[ThisWeek] Water and Auditions at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[This Week at the Kenworthy]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Water (PG-13)
Thursday, Friday & Saturday, August 10, 11 & 12
7:00 PM
Sunday, August 13
4:15 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/child under 13
KFS pass accepted for Sunday movies
(See movie review below)
* * *

Early next week at the Kenworthy!

On Monday, August 14
Sirius Idaho Theatre holds

Auditions for the World Premiere of
Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress
By Gregory Fletcher

Winner of the 2005 Mark Twain Award for Comic Playwriting

Directed by Stan Brown

Monday, August 14
6:00 ­ 8:00 pm
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
To schedule appointment, call Pam at 208.596.2270 or email
ppalmer at moscow.com

One contemporary piece for auditions

Four characters
2M (25-45), 2W (35-50)

After years of perseverance and rejection letters, undiscovered playwright
Christopher Post asks for a sign from the universe confirming that he¹s on
the right path.  The signs flood in, each contradicting the next.  When
Christopher runs into an old college buddy who works for role model and star
playwright Ward Edington, Christopher begins sneaking, stealing, hiding,
conniving, teasing, fighting, and his life continues to snowball from there.
Saving his marriage and career will be the hardest rewrite of his life.  A
romantic dramedy laced with farce and cows.

Copy of the script available for preview at BookPeople of Moscow.

Non-equity stipend for actors
Housing provided
Four week rehearsals start August 20
Six performances, September 21 ­ 30

www.SiriusIdahoTheatre.com

Sirius Idaho Theatre is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Tax-deductible donations are appreciated!

Pamela Palmer, Managing Artistic Director
Sirius Idaho Theatre
P.O. Box 8762
Moscow, Idaho 83843
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

An Inconvenient Truth (PG)
August 17, 18 & 19
7:00 PM
August 20
4:45 & 7:00 PM
Panel discussion Aug. 20, 8:45 PM
* * *

August 1, 2006
For immediate release:

On Friday, August 25 the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre and NorthWest
Public Radio will join together for a very special night at the movies.

The fun will begin at 6:30 PM with live music featuring Moscow's own Charlie
Sutton and Ben Walden, food, prizes, and a screening of the new Robert
Altman film, A Prairie Home Companion at 8:00 PM.

The event will be held at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre and proceeds
will be shared equally with Northwest Public Radio.

"We are very excited about this event," says Tom Hungate from NorthWest
Public Radio.  It will be a great time on a Friday night to support two
worthwhile community groups."  This is a match made on the Palouse, says
Julie Ketchum, executive director of KPAC.

Tickets for the event are $20 and are on sale at Bookpeople in Moscow and
Brused Books in Pullman.  Tickets may be charged to Visa or MC by calling
882-4127.

For more information, visit www.kenworthy.org or nwpr.org.
* * *

Coming in August at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre:

KPAC & NWPR present
A Prairie Home Companion Benefit
August 25, 6:30 PM
$20/general admission

A Prairie Home Companion (PG-13)
August 26, 7:00 PM
August 27, 4:30 & 7:00 PM
* * *

Coming in September:
Superman Returns; Sirius Idaho Theatre presents Cow-Tipping and Other Signs
of Stress

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger
Wednesday matinee prices: $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.  KFS pass good only for
Sunday movies.

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org
* * *

This week¹s movie review-

Water

Written and directed by Deepa Mehta
Presented in Hindi, with English subtitles
Rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It contains a suggestion of
prostitution and some brief drug use.
Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

As reviewed by Ruthe Stein writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

"Water'' is an elegiac lament for a sorrowful chapter of Indian history. The
title can be interpreted metaphorically as the cleansing of body and soul.
At its simplest it refers to the Ganges, which serves as a backdrop to this
overwhelmingly sad story of a country holding onto a tradition that vastly
inhibits the lives of widows even while Mahatma Gandhi offers the
possibility of liberation for all.

The film opens on the river in 1938. A bright-eyed 8-year-old is being taken
to the other side along with an obviously ailing older man. The assumption
is that he's her father. But it's soon revealed that they are husband and
wife, joined together in an arranged marriage that the girl, Chuyia, doesn't
remember. He soon dies, sentencing Chuyia to a kind of life imprisonment.

Hindu law, remnants of which remain in modern-day India, dictates that
widows must live together in ashrams. Swathed in white saris, they atone for
sins that somehow brought about the demise of their spouses. By focusing on
a youngster, writer-director Deepa Mehta, exposes the illogic of the
repressive law. What possible transgressions could Chuyia have committed in
her short time on Earth?

Mehta has created the perfect guide to this strange female world. Chuyia's
first rite of passage is to have her long hair shorn. Bald, her intense eyes
pop out even more, and she seems to see the hypocrisy of the system more
clearly than longtime residents whose spirits have been crushed, resigning
them to their fate. Read the riot act by the bloated tyrannical head of the
house, Chuyia dismissively calls her "fatty.'' With the energy of youth, she
skips through the long gloomy rooms as if they were a labyrinthine
playground.

By some extraordinary karma, Mehta located the perfect child for the role, a
Sri Lankan who goes by her first name, Sarala, and who had never acted
before. The naturalism of her performance contributes to its power and the
heartbreaking effect of watching Chuyia pushed into adulthood long before
her time.

As Mehta showed in "Fire'' and "Earth,'' the first two films in what she
calls her elemental trilogy, she has a tendency toward the melodramatic. A
subplot in "Water'' involving a beautiful cloistered woman named Kalyani
(Lisa Ray) and her unlikely romance with Gandhi supporter Narayan (John
Abraham) has the whiff of soap opera. They fall in love at first sight after
he rescues her little dog, which wisely has run away from the ashram. The
two continue to meet clandestinely. On one trip, Narayan drives her to the
British border where, he tells her, people don't care if she's a widow.
Their reality, however, is quite different. Narayan's Brahmin mother gasps
when he tells her his plans to marry a resident of a house of widows.

Ray and Abraham, both big stars in India, are so fabulous looking that it
becomes distracting. Abraham, in particular, isn't a strong enough actor to
make you forget he's a hunk. Ray is never seen without extravagant eye
makeup. When Kalyani's rendezvous with her lover are discovered, she is
punished by getting her long, luxurious hair chopped off. But the results
look like a Vidal Sassoon creation.

Because so much of "Water'' is set inside, it has a claustrophobic feel. So
it's a relief when Mehta and her gifted cinematographer Giles Nuttgens (who
worked on "Star Wars'') open the movie up, and the sights and sounds of
India come alive. During a festival, the widows are allowed to wear
something other than white and to extravagantly color their faces. Chuyia
laughs as bright pink powder is splashed all over her cheeks. The
unmistakable rhythmic patterns of Indian music can be heard in the
background.

This vivid re-creation of India is especially impressive considering that
violent protests by Hindu fundamentalists forced filming to stop there. Most
of "Water'' was shot years later in Sri Lanka. Fortunately Mehta didn't give
up. She's made an important movie that captures the beginning of modern
India in scenes of Gandhi preaching his message of freedom. Although it took
decades before the country was receptive to the idea of feminism, its roots
can be seen in the eyes of the film's magical young heroine.
 

As reviewed by Marjorie Baumgarten writing for the Austin (Texas) Chronicle

Water, which examines the second-class status of women in traditional Hindu
society, concludes director Mehta¹s ³elemental trilogy² (the other two films
in the series are Fire and Earth). Although the story is set in colonial
India of 1938 and coincides with Gandhi¹s rise to power, the film paints a
picture of religious fundamentalism that remains intrinsically unchanged
despite secular social advances that have occurred during the intervening
decades. Only three options exist for a widow in traditional Hindu society:
She can burn her body along with her husband¹s on his funeral pyre, she can
marry her husband¹s brother if he is willing, or she can move into a group
ashram for widows where the women live in penance and poverty. A note at the
end of the film tells us that conditions have changed little for many women
in present-day India.

We are ushered into the widows¹ ashram of Water through the experiences of
8-year-old Chuyia (Sarala), who, at the start of the film, is awakened by
her father who asks, ³Do you remember getting married?² The question is as
disturbingly irrelevant as the child¹s answer, for now she is a widow, and
her meager past will shape her entire future. Her father takes Chuyia to a
widows¹ home and leaves her there ­ confused, distraught, yet nevertheless
curious and bursting with life. For the longest time, Chuyia is convinced
her parents will eventually come to retrieve her from this strange place,
but while she waits she explores her environs and gets to know the women
living there. The widows all have shorn heads and wear only white, unstyled
saris, which make their station in life immediately evident to all. Only one
woman, a beauty named Kalyani (Ray), has long hair, but this, too, is her
sad fate rather than a kindly dispensation. She is the one woman appointed
by the domineering ³house mother² to prostitute herself to the local gentry
and thereby earn money to keep their ashram functioning. (She is accompanied
on her nightly visits by a transvestite eunuch.) Kalyani and Chuyia form an
instant friendship and become the main sources of unruliness in the home.
Soon Kalyani meets future lawyer Narayana (Abraham), who is a follower of
Gandhi and wants to start a new life with Kalynai, away from their
scandalized family and community members.

Whether or not it¹s really possible for them to escape the rigid religious
demands of their society becomes the film¹s central question. Meanwhile,
Mehta and her cameraman, Giles Nuttgens, capture the area¹s rich interplay
of light and color, land and water, and riches and poverty. The story they
tell is beautiful yet sad, a tale drenched in centuries of stagnant, holy
water that cleanses the body but putrefies the soul.


As reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis writing for the New York Times

Set in 1938 in the twilight of colonial India, "Water" focuses on a group of
women condemned by Hindu law to spend the rest of their lives in an
institution, or ashram, on the banks of the Ganges because they are widows.
While the devout Shakuntula spends her days assisting a local holy man, the
limpid-eyed Kalyani ‹ the only widow whose head has not been shaved ‹ is
forced into prostitution by the ashram's domineering housemother. Employing
a sly eunuch as go-between, the housemother sells Kalyani's services to a
wealthy Brahmin on the other side of the river.

Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, "Water" is an exquisite film about the
institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way
patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief. Serene on the surface yet
roiling underneath, the film neatly parallels the plight of widows under
Hindu fundamentalism to that of India under British colonialism. Though
Gandhi and his followers are an insistent background presence, the movie is
never didactic, trusting the simple rhythms of the women's lives to tell
their story.

Mustering a whole spectrum of luminous blues and greens, Ms. Mehta and her
cinematographer, Giles Nuttgens, paint a vibrant world of lambent light and
indigo shade. The lushness and texture of the ashram's surroundings are in
stark contrast to the widows' unflattering white robes, which hang from
their bodies like dirty bandages; but here even images of deprivation gleam
like gold. Never has the Ganges looked so inviting.

Shifting between romantic melodrama and spiritual inquiry, "Water" flows
with the simplicity of a fairy tale. The lovers' struggle may be the heart
of the film, but Shakuntula's awakening is its soul. In the triumphant and
moving final scene, her selfless act of bravery offers hope to Chuyia and
India alike.


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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