C2


S


KLMNO THE RELIABLE SOURCE Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger


HEY, ISN’T THAT . . . ?  Actor/director/oil-spill-cleanup-


JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS Fantasia opens up.


THIS JUST IN  “America Idol” winner


Fantasia Barrino says her overdose two weeks ago was a suicide attempt. “I just wanted out,” she told VH1. “I knew exactly what I was doing. You can’t accidentally take a whole bottle of pills.” Barrino, 26, said she was overwhelmed with personal problems, including an affair with a married man. And not that we’re cynical or anything, but her third album comes out this week.  Bristol Palin, 19, is mending her broken heart on the speaker’s circuit — at $14,000 a pop. The teen mom will be paid to speak in Louisville next month at a benefit for Lifehouse, a home for single mothers, reports the Louisville Courier-Journal.


UPDATE Back in July, celebrity chef Art Smith and his fiancé, artist Jesus Salgueiro, offered companies a chance to sponsor guest gift bags at their wedding. That meant donating 350 ritzy goodies, plus paying a fee — with a portion of the proceeds going to Common Threads, Smith’s favorite charity. All for a good cause, right?


Smith and Salgueiro tied the knot


Saturday; so how much did their nuptials rake in? “So far, we’ve received $21,800,” says Linda Novick O’Keefe, the charity’s executive director. “We’re expecting more to come in the next few days, even weeks.” The guest list included Moby (who


DJ’ed), Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, interior designer Nate Berkus. . . . but not Smith’s best-bud and former employer, Oprah. According to O’Keefe, the talk-show guru spent the weekend at the funeral for the mother of her partner, Stedman Graham.


machine magnate Kevin Costner lunching with friends at Occidental Grill & Seafoodon Monday. Ordered the crab soup and halibut; his mission in the District is as yet unclear.


Costner


Plucking the fun off the Vine T


here’s low-key. And then there’s . . . well, hate to say it: boring. The Obama family vacation on Martha’s


Vineyard — their second summer on the Massachusetts island — is shaping up to be a snoozer for all the other Vineyard VIPs. The president popped up to buy books Friday with his daughters and play golf, but the first family has spent each and every evening cloistered in their temporary digs, Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark. So far, there have been no dinners with


Vernon Jordan, nor with Sen. John Kerry, who has a place close by in Nantucket. POTUS passed on a Friday night dance party with Larry David and Bill Murray and skipped a Saturday fundraiser for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, hosted by senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and with guests such as BET’s Debra Lee and Harvard professors Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates Jr., reports the Boston Globe. Yawn. Suddenly, it looks like the blingy


Hamptons might be the place to be. Bill Clinton has been hanging around Sag


The generous couple.


KIPLING SWEHLA


LOVE, ETC.  Divorced: Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren on Monday in Florida. The


golf great, 34, and his wife of six years, 30, finalized their split in Bay County Circuit Court in Panama City, reports People. “We are sad that our marriage is over and we wish each other the very best for the future,” the couple said in a statement released by Nordegren’s legal reps. The couple has two children, Sam Alexis, 3, and Charlie Axel, 1. The big question — how much money did she get? — remains a mystery. Details of the settlement signed last month were not disclosed, although sources tell the magazine that their pre-nup was renegotiated after his sex scandal became public. Various media reports say Nordegren will receive at least $100 million.


Tiger’s on his own.


Harbor, so A-listers descended on the Hamptons in New York on Sunday for his 64th birthday bash. The party was held at the home of longtime aide Doug Band and co-hosted by Hillary Rodham Clinton; guests included Paul McCartney, Katie Couric, Jimmy Buffett, Vera Wang, Christie Brinkley and Matt Lauer, reports the New York Post. On Clinton’s actual birthday, Aug. 19, McCartney called him to sing (what else?) “When I’m Sixty-Four.” And since the Clintons are stealing all the limelight this summer, expect further hoopla when new bride Chelsea makes her first post-wedding public appearance Saturday, along with her proud dad, in Bridgehampton for a 60-minute indoor bike ride (yes, spinning for charity!) to benefit the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.


President Obama hit a bookstore with Sasha, center, and Malia; meanwhile, the Clintons partied in the Hamptons.


HAMPTONS PHOTO BY DOUG KUNTZ/BLOOMBERG NEWS; OBAMAS PHOTO BY CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS GOT A TIP ? E-MAIL U S A T RELIABLESOURCE@WASHP OST . COM. FOR THE LA TEST SCOOPS, VISIT WA SHINGTONP OST . COM/RELIABLESOUR CE


TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2010


A hammy ‘Twelfth Night’


theater from C1


the ideas about love and sexual identity with which Shakespeare is playing. “Twelfth Night” isn’t so much an exploration of mo- mentary passions as the deeper mysteries of attraction: What are the ineffable spiritual qualities in Viola that manage to captivate both an Orsino and an Olivia? Relying on shopworn exhibi- tions — the scene transitions are filled with dancers doing the tango across the curling floor of Riccardo Hernandez’s set — the production makes the lovers seem as shallow as the mischie- vous characters whose main task is to drive the odious Malvolio bonkers.


Although the 2008 edition was rescued by some piquant comic performances — the price- lessly self-infatuated Malvolio of Ted van Griethuysen being the crucial saving grace — the recon- stituted production has lost some of that bite. (It even feels longer.) Among the characters in the Malvolio plot, only Nancy Robinette’s Maria and Floyd King’s Feste adjust with agility to the changing pitch of Shake- speare’s bittersweet music. Agnew, Wooddell and Puma- riega, all new to this staging, ac- quit themselves well enough,


BOOK WORLD


A muddy, bloody vision of 1864 America B


by Peter Behrens


ruce Murkoff ’s “Red Rain” is a rich, thick stew of a his- torical novel, a powerfully imagined and thoroughly believ- able vision of America in its nadir summer of 1864. The protagonist is Will Harp, a young army doctor just returned to his family’s farm in the Hudson Valley from the Southwest, where he was an un- willing participant to the U.S. Army’s campaign of genocide against the Shoshone Indians. Dr. Harp arrives home hoping


CAROL ROSEGG


GET IT? Tom Story (Sir Andrew Aguecheek) and Floyd King (Feste) are back for more of Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s tricks.


given the constraints of the di- rector’s agenda. Pumariega achieves a winningly boyish countenance for her scenes as Orsino’s aide Cesario, and Ag- new brings saucy playfulness to a character sometimes por- trayed as a bit of a stiff. Accessorizing the production with billboard-size blowups of roses and alluring gowns in chartreuse and teal, Hernandez and costume designer Miranda Hoffman have gone to admirable lengths to give this “Twelfth Night” a chic varnish. But a ve- neer of Shakespeare is as rich as this one-note approach ever gets.


DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau marksp@washpost.com Twelfth Night


by William Shakespeare. Directed by Alan Paul, based on original direction by Rebecca Bayla Taichman. Lighting, Christopher Akerlind; sound, Martin Desjardins; fight director, Rick


Sordelet; choreographer, Daniel Pelzig; voice and text coach, Ursula Meyer.


With Tom Story, J. Fred Shiffman, Todd Scofield, Larry Bull. About 2 hours 55 minutes. Through Sept. 5 at Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F St. NW. Visit www. shakespearetheatre.org or call 202-547-1122.


to renew his connection to a be- loved landscape and to come to terms with the atrocities he wit- nessed. But American violence is not so easy to escape. This is, after all, a monstrous time, and the country is wading deep in the bloodbath of the Civil War. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia are doing their best to break each other’s spirit in formless battles of attrition.


When the bones of a mastodon


are extracted from a swamp ad- jacent to Harp’s land, the trou- bled young doctor becomes in- trigued by prehistory and deter- mined to acquire the ground — which is also desperately desired by an entrepreneur who has rail- road dreams. A mastodon may be ancient history, but any history can be vital and dangerous when dragged out of the swamp, as one farmer learns during an excava- tion: “It was a huge horn,” Mur- koff writes, “the damndest one he’d ever seen. He held his hands


out just as the sharp, ragged point ran through the soft skin of his upper thigh, just below his right testicle, dragging him up- ward as it twisted out of the mud.” “Red Rain” is no Ken Burn- sesque slab of the American past, delivered in sepia tones with tin- kly piano music. Murkoff offers a substantial and resonant vision of what was arguably America’s worst summer. Violence and dis- placement had thor- oughly wormed their way into the country’s soul, and these char- acters live in a culture that’s entrepreneur- ial, often deadly, in- tensely focused on the price of real estate. Had Dostoevsky sailed up the Hudson in the 1860s, he would have recognized this place. The novel offers a rich cast of secondary characters. Mickey Blessing, the little town’s goon-for-hire, has a gentle sister, whose soldier-husband has gone missing after that shapeless, lost battle known as Cold Harbor. There are Irish bullies, and bul- lies who hate the Irish; Jewish storekeepers; a gay photogra- pher; and a young river-rat or- phan boy whose allegiances switch in the fight over land. All these people live in the psychic shadow of the war in Virginia, which seems poisonous and un- stoppable. Murkoff is sensitive to the wild- ness and the surprising rugged-


CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson


RED RAIN


By Bruce Murkoff Knopf. 330 pp. $26.95


ness of the Hudson Valley land- scape, too. Though it was in a sec- tion of the country that had been settled for 200 years, his Ron- dout, N.Y., in 1864 still has the lawlessness of a frontier town, suggesting there may be some- thing in American life — some- thing buoyant and thrilling, and sick and dangerous, too — that keeps settlements from ever real- ly jelling into communities. The novel suffers, though, because Mur- koff is unable to resist weaving in too many stories and too many secondary characters. The struggle between Will Harp’s passionate desire to dig up the past and his oppo- nent’s ruthless deter- mination to bury it and to get on with the busi- ness of business is in- triguing and sugges- tive, but it develops rather slowly. The tex- ture of the writing is


gorgeous, but it’s sometimes clogged with what feels like pe- riod detail for its own sake. Con- sequently, the story’s momentum suffers. However, should you want to spend a while in the sum- mer of 1864, “Red Rain” is an en- gaging and bloody-minded read, a historical novel of great convic- tion that hints at a dark vision of the American present through its confident handling of our past. bookworld@washpost.com


Behrens is author of “The Law of Dreams.”


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