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Alexandra Tomalonis
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SHARON WYRRICK

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
Column: PERFORMING ARTS
October 30, 1989; Page b7

Sharon Wyrrick's artistic world, which a few years ago was made up of cloth clouds and broken flowers, is now much more concrete. The art and props for her "Storyboard for an Anxious Journey" are all lines and squares; the text -- musings on things she's read and done -- is the kind of letter a friend would write you, if your friend were a poet. "Storyboard," a solo piece performed this weekend at Mount Vernon College, has become a two-part work. The section that bore this name last summer is now called "Where's the Milk?" and is preceded by another section, "Tsunami," which received its premiere Friday night. Like "Milk," "Tsunami" expresses Wyrrick's concerns about our overprocessed society. The work's ruling metaphors are 59 bowling pins that she sets up painstakingly, two by two, in six rows at the beginning, as the children's song about the Duke of York and his 10,000 men is sung, over and over, in the distance. The pins assume varying personalities and shapes integral to the text, which is delivered by Wyrrick in a wry, rapid-fire patter.

When Wyrrick traces the relationship among Latin American debt, coffee prices and certain other exports, the pins encircle and ensnare her. When she talks abstractly about experts and consultants, they become a businesslike aisle. When the talk turns to the more personal frustrations with experts during her son's recent hospitalization, she nests the pins gently, neck caressing neck. Before collapsing world-weary amid the pins at the end, she walks on this unsteady row, angrily, unsteadily, as vulnerable to currents as the islands destroyed by the tsunami.

"Where's the Milk?," a complementary discussion of man's attempts to control life and the random cruelty of death, is delivered from a huge, raked checkerboard with colorful, giant-size milk and juice cartons adorning its surface. Wyrrick's craft, at this stage in her career, is impeccable, almost jubilantly confident. Each choice of art or words or movement is exactly the right one. Structural puzzles are solved correctly. It seems churlish to quibble, but perfection can become predictable, and ultimately I find this work less individual and a bit less satisfying than the nebulous images and dream landscapes that entertained her imagination several years ago