Theater Review: My First Story on Substack (by ALICE HURLEY, Reporter)

I drove five hours (traffic, lightning) to Sag Harbor Thursday to see 

the play "Mister Halston." Photo by Phil Merritt.

My first Substack post is live, about "Mister Halston."

Review of the one-man show here.

It's been a long time blogging....since 2010, to be exact. I followed my friend Kim onto the Blogspot platform, captivated by her reports. I loved posting my own, and now they also serve as very useful looks back, not just as a writer but especially as a mother on a sometimes rocky road.

Now my writer/editor friends Kim Flodin and Fay Ellis both write on Substack. And I love to follow icons Amanda Hesser, Dorie Greenspan (baking) and Kim France (fashion) there. I just subscribed to Sam's Plate, by nutritionist Samantha Cassetty, MS, RD, a contact from Good Housekeeping days. Seems there are free subscriptions and paid ones ranging from $5 to $8 monthly. And I just cancelled an $8 feed written by a style society maven because she wrote a catty comment about a fashion writer I adore. I don't like that.

I hope you will check out my first post. You can subscribe and read for free, no pressure.

Thank you. I still don't know how I will balance Substack writing with blogging. For a long time, and through the pandemic, I wrote on Medium, but mostly earned just pennies there, except for one controversial "Other Side of Karen" post that brought in about $500.

More to come.

Photos by Phil Merritt.

Does the Recipe Need More Cream? A Shower of Dark Black Pepper? Straw & Hay and "Ashes & Ink"

By Alice Garbarini Hurley

    Many Italian chefs offer a pasta classic called Straw and Hay. On Friday, I made Lidia Bastianich's version from her book of favorite recipes. The straw is regular (straw-colored) fettuccine and the hay is green (spinach) fettuccine. Add Parmigiano Reggiano, chicken broth, heavy cream, EVOO, prosciutto, baby peas, scallions.... It's an appealing idea, the recipe takes only one page in the book and is prepared in a skillet. I enjoy Lidia, and I enjoyed making it. But it wasn't exactly all I hoped for. 

Spice, teen taster, thought it needed salt, and I thought it needed more clingy richness, like that first Fettuccine Alfredo sauce I made at Dumont High School in the International Chefs' Club. I opened The Pollan Family Table cookbook (Corky, Tracy and Michael Pollan) and found another pasta in a white cream sauce---with butter, garlic, grated Parmesan, and more cream and black pepper than Lidia uses. Also: Plenty of spinach to boost the nutrition. So I made those additions.

In the end, it was good enough. But I think next time, I will also add some grilled chicken.

***  

 

Julian Shatkin as Quinn and Kathryn Erbe as his mother, Molly, in "Ashes & Ink," about addiction. Photo by Thomas Mundell.

Another two-noun title this week that was not quite everything I wanted/expected it to be: The off-Broadway production of "Ashes & Ink," a drama about addiction. The A word is almost a character.

Molly (Kathryn Erbe) is a pretty widow in an Eileen Fisher-style sweater coat. She lives in her tidy city apartment, wearing a headset, cataloging an extensive library of birdsong with a computer program. It's her business. She and her belated husband listened to birds of all feathers. The recordings also include their son, Quinn. Listen: A baby babbling, then the chirp and trill of a juvenile song sparrow. As a young mother, Molly compared the two sounds.

Now an addict in his 20s, Quinn (handsome standout Julian Shatkin, a boy in the 2014 film "Like Sunday, Like Rain") returns from Serenity House rehab, drops his duffel, sits in the chair where Molly had arranged a folded, fringed throw--stylish, homey. "That place was bullshit," he says. Right off, you know. His disorderly conduct and unpredictability are in stark contrast to the calm home, with a few bright Post-it memos on the wall and yellow No. 2 pencils neatly arranged in a cup.

Good luck with such serenity when an addict's sure foothold (in this case, in black Converse high-tops) is in the house. With his black leather jacket and silver rings, Quinn's surprise return is jarring. Molly's love partner, Leo (Francisco Solorzano at this performance) is a widower with a young son, Felix (Rhylee Watson), who adores Quinn but finds a crack pipe big brother buried under an oak tree at the country house. Felix was digging for acorns when he cut his hand. A deep cut for a parent. Shame. Your older child modeling substance abuse for a younger sibling. Making a faint effort to bury it, but no. You failed once, now might fail again because you could not nip the problem in the bud. What a loser you are. Two lives now about to be wasted at your hands.

That's how "fixers" talk to themselves. People who drain their own sanity and health, thinking it is their responsibility to solve the problem, rather than remain standing, even personally thriving, in the face of it. To be better and do better, to do their best, family members eventually arrive at acceptance. 

The Al-Anon part is good. We learn about a secret society. First, Molly faces the hand she was dealt, which takes a lot out of her, out of us all. "Where are you? Where’s my little boy who loves spinach and pirates and snowy owls?" Molly asks. "You hold your beautiful baby in your arms and smell the breast milk, crusting a little behind his ears. I’d dip Q-tips in baby oil and clean back there, really gently. Rock him to sleep and then...who knew... you end up holding a body bigger than yours and pray that he’s still breathing." 

Quinn (Julian Shatkin) and his mother, Molly (Kathryn Erbe). Photo by Thomas Mundell.

"Take Care of You. Who?" She tells of "a drudgy meeting in a dark church hall," code for Al-Anon. Molly's blue denim jacket looks small, so small on her dainty frame, but she is a fighter, a would-be warrior, silvery streaks in her hair, faint crinkles around her eyes. Life's badges, which we mothers see, and celebrate. We know the little creases are hard-earned and true. No mother wants addiction at her door. She loses precious time that could go toward, among other things, bedtime beauty cream rituals. Or work, or creativity. Or other family members. 

We are tiny but mighty in the face of A's force and grip. Like Molly, we learn the three C's of Al-Anon. "I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it." It lifts the blame.  

"Having you here and not knowing where you are is a fucking nightmare," Molly finally says to her son. "Hand me your keys. Leave me be until you can learn to stay alive. You know where to go for help."

Only problem, the story may be a bit too neatly tied up with a square knot. Molly's clearheadedness, bravery and hope, her success at getting Quinn out, at least for now, with support from Leo. IRL, it can take what feels like a lifetime to get there, and maybe there is a catharsis in watching others struggle with us, not pull it together. There's nothing neatly tied up about addiction, for the addict or a bystander. Still, this story helps us ponder, find inner strength. Know we are not alone. We wonder from seat F1 how the writer, Martha Pichey, knows all this.

The play is directed by Alice Jankell, mother to the actor who plays Quinn, with that great hair, ripped* muscles--and a tattoo that may or may not be made from both his father's ashes and studio ink.

Ashes & Ink
At the AMT Theater, Manhattan.

Performance time: 90 minutes. Running through the 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, November 3.

Leo: Javier Molina.

Bree (Molly's sister): Tamara Flannagan.

Scenic Design: Tim McMath.

Costume Design: Kaitlin Feinberg.

Sound Design: Alexis Attalla.

Lighting Design: Paul Hudson.

Al-Anon Family Groups: alanon.org.

*Merriam-Webster says "ripped" means

1. being under the influence of alcohol or drugs: high, stoned
2. having high muscle definition

Off-Broadway Review: Ike Mans up in ‘Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground’

John Rubinstein in "Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground."

Photo by Maria Baranova.

A solo performance brings back America’s 1950s president, unearthing his Kansas roots, true grit and swagger. More than 60 years after his second term ended, Eisenhower’s ideals sound pretty convincing in these troubled political times. 

By Alice Garbarini Hurley

June 22, 2023

Turns out Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower (in office 1953 to 1961) was not the stuffed chair he was sometimes portrayed to be, an outdated item to whisk out of the White House, along with all signs of thrifty first lady Mamie, so Camelot could sweep in. 

The Kennedys brought visions of Harvard, suntans, sailing, white-toque chefs and Paris fashions, not to mention expensive new furnishings. And Ike’s hard-won leadership lessons, still relevant today, were almost lost, left behind.

The 34th president wasn’t Ivy League. To finance a college education without help from his beleaguered parents, he set his sights on West Point. That propelled him into an Army career, culminating as five-star general during World War II, leading the Allies. He clung to his Kansas family’s practical wisdom. His mother "had six boys in three rooms, all rotating chores--doing the laundry, hoeing the corn, milking the cow, spading the ground." When Ike tore his trousers, he paid back his parents every dime that a new pair cost.

Based on an immersive study of President Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters, director Peter Ellenstein and playwright Richard Hellesen have stitched together a picture of this man at an acute moment in his life, when a New York Times Magazine article that summer, "Our Presidents: A Rating  by 75 Historians," by Arthur M. Schlesinger, put Eisenhower at a demoralizing #22. The play sets out to turn that around, and it does.

It is July 1962 when we meet him, played to a precise turn by John Rubinstein, who had the title role in "Pippin" and won the Tony for "Children of a Lesser God." We are at the Gettysburg farm Ike owns with Mamie, his wife of 46 years. He is 71. 

Rubinstein conveys likable confidence in every glance, every turn of his wrist; in the lift of a coffee cup or the pouring of scotch. We see self-assurance, and an occasional trademark loss of temper. "Hell’s fire!" says the son of a Bible-reading family, pounding on his desk in a moment of anger. His pants hang just so over his fit Army physique. His soul, it seems, is tethered to a neat, closely held code of ethics, and to his own set of high expectations. 

"Eisenhower" follows other captivating shows with a master cast of one--"Tru," Robert Morse’s transformation into an aging Truman Capote (1989) and "Ann," starring Holland Taylor as spicy Texas Governor Ann Richards (2013). Skilled solo performances lift characters from flat pages. The dead come to life. They walk and talk. And we hear their voices long after the final bow, as we ride on the subway and walk through the cereal aisle.

Throughout the play, photographs of the president’s birth family, Mamie, tense moments in history and more are projected against a fertile Pennsylvania farm backdrop. 

Speaking into a tape recorder with his musings for a memoir, Ike talks squarely, yet with ripples of regret and pain over horrors he witnessed.

A German concentration camp. "Most of our group couldn't get through it. Hell, George Patton got sick. But I forced myself to see every last inch of that camp. Then I marched the local population through it, so they could never say ‘they didn't know.’"

The integration battle at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor called off the National Guard, leaving the students to face angry mobs. "So the next troops to arrive in Little Rock were that Hundred and First Airborne that led the way on D-Day. I think that was the hardest decision I had to make as president: putting troops into an American city, where they do not belong. But it was a matter of justice, pure and simple. The law was enforced--those children got the education they had a right to."

The McCarthy hearings. McCarthy was "a fascist in a rumpled suit," a skunk, with Roy Cohn at his side. "The skunk and the weasel," Ike called them. 

Book burning. McCarthy planned to have books written by "Communists or leftists" in State Department libraries overseas be taken off the shelf and burned. "Don’t join the book burners! If we start believing that every individual or party that disagrees with us is somehow wicked or treasonous, then we are near the end of freedom's road."

Grave personal loss. Icky, who was Ike and Mamie’s first child, died in his dad's arms from scarlet fever at age 3. Ike blamed himself, because he had hired a maid, Mary, a girl who said she had scarlet fever but had recovered. "That first loss…it’s haunted me for 40 years," he says. "I said I always wanted to find a reason for things that happened--but what could possibly be the reason…Except to let it guide you for the rest of your life." 

The ground reference is real. "This piece of ground, that we all share...if we're going to leave our young people something better, then we just can't be complacent. We must never be content with half truth when the whole truth can be ours. We have to keep choosing the harder right instead of the easier wrong." Words to ponder, with criminal and FBI investigations facing a former president who plans to run for reelection.

Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

At the Theatre at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; eisenhowertheplay.com. Original seven-week engagement extended through August 20.  Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes.