Daily Bruin

Church rifts quell clergy in ‘Demon’ at Doolittle

By Jennifer Richmond

Daily Bruin Staff

Different views often cause upheaval and tension. But when there
is a serious difference of opinion among members of the church’s
hierarchy, a type of genocide occurs within its walls.

In the Royal National Theatre Company’s award-winning production
of David Hare’s "Racing Demon," seasoned priests get pushed out
through a variety of hurtful circumstances that surprise audience
members and pull them into the shocking plot of new ideas
overtaking old theories.

The Rev. Lionel Espy (Oliver Ford Davies) has been with the
church for well over 20 years and in that time his views about
Christ have changed. While he still believes in the Lord and
worships him daily, Lionel doesn’t feel Christ is the answer for
everyone. He trusts that some people just need the caring ear of a
priest without being preached at.

His friends, the Rev. Donald "Streaky" Bacon (Adrian
Scarborough) and the Rev. Harry Henderson (Michael Bryant), know
he’s not as theological as the church desires, but they cherish his
friendship, his views and his unquestionable love for the
church.

So, when the bright-eyed Rev. Tony Ferris (Adam Kotz) enters the
scene, convinced that Lionel’s ideas are hampering church
attendance, sides are taken and the witch hunt begins.

Davies’ Lionel is caring and gentle. His overflowing love for
the church creates a bond with the audience. It sees a man
dedicated to his work. His interest in helping people creates the
same caring bond with the audience that his character creates with
Harry and Streaky. It’s a feeling of friendship and understanding
that has further impact later when Lionel loses everything.

This gentle caring is white compared to the black darkness that
envelops Kotz’s Tony. He’s so caught up in educating the Christian
people and enlightening them about the teachings of Jesus Christ
that Tony fails to see their real problems.

When Stella Marr (Joy Richardson) says flat-out that she doesn’t
need Tony or his help with her abusive marriage, he’s convinced
she’s just scared and that with the teachings of God everything
will be perfect again. He can’t see that prayer isn’t what she
wants. All she wants is someone to talk to when she’s lost. Someone
to believe in her and pray for her. Someone to tell her that even
after everything, God still loves her. Tony doesn’t give that
assurance. Lionel does.

Obsessed to the point of evangelical, Kotz’s Tony is so caught
up in Jesus’ message he can’t see what’s really important ­
life. As long as Tony can get his word out to the community that’s
all that matters; who it hurts in the process is of little concern.
Although convincing in his portrayal, the audience finds itself
slowly hating Tony because of his hurtful actions toward a man
who’s out to hurt no one.

As hard as Tony tries to get Lionel dismissed, he too keeps
hitting walls. Streaky and Harry value Lionel’s views and his
caring for the community. Both stand behind him 100 percent. But,
as with all things, when push comes to shove they really have no
pull. Harry is in fact forced to leave the church.

When Lionel rushes in happily spouting that he did just as Harry
suggested, he receives a half-hearted congrats and the terrible
news that "Harry’s leaving." While Harry packs Lionel realizes he
has no chance and nowhere left to turn. His best friend has been
forced out, too. Both he and the audience know this is the
beginning of the end. His outpouring of emotion as Harry says his
goodbyes pulls at the audience’s heartstrings. But the final blow
comes moments later.

A shaken Lionel returns to his forgotten wife with a gift. Her
rejection of both his loving attention coming "too late" and the
gift left untouched on his desk creates an overflow of sympathy for
a man abandoned in a time of desperate need.

Davies’ Lionel becomes a broken man with nowhere left to turn
but his God; and even there, no loving response comes. Within the
closing lines the audience witnesses a man torn between his
feelings of the "right way" to preach and what he believes is right
for him and his community.

Because his concern for others is concentrated strictly on
helping, Lionel has no way to help himself. Confident in both
promises and his colleagues, Lionel is blind-sided by the
aggression that hits him head on. He and the audience are caught in
a fight as old as time. And with that fight comes hate for the
enemy. Tony’s enemy is Lionel. Lionel’s enemy is not face-specific.
The two are butting heads and taking sides, fighting a war with no
winners and forcing the audience to decide who or what they
believe. As Stella asks God at one point, "How can you fight
without hate?" There is no answer.

STAGE: "Racing Demon." Written by David Hare. Directed by
Richard Eyre. Starring: Oliver Ford Davies, Adam Kotz, Adrian
Scarborough, Michael Bryant. Running through Oct. 23 at the UCLA
James A. Doolittle Theatre. Performs Tuesday through Saturday at 8
p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2
p.m. TIX: $15-50. For info. call: (213) 365-3500.

Singer DeMent effortlessly confronts emotion

Gifted songwriter brings honesty, talent, elegance to country
music

By Michael Tatum

My father died a year ago today

Rooster started crowing when they carried Dad away

There beside my mother, in the living room I stood

With my brothers and my sisters knowin’ Dad was gone for
good

Well, I stayed at home long enough just to lay him in the
ground

And then I caught a plane to do a show up north in Detroit
town

Because I’m older now and I’ve got no time to cry.

­ "No Time to Cry," Iris DeMent

When most rock music fans think of great songwriters of the past
25 years, they usually think of someone like Bob Dylan or Elvis
Costello ­ two men who have made their names on lyrics that
strive to be "poetic," purposefully loaded with dense wordplay and
convoluted irony. It’s an approach that more than a few talents and
a great many hacks have attempted to copy.

Iris DeMent stands as the rare, gifted songwriter who can show
that strategy for the sham that it can sometimes be. While others
make a point in dodging their emotions and couching their true
feelings in literary corn, DeMent (performing two shows at the
Troubadour today and tomorrow) allows herself no such defenses.
It’s the rare person who can express herself with such directness
in this day and age without decorating what she has to say with
excuses and pretenses, but DeMent does it ­ and unlike lesser
mortals who tend to force such conceits, she makes it seem
effortless and natural.

"It’s the only way I know how to write," she told The Bruin
during a phone interview, "it’s not really something I set out to
do consciously. I just prefer a straightforward way of expressing
things … I’ve always been drawn to music written in that style:
Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Lefty Frizzel. I’ve always preferred
lyrics that aren’t really a great effort to unravel."

Like the above country legends named, she also shares an
affinity for open, honest music. The songs on her two records,
"Infamous Angel" and "My Life" (both on Warner Bros., the first a
reissue of an independent release) have little to do with the
Hollywood gone to Nashville high jinx of most of the so-called
artists ­ Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Billy Ray Cyrus, to name a
few ­ that seem to hog up the contemporary country
marketplace.

Her music could just as easily have been recorded 30 years ago;
her lovely, heartbreaking voice reverberates with a timeless
Appalachian spirituality, recalling only the greatest country
chanteuses: Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, the early Dolly Parton. Her
unadorned and unaffected arrangements, a sad reminder of what
country music sounded like before it sold itself to the city, are
ironically what prevent her music from being played on most
mainstream country radio stations. As journalist Michael McCall
pointedly notes: "She’s just too country for Nashville tastes these
days."

When asked about the state of country music today, DeMent says
that much of it ­ with the exceptions of people like Dwight
Yoakam, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Lucinda Williams ­ strikes
her as being largely false. "A lot of it seems out there only to
make money, though to be fair, that’s true with a lot of music
today, not just country music. I’m not adverse to making money,
that’s just not my goal. Even if I didn’t sell a hell of a lot of
records, I’d get more out of creating things that made me happy."
Does that mean she would forsake sales for the long haul, a piece
of history? "Oh definitely!"

But DeMent doesn’t make "keeping the faith" a deliberate
undertaking, just as her songwriting doesn’t spring out of a
premeditated scientific formula ­ like her emotional
directness, the integrity of her music comes instinctively: "You
just love what you do and do it," she states. "I’ve never had the
desire to ‘keep with tradition,’ just to keep doing what satisfies
me."

For a primer on what satisfies DeMent, look no further than her
album "My Life," which, judging from the seemingly unanimously
glowing reviews from critics, satisfies plenty of other people as
well. The vulnerable breakup songs, "You’ve Done Nothing Wrong" and
"Calling For You," are unique in the way that DeMent never sinks to
self pity ­ she shares the responsibility for the failures in
her relationships, without resorting to the callousness and hollow
anger that mars other such songs. When she sings, "Just because I’m
hurting, that don’t mean that you’ve something wrong," she intends
no hidden meaning ­ she means it. Others, like "Childhood
Memories" and the intensely moving "No Time To Cry" focus on
recollections of her father and the pain she felt after his
death.

Much has been made in the press of DeMent’s breaking away from
her fundamentalist Christian upbringing, something which she
clarifies when the subject is raised. Unlike others from similar
backgrounds, she neither regrets or resents her experiences. Though
she has since adopted different views than those of her parents and
their church, Dement in fact views their influence as being largely
positive.

"In many ways I think I benefitted. I certainly gained my love
of music at church," she remembers fondly, claiming that whatever
talent with which she might have been born certainly blossomed from
the Sundays to which she always looked forward.

Which of course leads to the matter of live performance,
something reputedly to have made DeMent nervous in the past. Not
that she really has anything to worry about ­ though her
concerts consist solely of her and her guitar, she doesn’t seem to
need much else. According to legend, when she sang in bars and
clubs early in her career, her voice proved so powerful in its
clarity, the stage managers elected to turn off her microphone.

So now that she’s in a position to tour with a larger band, why
not? Or, why not record an album on her own? "A lot of people ask
me that," she says. "I do like playing by myself. But the attitude
I bring to a live show is to do something that I don’t feel I can
do on record. I could perform on stage with a band, or vice versa,
but I think a lot of things would be lost."

One gets the feeling that DeMent might be a tad over-critical of
her talents, and even she admits that while she’s appreciative of
the attention thrust upon her, it nevertheless strikes her as "a
little weird." For all of the depth of her work, she still finds
the amount of time given to analyzing her work amazing, and even a
little intimidating. "I don’t find I have more or less difficulty
writing than I used to," she says, but adds with a laugh, "I’m more
aware of having an audience that likes hearing good songs!"

But that’s where part of her appeal lies. As she sings in the
beginning of one of her most lovely songs, "Sweet is the melody, so
hard to come by." While it may seem mysterious where her muse is
and when she’ll strike again, she makes the beauty and grandeur of
her art, so undeniable in its elegance and grace, seem so easy.

L.A. Phil: It’s the new style

Setting 20th-century pace for rest of season, Los Angeles
Philharmonic blazes through Stravinsky, darts gracefully through
Prokofiev, teases audience through Lutoslawski

By John Mangum

Still feeling the rush from a recent European tour, the Los
Angeles Philharmonic blazed through a program of uneven quality
Thursday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Under the baton of their Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, the
orchestra sounded better than ever. Salonen’s opening night program
combined two 20th-century favorites with a work by Philharmonic
favorite Witold Lutoslawski.

The program opened with Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s
"Classical" Symphony, an agreeable piece overflowing with tunes to
whistle.

Prokofiev said of the symphony, which he completed in 1917, "It
seems to me that if Haydn had lived today he would have retained
his own style while accepting something of the new at the same
time." Prokofiev combined the restrained humor and grace of the
idiom in which Haydn, an 18th-century composer, worked with the
angular momentum characteristic of 20th-century music. The work
defies all notions that classical music from this century sounds
loud and atonal.

The Philharmonic brought rough-edged elegance to the first two
movements and romped athletically through the gavotte and finale.
Warm playing and crisp ensemble, coupled with Salonen’s well-chosen
speeds, yielded a buoyant opening to what promised to be an
interesting evening.

The next piece on the program elicited the audience’s curiosity.
While most opening nights usually cough up a good deal of Beethoven
and Tchaikovsky, Salonen likes to evade convention.

This time his evasion took the form of Lutoslawski’s Piano
Concerto. Written in 1987, the work has yet to prove itself the way
200-year-old pieces have.

Lutoslawski, who passed away last year, maintains his position
in Los Angeles because of the advocacy Salonen gives the Polish
composer’s works. The Philharmonic not only invited Lutoslawski to
premiere his Fourth Symphony here recently, they also recorded it
for Sony Classical.

In its second outing with the Philharmonic, the Piano Concerto
was well played by the orchestra and pianist Paul Crossley, but
lacked many of the qualities that make great music interesting.

Some of the best things in the piece, like the concentrated
cadenza for the piano which opened the third section of the work,
were compromised by more pedestrian effects, like the quirky
percussion dialogue toward the close of the work.

The audience reaction to the Concerto ranged from boredom to
frenzied excitement. One woman leapt to her feet, furiously
applauding maestro, pianist and orchestra. Most others appreciated
the effort of the musicians but didn’t quite know what to think of
the new work. Beethoven or Tchaikovsky would have proved much more
enjoyable.

Too bad the audience wasn’t more like the first one that heard
the next work on the program, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet "The Rite of
Spring." At its premiere in 1913, Paris audiences rioted, throwing
things at the dancers and musicians and just generally behaving
poorly.

Thursday’s audience sat demurely and listened to Stravinsky’s
onslaught as though it was the tamest Mozart. They looked like the
people from the Simpsons in the new THX trailer.

Recognized for his interpretive genius when it comes to
Stravinsky, Salonen lived up to everyone’s expectations. His
Stravinsky rocked.

The orchestra produced a dynamic range that went from near
silence in the ballet’s introduction to a deafening roar in the
louder sections. The musicians played with an attention to detail
that produced a near perfect performance.

The evening ended well enough to promise that what lies ahead in
the Philharmonic’s season will never fail to stimulate.

The Philharmonic avoids war horses, never playing anything not
written in the last hundred years. Salonen’s allegiance to this
century brings some of its masterpieces to the Music Center with
nothing so equivocal as the Lutoslawski Piano Concerto.

He directs his orchestra in Viennese composer Gustav Mahler’s
Third Symphony (Oct. 12-15). The women of the L.A. Master Chorale
and the L.A. Children’s Chorus join the musicians to fulfill
Mahler’s gargantuan performance requirements for one of the longest
symphonies ever composed.

Violinist Julian Rachlin appears with Salonen and the orchestra
to play Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto (Oct. 20-22). The program
also includes the Five Pieces for Orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg,
disciple of Mahler and contributor to the musical life of UCLA
during the middle of the century.

Another notable contributor to music at UCLA shares the program
with Salonen at the Philharmonic’s 75th anniversary concert. Zubin
Mehta led the orchestra in a legendary concert in front of Royce
Hall to protest the Vietnam War during his tenure as music
director.

He reunites with the orchestra Oct. 24 for a repetition of the
first program the Philharmonic played 75 years ago. Mehta opens the
concert Dvorák’s popular "New World" Symphony. Salonen takes
the helm for the second half of the evening, steering the orchestra
through Liszt’s "Les préludes," Weber’s beloved overture to
his opera "Oberon" and Chabrier’s vibrant symphonic poem
"España."

Acclaimed conductors Franz Welser-Möst and Simon Rattle
also appear with the orchestra in a season which brings some great
artists to Los Angeles

Opening night provided a good introduction to the season for
audiences who can look forward to exploring masterpieces from the
20th century.

CONCERT: L.A. Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with
pianist Paul Crossley. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Oct. 6, 7
and 9. TIX: $50, $41, $36, $28, $22, $16, $9.50, $6. Students with
ID $6 two hours before performance.