Antipholus (Ken Miller, center) and his servant Dromio (Nicole Goeden, right) are befuddled enough by encountering their estranged identical twins. Here, they also have to deal with a courtesan played by Ian Muenther, in Stone Soup Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” at the Shorewood Public Library. All photos by Ed Valent unless otherrwise indicated.

After a Sunday Sheboygan performance, in which the company played through a huge cloudburst, their summer tour of Comedy will conclude with dates in Nelson Park in Decatur, IL on June 10; Mineral Springs Park in Pekin IL on Saturday, June 11, and Senior Citizens Memorial Park in Chicago on Sunday June 12. , IL. See information on Stone Soup Shakespeare and their remaining tour dates here.

“I to the world am like a drop of water that, in the ocean seeks another drop that falling there to find his fellow forth, unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.”

The timeless magic and the madness of live theatrical performance — in a virtual reality-removed world – felt palpably alive when Stone Soup Shakespeare performed its gloriously low-tech version of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors at the Shorewood Public Library Saturday.

The “madness” is the company bucking the seemingly inexorable technological zeitgeist by doing Shakespeare in free performances that bend and stretch dramatic principles but reach for the sky, in both their fairly strong textual fidelity and effort to touch ordinary people who might never otherwise go to a Shakespeare production.

The magic came in how they theatrically conjured an entertainment so witty, dynamic and ingenious with only their bodies and a few hand-crafted props that you sat in wonder when you weren’t giggling or laughing. That experience seemed evident in an audience ranging from toddlers to folks in their 90s.

The physical comedy comes fast and furious in Stone Soup Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.” Here Adriana (Julia Stemper, top) faints on her sister Luciana (Jen Pommerenke), who is falling for Adriana’s husband Antipholus.

“I don’t like Shakespeare, but that was fabulous,” enthused playgoer Frank Pipp, a middle-aged man from Fox Point, who later declared that he might now take a class in Shakespeare. Such a genius is always worthy of study. But Stone Soup proved that you don’t need to, and even if you didn’t quite follow some of the play’s fast action and mistaken-identity mind bending, you got plenty of the play’s comic genius, especially with the smart, energized elan of this Chicago-based company.

A poster from an 1879 production on Broadway, featuring Stuart Robson and William Crane. Courtesy wikipedia.org.

Indeed these young Shakespeareans have mastered their stage craft to approach the ease of a Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton defying physical limitations to broaden the possibilities of comic art. And yet, as far as I know those comic greats never attempted Shakespeare. 1

So, as a fine mist fell over the library green space in a cool June dusk, this company entranced and delighted an audience by doing Shakespeare on their terms, which brings his work to vivid life in a way that I think even he might’ve delighted in.

Comedy of Errors does have a story line, being a “family reunion” story, of sorts. But it is constantly subverted, twisted and goosed by Shakespeare’s devious string-pulling, based primarily on an improbable but not impossible circumstance of doppelganger goofiness flirting with tragedy. The company’s online synopsis posed the situation thusly: “What do you get when one pair of estranged twin brothers (both named Antipholus) and one pair of twin servants (both named Dromio) all wind up in the same city for the first time ever, completely ignorant of the others’ existence?”

As David Newell has commented, “This unlikely expansion of a classical formula is fun for the audience, but a nightmare for its victims. But the bewildering dream experiences of the visiting Antipholus convince him that  Ephesus (an ancient Greek city in present-day Turkey) is a hotbed of sorcery and deception.” The social germ of the chaos is that “there is nothing like the natural mimicry of twins to pull the plug on solemnity and dignity.” 2

A young man named Antipholus comes to Ephesus in a long search for his long-lost twin brother. Things quickly turn both weird and capitvating for him.

The backdrop is that the Antipholus twins’ father, the merchant named Aegeon from the ancient Sicilian city of Syracuse (Ian Muentener) is condemned to death for violating a travel ban between the two cities. This dramatic circumstance resonates in our current times of public concern and policy, both rightfully fearful and paranoid, over immigration and terrorism.

Without a formal set to evoke the mise en scene totality of a city, or an abbey late in the play, the company treads lightly on the play’s dramatic aspects.

But that works because Shakespeare created a play that is seemingly magical and absurdist centuries before The Theater of the Absurd. For that matter, The Bard’s play anticipates by centuries The Marx Brothers, the modern masters of comic chaos in, for example, the way several characters toy with their own identities and presences with full length mirrors (made here of large cardboard and tin foil) with which they spin, self-regard and hide behind. Think of Groucho’s famous routine with his “mirrored” self in Duck Soup. Shakespeare probably knew intimately the farcical potency inherent in doubled identities, being the father of twins.

Stone Soup’s DIY theatrical dynamics make the production hang together like a great gyrating amoeba rolling through time. They even ride that dynamic at times, with a wonderfully evoked ship on the high seas. No wonder Antipolous feels like a drop in the ocean searching for his fraternal drop.

At other times, they ingeniously employ audience members as props, without dragging anyone out of their seat. One viewer suddenly became, in effect, a tree stump to hide behind, and his personal existential reality might have shifted slightly in that moment.

Adriana (Julia Stemper) hides behind an audience member/tree stump in a madcap moment in “Comedy of Errors.” 

The madcap spontaneity of Stone Soup makes one think many of their physical gags are developed in improv sessions.

Still, conflicted emotions do transmit amid this show’s slapstick cavalcade. Among the sufferings endured is by bedeviled Antipholus, a bit of a lost soul despite his strong presence, and his wife Adriana, who grows quickly suspicious of her mate’s amorous intentions amid his travels. Company artistic director Julia Stemper plays out Adriana’s resentments and jealousies with a pulsing power that is by turns real, surreal and sensual. She shoots sparks in all directions that trigger anyone’s funny bone, because such physical comedy transmits wordlessly, even as it is accompanied by the world’s greatest dramatic poet. Stemper makes Adriana a sort of anti-heroine who manages to be lovable for being so human and insecure yet fearlessly “out there” about her feelings.

Ken Miller as Antipholous (as both twin bothers, actually) is tall, dark and handsome — the sort of husband a wife might be jealous of, regardless of the relative truth of her specific suspicions. He’s so utterly flummoxed that he’s deemed insane. Yet in fact, he is falling in love with his wife’s fetching sister Luciana (Jen Pommerenke).

Antipholus is bewitched, bothered and bewildered in Stone Soup Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.” Part of his dilemma is that he’s falling for his wife’s sister Luciana (below)

Among the show’s most remarkable performers is Nicole Goeden, who plays Dromio, the twin (and same-named) servants belonging to the twin bothers, Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Epheus. Goeden flops around the stage like a living, breathing rag doll in a myriad of zany, hilarious bodily and facial contortions, which suggest an Olympic sport is needed called Slapstick Gymnastics. And she funnels plenty of emotion through her zig-zagging expression.

And Muentener, a sturdily-built man, steals several scenes strutting about as a courtesan, done up deliciously in makeup, high heels, a tight black-and-white print shift and black feather boa. The actor slyly steals another scene as an arresting police officer in cutoff long underwear, twitching a giant fake handlebar mustache, back and forth, sort of like the fickle scales of justice in a world gone slightly mad, where common assumptions, identities, facts and social and political institutions seem topsy-turvy. Syracusians, such as Aegeon, are accused of fomenting seditious revolution against Greece. Does that sound familiar, by the way?

Thank the theater gods that this is not real life, only a “comedy of errors.” And hang onto such consolation for dear life.

The company is aptly named for “stone soup,” the name of an old folk story in which hungry strangers manipulate the local people of a town into sharing their food, by offering them soup made of stones. Yet this company, in a variation of the starving artists story, offers a goulash full of Shakespeare bottomless riches, in the hopes of wooing a few dollars into their donation bucket at the play’s end.

The non-profit organization gets funding for its annual spring-summer tours anyway they can and though this is its third visit to Shorewood, it needs funding to return here and other places.

They’re worthy of such support, for Comedy exemplified how — as well as any artistic group I can think of — Stone Soup attempts to joust with a windmill, with heroic integrity and ingenuity. If what they’re doing seems quixotic, the world needs more of this type of impossible dreaming. It shows how you can make even visions of Shakespeare come to life along a city street,  even for people who “don’t like Shakespeare,” or thought they didn’t.

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1. In a 1923 Buster Keaton short, his girlfriend briefly imagines him playing Hamlet.
2. David Newell, introduction to “The Comedy of Errors,” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Alexander Text, introduced by Peter Ackroyd, HarperCollins, 2006, 124

Hillary Clinton recently visited car wash workers in Queens, New York, who are represented by the RWDSU (Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union). Courtesy rwdsu.info

Note: Culture Currents normally does not get quite this specifically political. But this is a very important election year, especially if we are to realize change in our government, our economic system and our way of life, for the better. So, in this post, CC is testing the culture currents of change.

Understand first of all, I am thrilled at the powerful movement that Bernie Sanders has spearheaded, and I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time, as a spokesman for the majority of Americans’ financial interest, and a critic of Wall Street and the corporate world’s domination of American economy.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding at the Surf Ballroom Friday, Aug. 14, 2015, in Clear Lake, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Having said that, it appears certain that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination, though Sanders should continue as long as he has a mathematical chance to win the popular and delegate vote.

But if Sanders is aiming for a brokered convention, it will fracture and divide a potential consensus of supporters and voters who should be aligning to vote for the Democratic nominee to beat Trump.

President Donald Trump. Wrap your head around that. Yes, Bernie ranks ahead of Hillary vs. Trump in most polls. But he’s still not likely the nominee. If somehow he wins the nomination, then I feel confident he will beat Trump. Of course, that is a massively unlikely “if” at this point. And Hillary will win in November too, especially if disenfranchised workers and young people feel that she’s on their side, and understand that she must also work with at least a modicum of negotiation and compromise, which most successful politics entails (Republicans will never flop over and play dead to leftist demands.)

This leads me to a fairly historically informed argument by the noted liberal writer Thomas Frank in an interview with Financial Times. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/watch-hillary-clinton-revolt-brewing-101500894.html

Frank recounts how the Democratic Party has shifted its constituency response from its previous working-class base to that of middle-class liberals since the 1960s, and more recently, towards entrepreneurial power and the so-called “creative class.” This seems historically accurate in that young liberals sparked the leftward revolution of the ’60s and have driven much of Democratic Party direction of the  since.
And certainly Bill Clinton’s administration shifted gears toward the middle, and triangulated away from the poor and the working class, especially with his reform of welfare and tough-on-crime bills which resulted in our horrible black incarceration rates, a development he now admittedly regrets.

President Obama hasn’t done enough for the working poor and the dispossessed as one would’ve hoped, but he’s been fighting uphill against an obstructionist Congress his whole two terms. Chances are the Dems will take back the Senate and gain in the House, which will make things better for a Democratic president. And Hillary Clinton is a tough, smart and reasonable negotiator.
The problem I see now, however, with critics of Hillary Clinton is that they, including Frank, to often tend to conflate her with her husband in their arguments against her.

Thus, a significant amount of union people perceive her as anti-union, even though this is not the case. And many non-union workers assume she is against them and tend to support Trump, who feeds off their understandable feeling that nobody backs their interests. These contingents comprise much of the frustrated people creating the “revolt” the article refers too, a split between ardent Sanders and Trump supporters.

This is one reason why we need to work to bring the union movement back to something close to its former strength and respectability. I believe this intellectually but also because I have a lot to be thankful for from union membership. And I also know first-hand how vulnerable a worker, including journalists like myself, can be without union representation.

Like Clinton, some unions have hardly been paragons of virtue. Being comprised of humans, some have been subject to excess internal power-brokering, greed and self-interest. But they suffer, like Clinton does, from a very besmirched reputation from decades of right-wing and pro-corporate disinformation.

To the point of this election, let’s look at Hillary Clinton’s Senate voting record on jobs, the category in this comprehensive policy survey most relevant to working people.  http://www.ontheissues.org/Hillary_Clinton.htm#Jobs

For the most part, it shows how strong her support has been for issues that concern workers, both blue and white collar. Note also her high approval rating by the AFL-CIO and, in this election, the endorsement of her by a majority of labor unions.

Those who think that Hillary will preside like Bill Clinton did may presume that she’s stuck back in that era. She learned lessons from it, no doubt. But the truth is, she’s been extremely attuned to the present, which is why she has embraced her progressive ideals, even though she remained largely supportive of her husband as First Lady. Yet, unlike Bill Clinton, she would not compromise on the pioneering Clinton health bill, the prototype for the Affordable Care Act. The Clinton bill failed because she remained principled, she cared too much about the uninsured — mostly the working poor, minorities and the disenfranchised.

I think it is a perhaps-unconscious but sexist reflex to presume that Hillary is going to be Bill Clinton redux. She has always been her own woman, and obviously her relationship to women, and their issues, is probably 180° different than her husband’s, or at least 120°. So it makes a lot of sense that she will work hard to correct many of the excesses of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, which has harmed poor black men and single women and their families for the most part. It figures she will do more to change the situation than any current candidate. Most African-Americans with a sense of history appear to know this, judging by their strong support of her.

Courtesy edition.com

So if that’s not fighting for working people, I don’t know what is. We used to associate the image of workers predominantly with men, who used to most typically be the primary Income provider of families. We know how much that has changed, but most pointedly by seeing how bad things remain for poor and working-poor women in forced (or misguided) single motherhood.

Remember, Hillary famously said, “It takes a village to raise a child.” She clearly wants to create an administration that fosters just such a village, metaphorically and literally.

And for those who still profoundly distrust her, due to some past associations and decisions, I remain among you, especially in foreign affairs, where she’s very experienced, but, I fear, still too hawkish. Prove us wrong on that, Madame Secretary. This era cries out for American prudence and restraint overseas, as Obama has largely exhibited.

Nevertheless, I’ve gained trust in Hillary Clinton partly because she is a calculating politician, and she hears and understands the angry winds of change, for which Bernie Sanders has spoken most powerfully and persistently. Regarding Hillary’s relative dishonesty, consider the recent comment of Nicolas Kristof, arguable America’s most respected journalist, though an avowed liberal:

When Gallup asks Americans to say the first word that comes to mind when they hear “Hillary Clinton,” the most common response can be summed up as “dishonest/liar/don’t trust her/poor character.” Another common category is “criminal/crooked/thief/belongs in jail.”

“All this is, I think, a mistaken narrative.

“One of the perils of journalism is the human brain’s penchant for sorting information into narratives. Even false narratives can take on a life of their own because there is always information arriving that can confirm a narrative.” Here’s Kristof’s column: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/is-hillary-clinton-dishonest.html

Given that tendency of journalism and the human mind, it’s unwise to ignore the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politico.com‘s recent fact-checking assessment of the truthfulness of statements by all the current presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton comes out as the most truthful, with Bernie Sanders a close second. http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/fact-checkers-confirm-hillary-clinton-is-more-honest-than-any-of-her-2016-opponents/24196/

As MSNBC’s Chris Matthews commented Sunday, it’s up to Hillary to win the hearts of Americans. Against Trump, I’ll bet she succeeds.

And given the polarization between the two major parties, Hillary Clinton seems much better positioned and experienced to do something about positive change for the 99% as president. Assuming she’s the candidate, the Dems will need Sanders supporting her, along with great voices like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to continue to fight for everyone who works for a living, or tries to, or hopes to.

And by that, I don’t mean people who play morally-decrepit games with numbers on Wall Street.

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Bernie Sanders photo courtesy salon.com

Music director John DeMain conducts the Madison Symphony Orchestra in the stunning setting of Overture Hall in Madison. Courtesy isthmus.com

Rain…Rain…I don’t mind. Shine, the weather’s fine. I can show you that when it starts to rain, everything’s the same, I can show you, I can show you… It’s just a state of mind, can you hear me, can you hear me? — “Rain” by Lennon and McCartney

What a pleasure to be reminded how fortune smiles on Wisconsin with the blessing of two great symphony orchestras. There’s nothing like an orchestra working its big-canvas magic in person. In recent years I’ve reacquainted myself with the glories of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

On a rain-soaked day, sheets of rain, billows of rain, Ann Peterson and I drove to Madison to hear that city’s superb orchestra, but not before what has become a ritual, a stop at the Pine Cone Inn halfway between the cities in Johnsonville, to pick up a gluten-free monster cookie.
With slightly soggy crumbs nestled in laps, we rolled into Mad Town and stopped first at The Harlem Renaissance Museum on East Washington.

This place is  worth your time although, on a Sunday afternoon, also consider that a religious service is held in the back room, which is the way to enter. So if you make your way quietly to the front galley, you now see an exhibit of Cubist jazz art by the museum’s artist-in-residence Martel Chapman. The exhibit also includes a tribute to the great Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, a Wisconsin resident and one-time faculty member at the UW-Madison. On display were a selection of Toomer’s letters hand-written and typed to various people during important years of his career and they are illuminating and a bit historically transporting, although I wasn’t taking notes (apologies), so I can’t go into detail.

But Chapman’s art is a marvel. He has an uncanny ability to do conventional oil portraiture with great insight and style. But most of the pieces display his own trademark Cubist characterization of jazz and African-American cultural figures. Despite the almost futuristic stylization he’s capable of capturing the deep character of someone as profound as John Coltrane as he does in a portrait titled “Late Coltrane.” I  believe this is actually an interpretation of the famous black-and-white photograph of Coltrane for the album A Love Supreme.

“Late Coltrane,” John Coltrane as interpreted by Madison cubist artist Martel Chapman. Courtesy Martel Chapman

He does the same for white-haired sax icon Sonny Rollins and even superstar Black studies scholar-minister Cornel West. It’s almost as if the artist is torching a living person out of tubes of metal. Chapman’s not going for realism here, rather the essence of the artist, a remarkable achievement somewhat akin to a jazz player’s act of getting to the truth of the matter through a musical stylized abstraction.

Some of Chapman’s pieces comprise complete scenes more akin to Georges Braque’s early, somewhat painterly ” analytic cubism” such as the utterly delightful “Quartet ’58.” This painting interprets the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane performing at The Five Spot Nightclub in New York in 1958. The luxuriously-faceted piece is a virtual whirlygig of animated expression spinning out from the fabulous figure of Monk himself whose splayed arms and legs hover around the keyboard like a hipster Gumby. 1

Martel Chapman’s “Quartet 58,” and interpretation of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane on saxophone. Courtesy Martel Chapman. 

For all these fine artistic moments, the afternoon’s main event was the Madison Symphony Orchestra. They rolled up their sleeves with a taste-whetting performance of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Op. 62.
Then Emanuel Ax ambled on. The veteran, gray-maned and portly pianist has acquired a decidedly avuncular demeanor by now. But he sat down and showed that any uncle who can play a Beethoven concerto (No. 4) like this is worthy of inviting to dinner any old time. His playing absolutely sparkled and finely mirrored the orchestra’s rhythmic dancing through the melodies and sonic gusts rippling through deep meadows of sound.
Ax encored with an unannounced Debussy prelude, I believe, which unwound with strangely complex colors and arabesques.

Soon it was time for the centerpiece of the concert, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony 4 in G Major, one of the majestic pinnacles in the standard repertoire, and of late Romanticism.
I’ve always loved this work, as have many.  But it had been so long since I heard this orchestra after covering it for nearly 20 years. I somewhat forgot how fine and firm a grip DeMain has on such myriad details, dynamics and tempo, etc. and how superbly responsive the orchestra is.

They showed us what a ravishingly immersive creation the Mahler is, once again. It must be a supreme pleasure sit in the middle of that and participating in it. I’m still sappy enough of an Irishman to be moved to tears by it.

Composer Gustav Mahler outside the Grand Hotel Toblach in the Alps. Courtesy grandhoteltoblach.com

So thank you for moving me, my old friends. It’s in the way that all the strange and wondrous colors and rhythms engulf the listener, like a fully-evoked world or lifetime of memories, and then the finely-wrought melodies and fanfares that swell up like water-drenched sirens. This all leads to that late, luminous cathedral-like chord rising to forever, not long before the soprano enters.

This is DeMain the Grammy-winning, Leonard Bernstein-mentored opera conductor synthesizing those skills into the orchestral domain for a rare sort of larger-than-the-moon musicality. He’s clearly spent all the time necessary for a reach for transcendence, having performed the whole Mahler symphonic cycle during the years pI lived in Madison. I would love to hear this band record a Mahler symphony.

A protege of Leonard Bernstein, DeMain has led the Madison orchestra for 22 years.

And such a celestial song in the finale, though guest soloist Alisa Jordheim, still doesn’t compare to the warm magnificence of Judith Raskin with George Szell and the old Cleveland recording. Ms. Jordheim had confessed to DeMain that she was suffering from a cold, which did not seem to affect her voice’s lovely timbre. But at moments she seemed to strain to project over the orchestra.

Still, it came to a marvelous end, like a winding scenic journey to a high vista.

And finally DeMain nudged the unaccompanied basses along to extend the symphony’s last very note, like an earth-whispering Ommmm.

Sublime. I could go on, but it would be just the German side of me getting a little oom-pah pushy.

So we headed home. And the rains came, again, stronger than ever.

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1. For news on the museum’s first year anniversary and future plans, check out Pat Simm’s Wisconsin State Journal article:http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/madison-s-harlem-renaissance-museum-celebrates-first-year-plans-for/article_a1f73372-1a82-52bc-b0dd-4f9caaee33dd.html