http://www.fairfaxtimes.com/cms/story.php?id=1686
Playwright performs double duty as director
by David Hoffman
June 23, 2010
"I am not a noun, a category," declares the large man in a professorial tone.
"I seem to be a verb," he adds, and his know-it-all air of friendly
confidence as he spouts theory about architectural design and
environmental common sense creates an image of a very real
renaissance man of the 20th century in the play "R. Buckminster
Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe," by D.W. Jacobs.
Audiences at the Arena Stage presentation of a one-man show were
treated to a performance by Rick Foucheux, an Arena regular who
recently played a superb Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman."
Foucheux effectively demonstrates Fuller's gift of gab and remarkable
grasp of the future.
His powerful stream of insight and humor and metaphor equates to a
world-class university lecture on the environment, complete with a
slide show far funnier than anything Nobel laureate and
near-president Al Gore presented in his Oscar-winning film about
global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."
Intellectuals certainly know about Fuller, the writer of "Spaceship
Earth" and the man who understood from early in the past century how
fragile the earth is. And Fuller, also an architect, designer,
inventor and tireless advocate of sustainable lifestyles and
ecological wisdom, is a man whose ideas are timeless though he has
been dead for some years. Yet his message persists, and is brought to
life at Arena's current borrowed Crystal City stage in Arlington
through July 3.
So yes, it's an extended monologue, but in fairness, Fuller manages
to connect with his audience and involve them in his presentation.
And thankfully, the play is broken into two acts, so it's a lot like
drinking twice from a fire hose of information. Along the way, we
hear a lot about his design perfecting the shape of the geodesic
dome, including the one famously still in place in Montreal from the
1967 World Expo.
But there is also much we learn about Fuller at the
playwright/director's hands. Jacobs first heard Fuller speak at the
University of California, Santa Barbara when he was a student there
in 1968. Jacobs, also a longtime actor, producer and teacher,
co-founded the San Diego Repertory Theatre in 1976 before going on to
pursue independent creative projects.
"Fuller" had its world premiere in San Diego a decade ago and was
presented later in San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, but now the
show is freshly conceived and staged by Arena in its East Coast
premiere. Plan to see the show before it closes, and follow the
career of Jacobs, who has already turned his hand to a stage
adaptation of Edward Bellamy's classic 19th-century utopian novel,
"Looking Backward." And Jacobs has other tricks up his sleeve; for
example, co-writing and co-directing "The Whole World is Watching,"
an adaptation of the ancient Greek Oedipus trilogy as a TV talk show.
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