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October 2, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Mama’s Molotov Cocktails

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

WASHINGTON — Going gently into that good night, or going gently anywhere at all, is obviously not an option for Alexandra, the heroine of “The Velocity of Autumn,” a slight but genial new play by Eric Coble at the Arena Stage here. Although we first see her slumped comfortably in an armchair, wearing a festively colored dress and listening to a little Berlioz, the 79-year-old Alexandra, played with wonderful grit and wit by the great actress Estelle Parsons, is armed for bear.

She has barricaded herself in her Brooklyn brownstone and laid in a store of homemade explosives to keep her enemies at bay. Scattered around the otherwise cozy room are dozens of wine bottles, Mason jars and other assorted receptacles, all of which have been turned into Molotov cocktails. It is clear that should anyone attempt to remove her forcibly from the premises, the premises — and perhaps half the block — will be going with her.

Mr. Coble’s conceit — the feisty old lady as urban terrorist — may sound a little strained and too whimsical by half. But thanks to Ms. Parsons’s wry, thoroughly unsentimental performance, and Mr. Coble’s mostly sensitive writing, the slightly contrived setup fades into irrelevance fairly quickly.

“The Velocity of Autumn” is fundamentally a study of a woman of intelligence and firm will wrestling with the inevitable diminishments that come with age. Alexandra’s real enemies are not the officious son and daughter who have been pressuring her to leave her home, or the police who are soon to be alerted to the potential of a brownstone going kablooey on a leafy New York street.

No, the real foes are much harder to vanquish: the small daily humiliations that age brings, the legs that won’t work the way they used to, the mind and memory that choke up like a balky engine. (“Proper nouns are the first thing to leave the body,” Alexandra complains when reaching for a word.)

Most painful, perhaps, is the despairing knowledge that as the body and mind slowly decay, Alexandra’s identity — the personality that eight decades of living has earned her — is under siege. As she puts it, “What the world is taking away from me, what time is taking away from me, what God is taking away from me ... is me.”

Alexandra’s Alamo is breached, in the play’s opening moments, by an unexpected visitor, her estranged gay son Chris (Stephen Spinella), who wakes her from her mild doze when he clambers in the window, having climbed a tree. Christopher evaporated from Alexandra’s life some 20 years before — the circumstances are never explained satisfactorily — but has been called home by his siblings to deal with this unusual family trauma. A

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painter, like his mother, Christopher had always been the child Alexandra felt closest to.

The family history, and Christopher’s grappling with the dissatisfactions of his life, are themes running in counterpoint to the primary subject of their discussion, namely just what Alexandra thinks she’s doing, and whether she’ll come to her senses and seek a more sensible solution to her embattled state.

The outcome of that pressing question is never in any great doubt, of course. For all its appealingly acerbic humor, this gentle play, which sometimes recalls the amiably crowd-pleasing comedies of Neil Simon, clearly is not going to foist a violent ending upon us.

But Mr. Coble, and the play’s director, Molly Smith, have an immense asset in Ms. Parsons. Played with even a slight sense of twinkly adorableness, or for that matter any lapses into the maudlin, Alexandra and her plight would certainly touch hearts in the audience.

But Ms. Parsons’s bracing, honest and often deliciously funny performance gives no quarter to such easy heart string tugging. When Christopher confesses, at one point, to having dark thoughts of suicide, the moment is met by Alexandra with quiet acceptance and a casual touch of a hand on his shoulder, then a delicate change of subject. Ms. Parsons invests Alexandra with such natural intelligence and strength of purpose — notwithstanding those memory lapses — that our affection for her rests not on pity, but true sympathy for her plight.

It helps, of course, that Ms. Parsons also has a brisk way with a one-liner, as when she says, of her husband’s attitude toward Christopher’s homosexuality: “It made him uncomfortable. Like Gorgonzola cheese.” Here, too, Ms. Parsons gently underplays the jokes, letting them land softly, so that lines that read like shtick (“Just getting you out of diapers was like the Bataan Death March”) come across with a nice crackle without sounding artificial.

Mr. Spinella’s role is less fully fleshed out. Christopher’s reasons for remaining out of touch are left vague, and he has a couple of long, stagy speeches that interrupt the easy flow of the play. But he fills the vague outlines of the character with enough emotional specificity to make him a more or less equal partner in this pas de deux.

You could argue that Ms. Parsons, who is 85, gives such a vigorous, lively performance that it’s hard to believe her children would imagine Alexandra to be ready for a nursing home. But when she speaks of her frustration at her aching feet or scattered memory, there is a quiet but unmistakable sense of dread and defeat.

Anyone who’s even reached the crest of middle age will have an innate feeling for this admirably drawn, lovingly portrayed woman. Even as she rails intermittently throughout the play at the indignities she’s having to endure, Alexandra also admits there’s a bright spot or two amid the encroaching gloom.

“One of the few pleasures, I have to say, of growing old is that I can reread some of my favorite mysteries and still have no idea who’s going to do it,” she says at one point. As it happens I can relate: I just reread “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” Alexandra. Imagine my surprise.

The Velocity of Autumn

By Eric Coble; directed by Molly Smith; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Linda Cho; lighting by Rui Rita; sound by Darron L West; wig design by Paul Huntley; stage manager, Susan R. White. Presented by Arena

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Stage, Ms. Smith, artistic director; Edgar Dobie, executive producer; by special arrangement with HOP Theatricals LLC. At the Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth Street SW, Washington; (202) 488-3300; arenastage.org. Through Oct. 20. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Estelle Parsons (Alexandra) and Stephen Spinella (Chris).

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http://theater.nytimes.com/.../theater/reviews/estelle-parsons-stars-in-the-velocity-of-autumn.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print[10/3/2013 10:07:50 AM] , Beacon of Stage Avant-Garde, Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com

October 2, 2013 Ruth Maleczech, Beacon of Stage Avant- Garde, Dies at 74 By BEN BRANTLEY Ruth Maleczech, a reigning figure of the New York avant-garde theater for more than four decades, died on Monday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 74.

She had been suffering from cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, her son, Lute Breuer, said.

A founder in 1970 of the iconoclastic company, which became one of the most closely watched experimental troupes of the succeeding decades, Ms. Maleczech (pronounced MOLL-uh-CHEK) was celebrated for her fearlessness as an actress and her disregard for the perceived glamour of her profession.

She occupied the outer margins of established theater and wore that status as a badge of honor, refusing to join Actors’ Equity until the late 1980s and often seeming to revel in the contumely of the mainstream press.

“We got the worst reviews of any play Mabou Mines ever did,” she said of her performance as the title character in the company’s now fabled, gender-reversed “Lear” in 1990. “And I got the worst of all. That’s something I am very proud of.”

Her other roles for Mabou Mines included Madame Curie in “Dead End Kids” (1980), the company’s signature evocation of a nuclear holocaust, and the abused, sexually codependent butcher of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “Through the Leaves” (1984). She won the Obie Award for excellence in Off Broadway theater three times for acting and once for design.

Ms. Maleczech was born Ruth Sophia Reinprecht in Cleveland on Jan. 8, 1939, to Yugoslavian immigrant parents, a steelworker and a seamstress. She grew up in Arizona and studied theater at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she met her future husband and artistic partner, . She lived in San Francisco and Paris and studied with the revered theatrical innovator Jerzy Grotowski in Aix-en- Provence, France.

In 1970, Ms. Maleczech and Mr. Breuer founded the discipline-straddling collective Mabou Mines with the English actor , the composer and the director JoAnne Akalaitis. (The name came from a Nova Scotia town close to where the group developed their first project, “The Red Horse Animation.”) In its early days, the troupe’s productions eluded classification and were often discussed as part of the conceptual art movement. (“Red Horse” was presented at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo.)

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Mabou Mines went on to specialize in Samuel Beckett, especially his lesser-known works. But it was for creating multimedia collages like “Dead End Kids” (directed by Ms. Akalaitis at the Public Theater and re- created in a film version) that the troupe became best known. And in the 1970s and 80s, along with ’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater and the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines stood at the forefront of the genre-melding avant-garde theater.

Ms. Maleczech also directed productions, including Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine” (1984); “Wrong Guys” (1981), a deconstruction of film noir; and “Song for New York” (2007), a site-specific, harbor-side piece created as a hymn to a city that Ms. Maleczwech cherished.

“For 37 years Mabou Mines has been in New York City making work for New York City,” she said in a New York Times interview. “This is probably the only city where this work — all these works — could have been made. So it’s kind of a thank you.”

As an actress, Ms. Maleczech worked with eminent theater artists like Peter Sellars, Charles Mee and Martha Clarke. At the Public Theater, she was directed by Ms. Akalaitis, a lifelong friend, in productions of “Henry IV” (as Mistress Quickly) and “Woyzeck.” Her film appearances included turns in “Basquiat” and “The Crucible,” both in 1996.

Ms. Akalaitis, who recalled thinking Ms. Maleczech and Mr. Breuer were “the most exciting people I had ever met in my life” when all were in their early 20s in San Francisco, spoke of Ms. Maleczech in a phone interview. “She always said she was not an actor, but a performer,” she said. “But she really was one of our greatest actors.” She added that Ms. Maleczech realized her performances “through some deep subconscious exploration.”

Ms. Maleczech also “transmitted a deep reverence and love for the language of a play,” Ms. Akalitis said, and in her last days read aloud speeches from “King Lear” with her daughter, Clove Galilee.

At her death, Ms. Maleczech was working with Ms. Galilee, a choreographer and performer, on a version of Molière’s “Imaginary Invalid,” in which she would portray herself, Molière and the title character. Ms. Galilee said there were still plans to stage the production, possibly next year.

Though Ms. Maleczech and Mr. Breuer separated as spouses, they remained close artistic collaborators. “Ruth was the love of my life,” Mr. Breuer said in a recent interview. “She is certainly the love of my life as an artist.”

Besides her son and daughter, Ms. Maleczech is survived by a brother, Francis Reinprecht; a sister, Patricia Adams; and a grandchild.

While she cut a striking figure, with her red hair and sensuous frame and features (critics described her onstage as looking like “a Technicolor Lucy on a binge” and “Anita Ekberg on a diet”), Ms. Maleczech never presented herself as an exotic diva.

“Kinky, me?” Ms. Maleczech said in a story in The Village Voice about her Lear, responding to a description http://theater.nytimes.com/...10/03/theater/ruth-maleczech-beacon-of-stage-avant-garde-dies-at-74.html?pagewanted=print[10/3/2013 10:08:53 AM] Ruth Maleczech, Beacon of Stage Avant-Garde, Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com

from Mr. Breuer. “I’m probably the most colorless, hopelessly normal person around. Nothing exciting ever happened to me.”

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