Earlier this month, Residential Area Real Art (RARA) kicked off “Struc: An Art Exhibition on Construction/Deconstruction” in the DUC Visitor’s Lounge. It will stay there until the end of the year, and I advise everybody who walks through the DUC’s front doors to check it out. And yes, damn the congestion, that includes tours. It’s that good.

As the title suggests, the exhibit focuses on the art of construction and deconstruction, and each artist has a unique take on concept.

Three pieces from Wendy Leitner show her wide range of artistic ability. First, there’s “All You Didn’t Find,” a piece as dark as they come, but with enough texture to get you wondering what the heck is going on in there. Her second piece, “Chasing a Truthless Ideal,” is thematically related to her first, but it evokes less curiosity, more wonder. The gold globs grip the frame like mushy spiders, creeping this way and that, punctuated by the black and red background. Leitner’s third piece, “Staged Coincidence,” is one of the most literal interpretations of the theme of construction and deconstruction. Pieces of a house curl through black space, connected by stringy material. The whole things resembles a whip, post-crack.

Moving on, Lauren Banka’s “Misprint I-VI” is a sight to behold. Banka turns two prints into six distinct drypoints, but they all portray the same black-and-white naked woman. The figure curls into a ball and lets the anxiety, represented by an etched, black mess that matches her head, play by itself in the sky. Each one feels like a misprint in two ways: first, each item feels incomplete, especially when the viewer is encouraged to see each piece in comparison to the other five, and second, one gets the sense that the figure in each tile feels like a misprint.

Joseph Rosenberg’s “But What if Time is the Illness” represents disease as a sequence of melting faces. They hang from the wall like big-game trophies. Elsewhere, Melissa Golance’s “Tree of Life” is made of curled wood, but you’d swear it’s made out of metal. There’s an organic quality to it, but it’s also undeniably mechanical: perfectly crafted. Golance takes on a huge concept and shrinks it down so it can fit atop a three-foot-high podium.

Elsewhere, Jennifer Baker’s “Lies My Truth” looks like a ransacked mattress, ripped to shreds for whatever was underneath. The physical presence of the upright mattress creates a daunting figure, making the image haunting. Pure white, except for some stains at the top, the mattress has tears in the middle that reveal the blood-red interior, which curls like wool.

There’s so much more to write about, but as with any good art show, there’s a lot more to say than can be said in one article. Check it out yourself in the DUC Visitor’s Lounge—it’ll be there until the end of the year. Take a look at what each artist has to offer. Once you see every piece in the gallery, you’ll know how everything fits together and how it all falls apart.

There’s an uncanny sense of punk rock and painterly joy clinging to the canvases, more a celebration of material and process than a commentary on atrophy. Her choice of subject matter seems to be more formal than conceptual: What better subject for a painter of sprawling dense brushstrokes is there than a sprawling dense environment? Yet the lack of conceptual congruity between the paintings and their subject matter at times feels disheartening. They’re just a little too wonky for me to consider them social commentary. Although I’m sure the paintings are trying to tell me, I’m still curious what Tower thinks about post-industrial society.

To make these images, Tower and her bodyguard (who is featured in one of the paintings) trespass into condemned buildings around East St. Louis where she paints the decrepit interiors, sometimes in the company of “wild dogs, crack addicts and homeless residents,” says her artist’s statement. Tower’s approach can be characterized by an obsessive speed. Her strokes have a sense of immediacy and vitality, a seemingly natural byproduct of the time constraints of her process: She must finish each canvas before the site is demolished—a deadline she has not always met.

While the paintings may not be serving any apparent theoretical ends per se, there’s an inexplicably interesting tension between the mechanical subject matter and the organic, *orgiastic* paint handling. The images have more of a feeling of bodily processes than mechanical ones. The tension resulting from these two juxtaposed elements provides justification for the otherwise unhip and outdated practice of plein air painting. Are these the landscape paintings of a post-industrial era?

“Decadense” is up at Bruno David Gallery until May 8. The gallery is located at 3721 Washington Blvd. in the Grand Center arts district, directly opposite the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Also on show at the gallery are works by Nanette Boileau and Dickson Beall.

David Kilper | WUSTL Photo Services

Sophomores Ari Scott and Allison Reed in Lynn Nottage’s sharp-eyed satire “Fabulation,” directed by William Whitaker.

Shortly before I left for St. Louis, my parents told me I had their support, provided I did not loiter at home after graduation, waiting for life and employment to happen. The dreaded “boomerang generation,” as the London Telegraph calls it, frightens even the most-confident mothers and fathers. While most would-be Benjamin Braddocks simply lack a sense of direction, Undine, the protagonist of the Performing Arts Department’s latest comedy, returns home under more-desperate circumstances. “Fabulation,” playing this weekend at the Hotchner Studio Theatre, adapts the parable of the prodigal son for today.

The plot of “Fabulation” is straightforward. After her husband leaves her bankrupt and pregnant, Undine (sophomore Allison Reed) must live with her impoverished parents, grandmother and brother (sophomore Diamond Skinner, junior DeMarco Mitchener, sophomore Carissa Ferguson and sophomore Malcolm Foley, respectively) in Brooklyn until her name is cleared. Fourteen years before, Undine scorned her family by declaring that they perished in a fire. Moreover, she returns home impenitent and defiant, proud of her obsession with glamour and appearance. Her morals disturb her family, who expected an apology. Depressed yet stubborn, Undine refuses to repent until diffused by an optimistic former drug addict (junior Chris Kammerer).

Unfortunately, the humor of “Fabulation” compromises its message. The play earns laughter with Undine’s witty asides and observations, reacting to absurdities like her heroin-junkie grandmother, and the confession of a professor hooked on cocaine. Undine’s acerbic tone is derived from her arrogance and embarrassment with her family. This one-dimensional conceit may bring comedy to Brooklyn, but, given Undine’s intelligence, it makes Undine’s slow realization of the error of her ways irritating. Lynn Nottage, the playwright, portrays Undine as a lesson by counterexample, using Undine’s brother to declare, “There is no greater crime than abandoning your history.” Though Undine encounters increasingly ridiculous scenarios, such as a rude bureaucracy, her flaws never complicate, giving an incomplete feeling to her eventual epiphany.

“Fabulation” nonetheless provides excellent entertainment. The acting, strong and believable, transports the audience from Manhattan to Brooklyn seamlessly. Though clearly establishing the importance of family, Undine’s arrogance and fascination with sophistication make it difficult to relate to her as a protagonist. All the same, see “Fabulation” for its examination of morality in the slums and the importance of history.

This sort of tension is indicative of most of the work in the show. The exhibit’s centerpiece, aptly titled “Lunch Break,” is an 83-minute film with one eerily slow and uninterrupted tracking shot that traverses a long corridor of the shipyard as employees eat, read the newspaper, nap and chat with coworkers. The film has been drastically slowed down; six minutes go by before the camera passes the first figure, and another seven before it reaches the next group. As a result, every minute detail and action is brought into focus, adding an aura of sublimity and severity to the workers’ most banal actions. This might reflect a romanticized notion of how we can imagine the workers viewing their lunch break: as a short but sacred escape from the doldrums of manual labor in which every moment of rest has an elated and extended significance. Yet what undermines this reading is the film’s soundtrack, which was a collaborative effort between composer Becky Allen, filmmaker James Benning and Lockhart herself. To make this, Lockhart recorded the ambient noise of corridor in real time, which was then turned into a composition on an electronic keyboard and paired with harmonic frequencies of the machines in the corridor. This culminates in a dense drone of fragmented speech and mechanical modulations, creating a pervasive sense of suspense or even anxiety to the slowly moving piece. This unease is strengthened by the juxtaposition of the slow-motion cinematography and a seemingly real-time soundtrack, suspending our sense of the passage of time. All of this coalesces into an unclear picture: If the emphasis is on defying the banality of the lunch break, of bringing the most mundane tasks into a special significance, then all the cinematic suspense seems to get in the way.

While there is some humor  in certain moments, like when one worker slowly removes a bag of popcorn from an off-screen microwave, it is very unclear what that irony means. Should we be amused? Scared? Awed? The scale and ambition of Lockhart’s collaboration—both with the factory workers and with the other artists—is an impressive feat, but I fear that the inclusion of all these disparate elements creates an irresolvable, idiosyncratic product that falls short of any clear message.

The second film in the exhibition, “Exit,” is more successful. A 41-minute study of repetition and variation, the film depicts workers leaving the Bath Iron Works factory over five consecutive days. The continuity here is preserved by a fixed camera position. Each day is captured in an eight-minute segment of a mostly male working class happily unshackled for the evening, conversing and swinging their now-light coolers as they exit the facility. Whatever is lost by the Hollywood dramatization of “Lunch Break,” “Exit” maintains. Because it lacks the formalist over-composing that is prevalent in the rest of the show, “Exit” retains a sense of integrity and believability more reminiscent of Lockhart’s earlier work.

Ultimately, the exhibit “Lunch Break” is a portrait of an artist in transition. On one hand we see Lockhart the researcher/documenter. On the other we see Lockhart the formalist/composer. While she seems quite adept at both skill sets, there seems to be a certain number of complications that arise as she begins to combine the two.

That’s right. In Cast ‘n’ Crew’s production of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the audience members don’t just guess how everything turns out, but they actually get to vote on who should have done it. The first act of the show is a musical performance of Charles Dickens’ final work, but unfortunately, Dickens died suddenly without finishing his mystery and without leaving any notes about how it would have ended. Thus, during intermission, the audience gets to decide three things: the true identity of a mysterious detective who appears in the second act; which pair of characters should become lovers; and, most importantly, the murderer of Edwin Drood.

Altogether, this means there are more than 840 possible combinations of endings, which virtually guarantees that each audience will get a unique viewing experience. Even the actors haven’t rehearsed every possible ending. According to director Marley Teter, “What we do is rehearse each candidate for detective as the detective and each candidate for murderer as the murderer. It’s tricky, of course, because the murderer’s confession song is the climax of the show, and no single candidate for murderer will ever have rehearsed his or her song even a fraction as much as the rest of the show has been rehearsed, since he/she has to trade off at rehearsals with the other candidates. But isn’t that what makes it exciting?”

So if, like me, you read choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid and wished that concept applied to more than just books; if you crave control over your theater-going experience; if, in short, being a part of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” sounds like an exciting way to spend an evening, then get your ticket now. They are available for $5 at the DUC from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. all this week. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, with 2 p.m. matinees on Saturday and Sunday.

‘Match or Kasparov Never Played Black’  directed by Carter W. Lewis
This play is based off the little-known fact that Bobby Fischer was anti-Semitic.  In 10 minutes, this unexpected comedy explores themes of politics and religion and shows that analysis and reason can often help with matters of the heart.
(10 minutes – one-act)

‘Razor Love’ by Max Rissman, directed by Jeffrey Matthews
‘Razor Love”follows Perry, a 15-year-old boy who must deal with issues beyond his age.  With a dead father and a mentally unstable mother, Perry is forced to fend for himself as he tries to solve his own problems regarding life and love. He turns to the music of Neil Young for inspiration and discovers that the hardest part about love is realizing when it’s gone.
(one-act)

‘Steps’ by Margaret Stamell, directed by Henry Scvey
“Steps” tells the story of Aubrey, a spirited heroine growing up in small-town Louisiana.  Aubrey attempts to befriend the new girl at school but is wary of bringing her home to her drunken stepfather. What begins as a story of friendship becomes a story of determination, as Aubrey tries desperately to survive in a home broken beyond repair.
(full-length)

‘What Will You Tell Your Children?’ by Jessie Atkin, directed by Anna Pileggi
Set in the past, present and future, “What Will You Tell Your Children?” asks the infamous question, “Is it too late?” The play interweaves stories of modern-day anti-Semitism with a student trip to Israel, and it also focuses on one particular character’s struggle in dealing with the past horrors of the Holocaust.  In this haunting and complex play, “never again” becomes more of a question than a fact, as every character tries to deal with the history and aftermath of history’s darkest hours.
(full-length)

But the minute I met world-renowned dramaturg Liz Engelman, my fears completely dissolved. As Engelman said, dramaturgy “sounds like a disease,” but it’s definitely a disease worth catching.

The A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival is named in honor of the 1940 Washington University graduate (A.B. and J.D. ’40), who wrote novels as well as material for the stage and television. The Festival itself lasts two weeks and allots only 12 hours of rehearsal time for each play. At the end of a two-week intensive process of writing and rewriting, the plays are presented at the Hotchner Studio in Mallinckrodt.

The Festival begins with a competitive submission process, as any current University student can submit a play. Once the plays are chosen, a professional dramaturg is brought in to help the playwrights fine-tune their scripts and writing. This year, Engelman returns for her fourth Hotchner Festival and brings her vast experience, ranging from the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University to the ACT Theatre in Seattle.

I knew almost nothing about dramaturgy when I began the festival, but working under Engelman showed me the dramaturg’s integral role in shaping and contributing to the play.

“As a new play dramaturg, I try to refine and develop a playwright’s vision for their play,” she said. “I try to hold the play up to the playwright like a mirror, to show them what the play still is and what it might become.”

As the process continued, each play began to evolve before my eyes. We started with roundtable readings, where the cast assembled along with the playwright, director and dramaturg and heard their play read aloud. For Jessie Atkin, a first time Hotchner playwright, this experience was both helpful and challenging.

“The best part about working on the festival is the collaboration—and getting to see your work off the page. But I guess the best part about the festival is the hardest part,” Atkin said. “It can be very uncomfortable to relinquish control over your piece, even if it’s what is best for the play. But in the end, it makes it even more of a leaning experience.”

Interestingly enough, Engelman finds the writer-collaboration part of the festival to be the most challenging. Engelman asks playwrights to “Xerox” their brains in order to determine their vision for their play. But Engelman said, “It’s often a fine line between helping the playwright find their voice and inserting your own. The hardest part is having patience or knowing when it’s the appropriate time to give a suggestion or note. Sometimes, it’s difficult navigating different opinions and personalities and getting them on the playwright’s side. You might feel like you know the solution, but you have to wait for the playwright to figure it out.”

Playwright and 2009 graduate Jonathan Baude also found the process to be both intimidating and helpful.

“For me, the hardest part is opening up and letting everyone see my play. I’m very protective of things I write because I know they’re not perfect. I kind of want to stick it in a filing cabinet and say, ‘Oh, it’s not ready yet,’ and then never get it out,” Baude said. “It’s like Schrodinger’s Cat: When you’re not looking at it, it’s perfect, and it’s terrible. Only when you open the box do you find out what’s really going on. By that token, though, the best thing is finding out it’s better than you thought. The process just doesn’t allow for any pessimism.”

Engelman’s patience and advice obviously made an impact on second-time Hotchner playwright Maggie Stamell, a 2009 graduate who found the collaboration between dramaturg, director and playwright very helpful to her writing. “I love this process. Henry Schvey is a wonderful director to work with because he allows me to step in and give some direction myself,” Stamell said. “Liz is very insightful, and she honestly wants the play to reach its potential. Working with such a strong team makes me confident that my play is heading in the right direction.”

As the Festival continued, I also experienced a different kind of Xeroxing, as I was in charge of making copies of all the playwrights’ rewritten scripts. With every rewrite, the plays became easier to visualize and follow. Actors became more familiar with their roles, and playwrights made changes that helped clarify character journeys.

“I’ve learned a lot about my play from rewriting with the cast. Some of the actors really connected with the piece, and it was a little mind-blowing,” playwright Jessy Atkin said. “You always hope someone will connect with your work, but you don’t always write with that in mind. It really makes you think about what you’re saying on paper and what you’re putting out there.”

Each play began coming to life as we moved from reading the script in the Carson Room to actually rehearsing the play in the Hotchner Studio. I couldn’t believe the amount of progress that was made in such a short time. Sophomore Max Rissman took the challenge head on and not only edited out lines but cut an entire character out of his play, one that he originally wrote in high school and that evolved with his life experience.

“I felt like my play had been written by another person. But Liz, [director] Jeffery [Matthews], [resident playwright] Carter [Lewis] and the cast started coming up with these awesome ideas and suggestions,” Rissman said. “So I kind of had to dispose of some of my basic notions about the play and the characters in order to take it to another, better level.”

As we moved to the Studio, the directors began staging the play, playwrights kept discussing characters with the actors and Engelman continued to push the playwrights to refine their work.

“I have found the writers eager to work, quick and avid rewriters and very open to questions, ideas and feedback,” Engelman said. “The actors are engaged, the directors are great teachers and I’m impressed with how far the plays have come in one week.”

The festival will result in four world premieres being presented in the A. E. Hotchner Studio on Friday, Sept. 25, and Saturday, Sept. 26, at 7 p.m. After each play, the audience will be invited for a post-show discussion that will allow them to comment on the plays and ask questions of the playwright and dramaturg. The end of the festival, however, is not the end of the playwrights’ dramatic endeavors.

As Stamell said: “From here on out, I’m essentially on my own. Now, it’s about putting myself out there in the ‘real world.’ This festival has taught me that having confidence in my work makes a world of difference; and that weakness can become strengths when a play is paired with the right director. I can only hope that I will be given an opportunity like this again and will be able to work with such amazing mentors and actors in the new future.”

Even though my job basically consisted of making ungodly amounts of copies, reading each play’s stage directions and setting up for rehearsals, I still feel inspired by the process. The festival motivated me to continue with my playwriting. Who knows? Maybe you’ll see me in 2010. But for now, you should definitely come enjoy two nights of brilliant creativity and original work.

After taking out a $30,000 loan, moving to New York City and starting from the bottom up, he knows what it means to take risks and to put himself out there without fear.

With a children’s book (“Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek”) out on Sept. 9 and another book in the works, he is reveling in his hard work. Armed with experience from New York City, he has an attitude that shows that he does not let himself feel threatened by more talented artists or feel doubtful in his own abilities as an illustrator. Students here are lucky to have him as a guide and role model before diving into the real art world.

Cadenza: What courses do you teach at Wash. U.?

John Hendrix: I teach the Communications Design major, which means that I teach three classes every semester.

C:  I understand that you have a children’s book out on Sept. 9, and you have a book signing on Sept. 12. What is “Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek” about?

JH: It is a true story. When Abe Lincoln was a boy, he fell into a creek when he and his friend were trying to cross the creek. He nearly drowned, but his friend saved his life by jumping into the creek to pull him out. Later on during the Civil War, Abe often talked about this boy who he referred to as his “best friend.”

C: How did this project begin?

JH: Well, I pitched a book idea. They liked my work, but they didn’t like the manuscript that I had sent because it wasn’t quite right about that era. They found another writer to write a book about Abe Lincoln instead.

C: Is this your first book?

JH: Yes, this is my first kids’ book. I have done a lot of illustrations for jackets and covers. I have also done another book called “How to Save Your Tail.” It’s a chapter book, and it has black and white illustrations.

C: After looking at your blog, I noticed that your style and drawing ideas are much darker than those normally created for children. Did you feel like you needed to tone down your style for a much younger audience?

JH: Well, I think that I draw for the love of drawing, so I think that I can go darker to express issues. Then, at the same time, I have the ability to draw in that same voice and put it toward stuff that is a little lighter. So, I don’t really think that it is so much about adjusting my style than about catering toward a different audience.

C: When you were illustrating this book, was there something you found difficult to illustrate? Or, is there something that you would like to change now that you see the final product?

JH: You know, what was really hard was the log [pulls out the book] that goes across the creek, and it appears seven, eight, nine times in the course of this book. I had to draw it the same every time, the same number of branches. That was really difficult. What I should have done was make a physical model of it, and it would have been a lot easier to draw it than from memory. So that was hard. You know, and the really detail-oriented copy editors check to make sure that there are the same number of logs in the cabin whenever it appears. It’s those details that made it difficult.

C: What are you working on now that the book is finished?

JH: Right now, my big project is a little book that I wrote about John Brown, the abolitionist. He raided Harper’s Ferry right before the Civil War. He had crazy ideas to raid slaves in the South and set them free. So, that is what I’m working on right now. Actually, I started that in 2003.

C: What advice would you give art students and seniors about to graduate into the “real world” or art?

JH: I would tell them there is always room for another artist out there. I think that a lot of people feel like it is kind of silly to do this for a living because there are so many good artists out there and so many books. “What would I have to offer?” I think there is always room for someone else who has a clear, distinctive voice with a story to tell. Then, this is something I tell people a lot. “Talent” is very overrated. Talent doesn’t mean much. It is all about desire. If you have desire, that always beats talent every time. I mean, I have met people who had more talent than I had, but they didn’t want the career as much I wanted it.

C: So you would tell them not to be afraid, to get out there and try to get the best jobs because it is about working hard and wanting to succeed rather than just having the talent to do the work?

JH: Yeah, if you are not going to make it in the industry, it is better to risk it than not try it at all. Of course there are going to be people more talented than me. I can’t control that, but there is something I can do that nobody else does. If you can find that, then that is something that you can sell. You have to find your own voice. It will take time, but it is definitely there. But if you think that way, and you come up with that “back-up” plan, you won’t have the drive to work as hard. To succeed in the art world, you have to be willing to risk what you have.

C: If you could be a work of art, what would it be?

JH: Oh, I would hands down be a Cornell box. He wasn’t trying to be avant-garde. He wasn’t trying to make art. He was truly propelled to make these boxes. They slam imageries together that you wouldn’t expect. Look him up. It’s amazing.

Hendrix will be signing his new book “Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek,” this Friday, Sept. 12 at 6 p.m. at Left Bank Books on the Loop.