Arts & Entertainment
The power of two
Brother/sister duo K’s Choice reunite for U.S. tour
K’s Choice — brother-sister duo Sarah and Gert Bettens — are back with their first album in eight years. (Photo by Frank Clauwers; courtesy Think Press)
K’s Choice
With A Fragile Tomorrow
Wednesday
8 p.m.
$20
Ram’s Head on Stage
33 West St.
Annapolis, Md.
Ramsheadonstage.com
It’s an exciting time for K’s Choice fans. The brother/sister alt rock band that came to international fame in the ‘90s with hits like “Not an Addict,” “Believe” and “Almost Happy” while touring with Alanis Morissette and the Indigo Girls, are back with the U.S. release of their first album in a decade, “Echo Mountain.”
Though released abroad in 2010, “Mountain” and its acoustic companion “Little Echoes” are available stateside this month to coincide with a U.S. tour that kicks off next week in Tennessee. On Tuesday they play Ram’s Head Live in Annapolis.
During an interview last week, Sarah Bettens, who co-fronts the native Belgian band with her brother Gert, spoke to the Blade from her home in Johnson City, Tenn., (about four hours from Nashville) where she moved to be with her partner 10 years ago about the time K’s Choice opted for a long hiatus.
“It’s near the North Carolina/Virginia border,” she says, admitting it’s a much different place to live than her native Belgium where most of her family still resides “within about a 15-mile radius.”
“Yes, it is a lot different, but that being said, it has changed a lot in the last 10 years. There was just an article in the local newspaper about two guys looking to adopt. It was on the front page and I remember thinking, ‘Ten years ago, this would never have been in the local newspaper.’ Some, I’m sure, were offended by it, but more and more, they’re in the minority. People seem to care less and less. … It was an adjustment at first, but everywhere you go, you’re able to find like-minded people. We have good friends here and we’re happy.”
Of the four kids Bettens and her partner are raising, she says they’re, “actually very respectful” of her music.
“It’s always a bit of a surprise that they’re respectful about anything at that age, but when I play locally, which is only maybe once every two years, they come and feel proud.”
Sarah and Gert have one older brother. She says he’s “a music lover, but not musically inclined.” She says he’s always been supportive of K’s Choice, whose hiatus, she says, was “a very conscious thing.”
In the time between the last K’s Choice album, “Almost Happy,” in 2000, Bettens, 40, has released three solo albums and an EP and has also contributed her husky, haunting vocals to several movie soundtracks. Gert, 43, also did solo work in the meantime.
“We always said one day we’d get back together when we were ready and we knew it would be great fun, but we also considered the hiatus a true hiatus,” she says. “We needed to work with some other people, do some other things. We’d never really worked with anybody else because we’d kind of grown up in our own band so that kinda kept us from experiences with other musicians. That just had always been the way it was right from the beginning, so it was healthy and fun for us to go our own ways for awhile.”
Bettens’ U.S. residency did make for a few slight challenges when it came time to reunite for “Echo Mountain,” which has earned strong reviews with All Music Guide calling it a “simple but mature and filler-free alt-rock album” that’s more “nostalgic” and “downright fun” than “angsty.”
“For a long time, I would only see him when I was doing my solo tours,” she says. “We sent some MP3s back and forth but eventually we did have to sit down in the same room and decide what kind of record we wanted to make. It was very hard to get direction until we did that.”
Bettens says there’s not ordinarily a huge distinction between the songs she writes for her solo projects and K’s Choice material though the material for her first solo album — around the time she came out as a lesbian in the early ‘00s — was more personal than K’s Choice material had typically been.
She came out to her family “as soon as I was out to myself,” but waited to come out publicly.
“I didn’t wait around with a big secret for years and years,” she says. “I just kind of discovered it myself, for some reason I haven’t fully figured out yet, at a very late age. I was 28. Looking back, I really wonder why I didn’t see the 25,000 signs there were from the age of 5. But for some reason it took me til age 28 to fully figure it out. I didn’t come out to the rest of the world right away, not because I was scared of some backlash, but I knew I would quickly become some sort of spokesperson and I really felt I had nothing much to say about it yet. It was all so new to me that I didn’t want to have to speak for the gay community. I didn’t think I had anything interesting to share.”
Being outed in a magazine shortly thereafter was “fine,” she says.
“It was probably supposed to happen that way,” she says. “It was good to show young people that lesbians are normal people too.”
SIDEBAR:
5 quick music questions with Sarah Bettens
WASHINGTON BLADE: Alt rock lyrics, especially in the ‘90s, are known to be sort of vague and oblique. Do you think about how direct you’re being when writing lyrics?
SARAH BETTENS: No, I don’t give it any thought when I’m writing. Afterwards, my brother and I laugh about how different our lyrics are. It’s a much more roundabout trip to get to the bottom of his lyrics I think.
BLADE: Your pitch always seems so dead on. When you’ve been singing professionally for many years, does that eventually become something that happens naturally or are you always thinking on some level about whether your pitch is right?
BETTENS: Sometimes when we listen back to, say, a three-part harmony, we will notice things like places where we tend to go a little flat every time so we know to watch out for it. Sometimes you listen back to a recording of a live show where you think you did a fantastic job and it’s a little disappointing because it always sounds more perfect the way you remember it in your head, which isn’t always the reality. And we do notice things in rehearsal, like, “OK, we tend to go flat here, we need to be careful of that.” I find simply looking up in those passages is helpful for tone.
BLADE: Having started your career before the Internet became really widespread, all things considered, has it been more of a blessing or curse for your music career?
BETTENS: There are obvious downsides. Everybody has lost money and record companies have gotten smaller and really struggled. We started right before that when everybody still had money so Sony was giving us big dinners and there was lots of money to record, a big budget for touring. That’s unheard of anymore. When we toured with Alanis, Sony gave us a tour bus, money to pay our musicians. Stuff like that today, at least on our level, is unheard of. … And it’s getting very hard for a band like us to get on the radio but even so, no matter how small you are or how dire the outlook, there’s always the chance that something will get discovered on the Internet. There’s always that hope. So to say it’s been a totally negative thing would be exaggerating. But for sure, we’ve lost money by not selling records. We’ll play some crazy sold out show in someplace like Israel where we’ve never been before and people will be singing along to every word and we know we haven’t even sold 2,000 albums altogether in Israel so you think, “How do they know all these songs so well?” It makes for pleasant surprises but it’s also a little disturbing too.
Theater
‘Inherit the Wind’ isn’t about science vs. religion, but the right to think
Holly Twyford on new role and importance of listening to different opinions
‘Inherit the Wind’
Through April 5
Arena Stage
1101 Sixth St., S.W.
Tickets start at $73
Arenastage.org
When “Inherit the Wind” premiered on Broadway in 1955 with a cast of 50, its fictional setting of Hillsboro, an obscure country town described as the buckle on the Bible Belt, was filled with townspeople. And now at Arena Stage, director Ryan Guzzo Purcell has somehow crowded Arena’s large Fichandler space with just 10 actors, five principals and a delightful ensemble of five playing multiple roles.
Inspired by the real-life Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s fictionalized work pits intellectual freedom against McCarthyism via the imagined trial of Bertram Cates (Noah Plomgren), a Tennessee educator charged with teaching evolution. Drawn into the fracas are big shot lawyers, defense attorney Henry Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones), and conservative prosecutor, Matthew Harrison Brady (Dakin Matthew). On hand to cover the closely watched story is wisecracking city slicker and Baltimore reporter E.K. Horneck (played by nonbinary actor Alyssa Keegan).
Out actor Holly Twyford, a four-time Helen Hayes Award winner who has appeared in more than 80 Washington area plays, is part of the ensemble. In jeans and boots, she memorably plays Meeker, the bailiff at the Hillsboro courthouse and the jailer responsible for holding Cates in the days leading to his trial.
Twyford also plays Sillers, a slack jawed earnest employee at the local feed store who’s called to serve on the jury. And more importantly she plays Brady’s quietly strong wife Sarah whom he affectionately calls “Mother.”
When Twyford makes her memorable first entrance as Meeker, she’s wiping shaving cream from her face with a hand towel. With shades of Mayberry R.F.D., the jail is run casually. Meeker says Cates isn’t the criminal type, and he’s not.
“There’s a joke among actors,” says Twyford. “When an actor gets his shoes, they know who their character is. And it’s sort of true. When you put on boots, heels, or flip flops, there’s a different feeling, and you walk differently.”
Similarly, shares Twyford, it goes for clothes too: “When Mother slips a pink coat dress over her cowboy boots, dons a little hat and ties her scarf, or Meeker puts on his work shirt, I know where I am. And all of that is thanks to a remarkable wardrobe crew.
“Additionally, some of the ensemble characters are played broadly which is helpful to the actors and super identifying for the audience too.”
During intermission, an audience member loudly described the production as “a proper play” filled with beautifully written passages. And it’s true. Twyford agrees, adding “That’s all true, and it’s also been was fun for us to be a part of the Arena legacy as well. Arena took ‘Inherit the Wind’ to the Soviet Union in the early ‘70s when the respective governments did a cultural exchange. At the time, the iron curtain was very much in place, and they traveled with a play about a man with his own thoughts.”
When the ensemble was cast, actors didn’t know which tracts exactly they were going to play. “What came together was a cast, diverse in different ways. Some directors, including myself when I direct, are interested in assembling a cast that’s a good group. No time for egos. It’s more about who will make the best group to help me tell this story.”
At one point during rehearsal, ensemble members began to help one another with minor onstage costume changes, like jackets and hats: “We just started doing it and Ryan [Guzzo Purcell] picked up on it, saying things really began to come alive when we helped each other, so we went with that.”
“For me, it was reminiscent of ‘The Laramie Project’ [Ford’s Theatre in 2013] when we played five different parts and we’d help each other with a vest or jacket in a similar way. It worked so well then too,” says Twyford.
“Inherit the Wind” isn’t about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think, playwright Jerome Lawrrence has been quoted as saying. And it’s a quote that makes the play that much more relevant today.
Twford remembers a chat in a hair salon: “I was getting my hair cut and the woman next to me shared that she was tired of message plays. Understandably there are theater makers who believe that message plays are the point, while others think it’s all about entertainment. I feel like ‘Inherit the Wind’ sits in a nice place in the middle.”
She adds “the work is a creative way of showing different opinions and that, I think, is what we should be paying attention to right now. Clearly, it’s not right or wrong to express what you think.”
Out & About
‘How We Survived’ panel set for March 25
‘Living History’ discussion to be held at Spark Social
Friends of Dorothy Cafe will host “Part One, Living History: How We Survived,” will take place on Wednesday, March 25 at 7:30 p.m. at Spark Social House.
This event will be moderated by Abby Stuckrath, host of the “Queering the District” podcast. Panelists include: Earline Budd, activist, trans rights advocate; TJ Flavell of Go Gay DC; DC LGBTQ+ Center Board Member David Bissette; and Alexa Rodriguez, founder and executive director, Trans-Latinx DMV.
This event is part of a four-part storytelling series called “Living History,” which centers LGBTQ elders, activists, artists, and icons sharing their lived experiences and reflections with younger generations. The conversations explore themes like resilience, community organizing, chosen family, and the lessons earlier generations hope today’s LGBTQ+ and ally communities will carry forward.
Saturday, March 21
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
The DC Center for the LGBT Community will host “Sunday Supper on Saturday” at 2 p.m. It’s more than just an event; it’s an opportunity to step away from the busyness of life and invest in something meaningful, and enjoy delicious food, genuine laughter, and conversations that spark connection and inspiration. For more details, visit the Center’s website.
Sunday, March 22
LGBTQ+ Community Coffee and Conversation will be at 12 p.m. at As You Are. This event is for people looking to make more friends and meaningful connections in the LGBTQ community. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, March 23
Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Queer Book Club will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. The Queer Book Club meets on the fourth Monday of the month to discuss queer books by queer authors. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Tuesday, March 24
Coming Out Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a safe space to share experiences about coming out and discuss topics as it relates to doing so — by sharing struggles and victories the group allows those newly coming out and who have been out for a while to learn from others. For more details, visit the group’s Facebook.
Genderqueer DC will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a support group for people who identify outside of the gender binary, whether you’re bigender, agender, genderfluid, or just know that you’re not 100% cis. For more details, visit www.genderqueerdc.org or Facebook.
Wednesday, March 25
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit www.thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, March 26
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Small is beautiful: subcompact SUVs
‘Inherit the Wind’ isn’t about science vs. religion, but the right to think
‘How We Survived’ panel set for March 25
Calendar: March 21-26
Queer American in Israel discusses Iran war’s impact
Idaho advances bill to restrict bathroom access for transgender residents
Gay candidate running for D.C. congressional delegate seat
SAVE Act could silence millions of trans voters
Thomas A. Decker of Arlington dies at 73
The frightening rise of antisemitism, Islamophobia
-
Idaho4 days agoIdaho advances bill to restrict bathroom access for transgender residents
-
District of Columbia4 days ago
Gay candidate running for D.C. congressional delegate seat
-
Opinions3 days ago
SAVE Act could silence millions of trans voters
-
Obituary4 days ago
Thomas A. Decker of Arlington dies at 73
