Precise and pellucid prints of the classic photos that launched millions of coffee-table books may be viewed large and up-close at Decisive Moments: 20th Century Street Photography.
Truly, this is the International Photography Hall of Fame’s coming-out party. The relocated museum/gallery has hosted several shows since landing at its new digs in Grand Center, but this is a show that makes you idly wonder what sort of insurance premium is required to assemble this many gems in a single space.
The work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Atget, Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Robert Doisneau, Weegee, Larry Fink, Lee Friedlander and the St. Louis-born Walker Evans jostle for attention in this one, and the mind reels, passing from moments absurd to intimate to lyrical to disturbing to serendipitously marvelous.
Here, the photographer-as-spy has snapped an Al Capone wannabe shooing his mouth off for the benefit of the other neighborhood jamooks in front of “Chick’s Candy Store,” in 1938. The photographer as absurdist captures the vibe at a winter beach picnic, where revelers are swaddled for most unbalmy weather. The photographer as urban anthropologist has immortalized a Parisian café habitué dripping in an obscene amount of jewelry. The photographer as city poet frames the neon of the Manhattan of the ’50s, the chiaroscuro of skyscrapers at twilight, the unlikely sublimity of a city pigeon flapping to a landing.
The photographer as accidental historian snaps a menu printed on a glass storefront that advertises 10-cent hamburgers; a 1936 ad for an honest-to-goodness minstrel show paperboarded to a brick wall; a stairway lettered with the word “COLORED” leading to a cinema balcony; the ecstasy of a ’50s jazz audience be-bopping to the beat.
The photographer as comedian—in Robert Doisneau’s “Un Regard Oblique”— captures a woman discoursing on one painting in a gallery window, while her husband is held rapt by the bare derrière peeping from another.
That last one is the perfect example of Bresson’s term “the decisive moment,” referred to in the show’s title. That’s when everything visible through the camera’s viewfinder seems to have been timed just for the benefit of the photographer.
In the same vein, this entire exhibition is an island in time you want to visit before it dissolves into the ether. You’ve seen a good chunk of these photos in books (they’re “proto-memes,” if you will), but you most likely haven’t seen them printed in a format this large, so clear, arresting and close. They really pop.
Something about random street photography confers that intriguing sense of strangers and how they live, and the quiet streets as stage for our intersecting orbits.
The show is complemented by a small exhibition of street photography shot in St. Louis, and shot out-of-town by St. Louis photographers. It’s compelling stuff, too.
Decisive Moments: 20th Century Street Photography has been extended through May 31 at the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, 3415 Olive. Hours are Wednesday and Thursday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and students with ID, and free for kids under 18 and IPHF members. For more information, call 314-535-1999 or go to iphf.org.
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Falling is the play that catapulted local playwright/theater prof/Mustard Seed Theatre Artistic Director Deanna Jent to the big time. It played to gratified St. Louis audiences in 2011, played Off-Broadway in 2012, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best New Play produced in New York City in 2012.
The re-mounted drama, explained Jent, is a composite of the real-life struggles of families with grown autistic children, including her own.
The action becomes absolutely riveting when the Martin family, depicted in Falling, must deal with their grown autistic son when he becomes uncontrollably violent with his own family members.
When we first meet young autistic man Josh Martin, he's as gentle as a lamb and as charming as a fawn. His favorite pastime is dumping a box of feathers over his head. He giggles and gambols as they flutter down around him. His parents remind him to put them back in the box. When he isn't covered in white feathers, he's watching cartoons, eating popcorn, and tapping the sofa and doorjamb in an obsessive rhythm.
But heaven help him—and his frightened family—when the reliable rhythms of his child-like existence are interrupted. Loud noises made by a blender or a barking dog upset his super-sensitive ears, and may even drive him to grab his mother by the hair and yank her around the room until she can coax him back to calmness.
The Martin family's coping techniques include clapping headphones on his ears to muffle unwanted noises, distracting him with cartoons on DVD, giving him a list of appropriate choices from which to select, and code words used to warn one another of an impending filial blow-up.
Falling conveys a deep sense of the daily exhaustion that visits every member of a family that must spend nearly every waking moment mollifying a severely autistic kid. The work that must be done to keep him out of trouble is simply unending, and the audience, wearied by the aggregation of each parental trick that must be performed to avert disaster, feels the burden through a stressful osmosis.
When we're not gasping at the flashpoints of terror when Josh loses his cool, we're grateful for the many humorous moments that leaven the perpetual crisis. In one sequence, Mom and Dad wager how many minutes will pass before his visiting, sanctimonious mother will quote to them from her ever-present Bible; it's great fun.
Back on the admirably painful realism front, as Josh's sister grows desperate to escape a home where her presence has been eclipsed by a brother who requires constant monitoring, she asks if she can move in with her grandma for the summer. She is simply fed up with the madness.
Perhaps the drama’s cleverest moment comes in a climactic surprise that conveys the horrific guilt of mom Tami Martin, who sometimes wishes for an easier life—a life without her son at all.
This is great ensemble work, and every actor—each of whom appeared in the original 2011 run—deserves warm praise: Daniel Lanier as the lumbering autistic man-child, Michelle Hand as the patient-as-an-angel mother, Greg Johnston as the beleaguered father, Katie Donnelly as the overlooked daughter, and Carmen Russell as the Bible-banging grandma who finally comes to understand the frightening disruptions of which her clinically selfish grandson is capable. They move in lockstep, with deep commitment to a quality script.
Mustard Seed, as theatreniks know, has an agenda to present plays about "faith and social justice.” While Grandma Sue is rebuked in the play for her naive Jesus-can-fix autism viewpoint, the value of prayer is acknowledged by her daughter-in-law Tami. The latter plays as a proselytizing moment that may not be so welcome to the atheists and agnostics in the audience.
Also less-than-welcome, the drama’s $35 admission price, which is no small potatoes for some of us around these parts. Consider the “Pay With A Can/Pay What You Can Performances” on Thursday evenings. Admission is a cash donation or a canned food item.
At play's end, expect to stand in ovation, which is what Falling deserves. That the lifestyles imagined therein are very much real for the ever-growing number of families with autistic loved ones makes the impact that much greater.
Before the night is over, every audience member has asked himself, “How would I handle this? How could I handle this?”
Falling is presented by Mustard Seed Theatre, and written and directed by Deanna Jent. It runs through May 4. See it at Fontbonne University’s Fine Arts Theater, 6800 Wydown. For more information, call 314-719-8060 or visit mustardseedtheatre.com.
