Year: 2007

I’m wearing yellow in honor of Jupiter,” declared design-cum-business maven Stephanie Odegard. The Minneapolis native was in her twelfth-floor studio in the New York Design Center, cosseted in a modest office near two large showrooms that feature her acclaimed carpets and furniture. Odegard Inc. has six sales offices in the United States, operations in Nepal, and twelve thousand employees worldwide. She pays her workers a living wage, sponsors schools, and is one of the forces behind Rugmark, a program that certifies carpets made without child labor. But the strong impression one gets of Odegard is not of a capitalist titan but of a metaphysical seeker. Odegard’s company earns more than a million dollars a month, yet she takes the time to don a yellow scarf in observance of Jupiter’s Day, which, according to ancient astrological tradition, is Thursday.
Although Odegard “craves color,” she describes herself as a design minimalist. Her carpets are quiet seas of aquamarine, cerulean, tanzanite, and scarlet, sometimes with dashes of black at the borders. When she does include patterns, they are often subtle, just shades different than the background hues. Her home is a 1,200-square-foot Soho loft that she strives to keep empty. “You have this impulse to say ‘Here’s an empty space, I should put in a chair.’ It’s easy to fall into that, but I don’t want a house that’s filled. I can’t stand kitsch,” Odegard said, with a shudder and wave of the hand. “I live in fear of people giving me little presents. I don’t like lots of small things.”
Yet her office, where she spends most of her waking hours, is filled with small things. This is where a secondary aesthetic comes into play: object as memento. There are many gifts on the shelves, including a miniature collection of brown clay houses and temples arranged like a Nepalese Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. On a lower shelf sits a set of four white ceramic cups from India, each painted with abstract, blue flowers. There are also ceramic, glass, and silver vases as well as many awards and a few framed photos of Odegard with the Dalai Lama.
Odegard came to design for unusual and idealistic reasons. She longed to see the world and make it better. In interviews, she often speaks not of design but of the need for people to be well nourished and educated. She travels the globe trying to accomplish these missions, creating jobs and buying materials. The gifts and oddities she’s collected—the spinning toy tops kept in a vase, the metal inlaid mirror of the Hindu elephant-headed god, Lord Ganesh—represent alliances, friendships, and business well conducted. Having them around creates an atmosphere of positivity. By her own account, Odegard travels so lightly that she often runs out of clothes, but you get the distinct feeling she would dutifully lug home a bag of bricks if they were given to her by someone she liked or attached to a meaningful event. Suddenly the paradox of the minimalist with an office full of things makes sense. To seek objects is noisome; but to reject what arrives is to court bad karma.

A few months ago, while walking along the Stone Arch Bridge with a friend from Manhattan, the bright blue Guthrie Theater looming above us, I realized that Jean Nouvel’s big new thing might be one of the few places in Minneapolis that would actually impress a New Yorker. So we wandered into one of its many bars and, though it was early in the afternoon, ordered cocktails. Why not? In the dim interior light, we quickly lost track of time. Patrons for the 2:00 p.m. matinees and the 7:00 p.m. evening shows meandered through while we sank deeper into the seductive leather seats, drinking and talking and drinking. We considered seeing a show ourselves, but ordered a six-dollar bowl of almonds instead.
By 9:00 p.m., we were standing out on the “Bridge to Nowhere,” squinting drunkenly at the lights reflecting off the Mississippi River and talking about how beautiful theater in the Twin Cities can be. (When I’m drunk, I say “beautiful” too much.) If the purpose of theater is to entertain, then the new Guthrie succeeds, beautifully. We never even bothered to enter any actual theaters, and we were happy.
On the other side of the river, just north of downtown St. Paul, the Gremlin Theatre company lives in the back of a building on an astonishingly isolated stretch of Sibley Street. Their performance space used to be the loading dock for the rug company that occupied the space after the shoe factory vacated. In 2002, Gremlin renovated it for—no joke—five thousand times less than it cost to build the new Guthrie Theater. The only visible sign that a theater lives inside is a wooden sandwich board set out on the sidewalk on show days.
Sometimes, at an intermission for a show in the Loading Dock Theater, the owners of a coffee shop in another corner of the building remember to open. But they’ve always appeared deeply bewildered by the line of customers waiting to buy something from them. Once I ordered a cup of tea, and the guy behind the counter asked me how to make it.
In fact, the experience of live performance at Gremlin appears on the surface to be so different from the Guthrie experience that I wonder whether they’re referring to the same thing when they refer, in their names, to “theater.”

So what do we—and should we—look for when we go? Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, currently playing on the Guthrie’s McGuire Proscenium stage until March 25, inspires an interesting analogy to the local theater community. Indeed, Tom, the narrator, informs the audience that the play is, in part, about what theater can and should be. Other theater folk, he tells us, “give you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I intend to give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.”
Tom is the play’s writer. He works in a shoe factory (coincidentally apropos of Gremlin’s current digs), though he has bigger dreams. His coworkers call him “Shakespeare,” and he eventually gets fired for writing poems on shoeboxes. At night, he escapes to the movies, avoiding an equally suffocating home life in a St. Louis tenement apartment. (Most living playwrights, too, can be seduced by the movies on the off chance they’ll make some real dough.) He lives with his overbearing mother Amanda—who is like your annoying-but-amusing theater friend from high school who speaks in a distracting, slightly put-upon accent and always wants you to appreciate her—and his terminally shy sister Laura, both of whom await the arrival of Jim, the Gentleman Caller.
Tom describes the Gentleman Caller as “the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.” We, the audience, are to the theater community what the Gentleman Caller is to the The Glass Menagerie. Without us, the drama doesn’t happen. Yet when we head out for the evening, we, like Jim, are almost always oblivious to the nature of the drama we are about to enter. Generally, we’re just out looking for a good time.
Finally, Laura is theater itself. She can be hopelessly awkward, embarrassingly sensitive, torturously maladjusted, and uniquely beautiful. Sometimes, you just want to scream at her to grow up, get away from her mother, and get a real job. But then, when the lights are magically altered just so and music wafts in from some unknown location, you surprise yourself by suddenly falling for her. As Jim tells Laura in the play, “ … different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of … They’re one hundred times one thousand. You’re one times one!” And before you realize what you’re doing, before you can think better of it, you have to kiss her.
Laura reminds me of a young girlfriend who loved me even when I didn’t deserve it. In retrospect, I wish she had given up on me sooner and found healthier, more practical ways to expend her energy. Yet her unwillingness to turn off her emotions—the way she insisted on taking seriously things that the rest of the world takes for granted—is a quality that I still admire in theater. The flaws make me reach out to her more tenderly and hopefully.

All the other theaters in the Twin Cities exist in the shadow of the new Guthrie. None of the others have such a grandiose physical presence or sleek production values; in fact, few theaters in the entire world, let alone the Twin Cities, provide as luxurious an experience. Even the almonds are expensive. The Guthrie is to the theater world what the New York Yankees are to baseball, paying large-market premiums to showcase world-class talent—and occasionally nabbing actors from productions at smaller companies that can’t compete with the salaries it offers.
Unlike the Yankees, however, the Guthrie’s presence so changes the landscape that it can take some credit for actually supporting theaters that nominally compete with it for audience. By employing so many artists and technicians, it helps keep talented people in the Twin Cities year round. It makes leftover props and furniture available to many small companies at reasonable cost. It has even begun to help bring these companies to larger audiences by running their productions in the new Dowling Studio. (You can see four top-selling shows from last year’s Fringe Festival in the studio February 1–4.)
Finally, the Guthrie experience is alluring to people who don’t normally consider live performance a part of their life. An evening there is an event in the same way that going to the Metrodome includes more than a baseball game. You can have food, cocktails, and a beautiful view. If the show disappoints, at least there are pretty lights and booze.
At the same time, unfortunately, many people never have an alternative experience. (One full house at the Guthrie is a good-sized audience for an entire four-week run of a Gremlin production.) For them, the Guthrie is synonymous with theater—even more so now that even New Yorkers are willing to acknowledge its grandeur. I wonder, however, whether this showplace fosters false expectations in its audiences and, even sometimes, its artists. If the Guthrie has the expertise and financial wherewithal to create on the stage the type of clean, luxurious, virtually perfect experience that it offers in its numerous bars, why should it hold back? But on the other hand, should a play be that comfortable? Should it be that shiny and impressive? Watching incredible sets fly in and out, for example, you may find yourself marveling at the quality of air-traffic control rather than the quality of the play.
And what then becomes of Laura, whose strangeness makes her so special? “Art is a kind of anarchy and theater is a province of art,” as Tennessee Williams himself insisted, in an essay titled “Something Wild.” “It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society apparently must be based.” (By his measure, purchasing tea at Gremlin Theater may actually be the more beautiful theater experience.)
Theater, at its best, not only entertains but also nurtures what Tennessee Williams called a “highly personal, even intimate relationship” with us, the audience. We enter a unique, often-flawed world that nonetheless sometimes offers a closer approximation of truth than we see in our day-to-day lives. “It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive,” Williams admitted in another essay titled “Person to Person,” “that those emotions that stir [the playwright] deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself.” In The Glass Menagerie, for example, Williams recreates his memory of his sister in such a way that the true, heartbreaking beauty beneath her odd, fragile exterior can be more easily seen. We simply cannot experience theater if we substitute, consciously or unconsciously, comfort for this peculiar, sometimes “embarrassing and unattractive” light and power.
Of course, no theater should be defined by the experience you have in the lobby. Good theater—being alive and different every night—may seduce us like Laura on the Guthrie’s grand proscenium stage, up in its Dowling Studio, and just as well, down at the Loading Dock Theater (where Gremlin is producing a fun new play, Bach at Leipzig, by a young playwright named Itamar Moses)—or anywhere in the Twin Cities that wants to call itself a theater. Afterward, I recommend going to the new Guthrie for cocktails. I hear the cheese plate is good, too.

Do you know who wrote your favorite film? If the names Sidney Howard, Frances Goodrich, and Joseph Stefano fill you with a sense of admiration, then congratulations on recognizing what most of us consider trivial: These are the people who wrote the classics Gone With The Wind, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Psycho. Even among filmmakers, the obscure status of screenwriters tends to be the norm—director Nicholas Ray once grumbled, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?”
Ray was referring to the gulf between the script and what ultimately shows on the silver screen. By the time a finished flick hits your hometown theater, the screenplay, just one small part of the overall process of filmmaking, has devolved into a mongrel combination of original and consumer demand. Sometimes, as with “high-concept” franchises like the Mission: Impossible series, you don’t even need the kernel of original thought—the script is almost an afterthought. At the very least, the screenplay is interpreted by a dozen very different pairs of eyes, from the director’s to every actor who mangles a line, to the cinematographer and editor. If you want power over your art, screenwriting is the last medium to pursue.
Nevertheless, as it is for so many others in the movie business, an Academy Award is the premier accolade for a screenwriter. Perhaps to make up for the lowly status of writers in the pecking order, the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to take great pride in making oddball choices in films it selects to vie for the best screenplay Oscar (individual branches of the Academy—Directors, Composers, Film Editors, etc.—nominate films for awards in their categories). Sometimes the directors go crazy and give David Lynch a nod, but for the most part, the Writers Branch has a habit of unearthing the strange bedfellow, nominating and awarding an established literary figure (George Bernard Shaw, John Irving), or tipping its hat to an edgy new presence like Quentin Tarantino. While the Academy as a whole often bestows crowd-pleasers like Rocky or Titanic with the best picture award, screenplay awards have gone to such daring fare as Network, L. A. Confidential, and The Piano.
Best Original Screenplay remains the only Oscar that Citizen Kane won, and the only Oscar that Orson Welles ever could claim as his own. Charlie Kaufman, perhaps the best screenwriter working in America today, has his for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He was also nominated the previous year for his masterwork, Adaptation, a movie whose conceit was that a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman created an imaginary twin brother Donald, and together they attempted to adapt an unfilmable book into a decent screenplay (both Charlie and the imaginary twin were nominated in real life). Pedro Almodóvar has his, too, for Talk To Her.
Because it rewards eccentricity, there is a certain hip factor to the best original screenplay Oscars. This category remains the one corner of the Academy where, year after year, some of the coolest films get nominations—and actually win. While Sideways might earn nods for best picture and best director, no one expects it to actually win those awards … but it did earn Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor statuettes for best adapted screenplay. In 1995, Christopher McQuarrie’s Byzantine Usual Suspects beat out the much more classically structured (and ham-fisted) Braveheart; and Preston Sturges—a comic genius and arguably one of our greatest directors—has three nominations for his writing, one of which (The Great McGinty) resulted in an Oscar.
But just as the Academy likes to award actors- turned-directors (Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson)—perhaps knowing these icons would never win an acting award—so, too, it awards actors who lower themselves to write. Billy Bob Thornton, a legitimately decent actor, owns a little gold man for writing Sling Blade, as do Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting; Emma Thompson has one for acting in Howard’s End and another for her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Certainly, it does the Writers Branch no harm to welcome these high-profile types into its inner circle; while one could accuse the members of kowtowing to the stars, there’s also a case to be made for crediting the passion of writers—whoever they are—in bringing to the screen a work that they’re especially tuned into. Affleck and Damon were barely on the rise when they won their screenplay award, as was Thornton; and Thompson simply adored Austen.
Despite that passion, only the most devoted film buffs seem to glom on to published screenplays. Plays, too, are seldom read, but often published in the hopes that they’ll be produced (moreover, while theater buffs outside large cities might never get to see the new Pulitzer-winning play, movies are accessible anywhere). And if you’ve ever cracked a copy of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai with the best intentions—as I’ve done—you’re likely eventually to set it down and cue the DVD instead. Robert Towne’s Chinatown, rightfully heralded as one of the greatest screenplays ever written and taught in the best scriptwriting classes, is one exception of a well-read script. It remains that writer’s only Oscar—he’d been nominated for Last Detail and Shampoo in addition to Chinatown, for three nominations in as many years; sadly, it may have damned him to a lifetime of comparison. (His most recent work was the risible Ask the Dust.)
The script for Chinatown reads like one of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled thrillers, sparse and compelling; it still makes one shudder at its grasp of evil. But do we recoil from the wretched Noah Cross as we read him on the page, or because of what we remember of John Huston and how his acting in that role provoked such dread? Thing is, Chinatown is a classic because of its screenplay but also because of Roman Polanski’s vision, which gave the film its sense of foreboding, and its grim, cynical ending—which the director changed from Towne’s upbeat close. Then, too, there is Nicholson’s foolish leading man, John A. Alonzo’s washed-out cinematography, and Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score. Add to all of these a producer in Robert Evans, who brought these talents together and kept them from one another’s throats.
When Irving G. Thalberg was the boss of Universal Studios during the mid-1920s, he bluntly summed up the prevailing attitude toward those who toiled on screenplays: “The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches.” Studios have always been desperate for good ideas, and the screenwriter is your source for this most important product. Ultimately, though, no screenplay—from Citizen Kane to Chinatown—can stand alone as a classic. Perhaps this is because film is both utterly collaborative and thoroughly permanent. Plays are momentary, changing with each production, and the faces, voices, and places in a book are visualized differently by each person who reads it. But a movie, once made, exists essentially forever. Just as no one can ever remake Chinatown without seeing Jack Nicholson, no one can go back to Towne’s original vision, even if someone were foolish enough to attempt a remake. It’s in our collective consciousness now.
Movies need screenwriters as much as they need actors and actress, producers and directors and editors. And while the writers are the ones who see the film first, in their heads, they are perhaps the ones who suffer most as they watch their vision mutate into the final product. The screenwriter might indeed be the most important son of a bitch in Hollywood, but he is not the only son of a bitch by far.

The definitive sound of the North Country remains elusive, even as the Twin Ports become glutted with great live music venues and bands worth checking out. Is Duluth a folk music town, or a hotbed of alternative rock? We have no idea, but straddling those genres is Trampled By Turtles—a band loosely related to a bluegrass quartet, boasting banjo and bad attitude. They’ll rip into a Bill Monroe classic one moment, and follow it up with a meandering Radiohead reverie. This set of shows celebrates the Turtles’ new album, Red Alert: Trouble Ahead. If this is what Duluth sounds like, then we definitely need to visit more often. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com