[ThisWeek] Bougainville Sky, Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress, and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[This Week at the Kenworthy]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

The Martin Forum presents
Bougainville Sky: Portrait of a Peacekeeping Operation
Documentary Screening, Music, and Brief Talk featuring Iain Campbell Smith
Monday, September 18
7:00 PM
Free Admission

Iain Campbell Smith, Australian diplomat and musician, participated in a
³small footprint² peacekeeping mission to Bougainville Island in Papua New
Guinea. The mission sought to empower local and regional entities and bring
the former combatants together in culturally appropriate ways‹ music was one
of these ways. The documentary film Bougainville Sky traces the evolution of
the mission and its impact by focusing on the work of Smith and local
musicians in the aftermath of a bitter civil war. The free documentary
screening will be followed by a short talk, a question-and-answer session,
and performances of some songs from the mission.
* * *

Sirius Idaho Theatre presents
World Première of
Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress
by Gregory Fletcher

Directed by Stan Brown

Join us on opening night!  7:30 pm, Thursday, September 21st

Performances this week:
Thursday, September 21
7:30 PM

Friday, September 22
7:30 PM

Saturday, September 23
7:30 PM
Talkback featuring playwright Gregory Fletcher after the performance on
Saturday, September 23.

Also showing-
Thursday, Friday & Saturday, September 28, 29 & 30
7:30 PM

$15/adult, $10/senior, $6/student
Tickets and season passes available at:
BookPeople, Farmers¹ Market and Kenworthy box office an hour before each
performance

Undiscovered playwright Christopher Post has persevered through years of
rejection letters. Supported by Hilary Post, his pediatrician wife and
biggest fan, Christopher has nothing to show for his efforts except a drawer
crammed full of rejection letters from theaters around the country. After
asking the universe for a sign that he¹s on the right path, and while
attempting to sell his latest play to Tina Boyette, a struggling
off-Broadway producer, Christopher runs into Gareth Webster, an old college
buddy who works for Christopher¹s playwriting idol Ward Edington.
Christopher begins sneaking, stealing, hiding, conniving, teasing, and
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, this play includes adult situations and
brief nudity.

Christopher Post is played by James (JJ) Johnston, a University of Idaho MFA
candidate. Last year JJ acted in the University of Idaho productions A Flea
in Her Ear and Boy Gets Girl. Hilary Post is played by Chris Stordahl, a
second year University of Idaho MFA candidate in Costume Design and
Technology. Some of her past productions include Wit, Stop Kiss and Ghosts.
Tina Boyette is played by Andriette Pieron, founding board member of Sirius
Idaho Theatre and Director of Neill Public Library, previously seen in Steel
Magnolias. Gareth Webster is played by Luke Daigle, who graduated this past
May with a BFA in performance from the University of Idaho Department of
Theatre and Film. This summer Daigle performed in IRT¹s Schoolhouse Rock and
Comedy of Errors. Directed by WSU theatre professor Stan Brown, Cow-Tipping
and Other Signs of Stress portrays life issues and alternate lifestyles in
positive ways.

Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress won the 2005 American College Theatre
Festival Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting.

Usher and see the show for free!
(Ushers still needed during the second week of performances.)

Contact House Manager Cindylou Ament at 883-1012 or
<cindylouament at moscow.com> to volunteer.


Sirius Idaho Theatre 2006-2007 season passes

Sirius Idaho Theatre (SIT) announces their third season of plays, with three
productions scheduled at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre in Moscow.
Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress, the world premiere of a new comedy by
Gregory Fletcher, opens September 21. Touch, by Toni-Press Coffman, opens
January 25, 2007, and Breaking the Code, by Hugh Whitemore, opens April 12,
2007. In addition, SIT presents a staged reading of The Oldest Profession,
by Paula Vogel, as a special fundraising event on November 10 & 11.

Sirius Idaho Theatre is offering a significant savings to patrons who
purchase a 2006 ­ 2007 season pass. Passes are now available at the Moscow
Farmers¹ Market, BookPeople of Moscow, the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
box office, or by contacting a SIT board member (John Dickinson, Pam Palmer,
Andriette Pieron) www.SiriusIdahoTheatre.com

Adults - $15 per show or $40 pass
Seniors - $10 per show or $25 pass
Students - $6 per show or $15 pass

For more information, visit www.SiriusIdahoTheatre.com
<http://www.siriusidahotheatre.com/>  or call Pam Palmer, Managing Artistic
Director at 208-596-2270.
* * *

Also this week at the Kenworthy-

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (not rated)
Sunday, September 24
4:15 & 7:00 PM
Panel discussion following 7:00 PM show
$5/adult, $3/children 12 and younger
KFS pass accepted for Sunday movies
(See movie review below)
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

Sirius Idaho Theatre presents the
World Première of
Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress
by Gregory Fletcher

Directed by Stan Brown

Thursday, Friday & Saturday, September 28, 29 & 30
7:30 PM

$15/adult, $10/senior, $6/student
Tickets and season passes available at:
BookPeople, Farmers¹ Market and KPAC box office
* * *

Back by popular demand:
An Inconvenient Truth (PG)
Sunday, October 1
2:30, 4:45 & 7:00 PM

Coming in October: Who Killed the Electric Car?; Little Miss Sunshine

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $3/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-

ŒSopie Scholl: The Final Days

(Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage)

Director Marc Rothemund
Screenplay Fred Breinersdorfer
Running Time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.
Presented n German with English subtitles.
MPAA rating: Unrated


As reviewed by Kenneth Turan writing for the Los Angles Times

The very qualities we value most in life ‹ decency, morality, heroism ‹ are
the hardest to convincingly put on screen. The more idealistic the actions,
the less capable most films are of persuading us that flesh-and-blood human
beings actually carried them out. Most films, however, do not have the great
advantage of "Sophie Scholl ‹ The Final Days."

The story of Scholl, executed by the German government in 1943 when she was
but 21 years old for being a member of that country's anti-Nazi White Rose
student movement, is well known enough to have inspired at least two
previous motion pictures. And it is to Scholl that Traudl Junge, the
protagonist of "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary," refers at the close of that
moving documentary when she says that if this young woman knew the truth
about Hitler, she should have as well.

The current "Sophie Scholl" focuses on the last six days of the character's
life, from the night before her arrest to the moment of her execution.
Director Marc Rothemund and screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer based this film
on new interviews with friends and relatives and the never-before-released
records of her Gestapo interrogation. That has helped, but it's nothing
compared to the charge "Sophie Scholl" gets from Julia Jentsch in the title
role.

Jentsch, last seen in the U.S. in "The Edukators," has won at least three
major best actress prizes for her performance (the European Film Award, the
Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear, the Lola or German version of the Oscar)
and is a key reason why "Sophie Scholl" is one of this year's five foreign
language film Oscar nominees. Her strong and graceful, quiet knockout of a
performance is the film's most potent weapon, and, yes, it is just as
persuasive as all those awards would indicate.

"Sophie Scholl" begins with its heroine at her most typically young adult,
having fun singing American songs with a friend and sharing confidences
about young men. But once the two women part company, Sophie joins her
brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) and some other members of the White Rose,
University of Munich students who are printing and mailing clandestine
leaflets calling for resistance against the Nazi regime.

In a society so highly regimented that civilians could get into trouble for
greeting each other with a "good day" instead of "Heil Hitler," the
idealistic White Rose members were taking incredible risks by disseminating
the leaflets and writing words such as "freedom" on local walls.

But, convinced that "the campus will ignite," Hans and Sophie take the even
greater chance of personally placing the leaflets around the atrium of a
university building. They are caught, and Sophie is handed over to veteran
Gestapo interrogator Robert Mohr.

The resulting multilevel psychological duel between captor and captive is
the heart of "Sophie Scholl," and it develops in surprising ways. For at
first, unlike the cardboard heroes and heroines of fiction, Scholl declares
that she is apolitical and resolutely denies she has anything to do with the
leaflets.

Yet even in these early stages, we get glimpses of what makes Jentsch's
performance so strong. Both fear and defiant bravery live simultaneously on
Scholl's face; we can see her strength as well as her terror, her resolve as
well as her qualms.

When circumstances make it impossible for her to continue to deny that she
and the pamphlets are linked, Scholl makes a strategic but fiercely
idealistic retreat. Despite ferocious questioning by Mohr (an excellent
performance by Alexander Held), she refuses to name any further names,
insisting that she and her brother were the only members of the White Rose.

As the two antagonists spar over questions of ideology, conscience, law and
social privilege, it is Mohr rather than Scholl who finds himself
overmatched by the strength of will and integrity of his antagonist.

Director Rothemund does a strong job of keeping this film, his third
feature, on an even keel. Though the Nazis are sometimes too evil-looking
and the film's Johnny Klimek-Reinhold Heil score is occasionally too
emphatic, "Sophie Scholl" by and large does not overdo the emotion.

And Rothemund had the very good idea of, in his own words, "showing as few
uniforms and swastikas as possible," the better to indicate the contemporary
relevance of the issues involved.

It is, however, a measure of how much "Sophie Scholl" centers on Jentsch
that finally all we can see on screen is her. As befits a film about a woman
who took much of her strength from religious conviction, Jentsch's
performance seems to be lit from within. This role has so taken hold of the
actress that we feel we're seeing Scholl's spirit come to life again. To
take a character that idealistic and make us believe she unquestionably
existed is acting the way you want it to be.


As reviewed by Leslie Camhi writing for the Village Voice

Making a film about Sophie Scholl, the 21-year-old Munich University student
who, together with her 24-year-old brother Hans, mounted the most famous
underground resistance network in Nazi Germany, is a challenging
proposition. First there's the difficulty of humanizing a figure whose
heroism, in contemporary Germany at least, is legendary. Then there's the
problem of her character's evolution, when her commitment to her ideals
appears never to have wavered, even for an instant. Finally, most viewers
going into the film will know that Hans and Sophie Scholl, together with
other members of their group, the White Rose, were imprisoned by the Gestapo
and executed. A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin
temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping,
moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period: the Scholls'
arrest for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets on university grounds, their
interrogation, their show trial before an infamous Nazi "blood judge," and
their murder by state authorities. Percy Adlon's 1982 feature Five Last Days
explored similar territory, but Rothemund's film benefits from historical
material that's since come to light, in particular the transcript of
Sophie's grueling Gestapo examination.

Julia Jentsch gives a brilliantly nuanced performance as Sophie, a
fun-loving girl who likes marmalade and Schubert but also happens to be a
rare beacon of conscience in totalitarianism's dark night. Rothemund and
screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer suggest the possible sources of her moral
strength, in the example of her father, a conscientious objector, and in her
searching intellect and profound love for Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), which
bears the seeds of her broader empathy for others.

But don't expect dramatic transformations: Her character's consistency, some
60 years later, is still unnerving. Flawlessly composed under scrutiny, she
even convinces her Gestapo interrogator, Robert Mohr (Alexander Held), of
her innocence. Confronted with her brother's signed confession, she relents,
but still hammers away at Mohr‹she and Hans were the only members of the
White Rose, she insists, and Mohr has the wrong worldview, not them. (Is it
too perverse to hear, in her insistence on receiving "the same punishment as
my brother," a touch of sibling rivalry?) This was a woman who, just before
her sentencing, rose in the dock and fearlessly told her Nazi judges,
"You'll soon be standing where I am now."

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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/thisweek/attachments/20060918/5037d7c7/attachment.htm