|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
 |
|
|
||
|
Schedule Opening night Saturday, April 15 Sunday, April16 Thursday thru Sunday April 20 - 23 Thursday thru Sunday April 27 - 30 Showtimes are 8pm Thursdays thru Saturdays & 3 pm Sundays Tickets are $18 / $15 For Real Art Ways Members.
|
Real Art Ways presents acclaimed NYC Writer and performer Elizabeth Hess in a multi-week run of her stunning solo performance "Birth Rite: Sex, Drugs, and a Restless Soul." Birth Rite is a one-woman autobiographical play concerning a young Mennonite woman’s struggle to break free from the rigidity of her religious roots. Through the use of creative costuming and the incorporation of beautiful music, Birth Rite elegantly documents the process of one woman's self actualization. The audience remains transfixed as her world is transformed from one of stark reality into one of sensual release. "I flipped through the hymnal, adding the words 'in bed' to the titles in my head, so that they read like this: 'Awake My Soul, Awake My Tongue' --in bed. And I wasn't quite sure what it all meant, but I knew it was dirty and had something to do with love." - Elizabeth Hess Deborah Hornblow Hartford Courant At the end of Elizabeth Hess' acclaimed 90-minute, one-woman show "Birth Rite: Sex, Drugs & a Restless Soul,'' the writer-actress stood teary-eyed in the footlights accepting an enthusiastic standing ovation from a full house at Hartford's Real Art Ways. Hess' moving curtain call seemed equal parts gratitude, relief and exhaustion. She had, after all, been through something. So had the audience. "Birth Rite,'' in which Hess relives some of the most painful and funny episodes from her childhood, is akin to an exorcism in which Hess purges herself of the demons of the past, ultimately transcending her difficult upbringing to find release and joy in hard-won selfhood and the victory of self-transformation. Born to a Mennonite minister and his wife and raised in the confines of a parsonage, Hess' earliest memories are of her parents' chilly distance and of their concern for parishioners' pains ("more high-profile cases'') at the expense of Hess and her siblings. To a sensitive, acutely intelligent child such as Hess, the physical and emotional neglect amounted to abuse. (To say nothing of her father's spanking rituals.) The grown Hess is as skilled an actress as she is a writer, and she puts herself through vigorous paces in the demanding, emotionally raw, intermissionless show. The simple stage set comprises a wooden bench and chair, a small trunk and a patch quilt - props that Hess employs with inspired variety under Richard Caliban's apt direction. Moving seamlessly from beat to beat (one sometimes wonders where she gets her breath), Hess sings, shouts, cries, laughs, rages and revels. The chronologically structured account of her childhood begins with memories of singing with her mother in church (a ritual in which her typically frosty mother seemed transformed into a more sensual being) and ends with her triumphant discovery of herself and her place in the theater. In between, Hess covers the high and low points, and the show shifts from her accounts of playing doctor to a near-miss with a child molester, from her hilarious account of an acid trip with the Harley-riding "Bimbo'' to conversations with her demanding father (a man she once saw as the Holy Trinity combined), from the harrowing account of her mother's miscarriage to a devastating love affair and her experiences at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. There are a few scenes in which Hess depends heavily on blaming her parents for sins of omission and commission, and a distracting tone of victimhood invades her text. But elsewhere and generally, she triumphs, examining the experiences with greater perspective. Her writing combines keen observations ("a handshake - the Mennonite equivalent of a hug''; dropping acid as a ritual recalling communion), amusing thumbnails (as of the lover who chanted "hit me with your rhythm stick''), and more poetically charged passages ("a smile stretching like an open gash,'' "some cowlick in my soul that wouldn't lie down.'') "Birth Rite'' makes marvelous use of music, the key to Hess' salvation, with taped soundtrack segments ranging tellingly from church hymns and Mozart's Requiem to Jefferson Airplane. Throughout, Hess is drawn on by what she calls her need to be "fully expressed.'' In her show, she has realized her dream beyond measure. Costumed in traditional Mennonite dress as the show begins, she gradually peels away the layers until she has unmasked her essential self. This is the inspired, transforming journey of "Birth Rite.'' Not Just at the Retelling D.J.R. Bruckner New York Times The rite at the heart of "Birth Rite: Sex. Drugs and a Restless Soul" by Elizabeth Hess is not nice. A teen-age girl Is called home from school by her father to help care for her mother, who has just had a miscarriage, and the mother's demonstration of what miscarriage means is startling. The father tells her a miscarriage is simply nature's way of correcting mistakes, and the girl says, "I thought 'mistakes' was a word reserved for my sister and me; we should not have been born." Yet "Birth Rite," a one-woman show performed by Ms. Hess, is not a grim play. It is an enchanting evocation of a life, presented as autobiography, from early childhood to a successful acting career. The transformation is wonderful to behold - in fact , Ms. Hess draws you so deeply into the experience you leave convinced you shared it. And the story is often very funny. It is also poignant, a tale of escape - from fear, ignorance, inhibitions, fundamentalism - but escape at great cost. The parents of the young girl are a Mennonite minister and his wife in Toronto, and quite lovable people; indeed, it is a tribute to the steadiness of Ms. Hess's vision that virtually everyone her protagonist escapes from seems on reflection to be more warmly human than she is until the last few minutes of the play. "My first language was music," she says at the outset, and music, including some beautifully sung hymns, paces the performance. As the childhood faith of the young girl is ebbing out of her while she is in college, she can still intuit God in music. When she starts to act, her greatest revelation is the realization that she is an instrument in search of a score that she herself has to provide. And the freedom she had sought all her life comes to her when she falls in love with a concert musician who says if he could love anyone it would be her, but his heart has no room for anyone. "For the first time in my life." she cries, "I was looking for a way in, not out." It is then that the image of the miscarriage is recalled, in a remarkable moment when Ms. Hess, kneeling on the stage, seems to spontaneously abort the embryo of her own life before she arises as a vibrantly sexual, magnificent woman with the irresistible attraction of someone made wise, and perhaps a little dangerous, by the loss of a self she rejected but loved. The play is about transformation, and Ms. Hess's realization of it is astonishing. The little girl is really a little girl, awkward and plain in her traditional Mennonite garment. The teenager discovering sex and desire is giddy and voluble. The college student dropping acid, working with the vigor and precision of an explorer to lose her virginity and learning with relish how to drop men she is tired of is energetic, attractive and, at least to a man, sometimes a bit repulsive. And the woman gazing out at the audience as the lights go down is so stunning you need a moment to remember she was there all the time. That it all comes off so smoothly owes a lot to very sensitive direction by Richard Caliban. who has often demonstrated how to make one actor's movements suggest whole legions. And something important is owed to the costume designer, Marc R. Aubm. When Ms. Hess enters in her severe Mennonite habit, you have no notion how many garments of vastly different fashions are hidden in that simple skirt, blouse, jacket and shawl; they form a kind of chrysalis from which a dazzling creature finally emerges. |