"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Berthe Morisot
with Bouquet of Violets
etching, Édouard Manet, 1872

Last week, I was out with a friend, it was trivia night at The Bottlehouse. She was talking about the future, I was talking about the past. I have a future, at least I believe I do, but oh man, I have been overwhelmed by the past lately.

For example, on Saturday evening, I caught the Seat of the Pants production of The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias, playing through May 31 at Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Tremont. In the 1990s I performed in a surprising number of shows in Pilgrim, beginning with the 1992 Working Theatre production of Jean Racine’s Andromache, and concluding with Eight Impressions of a Lunatic by Sarah Morton, and produced by Red Hen Theatre in 1998.

  

Lisa Lewis & David Hansen
"Andromache"
by Jean Racine
The Working Theatre, 1992

The Book Club Play takes place in a nice living room in modern America, and as SOTP specializes in site-specific plays, they found a pleasant sitting room at Pilgrim for the performance. This room is adjacent to the actual theater space (with a platform stage and traditionally seating) and was one we used as a dressing room for Eight Impressions.

I shared a bit about that production a couple years ago, one of those experiences I used to have, when I took myself seriously as an actor. I read several books on the character I was playing, Édouard Manet, and on the subject of the play, Berthe Morisot. For the first time in my life, I studied painting. I grew my hair out. I added to my shallow education in everything.

Manet & Morisot
David Hansen & Tracey Field
"Eight Impressions of a Lunatic"
by Sarah Morton
Red Hen Productions, 1998
Photo: Anthony Gray

It is a marvelous thing to be so prepared, so attired, so transformed. And I had it so easy; Morisot and her mother, speaking of my character before I entered, the great man, generating expectation and anxiety in them and in the audience. There is a particular moment, when the charming and confident man appraises the woman’s work, when he is surprised, sees beauty, originality, remarkable talent, and he is amazed, even threatened.

I have a good friend who has told me he was taken with that brief moment, that I succeeded in communicating all of those things. Good for me. What I remember is that no matter how much self-confidence, even arrogance, that I was able to maintain, it was only from the shoulders up. When Tracey Field, as Morisot, handed me a cup of tea, my hands shook so terribly. Every single time. My face can fool people. My hands, not so much.

Berthe Morisot Reclining
Édouard Manet, 1873

Last Saturday, I took myself on an artist date to University Circle. First, I explored the Cleveland History Center. I had been looking forward to checking out the Hollywood on the Cuyahoga exhibit, which held a few surprises (I want to know more about those Cleveland-based lithograph houses that were some of the biggest producers of movie posters during the silent era) but was padded out with a lot of photos of movie stars who grew up – or spent a some time – in Cleveland. That’s not really interesting, that’s just trivia.

But as long as I was there, I decided to just wander around. There's a lovely exhibit on community-based health care. I got fairly lost in the Hay-McKinney Mansion, a large wing of the museum I’d never taken the time to experience before. There were no other people around and I became concerned that I had entered some “employees only” area, especially when I encountered the servants’ quarters. But things were labeled for display, and marked “please do not touch” so I assumed the best.

" ... out of a DeLorean?!"

In fact, I saw the servants’ dining room before I saw the main dining room, and I thought, this is cozy. And there’s a lot of natural light. The Hay-KcKinney dining room was grand and opulent and dark and felt dusty.

And I hit the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, which I have been to many times (we even attended a wedding reception there in the late 90s) not so much to see the cars, but the peer through the windows of the recreated Euclid Avenue storefronts located along one wall in the lower level.

I was reminded of Yesterday’s Main Street at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, which my family first visited some fifty years ago. As an eight year-old, every exhibit made an indelible impression, and in idle moments, or drifting off to sleep, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in a different time and place.

Or maybe just a different time. My kids tease me about my obsession with the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. And it’s true, if you were to use the DeLorean they have at the Crawford Museum, to travel to any time or place in history, I wouldn’t choose the birth of Christ (that might settle some arguments) or Shakespeare’s London (that wouldn’t settle any arguments) I would choose the summer of 1936, Cleveland, Ohio.

For more information, check out the script for my play Cleveland Centennial! or read this blog from the beginning.

The story of Manet and Morisot is one of mutual respect and admiration, and it’s one that still interests me because I seek out such symbiotic artistic relationships in my life.

Morton’s play is a feminist work, one centered on Morisot, and her struggle to create art while also accepting her place in bourgeois society – she wants to be married, to have a child, she also wants to paint and for her work to be acknowledged. Like most of us, she wants happiness.

Self-portrait
Berthe Morisot, 1885

And Manet was just one part of that equation. A mentor, a colleague, even if you will, a muse.

Many of the works currently on display at the the CMA are Manet’s studies and paintings of Morisot, and they are lovely, tasteful portraits of a proper, middle-class woman, often dressed in black, occasionally reclining, though never the subject of a fictional work like Olympia or Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (no, those two aren’t here in Cleveland) though the very best painting of Morisot is the last one we encounter before exiting through the gift shop – a self-portrait, painted when she was forty-four. She painted what she saw in the mirror, a middle-class, middle-aged woman, palette and brush at hand.

She looks happier.

"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art continues through July 5, 2026 -- with free admission on Saturday June 6, to celebrate the CMA's 110th birthday.

Bread & Puppet Theater presents "Grasshopper Rebellion Circus"

"Grasshopper Rebellion Circus"
Bread & Puppet Theater, 2018

Once We Were Young and Activist

Growing up during the late 1970s in suburbia, the hippie days were long past, as if they ever even were. A subject of mockery and disdain, moving into the Reagan era the very idea of public protest, of activism, just was not cool, man.

My brother, however, was very interested in current events. It was he, not my father, who wanted the national news switched on at 6:30 PM, every single night. Among other artifacts, he had a few Doonesbury anthologies lying around. These I read, and they soon became an obsession for me.

Gary Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury documented (among other things) the student’s-eye-view of the college scene during the tail end of the Vietnam War. To understand the jokes I needed to understand the time, and so I began to read books and watch films to bring me up to speed, and slowly developed what you might call a bleeding heart liberal’s worldview.

In the year 1980 I was surely the only twelve year-old in Bay Village to have watched the motion picture Woodstock.

Interestingly enough, I still registered as a Republican when I turned eighteen. I thought that I was Republican the same way I understood myself to be Caucasian or Presbyterian. The first time I voted in a Presidential election I noticed I had voted for all the Democratic candidates and soon after officially changed my party affiliation.

"Grasshopper Rebellion Circus"
Bread & Puppet Theater, 2018

But though I leaned left, I was not what you might call radical. At Ohio U., I had an interest in social justice, but I still looked down my nose at those modern, Gen X hippies. The guys from Rocky River who cut the soles off their shoes who have never left Athens. The guys from Athens who eventually moved to Brooklyn. They would stage street protests about … whatever, and I just thought it was embarrassing. Surely there are better ways to get your point across than playing acoustic instruments and wave hand-painted signs and bleating cringe-worthy phrases ad nauseam.

We write letters to the editor. We produce plays for the people who desire to see them. And if we are truly serious about social change, we run for public office. But standing on a street corner screaming is just, well it’s gauche, isn’t it?

The tipping point for me was the Persian Gulf War of 1991. I was still at college and the outrage on campus in Athens, Ohio rivaled anything I’d ever personally experienced. I did feel there were those in the crowd who seemed excited at the possibility of Vietnam redux, complete with old-timey protest songs and tie-dye, sit-ins and peace signs. But I was against the war, too, I was opposed to the proposed New World Order that was being shaped so soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so I participated in my first outdoor performance protest on January 16, 2001 (see: Desert Scream.)

That was before the 30-day war, before the parades, before Whitney Houston’s "Star Spangled Banner" topped the pop charts. America’s bright, shiny victory left me feeling hollow and dispirited and helpless. That was when I decided that I liked street protest. Because I saw the bravery and strength in shouting at the top of your lungs on a street corner in the face of seeming adversity. Maybe it wouldn’t accomplish anything. But it’s the only thing that could.

"Grasshopper Rebellion Circus"
Bread & Puppet Theater, 2018

Bread and Puppet Theater

Last week the circus came to town, the Grasshopper Rebellion Circus. The show was produced by Bread & Puppet Theater, a world-renown political activist street theater collective, founded fifty-five years ago. They set up camp on Wade Oval in University Circle, and I changed a physical therapy appointment to make the date.

It had rained for several days prior to the event, but this was a perfect early-fall evening, just a little cool. Jacket weather.

They used no electrical anything for their performance, which began at 5:30 pm. Natural light, no amplification. They performed live music, and used large hand-painted signs. Their voices, when they used them, were big, and they carried well. They had trained to speak in odd voices, as to best catch the ear. To be concise, rehearsed and clear.

The event was episodic, ideal for street theater. Our crowd had gathered here to settle in for the performance, we had chairs and blankets, but it could easily have taken place in Public Square or Times Square. If you were walking by you could stop for one or two scenes or plays, then move along.

The company was multi-racial. The musicians were almost all men, the actors predominantly women. There were child performers, too.

The crowd, while diverse in age, was mostly white. There were some old school, east side Baby Boomer liberals seated down in front, putting their wizened fists in the air. The Millennium age companion standing next to me in the back sniffed that he didn’t really like it, which surprised me. At the very least you could appreciate the music, the movement, the puppets. It was rough but entirely professional.

There were a few brief speeches about the current atrocities in Gaza, Yemen, at home, on the Supreme Court. There was plenty to see, laugh about, get angry at, question, delight in.

One scene stuck with me as familiar: A giant puppet of James Madison arrived and handed the citizenry the Second Amendment. With it emerged a multitude of AK-47s and the citizens stalked the stage, bearing their arms, until one by one they were shot and killed.

"The History of Western Civilization"
Guerrilla Theater Company, 1994
Photo: Mike Cantwell

One of Guerrilla Theater Company’s few entirely wordless performances was “The History of Civilization” which included with a struggle over a handgun which concluded with everyone dead and the sole survivor, witnessing the carnage he had created, on the apparent verge of suicide.

We didn’t produce a lot of purely physical pieces in GTC, we didn’t have a live band (we did have a DJ) but I was always proud when we did. I know I found it very challenging to compose something visual without having to conclude with dialogue.

The B&P performance was a touching reminder of the work we did in Guerrilla, the manner in which we, too, made political point. Obvious, broad, uncomfortable political points. And I noticed I missed political theater for its own sake, that this gathering of “Hippies With Dolls” (their words) was a rare treat, in our own yard.

It was also a reminder that you don’t have to be young to do this. You just have to care.

They traditionally conclude the performance by handing out bread and aïoli to any who choose partake, and walking up to receive some with the wife and the boy, I was reminded of last year, when we attended the Neo-Futurists and received some of those small pieces of pizza he was so looking forward to.