, before the killings began.
The past overshadows her hopes for the future. She doesn’t have ambitions like becoming a doctor, a teacher, a journalist. All she wants for the future, Halilovic translates is “she would like for her father to come home. And she hopes he will come back.”
Her father, Smajo, whom she was named after, has been missing for three years and is presumed dead.
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