Candide Indeed

A production of the Voltaire/Bernstein/Zimmerman play Candide is in performance at the Huntington's BU Theater for its season opener. It is a vigorous and pleasurable, if long performance. It originated in Chicago at the Goodman a year ago, then played at Shakespeare's Theater in Washington, D.C., in December. I couldn't find if it went anywhere between then and now.

Candide is famously a work by Voltaire published in 1759 satirizing a philosophy of predetermination in which everything that happens is "for the best" and is as it should be. Candide receives the teaching from his mentor Pangloss while growing up comfortably in Westphalia, which is overrun, forcing him out into the world where he experiences its many hardships. The story proceeds rapidly with vignette-like incident after incident of disasters and trials. Early he meets and falls in love with a baron's daughter Cunegonde who, with Pangloss, winds in and out through the odyssey that takes him from Europe to South America and back to Arabia. In the end Candide rejects the optimist philosophy for a more measured view of mankind.

The operetta is a reworking of what was once a Lillian Hellman effort with Leonard Bernstein in the 1950s that never got off the ground. The lyrics are written by Richard Wilbur and others. This production is done in a kind of energetic story theater style, with a cast of 19 and lots of sudden props and onstage costume transformations. It was directed and somewhat adapted by Chicago's Looking Glass Theater artistic director Mary Zimmerman. A few years ago she also directed a production of Journey to the West that played the Huntington.

The Boston Globe review by Don Aucoin is favorable and fairly uncritical. It's difficult to tell audience response because the Globe has gone all subscription, and I haven't found the reader responses though I am a subscriber. The unsigned Chicago Tribune review was fairly soft but complained that after the first scene change, "the carnival of multifarious acting styles returns, as does some needlessly fussy staging, especially frustrating when Bernstein's exquisite score needs to communicate without models of boats or balloons floating by." There were quite a few critical reader responses appended to that review, and it was evident that the McArthur Genius Award-winning director Mary Zimmerman has a reputation for the kind of mythical story-telling staging used here and as we saw in Journey to the West. As one Chicago review reader wrote:

"For the life of me, I will never understand the Zimmerman love in this town. It's the same thing over and over and over again. Someone dies, red fabric flies out. Time to cross the ocean, blue fabric shimmies across the stage. Two people have sex, they roll around the floor without touching in a choreographed move. Toy boats are handled by actors to show crossing the ocean. And this is genius???"

In terms of staging, it was no different at the Huntington.

The most common criticism of the Chicago production, other than Zimmerman's style, was the small orchestra and the disservice to Bernstein. There wasn't much to correct that in Boston.

The set was designed by Daniel Ostling, whose web site says he is based in San Francisco, in residence at the Looking Glass theater in Chicago and on the faculty of Northwestern University in Evanston, north of Chicago - I'm sure resulting in many frequent flyer miles. He has designed at many of the resident theaters across the country, as shown in the portfolio of his work . His site shows generally spare and open, quite uncluttered designs for a number of LORT houses. He has used the deep box design employed here, and a few other enclosed environments, but most of his portfolio shows what appear to be more open staging with arrangements of interesting pieces, shapes and necessary furnishings.

Candide opened with an 18th century table scene within a small proscenium frame, backed by a red toile image of a period interior on a loose fabric curtain, all of which whipped away at scene end to reveal a full stage-sized box that walled in the production. Within this box the company continually transformed the space with movement, choreography, and ever-changing furniture piece or two to suit the story telling.

This oaken-beamed box had panels that slid aside for props and people to enter and exit at several levels. The entire back wall flew for skies and exterior scenes, such as a Rousseau jungle, or a sky of fluffy clouds for a scene with red fluffy prop sheep. There were traps in the floor that swallowed and disgorged people and props. The overhead lighting came through huge oak-paneled shafts in the ceiling, and there was a double row of lighting units with dozens of color scrollers slung right under the top of the proscenium arch to light tightly the downstage areas. You can get some feel of the setting from the image here, but I had to enhance it substantially to show the dark wood, resulting in some overall color distortion.

Costumes were by Looking Glass designer Mara Blumenfeld. I thought they were handled well and I was impressed with the attention to character and variety in the 18th Century dress, and with the onstage redressing and much doubling of roles. I did wish there had been a costume choice to single out Candide better because he sometimes got lost in the crowd in the narrow palette. Regardless of the variety of shapes and pieces, the whole show seemed very brown. The few shows on Mara's web site show facility with the 17th and 18th century period look in design, particularly her work on The Glorious Ones about Flaminio Scala and Company.

T. J. Gerckens, whose lighting credits are all over the regional theater circuit, was able to capture the moments well. With so much onstage scene-changing and transforming episodes, one into another, things were placed well and usually the focus of the scene was clear. Some clever lighting choices were used, but sparingly. I noticed the choice not to do a cliché lighting change for a couple of "slo-mo" fight sequences. Full-screen projections of period text on the act curtain accompanied the opening of each act.

As for the performances, the principals of Pangloss (Larry Yando), Candide (Geoff Packard), and Cunegonde (Lauren Molina) carried their roles quite well. Yando was a clear and distinctive tall and skinny Pangloss, later sporting a metal nose. Packard gave Candide much naivete and enthusiasm. Molina drew some fire in Chicago from those who thought she wasn't up to the operatic role, but I actually thought she was quite good. She engaged me in her performance. There were other distinctive performances from the 19-member cast, but the number of characters is too overwhelming to focus. One interesting moment for me came as the play neared its conclusion: the chorus went a capella for the anthem and Candide's discovery speech was presented clearly and directly.

This is a regional theater road show. I know it has become general practice to share productions, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. A wonderful show should travel and share the work everywhere it can, and the economics of production can be optimized. But I can't imagine that it is particularly good for developing and employing local artists.

Then, I have to wonder how much local talent the Huntington employs beyond production staff under any circumstances.

Scenemaker
23 September 2011

And so it begins (redux)

And so it begins. The last post was about the grand ideas. This is about the nitty-gritty.

Like every teacher, I'm deep in piles of old syllabi, academic calendars, production schedules, class registration lists, and a scramble of notes from past semesters. I look down my class lists and see students whom I know in the major courses, and all new names in my introductory class. Out of all of this I must come up with 25 or so scintillating learning experiences for each course, carefully linked to learning goals and sequenced for optimal development while observing all of the research and data on how students learn best. The good part is that this isn't the first time I've done it. The bad part is that although I have had some good classes, there always are students who don't achieve my learning goals for them. How does one deal with the disappointment that every student didn't get it . . . all?

I have my own history as an occasionally indifferent student, and I recognize that students do wind up doing triage on what gets attention. I always try to figure out how the courses that students do invest in can be the ones I teach. The content I teach generally is not very difficult in my introductory courses, and my measures do not really require much original thinking or conceptually difficult perspectives. Everybody can get a good grade, they just have to DO THE WORK.

So I review the syllabus and notes on these courses I've taught annually for years. I am facing those issues all teachers face: Which assignments worked well and which didn't. Why. Did the sequencing and the timing build toward the learning goals. How valid are all the learning goals. How much content is essential, beyond the curriculum framework. What would everybody expect students who succeeded in this class to know or to be able to do. What would we be appalled that a student who got a good grade didn't know or couldn't do.

How can we turn this lecture into an activity. How can we make these class experiences more active. What activity can we invent that will get at the goals that they don't get out of our lecture and won't get out of the reading they won't do. How can we motivate more through fascination than fear. Or even through fear. How can we create assignments that these students actually will invest in. Or will do at all.

Into all this, fit the new. What have we been teaching that is getting dated. What is happening on the topic today that we need to incorporate. What are the likely recognizable references for undergraduate students today -- they were born in the early 1990s and connect with historic and cultural references only since about 2000.

I have to think about how to make reference to current experience without sounding out of place and faux-hip. (See: the annual Beloit mindset list) And how to avoid dangerous dated references (like "hooking up").

And so . . . it begins. It will be great semester. I feel it.

Working Out the Path to the Goal Line

It's mid-August and we're now bending our minds toward school - those of us who benefit from a tradition of not opening school until Labor Day - or at least September 1. I cherish the slightly later start of New England colleges, after beginning my career in the central states where earlier report dates were becoming common.

I'm sure that compared to many of my colleagues, I'm quite late to the task. But now is when I really plan the course revisions I've been intending to make in courses I have taught many times.

I have watched the process become dominated by 21st Century tasks, and I am doing so much more without paper and pencil. I'm revising syllabi and verifying various links, revising my Blackboard sites and Classmate grade book for the new syllabi and class rosters for each course. I'm reviewing the online and digital classroom materials to see which ones require that I build in some revision time as the class dates approach.

Like most faculty, I do use paper in re-evaluating the content and sequence of each course. This involves scratched notes and materials with line-outs dropped into the folders when the courses were offered last. I pull out my paper calendar to scratch in sequencing ideas, but eventually that becomes dense and the arrows moving things around become confusing, so a digital version gets sketched in.

As I know current and former students can read this, they may have another perspective on their experience in my classes. These notes speak to intentions. As they say, your experience may differ.

As every teacher knows, building the course is always a struggle with content load and the learning experience itself, and . . . time. Content load isn't just about information retention and skill development - it's always about so much more. I imagine for faculty in most fields, the specific information retained actually is second in the instructional goals on the scale of importance and intention. Often skills are important, particularly at upper division level, but we can never deliver enough information.

So if not just content and skills, what is it really about?

It's about developing a state of mind, an attitude of discovery, an awe about the body of knowledge and hunger for more, and a commitment to real excellence. If the students develop this, the rest surely will follow. These are things that aren't easily reduced to a percentage grade. My difficulty, which I likely share with many faculty, is finding the balance of focus in the course between this developmental aspect and the content. I need to develop enough of a body of knowledge that the student can begin constructing her/his own connections among the elements, and enough skill and foundation of experience for another step in the curriculum. Ideally, I want students to develop the commitment to visualize a complete path - one that challenges them, promotes their growth, and one to which they can commit.

One consistent problem is the student who lacks desire to meet goals that require real investment of effort, often - to be fair - in competition with other personal and educational goals. Or perhaps they lack the foundation for continuing development. It's a problem as old as formal education itself. The grand goal may be desirable but some or many of the steps to achievement are too demanding or distasteful, or their application may seem irrelevant. In such cases, the curriculum certificate or diploma forces the commitment. We do what we can to make it effective and palatable, but in the end students must demonstrate that they have achieved certain skills and knowledge to be awarded something that validates that achievement, i.e. a diploma.

Almost no class ever really achieves all of my goals - which is not to say I haven't had some excellent classes. (If they all were to do so, I would feel I could have reached higher.) But the classes all begin with a commitment and hope and energy to inspire and get people excited about what they are learning. To build a connected body of knowledge and an array of connected skills and perspectives for artists and their audiences.

I think most faculty share these or similar intentions.

[Now, back to prepping the syllabi.]

Vocational Higher Education in Theater

About every couple years we get an extensive article trying to define what baccalaureate graduates need to know for our "industry," and it always reads like a superman wish list. Usually it is a compilation of surveys or focus groups of people working in the theater and entertainment industry and it is always quite long and specialized. It has taken me a while to learn to read them with a little perspective.

Sure. You ask people what they want in a new employee, and you get a description of a superman/superwoman who has a fantastic set of chops and varied experience in every task of the trade and doesn't need to learn anything except local practice, who is brilliantly creative and capable of reinvention, who knows history, literature, and art with the perspective and detailed recall of a savant, who is fabulously humble and eager to learn and please and work with/under any oddball personality, who can direct and supervise others with skill and empathy, who is completely free of personal encumberments and commitments that might restrict night and weekend work and travel, who is ambitious but not threatening, and especially who is incredibly loyal and is committed to working for you forever. And who will start at minimum wage and take a seasonal hiatus. And who owns a van or pickup.

So you have to have that in mind as you read through something like Heidi Hoffer's Spring 2011 Theater Design & Technology article "Preparing design/tech undergraduates for the entertainment industry." She did a lot of surveying of industry vendors of entertainment products and services, stage managers, and others who employ theater production graduates. I'll quote from her opening summary:

"Many of the people . . . shared the view that the fast pace of change in the industry might require a different kind of undergraduate training today. There was a fundamental agreement that the practical knowledge learned in school was the most valuable in the workplace. They also agreed that too many new employees don't work hard enough, they expect instant gratification, and they don't have a professional work ethic."(p. 51)

But she also provided a quote from an industry leader admitting, "There's just so blasted much that you really need to know that it's tough for a student to be grounded in enough disciplines when they first get out of school to be ready to get a job and work effectively and successfully." (p. 52)

The article goes on to discuss knowledge bases in stagecraft, costume technology, hand drafting, cad drafting, traditional rendering, digital rendering, lighting design, costume design, scene design, theater history, theater literature, scene painting, stage management, internships, job-seeking skills and life skills.

So what does that mean to me and my students? Well, there really isn't a lot that is very new here except the list is longer. What we didn't know, we did suspect. There is a phenomenal knowledge and skill base that needs to be developed, and it takes commitment. Specialization is valuable, but of course the liberal learning is important, too. As theater work, it's slightly more reliable than acting and directing. I'll be thinking about this as I prepare my classes, trying to figure out how to cover the necessary bases in the time we have, and yet inspire students to pursue and commit to something. I really can't get at the whole list, but maybe I can encourage and help them find a part that can appeal to them. What will drive it ultimately will be their love for the art form, their love for the people who work in it, and the imagination and commitment to success in the work they do.

A lot of this they must have the drive to do for themselves. Actors, directors, designers, technicians. And teachers. Our working world is different, and is highly dependent on initiative. We can attack it directly or wander through and try to sort it out. But it really is up to us and to what we are willing to commit. That's how we're different. And we'll find ways to learn what we need to know to keep up.

On the Fringe - really

This is the month of the fringe festival in Washington, D.C. I have to say I wish I could be there. There appear to be some interesting conceptual pieces being done, and I would love to be able to see them. The descriptions suggest they are playful and challenge assumptions about the nature of theater, or at least about the seriousness of the art form itself. They suggest an openness to the theatrical experience and above all, they provide a stimulus for discussion about theater and what theater is.

The biggest and best international fringe began in 1947 and runs in Edinburgh, Scotland every August, but many other cities host their own fringes. New York, of course, as well as New Orleans, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Hollywood, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Orlando - all periodically have a festival for odd and innovative theater performance.

I had to look around a little to find out about the New England Fringe Festival in Burlington. It does come at a busy time - September 17 to October 2 - and it seems to be out of the way, certainly from south of the city. But now that I have my attention drawn to it, I hope to take in some of the work. The titles of past award winners look intriguing, although I hope it isn't dominated by solo artists. I also hope they can get some information out to the world about what is going on. The internet is great, but real promotion has to appear in your path.

I have to wonder why I have been unaware of the festival before, which has been going on since 2007. The Washington Post website is all over the festival there on a daily basis, but I don't remember reading anything about the New England festival in the Globe.

One problem with a Fringe Festival necessarily is venues. Theater art requires a certain amount of overhead - and for whatever reasons, not much of the fringe seems to occur in the city here. Maybe it is more cost effective to concentrate the festival in Burlington, but it's not getting the kind of visibility from Boston papers that the Washington festival is getting. I can't help feeling that attention to a fringe festival would inject some life into the world of Boston theater and challenge some conceptions about what theater can be.

Boston tries to maintain a sense of itself as a theater town. It does have a richer legacy of theater history than Washington and some of the other cities with festivals, but I wonder if it isn't weighing us down. I think there may be some things going on in the Boston area that rise to fringe kind of experiences, but there's no critical mass or media focus to project their influence and freshness into the art form at large. We hardly ever hear much about them in southeastern Mass.

I have a clipping I use of a group that did a play in a working, operating laundromat a few years ago. The patrons were the audience. It was a consciously scripted and intentional work, not just a "happening." Few such challenges to traditional presentation rise to media consciousness with a byline story and a picture. Some experiments may be occurring but there's little collective influence.

I have fond memories of some remarkable theater events that were created by Mobius members in their studios in the Fort Point district back in the 80s and early 90s. Some of the pieces were thoughtful and prompted real reflection, others were joyful and raucous, and still others were just odd. Nobody ever tried to define it all for you, but let you meet the work on your own, making whatever sense of it you might. Those events did have a certain amount of thoughtfulness to them and they did intend to shape an experience to a purpose. The organization gave it a focus of energy and critical perspective. It is notable that these generally were created by performance and media artists, not theater people.

I think audiences have the capacity to embrace the new. My students today are no longer surprised much by weirdness, because it has emerged as a kind of pop meme. From internet sites to cartoons to high school antics and youth oriented media in general. Given the intensity of feature filmmaking, there's little that can shock my students anymore. I think they can see silliness for its own sake and make some astute judgements. They seem to be a bit more ready to find meaning in an experience, and will apply a critical perspective if they are led to it a little.

One of the more important aspects of a fringe festival is that it de-institutionalizes the art form. Few major art forms have the institutional overhead of theater, but we keep pretending it can be be done on a trestle and board. A fringe festival reminds us that something interesting can be done with less. And new ideas can happen with minimum investment.

Under the best of circumstances, in a festival there is a critical mass of new experiences that allow audiences to explore and compare. The artists themselves are influenced by what goes on about them, and can work more thoughtfully in the context of the stream of current activity. It's all good for everybody.

But we have to know about it. Boston still pretends to be a theater town. It really needs to game up and the media should help. It's not like it costs them a lot. But of course it means less time and space for the latest outrage or sports win. On TV there's no longer time even for Joyce Kulhawik, who only reported on the most mainstream theater.

July 17, 2011
Scenemaker

Pushing the Bounds of Modernism-or not

I am a little fascinated when I think about the early evidence of change that I failed to grasp as change. You often can't predict the longer term direction or development of critical mass for change, but it's fun to reflect on how it played out.

While working on an article recently, I pulled up notes I made on a scenic choice I saw at the Huntington Theatre last fall. It was Bob Glaudini's Vengeance is the Lord's, directed by Peter DuBois and designed by Eugene Lee. It's a domestic drama about retribution in a family that boosts cars. It could have been written any time in the last 50 years and had a kind of made-for-TV feel.

The setting on the Huntington's full-stage turntable included a living/dining room, kitchen, bedroom, center hallway with stairs to a second floor and an outside porch stoop. There was a fence and some exterior scenic off the turntable. The entire show used only the living/dining room and the stoop. The turntable spun around between scenes and a character could be seen doing something mundane in the kitchen or the bedroom, but there was no action there. These richly propped rooms were totally unnecessary for the action of the play.

Many people know something of Lee's work as the designer for Saturday Night Live, but at Trinity Rep where he is resident designer he frequently likes a lot of iconic scenic atmosphere for the mostly open stages, though not usually naturalistic. Although it doesn't show on IBDB, I think he designed LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka) Slave Ship in New York in the early 1970s that uniquely included the audience in the ship as if slaves. This was considered part of the "environmental theater" movement following the artistic upheavals of the 1960s. A few years later, Lee became well known for Sweeney Todd in 1979, when he had an old foundry dismantled and installed on stage to frame the setting that occurred in a more modest space within.

What is interesting - and challenging - to me is the sense of artistic progression and paradigmatic shift I've seen during my life in theater art. Artistically I've been a child of what I call Modernism as a style, which I interpret to be about economy of statement and finding The Essential, about the perfection of form and space and saying as much as possible with a single Picasso-like line. It is the essential economy of poetry and as a dominant style it described the world of art for more than a half century from about 1920 to 1980. As it evolved, in my view the style of Post-Modernism, for whatever else it is about, is about generating the most possible connections and associations for the perceiver/audience. It is about a richer associative experience that is not defined or controlled, perhaps barely even led by the artist. It's a more co-creative, ultimately democratic approach to meaning in art. It is antithetical to economy of statement.

Lee's use of unnecessary scenery reminded me of our BSU production of A. R. Gurney's 1981 play The Dining Room in 1986. The play is a series of scenes of different families' lives playing out in different eras in a generic upper middle class dining room. (An interesting precursor to Tom Stoppard's more complex conceptually challenging 1993 play Arcadia.) Our production, directed by Stephen Levine, emphasized the meaning of the dining room as an institution that was embedded in class. He also asked for a museum-like display of two other rooms in other areas of the theater space as institutions of social class.

In an idle exercise of retrospective rationalizing, I now wonder if these rooms (and perhaps Gurney's play itself) may have been a kind of step toward a Postmodern style. One reading of the event might be that although the rooms were not focused on generating random or uncontrolled connections, they were (self)consciously asking the audience to make their own associations related to the concept of the play. And one might imagine, to the concept of museums and, by extension, to the theater itself.

The pressures of schedule were too great and the other rooms were not propped appropriately or given the kind of presentation the concept required. As a Modernist, I felt like the rooms were a digression, a distraction from the through-line of Gurney's play. I think most of the audience thought they were a strange artsy idea. Only a few people actually spent a few minutes looking at them. The point to be made here is that although they had a more self-conscious purpose, the rooms had much in common with Lee's unused rooms on the turntable.

If I ponder this more, I recognize that Lee's extra rooms clearly were part of the scenic statement of the family home, emphasizing the normal domesticity of this criminal family. There was none of the real randomness of visual Postmodernism, and certainly none of its random eclectic references. I know that in both productions the concept was still pretty controlled, and that Postmodernism can be an influence on a style rather than a driving aesthetic. Neither production really tried to generate the kind of rich co-creative involvement of the perceiver that Postmodernism typically seeks. But both productions expanded the conceptual world of the play.

Within the next decade, we did a number of other productions that were more deliberately conceptually challenging, and I was teaching Postmodernism style as an aesthetic in my classes. Historic cultural evolution is so difficult to see in its time. You often don't know you are part of a movement until it moves on because it can really be defined only in retrospect.

The art world is different today than in 1986, and I think audiences have different expectations for a stage experience. They've seen it all, so ground-breaking has lost its cachet. The challenge today, more than ever, is to define the stage experience in relation to all of the entertainment technologies, from gigantic touring music acts to Cirque du Soleil to Disney entertainment environments to Spiderman on Broadway, all to compete with home electronics. And so we have swirling turntables with whole houses of strictly scenic rooms on them.

We seem to have returned to an era when spectacle and occasion have the most to contribute to the live theater experience. And incidentally, to most other traditional live art forms.

I view that with some concern. I think meaning is important, too.

Scenemaker
July 2011

The Bruins, Bulger and bin Laden.

There has been a trio of interesting pieces of public theater recently. Perhaps not theater in the sense of deliberately crafted artistry, but stories bearing the structure and important cultural features of theater, nevertheless.

One was the capture of Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, who has been "on the lam" for decades after playing both sides with the FBI. Another was the assassination of 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Ladin. And the third was the Boston Bruins' winning Lord Stanley's Cup in hockey, taking it from a Canadian team after a two-decade dry spell.

What makes these events theater? The normal circumstances of theater - storytelling in a controlled space with some form of reenactment - are generally absent or have to be stretched to embrace these events. But there was significant pageantry in all three cases, however different they are in their particulars. Two are high drama, and the third a comedy.

First, all three events are full of symbols and meaning. The capture of Bulger and the assassination of Bin Laden were fulfillment of naratives of our cultural sense of right and wrong and retribution. These were the plots of melodrama. Here were the major players in a years-long story line that has been nurtured in the public's mind and played out for a decade and more in a kind of parable. There was an unwritten plot that, in the case of Bulger the fabled gangster, continues to be played out through the media at as much length and intensity as the public attention will stand. There are many lines to the story that translate into acts of plays about Bulger and bin Laden - their rise and fall, their capture, and our retribution. All sides of the story are examined and measured against the public sense of justice and our moral and cultural imperatives as human beings.

In the case of bin Laden, the curtain finally seems to be coming down. We continue to maintain our inevitable conspiracy theories, but the meaning of the story line generally was resolved with his death. As for Bulger, the last act remains to be performed. We've come to know the actions of the villain and brought him back onto the stage, but we haven't persuaded ourselves that all of those who share the blame are yet included in the resolution. Indeed, we suspect that there are subplots in play of which we know little - yet.

The Cinderella story of the Boston Bruins hockey team brought the audience to its feet in a celebration of joy. This story was crafted for the most dramatic result. The Bruins overcame huge obstacles and a two-decade history of failure to compete for the top prize. They captured it from a team in the country that owns the history of the game. And they brought pride and glory to their patrons, as they finally joined the local football, basketball and baseball teams in achieving the top prize in their sport.

There was suspense and fulfillment as the Bruins went the distance, hanging on to win the last game of the best-of-seven series. Sports writers whipped up fans with metaphors and the meaning of victory. The final scene was an immense parade in the winding narrow streets of Boston, which must have rivaled some of the biggest in a town that loves a parade. There were heroes along the way, and perhaps a few minor villains, but it was a story of winning through, of the struggle to achieve the top prize of the sport, and snatching victory from the brink of disappointment.

It's turning into a good year for cultural theater.