Large falling snowflakes accentuated the charms of our view across the river while Dylan spoke with passion about the need for “smart” cinema in our culture. Dylan explains how the true noir impulse has devolved into thrillers and action films—films that don’t bother to be smart.

The business side of the film industry appears to have the upper hand. This situation reminds me of the 1980s film business, when Hollywood first was capable of making films look very good technically, no matter what sort of hackneyed content they presented. The current Academy Awards reflect this as well, relegating fine artistic films in a wide variety of styles to second place behind the cute, the propagandistic and the melodramatic.

Dylan certainly is not alone in his desire to create engrossing cinema. One can find excellent films regularly—some even get Academy Award nominations, like the breathtaking “kids’ film” Coraline. Still, Dylan has produced quality film here in Chattanooga, and he is distributing it through the Internet, directly to an audience hungry for interesting movies. As Lloyd Kaufman recently emphasized at ConNooga, the studio system thwarts independent films through its lock on distribution. The Internet can bypass this oligarchic obstacle, and has begun to establish itself as a source for alternative work.

I’m not really aware that film noir ever stopped being produced, but during the’90s, there was a strong push from academics to relegate the noir film genre to a mere historical category. Directors like Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone, along with a number of others, overwhelmed this academic strategy with a profusion of excellent noir films. Now noir remains, perhaps like the Western, as a stable, but challenging, film genre. In other words, directors need not produce these films unless they are prepared to offer something excellent. The drive to create great film will continue to provide audiences with great work in difficult genres.

The original films noir had a relationship with Italian neo-realist cinema, another genre that has disappeared, as the recent Gomorrah eloquently attests. Fellini, Bertulucci, and DeSica produced great film from their own neo-realist perspectives, but academics have been all but blind to American neo-realism, preferring to class everything outside of the studio system in the commercial category of “independent film.”

Dylan Kussman’s The Steps promises to be a new entry into American neo-realist film, as well as film noir. Its episodic presentation has precedent as well. Flash Gordon was originally presented in episodic form. The real point here has to do with creative drive. The packed-out premiere at CreateHere demonstrated the enthusiasm Chattanoogans have for this project.

The cast did very well. I was particularly impressed by Robert Bass, Whit Davies and Kim Jackson. Remember also that Dylan’s character, Charlie Madison (aka Ron Harlin), is not what he seems. However, the tone that Dylan has presented, dark and twisted, with black humor accents, remains the real thing. Follow these steps—if you dare.

The Steps
Find webisodes at www.followthesteps.net
Check the site for a contest to win a Dell computer.

For their Masterworks concerts and opera events, the Chattanooga Symphony is no stranger to the Tivoli Theater, but the Chamber Series is a different animal.  Instead of watching the conductor and his musicians raised on a stage far out of reach, the Read House Silver Ballroom offers music lovers the chance to see and hear important music in a comfortable and relaxed setting.  This weekend’s concert features three works for small orchestra by two of Russia’s most lauded composers: Igor Stravinsky and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.

Sunday’s program opens with Stravinsky’s “Octet” for eight wind instruments, a work that Maestro Bernhardt is especially excited about performing.  “The ‘Octet’ of Stravinsky is an absolute masterpiece,” Bernhardt said in an interview.  “It’s what happens when you restrict a genius.  The eight instruments build an absolutely extraordinary creation in three movements.”

The “Octet”, composed in 1922, has a distinctly 20th-century sound, but it is not a work solely concerned with groundbreaking musical innovation.  “This is Stravinsky as a neo-classicist,” Bernhardt said, “using his own language combined with musical techniques of the past, such as fugue and counterpoint.  The result is an incredible, extremely clever combination of looking forward…and a real challenge for the eight musicians.”

When asked how many rehearsals the orchestra normally puts in for a chamber music concert, Bernhardt said that three is the usual number, but that for music as complex as Stravinsky they might need to sneak in one or two more.  Polishing the “Octet” is one of the orchestra’s priorities as it is a piece they have been looking forward to performing for a long time.

The second Stravinsky work on the program was composed after World War I at a time when Stravinsky was attempting to pick up the loose threads of a career that had been torn asunder by the conflict.  Before the war, Stravinsky had composed two of his most famous works, “The Firebird” and “The Rite of Spring” for the Russian ballet stage, and choreographers were looking desperately for a way to entice him back into the fold.  One of these choreographers suggested he adapt the music of an 18th-century composer named Pergolesi; Stravinsky balked until he finally glanced at the music.

The result was a ballet called Pulcinella that shows a distinctly different side of Stravinsky’s personality than the “Octet”.  The CSO is performing the orchestral suite from Pulcinella on Sunday and Bernhardt said that to hear both of these aspects of Stravinsky is one program is extraordinary and quite unusual.  “Stravinsky took the music of Pergolesi and created an effervescent tour de force,” he said.  “It is a wonderful orchestral suite in which all the winds and brass have their solo turns.  It’s very challenging and just beautiful.”

The two Stravinsky pieces serve as 20th-century bookends for a work that will be familiar to even the most casual classical music lover: Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings”, a piece that captivates from the first measure with its lush, often heartbreaking melodies.

Tchaikovsky composed his famous “Serenade” at the same time as his immortal “1812 Overture”.  He wasn’t pleased with the “Overture”—an irony that says much about how composers view their own work—and wrote the “Serenade” not only so he could have a respite from the “1812 Overture”, but as an homage to Mozart, whom he once referred to as “the Christ of music.”   Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade” is as pure an export of Russian romanticism that you could ever hope to find.

It has been said that Stravinsky began what would become his “Octet” without knowing what would finally become of it and that he found more complete guidance for the work in a dream.  “I saw myself in a small room surrounded by a small group of instrumentalists playing some attractive music,” he said.  “I awoke from this little concert in a state of great delight and anticipation and the next morning began to compose the ‘Octet’.”

The CSO’s Russian Masterpieces concert this Sunday is a chance to have an encounter much like Stravinsky had in his dream—to place yourself in an intimate setting and experience chamber music the way it was meant to be heard.

“The spirit of the event is intentionally informal,” Bernhardt said.  “You’re sitting in a beautiful space and it’s just as though you might be listening to the music in the 19th and early 20th century.  It is chamber music in its truest sense; very clever, humorous, and something that people can get close to both musically and physically.”

“Russian Masterpieces”
$15, 3 p.m., Sunday, March 7
Silver Ballroom, Sheraton Read House,
827 Broad Street, (423) 267-8583.
www.chattanoogasymphony.org

“Place in the Woods” is part of an “Art in Public Places” grant made by the Benwood Foundation to the Hunter Museum. The popular sculpture “Arriving Home” by Dennis Oppenheim at Miller Park was also placed through this grant. Chattanoogans participated in the final selection of pieces through voting opportunities provided by the Hunter. Katrina Craven explains how this allows the Hunter to have a broader presence in the community. So far, this seems to be working well.

In “Place in the Woods”, both design and material work to effect a sort of physical paradox, an enclosing structure with generous open space. The deeper question here involves our conception of space, and it’s interesting to see how a space may be altered to a purpose and yet still be connected to its natural environment; space that has been defined by natural forces.

“We’re really interested to see how it changes over time. It will develop a patina,” explains Carol Mickett. This design uses architectural bronze and brass to frame an enclosure with a sort of rayed “roof.” These frame pieces are “extruded”; this means that they are hollow. Using extruded pieces reduces the weight of the structure. Still, the individual frame pieces weigh 85 pounds each. Robert Stackhouse remarks that this sculpture “has a broad footprint and many feet.” Carol appreciates the warmth of these metals as well as their ability to interact organically with natural elements.

Carol and Robert work as artists in collaboration. Their creation of “Place in the Woods” nevertheless has required more hands to bring it to realization. Because it had to be constructed on site, contractor David Smith of DJ Smith Company has been engaged, since this sculpture is also a structure. Local artists Isaac Duncan and Rondell Crier assist with welding and other details. Consequently, this installation involves a broader collaboration of the arts community that has responded to Carol and Robert’s creative partnership. I believe this to be a wonderful expression of the Chattanooga arts community.

“Place in the Woods” has been established by the river at Renaissance Park. Visitors can view the final stages of installation and appreciate its bright visuality and subtle tactile qualities. Enjoy!

The Steps is about Charlie Madison (director/writer/actor Dylan Kussman), a Los Angeles private investigator who escapes to Chattanooga—only to find that he cannot run from his criminal past. Filmed entirely in Chattanooga using local cast and crew, The Steps is one of the first in a series of short webisodes created for the Internet.

“This summer we shot the whole first season, episodes 1-10. Each one is approximately six minutes,” says Director of Photography Tim Cofield. “We used all of the grant money to do the first season—the web series is partially funded by a MakeWork grant from CreateHere—and all episodes will be streamed by the end of April.

“Our main focus now is telling people that [the launch party] is a device party. I don’t know if this has been done in Chattanooga before, but it’s certainly a rarity. [It’s] where everyone’s encouraged to bring iPhones or laptops to view the series. If they don’t [bring a device] they can gather round laptops, for free, of course.”

Beginning at 8 p.m. there will be two screens streaming live from New York and Los Angeles. Attendees can interact with both coasts at the two provided laptop stations and hang out until the viewing. At 9 p.m. episodes 1-4 will be streamed on Ustream.tv.

“EPB is bumping up the bandwidth just for that night!” exclaims Cofield. “Also CARTA has partnered with us; they’re parking a bus outside of CreateHere and they’ll have wireless on the bus. There will actually be several spaces in and around CreateHere replicating all of the different spaces you can see The Steps. This is one of the fun concepts [CARTA] is helping us do.

“CARTA wants to promote younger people riding the bus. A lot of people don’t know there’s wireless on the bus. I certainly didn’t know. Also, everyone can look for four buses with a sign of The Steps on the back this month.”

There will be no cost to get in to the party, hosted by CreateHere on Main Street, and drinks and food will be catered. The only optional cost is the purchase of posters designed by Young Monster, www.weareyoungmonster.com, an art collective specializing in design and screen-printing.

“Nick DuPey designed the really cutting-edge noir posters for The Steps. He was on CNN a couple of months ago and won a MakeWork grant last year. His screen prints will be for sale. Besides that, it’s a totally free event.”

If you can’t make it to the release party, you can view the episodes online at home streamed live. After episodes 1-4, the following episodes will be released one episode a week, with the first one, Episode 5, to be released February 20 at 12:01 a.m.

For music devotees, there is currently a competition on the web site, www.followthesteps.net, where fans are encouraged to record and remix “Red Dress”, the original theme song for the series written by Kussman and Cofield.

“We’ve already gotten remixes from various people,” says Cofield. “Eventually, probably in the spring, we’ll begin voting online. [Whichever song] gets fan favorite will be the song used in the next season. Right now, the music page is one of the most hit pages on the site. There’s a lot of [musical] talent in the city.”

For Season 2, the producing team is looking into branding sponsorship like product placement, but in addition to the launch party, the web site and the CARTA buses, another fun advertising opportunity has presented itself.

“Some of the locations we used included Loose Cannon, Good Dog, Tremont Tavern. We have coasters that say ‘Shot on location here’ with ‘The Steps’ on the back. Those will be thrown into local venues this week.”

Cofield muses, “[The Steps] highlights Chattanooga. Everyone one in the cast and crew is in Chattanooga and people don’t think of Chattanooga as a film town.”

They are taking steps to change that.

The Steps Device Party
Free.
8 p.m.
Friday, February 19
Create Here, 55 Main Street
Bring your own device.

Curator Carmen Davis explains how the name change to “The Bessie Smith Cultural Center” will clear up some confusion among Chattanoogans concerning just what is happening at the lovely facility on MLK Boulevard. A recently acquired electronic sign on the lawn lets folks know about the current artist exhibition, “A Love Supreme”, by Atlanta-based Okeith. From Chattanooga, Okeith’s show will move to New York as part of the New York Times’s Fine Arts Preview. The center also houses its own permanent collection of African and African American art, including its focus on blues pioneer Bessie Smith.

The BSCC is also home to the Performance Hall, a venue for concerts and other events. Of course, the center has a high visibility during the annual Bessie Smith Strut, part of Riverbend, and the Heritage Festival, featuring fine music performances as well as artist-to-artist talks.

Fun social activities with an educational emphasis and outreach programs to kids at risk are ongoing. The Friday evening “Soul Cinema” shows and disco parties continue through February. Upcoming films include Five Heart Beats  (February 19) and Michael Jackson’s This Is It (February 26). Twenty-five percent of the proceeds from these showings will be donated to the Haiti Relief Fund.

Also during February’s Black History emphasis, a Brown Bag Lunch Program takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to 1 p.m., when segments from the series Eyes on the Prize, a history of the civil rights movement, are shown. Eyes on the Prize presents one of the foremost efforts in documentary film, stunning and deeply affective.
You’ll find a rewarding experience in “A Love Supreme.” Okeith’s jazz paintings form only a portion of this varied exhibition. I found the title piece, named for John Coltrane’s famous work, and “Ole Soul” to be engaging for their composition and color tones, and I found pleasant surprises in other jazz pieces.

Okeith’s pre-eminent works are large figures, eyes closed, executed with a palette knife into multi-faceted originals and glicee prints. These pieces work through a range of color tones. “Naked Truth,” oil on wood, in turquoise, gold and earth can be seen in development, since a drawing of this is also on view. I found Okeith’s drawings of nudes to be nuanced and dynamic. On the whole, I found his work to be unpretentious and innovative, important qualities for traditional media, provoking intuitions.

The Bessie Smith Cultural Center presents a major cultural asset, and its new name should boost its citywide profile even further.

Needless to say, this chap has a lot riding on him: nothing less than the mood and momentum of the entire production. Thankfully, Rob Inman, the Stage Manager in the CTC’s Main Stage production of Our Town is up to the task. Donning tweed slacks, a dangling watch chain and an impeccable part in his hair, he exudes all the provincial trustworthiness of a Norman Rockwell creation. As the audience saw last Friday night, he is capable of steering a somewhat shaky production.

But he isn’t the only character in Our Town faced with unusual challenges. The cast must act out the various activities of everyday life under drastic set restrictions. Every aspect of the town’s physical character, from Main Street storefronts to kitchen props, must be imaginatively implied from a few tables and chairs, two ladders, and a bench. Housewives must shuck invisible beans, stir invisible batter and pour coffee from invisible pitchers. Children run off to school with books we can’t see.

Some of the actors are especially deft at going through these motions. Though he has help from some offstage sound cues, Andy Still, as milkman Howie Newsome, carries out his trade with a fervor that compensates for his lack of props. Randal Fosse, as Dr. Gibbs, lifts his saucer and sips his coffee with an effortlessness that conveys the full sense of this morning ritual. And Nancy Hammons, as Mrs. Webb, gestures the stirring of batter with intuitive ease.

Not all the cast members are quite as deft at this game. In his role as the drunken choir director Simon Stinson, Stacy Helton gives a comical turn, to be sure. (In one of the play’s most humorous moments, he implores his choir to sing more quietly during rehearsal by screaming at them.) But as he pushes his hands over what we can only assume is a piano, he might just as well be petting a dog as playing a keyboard. Perhaps we can be blame Stimson’s boozy demeanor for this lapse.

Why did Wilder choose to burden his cast with these seemingly unnecessary acting responsibilities? “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind,” Wilder famously wrote, “not in things, not in scenery.” This quote sounds like the quip of a Gnostic dualist, or perhaps a reaction to Imagism, the early 20th-century literary movement led by William Carlos Williams’ famous mantra, “No ideas but in things.”

But what Wilder was really after with Our Town was a theatrical approach akin to Williams’s later poetic project, which aimed to capture the ordinary experiences of the 20th-century American Everyman. If Williams tried to show how ordinary Americans talked—by writing poems in the idioms of plain speech—Wilder wanted to show how those people lived, and, more importantly, what they lived for. By removing the artifice of a set, Wilder was drawing his audience’s attention to the supreme importance of his characters, since life’s essence, as he explains through Our Town’s Stage Manger, transcends the temporal. “We all know that something is eternal,” he says in the third act. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…that something has to do with human beings.”

In the case of Emily Webb, one of Our Town’s main characters, this is not discovered until after her death. In the first two acts, Wilder shows us Emily’s life, which by the standards of Grover’s Corners amounts to an average existence. She had attended school, earned her diploma, fallen in love with the boy next door, and married young. But in the third act, Emily gathers with the local deceased at the Grover’s Corners Cemetery, having died in labor. Now she pines to return to her living family. Though she is allowed to go back for one day, she is alarmed by what she finds.

“It goes so fast,” she cries to the Stage Manager. “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? [They] are just blind people!”

These lines, delivered passionately by Joanna Miller, serve as the emotional centerpiece of Our Town. Indeed, the pathos of Miller’s performance even pushes us to forgive that of her fellow lead, Tony Dagnon, whose turn as Emily’s suitor, George Gibbs, is fraught with screechy adolescent awkwardness. His is certainly a coming-of-age story, but the role demands a palpable sense of burgeoning maturity as much it calls for study-hall romping.

As Our Town draws to a close, the Stage Manager steps forward to wind his watch and remind us of the time. It is late in Grover’s Corners. Emily’s funeral is over, and the townspeople, those still alive, are heading off to bed. “You get a good rest, too,” the Stage Manager implores. But as the stage lights darken, we know that he means for our eyes to remain opened. His hope is Wilder’s hope: that we not stay blind to the beauty of life in Our Town, or any town.

On Thursday, February 11, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre will offer real-time captioning of the performance. Courtesy of new equipment from the Chattanooga Chapter of the Hearing Loss Association of America.

Our Town
$12 – $25
7 p.m. Thursday, February 11
8 p.m. Friday, Saturday February 12, 13
2:30 p.m. Sunday, February 14
Chattanooga Theatre Centre, Main Stage, 400 River Street.
(423) 267-8534. www.theatrecentre.com

Media involved include performative photography, video and sculpture. The work from these installations features intricate and consummate execution, but the conception of the work remains the most challenging element. These artists of surreal history, ranging from icy wilderness to outer space, produce a vertiginous grasping for reference of the real and a satirical indictment of presumed real history.

A kind of history of such aesthetic enterprises may be found in Matt Glass’s Constructed Realities in the Age of Photography (see www.glassbrain.com).

Down on Earth, we may not notice floating, airless moon rocks decorating the space around our familiar moon, nor do typical photographs show the ruins of tiny colonies a century old. Here we are indebted to Kahn and Selesnick for their panoramic photographic documentation of valiant Edwardians in their buffalo space coats pondering the temporal mysteries of the lunar inter-planetary threshold.

In this new millennium of information overload, we may gasp at the loss of cultural products and the confusion of fact and legend. Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (a very early film) and the moon novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells documented this imaginative soaring to embrace our colder sister, first neighbor in space. I’ll leave it to you to discover the uncanny astonishment that greeted these intrepid Edwardians and that fueled their meditations while they mined moon rocks for air!

Kahn and Selesnick are currently pursuing a NASA grant to document the Martian surface. Perhaps they will discover the significance of the strange face on Mars, or unriddle the paradox of distant familiarity on the Red Planet.

“Eisbergfriestadt” elegantly explores the microcosm of Lubeck, a German port city, when an iceberg drifts into its waters, and opportunistic capitalism exploits this icy environment. The viewer wades through a landslide of detritus from the aftermath. Here, a precious antique marzipan iceberg, there, a wheelbarrow full of “notgeld”, the local super-inflated currency, a “kartenspiel” card deck faces a wall witness to the intricate minutiae of Lubeck’s historic adventure.

However you may arrive at this internationally acclaimed exhibition at the Cress Gallery, be prepared to rest in temporal dislocation and gaze at surreal archetypes so curiously indifferent to your stares.

KAHN AND SELESNICK: Work from “The Apollo Prophesies” and “Eisbergfreistadt” projects
Cress Gallery of Art, UTC Fine Arts Building, Vine & Palmetto Streets
Through March 16. (423) 425-4600.
www.utc.edu/cressgallery

This large volume, roughly comparable to an extensive world atlas, contains a world of Jung’s making, though this world has plenty of connections to our own. It includes a wonderful, digitally accurate facsimile of the sections that make up Jung’s fragment, as well as a translation and an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, with additional material.

The Red Book is presented, after introductory material, in three sections, “Liber Primus,” “Liber Secundis,” and “Scrutinies.” It has the look of a medieval alchemist text with particularly elaborate illuminations, that is, capital letters at the beginning of passages become complex paintings, variously sized. The passages themselves are calligraphic, very lush artistry. There are also large paintings and poems with paintings called “Incantations”; these recall the Illuminated Poems of William Blake.

The subtitle “Liber Novus”—(New Book) reminds me of Giambatista Vico’s Nuovo Sciencia (New Science or Knowledge). Some of you may recall that Vico served as the villain in the second “Ghostbusters” film. Vico went deeply into mythology and poetry, and his work was imposing, perhaps sufficiently scarily imposing that he was written into that movie.

Jung enters the realms of mystery and paradox, for more than a decade and a half, creating paintings of mystical expressionism, along with a vertiginous spiritual text that contains a good deal of clarity.

In his epilogue, Jung says that he stopped work on his folio when he received the “golden flower”, which he calls an alchemical text in 1928. Jung published an introduction to The Secrets of the Golden Flower in 1948, 20 years later, according to Psyche and Symbol, edited by Violet S. de Laszlo.

This book reminds me of Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written late in Flaubert’s career, such a controversial work, but staggering in its esoteric poise. Such text may be rare, but Carl Jung’s “Red Book” shows itself absolutely remarkable.

Jung demonstrates a fine quality of execution of strange conceptions. This artistic direction had begun well before Jung set up The Red Book, and much of the content comes from these writings, called “Black Books.” The writing is emphatic, careful and astonishing, a deep meditation on spiritual art and the book is an exemplary object of spiritual art.

This act, in the current production on the Chattanooga Theatre Centre’s Circle Stage, succeeds brilliantly, a potent combination of expert direction from Magge Cabrera-Hudgins and outstanding performances from the four-person cast, most particularly Wendy Tippens as Diane and Hunter Rodgers as her self-absorbed, movie-star-with-a-heart-of-tinsel client, Mitchell.

By any standard, “Little Dog” is an insider’s comedy, with its jokes about the relative worth of screenwriters in Hollywood (zero), and the Byzantine intricacies of a film contract; Diane’s verbal aria on this is a small masterpiece. So it might seem that only those on the two Coasts would “get it”—yet on opening night, the Circle’s audience was mostly in full appreciation of the dish.

“Little Dog” tells the story of Mitchell, minor movie star hoping to move up the food chain, and his encounter with Alex, a male hustler with whom he falls as much in love as his shallow soul is capable of. Alex, meantime, has been maintaining a relationship with Ellen, a party girl gal pal doing her own hustling with older men…and then there’s Diane, a redheaded barracuda in heels, who is the most clear-sighted, and in some ways, the most honest, of them all.

She’s completely willing to pose as Mitchell’s older-woman love interest, knowing that no one inside the Hollywood scene will buy this for an instant, but swoops like a harpy onto Mitchell when he proclaims he will be seen about town with Alex and damn the consequences. She knows only too well what her client really wants, and what is he willing to do to get it.

There’s an odd and, as she might say, “almost genuine” affection for Mitchell in Diane’s manipulations. Yes, she’s out for herself, and plays the game with gusto, but as someone who has seen it all, she’s not going to let him flame out (excuse the pun) for a love that yells out its name for nothing.

Wendy Tippens is obviously having a blast playing Diane and well she should—she tears it up. This part requires both commitment and technique from the actress and Tippens delivers.

Her real-life son, Cody Keown, plays Alex, and he’s got some wonderful moments, particularly in the first couple of scenes with Mitchell in which he reveals—or doesn’t—some of Alex’s real story. However, Alex is not particularly well served by playwright Beane…more on this a little later.

Jennelle Gilreath uncovers the emotional neediness behind the at-first brittle Ellen, who refers to her mother as “Screech” in yet another hilarious first-act monologue.
But it’s Hunter Rodgers as Mitchell who takes the honors here. You don’t need to be an ex-Angeleno to recognize his type…vacillating, charming, weak—yet suddenly stony when the all-important “career” is at stake. Rodgers gives us the full monty on this character, and leaves a taste in your mouth of overpriced champagne.

Other kudos: The versatile set, by Scott Dunlap, allows the play to keep moving without blackouts or pauses, always a plus. The uncredited music design is rather fabulous.
Where “Little Dog” becomes problematic for me is in the second act, when Beane brings it down from the comic peaks and tries to show there is some there there with at least three of the characters (Diane remains supremely above having any “there” and thus also remains the most successful of his creations.) I just did not buy this adjustment, and was not, to tell the truth, terribly interested in their, to me, manufactured angst. Alex in particular is sent on a journey, both figurative and literal, that just does not resonate, though Keown gamely invests himself in it.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend “Little Dog,” and as ever, commend the CTC for their commitment to bringing topical, on-the-edge theater to our community. If you support this kind of work, hie thee to the Circle for one of the four remaining shows.

The Little Dog Laughed
8 p.m.
January 22, 23, 29, 30
Circle Stage, Chattanooga Theatre Centre
400 River Street, (423) 267-8534.
www.theatrecentre.com