Deleted Scene: Howard & Jen & Lenny & Lou & The Wheelbarrow Walk

Howard Shalwitz and Jennifer Mendenhall in Ian Cohen's Lenny & Lou, directed by Tom Prewitt, 2004. Thanks to Gwydion Suilebhan and Lexi Dever at Woolly for digging up the photo.

It pains me to report that when my Washington City Paper story about Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Founding Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz's career as an actor hits tomorrow it'll be absent one filthy anecdote from his Lenny & Lou co-star Jennifer Mendenhall that had to be sacrificed for space considerations. (Newsprint doesn't grow on tr—you know what, never mind).

Anyway, here's the bit. My apologies to Ms. Mendenhall's spouse Michael Kramer, who gave me some less salacious but still insightful comments about directing Shalwitz in a 1990 production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly that also hit the cutting room floor.

Mendenhall had been a little intimidated, she recalls, when she’d had to share a long kiss with Shalwitz—an actor she hadn’t met before—in Savage in Limbo. But when Prewitt put the two actors together again in Lenny & Lou, 17 years later, that kiss felt like mere foreplay.

Or five-or-six-play, if chief Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks is to be believed.

“It’s not pornographic exactly,” Marks wrote in his admiring 2004 review of Lenny & Lou, “though one scene of acrobatic rutting is so well-choreographed it would make a decent novelty act in an X-rated Cirque du Soleil.”

Woolly was without a regular address at that time (the show was performed at Theatre J which makes that filthy sequence all the more fun to try to imagine), and Mendenhall recalls rehearsals taking place in offices borrowed from Theatre J. Mendenhall kept urging Prewitt and fight director John Gurski—sex scenes have fight directors—to let the encounter be more absurdly explicit.

“I said, ‘We need a wheelbarrow walk.’ Howard said, ‘What’s a wheelbarrow walk?’ I said, ‘I’ll show you!’” Mendenhall recalls, laughing. She says Shalwitz’s one job during their carnal melee was to hold her skirt down so it she wouldn’t moon the audience. But he’d sometimes forget. The night her parents were in the audience was one of the nights when he forgot.

“It was insane,” she says. “It was so fun.”

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Logan Lucky, discussed.

Workaholic artist Steven Soderbergh on the set of Logan Lucky. (Bleecker St.)

I dropped by NPR HQ to talk about Steven Soderbergh's return to features, Logan Lucky, with screenwriter and author Danielle Henderson and regular Pop Culture Happy Hour panelists Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon.  When we recorded this discussion, I'd taken the opportunity to see the movie a second time after filing my review, and my opinion on it had evolved a little. Anyway, you can find the episode here.

I wish I could put my finger on why it read to me as condescending in a Coenesque way the first time but not the second. I love the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. But the ones Logan Lucky most recalled for me, Raising Arizona and Fargo, are not among my favorites.

Hillbilly Elegy: Logan Lucky, reviewed.

Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, and Adam Driver as the luck-starved Logan clan. 

Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh’s return to features after a four-year “retirement” in prestige TV, is a lot of fun, though I’m not as high on it as some. I have the same reservations about it that I do about the Coen Brothers films it most readily recalls. Anyway, here’s my review.

The Strangest Yard: Whipping, or The Football Hamlet, reviewed. Plus: King Kirby.

Emily Whitworth and Kamau Mitchell in Whipping. (Kathleen Akerley)

My review of Kathleen Akerley’s latest opus, Whipping, or The Football Hamlet, is in today’s Washington City Paper, along with a few paragraphs about another show that has regrettably already closed: Crystal Skillman & Fred Van Lente’s King Kirby, a bio-play about legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby and his lifelong struggle to be fairly compensated for the dozens of Marvel Comics characters he created—or co-created with Stan Lee. They don’t agree on who did what, and therein lies the tale.

If this subject interests you, I recommend Sean Howe’s 2012 history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Don’t Forget the Motor City: Detroit, reviewed.

Anthony Mackie plays Robert Greene, a Vietnam veteran assaulted by police in Detroit.

Review-writing is easier when you can interrogate your responses to the work and make judgments quickly. Detroit just wasn't one of those movies for me.

I thought it was important to try to discern exactly where the Bigelow-Boal directing/screenwriting duo deviated from or compressed the facts, which is hard in a 50-year-old case where so many of the facts were disputed. But I also saw some odd parallels between this movie and a couple of the ones Bigelow made before her historic Oscar win changed the way we receive her work. So my review is, among other things... long.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Atomic Blonde

The Mondo two-LP blue-and-yellow-vinyl edition of the soundtrack to David Leitch's stylish Charlize Theron-headlined, set-in-1989 espionage thriller Atomic Blonde that I ordered won't arrive for several weeks, I'm told. Until then you and I will just have to make do with our extant libraries of New Order, The Clash, A Flock of Seagulls, etc. And with this thrilling recorded-in-one take episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon brought me in to talk about how much we all like watching Ms. Theron kick ass. It's a lot more satisfying that watching her play second-fiddle to some grunting no-talent clown in a tank top.

The Hateful Eighth: An Octoroon and To Tell My Story: A Hamlet Fanfic, reviewed.

Erika Rose and Kathryn Tkel in An Octoroon (Woolly Mammoth).

My review of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company remount of An Octoroon, the best show I saw in 2016, is here. I should've credited Gwydion Suilebhan (a Woolly staffer, though I've known him longer than he's been on payroll there) for the observation in paragraph four about police body cameras; I couldn't swear I would've thought of that if he hadn't mentioned it to me when we were chatting after the show. He's a playwright and a very smart guy, so if you're going to pilfer ideas, he's a good victim. Also, the 2016 cast isn't quite "fully intact" like I said in paragraph three; Felicia Curry is new to the remount.

I also reviewed To Tell My Story: A Hamlet Fanfic, the latest literary comedy from Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri.

FURTHER READING: My 2013 profile of An Octoroon playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

Wartime in a Bottle: Dunkirk, reviewed.

400,000 stranded British soldiers await rescue on the frigid beach at Dunkirk. (Warner Bros.)

I've never understood the objection that Christopher Nolan's movies are sterile. Dunkirk, his new dramatization of the 1940 rescue of British soldiers from the beaches of Northern France carried out largely by civilians, knocked me flat. Here's my review.