Jay Harvey Upstage

Soft and easily permeable, balsa wood is not the material for hardy survival. It's enough to furnish a title Jersey boy Lou Harry: Celebrating roots through theater for a thematically apt short play in Lou Harry 's penetrating Wildwood series — a homage to his New Jersey hometown.  From the Garden State's dangling appendix up through the storied Asbury Park, the Atlantic shore towns in this alternately overpopulated and sparsely settled state offer a rich opportunity to study matters of identity, leisure, and the will-o'-the-wisp of permanence and the solidity of class structure. "Balsa Wood" is another verse in Lou Harry's way of stage-saying greetings from Wildwood, " Hello America, how are you? Don't you  know me? I'm your native son ."  It's a feature of this year's " Spirit & Place Festival ," with its 2024 theme of gratitude. It concluded a weekend run Sunday afternoon at Indy Convergence 's modest tent pr

Su-Han Yang, also adept without a baton  One of the cleverest thematic titles for an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra program is the current "Mozart and the Misfits." It has both the perennial allure of alliteration and a tease to provoke curiosity and stimulate attendance.  Apart from the hint that Wolfgang Mozart himself was a misfit — the caricature portrait in "Amadeus" hangs on in the public imagination — the provocative title accurately brings in the eccentric, genre-bridging figures of Friedrich Gulda and Alfred Schnittke .  The prime attraction is the solo position of one of the ISO's outstanding principals: cellist Austin Huntington. I had thought the ISO's publicity surrounding him moved into hype when it described him as "beloved." But once I heard the huge ovation after his performance of Gulda's Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra and looked up into the front row of the dress circle to take in the hearty demonstration of six you