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Hypocrisy target of Mode
concert
The Courier
By: Pam Chickering
The laughter has a different tone at the Mode Theater last week; comfortable, unapologetic, deep and heartfelt.
An almost all female audience made the opening of “Call me by my True Name.” Friday night, making for a personal, intimate show which still harkened to universal concerns: Heads nodded across the assembled chairs as singer/guitarist Mary Waitrovich and percussionist Dana Beilke shared original music, alternating with dramatic sketches by actress Jinx Davis, Mode Theater owner.
Waitrovich sang of
coming into one’s own, of dealing with love lost, and relationships that fail to
connect, and of the hectic schedule the world imposes. A few basic themes
ran through the show, tying the music and drama: hypocrisy, honesty and
compassion.
“The Spiral Stair,” a personal favorite, addressed the deadly pace of modern life, which keeps people running as if they climb a spiral stair, eyes on the next flight as they stumble on this one. “Working so hard to prepare for the next thing, I forget I’m already somewhere, already doing something,” Waitrovich sang, her driving chords backed up by Beilke’s earthy echoing drums. Another phrase referred to “all the life I can squeeze from a day.” An attorney as well as a creative songwriter, Waitrovich revealed a love of words as well as music in her varied songs, skipping from the country “You gotta put your quarter in the jukebox, darlin’” to the subtle “You’re packing up your mind...you’ll be leaving pretty soon,” to the compelling image of a lover, “trapped like a deer in your high beams, I’m walking on a road toward you.”
The few deep lines across the singer’s hawk-nosed face, the few streaks of silver in the short hair that came across her forehead like a raven’s wing, accentuated the intensity of the singer’s expression. Her maturity lent an authority when she sang of loss, a certain confidence when she sang of accepting her true self, as in the song, “Feel the Chain.” “It’s a complicated feeling; it’s an inrushing tide. It’s a dark cloud of anxiety, twisting into me from inside,” Waitrovich sang, then entreated herself to “Give it up, let it go now…feel the chain and feel it snap.”
In “I can’t see myself,” Waitrovich sang of trying to live up to society’s ideal image of a woman: a mirror in which ordinary women will never find their reflection, and an ideal, she argued, that we must discard in order to live up to our potential, “Women,” she said, “If only we could see our complete selves clearly, we wouldn’t have all these self-esteem problems.”
Davis followed that act with her impression of a
self-empowerment group for women in Texas. In a grating Texas accent, she
imitated
the group’s
leader, saying “Everything I want is coming to me from the universe.” With an
ironic combination of self-doubt and immense power and manipulative ability,
these women formed their own “old boys network” at once supporting each other
and promoting the most blatant and selfish materialism. “Unable to deal
with the juxtapositions and the strange, strange contradictions,” Davis said, “I
did something no one does in Texas. I took off my shoes and walked home along
the freeways. Twelve hours later, I arrived at my destination.”
Another Davis sketch played off Waitrovich’s tale of an operation she had as a two-week-old baby. As an adult, Waitrovich had visited a doctor who asked about the scar. “I was born with a blocked esophagus,” she said. “I had to have an operation when I was about 2 weeks old to unstop it so I could eat.” The shocked doctor revealed that the only anesthetic at the time was ether, which could not be used on babies.
Davis turned a doll and a blanket into a child, asking the audience how to reassure such a small child in great pain. From the audience, the actress elicited a tremulous, beautiful lullaby, followed by a tender silence.
That silence carried a respect, a comfort in companionship and a support for human pain. The same feeling reverberated through the entire performance. It was that feeling that allowed audiences and performers to share in the same, genuine, daring laughter.