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Style

Media Woo the Appalachian Tale

“For the record, I think the

TODAY Show spot was pretty insulting.”

ABC correspondent Jake

Tapper dissing his NBC

competition in an e-mail to a staffer of South Carolina Gov. Mark

Sanford

BY BILL O’LEARY — THE WASHINGTON POST

DANCE

Merce Cunningham, As Riotous as Ever

Choreographer Stirs Wolf Trap’s Passions

By Sarah Kaufman

Washington Post Staff Writer

For a moment at Wolf Trap on

Tuesday night, it looked as if to- matoes might fly, or perhaps a deviled egg from someone’s pic- nic hamper.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company had just finished performing “Sounddance,” Cun- ningham’s ecstatic opus from 1975 with a thundering electronic score by David Tudor that, when it didn’t sound like high-decibel crickets or machine-gun fire, made you feel as if you had your ear to a cyclone. I thought the whole experience, music and dancing, was an exhilarating rush — like bobbing in the ocean, be- ing swept by wave after wave, get- ting sucked under and tumbled

around from all directions. From the cheering, most of the crowd seemed to agree with me — but not everyone.

“Thank goodness it’s over!” shouted the fellow seated in front of me, hands cupped to his mouth, addressing the dancers as they took their bows. He booed over and over at high volume, adding somewhat redundantly: “You were terrible!” People stared. A man a few

seats away yelled over to him, “Hey, shut the [expletive] up! If you can’t appreciate it, just leave!” The booing continued. So did the applause. And from those hot emotions rose inescapable testi- mony to Cunningham’s continu- ing impact, still sharp after dec- ades of exploding the mold. A modern-day Diaghilev, collaborat- ing with the leading painters and musicians of the age, Cunning-

See DANCE, Page C9

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

There are times when journalists

badly want to land a hot interview. Very badly.

A newly disclosed stash of e- mails to Mark Sanford’s office shows media figures offering to be sympathetic, even sucking up, if he will grant them an exclusive. It was late June and the South Carolina governor had sparked a furor by vanishing for several days, but the world did not yet know of the affair with his Argentine soul mate. “If you all want to speak on this

publicly,” a Washington Times staffer wrote, “you’re welcome to Washington Times Radio. You know that you will be on friendly ground here!” Griff Jenkins, a Fox News feature reporter and producer, wrote: “Having known the Gover- nor for years and even worked with him when he would host radio shows for me — I find this story and the media frenzy surrounding it to be absolutely ridiculous! Please give him my best.” Even Stephen Colbert, a South

See MEDIA, Page C2

BY STEVE MANUEL

“If the Governor is looking for a friendly place to make light of what I think is a small story . . . I would be happy

to have him on.”

Stephen Colbert in an e-mail to Sanford’s staff, before the Appalachian tale turned into the Argentine saga

C

Thursday, July 16, 2009

S

BY ANDREW PROPP

In “Split Sides,” there is interesting interplay between the Merce Cunningham dancers’ costumes and alternating backdrops.

BY MELINA MARA — THE WASHINGTON POST

Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and a Muslim, was invoked by President Obama in his Cairo speech.

A PUBLICS FIGURE

Congress’s First Elected Muslim Is Emblematic of Many Things, Depending on Group Needing a Symbol

By David Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Keith Ellison is what he is — the first Muslim elected to Con- gress, the first African American to represent Minnesota — while trying not to be too much of what he is. But not too little, either. Quietly devout, he unrolls his

prayer rug in the privacy of his of- fice in the Longworth House Of- fice Building, facing the corner be-

yond which lies Mecca — but that is still too Muslim for some. Antiwar, he once voted for an

Iraq war-funding bill because it had a timetable for withdrawal — but that was not dovish enough for some protesters who subsequently held a sit-in at his Minneapolis of- fice.

More than two years after he came to Washington, the idea of Keith Ellison, the symbol of Keith Ellison, remains potently useful to

various agendas. President Oba- ma seized on it last month, during his address from Cairo University to the world Muslim community. In the president’s list of examples of how “Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” he allud- ed to Ellison, though not by name. Ellison’s might may be the least important part of his identity. Oba- ma said: “When the first Muslim

See ELLISON, Page C4

THEATER

Would You Buy a ‘Dark Play’ From This Cast? Yes, You Would

By Peter Marks

Washington Post Staff Writer

Good actors are like the cagi- est salesmen: No matter how deep your initial skepticism, you might wind up buying some of the most impractical things they have in stock. So blame your ad- miration for Forum Theatre’s “Dark Play or Stories for Boys” on an impeccably pushy cast, which manages to sell from the stage of the H Street Playhouse every unlikely twist of Carlos Mu- rillo’s Internet-Age drama. Don’t get me wrong: Murillo, a Chicago playwright, has crafted a corrosively entertaining piece about a dastardly digital mas- querade — a kind of perverse modern riff on all those classical plays about disguised wooers.

The one hitch is how Murillo takes the easy way out with the more far-fetched threads of his tale, by offering us the option of concluding that what’s trans- pired has been a figment of his antihero’s imagination. Still, imagination is fervently in charge on this occasion, em- powered by a director, Michael Dove, who manipulates the pro- ceedings with a starkly seductive agility. And a cast, led by the ster- ling James Flanagan and the deeply sympathetic Brandon Mc- Coy, that nimbly distills both the everyday and the exotic in Muril- lo’s story.

The unadorned, 90-minute production — it’s played in the round, on a bare floor, with only a

See THEATER, Page C2

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