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Friday, July 30, 2004 By Phillip Maddox staff writer But they had little trouble picking up on the activist theme of the earlier era or the lyrics of many of the songs culled by Slattery for her show. Something of the "60s spirit - and even a few of the recognizable faces from the period - seem to have resurfaced of late. Populist films that question the policy and veracity of the government, the media, and business culture are finding an audience. Musicians are again lightening rods for protest, Jimmy Buffett is at the top of the music charts. And some veterans of the Vietnam era protests like Slattery are finding themselves joining in anti-war protests again 30 years later. Some familiar faces and events also resurface in "What's Goin' On?" Slattery recalls coming across a chanting Allen Ginsberg during a Vietnam War protest that had turned violent. She remembers how idealism and teenage hormones inspired her to chain herself to the door of the National Draft Board with a dashing protest figure named Tony. And she reveals she and several protest cohorts were once arrested for flying a kite near the Washington Monument. There is also a familiar question at the heart of the show's mix of music and personal vignettes: How much have we really learned from our past? The awakening to a bewilderment about what is going on seems to be what is driving the interest in counterculture entertainment. If some of the questions raised in "What's Goin' On?" are familiar, the means Slattery's uses to introduce them are not. She moves seamlessly from song to storytelling and back and forth between her the happenings of her youth and present day. Though it is clear that she is an accomplished singer and storyteller, her technique never upstages the story. Slattery, who has a master's in theater, is now in her 50s and lives in Somerville. She is an adjunct faculty member at Lesly University in the creative arts and learning program and she holds workshops and private tutoring in acting and performance skills. She grew up attending Catholic school first in California and later in Washington, D.C. After moving to the Boston area in the 1970s she trained at an experimental company in Boston, Reality Theater, and began to perform original songs on the acoustic/coffeehouse circuit, including performances at Club Passim in Cambridge and the Iron Horse in Northampton. She studied voice and music at New England Conservatory, expanded her repertoire to sing jazz, pop, and rhythm and blues, and for a time performed six nights a week at the Bamboo Bar at the famous Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. In 2001 she released a CD, "Movin' On." For "What's, Goin' On?" she draws on both her life experiences and professional skills. She also uses an element that isn't generally associated with the '60s, a storytelling restraint. Taking the stage dressed in jeans and a sleeveless print blouse and accompanied by pianist Mark Shilansky and guitarist Eric Byers, Slattery takes the audience through a musical and personal collage that includes songs by The Who, the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Lucy Kaplansky, and Bruce Springsteen and vignettes about the suicide of her daughter' s father, life in a loft where an old car-seat is used as a sofa, and of the overwhelming need to hear the voice of her daughter, who works in Manhattan, following the attacks of Sept 11. "It's 9:08. I'm listening to NPR. Bob Edwards is on. BBC is always on at that time," is the way she begins the 9-11 story. She recalls hearing the report that a plane had hit the one of the World Trade Center towers, gradually realizing that it wasn't a private plane but a jet liner and that this was unfolding near where her daughter works. "I'm trying not to panic," Slattery remembers. "I try her cell phone. All circuits are busy. I'm trying to make all sorts of deals with God." She finally reaches her daughter. "She is in her midtown office. She's safe." What Slattery leaves out of her stories is as important as what she includes. Her words have way of inviting the audience to connect a visual scene around them. The experience is closer to reading a book than watching a television program. "I'm not trying to draw too many conclusions," she said during an interview before last week's show. "It's my experiences along with the music. I hope it has an evocative effect on people - that it gets people to laugh a laugh bit and maybe cry." Slattery said "What's Goin' On" is a product of the show "Moving Target," which she began performing in 1997. She and her director, Bill Castellino, came up with the idea at the time as a way to revive interest in a period that seemed to have fallen into neglect. "Frankly, the whole era meant so much to me," Slattery said. "It changed the whole course of my life. I felt it had been trivialized." Then, about three years after she began performing her show, came the attacks of Sept. 11 and a sense that "Moving Target" might be off target at that moment. "I wasn't sure if I should do it," she said. "It was all a little disturbing. But I found people were moved in a whole different way." Then came the war in Iraq and protests and references to quagmires and Vietnam and the themes of Slattery's look back at her own coming of age and the music and events that time had a sudden present-day relevance. During her stage show, she notes some similarities between the era of her youth and the present day - war, protest. Bob Woodward, duck and cover and duct tape, and attention-grabbing linguistics of each period's vice presidents. But the hour-long show, which Slattery refers to as a "countercultural cabaret," is personal rather than polemical. Even the ease with which she shifts from narrative to song - sometimes interrupting her own singing to add a brief observation about a lyric - is a reminder that life's experiences, aren't easily separated from one another. All of it, the good and the bad, the naive and the wise, the fortunate and the unfortunate are part of the same piece. As she notes at one point in "What's Goin'On?": "Everything that happens to us contributes to who we are - you can't edit out the bad parts." Slattery said her.show which has played at various venues, has generally been favorably received. She said she is not surprised at the new passion for public involvement and for works that question policies and values. "People are turning again to the political arena. They are realizing the '80s and '90s, where the focus was personal financial gain, only took us so far," she said. She's also not surprised that some filmmakers, playwrights, singers seem to have taken the lead in this public dialogue. "Artists," she said, "reflect the society and times." "It's always healthy to look at history, to discuss it honestly and openly, to look at what mistakes were made and ask how can we avoid them again," she adds. But as Slattery reminds her audience in "What's Goin' On?" we're often more tied to the past than we'd care to admit. The show also seems to suggest that acknowledging those limitations offers a certain liberation. "We think we have control of our lives," she says during the show, "but we're such a product of our time." Targeting life in the '60s and 70sDropping In Jim Sullivan
Celia Slattery, on stage at Jimmy Tingle's Off-Broadway in
Somerville, begins "Moving Target," her music-and-monologue
show about growing up in the
1960s and 1970s, by referencing
earlier, "simpler" times. Initially,
this seems to be a false note -
even before the Vietnam War, the
touchstone for her generation,
things were pretty gnarly. But it turns out Slattery is setting up that notion
of a simpler time as being illusory. By the end of the 80-minute
show - after taking us through her personal journey, interspersed
with folk and rock songs from the era - she has come to that conclusion:
No time is simple when you've
lived through it.November 20, 2003 Slattery, who just turned 50, grew up during a time when the personal was political and vice versa. The moment that jolted her into the ugliness of the real world was John F. Kennedy's assassination. Slattery was informed of the president's shooting by Sister Pauline at the Santa Barbara, Calif., Catholic school where she was being taught. "Something has happened to our president," said Sister Pauline. Slattery happened to be the class president at the time, and thought the Sister was ousting her; then the reality and gravity set in. With "Moving Target," Slattery, accompanied by keyboardist Mark Shilansky, takes you along for her ride through good times and bad, through naivete and anger, in a pop-cabaret getting. Beatlemania gave us a reason to be cheerful after JFK's death. Her schooling taught her contradictory ideas about obeying authority and opening your mind; a hippie pad was a pretty cool place to crash until it seemed like a trash mound. Slattery's hippie pad, where she lived with her boyfriend Bob, among others, was what is now the Piano Factory on Tremont Street. She says she moved 12 times in 10 years, hence the title of the show. She did yoga and moved to an isolated cabin in New Hampshire with her daughter. She studied theater, worked scads of straight jobs at which she failed, and got arrested in Washington, D.C., where she spent much of her young life, for flying a kite in the park. The hippies, you see, had a "kite-in" protest in April 1970 and four of them were arrested for violating an 1892-era law about flying kites in public. Slattery had hoisted a Red Barren kite (remember the Red Barron of World War I and, later, "Peanuts" fame?) and she got busted for it. You can read all about it in The Washington Post. Slattery copies the story for the program for her show. The best and worst of hippie culture come tumbling out here. You may tear up, you may wince. Music, particularly soft-rock and folk, plays an important role, and Slattery starts with the Turtles' "Happy Together" and winds through the Beatles, Country Joe and the Fish, and a medley of lounge songs she performed when she was a performer in Bangkok. Her Bangkok experience allows her to ruminate about a culture where monks and prostitutes coexist, but it seems out of context in this work. The two centerpieces of the show are a medley of Joni Mitchell songs - was there a female folk singer of this period not enamored of Mitchell? - and Cat Stevens's "Peace Train." The years of protest have the most resonance and texture. Slattery, who once chained herself to a gate outside the draft board office, wrestles with the issues of nonviolence and draws inspiration from Allen Ginsberg, whose chanting of "Om" reduced the tension at a protest and led to the hippies giving the police flowers instead of pelting them with debris. There's a sense of resolution upon hearing the Beatles' "Revolution" played - if someone of John Lennon's stature is making a pacifistic plea, maybe the extreme left is not going about things properly. At the end of "Moving Target," Slattery jumps from the mid-'70s and the end of the Vietnam War to where we are today. She muses that although Iraq is not Vietnam and George W. Bush is not Rich ard Nixon, "sometimes it feels like it." Whos life is it anyway? In one sense, it's singer-actress Celia Slattery's. In a broader sense, say she and her collaborators, it could be all of ours. Slattery's musical and dramatic take on her roller-coaster life can be appreciated in her one-woman show, "Moving Target," which is opening Public Access: 12 Hours of of Free Theatre" tomorrow at noon at the Actors Workshop, 40 Boylston St., in Boston. Admission is, of course, free. The performer's act - "part cabaret, part musical theater, part something different," Slattery says - traces a young woman's search for herself in the Age of Aquarius (think "Hair"). She and director Bill Castellino, who calls this a "poeticized memory play of a life completely lived," blended original and classic '60s and '70s music with the assistance of music director Mark Shilansky. He calls it "cabaret with pop tunes and rock 'n' roll." Quoted are "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens, some music by Bob Dylan, a medley of Joni Mitchell tunes, some Beatles, and "Make Me a Kite" by Amanda McBroom, the singer-songwriter-cabaret performer who wrote "The Rose." Slattery was arrested in 1970 for flying a kite at a "Kite-In" at the Washington Monument protesting the Vietnam War. (An 1892 act of Congress made it illegal to fly kites in Washington, D.C.) There'll also be two original pieces by Slattery. Born in southern California, Slattery moved with her peripatetic family to Washington, where she became involved in antiwar demonstrations and was arrested at age 17 for blocking the entrance to the national draft headquarters. But that was only one phase of Slattery's (r)evolution. Others were her transformation at 19 into a single mother, and the suicide of the father of her daughter, Crystal, now 26. Slattery is an alumna of the award-winning experimental company Reality Theatre. Among the show's more inspired moments is her depiction of her improbable singing engagement at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, which has been called the world's best hotel. The engagement turned out to be "for most of 1991," she says. After listening to white men whining on Boston stages, it's refreshing to discover two women opening solo performances next week. Instead of self-absorbed sniffling about the battle of the sexes, Sherri Lewis and Celia Slattery use their life stories to find universal truths about survival, strength, growth and hope. While both women use original music and classic hits from the '60s, '70s and '80s, each have strikingly different tales to tell. Lewis' "Life Is a Beach," which opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art Theater on Thursday, traces her meteoric rise to pop music fame - she had a Top 40 hit with "Just So Lonely" in 1981 - and even faster fall. "My story is really about living with HIV," says Lewis. "But I don't want people to think, 'Oh, that's a bummer.' So I've taken a kind of People magazine mentality toward it. My life has been very colorful. I had my 15 minutes of fame and lost it, and in 1987 I was diagnosed HIV positive. "I think it's important for people to know that this can happen to anyone and we still have no cure. But rather than be a memorial to those who have died, this show celebrates those who are still living." Slattery's "Moving Target," which opens at the Little Flags Theatre in Cambridge on Nov. 7, traces her ability to navigate a path through a commitment to the anti-war movement, the challenge of being an unwed teen mom in 1972, the shifting tides of '70s alternative lifestyles and the ridiculous jobs she took on while getting back on her feet. "My experiences affected me deeply," says Slattery, "but I know the scene affected a lot of people deeply. I may have an unusual story, but it's not just about me." Slattery has teamed with well known director Bill Castellino (best known for directing and choreographing Garry Trudeau's hilarious satire "RapMaster Ronnie"). |
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