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TBA TBD

Michael Redmond
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0
TBA TBD

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The sunny skies over Portland, Ore. were added incentive to bask in the summer coda offered by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, which ran Sept. 11-21. But the pretty green sheen that appeared one day on the surface of the Willamette River turned out to be a toxic species of blue-green algae. Scientists called it unprecedented for the river but an increasingly common problem in the Northwest due to the warming environment. And this unwelcome intrusion was like the best work seen in the final weekend of the festival, rousing one from a complacent slumber into something resembling a world out of balance.

One work in particular: Ground and Floor by chelfitsch, the brilliant Japanese company led by playwright-director Toshiki Okada. And, with limitations and reservations, the much-talked-about theater offering from France’s Halory Georger and Antoine Defoort, Germinal.

Germinal, which has been making the festival rounds, proved a deftly executed and designed work as well as a crowd-pleaser. The piece begins with supine bodies motionless on a darkened stage. Then the houselights begin to dim in a teasing back-and-forth pattern, and a dim orange pool of light collects on the stage with a similar coming and going, both calling attention to the mechanical artifice of the stage.

The four performers gradually sit up or stand, fiddling in silence with some portable consoles. Their manner is affectless, emotionally muted, like freshly shaped clay figures. Still, each has a distinct personality. One, Halory, discovers that by a certain manipulation of his console he can cast his thoughts (as supertitles) on the back wall of the stage. Soon the others are trying it. Soon one is doing it without the console. How about that? They think. They throw the consoles away. They can all do it!

They explore further. Who is whom, exactly, among these cartoon-like thought bubbles appearing on the back wall? It’s confusing, until Halory suggests they put their names before any thought. The question of being naturally follows for Arnaud, who ponders his name and its meaning. “It’s just that it raises a few questions about identity,” he explains. He, Halory, and the other male, Antoine, all sit and think on this as the woman, Odine, takes a pick-ax to the stage and unearths a live microphone. “I found something,” she tells her companions.

In this fashion, half-detached confusion and excitement intermingle with the humorous unfolding of dawn — the beginnings, it turns out, of a new world circumscribed by the physical and technological limits of the theater — as the characters not only explore and expand the possibilities for communication, but begin the process of classifying their world and its terms in what becomes an elaborate, evolving Venn diagram projected on the back wall.

This is a charming and intriguing beginning, and its elaboration over the course of the play offers more laughs and surprises, as the four continue to manipulate the elements of their world. But the conceit recapitulates philosophical and scientific categories without doing much more. This parallel universe might have been more interesting had it chosen to be truly different. But it starts to feel too familiar, without the critical distance that might have made the trip worthwhile. The play’s affirmative key rings out literally at points (as the four characters discover music as another “tool for communication”). But in the final crescendo, a chorus of affirmations grounded in an old-fashioned celebration of Reason, even the multiverse starts to feel a bit cramped.

If the optimism in Germinal came to feel like a retreat into comfortable certitudes, the brooding misgivings in Ground and Floor felt more in touch with the spirit of the times. Even playwright Okada’s setting of the play in some “future Japan” was riddled with a kind of ambivalence — the supertitle was followed by an afterthought that made it the “near future” instead. Ambivalence is the key of this piece of “musical theater with ghostly apparitions,” and it’s just for that reason that it remains rigorously, confidently, defiantly of this time and place.

The play concerns a family in which the living, the dead, and the unborn are all in an uneasy, imperfect relation to one another. A woman resists acknowledging the ghost of her mother in an attempt to shield her soon-to-be-born son from — what? “I am not going to see anything unpleasant,” she insists. Her husband gives a her weak encouragement as if from some distant place she barely registers. Her brother meanwhile announces he has at long last secured a job, and is restoring himself to a respectable position. But what is his job? No one asks, and he is wary of saying.

A wood stage raises the actors slightly, and a screen cut into the shape of a wide, squat cross acts as a screen for Japanese and English supertitles. The cast establishes a gentle, contemplative pace, delivering its performances with a kind of melancholy that resonates like a dream or the stunned aftermath of a disaster. The six scenes comprising the play are carefully juxtaposed to a shimmering, musing prerecorded score by Tokyo instrumental band Sangatsu.

The characters barely interact with one another, but are comfortable addressing the audience and commenting on the subtitles, pointing out the untranslatable gaps attendant on translation. These are maybe analogous to that gap between the living and the dead expressed here. The social fabric, covering time and space, is rife with holes. And the production succeeds by limning them quietly, pensively, even mysteriously, without any firm answers or blunt messages. Unlike the prototype-universe in Germinal, this weary place may be winding down but it does not feel yet like a closed system. *

http://pica.org/programs/tba-festival/

 

Family fish fry

Erica Hanna
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0
Family fish fry

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Ireland’s exceptional Enda Walsh may have gained wider attention and a bigger paycheck for his stage adaptation of indie film Once, but his real work for the stage is in more intricate little plays — far darker, funnier, and more polyphonous dramas like 1996’s Disco Pigs and 2007’s The Walworth Farce, the latter seen in Berkeley in 2009 when Cal Performances hosted Druid Theater of Galway’s superb production.

The New Electric Ballroom, currently up at Shotgun Players’ Ashby Stage in a Bay Area premiere, is something of a companion piece to The Walworth Farce. Written around the same time, it too revolves around the twisted and twisting routine of a vicious familial regime. This time it’s a fishy tale of three sisters in a kind of Chekhovian-Irish blend of suspended animation, crammed together in a tin-roofed shack (rendered in expansive detail by ever-impressive scenic designer Erik Flatmo) where together they replay the glorious promise and ignominious catastrophe of a night two of them experienced as teenagers and the other never experienced at all.

Claustrophobic and (presumably) foul-smelling, their little shack nevertheless transforms regularly into a paradisiacal nightclub as they relive its intoxicating crush of bodies, “and its tide of badly suppressed sex,” from the vantage of partial and incomplete memories.

Ada (Beth Wilmurt), at 40 the youngest sister, seems to sublimate her own deeply repressed desires in spurring on a longstanding feud between her older 60-something sisters, the racier Breda (Anne Darragh) and the still innocent Clara (Trish Mulholland), each of whom had eyes and more for some big-handed young man in the parking lot of the titular local nightclub of their youth. Together, they’re the ABCs of sex, though maybe in reverse order, enacting the daily ritual that is their torture and their solace, a purgatorial pause in the merciless flow of time.

Village loner and oddball Patsy (Kevin Clarke), meanwhile, forever proffering a tray of the day’s catch to this hostile household of shut-ins, is literally fishing for compliments, the poor bastard. In his rubber boots and rough clothes he presents himself with decorous care and insistent charm, like a seriously underappreciated only child.

But that’s in keeping with this little sadomasochistic community of private hells, in which characters take turns spilling out their lives to a mostly indifferent room. Indeed, you could almost think of the play as a series of monologues — beautifully written ones. Walsh has a gift for a subtly heightened vernacular. Unlike the self-conscious falsetto lyricism in so much new drama, it never cloys but rather sings out plainly in a gritty, open-throated pitch. These monologues are attention grabbers. But nearly as striking are the ominous, rueful, anticipatory silences they set off, like dark and slow-roiling waters tugged by the moon.

Although the play has a streak of wild and easy humor running through it, director Barbara Damashek leans toward the more serious side of things in her interpretation, emphasizing the dark corners to the point that they tend to look not all that dark. It might look otherwise were the humor more foregrounded and intense. The play seems to demand a manic, barely contained intensity that registers only weakly here — even the sight of older women made up in garishly exaggerated makeup and parading around in teenage garb lacks some of the macabre, obscene humor and pathos you feel it wants to contain. And it makes the play feel thinner, a bit reedy. Her actors, while highly capable, only intermittently produce the kind of deeply etched tensions between them that you’d expect from these obsessive and long-festering relationships.

This is still a worthwhile show, though, with solid acting doing service to a lively litany of punishing doubts and irrepressible hopes — until the flotsam of lost time finally washes ashore, electrifying (briefly) an otherwise dull, ruthless, and necessary domesticity. *

 

THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM

Through Oct. 5

Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm (Oct. 5, show at 2pm), $20-$30

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk

www.shotgunplayers.org

On the fringe

Michael Redmond
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0
On the fringe

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The first show of the first night of this year’s San Francisco Fringe Festival was a local story, a confessional by a man who’s spent 27 years “irritating” his wife and “annoying” his children as a workaday clown. If this isn’t what the Fringe is all about, it’s pretty close.

As a non-curated, lottery-based affair where the artist keeps all proceeds from ticket sales (host Exit Theatre collects donations toward the larger effort, and hopes you’ll buy a beer or two to wash down the Exit Café’s always complimentary bowl of pretzels), the Fringe is a magnet for the tell-all and tawdry solo outing. This is a good part of why we like it. Technically anyone can get in, with presumably almost anything they’d like to stage for a live audience, and, as a result, shamelessness of different sorts abounds. And despite the wide net of possibility cast by the proceedings, a hefty percentage of shows tend to converge around this redoubtable — or is it doubtful? — formula, turning the theater into a kind of confession booth where, if you want to be absolved of anything, you better make it good.

Through the Eyes of a Clown is a heartfelt and not unsympathetic instance of this compulsion. It’s an “apology” by David Magidson, aka Boswick the Clown, unfolding on a small stage lightly cluttered with the paraphernalia of the profession. Using his inside clown voice, the longtime licensed balloon-tier and pratfaller speaks of getting his first laugh at a tender age and never looking back. While self-effacingly frank about the culturally suspect side of his chosen obsession, Magidson, a graduate of Ringling Brothers Clown College, also offers an implicit defense of the calling, pointing to contemporary heroes like Pickle Family alum Bill Irwin (as chance would have it, right then only a couple of blocks away preparing to open at the Geary) and Stephen Colbert (a clown by definition, according to Magidson, because, rather than merely rendering comic critique from outside, his satirical right-wing persona invites you to see the world through his own eyes).

The mix of personal and observational detail can be interesting, and probably has more potential than is admittedly realized here. There are also some intriguing admissions around Magidson’s distance from his audience, his inability to always sympathize with them, even when they’re children in hospitals. It’s the laughs he’s after, and the laughs he needs. This realization stirs an unrest or discomfort in him, but it’s mingled with a specialized solipsism that’s almost clinical.

This confusion and paradox is maybe the heart of this rambling piece — although also impressive are the few (too few) passages of deft physical comedy that show off the highly tuned wackiness and balletic precision of the professional. The writing, however, is a mishmash that needs editing to bring out a stronger arc. More urgently, Magidson could use a directorial hand, since too often the show feels rudderless and his delivery off-kilter. At the same time, the ingenuousness of his account and the boyish enthusiasm middle-aged Magidson still generates for a career choice most people would politely call ill-advised are the real thing, and they suggest that, along with the clown, there’s a better, stronger show lurking somewhere inside.

The second show of the night was a second clown, albeit in gumshoe drag. In 2 Ruby Knockers, 1 Jaded Dick, Melbourne’s Tim Motley fires a volley of one-liners in a hardboiled accent vaguely tinged with an Aussie drawl — a veritable taxonomy of the corny, bawdy similes of the iconic private eye delivered in trademark trench coat, his eyes a band of shadow beneath a well-molded fedora.

For Motley, the PI shtick is a ready vehicle for a little mind reading and a card trick or two as the lights go up on his unsuspecting audience, which gets worked into a convoluted plot involving a (titular) sinister mastermind. Off-the-cuff smarts make the quick-witted Motley’s unabashedly hokey offering an enjoyable as well as somewhat unruly ride, as he does his best to shepherd clueless audience members — themselves doing their best to play along — through a zany caper. *

SF FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sept 20 (no shows Mon/15), $10 or less at the door; $12.99 or less online (passes, $45-75)

Exit Theatreplex

156 Eddy, SF

www.sffringe.org

 

No place like home

Michael Redmond
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0
No place like home

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Out at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, just after sunset, the darkness and the silence are real presences in themselves, not just a context for something else. They’re right now pressing their respective noses against the windowpanes of the large, beautifully-worn army barrack–turned–artist studio in which Saya Woolfalk is pouring some dark red concoction from a squat glass jug.

She begs her guests not to try to translate the hokey Portuguese label on the bottle, brought back from Brazil by her husband, an anthropologist, as she hands each of us a crimson thimbleful in a plastic dentist cup. Looking like NyQuil but tasting more like some berry-based moonshine, it gives me an almost instantaneous headache but is otherwise kind of nice. Anyway, it does the trick. We’re now prepped to enter the mandala.

Standing there with me are Marc Mayer and Annie Tsang, both of the Asian Art Museum, as well as Brian Karl, the Headlands’ program director. The mandala corresponds, for now, to a tape mockup on the floor next to us. It’s a circular shape about four feet in diameter, with concentric and crisscrossing lines. At four equidistant corners outside the circle are small freestanding pieces of heavy paper representing alcoves, on the outside of which a slide projector illuminates a colorful figure in exotic garb. Behind each alcove, Woolfalk explains, a dancer will be tucked away.

Also standing around are two department store mannequins, each draped in a careful clash of fabrics and traditions: a skirt of pink-and-gold-striped glitter cloth from the Mission, a tourist version of a Chinese vest from Grant Street, a batik shoulder wrap brought back from Africa.

It’s all just the smallest hint of the Brooklyn-based artist’s elaborately extensive portfolio and practice, which blends visual design, sculpture, textiles, film, live performance, original musical soundscapes, ethnographical narratives, and invented ritual into playful, extraordinarily vivid and enveloping explorations of the limits and promise of hybrid identity.

Woolfalk’s dance-performance installation — the scale model of which was still being toyed with and adjusted when I visited her temporary studio — has been developed during a residency at Headlands under a commission from the Asian Art Museum, where it will run Thu/4 in the AAM’s capacious upper chamber in conjunction with the exhibition Enter the Mandala: Cosmic Centers and Mental Maps of Himalayan Buddhism (ongoing through Oct. 26). The piece, called ChimaTEK: Hybridity Visualization Mandala, culminates a seven-year project by Woolfalk that has received exhibitions and rapt attention around the country.

It began in No Place, which Woolfalk describes as “a utopian paradise in which hybrid identities flourish in tolerant communities with elaborate cultural rituals.” Its alternative narratives and reconfigured systems of representation took multiple forms across an integrated set of media, an environment unto itself, including a six-chapter ethnographic film documenting No Place made in collaboration with anthropologist Rachel Lears.

In the second iteration of the project, the narrative of No Place advances in time. Now its inhabitants have evolved into beings called the Empathics, who have developed a way of sharing their hybrid consciousness with others, while conducting research through their own nonprofit, the Institute of Empathy.

In this third and final stage, the Empathics have redirected their technology into a for-profit model, namely a corporation called ChimaTEK, a virtual world enterprise in which customers buy access to different Chimeric identities and consciousness through their own personalized virtual avatars. The chimera (which here refers simultaneously to the mythological she-monster made up of different body parts and to an organism with two or more genetically distinct tissues) ends up the repository and agent of corrupted utopian impulses.

As a tool for spiritual guidance, the mandala represents the universe, while helping to train the mind on essential insights and untapped potentialities. Made in collaboration with four local dancer-choreographers working in disparate ethnic traditions — with essential input from DJ Dr. Sleep (Melissa Maristuen) and a “virtual” DJ (none other than Paul D. Miller, or DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, who composed the original score) — ChimaTEK will be a kind of contemporary mandala, manifesting a chimeric state of being in which participants remix identities through virtual avatars in a virtual space. Fact and fiction blend so freely here that the distinctions between them might be called into question. So might the degree to which this virtual space is coextensive with the universe itself, or at least our tangled and conflicted corner of it. *

CHIMATEK: HYBRIDITY VISUALIZATION MANDALA

Thu/4, 6-9pm, free with museum admission ($5 after 5pm)

Asian Art Museum

200 Larkin, SF

www.asianart.org

 

The sound of America

Michael Redmond
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0
The sound of America

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER As recently as last month, Berry Gordy Jr., the 84-year-old music mogul, founder, and creator of Motown Records, was hailed as an American icon and an African American hero. Those were Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s words Aug. 18 when it was declared “Berry Gordy Day in the East Bay.”

Impeccably dressed, Gordy made a rare public appearance to speak and receive his accolades on the steps of Oakland’s City Hall. He briefly reminisced about his life’s achievements, particularly building Detroit’s Hitsville USA, not only in a physical sense, but also creating “The Sound of Young America,” as his label would come to be known to the world. Live cast performances from Motown the Musical, the theatrical show based on his autobiography from nearly 20 years ago — To Be Loved: The Music, The Magic, The Memories Of Motown — were interspersed throughout the event.

The Kevin McCollum production (Avenue Q), directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, is running through Sept. 28 at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre. But how does one fit all that the Motown-Gordy life story encompasses in a matter of just a few hours?

One sure way to please the audience is through music, which the production certainly does. Here we get a condensed version of a story that deals with America’s recent racist history, with scenes set at the Motortown Revue (which allowed segregated audiences in the South), to the full-on love story where Gordy’s muse, Diana Ross (convincingly played by Allison Semmes), serves as the impetus for his own business savvy and crossover to success with white audiences.

In the early ’60s, the industry still referred to Gordy’s output as “Negro” or “colored” music, or worse. African Americans weren’t seen as entrepreneurs — and owning an independent, predominantly black label was a revolutionary statement to say the least. Gordy’s personal history of being a boxer who idolized Joe Louis in the 1940s, and later borrowing $800 from his family to launch a recording studio, is chaotically interwoven with glazed-over details of complex business deals and lawsuits.

It’s not surprising, considering this is a musical, that an overreliance on a hefty catalog of sentimental songs that resonate throughout generations is a recurring theme. A combination of well-executed choreography and the hits we’ve come to know by the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the rest of the roster probably make for a more entertaining evening than going into detail, say, about top songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland defecting to create their own label, Invictus. Or the way top artists like the Jackson 5 and Ross would jump ship to other labels like RCA and Epic for more creative control or financial reasons. And any tales of Gaye’s in-studio drug use (documented in writings as being annoying to Ross while they recorded together during her solo years) are excluded, because this story is told from Gordy’s perspective.

And there are other exclusions. While it’s great to see the early acts from Gordy’s early Motown-Tamla Records days — such as Jackie Wilson, the Contours, Barrett Strong, and Mary Wells — getting recognition, Gaye’s frequent duet partner, Tammi Terrell, gets the shaft with nary a mention. It could be seen as added insult, but is more likely a gross oversight, when cast members depicting Gordy and Ross sing the Ashford and Simpson-penned soul ballad, “You’re All I Need to Get By,” one of Terrell’s signature hits with Gaye.

After the intermission, the latter half of Act Two seems especially rushed, though the costumes, sets, and décor during the Black Panther-Vietnam protest-Detroit riot eras, and the company’s relocation to Los Angeles in the early ’70s, are particularly vibrant.

As soon as we emerge from the tumult of the ’60s and the somewhat understated effects of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, the Jackson 5 are introduced (Reed Shannon plays the young versions of Gordy and Wonder, as well as Michael Jackson), and Ross’ solo career advances when she leaves the Supremes. Gordy’s master plan to have her sing standards in order to assimilate has often been a point of criticism, not only in this case, but also for his other acts, who have been accused of not being “black enough.” Eventually, though, it pays off when she plays grandiose venues that allow for elaborate stage productions. Her subsequent entrance into movie stardom seemed to be something he was grooming her for all along.

Motown revolutionized the world’s perceptions of music. Gordy’s story is one of success through persistence. Most (if not all) of his label’s artists share the same narrative of overcoming obstacles and having to struggle. After all, these were performers who literally had to dodge bullets on stage when they toured the South.

Audience members would be out of touch or ignorant if they couldn’t see the modern-day parallels in racial divisions — unrest and outrage over Mike Brown’s shooting death by police in Ferguson, Mo., had been going on for about a week at the time of Motown‘s press night. Viewers may have to ask themselves how much has changed in the last 50 years. That alone could merit this production’s cultural relevance, if not some harsh realizations. But I have a feeling most people crave those feel-good hit-factory songs, which do make seeing Motown the Musical worthwhile. *

MOTOWN THE MUSICAL

Through Sept. 28

Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm, $45-$210

Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

www.shnsf.com

 

Curtain up

Michael Redmond
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0
Curtain up

arts@sfbg.com

FALL ARTS

The Old Woman Robert Wilson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe — None of these guys are ever to be missed, but all three together are worthy of queuing up overnight to see. There’ll be camping out onstage too, as Wilson directs Baryshnikov and Dafoe (playing several characters between them) in an outrageous piece of high-art drag, based on the short story by the formidable Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms. Nov. 21–23, Zellerbach Hall, Berk; www.calperformances.org

Cock As relationship plays go this is a prickly one. But British playwright Michael Bartlett scored big with this 2009 drama, in which a gay man falls for a woman and into a sexual identity crisis that takes the form of a merciless cockfighting pit. Sept. 5–Oct. 12, New Conservatory Theatre Center, SF; www.nctcsf.org

New Electric Ballroom Enda Walsh is not a household name, and Enda is not a typo. Nevertheless this is Ireland’s, maybe the world’s, most brilliant contemporary playwright — at least it sure seemed that way when Druid Theatre rolled into town in 2009 with Walsh’s tragic-comic Escher-drawing of a play, The Walworth Farce. Some of us have been waiting for more from that weird, dark, deeply funny mind ever since. Sept. 3–Oct. 5, Shotgun Players at Ashby Stage, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org

The Totalitarians This grim and grimacing take on the current state of political discourse in the cornhusker state of Nebraska comes to Z Space as a newly commissioned comedy from the steely and hysterical pen of playwright-in-residence Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, who also penned Boom, T.I.C. (Trenchcoat in Common), and Hunter Gatherers. Nov. 19–Dec. 14, Z Space, SF; www.zspace.org

An Audience with Meow Meow Hypnotically charming, quixotic, and unflappably zany British cabaret sensation Meow Meow (aka Melissa Madden Gray) takes a rare Bay Area bow-bow in this new show adapted and directed by Kneehigh’s Emma Rice. Sept. 5–Oct. 19, Berkeley Rep, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival Indie theater at its shaggiest and most low-to-the-ground, the lottery-based, anything-and-everything Fringe offers 150 performances over 16 days at 50 minutes and 10 bucks per, which, if you do the math, equals fast, cheap, and out of control. Sept. 5–20, EXIT Theatreplex, SF; www.sffringe.org

Die! Mommie, Die! Charles Busch made a play, then a movie, then a play about shameless obsession, not least his own. J. Conrad Frank (creator of alter ego Katya Smirnoff-Skyy) steps into the unforgiving shoes of a title character originated by Busch, namely fallen 1960s pop singer Angela Arden — a cunning mash-up of Hollywood’s grand, ax-wielding tradition of good-women-gone-bad. Oct. 3–Nov. 2, New Conservatory Theatre Center, SF; www.nctcsf.org

San Francisco Improv Festival Ten years old and still acting like it, the SF Improv Festival celebrates its milestone with an array of local talent headed up by special guests Tim Meadows (Saturday Night Live), Scott Adsit (30 Rock), and Ron West (Whose Line Is It Anyway?). Sept. 10–20, Eureka Theatre, SF; www.sfimprovfestival.com

Britten: Curlew River Subtitled A Parable for Church Performance (Op. 71), Benjamin Britten’s 1964 church parable is based on a 15th-century Japanese Noh play with a libretto by South African and British author William Plomer. A major turning point for Britten’s later style, Curlew River plumbs themes of suffering and redemption in the story of a bereft mother told by four characters in the Noh tradition. British tenor Ian Bostridge stars in this new, enveloping, and highly praised multimedia staging co-presented by London’s Barbican Centre and Cal Performances. Nov. 14–15, Zellerbach Hall, Berk; www.calperformances.org

Superheroes A journalist investigating the history of the crack-cocaine epidemic follows a maze of shady associations to reach a startling conclusion in this new play written and directed by Campo Santo’s Sean San José and inspired by the late Gary Webb’s maverick work on the links between the CIA and Central American drug traffickers. Nov. 14–Dec. 14, Cutting Ball Theater, SF; www.cuttingball.com *

 

Final stages

Michael Redmond
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0
Final stages

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Theatre Rhinoceros had a big enough success with The Habit of Art last spring to bring it back for a final run, allowing more people, this reviewer included, the chance to see the 2009 follow-up to The History Boys by England’s rightly beloved Alan Bennett. Judging by the production, it’s also possible they were just having too much fun with it to stop so soon. But then that would speak as much to the themes of the play as to its decidedly playful construction. As a play-within-a-play-within-a-rehearsal, The Habit of Art ends up, among much else, a cleverly crafted paean to the lure of theater itself.

As with several of his other well-known plays, including the Madness of King George III and Single Spies (the latter, a shrewd pair of one acts on the Cambridge Five spy ring, was essayed by Theatre Rhino in 2004), Bennett finds inspiration in the real lives of eccentric Englishmen, whether long since passed or roughly contemporary. Here, the playwright imagines a fictitious meeting between two giants of his own time: W.H. Auden (Donald Currie) and Benjamin Britten (John Fisher).

The poet and the composer did know each other in real life, and had been collaborators at times. But Bennett brings the two men together for one more tête-à-tête, in 1972, a year before Auden’s death and some quarter of a century after they had parted ways in the wake of their work on the operetta Paul Bunyan, a critical failure. Interestingly, their meeting has many brokers — a biographer (Ryan Tasker), a stage manager (Tamar Cohn), a playwright (Michael DeMartini), and the real playwright, Bennett himself — yet feels personal and vivid, at once jocularly familiar and freighted with a sad awareness of time spent.

But that encounter takes place only in act two, sandwiched in a lively rehearsal of the play-within-the-play, a work called “Caliban’s Day,” inspired by Auden’s long poem, The Sea and the Mirror. That poem, which imagines the characters of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in dialogue with the author and his audience, is itself partly a meditation on the tangled natures of life and art. And in the back and forth between the “play” being staged and the actors and crew rehearsing it, we get Bennett’s subtle, witty, unflinchingly raunchy measure of a life lived in artistic creation.

Act one, which sets up the turmoil that act two engages and in some sense subdues, belongs to Auden as well as the addled actor playing him, who can’t quite remember his lines (both embodied with a lively and beautifully measured insouciance by Currie). Having recently returned to Oxford, Auden lives at his alma mater in a cluttered and untidy room like a rowdy teen. His less than sanitary disposition comes coupled with an abrasive temperament that wins him few admirers despite his status as a grand master and living legend. At one point, he tactlessly and unapologetically mistakes a visit from BBC reporter and future biographer Humphrey Carpenter (an excellent Tasker, replacing Craig Souza in the role) for his rent boy (an even-keeled Justin Lucas) — a figure who comes to stand, defiantly, for all those left out by posterity.

Act two finds Britten (played with an almost wooden reserve by director Fisher) approaching his old friend in an anxious mood over his current project, an opera based on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Here the play’s true themes come into view, as the two aging artists, under the gaze of their mutual biographer and very much opposites in most ways, circle a common need for the certainty of art like desert vagrants at a watering hole: It may be a mirage, but it’s a life-saving one just the same.

If the disheveled book shelves, garden of crumpled paper balls, and two upstage pianos (in Gilbert Johnson’s scenic design) seems to belie the neatness of the play’s construction, Bennett’s care and control evoke precisely the untidiness of life. It’s maybe this that attracts him more than anything else — the messiness of personality, love, sex, art, loyalty, and all of the things we’d like to think of as pure and inviolate. *

THE HABIT OF ART

Wed/20-Sat/23, 8pm (also Sat/23, 3pm), $15-$25

Eureka Theatre

215 Jackson, SF

www.therhino.org

 

Innocent bay stander

Michael Redmond
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0
Innocent bay stander

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Sarah Cameron Sunde will be standing in the water at Aquatic Park this Friday. She’ll stand from low tide, at 9:26 that morning, through high tide at 4:09 in the afternoon, and back to low tide again at 10:31 that night. Thirteen hours and five minutes of being still, while everything around her changes.

When it comes to the near and distant impacts in store from sea level rise brought on by the planet’s changing climate, Bay Area residents might be expected to know more than most. The bay’s distinctive shape is already being modified by creeping water levels. New efforts at shoreline protection are underway, but with an expected rise of six feet by the end of the century, the bay and San Francisco are destined to be different places no matter what.

How conscious we are of that fact remains a question. It’s one thing to know the figures and another to “feel the rise,” as Sunde puts it in her invitation to locals. For the New York–based theater director and interdisciplinary artist, the awesome movement of the daily tide shift acts as a visceral metaphor for larger cycles, and momentous changes afoot. Even those who choose to watch from the shore might grasp something of this larger theme, tucked into an ephemeral moment, merely by registering the bay’s embrace of a human tidal gauge.

That, anyway, is Sunde’s hope as she embarks on the third iteration of her 36.5 Water Project. The venture began last August in Maine, while Sunde was at an artist residency near Bass Harbor. But its roots go back a little further, to 2012 and Hurricane Sandy.

“When Hurricane Sandy hit New York,” she says, “it was the first time I truly, deeply understood that everything is temporary.” This despite being married to a water engineer from the Netherlands, whose first impression of New York City was tantamount to a liver specialist encountering Dean Martin. “And I didn’t believe him,” she admits. “Then [the hurricane] hit, and I understood. It changed the way I think about these things.” Sunde realized there was a real and dangerous deficit in long-term vision. “We know how to rally after a disaster but there’s no forward, future thinking.”

Sunde — whose theatrical work has largely revolved around her position as deputy artistic director of New York’s New Georges theater company, as well as her role as the foremost American translator and director of the famed contemporary Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse — was at that time also moving away from new play development toward her roots in more experimental, devised performance-making with a group of interdisciplinary collaborators collectively known as Lydian Junction. Its experiments, informed in part by the writing of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and by issues of sustainability in the arts, explore art’s relation to suffering and sacrifice.

“In Maine, I was thinking about all these things. I was thinking about New York sinking. I was thinking about art and sacrifice and suffering, sustainability. And I was on this bay, this tidal bay, where there is a ten-and-a-half foot tidal shift. That meant that it was a mudflat during low tide, and then during high tide it was a bay, a full-on bay of water. I had never seen the environment change so drastically with the tide before. I was watching this huge rock out in the bay get swallowed. There was something really beautiful about this.”

Suddenly, an image came to her director’s eye.

“I thought, I see a human being standing there up to the neck, and then the water going back down again. I thought, I have to do this. How can I create this spectacle? I thought about my collaborators and I thought, shit, they’re not going to do it; I guess I’m going to have to do it myself. I decided to do it three days later because it was my half birthday — I always try to do something that is related to my own tracking of time. I’m a little obsessed with time, the expansion, the contraction of it, the perception, all of it, the routine, the anti-routine. That’s why it’s called 36.5, because I turned 36 and a half that day.”

Since then, Sunde has developed some more thinking around the shape of her piece and its intentionally simple design. She plans to travel to six continents, drawn to places with some personal connection. (Having grown up in Palo Alto, Sunde has roots in the Bay Area that run especially deep.) Each iteration will involve specific local partnerships. Aptly enough, the after party for Friday’s performance takes place at the Long Now Foundation at nearby Fort Mason. And the number in the title ends up being significant in several ways: The average person needs 36.5 cubic meters of water a year; at the current rate of climate change, oceans could rise 36.5 inches by the century’s end; and ditching the decimal point leaves the number of days in a year. The connotations underscore the way the personal and universal remain deeply entwined here.

The invitation to the public to test the waters with her, meanwhile, adds a new wrinkle in this globetrotting project, granting space for direct participation in the experience. At the same time, it means the performance becomes a collective action, however peripheral or absurd it may appear on the surface. Small steps just might sound greater depths. *

36.5 WATER PROJECT

Fri/15, 9:26am-10:31pm, free

Aquatic Park

Hyde at Jefferson, SF

www.365waterproject.org

 

Boxing lessons

Michael Redmond
-
0
Boxing lessons

arts@sfbg.com

While still a child in early-’80s San Francisco, Boots Riley witnessed something he didn’t quite understand but that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Walking into a theater performance at the venerable Mission District art space Project Artaud, Riley saw actors in body paint writhing around him in apparent agony on all sides. It was meant as a simulation of the AIDS epidemic, with the actors portraying the afflicted. But it didn’t enlighten him much as a kid.

“It just scared the hell out of me,” Riley recalls. “You walk into this place, and it’s like a whole city, with people all around you.”

Given how Riley’s own work with long-running hip-hop group The Coup likewise mixes political activism with overwhelming performance energy, it’s fitting he would look back on this experience as the inspiration for The Coup’s new multimedia project, Shadowbox. Featuring the work of street artist Jon-Paul Bail, videographer David Szlasa, and a host of other bands and performers, Shadowbox casts the Coup’s music in the context of an all-encompassing artwork that attacks the audience from all sides. He’s debuting the project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Aug. 16, but he hopes to eventually take it on the road to wherever an art establishment is willing to fund it.

Riley prefers to remain secretive about what the performance actually entails. He’s described it in the past as featuring puppets, drones and “Guantanamo Bay go-go dancers,” whatever those may be. To Riley, having the audience come in blind is key to maximizing the impact of the show.

“Some of the things that would make people probably want to come to the performance are things I don’t want to talk about before they happen,” Riley says.

What we do know is that it’ll feature multiple stages and a dizzying roster of collaborators, from socialist hip-hop militants Dead Prez to dream-pop duo Snow Angel, comedian W. Kamau Bell, chamber orchestra Classical Revolution, and the New Orleans-style second line unit Extra Action Marching Band. All of it will be encased by Bail’s black-and-white artwork, which will give the audience the impression of being in an actual “box of shadows.”

Bail, a Bay Area street artist perhaps best known as of late for his “Hella Occupy Oakland” poster, was one of Riley’s early heroes on the Bay Area art scene. The two met in the late ’80s amid a wave of neo-Nazi skinhead activity in the Bay Area, which the two of them helped fight to counter.

“When I was in high school I would hang out at Alameda Beach,” Riley recalls. “Back then Alameda was still a navy town and they didn’t like a lot of black folks coming around. Police rolled up to harass us, and the police insignia on the car was covered in a swastika. The first thing I thought was: ‘Who the fuck did that?'”

It turned out to be Bail, and the two artists quickly bonded, putting up anti-Nazi posters around the city. They’ve remained friends through the years, but they haven’t collaborated on a large-scale project until now.

“He was the first artist I ever met who was trying to do something more with art than just make art,” Riley says. “He had a collective at California College of the Arts at the time, which had the slogan — ‘no art for art’s sake.'”

The Yerba Buena Arts Center connected Riley and Bail with videographer (and Theater Artaud collaborator) David Szlasa, who helped design the video elements of the project. Together, they form Shadowbox’s core creative axis, responsible for the aesthetically overwhelming experience Riley hopes the project will be.

Though Shadowbox contains elements of both a gallery exhibition and a theatrical performance, Riley ultimately hopes that Shadowbox will feel more like a show than anything else, in line with the Coup’s high-octane concerts.

“A lot of the time when you’re doing something theatrical people just want to stand around,” Riley says. “But our shows have always been known to be a dance party, and we’re keeping the audience with us and not just watching us.”

The performers and artworks are intended to surround an audience, which will be able to move around and examine the exhibit at first. But as the room fills, Riley hopes the crowd will solidify and focus on the music. The musical element of Shadowbox will mostly consist of Coup songs, but each of the additional musical performers will play one of their own songs in addition to collaborating with the band.

The Coup didn’t write songs specifically for the performance, rather choosing to perform works culled from the band’s six-album, 20-plus-year catalog — including a few unreleased tracks and songs they don’t generally perform live. Though calling Shadowbox an augmented Coup concert would surely sell the event and its collaborators short, it seems as if all the key elements of a Coup show will be there: the songs, the audience-bludgeoning power, and especially the politics.

Though the title Shadowbox primarily refers to the effect Bail’s artwork creates on the performance space, Riley sees multiple meanings to the title. Shadowboxing is the practice in boxing of “fighting” an imaginary opponent to prepare for a match, and Riley sees parallels between this practice and the way in which the Coup “prepares” its listeners to fight real-life injustices. He’s aware political art can’t always change the world on its own, but it can inspire listeners to take action.

This gives rise to a third, even more poignant meaning to the title: that the social issues depicted in the work are only shadows of what’s really happening in the world, contained within the clearly defined “box” of the performance space.

“There are a lot of terrible things happening in the world that we’re talking about in the performance,” Riley said. “But the artwork is just a shadow of what’s really going on.”

THE COUP’S SHADOWBOX

Saturday, Aug. 16, 5 and 9pm, $25-$30

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415)978-2700

www.ybca.org

Sm/Art car

Michael Redmond
-
0
Sm/Art car

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Once the image of the highway-bound pioneer, the camper van has been reborn on the plains of the Wild West of arts programming, just off 51st Street in Oakland. It’s been sighted here and there since May, greeted with honking and cheering by fans of the tiny house movement, idle curiosity by idling bystanders, and mild frustration by those anticipating a sidewalk taco or crème brûlée.

Something like the sloped cross-section of a survivalist’s shack, the trail-able cabin, with a pair of wide windows set in its redwood-plank sidewalls, looks modest enough if a little odd. But husband-and-wife artists and Range Studio founders David Szlasa and Katrina Rodabaugh see it as the beginning of a convoy, and endless possibilities.

The idea was born shortly after the couple’s son was born, about three years ago. Szlasa had just left his position as programming director at Z Space to pursue life as a stay-at-home artist and dad, and was quickly finding room to work at more of a premium than ever. Already a fan of the tiny house movement, he applied to the Center for Cultural Innovation for a material-support grant, with the idea of building a small studio in the parking space beside his house.

“In the process of designing it and talking to people about what it would take, a lot more people became interested in it,” recalls Szlasa. “I started thinking more broadly that this is a significant need across the Bay Area and, after talking to people outside the Bay Area, a significant need all around.”

One of the needs he had hit on was a way of leveraging project-based support to artists for capital improvements that they could get further use out of.

“We as artists get in this pattern of raising money to do this show or do that show,” he explains. “This was re-thinking that and reapplying those funds to something that could give and keep giving. So with that I began to see the bigger opportunities in it, and pretty quickly realized this would be a prototype and model for a larger effort.”

Having built it over the course of about six months beginning last December — with crucial help from a few friends with specialized skills — Szlasa is now tooling around with his new mobile artist studio, hitched to the back of his old white pickup, in the hope of attracting support for the larger venture. Formalized as the Range Studio project, and co-directed with Rodabaugh, the former program director of artists resources at Intersection for the Arts, the idea is to replicate the prototype, christened Studio 1, and create a small fleet of deliverable art spaces and platforms that can be used individually, in tandem, or in remote coordination across a wide geographical area as a scalable artist residency program. Made of reclaimed and sustainable materials and entirely solar powered, the flatbed studio offers arts makers and programmers a real-world solution to the increasingly challenging problem of space in the Bay Area’s punishing real estate market, while embracing an ethic of conserving and maximizing material resources.

“And it’s all working!” says Szlasa, still a little surprised by the whole thing.

Studio 1 makes its formal debut this week as part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 7 exhibition, which this year assumes an art fair format to showcase a wide range of practices and strategies among the Bay Area’s small to mid-size visual arts organizations. Parked outside YBCA’s downtown edifice, Studio 1 will house a series of micro residencies — with its guest artists on display to, and in various degrees of contact with, the general public. Artists-in-residence temporarily ensconced in the tech’d out trailer include Aaron Landsman (co-creator of last week’s City Council Meeting at Z Space); Dohee Lee; YBCA’s own Marc Bamuthi Joseph; and Keith Hennessy.

It promises to be almost as much of a spectacle as anything an artist inside might be working on. And Szlasa (who’ll be editing video there himself ahead of the Coup’s Shadowbox at YBCA on Aug. 16) readily admits, “It’ll be a hard day’s work to stay focused in there.” Still, with the amenities and accessibility Studio 1 offers, not to mention the spur to the imagination, it’s fair to assume its maker-residents will be happy campers. *

BAY AREA NOW 7

Through Oct. 5

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

 

Democracy wow!

Michael Redmond
-
0
Democracy wow!

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER From a certain angle, democracy is just one big bout of audience participation. So when playwright Aaron Landsman, director Mallory Catlett, and designer Jim Findlay started kicking around the idea of somehow staging a city council meeting, of all things, the notion that the audience itself should enact it must have come as a eureka moment.

It is indeed the charm and challenge of City Council Meeting that, while conceived and instigated by the New York–based artistic trio, the show is ultimately a collaboration with whoever shows up, plus a few semi-rehearsed locals in on the running of the thing. These latter include a group of “staffers” who help guide participants through an actual city council meeting — or more precisely, a seamless composite of public transcripts of such meetings held around the US in the past couple of years, plus an artistic flourish or two. For the San Francisco premiere (running this weekend at local co-presenter Z Space), the staffers include Claudia Anderson, Awele, Dwayne Calizo, Jennifer Chien, Sarah Curran, and me.

Moreover, the piece always concludes with an original ending crafted specifically for the locale in which it plays (that, so far, has been Houston, Texas; Tempe, Ariz.; and New York City). This time, the play’s unique final movement, a creative response to what has preceded it, was built in partnership with Bay Area director-choreographer Erika Chong Shuch.

As a staffer, your job is to help facilitate the encounter between the play and its audience. Since that’s kind of what a critic does anyway, I reasoned, and given that everyone in the audience is already at least minimally involved in the production, I signed on for a more inside track on City Council Meeting‘s three-day San Francisco run. At the first rehearsal, director Catlett introduced us to our binders, which contained things we’d need, including something like the script of the performance.

(There is no definitive script. The play is an un-distillable architecture of discrete dialogue, directions on note cards, live and recorded video feeds, and whispered cues, not to mention the unforeseeable but pretty much guaranteed contingency. And perspectives and experiences will vary pretty widely depending on the physical and dramatic space one chooses to occupy: council member, speaker, bystander.)

It was a little confusing, frankly. But halfway through a swift two weeks of rehearsal, I’m seeing more clearly the shape of the show as well as appreciating the subtleties in its construction. Like much contemporary participatory performance, or what’s sometimes called “social practice” art, City Council Meeting moves the bulk of the action and agency onto its audience as a way to simultaneously investigate and manifest our social circumstances and potentialities. It is therefore purposely unsettled — participants are always themselves and yet tasked with enacting the words of other real people like, or more often not like, themselves.

The sheer awkwardness of it is really the point. Is this a study, a parody, an incitement, an invocation? In enacting the form, does the piece share in some of its power? A strange combination of sincerity and dry humor runs throughout it all, as the double-consciousness built into the piece throws everything gleefully up in the air, suspended somewhere between the rehearsal of dead forms (whether political or aesthetic) and the activation of new ones.

That’s a salubrious position, encouraged by the context at large. Or so I couldn’t help thinking. Was it merely coincidence that after leaving rehearsal one night I walked directly into road blocks, sirens, and hundreds of cops — the wake left by a president and secretary of state on political shopping sprees? Is the power that creates such disruption, traffic, and annoyance wherever it goes, like some heedless B-movie giant, even related to the power invested in local government? Was it just coincidence that after leaving another rehearsal a few days later, the Chronicle building was papered over in posters reading, “the media lies as Gaza dies,” this time the unsanctioned wake of a protest on behalf of the powerless?

For a moment there, Occupy took back government from representative bodies and held it in the bodies of real people, acting on their own behalf. It was wild, unexpected, and startlingly easy. It was also strikingly creative — and art was everywhere in the movement. It’s become clearer since then that the relationship between art and politics is a much more serious question than many of us had realized. We can’t afford a paucity of imagination in either. We need the room and wherewithal to ask questions. If nothing else, City Council Meeting asks questions. Including these:

“Are we working together? Are we capable of it? Is that why this structure is here? Or is that what the structure prevents?” *

CITY COUNCIL MEETING

Fri/1-Sat/2, 7pm; Sun/3, 2pm, $20

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

www.zspace.org

 

Gorgeousness unbound

Michael Redmond
-
0

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER If you were milling around the Asian Art Museum last Thursday evening, you might have seen a woman tumble — ever so slowly — down the Beaux-Arts building’s elegant flight of central stairs. Ringed by a crowd of onlookers and the second floor’s imposing colonnade, her limber form caressed the marble steps luxuriously as she cascaded beneath the elegant arched ceiling, entirely at her own pace, leaving behind her the unraveling, impossibly long train of her white and lavender gown.

Bystanders ruminated silently or chatted quietly, sipping cocktails, for the duration of Fauxnique’s 20-minute high-art pratfall, Beautility, as house music reverberated from DJ Hoku Mama Swamp’s station in the nearby lobby. Passing through the lobby, you would have seen mercurial artist Dia Dear offering free makeovers, while members of TopCoat Nail Art Studio applied lacquer to willing hands, in designs inspired by pieces in the museum’s current show, Gorgeous, built from the permanent collections of both the Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Having at last landed on the first floor, in front of the shiny red and white speed demon parked there — German designer Hartmut Esslinger’s Prototype for Frog 750 motorcycle (1985), from the SFMOMA collection — Fauxnique (aka Monique Jenkinson) gathered up her enormous train and rushed up the stairs and out of sight.

Back in the lobby, you might also have caught sight of Nude Laughing, a peripatetic work by La Chica Boom (Xandra Ibarra), and followed the nude figure as she went by, dragging behind her a large nylon stocking filled with what appears to be hair and plastic breasts. You’d have ended up in an alcove on the first floor between several incongruent sculptures — including British artist Tracey Emin’s hot pink neon phrase-sculpture, Fantastic to Feel Beautiful Again (1997); a voluptuous, powerful, and headless stone torso of a female deity from southern India (1400–1600); and American Dan Flavin’s horizontal row of fluorescent colored beams, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 50th anniversary of his gallery) (1987).

In the company of these disparate pieces, the performer slips inside the giant nylon pouch — a Marilyn Monroe wig over her dark hair and atop her painted face, fake furs and sundry toy boobs pressed against her brown body — as she stretches the sheer fabric enveloping her, writhing in coquettish spasms, emitting artificial squeals of pleasure. A puissant abstraction, seriously unsettling and completely mesmerizing in her vaguely menacing flirtation with her audience, the figure eventually sheds her gauzy cocoon and, with a confident stride, disappears down a hallway, leaving behind some flotsam of costume pearls, wigs, and fur.

Headlining this promiscuous night of performance making — part of the museum’s seasonal Thursday night programming, which also featured work from queer punk drag artist Phatima Rude and drag duo Mona G. Hawd and VivvyAnne ForeverMORE — was art-band collective Nicole Kidman Is Fucking Gorgeous (John Foster Cartwright, Maryam Rostami, and Mica Sigourney). At about 8pm, NKIFG took over the regal upstairs chamber with its show, Fuck Gorgeous, a 45-minute incantation, exultation, and rumination on the elusive properties of art, celebrity, fashion, and existence — Nicole Kidman, for short — by three Goth punks with microphones and boundless insouciance.

With enormous projections of full moons looming over a small stage, John, Mike, and Mary engaged in welcoming speeches, banter among themselves, victory laps with streamers, occasional howling, extended ferocious lip-synched roaring, and worshipful mouthing of one truly insipid Oscar acceptance speech. Sound rose and fell, a cacophony of noise gave way to mumbled quips, focus blurred and shifted, bodies went slack, writhed on the dance floor, or bounded around the room. At one point, Mike’s address from the podium slipped from a kind of self-actualization seminar into an outright stab at mass hypnosis as he charged us all to “be Nicole!”

Nicole Kidman, their vessel, “both everything and nothing,” was not quite an object and not quite a projection. Like the other performances enlivening the spaces of the museum and the strange harmony of the artworks on display, Fuck Gorgeous was deeply ambivalent but committed to being in-between, both a come-on and a refusal. *

GORGEOUS

Through Sept. 14, $10-$15

Asian Art Museum

200 Larkin, SF

www.asianart.org

 

Gorgeousness unbound

Michael Redmond
-
0
Gorgeousness unbound

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER If you were milling around the Asian Art Museum last Thursday evening, you might have seen a woman tumble — ever so slowly — down the Beaux-Arts building’s elegant flight of central stairs. Ringed by a crowd of onlookers and the second floor’s imposing colonnade, her limber form caressed the marble steps luxuriously as she cascaded beneath the elegant arched ceiling, entirely at her own pace, leaving behind her the unraveling, impossibly long train of her white and lavender gown.

Bystanders ruminated silently or chatted quietly, sipping cocktails, for the duration of Fauxnique’s 20-minute high-art pratfall, Beautility, as house music reverberated from DJ Hoku Mama Swamp’s station in the nearby lobby. Passing through the lobby, you would have seen mercurial artist Dia Dear offering free makeovers, while members of TopCoat Nail Art Studio applied lacquer to willing hands, in designs inspired by pieces in the museum’s current show, Gorgeous, built from the permanent collections of both the Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Having at last landed on the first floor, in front of the shiny red and white speed demon parked there — German designer Hartmut Esslinger’s Prototype for Frog 750 motorcycle (1985), from the SFMOMA collection — Fauxnique (aka Monique Jenkinson) gathered up her enormous train and rushed up the stairs and out of sight.

Back in the lobby, you might also have caught sight of Nude Laughing, a peripatetic work by La Chica Boom (Xandra Ibarra), and followed the nude figure as she went by, dragging behind her a large nylon stocking filled with what appears to be hair and plastic breasts. You’d have ended up in an alcove on the first floor between several incongruent sculptures — including British artist Tracey Emin’s hot pink neon phrase-sculpture, Fantastic to Feel Beautiful Again (1997); a voluptuous, powerful, and headless stone torso of a female deity from southern India (1400–1600); and American Dan Flavin’s horizontal row of fluorescent colored beams, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 50th anniversary of his gallery) (1987).

In the company of these disparate pieces, the performer slips inside the giant nylon pouch — a Marilyn Monroe wig over her dark hair and atop her painted face, fake furs and sundry toy boobs pressed against her brown body — as she stretches the sheer fabric enveloping her, writhing in coquettish spasms, emitting artificial squeals of pleasure. A puissant abstraction, seriously unsettling and completely mesmerizing in her vaguely menacing flirtation with her audience, the figure eventually sheds her gauzy cocoon and, with a confident stride, disappears down a hallway, leaving behind some flotsam of costume pearls, wigs, and fur.

Headlining this promiscuous night of performance making — part of the museum’s seasonal Thursday night programming, which also featured work from queer punk drag artist Phatima Rude and drag duo Mona G. Hawd and VivvyAnne ForeverMORE — was art-band collective Nicole Kidman Is Fucking Gorgeous (John Foster Cartwright, Maryam Rostami, and Mica Sigourney). At about 8pm, NKIFG took over the regal upstairs chamber with its show, Fuck Gorgeous, a 45-minute incantation, exultation, and rumination on the elusive properties of art, celebrity, fashion, and existence — Nicole Kidman, for short — by three Goth punks with microphones and boundless insouciance.

With enormous projections of full moons looming over a small stage, John, Mike, and Mary engaged in welcoming speeches, banter among themselves, victory laps with streamers, occasional howling, extended ferocious lip-synched roaring, and worshipful mouthing of one truly insipid Oscar acceptance speech. Sound rose and fell, a cacophony of noise gave way to mumbled quips, focus blurred and shifted, bodies went slack, writhed on the dance floor, or bounded around the room. At one point, Mike’s address from the podium slipped from a kind of self-actualization seminar into an outright stab at mass hypnosis as he charged us all to “be Nicole!”

Nicole Kidman, their vessel, “both everything and nothing,” was not quite an object and not quite a projection. Like the other performances enlivening the spaces of the museum and the strange harmony of the artworks on display, Fuck Gorgeous was deeply ambivalent but committed to being in-between, both a come-on and a refusal. *

GORGEOUS

Through Sept. 14, $10-$15

Asian Art Museum

200 Larkin, SF

www.asianart.org

 

Turning the tables

Michael Redmond
-
0
Turning the tables

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Between Mugwumpin’s 10th anniversary multi-show celebration and the University of Chichester’s second annual performance-making intensive, the summer has already been a pretty good one for ensemble-driven theater. “Fury Factory” sends it over the top, this week and next, with a festival devoted exclusively to collaborative efforts in live performance from around the Bay Area and across the country. Utilizing the full plate of performance venues in the Mission’s block-sized Project Artaud, the festival (a roughly biennial offering of local theater troupe foolsFURY) offers nine main stage shows and 16 works-in-progress by groups from New York, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, and from California, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Oakland, Blue Lake, and Los Angeles.

It all kicked off Sunday night at Z Below with Unfinished Business 2014 (Bay Area Edition), a free works-in-progress showing from the aforementioned performance-making intensive offered by the UK’s University of Chichester and co-presenter the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) — which has come onboard as a local partner and host for the university’s forthcoming MFA program in performance-making (another sign, and a favorable one, that border-blurring devised work is on the rise locally).

As part of its effort to spotlight ensemble work locally as well as put it in a larger geographical context, “Fury Factory”‘s Saturday program includes a midday “convening” on the relationship of Bay Area theater to the wider national and international scenes — a salon whose centerpiece is a public “long table” conversation that this writer, among other folks, was invited to help lead off; followed by a screening of Austin Forbord’s 2011 documentary, Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco, with further input from the film’s lead researcher, Dr. Zack.

And speaking of tables, leading off the main stage productions this year is a work that takes place on and around one long-ass dining room setting called The Party — a weirdly intent performance soirée by the Imaginists, the admirable Santa Rosa company making its San Francisco debut at the Joe Goode Annex this week.

The piece (which I saw in an earlier version several months back) comes across as mischievously esoteric, eschewing a clear storyline for a jumble of narrative fits and starts that inevitably reflect on the power and contingency of story itself. At the same time, there are immediate, real world concerns undergirding the work, lending a sense of purpose and apprehension to its playful surfaces. For the past six years, founders and artistic directors Brent Lindsay and Amy Pinto have grown a flexible and adventurous company deeply rooted in its largely Spanish-speaking, working-class community. The group had been putting together a Christmas show featuring Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden last October when Santa Rosa was rocked by the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Andy Lopez by a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy. (The boy had been walking home with a toy gun at the time.) The grief and the ensuing political hailstorm emanating from that event brought the company’s production plans to a standstill. What finally emerged was The Party.

“We all came to it as a collaborative effort,” explains Lindsay, “and then we all just kept trying to clarify what the hell we were doing.” While the shooting and the politics it brutally underscored remain instigating and enduring inspirations, the play has traveled far down its own path of investigation. Its action serves less to advance an overarching storyline or moral than to conjure a substratum of desires and compulsions, a silence that speaks of what is not spoken.

“We really yearn for story, we want that,” says Lindsay. “The chaos of life won’t hand it to us. So we look to storytellers, or theater, to hand us the clean arc or the plot, we all have a desire for that. [The Party],” he laughs, “is really not giving you that at all.”

And speaking of substrata, a family-friendly main stage Bay Area premiere comes courtesy of Under the Table, a Brooklyn-based physical comedic theater ensemble. Its festival offering, The Hunchbacks of Notre Dame, follows a troupe of hunchbacked siblings trying to turn the tables on their hard luck, in something maybe just vaguely resembling the story by Victor Hugo. Yet more subsurface family-friendly comedy comes along in The Submarine Show (an SF Fringe favorite by Oakland-based Slater Penny and former Cirque du Soleil performer Jaron Hollander).

The emphasis on works-in-progress in the festival’s “Raw Materials” series, meanwhile, develops an interest cultivated in two previous iterations of foolsFURY’s separate “Factory Parts” festival, which opens up the creative process to audiences (who see several offerings for the price of a single ticket) and, in the words of co–artistic director Debórah Eliezer, “provides a rare opportunity for new work to gain critical feedback through performance and audience engagement.” “Fury Factory” offerings in this realm include two developing pieces by San Francisco’s Deborah Slater Dance Theater, another by international clown trio the Defenestrators (of Blue Lake, stomping grounds of famed Dell’Arte school of physical theater), LA’s Estela Garcia (with a piece on the Spanish-Mexican surrealist painter and anarchist Remedios Varo), Atlanta’s Danielle Deadwyler (with a “stream of consciousness mixtape listening party” exploring representations of the black female body), and two by foolsFURY (including playwright Steve Haskell’s Baden Powell Wars, about the conflicted Boer War hero and Boy Scouts founder). *

“FURY FACTORY”

Through July 20, $16 (three performances, $39; five performances, $55)

Z Space, 450 Florida, SF

Z Below, 470 Florida, SF

Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama, SF

NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF

www.foolsfury.org

Making waves

Michael Redmond
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1
Making waves

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The Fourth of July kicked off a revolution once; could it happen again? Each year in Dolores Park the San Francisco Mime Troupe gives it a shot, kicking off its touring season of free outdoor shows with a musical-comical call to arms — an appeal to popular solidarity against the very real forces of oppression on a holiday gleefully synonymous with keg-tapping.

It’s a task the legendary 55-year-old artist-run collective pursues with passion and its own unique flair: a larger-than-life mix of Italian commedia dell’arte storytelling and American-style melodrama, with a smattering of original songs thrown in for good measure. It’s an eye and ear catching spectacle that this year hits close to home, wading into the conflicts and displacement churned by a rapidly transforming high-tech, high-cost city.

Ripple Effect is set in present-day San Francisco, or just offshore in the bay, in a small tour boat where three women of very different backgrounds reckon with one another. The boat’s captain is an ardent but paranoid Lefty activist (played by Velina Brown). Her passengers are a Vietnamese beautician and all-American immigrant (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) and a newbie tech worker from small-town Nebraska (Lisa Hori-Garcia) whose popular app landed her a corporate job in the big city.

Against the backdrop of a yawning wealth gap, real estate speculation, an epidemic of evictions, Google bus protests, and diminishing diversity, Ripple Effect‘s three protagonists (all played by longtime Mime Troupe members) explore the tensions that divide them and the common ground beneath them. (The Mime Troupe is also linking the play to a series of community forums, at its Mission studio and after select performances, in which various community leaders will facilitate public dialogue around the show’s themes and the growing divide in the city.)

“It’s always tough because we do tour the shows, so we don’t want to make them too specific to San Francisco,” says Mime Troupe actor-writer Michael Gene Sullivan, who plays several secondary roles in Ripple Effect, including a certain wily CEO. “But we feel like there are so many issues going on within the city that people around the state, really around the country, will be able to relate to — not just housing and how the cities are changing, but also the struggle within the working class, the way people are being pitted against each other while the incredibly rich are getting incredibly richer. It’s just that it’s more pointed here.”

There is precedent for SF-centric plays in past Mime Troupe offerings. In fact, the company’s 1999 show, City For Sale, took on the housing crisis of the last real estate and dot-com bubble. But Sullivan says the issue has also changed. “This show, while it touches on [housing], is much more about a change in the culture of the city. Not just what does it mean to be living in San Francisco, but what is San Francisco now?”

Ripple Effect is a departure in some other ways too. It’s a more concentrated drama, less concerned with a particular impending disaster to push the plot than in the precise relationship between the main characters. “In this show the dilemma is, to a large extent, how the characters see each other,” notes Sullivan. To this end, Sullivan, head writer for the collective since 2000, shared the writing this time around with Bay Area playwrights Eugenie Chan and Tanya Shaffer, each of whom explored specific aspects of the characters’ back stories. The show also sports two directors (Hugo E. Carbajal and Wilma Bonet) and comes with a new musical team: composer-lyricist Ira Marlowe and musical director Michael Bello, who together fill roles covered in recent years by Pat Moran.

The Mime Troupe has not been immune to the financial upheaval shaking the city. Last year, the collective had to launch an emergency fundraising campaign called the Cost of Free to make up for a serious budget shortfall that jeopardized its ability to offer its annual show. Velina Brown, Sullivan’s life partner as well as fellow artist, explains that the 2008 economic downturn had reduced the offerings of arts foundations by as much as 40 percent. “Being already a really lean organization anyway, 40 percent going away is huge.” But where another theater might have folded up shop, the Mime Troupe, with help from its audience, bounced back.

“One of the things that’s helped us over the years with all these ups and downs is that we are a collective,” says Brown. “It’s not all on one or two people and if they feel like that’s it, then that’s it — there’s a larger group of people that have to agree that that’s it before the doors close. We also own our building, and that has definitely saved our behinds. We haven’t had to be at the mercy of a landlord — who says, “Hey, I could get 10 times what you people are paying” — and kicked to the curb.”

“Because we’re a collective it takes people a lot longer to get burned out,” agrees Sullivan. “Because we’re worker-owners of our company we are willing to put in more time, do things for a little less pay, come to meetings when we’re not paid to be there. We do get paid; it’s an [Actors] Equity company. But we have a sense of ownership you don’t get at other places, and that also helps the company in the most difficult times.” *

 

THE RIPPLE EFFECT

Through Sept. 1 at various NorCal venues

Fri/4-Sat/5, 2pm, free

Dolores Park

19th St at Dolores, SF

Also Sun/6, 2pm, free

Yerba Buena Gardens

760 Howard, SF

www.sfmt.org

A heart in San Francisco

Michael Redmond
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5
A heart in San Francisco

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER This week, at New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco’s Evan Johnson remounts his popular 2013 solo play, Pansy. It’s the story of a disaffected twentysomething gay man who discovers a cache of videocassettes in the basement of his SF apartment building — made by someone who could be considered his doppelganger, a club kid long since felled by AIDS. The play functions in part as a communion between a younger generation of queer San Franciscans and the early era of the AIDS crisis.

Of course, there are those who, in their lives as well as work, continue to bridge the two eras, maintaining a vital link to this fraught but fecund period in SF’s queer/queered history. One of them is the inimitable Justin Vivian Bond. Mx. Bond has long since been based in New York, and yet v (to apply the preferred prefix and pronoun to someone who has gracefully sidestepped the dominant gender binary) grew into an artist here, and has returned to SF many times over the years, including for packed performances produced by Marc Huestis at the Castro Theatre.

Although maybe still most often identified with the cabaret sensation Kiki and Herb — a Tony-nominated, long-running duet with Kenny Mellman, in which Bond excelled as the perennially sloshed Kiki Durane — Bond’s career has hardly slowed since K&H were put to rest more than five years ago. In fact, the output for this internationally acclaimed artist, actor, performer, and singer-songwriter has been impressive: In addition to innumerable musical performances, there are two fine albums, a spunky and poignant memoir about growing up as a trans kid in suburban 1970s Maryland, and a recent turn as the Widow Begbick (singing original songs by Duncan Sheik) in a New York production of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s a Man.

A powerfully soulful and charismatic performer, Bond brings Love Is Crazy!, an evening of songs about love in all its aspects, to Feinstein’s at the Nikko this weekend.

SF Bay Guardian In the late 1980s and early ’90s, AIDS made SF a dark place, but it was also a time of exceptional artistic, intellectual, and political ferment. How did that affect the development of your career?

Justin Vivian Bond I majored in theater in college, but I couldn’t really see a place for myself in mainstream theater. At my freshman evaluation they told me I had to butch up; I had to be able to pass as a straight man in order to make a living in the theater. Fortunately, I’ve been able to prove them wrong! But that was sort of a frustrating and unappealing way to live my life.

So I moved to San Francisco. I was going to probably go back to college and get a degree in art history and teach. But instead, I found Theatre Rhinoceros and queer performance and Queer Nation. It was a time when there was a tremendous amount of activism around HIV and AIDS. I worked at A Different Light bookstore, so I was exposed to the greatest queer minds of the day, brilliant writers and artists that would come in there. It was also, looking back now, the golden age of queer publishing. It was when Mike Warner published Fear of a Queer Planet. It was an intellectual and creative surge for queer people. Rick Jacobsen was still alive, and he did the Kiki Gallery [1993–1995]. I worked with him on a show that was written by Christian Huygen called Waiting for Godet, which appropriated Waiting for Godot and made it about two drag queens. It was so much fun, and really exciting. And I was in Hidden: A Gender with Kate Bornstein at Theater Rhinoceros. We toured that around the country — that was my New York stage debut.

I was at the Alice B. Theatre in Seattle when the NEA Four were defunded. Three of the four were at that festival. That was when I decided that I was going to devote my life to queer performance and to having the voices of queer people heard in as many places as possible. That propelled me to stay in the role of Kiki longer than I might have liked to, because it eventually brought me to Carnegie Hall and a Tony nomination on Broadway. [After that] I thought, OK, now I can really start honoring my own creativity, aside from making political statements. Fortunately for me, once I gave up that character and started performing as myself, I feel like things have been going pretty well. And it all started for me in San Francisco, which is why I love it so much.

SFBG Was there always a political dimension to your work?

JVB Having my art spring from a political place — exposed to the queer politics, really the life-or-death politics, that were happening back then — really justified my impulse to be an artist. I’m not saying that everything I’ve ever done has been politically astute or important, but there is a political perspective behind everything I do. That helps me justify asking a bunch of people to pay attention to me. If I didn’t feel like I was actually saying something, I’d probably be embarrassed to be on the stage, really.

SFBG What are the origins of Love Is Crazy!? You took it first to Paris. Was it a show you made specifically for that city?

JVB It kind of evolved. When I was last in San Francisco, actually, I was getting ready to host a benefit for the Lambda Legal Defense [and Education] Fund. Sometimes I’ll just pick a word and put it on my iPod, then let all the songs with that word in them play. That particular day, I had recently become single, so I hit “love,” and this list of songs played. I thought, “I should just write down this list and that could be my next show.” And that’s what I did for a show here in New York called “Mx. Bond’s Summer Camp.” I liked that show but over time I sort of finessed it. Now, not all the songs have the word love in them. Some are songs from both of my records. I was going to Paris, and I decided I wanted to do this Valentine’s Day show in front of the Eiffel Tower. I had a really wonderful time with it, so I decided to tour that show this year. So that’s what it is, craaazy love. And it’s got some good anecdotes in it.

SFBG I’m curious about the origins of your distinctive singing voice.

JVB For Kiki, I sang with a character voice. I started performing Kiki when I was like 28 or 29. I was just coming into my own voice at that time, and I kind of sang in that voice for 15 years. In San Francisco, during the last run of Kiki and Herb, I met this person who I fell in love with, and went on the road with, from San Francisco up to Canada. I kind of got back in touch with my queer roots, and I started writing my own songs, because I needed to find my own voice. It really helped me to get myself into the mindset of what I wanted to say, as opposed to what I wanted to say as this character.

I wrote several songs that were on my record Dendrophile. And I started singing songs that really resonated with me, including “The Golden Age of Hustlers,” which is a song by Bambi Lake and Jonathan Basil, who lives in the Bay Area. It’s about San Francisco and Polk Street. It’s an elemental song for me. And that’s how I started to rediscover my own voice. I had also just been in London; I went to Central Saint Martins College for my MA in scenography, which is like performance installation. One of my teachers was talking about Nina Simone, and how when you hear her sing you hear the life that she’s lived. I set out to try and make my voice reflective of my experience, so that when people hear my singing voice, they’ll sort of know what my life has been like and the world that I inhabit through it. That was my goal. And it really is a very satisfying thing, I have to say.

SFBG To be concentrating on your voice?

JVB And my life, and what my voice can say. 

JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND

Sat/21-Sun/22, $35-$50

Feinstein’s at the Nikko

222 Mason, SF

www.feinsteinssf.com

 

Still hungry

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1
Still hungry

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER A figure wanders into the void — a pristine wooden stage, that is, pinpointed by four delicate weights hovering pendulum-like at the corners, alive to the slightest ripple of air. In the back, behind a scrim and awash in crepuscular light, a large and blooming tree floats exquisitely in space. For the wanderer, the time (if such a thing can be said to exist here) is ripe. “This must be bardo, then,” thinks the ghost. “I’m cool with that. I was beginning to think I’d live forever.”

The bardo, the in-between state between one life and another in the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation, affects different people in different ways — our wanderer is only one of 28 characters we come across — but throughout New York playwright Chiori Miyagawa’s witty, dreamy, and discerning Bay Area debut, the bardo becomes a supreme vantage on a reality burdened by desire and that transubstantial baggage known as karma.

Now enjoying a splendid world premiere (in a limited two-week run) as part of Theatre of Yugen’s 35th anniversary season, Miyagawa’s This Lingering Life freely adapts nine 14th-century Noh plays, infusing them with a decidedly present-day sensibility. Under artistic director Jubilith Moore’s expert touch, the production amounts to an exceptional blend of modern Western dramatic style and traditional Noh influences. And at its best, it strikes one as some of the more contemporary theater around.

Miyagawa’s astute grasp of the human comedy of living and dying does not always translate with equal force across the various plots — which include, for instance, a mad woman’s desperate search for her abducted son; a Romeo and Juliet–like tragedy involving two drowned lovers; the suicide of an old man who falls in love with a spoiled young princess; and the fallout between a rich father and his disinherited son, in which the impoverished younger man goes blind but ultimately grows wiser than his father. Nevertheless, the majority of the scenes (underscored by a transporting sound design from Michael Gardiner, sitting with laptop offstage right) are remarkably successful, and cumulatively powerful as characters rub shoulders in the afterlife.

Moreover, the nine-member ensemble (composed of Theatre of Yugen’s Moore, Sheila Berotti, Sheila Devitt, Alexander Lydon, Norman Munoz, and Lluis Valls; joined here by Nick Ishimaru, Hannah Lennett, and Ryan Marchand) does fine work running the gamut of earthbound emotions, from visceral anguish to driving lust and petty cruelty, while freely trading genders too in a hint of the promiscuous cycle of rebirth. Particularly fine comedic performances make the most of the playwright’s hilariously down-to-earth dialogue, while expert Noh-inflected vocal modulations and movement add a frisson to decisive moments.

San Francisco’s dedicated practitioners of classical Noh and Kyogen styles, Theatre of Yugen has long been adept at channeling Western stories in these ancient Japanese dramatic forms, setting them in a highly ritualized context that can set off their content with surprising intensity. In fact, Yugen (which takes its name from the Japanese word meaning “mysterious elegance”) led off its anniversary season last November with a Noh-inspired staging of an enduring American tragedy and Civil Rights Era–case: a beautifully composed, movingly effective meditation entitled Emmett Till, a river. The hour-long poetical-musical treatment by co-writer Judy Halebsky and lead writer and composer Kevin Simmonds not only explored the role of individual action, or inaction, in the perpetuation of systemic racism, but also opened up a space for reflection, communion, and an unsettled yet pointed act of reconciliation with the past.

This Lingering Life in a way takes the opposite tack, and thus is something of a departure for the company, since it mines the contemporary in a Westernized, interlocking set of ancient Japanese stories — supporting it all with a few choice elements of the Noh aesthetic. The hybrid creation, spread over 24 scenes, retains a Buddhist worldview, however, in which a person’s actions in one life determine the nature of the next. This lends a particular moral force to what we see, including an abiding sympathy with the dead that is both affecting and thought provoking. But, as the play suggests, karma is not always destiny. In the in-between space of the bardo, clarity and free will can penetrate the hazy sleepwalking of existence, and even fate can be renegotiated.

THIS LINGERING LIFE

Wed/11-Thu/12, 7pm; Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm, $15-50

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

www.theatreofyugen.org

Rolling along

Michael Redmond
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0
Rolling along

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s groundbreaking 1927 musical, Show Boat, transformed one of Broadway’s major theatrical forms from a light and episodic operetta-style divertissement into a red-blooded American art form. Wedding spectacular entertainment (its producer was none other than super-showman Florenz Ziegfeld) with a full-fledged drama, Show Boat‘s expanded canvas came nearer the realm of classical opera, as all elements of the production, beginning with the music, orbited tightly around the story — which in addition to humor and hijinx sported complex characters and serious social content.

Since 1927, opera and musical theater have continued to grow closer at various points — most famously in the work of crossover composers like George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. San Francisco Opera’s co-production of Show Boat, the first time the company has essayed the legendary musical, turns out to be a wonderfully successful case in point: a crowd-pleasing hybrid of musical-theater style, sharply delineated drama, rousing choreography (from Michele Lynch), and full operatic glory (including an appropriately-sized orchestra and chorus). It’s a muscular production with a light step and buoyant spirit that shows off the best in a story that not only affirmed a common humanity among those up and down the ladder of social status, but also registered the injustice and violence of the American racial caste system in tones boldly progressive for the time.

Of course Show Boat, for all its socially and artistically progressive aspects, was still a product of the 1920s. And while it has been revived many times, the dialogue and other details have also undergone revisions to keep pace with social attitudes, conventions, and sensitivities, especially with regard to race. The SF Opera production under Maestro John DeMain follows DeMain and General Director David Gockley’s former collaboration on the historic 1982 revival for the Houston Grand Opera, which restored for the first time since 1927 significant sections of the original dialogue and score. The opera opens on a beautiful riverside quay awash with Technicolor hues (in perhaps indirect homage to the 1951 MGM film version), while the backside of the ship rises from the stage at the War Memorial Opera House like a delicate three-layer cake in the first of set designer Peter J. Davison and lighting designer Mark McCullough’s consistently atmospheric scenic environments.

Based on the 1926 novel by celebrated author and Algonquin wit Edna Ferber (who with frequent collaborator George S. Kaufman brought The Royal Family to Broadway the same week that the musical version of Show Boat set sail), the story spans the 1880s to the 1920s and revolves around the crew and passengers of the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi show boat plying the river’s shoreline inhabitants with melodrama and comic fare. The boat’s operator is the warm-hearted Cap’n Andy Hawks (played by Broadway and local legend Bill Irwin in a memorable SF Opera debut) and his wife, the pants-wearing disciplinarian Parthy Ann (a comically fierce and ultimately redeeming Harriet Harris). Their innocent daughter and the story’s heroine, Magnolia (played with affecting pluck by a radiant Heidi Stober, the fine American soprano), falls for a rakish riverboat gambler named Gaylord Ravenal (baritone Michael Todd Simpson in a suave and graceful performance), whom she weds and follows to Chicago.

Magnolia and Gaylord’s doomed marriage, but enduring romance, makes up the central storyline, while a significant secondary plot involves the downward career of the talented actress and singer Julie La Verne (given a sultry and wrenching interpretation by soprano, and esteemed SF Opera regular, Patricia Racette). In an early scene, Julie’s husband, Steve (Patrick Cummings), fights with his wife’s spurned suitor (James Asher) and the latter takes revenge by tipping off the local sheriff (Kevin Blackton) to the illegality of their marriage under the state’s anti-miscegenation law. In this way we learn that Julie is of mixed-race ancestry. A bickering but loving African American couple among the Cotton Blossom‘s crewmembers, Queenie (the regal soprano Angela Renée Simpson) and Joe (bass Morris Robinson in a robust, beautifully measured performance), are also significant supporting characters. Indeed, the most of the show’s great songs are associated with these secondary characters, not least “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”

The show itself strikes a knowing stance with respect to narrative, making good fun of the stilted melodramas put on by Cap’n Andy while reveling in the backstage intrigue and the characters’ own double-playing onstage (a situation that nicely serves the woo-pitching in the number “Make Believe”). Even the fight that breaks out on the dock between Steve and Pete at the outset of the play gets co-opted by Cap’n Andy, who in a hasty bit of diplomacy tells the crowd it was just a preview of the night’s entertainment onboard. This covering is also an uncovering, however, since it hints at the complex relationship between the stories onstage and real life in all its messiness.

Of course, what “real life” the musical expresses is still very much idealized as well as stylized. But the SF Opera production proves there’s still a pulse to the 1927 narrative, and it’s as vital as the enduring score with which it’s intimately bound. With panache but also keen sensitivity, the show conveys Ferber’s original emphasis on the shared humanity of rich and poor, white and black, and the compassion a bird’s eye perspective on it all can breed. In Show Boat, absurd melodramas and life’s everyday triumphs and failures play out alongside each other as so many ripples on the surface of a deep and indifferent river — a dark and mysterious universe that, in the image of the show’s great recurring theme, just keeps rollin’ along. *

SHOW BOAT

Through July 2, $24-$379

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF

www.sfopera.com

 

Oakland roundabout

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0
Oakland roundabout

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Read. Think for yourself. Speak your mind. Map the wide world. Just don’t leave your house.

Those are the parameters for a hungry young mind in a black male body in Oakland in 2008 — at least according to Watts (Michael Wayne Turner III), who has been living by them for years. Watts became a shut-in after his 10-year-old self took in the cold fact and wider implications of the 1991 Rodney King beating. Seventeen years later — which is how many dead young black men later? How many incarcerated bodies? — Watts lives a life of restless confinement with his sometimes prodding but understanding mother, Willie (Halili Knox).

Quick, a little acerbic but generally kind, Watts (played with a frank charm by Turner) is a voracious reader and a self-styled cartographer, aware of every square mile of his city and yet afraid to physically set foot in any corner of it. As if to underscore the danger he perceives outside, his siblings are more or less MIA. As if to underscore the impossibility of holding it all at bay, he eventually finds a guilt-ridden white guy (Dan Wolf) living as a tenant in his own small bedroom. More ironically still, the New Year’s Day he resolves to finally leave the house is the day a BART policeman named Johannes Mehserle (in what was later deemed an accident) takes Oscar Grant’s life at Fruitvale Station.

Like her main character, playwright and poet Chinaka Hodge is mapping her world here with a keen, obsessive focus. In Chasing Mehserle, Hodge, an Oakland native, picks up again the lives of the Oakland family she introduced in Mirrors in Every Corner, her 2010 debut. Once again, too, she teams up with Intersection for the Arts, Campo Santo, and Youth Speaks’ Living Word Project to realize her sure, capacious imagination in what directors Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Sean San José ensure is an overall vibrant transposition to the stage.

Act II is somewhat less sure and consistent in its unfolding than the strong opening act, and some of the staging (especially the video projections against a slack fabric wall) is less effective than it might be. But throughout Chasing Mehserle is strong acting, lyrical yet rooted dialogue, redolent ensemble movement, and scenes that range from effortlessly funny to startlingly potent.

Unfolding on and around a makeshift playing area at Intersection (where a rolling set of wooden stairs, courtesy of designers Evan Bissell and Tanya Orellana, serves variously as stoop, bedroom, and jail cell), the story comes narrated by a series of characters beginning with Watts, who tells us "his" play is not about Oscar Grant but about himself. Then again, we come to see that Watts’ vision of things is skewed by his long isolation. He may be well-read, he may have intricately mapped his city, but once he steps out in it there is much that eludes him, and much he gets wrong, even tonally — his fictional sidekick and co-narrator, Puck (Danez Smith), balks sometimes at the 10 dollar words he’s made to speak. A chorus of four (Tristan Cunningham, Tommy James Shepherd Jr., Isiah Thompson, and Johnathan Williams), that channels the human landscape in some spare and evocative choreography, also serves as a casual, no-nonsense counterpoint to Watts’ rhetorical flourishes and emotional extremes.

This is all the more crucial a corrective when Watts, learning of the death of Grant, takes it upon himself to track down and kill Mehserle, who has fled the Bay Area and gone into hiding. Watts, in other words, addresses his longstanding fear of white authority, and specifically the police, by turning the tables. But the road he sets down is complicated and confused. His unwanted partner is Lyle (the aforementioned white guy bunking in his bedroom). His perspective is in some ways fresh, in others myopic and deeply problematic. We root for him, and recoil from him. Hodge has created a wonderfully flawed hero, around whom a more complicated topography presents itself, and with whom we encounter a truer and more compassionate grasp of our fraught, divided, unequal, haunted, absurd, yet yearning environment.

CHASING MEHSERLE

Thu/29-Sat/31, 8pm; $15-$25

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

theintersection.org/chasing-mehserle

Burning mouse

Michael Redmond
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0

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Mike Daisey is a talker. He can talk about a lot of things. Hell, he can talk for 24 hours straight (and did in All the Hours in the Day at Portland’s TBA Festival in 2011). This gift of gab has brought him acclaim as an artist in the theater, where he’s known as an eminent monologist of the desk-bound Spalding Gray school. In one case, it’s even brought him public scandal, to wit, NPR’s 2012 call-out regarding fabricated bits in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs — an experience Daisey says has made him not only “wiser” but “a better storyteller.”

But Daisey doesn’t tell stories for the sake of talking alone. He chases after questions that intrigue him, and these, more than his comically barbed but affable stage persona, make his stories worth listening to. Occupying a fertile middle ground between high concept and low humor, his self-referential yarns confront issues he sees as central to how we live and — in a related, no less passionate way — to how the theater lives and dies in American culture. He directly essayed this latter theme in his 2008 show, How Theater Failed America, but it remains a lively concern, as he suggests below.

His latest, American Utopias, makes its Bay Area debut at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend. Following the format he has been honing since the late 1990s, Daisey uses a few notes written on loose sheets of paper to re-create afresh each night a set of three intertwining stories about Disney World, Burning Man, and Occupy Wall Street, following all three down their respective rabbit holes to glean what, individually and cumulatively, they might teach us about ourselves.

SF Bay Guardian You grew up in a really remote corner of the country. When you consider what brought you to where you’re at now, how much of that do you attribute to this background?

Mike Daisey I grew up in a place called Fort Kent, Maine, which is on the Canadian border. It’s actually the end of US Route 1, which begins in Key West. To me, psychically, it always feels like this must be the most remote place possible because every piece of mythology about roads is that sort of Tolkien idea, “The road goes ever on!” Whereas I was like, “No, it doesn’t actually. It ends. Right here. This must be the furthest place from everything.” It’s a very interesting area, the St. John Valley, around the St. John River. The people are predominately French Canadian. It’s a very different place from what I’ve come to recognize as the rest of America.

I do think that there’s a storytelling tradition that grows up in Maine, that exists there, that informs the work I do now. I think partly it’s informed by years of speech and debate at a very tender age. I think it’s informed by a couple of years of playing Dungeons & Dragons at a formative time. And, layered on top of all of that, was a very earnest desire to discover a form that would allow me to create theatrical experiences that were new in the moment that they were spoken. I was really dedicated to that proposition, that there could be a form of theater that lives in the moment that it’s spoken, both for the performer and the audience. I was looking for a form that would allow both there to be rigor and precision in the structure, but at the same time allow true spontaneity, and allow discoveries to happen in the moment that could not be anticipated.

That’s what I love about the monologues, about all storytelling. I often think of jazz when I’m trying to explain it to people. In the Western tradition, it is hard for people to understand how it is that something is composed without being written. We’ve all become so mired in the tyranny of the written word that we actually come to believe that the act of writing is the act of thinking. The spoken work is actually closer to the thought; it’s a more primal form than the form that writing takes. We forget that. So it’s hard to explain to people sometimes how something [spontaneous] can have form and precision and texture and depth. People often want to know, “How long did you work on this monologue?” And there really is no right answer to give, except the one that the jazz legends often give, which is to say, my whole life.

SFBG Do you think that that fascination with the research and work that goes into a piece is part of the way art gets commercialized, packaged as discrete products?

MD Yeah, I think that’s true. You know, I just went to Cuba. I was in Havana for about two weeks. I’m working on what’s going to be a separate piece, from the show that I’m bringing to Yerba Buena, about the commodification of art. When art transforms into a good. As soon as it does, as soon as it enters that market place, we really want to know its provenance; we want to know that this piece was not just tossed off by the artist. We want to know that the artist was thinking about something, or dreaming about something. We want to know that the piece we’re holding is a piece of the artist’s greatness and is an important piece at that. A lot of what it’s about is really acquisitive in nature.

That’s one of the reasons my going to Cuba was so fascinating. Being in a culture where a ballet dancer is paid the same amount that a surgeon is paid is really fascinating for what it does to cultural priorities. I’m not even saying that we all should pay surgeons the same amount as ballet dancers. But coming from my own culture, which I think is anti-art — I think it’s heavily tilted against art because of a real grain of Puritanism that runs through the center of the American character — it’s really fascinating to think about different ways that lives could be lived. Watch me: I’m slowly dovetailing! That connects to American Utopias in a really direct way. A lot of that monologue is about the effort to imagine a different way of life.

SFBG Where does theater figure in that imagining?

MD Theater really needs to make more radical shifts if it wants to take back some ground in the cultural conversation. Not necessarily in a traditional way, opening large movies that everyone’s talking about, but in a quieter way. I feel like theater sometimes suffers from being neither fish nor fowl. I’m often struck by the difference between a play [that’s considered a success] with 400, 500 performances. But those numbers don’t compare to millions of page views on YouTube.

At the same time, there’s another unique number, which is one, like when I create a show that’s for one night only and only happens once. There’s uniqueness to that, which the American theater also has a hard time [working] with because the form involves playwrights and rehearsals — we have a hard time doing the unique event. So instead we have this weird compromise, where we create this unique event but we then do this unique event 23 times. There’s this very odd middle ground. I often feel a correspondence between those numbers: like a run of 23 or 31 performances and page views of seldom-visited pages on the Internet. It’s really hard to thrive when you’re not doing something that’s singular each time and, at the same time, you’re not doing something that’s digital and ubiquitous and anyone can watch anywhere.

I just wish theater would grapple with one world or the other. I feel sometimes like the theater is a little bit its own version of The Glass Menagerie. It’s ignoring the war, everything that’s going on outside, like Tom talks about in his opening monologue of that beautiful play. But then the whole play is in this apartment, in this world where everyone’s dreams become sort of curdled and small. I sometimes feel like we really need to break out of the apartment. We all need to be like Tom and we need to hit the road.

SFBG Given it has three very different strands to it, what is American Utopias ultimately about?

MD American Utopias is about how we create spaces. But not just in the traditional architectural terms, but how we create them socially. So it’s an examination of three very different types of spaces. In each case, the members of the community that have made that space think of it as a kind of utopia. They see it as a reflection of a more perfect world. In many cases they wish they could live there more of the time but they know it’s not possible. I have preferences among the three to some extent but, on the other hand, none of the three are really my utopia. As a consequence, my role, I feel, is to talk about the connections between them. What really interests me are the anthropological systems, how humans organize themselves and how we share dreams. That interests me a lot. *

AMERICAN UTOPIAS

Fri/16-Sat/17, 7:30pm, $30-$35

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater

700 Howard, SF

www.ybca.org

 

Sounds of silence

Michael Redmond
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1
Sounds of silence

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER How we hear — or if we hear — is to some extent a matter of association. We’re inclined to listen to, take seriously, and treat as equal those people with whom we identify and can sympathize, people who seem to share basic things, including certain values, with us. Such is the implication (and provocation) in English playwright Nina Raine’s engaging drama, Tribes, which roots itself in an eccentric London family — one of whose members is deaf — in order to explore wider social questions of affiliation and communication, exclusion and indifference. The play in this way takes on literal and metaphorical deafness, exploring clan-like thinking and behavior in and through the politics of the deaf community.

The serious questions at the heart of the play, however, come agreeably packaged in a very loud and amusing family of cantankerous extraverts headed by a former scholar turned author named Christopher (a gruffly and charmingly expansive Paul Whitworth) and his wife, a novice novelist named Beth (a cheerful yet concerned Anita Carey, in an admirably supple performance). The household has recently expanded to former proportions with the return of grown 20-something children Sylvia (Nell Geisslinger) and Daniel (Dan Clegg), who rejoin their grown and deaf brother, Billy (a sympathetic, impressively complex James Caverly), around the family’s book-lined living room (in Todd Rosenthal’s detailed, naturalistic scenic design, which transforms when necessary into offsite locations or inner spaces via Christopher Akerlind’s mutable lighting and Jake Rodriguez’s evocative sound design).

We meet this dysfunctional, codependent set of oddball overachievers and outcasts around the long table to the left of center stage, where they engage in clearly quotidian bouts of whining and dining. “Why am I surrounded by my children again,” wonders Christopher rhetorically. “When are you going to fuck off?”

Playwright Raine has an ear for the kinds of cruel jabs, off-color remarks, and outrageous propositions that, it seems, only a family can indulge in (let along get away with) without so much as a tremor of trepidation or regret. In this smarty secular Jewish household, that sniping is especially vituperative, colorfully earthy (especially in Dad’s frequent bon mots), and colored over by an intellectual hue: Christopher’s pet theme is the rootedness of feeling and personality in language. Daniel, plagued by a damning superego that has produced condemnatory voices in his head, is writing a thesis more or less arguing the opposite — that language does not determine meaning. His socially awkward sister, meanwhile, has taken up the pursuit of music (where feeling transcends language), singing opera in pubs. Moreover, despite their constant assailing of one another, there’s a collective pride undergirding it all — a satisfied sense of the family’s own positive difference from the rest of the (alternatingly intimidating and pitiable) world.

But, notably, these animated discussions among the family tribe, with which the play begins, rarely include Billy. When he speaks — in the pronounced but muted tones of someone who does not completely hear his own voice — it’s usually to ask what everyone else is talking about. Treated as an equal (with a nonchalance bordering at times on indifference) and yet simultaneously eclipsed by his loudmouthed, self-involved relatives, Billy ironically stands out (to us) by virtue of his quiet remove.

He soon breaks free and into clearer view after meeting a woman named Ruth (a sharp and vital Elizabeth Morton) with whom he falls instantly in love. Ruth is losing her hearing, but coming from deaf parents, she is well acquainted with the community and culture of the deaf. This does not make her transition any easier, however. Indeed, it complicates it in subtle ways. More than any other character, she straddles both worlds: the hearing and the non-hearing. It makes her both threatening and attractive to Billy’s family, who fear Billy’s categorization and cooptation as part of a deaf minority.

Billy, unusually adept at lip reading and emboldened by his love for Ruth and the community she provides access to, takes a job with a law court providing crucial transcriptions from audio-less video for criminal trials. This allows him to move out of the family home for the first time. Ruth teaches him ASL, which he begins to use more and more exclusively. Both he and Ruth meanwhile confront a family that places a premium on the connection between language and feeling. From this constellation of voices and positions, a serious split emerges that throws the family into a tailspin while asking a series of stimulating questions about where, and how, we belong.

Raine’s 2010 play (originally produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre) gets a spirited, involving production from Berkeley Rep and director Jonathan Moscone. Moscone (the artistic director of California Shakespeare Theater who excelled at another contemporary family-social drama when he helmed Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park at ACT) stirs the hornet’s nest of mad, madcap family living with an expert hand, and his fine cast delivers Raine’s witty (albeit sometimes too thematically forceful) dialogue with precision and ease. If the play wraps up a little abruptly, it also leaves much in the ensuing silence to continue listening to. 2

TRIBES

Through May 18

Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm; no 2pm show May 18), $29-99

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Berk

www.berkeleyrep.org

 

Moscow weather report

Michael Redmond
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0
Moscow weather report

THEATER Moscow’s temperatures had been climbing up to 70 degrees just a week before my arrival, but by the first of April, it had slipped back into the 30s and 40s, collecting snow on the ground and clouds overhead in a gloomy replay of winter. In a novel this would have looked like a cheap literary device: nature manifesting a political climate that had also grown decidedly chillier. But with Russia’s recent reabsorption of Crimea, and talk everywhere of a new Cold War, it was pretty apt nonetheless.

At the same time, theatrical fires were burning brightly in the weeklong Russia Case, an annual mini-festival spotlighting (for an international audience of presenters, journalists, and others) exceptional theatrical work from the much larger national Golden Mask Festival, with some additional offerings thrown in for good measure.

Curated by Kristina Matvienko, theater critic and member of the Golden Mask board of experts, this year’s Russia Case included 20 productions, in addition to other public events, such as an absorbing tour of Moscow’s famed Taganka Theatre, the country’s center of theatrical innovation and radicalism in the 1960s–70s under founding director and actor Yuri Lyubimov. It’s now celebrating its 50th year with a special jubilee program of exhibitions, projects, and new work headed by a group of young theater artists, managers, and critics commissioned by the city’s Culture Committee and Cultural Minister Sergei Kapkov.

Things began auspiciously with a sparkling new piece by famed director Kama Ginkas at Moscow TYuZ (pronounced “tooz” and standing for Young Generation Theater), the theater led by his wife, Henrietta Yanovskaya, also an acclaimed director with a production in the festival. Lady Macbeth of Our District, based on a short story by 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov that was also adapted into an opera by Shostakovich, concerns the ebullient young wife of a village merchant whose lust for life entangles her with a brash laborer with tragic results. Staged with muscular precision and effortless invention — including a shrewd use of winter coats as malleable second-skins and visceral bursts of song and energetic movement — this excellent ensemble piece, led by the vibrant Elizaveta Boyarskaya in the title role, cut right through the serious jetlag of the hour.

Among other highlights was a new work by internationally renowned director Dmitry Krymov (whose In Paris premiered locally at the Berkeley Rep in 2012). The captivating Honoré de Balzac: Notes About Berdichev derives its title from a line in Three Sisters, and this inspired riff on Chekhov’s characters sneaks in a fitting depth of thought and emotion beneath its macabre comical surface. With the consummate attention to design and ensemble playing that Krymov and his collaborators have rightly become known for, the production unfolds as a kind of Grand Guignol spectacle, holding up a funhouse mirror to the iconic figures of Chekhov’s oeuvre in order to see them afresh as the pitiful, horrifying, hilarious, and beautiful creations they are. The production then shifts into a prolonged denouement in which the actors remove their elaborate makeup and converse and play with one another in a wistful and teasing middle ground between art and life that speaks quietly of that communion that is the essence of theater.

Equally effective was a timely adaptation of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film at the vibrant Gogol-Centre, a new and leading venue with four resident companies and a popular youthful following. Fear, adapted by young playwright Lyubov Strizhak from Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is one in a trilogy of works by Latvian director Vladislav Nastavshev that adapt famous films (the others being Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots, each in some way dealing with the negotiation of borders and the plight of outsiders). The story concerns the socially unsanctioned love affair between a young Tajik migrant worker and an elderly Moscow widow. Unfolding with a bold, forceful grace on a spare arena-style stage that made dynamic use of a set of white plastic tables, this well acted and moving piece was also among the most overtly political, dealing head-on with the rising xenophobia that has plagued Russia in general and Moscow in particular in recent years. (The one other piece in the program with comparable political punch came from the tiny but intrepid Theater.doc, an independent documentary theater, run by Elena Gremina. Documentary theater is the mode of choice for much political work on Moscow stages, and perhaps not surprisingly Fear‘s playwright Strizhak is well associated with the form.)

In all, I took in half of the total program of the Russia Case, in a packed week of theater and discussion, as part of a group of Americans traveling under the auspices of the Center for International Theatre Development. Needless to say, politics were in the air throughout, and not only because of recent events in Ukraine. The theater in Russia is far more culturally important and influential than theater tends to be here. And while not overtly political in what it stages (except in some notable instances like those just mentioned), it remains a site of many progressive and antiauthoritarian voices as well as big personalities and vested interests. Even the Taganka jubilee was marked by internal turmoil and public scandal, stemming in part from Lyubimov’s contentious public departure from the theater in 2011 but sparked by a historical exhibition on the walls of the theater that provoked defacement from outraged members of the company.

More broadly and urgently, however, the Russians and their international guests mulled over the future of theater in a country drifting rapidly toward ultranationalist extremes. All seemed to agree that whatever happens, this year’s Russia Case will likely not look like next year’s, and that artists and audiences are in for a wild ride.

 

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