“Sometimes the body knows things the mind isn’t listening to.”

Baseball season is around the corner and I’m hoping, very soon, to go in person and see (and hear) someone hit a home run.  There’s a certain crack and feel to the flight of the ball when you absolutely know that the batter nails it.  You don’t have to know anything about baseball to understand that.

The same is true in the arts.  You don’t have to “appreciate” theater to know when they nail it.  It doesn’t take any study or education or “acquired taste” when a choreographer and dancer line up just so.  You feel it.  Everyone in the room feels it.  And it feels right.  It doesn’t matter if it’s your first performance or your thousandth.

I wish they’d teach art appreciation like that.  It only takes about four stages.  First, art is big – there’s tons and tons of stuff out there.  Second, you won’t like it all – no one likes it all and some people will like different or nichey stuff.  Third, some of it is great – most people will just know it when they see it.  Fourth, watch this, listen to this, see this – not the stuff that some old professor likes – but the stuff that everybody feels and everybody likes.  I’m essentially a populist – go get it.

If I was teaching theatre appreciation, I would’ve taken my class to see the Theatre UAB performance of Paula Vogel’s prize-winning How I Learned To Drive.  This play is essentially about a complicated and inappropriate relationship between a mostly-good middle-aged man and his underage in-law niece.  Almost like Equus, though the man does some questionable things, at the end of the play you’ve been gently led into feeling ambivalently about him.  Is he a good guy or bad?

“You should take it as a compliment that he wants to watch you jiggle.”

UAB performances are consistently as good as any other company in Birmingham and they may be the best-kept secret.  This play had the best cast of anything I’ve seen at UAB.  Jessica Walston skillfully plays ages eleven through all-grown-up and is pretty in every way.  Joshua Butler somehow stays likeable even while frequently toeing (and stepping entirely over) the sweet/creepy line.  There are lots of opportunities to mis-step and make the uncle too nice or too evil; I give a lot of credit to Butler and his director, Dustin Canez.  The three other members of the chorus were also excellent.  I’m getting used to seeing Atom Bennett in UAB performances and I hope he keeps acting and performing.  My note about Brittney Michelle is “has a huge sparkle” – and I mean it.  Her Mama Bear’s “Girl’s Guide to Drinking” is worth the effort: “A wet woman is less conspicuous than a drunk woman.”  Finally, Trista Baker has been good both times I’ve seen her and may get to deliver some of the funniest lines in the play.

Thanks again to Melissa Christian and UAB Theatre for letting me write about these performances and spread the word.