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Familiar but strange

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Familiar but strange

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER In 1934, Broadway hosted its longest-running opera to that time, the serenely unconventional Four Saints in Three Acts. The brainchild of writer Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thomson, the production famously featured an all–African American cast (for the first time in roles not geared to depicting African American life), a scenic design covered in cellophane, music that mingled hints of Parisian modernism with a boisterous collage of vernacular American forms, and a libretto of unfathomable if evocative wordplay that merrily eschewed narrative — or even consistency with the title (acts were actually five, saints were many). It was weird. And people liked it.

In deciding upon a topic for the opera, Stein had taken on the lives of saints (especially Theresa and Ignatius, who figure prominently) as representative of the lives of artists. It was a secular work, and apotheosis, that ultimately concerned both her and Thomson, neither of them otherwise religious. As it turned out, the opera not only hailed the arrival of avant-garde ideas into the mainstream, but catapulted Stein into the stratosphere of celebrity.

“In Stein’s personal story the opera was a very large chapter,” explains Frank Smigiel, associate curator of public programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, currently presenting The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde. “In addition to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, [Four Saints] radically transformed Stein from an experimental writer known for collecting other artists into a popular artist in her own right.”

One good apotheosis deserves another. This weekend SFMOMA, in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, presents Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera Installation, as part of The Steins Collect. While the exhibition already includes footage and ephemera from Stein and Thomson’s landmark opera (with even more footage on view in the concurrent Gertrude Stein exhibition at nearby Contemporary Jewish Museum), audiences will now have the chance to see a full staging of the work. Meanwhile, the production’s team of collaborators promises as much a re-envisioning as a revival.

This is as it should be, suggests Smigiel, who spearheaded the idea for the revival about a year ago as he and his colleagues were asking themselves how they might expand on the exhibition.

“If you look at all the other artists in the Steins Collect exhibition, they’re all working not just on canvases,” he says, speaking by phone from his office at SFMOMA. “It was a creative community that was crossing disciplines in ways people might not always know about. One of our aims was to rev up the avant-garde energy of the exhibition. There’s a way, when you go to a show with Matisse and Picasso, they can just look canonical now to us. One of the hopes is that there’s still something about Stein’s language and the opera that’s going to have a bit of shake-up to it. It won’t just appear as a rolling out of a canonical piece, and people wondering, ‘What was this again?'”

To that end, Smigiel approached local company Ensemble Parallèle, acclaimed specialists in contemporary chamber opera, having been impressed by their recent production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, including its shrewd use of visual media. He also sought out Italian-born, San Francisco–based composer, performer, and musicologist Luciano Chessa, an expert in the period whom he had worked with before. Equally inspired was Smigiel’s call to Kalup Linzy, whose video-performance practice mixes soap opera genre with drag, original songs, lip-sync, and themes of family, community, sexuality, and otherness through the prism of his African American Southern upbringing and later Brooklyn milieu.

After a process of deciding how they might re-approach the work, Chessa landed on the idea of resetting the text that Thomson had excised in his own 1950s version of the opera. The result is its own piece, entitled A Heavenly Act, which will immediately precede Four Saints without an intermission (the entire program will run a fleet 90 minutes). Linzy developed video projections as the predominant visual element in the production.

Chessa and Linzy offered further insight into the collaboration, and their respective processes, during a break from a rehearsal last week. Although neither knew the opera very well before embarking on the revival, each found points of contact and familiarity with their own work.

“I knew it mostly because of [Canadian filmmaker] John Greyson’s [2009 operatic documentary] Fig Trees,” explains Chessa. In conceiving A Heavenly Act, Chessa says he wanted to account for both Thomson’s own musical influences as well as the legacy he has left in the work of later composers.

“I couldn’t be approaching the text naively as if I was discovering it for the first time,” he says. “There is a history of setting Stein in the 20th century, which I ended up discovering by analyzing the work and also the development of Thomson’s fortunes in the 20th century. Because Stein’s text is very wordy, Thomson used the technique of having it chanted. So my idea was to bring this element of chant, but do it in a different way, using different lines of text moving at different speeds, creating clusters of textures.”

Adds Linzy, “We kept things very loose and abstract, kind of organic. It didn’t have to be so strict.” Linzy — who in the production also performs a song Chessa wrote for him set to Stein’s words — shot a cast of friends as angels against a green screen, usually with movement informed by music tracks Chessa had forwarded. But in at least one case, Linzy didn’t receive the track for a corresponding scene.

“There’s a dance scene [in A Heavenly Act] where [Chessa] did a waltz, but we danced to Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls,'” explains Linzy. “But seeing it against the waltz, really slowed down, it’s almost like the angels got high off LSD and just went too far. But we were moving to Donna Summer, we were discoing. That’s what I like. He had sent the tracks but somehow I didn’t get that particular one. So I was like, ‘Oh, we’ll just disco it out.’ And so that’s what we did, and it’s the most amazing thing.”

FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS: AN OPERA INSTALLATION

Thurs/18, 7:30 p.m. (preview); Fri/19-Sat/20, 8 p.m.; Sun/21, 2 p.m., $10-85.

Novellus Theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

Class clowns

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Class clowns

THEATER Linda Brown is a maid at the end of her tether, and tender, as the much-put-upon employee-slave of an exclusive country club. The signs are there from the moment she steps onto the stage: the circles under the young woman’s eyes, her frightened stare, the desperate swigs from a ready flask, not to mention her shameless histrionic intensity as she addresses the audience about the soul-sucking richies perpetually at her back.

But it will take the full length of playwright-director Jeff Bedillion and Back Alley Theater’s sometimes ambling, generally rowdy new farce, Country Club Catastrophe, before our lower-class heroine manages a proper escape — only it’s unclear even to her if it’s a genuine escape at all, as she stares into the eyes of her replacement with an eerie shock of recognition.

In this uneven but promising production by newcomers Back Alley Theater, performances are at times stilted and pacing might be tightened in places, and perhaps as much as 20 minutes of meandering dialogue productively lost from the second half. But Country Club Catastrophe gets laughs in part because it knows what it is about. Inspired equally by classical French farce — Molière’s five-act structure in particular — and recognizably American figures from the yawning class divide, it aims at a contemporary social crisis churned by the obscene disparities in wealth in post–middle-class America. (All glimpsed at the preview ahead of opening night.)

Thus, long before her existentially fraught exit, both Linda (played by a comically intense yet sympathetic Katharine Otis) and her handsome gold-digging coworker, the doorman Max (a winningly boisterous Joshua Rice), largely retreat from view behind an onslaught of self-absorbed club members (numbering only a handful in fact, and yet a real handful just the same).

First to arrive is Mrs. Montgomery (a sharp, coolly imperious Jennifer Lucas), her teased hair rising to just within the frame of the front door center stage (in A.J. Diggins’ spare, functional set design) and a long leash trailing from her wrist to an unseen standard poodle with an unhealthy appetite for the doorman. (Exit Max for some scenes.)

Separately from Mrs. Montgomery — who in a manipulative confessional gesture lets Linda know her first name is Tabytha, only to insist she still call her Mrs. Montgomery — arrives the rest of her small but attenuated family. There is husband Miles (Len Shaffer, dispensing affable sleaze), a jolly and salacious philanderer; and son Tristan (a humorously shrill Salvadore Mattos), Tabytha’s barely closeted Brown University brat whose constant companion is a houseplant he calls Sister.

Greater than Tristan’s fixation on foliage, however, is his unbounded lust for childhood playmate Edward (Jeremy Bardwell), the egomaniacally cocksure but increasingly put out fortunate son of club members Biff and Muffy Birmingham (played, respectively, by a buoyantly silly John Weber and a hilariously sugary yet menacingly bitchy Meaghan M. Mitchell). Biff and Miles are best friends; Muffy and Tabytha not so much. Muffy prefers the company of club member and shy post-debutante Peggy Dupont (a harried Sabrina De Mio), whom Muffy bosses and harshly abuses with an almost innocent glee.

Last and, in the opinion of the club house anyway, certainly least comes Cynthia Anniston (an amusingly oblivious and high-keyed Gloria Terese McDonald), Brown University first-year and cheerleader desperately chasing one-night-stand Edward, her lax outfit reading alternately “prostitute” and “foreign exchange student” to the club’s members and its equally indignant staff.

For the play finds stark but amusing ways to underscore the primacy of money over every other social divide, be it race or sexual orientation or education. Even the mere appearance of not having money is enough to put one squarely outside the club — or rather, squarely within its steep hierarchies of privilege and worth. As the plot gets increasingly tangled, we’re left to consider the intoxicating stench of money in everyone’s noses as the ultimate obscenity.

And yet, Linda (and the play) asks, can the greed, selfishness, backstabbing, dirty dealing, and rampant mistreatment that runs rife through these perverse excuses for families really continue without some final judgment befalling such a club and such a country?

Intonations of just such a judgment are there already in the title, in a gathering electric storm outside, in the self-consciously heightened language, and in the rumblings of piano keys from musician Mike Miraglia’s offstage upright. But the catastrophe that finally breaks in on this world isn’t exactly The Day of the Locust. It is, instead, an ironic and apt judgment on the misspent lives and deflated hopes of the present day, so semi-cozy and quietly desperate despite the raging storm outside. 2

COUNTRY CLUB CATASTROPHE

Through Aug. 13

Thurs.—Sat., 8 p.m., $20

Exit Theatre

156 Eddy, SF

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

As the world turns

Andrew Lam
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0
As the world turns

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The title of Matt Smith’s solo show recalls a certain long-running television soap, but the tale it flags is nutty even by the guiding light of that genre. The Seattle-based writer-performer’s All My Children, now running at the Berkeley Marsh, is the wry, offbeat first-person account of one solitary middle-aged man’s shameless construction of a family by unconventional means — namely, stalking the children of his exes.

Max Poth (an affable, dryly amusing Smith) explains he’s had six serious romantic relationships in his life. But owing to a certain reticence or immaturity on his part, none of them lasted or led to marriage, let alone children. Max has recently learned, however — after a little nostalgic trawling of the Internet — that the women he once loved all managed to marry some other dude within months of breaking up with him. More than that, they each had a child — their one and only child — within a year of leaving him.

Max is the kind of guy who takes that kind of thing personally. Intrigued, stirred, and more than likely gripped by a midlife crisis, the wiry, weathered, graying perennial bachelor seeks out these grown children one by one, and tells them he is their real father. To hear Max confess it, this pronouncement comes out the first time as the pure inspiration of the moment, an irresistible impulse. But what begins willy-nilly soon continues with premeditation, a half-examined earnestness, and an almost scientific detachment. We, his audience, listen with increasingly rapt attention, a combination of fascination, mounting horror, and nervous laughter as Max — alone on a small stage with no mise-en-scène to speak of beyond a deliberately hokey light shift or two — waxes on about his cuckoo-like experiment in brood parasitism, or fatherhood.

The beauty of the show and its sly, unadorned storytelling (handily managed by director Bret Fetzer) lies in its ability to expand beyond a one-liner premise. Max soon introduces us to six younger characters as intriguing as his own suspect self. That this droll, unpredictable yarn ends up not just a midlife ode to parenting but one with something that smacks of real truth in it can be chalked up to the delicate (im)balance in Max between seemingly psychotic tendencies, morbid humor, and a genuine urge to devote himself, at last, to others. If love is the ultimate high he seeks, for Max — and all his voluntary children — a willing weirdness is the gateway drug.

 

SUBURBAN MAUL

Dysfunctional parents and dysfunctional children ultimately harmonize and heal amid the silent stalking of an escaped tiger in Tigers Be Still, a sweet and competent if TV-mannered 2010 comedy from young New York City playwright Kim Rosenstock, now making a sure West Coast debut at SF Playhouse under director Amy Glazer.

After her advanced degree in art therapy leads to exactly no job offers, Sherry (Melissa Quine) moves back into her mother’s house. It’s a house that admittedly could use some therapy. Mom is a recluse who communicates by an internal phone line from upstairs (and offstage), where she battles the shame of weight gain from an unknown ailment. Sister Grace (Rebecca Schweitzer) meanwhile occupies the couch, besotted, recovering not too well from a breakup with her fiancé with the aid of a large bottle of Jack Daniels, a well-worn DVD of Top Gun, and a reckless flirtation with the geriatric postman.

But Sherry’s ostensible charge, and first client, is in fact Zack (Jeremy Kahn), the morose son of her mother’s old flame and Sherry’s new boss (Remi Sandri). Zack, it turns out, is burdened by guilt over the car accident that took his own mother’s life, and his relationship with his loving but perplexed father has accordingly attenuated. In other words, that escaped tiger outside ends up standing for a lot of people’s trauma and fear — unless of course it’s just as lost and bored and depressed as everybody else in this gentle, mildly funny, and well-acted production. Although sentimental and not quite as outrageous or acute as it would like to pretend, Tigers Be Still has some decent laughs and can charm, especially with so likeable a cast, even if it doesn’t bite.

ALL MY CHILDREN

Fri/22, 8 p.m.; Sat/23, 8:30 p.m., $20–$50

Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley

2120 Allston, Berk.

www.themarsh.org

TIGERS BE STILL

Extended through Sept. 10

Tues.–Wed., 7 p.m.; Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 3 p.m.), $30–$50

SF Playhouse

533 Sutter, SF

www.sfplayhouse.org

Calling the doom tune

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Calling the doom tune

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER 2012: The Musical!, the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s latest offering in its annual free outdoor theater shows, opens in the Oval Office, where President Obama (Michael Gene Sullivan) — face painted a garish red, white, and blue — sells out Workingclass Man (Cory Censoprano) at the bidding of his spooky capitalist overlords. It plays like a parody of agitprop conceits and, sure enough, it is. Audiences sprawled on the glade at the northwest corner of Dolores Park this Fourth of July (the production tours throughout the summer and fall across the Bay Area and beyond) were being treated to the radical stylings of “Theater BAM!”, a tiny left-wing theater company fighting the good fight against the Man and the Pigs, among other stock characters in the black-and-blue pageant of industrial and postindustrial capitalism.

It earned a good laugh, this dramatic feint. The scene ends, the company takes its bow, and the “real” play begins as life imitates art with uncomfortable (and self-referential) complications: the members of Theater BAM! are indeed committed to overthrowing the system, but have been at it some time now with limited results and redundant gestures. Worse still, the company is facing an unprecedented financial crisis that has them leaning toward corporate sponsorship.

This last detail appalls at least one member, steadfast artistic director Elaine (Lizzie Calogero). But the rest of the company finds itself swayed by Elaine’s sister and fellow BAMmer, ambitious daytime corporate sellout Suze (Siobhan Marie Doherty), otherwise busy climbing the ladder as assistant to investment banker Arthur Rand (Victor Toman). (“It’s all dirty money,” she sings, in composer-lyricists Pat Moran and Bruce Barthol’s bouncy 1950s-style R&B. “If you don’t take dirty money you don’t have any money at all.”)

Rand, for his part, tired of competing with the piffling “people” in the political marketplace, gets the idea (with Suze’s prompting) to buy himself a politician outright. The serviceable Senator Pheaus (Sullivan) does nicely in this position (i.e., supine). Eagerly, desperately following Rand’s explicit instructions, the telegenic Pheaus pushes forward Wall Street’s business-as-usual agenda through a ready rhetorical smokescreen of nebulous and all-pervading fear.

Meanwhile, the stalwarts of Theater BAM! find themselves underwritten by an ostensibly progressive, feel-good corporation called Green Planet, Inc., headed by a bubbly Ms. Haverlock (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) who, with hands clasped firmly on the purse strings, “offers” increasingly invasive production suggestions. The upshot? A new musical about the end of everything called 2012, replete with Mayan priests and giddy millennial mayhem. Needless to say, apocalypse doesn’t go so well with political commitment or revolutionary change, but dovetails quite nicely with an apolitical consumerist ethos of all now and damn the future.

Directed with reliable snap by SFMT vet Wilma Bonet (augmented by Victor Toman’s big-time small-stage choreography) 2012: The Musical! is a solid SFMT production attuned to the timber of the “end times,” not as a biblical prophesy but as capitalist conspiracy. It also flags the messy compromises made all too easily by artists and audiences alike with “the system.” The script (by longtime head writer Sullivan, with additional dialogue from Ellen Callas) is along the way dependably smart and funny — and seemingly inspired at least in part by the recent Flake flap (to wit, Congressman and Arizona Republican Jeff Flake’s attack on NEA chair Rocco Landesman last May for the NEA’s funding of the 52-year-old left-wing San Francisco Mime Troupe). The half a dozen songs are equally snazzy, with admirably clear and pointed lyrics, and while the singing is not as strong as in recent years, the comic acting is first-rate.

But if the story complicates the usual agitprop scenario represented by the fictitious Theater BAM!, it can also be too pat to be wholly satisfying. The excuse offered business as usual by the distracting and enervating fear of the millennium has several sources after all, including the pernicious hard-on by religious demagogues for spiritual redemption in a fiery end (a crowd and pathology wonderfully exposed in SFMT’s Godfellas). The solutions as presented here are also less than clear. Getting the airhead Senator Pheaus to save the day by reading a speech crafted by our heroes, instead of his Wall Street handlers, only underscores the idea that such “representatives” are ventriloquist dummies who lean left or right depending on whose forearm is up their ass. Those guys are Theater Bum, and they’re overfunded.

2012: THE MUSICAL!

Through Sept. 25

Various Bay Area venues, free

www.sfmt.org

 

Biting the Big Apple

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Biting the Big Apple

arts@sfbg.com THEATER The world’s largest arts festival, the now-venerable Edinburgh Festival Fringe, got its start in 1946 as a scrappy party-crasher outside the official Edinburgh International Festival. Thanks to its inspired blend of difficult-to-categorize, anything-goes performances, the Edinburgh Fringe helped create a definitive theatrical format that has since flourished in Fringe Festivals around the world. Among other things, Fringe is a catalyst for new works, new companies, and new interpretations of how theater can be made, and experienced.

Of all the Fringe Festivals in the United States, the one that generates the most buzz is by far the New York International Fringe Festival (this year’s dates are Aug. 12-28). That the New York Fringe is curated is a sticking point among festival purists because it violates one of the founding precepts of Fringe: that anyone with a story to tell and a willing venue can take part. Despite that breach, there still manages to be a pretty broad spectrum of representation.

Works originating in the Bay Area display a staggering variety: the tale of an Iranian-American woman striking a compromise with her Islamic family over her live-in atheist boyfriend; a provocative series of multigenerational monologues on body image and acceptance; a musical homage to a 19th century black opera pioneer; and a transcontinental coming-of-age story.

When Bay Area comedian Zahra Noorbahksh began developing her solo show All Atheists Are Muslim at the Bay Area’s Solo Performance Workshop in 2008, she discovered something about the material that she had previously worried about being alienating or inaccessible.

“The Muslim and non-Muslim public is [hungry] for a three-dimensional view of a mainstream Islamic-Iranian American family that isn’t some heavy-handed political discourse,” she shares over e-mail. “I love seeing that moment when the audience that came in with their arms crossed, ready to challenge me and my ‘ludicrous’ title, realize that by my father’s very mathematical equation, all atheists are in fact Muslim.”

For Noorbahksh, the fest offers not only the opportunity of performing in New York but of expanding on the very definition of Fringe.

“It gives a ‘fringe’ culture and religion like Islam a platform and an opportunity to open up a dialogue with the non-Islamic world,” she says. “[And it] has given me an opportunity to be a part of the healing that needs to happen between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans and the general image of Islam in the public consciousness today.”

Oakland native ‘rie Shontel (a.k.a. Anita Woodley) raises consciousness every week as a producer for syndicated North Carolina Public Radio show The Story in Chapel Hill. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Shontel was moved to tell her own story, initially to friends and family, and Mama Juggs was born. Inspired by the memory of her 100-year-old great-grandmother, Suga Babe, and her repertoire of breast-feeding songs, Shontel performs four interwoven monologues wrestling with body image and breast awareness (her mother, one of the characters portrayed, died of breast cancer at 47), and the cultural myopia surrounding both. What sounds on the page like potentially heavy-handed material reveals itself on the stage as a thoroughly engaging, irreverent take on “titty juggs,” her great-grandmother’s term.

August may mark Mama Juggs‘ first foray into Fringe, but Shontel has already been drumming up national support via her “100 Living Rooms” tour, performing in private homes across the U.S.

“The intimate parlor performances have raised many interesting discussions and encouraged many to get breast exams,” she reports. “My mission for Mama Juggs is to make breast health a topic for conversation.”

“I was inspired by this very accomplished woman of color and wanted to give voice to her story that has been largely forgotten.” Opening up an entirely different conversation, Oakland-based opera singer Angela Dean-Baham’s solo show The Unsung Diva traces the history of 19th- century black opera sensation Sissieretta Jones. In a format reminiscent of Tayo Aluko’s tribute production Call Mr. Robeson, Dean-Baham’s one-woman work of musical theater combines American folk and spirituals with operatic arias and character vignettes drawn from the life of a woman once so influential that she was the first African American to perform at the then-unnamed Carnegie Hall. Like her hero, Dean-Baham is excited about what a successful run in New York could mean for her future.

“NY Fringe offers its artists a tremendous opportunity to put work before NY agents, producers, press, diverse audiences at a reasonable cost to self-producing artists,” she said. “As a juried theater festival, they offer the immediate gratification that other artists find the work engaging and that there is an audience for the work.”

San Francisco-born Aileen Clark knows firsthand the universality of a good story. Raised speaking three languages on four continents, Clark nevertheless refers to herself as the “whitest Latinita” on the planet, and her solo show How I learned to Stop Worrying and Lost My Virginity has touched a nerve among audiences of all colors and persuasions.

“I’ve always loved telling stories and acting out everything I see and do,” she says, describing the impetus behind the show’s creation. “I set out to make a play that would feel like we were just hanging out at a party and talking.” With John Caldon of Guerrilla Rep and Claire Rice of AMP, she crafted a comedic coming-of-age memoir packed with 21 characters, which debuted at the EXIT Theatre in November 2009. Newly transplanted to Brooklyn, Clark hopes Virginity will help introduce her to New York audiences.

“This show definitely gives me a wonderful connection with the people who come to see it,” she enthuses. “I’m hoping Fringe can be a door that opens other doors to great opportunities.”

www.fringenyc.org

Don’t go changin’

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Don’t go changin’

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The story of earnest young traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who awakens one morning to discover he has changed into something he and his family can only describe as vermin, Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis has undergone a number of metamorphoses of its own in terms of adaptations for stage and screen. One of the latest is the lauded 2006 interpretation by actor Gísli Örn Gardarsson and director David Farr, a coproduction between Iceland’s Vesturport Theatre and England’s Lyric Hammersmith that debuted in London and made its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last winter.

Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre offers the first wholly American production of this stage version, under the direction of Bay Area playwright-director-actor Mark Jackson. The production has many fine features, but the balance between the social and emotional content of the story and its abstract or absurdist framework gets skewed a bit too far toward the latter.

Jackson’s production stakes out its own territory by eschewing the Nazi-era periodizing of the original Vesturport–Lyric Hammersmith production. This Metamorphosis is set in the American 1950s — although the trappings of that place and time are only vaguely evoked here. Indeed, the costumes, semi-abstract split-level set, and heightened performance style together seem a blurry blend of Germanic petit bourgeois culture, high modernism, and Leave It to Beaver-esque TV surreality.

A horror and embarrassment to his family, Gregor (a winningly agile and sympathetic Alexander Crowther) confines himself most of the time to a variety of perches in his second-floor room — an environment rendered via a striking modernist pop-out painting and vertical jungle gym by Nina Ball. Its spare features are all askew and rotated forward on a sloped, accordion-like set of ridges, a veritable waterfall of steps supporting an elongated metallic bed frame and the creeping, scrambling Crowther.

Formerly the main breadwinner of his downwardly mobile lower-middle-class family, Gregor does not report for work one day. It’s that day, of course, that he drops so far in the estimation of his family that he is no longer even comprehensible to them, no longer even human. They instinctively side with his overbearing employer (Patrick Jones) and consider their own plight now that they must fend for themselves. Only his beloved sister Grete (Megan Trout) makes a serious attempt at communication and sympathy, although with melancholy results.

Grete is the key figure in this brisk 80-minute stage adaptation. Her brother’s transformation entails her own, from a would-be dancer into an eligible commodity in the material calculations of her desperate family and finally into a self-possessed agent in the cold material world. Trout is sharp but perhaps too perky and superficial in the role, since the anguish Gregor feels at seeing her metamorphose doesn’t have the same impact in the absence of a convincing sibling bond. Gregor clearly lives vicariously through the promise of Grete’s freedom, her life as an artist. When that dies, when she is transformed, his own demise is complete.

Gregor’s parents (played with sure satirical exaggeration but, again, little beyond comic anguish by Madeline H.D. Brown and Allen McKelvey) also feel too distant from it all. The cast offers little coherence as a family, albeit a fractured one. Instead we get a nicely wrought metaphor without much of a sense of its stakes, a lost opportunity and no doubt an unintended consequence. Bosses and subhumans, marriage as sexual commerce, art as perversion, the quiet everyday destruction of personality, the corruption of the closest social bonds by vast coercive hierarchies of power and authority — Jackson’s right, you don’t need to go back to Nazi Germany to find all that. It should all feel closer to home. *

METAMORPHOSIS

Through July 17

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Tues. and Sun., 7 p.m.;

Also Sun., 2 p.m., $10–$55

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

Return to Barbary Lane

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Return to Barbary Lane

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The mainstream apotheosis of once-outré subculture is always a complex matter. Even the good-natured, good-time stories in Armistead Maupin’s original “Tales of the City” San Francisco Chronicle serial had a subversively political edge to them in 1976 (which made their publication in the paper beginning that year both remarkable and fraught with behind-the-scenes battles between writer and editorial). So it is a little weird, if also apt, to see a full-fledged musical adaptation of Maupin’s classic Tales of the City — the first and eponymous title in what became an eight-book series — getting its Broadway-bound debut at American Conservatory Theater.

Although inevitably speaking less to today’s San Francisco than to an idealized conception of a glorious recent past, this Tales is still recognizably homegrown (despite all the out-of-town talent), affirming, lightly risqué, and overall slickly accomplished. Minor weak points aside, there’s plenty of vitality throughout a generally shrewd production, whose creative team includes playwright Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q) and music group Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and John Garden (providing the eclectic music and occasionally awkward but mostly inspired lyrics for Whitty’s admirably clear, compact book).

The results are nostalgic but never blinkered. Even the shopworn feel of Haight Ashbury and disco kitsch proves less than annoying thanks to Maupin’s set of palpable and sympathetic characters (animated by a strong cast), his nicely entangling storyline, and the show’s engaging, even rousing period-savvy score. Whether it will play in Peoria — or New York City for that matter — who knows. But for the audience at last week’s opening in San Francisco, it solidly earned the love fest it probably would have gotten either way.

Cleveland-reared but Bay-curious Mary Ann Singleton (a formidable Betsy Wolfe) arrives in 1976 San Francisco, a city celebrating its own version of the “bi-sexi-centennial” year with a burgeoning alternative culture mixing remnants of Summer of Love hippiedom with mirror-ball dance floors and gay bathhouses. Fleeing her oppressive hometown and shedding gradually her straight-laced upbringing, Mary Ann makes her new home at 28 Barbary Lane, a Russian Hill apartment complex (a skyward Victorian framework flanked by great locks of greenery in Douglas W. Schmidt’s choice scenic design) overseen by the benignly extravagant matron and marijuana maven Anna Madrigal (played with serene assurance by Broadway’s golden-throated Judy Kaye). She soon joins the other tenants in a loose alternative “family” (with all attendant subplots) centered on the mysterious Anna, who we learn started out even more remotely from her present self than did Mary Ann.

The numerous other characters come equally well realized. As Mary Ann’s out gay neighbor Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, for instance, Wesley Taylor is as believably down-to-earth as he is charming (Michael’s loving coming-out letter to his Anita Bryant–loving parents is just one of the show’s dramatic highlights). Broadway veteran Richard Poe, meanwhile, delivers Edgar Halcyon — the stuffy businessman grasping for a last chance at life under Anna’s amorous tutelage — with commanding aplomb and a nicely understated vulnerability. Many other fine turns abound in the large cast, amid some fine musical numbers — although an otherwise effective power ballad from secret Anna daughter Mona (the excellent Mary Birdsong) is somewhat marred by the unintentionally comic title “Seeds and Stems.” And the final “No Apologies” number, while good, is stretched thin with the duty of wrapping up various subplots.

If nostalgia reigns here, the story till has real roots that make themselves gently felt throughout. In 1976, Maupin was a young transplant from North Carolina, via the Navy, and newly, enthusiastically out as a gay man and budding author. Capturing the gig with the Chronicle, he serialized what would become his first novel in a rush of five installments per week under the column title “Tales of the City.” He wrote close to the ground (and the Chronicle society desk), delivering what was at times almost as much reportage as fiction, peppering his hastily composed plotlines and characters with anecdotes from the city he was coming to know intimately. Of course, the ground he worked was then heaving in a cultural and political earthquake that set San Francisco ever further apart from the rest of the country. Tales of the City, in its various incarnations, is still a no-apologies love letter home. 

TALES OF THE CITY

Through July 10

Check website for dates and times, $35–$98

American Conservatory Theater

405 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

Stalled out

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Stalled out

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Call it one step back in the middle of a big leap forward. Intersection for the Arts and resident theater company Campo Santo marks the organization’s recent move to the Chronicle Building with a hobbled world premiere adaptation of Denis Johnson’s latest novel, Nobody Move. The title for Johnson’s fleet, cool, and witty crime noir comes from a reggae lyric: “Nobody move, nobody get hurt.” A cautionary line that sounds too prescient under the circumstances, but life moves whether we like it or not.

Personally, I don’t like it, at least this week. Watching Campo Santo flail with Denis Johnson material is a bummer that feels like the end of a winning streak. Johnson, a protean American author (and Campo Santo’s playwright in residence), turned midcareer to playwriting after contact with the exceptional San Francisco theater company back in 1999. His close collaboration with Campo Santo led to some of the more vibrant and thrilling productions of the last decade, including Soul of a Whore and Hell Hound on My Trail. Even less successful outings like 2006’s Purvis were more than worthwhile, full of bold ideas and strong take-no-prisoners performances.

No such inspired passion or theatrical muscularity arises from Nobody Move, which centers on the California adventures of one Jimmy Luntz.

Many a first-glance would peg Luntz (Daveed Diggs) as a loser, but this oddball amateur musician and inveterate gambler is sure he was “born lucky.” Luntz, however, has owed a gangster from Alhambra named Juarez (Tommy Shepherd) a little too much for a little too long. He narrowly escapes retribution from Gambol (Donald E. Lacy Jr.), Juarez’s strong arm, by popping him one in the leg and making for the mountains along the Feather River. There he meets a tough, boozy Indian beauty named Anita (Catherine Castellanos) who has been set up to take the fall for an embezzlement scheme by her powerful ex-husband and a corrupt judge. Luntz and Anita form a lopsided marriage of lust and convenience, with Luntz promising to help her steal the stolen money as they hide out together at a sad motorcycle clubhouse operated by former Luntz associate Capra (Michael Torres) and his high-strung lover Sol (Brian Rivera). Meanwhile, a veteran in Juarez’s employ named Mary (Margo Hall) nurses Gambol back to his ugly self and begins a curious romance with the bad man as he plots sadistic, testicle-chomping revenge against lucky Luntz.

Lunching on Luntz’s nuts is just one plot-driver, but a solid one. At the very least, it should have created — as it does in the novel — a wincing degree of suspense. Director-adapter Sean San José assembles a cast of Campo Santo regulars who should be more than up for the job. But an unmoving note is struck from the very first lines. Diggs broadcasts too loudly and manically to allow us much entry or sympathy for our hero. And though Castellanos gets him to cool down a bit, just about everyone else is over-amped too, turning the cool-jazz tone of Johnson’s enjoyable prose into a screechy cacophony.

There are, nevertheless, some choice moments here and there, as you’d expect from the likes of a Margo Hall or Michael Torres, who both provide some much needed ballast. But the actors are also up against a script that never quite stands firmly on its own legs, but rather — like the injured psychopathic gangster Gambol (infused with plenty of bluster and spleen by Lacy) — hops painfully from one place to the next. The dialogue — originally sharp, lean and consistently funny noir-repartee — comes across here as strained and unnecessarily overloaded by detail confined to descriptive passages in the novel. As is, the play moves, but skittishly, in a loud and self-conscious way that prevents any serious engagement with either the characters or the story.

The benefits of Intersection’s move from Valencia Street to previously vacated space on the ground floor of the Chronicle’s longtime headquarters (the newspaper’s offices have retreated to an upper floor) will no doubt show themselves in the coming months. But Campo Santo’s opening bid is a disappointment, even as it shows off a promising new performance space in a large basement-level conference room.

NOBODY MOVE

Through June 12

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun, 3 p.m., $20–$35

Intersection for the Arts

925 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2787

www.theintersection.org

Stein time

Maria Poblet
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0
Stein time

arts@sfbg.com

 A visit to the Bay Area from David Greenspan is a rare treat. A visit by Gertrude Stein even more so. It’s kind of a twofer this weekend as Greenspan delivers his version of Stein’s lecture on the theater, Plays, amid a wide-ranging Stein retrospective (Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories) at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (which occurs simultaneously with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition, The Steins Collect). Although Greenspan is not often seen on stage in these parts, the inimitable New York City playwright-actor — whose brilliant comedies are often as rich in humor as in formal and intellectual surprises — has had his share of productions in the Bay Area. SF Playhouse recently mounted the musical Coraline (for which he wrote the book) and She Stoops to Comedy. A little further back. Thick Description and the Jewish Theatre had a hit with their coproduction of Greenspan’s Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain. Greenspan spoke to the Guardian by phone from New York ahead of his appearance at CJM.

SFBG The Stein lecture you’re presenting ran in rep with the New York revival of your 1999 play, The Myopia, in which Stein is also referenced. Was that the first time you’d done the lecture as a piece of theater?

David Greenspan I’ve done it periodically, one night here, one night there. And then I did it for a benefit for a theater company. Melanie Joseph, who runs the Foundry Theatre in New York, I invited her and she loved it. So when we began playing The Myopia, we decided we would include [a performance of] the Stein lecture in tandem. I had never had anything approaching a run before.

SFBG What drew you to that lecture as something to perform?

DG I’ve become interested over the last number of years in the theatrical possibilities of nontheatrical texts. I did this piece called The Argument, which is based on Aristotle’s Poetics and the writings of a man named Gerald F. Else, who wrote about The Poetics. The Argument recites the first half of The Poetics. I’d been toying with that for a while, and I’d also done — in a reading for a friend, a fellow playwright — the Stein lecture, and it went over so well, people so enjoyed it. So, besides the interest in the non-theatrical text as a performative work, it is an intriguing lecture.

And I should say, it’s not that it’s not performative. Even The Poetics. They’re both performative pieces in the sense that they’re both lectures, so they would have been given. Whatever difference between a lecture and a performance, it’s a presentation. So there’s theatrical potential in them. But I guess I was fascinated by her observations about the theater, how it addressed her own concerns, recollections, and reminiscences about growing up watching plays, and references to her experiences when she finally moved to Paris. I found it rather rich historically as well.

SFBG There’s that wonderful line you quote in The Myopia about theater as something that’s actually happening&ldots;

DG Right. Well, she says that something is always happening. And that anybody knows a quantity of stories, so what’s the use of telling another story? There are already so many stories. I think what she’s trying to get at is that there is something beyond simply telling the story. There’s some essence of what is happening. And she’s trying to depict [that] without actually telling a story. It’s almost a series of impressions that she’s molding, almost like a sculpture, to give an audience a sense, without a story, of an experience. Of course, in The Myopia I pickled it because The Myopia is filled with stories. In a sense, I use it as a way of separating myself from her because my concerns are different. But I still find her delightful.

SFBG What do you think of Stein’s plays?

DG I’ve seen a few of them on stage. They’re difficult to describe, and they’re difficult for me to talk about. The closest experience I’ve ever had to performing in something like Stein would be a Richard Foreman play. I acted for Richard Foreman once. His work eschews traditional action. It’s somewhat different, but it’s the closest I’ve come to something like Stein. Like she says, she’s not interested in story and action. She’s interested in emotion and time.

I think also what she’s interested in is coordinating to her own satisfaction a visual and aural experience, one that is not dependent on following a story. Because she had problems with that, she found that it bothered her to have to pay attention, particularly if it was a story that had any kind of nuance. She wanted to keep backing up and seeing it again and couldn’t do it. But to get back to your question, the plays themselves I can’t speak to, but the lecture itself with its analysis and observations of the theater experience — and it’s a very personal lecture, very personal descriptions for her — and the rich theatrical reminiscences, I find very satisfying and continually intriguing. Also it begins to elucidate what she was trying to do in her plays.

SFBG What kinds of things do audiences relate to?

DG When she describes her experience of theater as a young person, it’s all about San Francisco and Oakland. So it should give people a little bit of a peep hole into what it was like to see theater [back then]. It was very important to her, the arrival of foreign companies. And Sarah Bernhardt came through, and that was an important thing for her to see. It was very significant for her to see a play in a language she really didn’t understand. She didn’t have to follow it. She could just listen to it and look at it without dealing with a story. That’s what’s most important to her — how to coordinate seeing and hearing in the theater. 

DAVID GREENSPAN’S PLAYS

Thurs/26, 7 p.m.; Sun/29, 1 and 4 p.m., $20

Contemporary Jewish Museum

736 Mission, SF

(415) 655-7800

www.thecjm.org

Hot house Magic

Andrew Lam
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0
Hot house Magic

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Talk about community theater. New York City drag artist Taylor Mac doesn’t just bring his Obie Award–winning 2009 show to town, but a good swath of the town to the show. That includes six local directors and something like 40 local actors and musicians, with host Magic Theatre producing in collaboration with queer performance collective THEOFFCENTER and a large handful of other Bay Area players (Climate Theater, Crowded Fire, elastic future, Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, Shotgun Players, and TheatreWorks).

That’s probably as it should be for a sprawling, gleefully elaborate five-hour performance spectacle that revolves — with good camp humor, extravagant Theatre of the Ridiculous gestures, and devilishly arch songs set to composer Rachelle Garniez’s evocative genre-spanning musical score — around a simple message of brother-sister-otherly love.

A simple message, but couched in a most extravagant presentation. To begin with: Mac as the play’s titular flower, done up stunningly in garish green sequined fabrics and glittering makeup to match, a corolla of five spongy petals around his neck. As some wisenheimer points out in the first act, five petals in a corolla is actually one short for a normal lily, but there’s nothing normal about this Lily: an organic loner raised in a basement studio apartment in Daly City who decides one night to go to the theater. And anyway there are only five acts, so one per.

Suburban bumpkin Lily is audibly charmed and bewildered by what he sees onstage in Act I: a “princess musical” titled “The Deity” (directed by Meredith McDonough) that pops up vociferously from an array of frilly doll-like bodies, all named Mary, strewn over a patchwork wallpaper stage.

The musical would like to be a standard wedding tale, centered on a blustery latter-day maiden (Casi Maggio) chomping at the bit — just a typical romantic story overseen by the proscenium curtain, who goes by the name of The Great Longing (Mollena Williams). But opposing it all is no less than Time herself, played with a sort of airy gravitas by Jeri Lynn Cohen, decked out in a see-through plastic hourglass and a cuckoo clock for a hat. (The costumes, all stars in their own right, are by Lindsay Davis.) Time balks at the repressive hold of this narrative paradigm. To this end, she draws intellectual support from a random daisy (Julia Brothers) reawakened into her former life as a Berkeley critical theorist in comfortable outerwear named Susan Stewart, who recites from her book-length essay, On Longing (an actual book by an actual Susan Stewart, as it happens), attacking nostalgia as inauthentic attachment to an imaginary past at odds with the here and now (or something like that).

In short (not that there is anything short about this show), Time persuades Lily, as a creature grounded in the here and now, to join the proceedings. And Lily, his own love-struck ego asserting itself, decides to embark on a metamorphosis — to shed his flower self for a hoped-for underlying manhood, operating perhaps under a curse of one sort or another — so that he might win the bride for himself (and away from the all-too-male groom in Speedo and accordion, played gamely by Paul Baird).

It will be a shame if the run-time keeps the otherwise Lily-curious away. This was one five-hour extravaganza that really seemed to fly by. (I’ve sat through much longer 90-minute one-acts just this month.) If the plot of The Lily’s Revenge is not exactly designed to keep its audience guessing — our potted hero must live up to the title — the production does keep its audience moving, interacting, and generally engaged when not outright delighted by a steady stream of madcap turns and gaudy mayhem that spills joyfully off the stage and out into the lobby (where Jessica Heidt directs a series of Kyogen segments) and beyond.

A spirited platinum blonde called the Card Girl (Kat Wentworth) corrals the audience for no less than three intermissions, designed to encourage mingling, fraternizing, and face-time with fellow audience members and cast alike. (Meanwhile, Andrew Boyce’s sets and the seating arrangements are rapidly and inventively rearranged.) The intermissions come complete with an optional dinner, dance parties, songs “flushed from the show” performed in and around the lavatories, and other sideshow offerings (solid advice from a garrulous sock puppet, for instance, or a glad-handing glory hole) — all in compact 15-minute increments.

Each act has its own particular character as it advances the merrily convoluted plot. Act II (directed by Marissa Wolf) is set in the round in a flowerbed and features a verse-off between Lily and assorted garden varieties. Act III is a “dream ballet” directed and choreographed with inspired exuberance by Erika Chong Shuch, in which a hilarious second pair of marriage hopefuls (Joe Estlack and Rowena Richie) devolve, amid an onset of “options” and a frenetic set of macabre bridesmaids, into a comically horrifying orgy of indulgence. In Act IV we enter a virtual realm called Ecuador (long story), with animated video sequences to live voice-overs directed with wry sophistication by Erin Gilley.

Finally, as the wedding party assembles amid the “divine madness” of Act V (directed by Jessica Holt) and ceremonial noises erupt under direction of the domineering Curtain, the Revolutionary Flowers, having infiltrated the proceedings, suddenly burst forth from low-rent disguises and storm the stage, while an enormous papier-mâché turd floats across the stage ahead of a dyspeptic visit by the Pope and a giant black Tick holds the White Rose captive and — I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on by this point, to be honest. But as a debauched melee ensues, it’s pretty clear things are tending toward one hell of a climax. It’s all followed by a denouement too. This featuring an address by Mac, now in immaculate dress, the details of which are too charmingly candid to want to relate here. Better you see and hear for yourself.

The five-petaled Lily is most certainly the star of the show, but Mac is also a generous performer, giving ample space for his talented collaborators to shine. If some of the best moments are naturally centered on Mac’s riveting presence, the sweetness and childlike impetuosity in his endearingly comic character, and not least his enthralling power as a singer, there are many more highlights to be had, big and small, among the general bloom.

THE LILY’S REVENGE

Tues–Sat, 7 p.m.; Sun, 2:30 p.m.;

Through May 22; $30–$75

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center

Bldg. D, Third Floor, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

 

Age against the Machine

Andrew Lam
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1
Age against the Machine

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Death-defying acts of autobiography enliven the main stage at the Marsh this week in Geoff Hoyle’s unadorned yet dazzling new solo show. Developed with director David Ford — and one of the very best things to come from the Marsh’s fertile performance breeding grounds all year if not longer — Geezer takes a serpentine course through the accomplished career of the longtime Bay Area actor and physical comedian to confront the challenges, epiphanies, and qualified, but nonetheless quality, opportunities of aging and mortality.

There’s something undeniably stirring already in an actor as protean as Hoyle talking about metamorphoses beyond his control or ken, but to watch the English-born 64-year-old master showman, without props or costumes, convert aging into a frenetic, heart-pounding, hilarious virtual-reality game of 3-D megaplex proportions lets you know his game, at least, is a long way from over.

But this is a clear-eyed confrontation with the inevitable, as well as a backward glance, half-bemused and half-knowing, at the accumulations of a life. As enthralling as the sure comedy on display are the memories and questions, political awakenings and philosophical musings, that buttress a beautifully crafted script, a fascinating and poignant memoir animated by flights of whimsy and physical poetry that few performers of any age can muster.

Dwelling with a mix of palpable emotions on his working-class roots in postwar Yorkshire, childhood Hoyle was the hyperactive class clown bursting with an unbridled but unguided desire to perform. He’d probably have been medicated anywhere else, but Yorkshire in those days could still provide class clowns with a fighting chance. Crucial assists come from a handful of role models and supporters (all deftly brought back to life before our eyes), one English university’s spanking-new drama department (a fine opportunity for Hoyle to relive for us his hysterically clueless audition), and the French government, which financed the young university graduate’s study with master of corporeal mime Étienne Decroux in Paris (where the uprising of May 1968 called the young, instinctively socialist artist to the barricades in his off-hours).

The journey of this journeyman artist ultimately lands in the Bay Area, where Hoyle becomes a Pickle Family Circus performer with a budding family of his own (including Marsh star Dan Hoyle, quite a chip off the old block). But the germ of his peripatetic career can be found in the pivotal half-intended gestures of his humble parents, especially those of his father, an otherwise reserved typesetter with a fondness for the jocular tunes of the English music hall — one of which winds its way cleverly through the narrative — who also bequeathed his son a volume of Shakespeare’s collected works. His father had little grasp of the Bard himself but a sure sense of the bulky tome’s importance as a cultural step up. Indeed, some key lines from Shakespeare — ruing life as “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” — form another of the play’s supple leitmotifs.

Macbeth’s soliloquy, committed to memory by the young Hoyle long before its full import could possibly accrue, is no gratuitous Bartleby citation either but lines deeply connected to his narrative — immortal lines, no less, and testament to the potential in art to simultaneously look without illusion at oblivion and still defy it anyway by the sheer projection, across many lifetimes, of such exquisite perfection and courage.

What a dissection this is — of a life, of an artist, of the purpose of art, and of the conundrum of memory and loss that gathers darkly over the heads of those blessed and cursed with longevity. The fusing of mesmeric physical performance, searching autobiography, subtle humor, raucous hilarity, and tender regard all come together to form a thematic whole of pronounced charm and beauty.

GEEZER

Wed.–Thurs., 8 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun., 5 p.m.; through July 10

The Marsh

1062 Valencia, SF

(415) 826-5750

www.themarsh.org

 

Found in translation

Andrew Lam
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0
Found in translation

arts@sfbg.com

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

— Goethe

THEATER In Mark Jackson’s breakout theatrical hit, 2003’s The Death of Meyerhold, title character and playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold asserts that “the classics are always new. That is why they are called the classics.” That philosophy of theatre is one that Jackson’s other plays frequently embrace. From reimagined Shakespeare to adaptations of underproduced Russian dramas, Jackson’s work is invariably characterized by his respect for and understanding of the universal nature of human emotion, regardless of location or century, as well as an intensely verbal style of playwriting and often aggressively physical staging.

It’s a logical progression that a writer with such a facility for his own language might eventually turn to the translation of theatrical works in other languages — especially after spending a year abroad, steeped in the theater scene of another country (in Jackson’s case, Germany). To date, Jackson has translated two full-length works, Faust, Part 1 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mary Stuart, by Friedrich Schiller, presented in 2009 and 2010 by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage. Translating from a director’s perspective, Jackson’s primary focus is on the spirit of the original play, and the intentions of the playwright, not necessarily a word-for-word direct interpretation.

“Why do that,” he wonders when asked about his approach, “except out of academic interest?” In addition to preserving the overall intention of the pieces he translates, Jackson also focuses on what he calls the “music” of the German language.

“Fortunately, because English is a Germanic language, it’s easier to retain the melody of it,” he explains. “To streamline the text but keep the poetry.” From Jackson’s perspective and personal experience, it’s the music of a language that ultimately reveals the character of its people, and therefore the characters of the pieces he translates.

For Rob Melrose of the Cutting Ball Theater, an experimental Bay Area company with a dedicated bent for the classics and the avant-garde, translation is an opportunity to stretch his comprehension of the English language and language in general. A dabbler in five languages in addition to English, Melrose has translated a total of seven plays from French and German and appreciates the insight into different cultures learning languages has given him: how the spare simplicity of French reveals the elegance of the French; how the logical, tightly constructed phrases of German are engineered as flawlessly as one of their vaunted automobiles. But even more, he appreciates the ways that these other languages push him as a writer and an artist.

“Working in another language makes you think differently,” Melrose explains. “Learning how other languages work helps me appreciate our language better and helps me identify what is unique about it. It also helps me stretch English a bit by trying to make it do what French can do or what German can do.”

It’s fair to say that Bennett Fisher, a cofounder of San Francisco Theatre Pub and an English teacher, has an in-depth understanding of English, which may be why for fun he chooses to translate plays from ancient Greek and French. The convivial atmosphere created by San Francisco Theatre Pub doesn’t mask its emphasis on thinking theatre, including Fisher’s translations of Cyclops and Ubu Roi. For his Greek translations, Fisher relies on the translation website Perseus project (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper), first translating chunks of text verbatim, then struggling to fill in the blanks.

“What I end up with is a kind of “me Tarzan, you Jane” sentence,” he says. “Then it’s a kind of puzzle to figure out what it means and how to phrase it to make it sound conversational. Once I get a handle on that, I can do all the stuff I do with French in terms of getting at feeling, tone, intent, and all that. There’s a lot of trial and error. It’s kind of like being a director — you try interpreting the dialogue in different ways and eventually you find a choice that feels right.”

It’s not just the classics that inspire local theatre-makers to try their hand at translation. One of the most exciting productions of 2006 was foolsFURY’s take on Fabrice Melquiot’s The Devil on All Sides, translated by artistic director Ben Yalom. A harrowing blend of magical realism and atrocity, Melquiot’s play set in the former Yugoslavia was pronounced the theatrical discovery of the year in his native France in 2003. The production went on from San Francisco to New York City, and helped inspire foolsFURY’s ongoing Contemporary French Plays Project, with two more Melquiot translations in the works and more possibilities waiting in the wings.

Daniel Zilber, cofounder of the Thrillpeddlers, translates original Grand Guignol plays from early 20th-century Paris, retaining all the melodrama and humor of the originals. Both the foolsFURY’s emphasis on physical artifice and the extreme naturalism of the Thrillpeddlers stem from French theatrical traditions, an influence that even extends to the writing and staging of their English-language productions. Much the way the art of translation pushes theatre-makers like Jackson and Melrose to think differently about the language of playwriting, so does the language of French theatricality encourage foolsFURY to create seething tableaux of writhing bodies, as in 2008’s Monster in the Dark, and the Thrillpeddlers to push the playfully edgy Grand Guignol aesthetic in their English original shows.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that some of Bay Area theatre’s most compelling risk-takers are also drawn to the possibilities translation offers them — from the challenges of the process to the rewards of producing a fresh interpretation of a classic work for the modern stage. But the greatest impact of the translation process may well be the way it continues to influence these theatre-makers during the creation of their original works. Perhaps Melrose puts it best: “It’s only by knowing these other languages well and by translating classic works that I have the idea to push English in my own writing.”

 

Harmonic canons

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Harmonic canons

THEATER A gorgeous clutter of instruments fills the stage at Z Space/Theater Artaud this week, and audiences, after an eye- and earful of Schick Machine, are invited to go up and play them, too. A musical background is unnecessary: Nothing on stage likely resembles anything you grew up practicing, and anyway all that’s called for is a little rhythm. The show itself gives you a healthy dose, amid a wonderfully designed, gently madcap, almost cosmological musing on the nature and origins of rhythm as well as our yearning embrace of it (and vice versa).

The Paul Dresher Ensemble’s Schick Machine — a collaboration with, among others, writer/director Rinde Eckert — gives the stage over to master percussionist and contemporary music veteran Steven Schick. In the character of musical inventor Laszlo Klangfarben, Schick wanders around a garden playground laboratory of ingeniously crafted percussive and stringed instruments (composer Dresher’s fanciful yet practicable inventions), against a video backdrop evocative of everything from superstrings to abstract expressionist painting to architectural blueprints and scientific scribblings. The instruments of wood and steel form elegant ridges, playful spirals, majestic fans, Ferris wheel–like magic circles, and sonic tulip patches — a kind of Eden for a lone but rarely lonesome madman. Schick’s balding head and glasses compliment the mad scientist look, though his outfit — a high blue apron over white shirt and thin tie — calls to mind an old fashioned small-town grocer.

The thinly-sketched narrative is an excuse for a quiet and contemplative piece of theater, though great explosions of rhythm are mixed in with the goofy humor and crisp, enrapturing visual aesthetic. At the center of it all, the piece suggests, is a single heartbeat.

 

LADY GREY AND OTHERS

Will Eno’s plays (or at least the half-dozen I’ve seen and/or read) tend toward being tongue-in-cheek questions about the relevance of theater, whether as an art form, a social undertaking, or a compliment to dining out. Self-consciousness is both a conceit and strategy here, the basis for playing with inherited forms and conventions as well as an unevenly successful but sometimes rich brand of humor. The best plays not only win laughs but some pang of recognition, through a deft balancing of the profound and the banal. The less successful plays devolve into pretentiousness and sentimentality. In any case, the idea that the traditional theatrical stage is being overturned can only be indulged if you consider a pretty small section of it.

In Cutting Ball Theater’s presentation of Will Eno’s Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and other plays it’s those inconspicuous “other plays” that are most worth seeing. Lady Grey, like the title suggests, is a shadow of former glory, to wit, Eno’s 2004 breakthrough play, Thom Pain (based on nothing), whose structure — up to and including the title itself — provides the template for this play. Cutting Ball had deserved success with Thom Pain, thanks to actor Jonathan Bock, playing no small part but a big and lonely one: the angry, tortured, sarcastic young man who single-handedly holds the audience hostage for an hour or so, assailing it with words, suspect memories, and bold staring contests.

Lady Grey calls for a similar fearlessness and fierceness, depositing onstage something like a female version of Thom Pain to accost and cajole the “audience” (here too much a written idea of one to avoid those scare quotes) across the fourth wall. In the title and only role, Danielle O’Hare, as directed by Cutting Ball’s Rob Melrose, was inconsistent if occasionally beguiling, rarely seeming to step out from behind the text, or rather to completely own its conceit of not being a text. But Melrose and O’Hare, who have done memorable work together in the past, are also essaying a less inspired play. Grey adds up to a hit-and-miss series of one-liners, not a very compelling total.

The other two short plays that make up the fairly brisk evening prove more rewarding. Intermission, which opens directly after one, is an amusing and almost wise desultory conversation between an older couple (Gwyneth Richards and David Sinaiko), and a younger one (Galen Murphy-Hoffman and O’Hare), during the intermission of a seemingly tedious play about life and death. Melrose gets superbly dry performances from his cast, doing full justice to this light but cunning little play riffing on theater’s capacity for channeling yearning, regret, and blank obliviousness.

Cutting Ball regular Sinaiko then returns for the archly histrionic monologue Mr. Theatre Comes Home Different, a piece that the actor — playing an actor reveling in a state of decidedly Eno-esque self-consciousness — rocks with utter conviction. It’s a high note to end on and, for all the seeming ambivalence and sentiment in this slice of Eno’s oeuvre, went perfectly well with dinner.

SCHICK MACHINE

Through Sun/27, $10–$20

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

LADY GREY (IN EVER LOWER LIGHT)

Through April 10, $15–$50

EXIT on Taylor

277 Taylor, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

Mother courage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Mother courage

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE As outrage mounts at the vicious repression of civilians in Libya, Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined reminds us of the ongoing crimes against humanity — in particular the strategic use of sexual violence against women — carried out routinely for years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The devastating civil war that began there in 1998 continues today as one of the most destructive on the planet, having taken well more than 5 million lives.

Despite its title, Ruined is as much a tribute to the persistence of life amid the most unspeakable atrocities. The play gets a strong, well-acted Bay Area premiere in a coproduction between the Berkeley Rep, Huntington Theatre Company, and La Jolla Playhouse. Directed with sharp timing and a keen eye by Liesl Tommy, it uses a small circle of characters to draw attention to the horrendous ordeal, as well as the enduring fortitude and resilience, of hundreds of thousands of Congolese women whose bodies, as one character puts it, have been used as battlegrounds in a ruthless and terrifying conflict.

Mama Nadi (an expansive and canny Tonye Patano) runs a modest little bar and brothel in a mining town somewhere in the lush and lawless countryside of eastern Congo. Her clientele are exclusively men: a dangerous mixture of miners, soldiers, rebel militiamen, and shady merchants. Not unlike the title character in Brecht’s Mother Courage (which was indeed the inspiration for Nottage’s protagonist and a starting point for her play as a whole), Mama does her best to keep the conflict outside in the name of doing business, insisting that her customers unload their weapons before entering and smoothly managing any potential unrest with a swift flow of alcohol or some proffered female companionship.

But in truth, the best Mama can hope for is an uneasy negotiation with the usually heavily-intoxicated and power-drunk marauders who inevitably bring the evils of war with them as they come looking for respite. And Mama is not all business either. She’s reluctantly kind-hearted, a trait that creates (or recapitulates) conflict where she would prefer there was none.

Four years sober but soon pushed off the wagon, Mama’s friend Christian (a compelling Oberon K.A. Adjepong) brings over two young war refugees as new labor for her business. She finally accepts both, even though the shy, limping Sophie (a moving Carla Duren) is “ruined” by the sexual assaults she’s suffered, and thus of limited use to the proprietress. The other woman, Salima (Pascale Armand), is a former wife and mother cast off by her husband and community in the wake of her abduction and rape by a group of soldiers. (Her soldier husband, played by Wendell B. Franklin, eventually comes looking for her, having reconsidered, but he doesn’t realize she’s pregnant.)

The Brooklyn-born Nottage — whose earlier play Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine is also running in the Bay Area this month in a production by the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre — traveled to Africa to hear firsthand from Congolese women who had suffered the various forms of violence, exploitation, and exclusion depicted here. There is a strong sense of authenticity in the stories that Ruined elaborates, despite the conventions of the dramatic form she has chosen. It’s an emotive and sturdily constructed drama, if also a traditional and familiar-feeling one.

The tension arises less from the storyline — which is dispersed across several overlapping plot points — than the palpable threat of violence and fearful gloom permeating the stage, an open-air barroom enshrouded by vaunting jungle in scenic designer Clint Ramos’ impressive rendering.

It’s a venomous atmosphere dispelled strategically, here and there, in merciful moments of humor, tentative affection, and bursts of lovely, joyful song delivered by Sophie (backed by an understated but terrific pair of musicians acting as Mama’s house band: Adesoji Odukogbe and Alvin Terry). This dynamic — the contrast between the memory and promise of happiness contained in the music, and the toxic physical and mental forces bearing down on the characters — might be Ruined‘s most tangible illustration of the perversion of life by war. 

RUINED

Through April 10

Berkeley Rep, Roda Theatre

2025 Addison, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

The shakes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The shakes

THEATER When your free-form sister (Amy Resnick) arrives from Los Angeles with a yoga mat, but without a job, a place to go, a return ticket, or a care in the world—except for an unopened package some guy named Bulldog asked her to hand off when she got to Minneapolis — it’s unsettling. What’s even shakier, though, is such a visit combined with a marriage teetering on the brink, a job or two in the balance, and a worldwide economic depression. It’s then that foundations critically loosen, supports buckle, things suddenly fall apart. But is it all just Rumsfeldian “stuff” happening, or some human-made flaw in the system?

That’s a question lurking teasingly, even frustratingly at the heart of Allison Moore’s Collapse, an inconsistent but often bright new comedy now enjoying a sure and high-spirited production under director Jessica Heidt at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre. And by heart we mean the play’s operative real-life metaphor: the deadly Aug. 1, 2007 collapse of a Minneapolis bridge. The piece of Interstate 35W that plunged into the Mississippi River that day was in heavy and regular use, a standard steel-truss arch bridge whose soundness no one would have thought to question. A broken stretch of it appears here as the impressive principal feature in Melpomene Katakalos’ scenic design, filling the length and height of the back of the stage and looming over the action throughout.

Officials pronounced the likely cause of the accident a design flaw, coupled by extra weight. That’s a description that could fit the whole socioeconomic system girding the play’s action and themes. Set in 2009 against the literal backdrop of the bridge and the figurative one of the current economic crisis, nothing is as secure as it once seemed in the staunchly middle-class home of attorney Hannah (Carrie Paff) and her husband David (Gabriel Marin). David, we learn, has not been going to work much and has become a queasy, quasi-alcoholic—more of a poser than anything else, since he secretly drops most of his beer on the house plant, but anything to justify his ungovernable fear since miraculously surviving the bridge collapse in 2007.

As flaky sis Susan (played with a hilariously reckless, chirpy energy by Resnick) arrives from LaLa Land with her disturbingly large suitcase, Hannah has been concentrating the couple’s energies on having a child. A professional and beautiful woman used to getting her way and now (in Paff’s nicely nuanced performance) increasingly at a loss as things slip out of her grasp, Hannah pushes the baby idea to erase another recent, related tragedy, even as her position at the firm looks precarious.

She also pushes David (played by Marin with a comically anxious, hangdog moodiness) toward AA. Somehow she ends up going instead, on his behalf, as David decides to deliver the shady mystery package himself. When in the hallway Hannah meets a charismatic black man named Ted (a charmingly imposing Aldo Billingslea) — nickname, Bulldog — an affair looks in the offing, and a crime caper, to boot.

Heidt’s strong cast transforms the unmoored quality among these four characters into some good laughs. But Moore’s writing is up and down. The dialogue is crisp at times, labored at others. Moreover, the characters can come too laden with undeveloped contradictions. Most unsettling is the sudden shift in the final scene, which forgoes comedy for a forced sincerity that brushes any larger political point under the condo rug. When an emotional David asks his wife, “How do we keep collapsing?,” her response tolls an unsatisfying reaffirmation of marital harmony: “Maybe we can’t. Maybe we can just figure out how to fall together.”

While set amid an ongoing social crisis, Collapse edges away from that terrain as if from a dizzying height and retreats into personalizing discourse about romantic love and middle-class domesticity. That’s the kind of turn that leads from the potentially subversive back toward the status quo. 

COLLAPSE

Through March 6; $34–$55

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

 

Classic ‘Rock’

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Classic ‘Rock’

arts@sfbg,com

THEATER Only the barbarity of these dark dumb days could make someone nostalgic for the Reagan era. A simpler time? Not for most — hairstylists maybe least of all. But in The Man of Rock, New Jersey in 1986 appears mercifully devoid of economic mayhem, quasi-fascist politics, or the doom-shrouded future they portend, which is probably why this lively new music-blasted comedy can rock so well. Heavy metal, yes; heavy going, no.

At the same time, Bay Area playwright Daniel Heath (of Forking fame) shrewdly draws here on George Etherege’s 1676 Restoration comedy, The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter, for a sweet and saucy adaptation that ensures there are brains, too, under all the big hair. One could almost call The Man of Rock (featuring spot-on original music by Ken Flagg) the thinking person’s Rock of Ages.

In Heath and director Jessica Heidt’s sure, evocative transplantation, Etherege’s witty aristocratic rake, Dorimant, becomes a one-hit rocker and multihit lady-killer operating a live-music bar on the trashy tourist boardwalks of the Jersey Shore. Perennially short of rent, Dorimant (played by a smooth Adam Yazbeck) gets a tip from his weary landlady (Arwen Anderson, in the first of several deft turns) about the arrival of a rich, eligible young Connecticut princess, Antoinette (Anderson again), also known as Toni, summering at the shore under the watchful eye of her cheerfully high-strung, busybody mother (a sharp and funny Danielle Levin, in one of several distinct roles).

Never mind that Dorimant already has a girlfriend, singer Suzie Love (a winningly earthy Michelle Maxson), or that he’s working on throwing her over for her best friend, the smart but smitten Missy (a somber, soulful Levin): Dorimant loves only Dorimant.

Until he meets Toni, of course. Then sparks fly in all directions. The brainy, initially icy Toni, for her part, is slower to savor the comical suave of her rock-star suitor. Yazbeck delivers cocksure rogue Dorimant with laid-back cool and a convincing glam-rock literary pretentiousness that is the play’s single overt nod to the lilting language of the original text, while nimbly aligning it with an utterly distinct era. “Your ship of conjecture has left the feeble harbor of your facts,” he tells a suspicious Suzie at one point. It’s a ridiculous phrase, yet Dorimant can get away with it, even amid the more off-the-rack working-class accents and preppy inflections of those around him. At the same time, a good part of the fun between Dorimant and Toni is the latter’s ruthless ability to mock this verbal frippery.

Meanwhile, Suzie smells a rat, Missy wallows in lovelorn guilt, and Dorimant’s fellow musicians — assembled under the choice name Silverwolf (bassist Chadd Ciccarelli, guitarist Joshua Hertel, and keyboardist Dane Johnson, backed on drums by an able and charismatic Lance Gardner in another of the production’s outstanding multirole performances) — cast disapproving glances in his direction.

A couple more significant subplots unfurl as well, the first having to do with the fact that Toni is not as well off as she appears, and her mother is therefore desperate to see her married to eligible childhood chum Harry Bellair (a smart, effortlessly charming Patrick Alparone), son of a wealthy businessman (a hilariously loud, cigar-chomping Gardner), but also secretly gay. Then there’s the arrival of a new band on the scene, Hämmer (conjured by the same backing musicians in different wigs), complete with umlauts and a lead singer named J.J. Rock — a balls-out, over-the-top fop played with sock-puppet falsetto but real panache by Alparone. The cast as a whole convincingly sells the rock numbers scattered throughout the play with a combination of respectable, even exceptional musical ability and pitch-perfect histrionics.

Naturally, everything resolves on the tonic, which is to say on a happy note. And if that’s not reality, it’s not noise pollution either. *

THE MAN OF ROCK

Through Dec. 23

Wed.–Thurs., 8 p.m.; $15-35

470 Florida, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.climatetheater.org

More than child’s play

Andrew Lam
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0
More than child’s play

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Enticing adults with a children’s story shouldn’t be too hard these days, with trails long since blazed by comic-book blockbusters, primetime cartoons, and the like. Still more to the point, the theater has a long tradition of adapting folk and fairy tales to sophisticated, not to say macabre purposes. Witness ACT’s hit run of The Black Rider or — in New York City — the current blood-splattered take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes by Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theater, which last year offered its Brief Encounter to Bay Area audiences.

So what’s the matter with Coraline?

The stage adaptation of creepster fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman’s 2002 children’s story (also a 3-D animated film in 2009) proves a generally drab musical in SF Playhouse and director Bill English’s West Coast premiere, despite sporting an impressive ensemble of collaborators that includes playwright David Greenspan (book) and the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt (music and lyrics). It’s all the more surprising given the inherent attraction of the material, which comes shot through with quirky staging possibilities and rich, dark veins of psychology and existentialism.

The title character is a sharp, gutsy little girl and only child (played by the confident and tuneful if somewhat too flinty Maya Donato, alternating nights with Julia Belanoff) born to a pair of middle class English parents (Jackson Davis and Stacy Ross). Their eccentric neighbors include a pair of aging actresses (Susi Damilano and Maureen McVerry) and a Russian showman (Brian Degan Scott) who carries around a mouse-circus tent.

Coraline and her parents live in one half of a converted old house (a spectral pop-out figure looming in the back of English and Matt Vuolo’s slightly Seuss-ian scenic design). The other half remains empty, supposedly, separated from the inquisitive Coraline by an intriguing door leading immediately onto a brick wall. Naturally, this proves no impasse, soon offering the little girl entrance into a parallel universe where the neighborhood cat (Brian Yates Sharber) suddenly commands the power of speech and her “other” parents (Davis and Ross again) — with black buttons sewn into their eye sockets — eagerly await her arrival.

Coraline at first appreciates this Other World where, for one thing, people seem to get her name right, instead of insisting on calling her Caroline all the time. But the place, which she herself notes is more like “an idea” than a physical reality, also comes to threaten her profoundly. Meeting a group of lost children who’ve become forgetful ghosts, she comes to understand that her Other Mother is in fact a wicked pursuer bent on snatching her soul, and who has meanwhile abducted her real parents. With the help of the independent-minded but sympathetic cat, Coraline will summon the wherewithal to beat back this threat, but the experience — corresponding to a child’s first confrontation with the fact of her own mortality — leaves her changed, more knowing, in touch with her “authentic” self.

Musing on the latent, vaguely Heideggerian content of this “children’s story,” however, turns out to be just one way of passing the time over the course of 90 otherwise-uneventful minutes. Musically, the play begins with a tinkly little overture on toy pianos by the ensemble, before transitioning to off-stage (and somewhat muted) piano accompaniment by music director Robert Moreno. Merritt’s lightly humorous songs seesaw between naïve surface gestures and intimations of roiling depths. But the shrewd charm of the songs themselves can’t carry a show preoccupied with balancing the story’s cuteness and its potential shock value, and leaning too heavily toward the former. (It may have been a shrewd move of the original New York production to have cast an adult, namely actress Jayne Houdyshell, in the title role, thereby holding out the potential for greater subtlety and irony at the center of the story.)

The material and music notwithstanding, the production’s too timid approach to the violence and dread in the story tends to fracture the action into a series of adorable bits and self-consciously “playful” wickedness. The Brothers Grimm or even Hans Christian Andersen it ain’t, though you can’t help feeling it should have been.

CORALINE

Through Jan. 15; $30-50

SF Playhouse

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596

www.sfplayhouse.org

 

Heavenly landing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Heavenly landing

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER A rare sighting the weekend of Nov. 18-20 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Cynthia Hopkins, as intergalactic space pilot Ruom Yes Noremac, a post-human “Druoc” in a floppy silver space suit hovering high above the stage of the Novellus Theatre, returning from the far distant future … to do what? “Save the earth, of course.”

It was one of many memorable moments in The Success of Failure (Or, the Failure of Success), a comical operetta musing on “the pros and cons of evolution,” and part three in the wildly inventive Accidental Trilogy developed by the New York City–based artist and company Accinosco. Before a spacescape projected across an enormous screen, above a stage aglow and twinkling with arch sci-fi phantasmagoria, Hopkins appeared to defy gravity with her deft spectacle and ethereal song. The atmosphere was one of all-pervading nostalgia and regret.

The real high-wire act, however, lay ahead, in the second half of the piece, after the conclusion of a wacky and yearning sci-fi bedtime story narrated from a billion years hence by a silvery flashing orb to her smaller, highly inquisitive offspring. By that point, baby orb has rebelled against the downer ending of mama orb’s story, preferring to make up a happy conclusion instead — that childlike one in which human beings do manage to evolve past self-destruction just in time.

The stage emptied itself of all pretense and everything but the barest of effects, leaving just the 38-year-old Hopkins and her story. Surrounded by a cluster of musical instruments and backed by a hand-drawn star chart of personal crisis and loss, she managed a feat of confessional theater. With uncommon and at times unnerving frankness and poise, Hopkins’ planetary grief and trepidation gave way to a hauntingly brazen concern with saving herself.

Between the planetary and the personal there was no contradiction. The stated aim of the entire Accidental Trilogy is a “mediation on the miraculously powerful (though intensely challenging) process of self-transformation,” as well as the tension between unbearable truths and their transformation into entertainments. Hopkins makes that plain at several points along the way, but never more brilliantly than in the opening lines of the final monologue, as she verbally telescopes, by orders of magnitude, from the full expanse of time and space to her precise location before a San Francisco audience.

This soul-bearing, careening, and stunningly well-delivered monologue cracks open the trilogy’s slyly self-referential conceit, founded on the life of character and alter ego Cameron Seymour (spelled backward in the sci-fi joint to derive space pilot Ruom). Hopkins takes us without artifice — beyond the assistance of her luminous songs — to the darkest points of her own evolution. Amnesia, escapism, failure, and alcoholism: these points reaching back to the defining grief of a mother who died of cancer when Hopkins was a girl. Her mother’s resolute faith and early demise stand throughout in wrenching ironic contrast to both her own and her father’s willful yet unsuccessful attempts to “throw ourselves into the jaws of death.”

“This is a funeral pyre,” she tells us, “and onto it I’m going to toss this method of turning truth into grotesque fiction.” The end comes in a blaze of passion and pain and conjecture, frenetic and quasi-poetic reenactments of past mania, and almost sacramental bursts of quirky, moving song. But, through “a magical ritual called forgiveness,” from those ashes something else rises, mushroom-like, at the scene of disaster. The universe collapses even further — down from the distance of galaxies and tongue-in-cheek fantasy, the pretense of art and performance, and the nostalgia for the loss of it all — onto a single face, captured in a tight beam of slowly fading light, as above her own unamplified guitar a bare crystalline voice muses in song on the wonder of the sun.

As a close encounter, it was one of a kind.

East Bay studs

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
East Bay studs

Kieran McGrath, a carefree 32-year-old Irishman living in New York City, would like to be a writer someday. In the meantime, he has a temporary job subbing for a friend as a carriage driver in Central Park. Its fortuitous, because the material for his first book will conveniently climb into the back of his palomino-drawn carriage in the form of an upscale pimp named Marsha and the series of rich and lonely Manhattan women she represents.

McGrath’s perspective on this unexpected line of work has a good deal of compassion and humor-laced insight to it, but playwright-performer David Cale’s one-man show, Palomino, takes us more than once around the park. With a facility for characterization, dialogue, and storytelling that draws one in slowly and surely, Cale unfolds a globetrotting tale of desire and connection from a variety of distinct perspectives, with McGrath’s alone being male heterosexual. By the end, the play achieves a subtle but affecting blurring of lines, as themes of love, solitude, and aging inform a disparate set of vivid personalities.

It’s more than a decade since British-born actor and playwright Cale mounted a show locally (the Obie Award–winning Lillian in 1999). Especially given the recent resurgence in solo theater, Cale’s return to the Bay Area in Aurora Theatre’s simple, elegant production feels timely. His work stands out from much of the solo theater landscape in being decidedly not about himself, but rather the story and characters he has in his head. Despite the actor’s physical dissimilarity to most of the people he plays, he delivers well-rounded and compelling characters. His women are especially attractive — not least the rich but fragile and searching widow, Vallie, one of McGrath’s clients, with whom he has a short but full-blown love affair.

A low-key but masterful performer, Cale displays a lot of love and understanding for his flawed characters, embodying them with supple charm on scenic designer Kate Boyd’s graceful stained-wood set, which swoops up and away toward a screen at the back of the stage. There, Rick Takes’ projected images offer choice visual compliment to the story’s continent-hopping narrative. Heartfelt and at moments a little gooey, the play nevertheless avoids tawdry romantic mush for a gentle, gliding look at the fears and gathering pain beneath lives largely spent skimming the surfaces of things, only every once in a while daring something deeper.

 

THE PLAY ABOUT THE NAKED GUY

“You can’t do this! It will be the death of Integrity!” And not a moment too soon.

Not that we’re unsympathetic to this outburst by Dan (an endearingly silly Brian McManus), the stuffy but passionate artistic director of a puny, unpopular Off-Off-Broadway company, the previously-referenced Integrity Players. But given the sampling of Integrity in action — a painfully earnest and self-righteous set of classical gestures that opens, with much winking hilarity, this zinging new comedy by playwright David Bell — it’s hard not to be thankful for the jolt Dan gets to his artistic sensibilities, not to mention his fragile theater-family composed of stalwart star (a sharp Jai Sahai), visibly pregnant wife and lead actress (a temptingly innocent Eliza Leoni), and disdainful producer and mother-in-law (a riotously larger-than-life Monica Cappuccini).

The jolt, incidentally, comes courtesy of his new producing partners, the box office geniuses behind such gay flesh outings as Naked Boys Running Around Naked and I Am My Own Whore. With financial problems of their own, the crafty Eddie (John Ferreira) and his pair of preening club-boy sycophants, T. Scott (Adrian Anchondo) and Edonis (Timitio Artusio), have moved into Integrity’s little turf to, as Dan puts it, “Fuck art right up the ass.” In tow is their box-office bait, porn star Kit Swagger (a swaggering Steven Satyricon), titular titillator for Eddie’s latest extravaganza, an (even more) homoerotic staging of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

Impact Theatre, which premieres The Play About the Naked Guy in its aptly seedy basement theater beneath a Berkeley pizza parlor, has a proven way with this kind of material. Directed with anarchic élan and requisite comical definition by Evren Odcikin, Naked Guy turns ably on stripper poles as well as a nicely off-the-shelf but just-true-enough clash between artistic truth and lowest-denominator mass entertainment. The real draw is in the camp, however, played to the hilt, and compellingly enough that it’s easy to echo Dan’s wife and mother-in-law in their rapt engagement with the trashy side: “This is fun! I wanna be gay too!”

“We all do, dear.”

PALOMINO

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.;

Tues., 7 p.m.; through Dec. 5; $10–$55

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

THE PLAY ABOUT THE NAKED GUY

Thurs.–Sat., 8pm (no show Nov. 25); through Dec. 11; $10–$20

La Val’s Subterranean

1304 Euclid, Berk.

(800) 838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

GOLDIES 2010: Christopher Kuckenbaker

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
GOLDIES 2010: Christopher Kuckenbaker

In September, the San Francisco Fringe Festival offered patrons an off-Beat gem, The Burroughs and Kookie Show. A deftly performed blend of homage and intimate psychic excavation, the play imagines William S. Burroughs (actor-playwright Christopher Kuckenbaker) as talk show host, opposite a deadpan, laconic musician named Loubis the Pubis (Louis Libert), and a missing cohost, “Kookie,” symbolized in absentia by a small, empty chair. Tonight’s guest? An unsuspecting actor named Chris Baker (Christopher Kuckenbaker again). At once mood-alteringly dreamy and piquant, shrewdly funny and unexpectedly poignant, the show deservedly scampered off with “Best of Fringe” honors.

Kuckenbaker is a sharp, versatile actor who’s plied the more vibrant fringes of Bay Area theater since the 1990s. He and his now ex-wife moved away in 2001 to pursue professional careers as actors in Chicago and Boulder, but Kuckenbaker returned in 2007. The timing was auspicious. A month later, he was memorably cast as real mama’s monster Grendel in Banana Bag & Bodice’s bicoastal hit, Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage. Next up, Kuckenbaker appears at Z Space opposite 2009 Goldie winner Beth Wilmurt in The Companion Piece, directed by Mark Jackson.

Kuckenbacker came to acting while at Santa Barbara City College. This followed a scattered upbringing in California towns like Hollister and Salinas, and far-flung lands like Australia. He credits all the moving around with seeding his actor’s outgoing personality. “It maybe forced me to be a little more gregarious than other people,” he suggests.

Arriving in San Francisco in 1993, Kuckenbaker received a degree from San Francisco State’s prolific theater department in 1997. Since then, his graceful work and alternately intense and quirky looks have made him a unique presence onstage. He’s also an astute and generous ensemble player who’s worked repeatedly with leading smaller companies like Art Street and the Shotgun Players; been part of a now defunct sketch comedy troupe called Old Man McGinty; and appeared repeatedly in Playground’s popular stagings of contest-generated short plays.

His own shift to playwriting, meanwhile, is more than a lark. He and Burroughs go way back. They first met in the Interzone of the imagination around the time Kuckenbaker left Santa Barbara with some Beat-obsessed cohorts for Bellingham, Wash., in the early 1990s. He stayed only a year in the Pacific Northwest rain, but something had happened to him up there, some inter-era nod, some afflatus. A mind-meld with old Bill.

“When I first moved to Bellingham, I’d go to the grocery store and pick up CDs of him reading his own works. That turned me on. There was something about his voice that triggered something in my brain, released some kind of new chemical in my head, and it just made sense.”

After gestating for nearly two decades, that initial inspiration has become a Möbius strip seamlessly joining in one actor two complex identities: Burroughs and the actor alter ego called on to process the painful end of a marriage. In giving a compelling dramatic shape to the voices in his head, Kuckenbaker says he’s found new definition in a still-unfolding career.

“When I look back, it seems to me I was just going from one show to the next, never really seeing myself any further along than the next show. Now, after giving birth to something in a very personal way, I want with all my power for it to grow and be seen, to spread itself out across the world. I have some big ideas about where I want to take the next iteration of The Burroughs and Kookie Show, making it a much larger and richer piece.” 

www.kuckenbakery.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

Now is the time

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Now is the time

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE The recent appointment of L. Peter Callender as artistic director of the African-American Shakespeare Company is exciting news, and not only for the San Francisco–based operation founded in 1994 by Sherri Young. With the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre recently rocked (though thankfully not tumbled) by the untimely deaths this year of its founding directors, Stanley E. Williams and Quentin Easter, the revitalization of a serious theater devoted to “coloring the classics” comes as especially welcome and timely. Moreover, the arrival of Callender — who, as a preeminent Bay Area actor for two decades, brings excellent experience and connections — promises a broadening of AASC’s programming as much as an overall increase in proficiency.

Case in point is AASC’s first outing under Callender’s leadership, IPH …, Irish playwright Colin Teevan’s 1999 adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. The U.S. premiere, directed by Dylan Russell, proves an uneven production, but it offers energy, invention, and, not least, Callender himself in a central role. Indeed, whatever its limitations, IPH … has no trouble expanding to fit the cavernous Brava Theater (coproducer for this season opener), which says something about the heft of the company now and going forward.

Callender plays King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces assembled at Aulis, en route to make war on Troy, whose Prince Paris has made off with Greek beauty Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother and Sparta’s king, Menelaus (Dorian Lockett). It’s a family affair, in other words, to which whole nations of people are unfortunately tied. But before the slaughter commences on the battlefield, Agamemnon must sacrifice one of his very own: beloved daughter Iphigenia (a warm and spirited Traci Tolmaire). A soothsayer has told him it is the condition under which the goddess Artemis will release his ships, now stranded in a dead calm.

In Russell’s expansive staging — which includes effective use of Matt McAdon’s gracefully sloping three-level set and Wesley Cabral’s large video backdrop — Callender’s Agamemnon stirs in nightmares at center stage, haunted and agitated like a giant unused to helplessness. Confronted by the bullying of his humiliated brother and facing the wrath of his proud, outraged, and grief-stricken wife, Queen Clytemnestra (an elegant and imposing C. Kelly Wright), Agamemnon musters all his regal strength. Only before his adorable and adoring daughter does he seem barely up to the task at hand. Callender excels as a leader of men brought to the very brink of emotional collapse by this cruel test of allegiance, responsibility, and resolve. (At times, however, disparities in acting ability can make it seem as if the actors onstage are in separate productions, as when Callender and Lockett’s kingly brothers square off.)

Of course, leaders of state rarely sacrifice their own in waging war — very much to the contrary. All too easy to have other, far less powerful people sacrifice theirs, hence the importance of ideas of “sacrifice” on behalf of a “nation,” whatever that is. (Interestingly, Jon Tracy’s In the Wound, currently making its premiere in a production by the Shotgun Players, is an adaptation of the same Greek myth that takes heated exception to this notion of national sacrifice). The drama as adapted by Teevan emphasizes familial conflict and presents us with the ultimately willing figure of Iphigenia, accepting her own death out of paternal love and a sense of civic obligation and a greater destiny. But the play’s very title suggests an underlying ambivalence, and Teevan frames the story from the world- and war-weary perspective of an old servant (Peter Kybart), who gives us the tale as a flashback, seen from the other side of 10 years of bloody and pointless conflict.

The playwright also balances all with a strain of mischievous humor, centered in a chorus of four catty, flirty women (Natalia Duong, Lisa Tarrer Lacy, Marilet Martinez, Sarita Ocon) who sing their narration to familiar melodies from the “classics” of American pop music — for instance, discoursing ravenously on the manly attributes of Achilles (Luke Taylor) to the tune of Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” The gambit has a generally crowd-pleasing effect, though as presented here it goes on a bit long, diluting the central emotional content of the play.

IPH …

Through Oct. 16; $15–$35

Brava Theater Center

2781 York, SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

Expansive roles

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Expansive roles

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE Ogun Size has shaped up into a complex, intriguing character across the first two plays staged so far in the Bay Area debut of Terrell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays. The Magic Theater last week opened The Brothers Size, the second play in the celebrated trilogy, in an electric production sharply directed by Octavio Solis. Its choice minimalism (including a spare but evocative car garage set from scenic designer James Faerron and scenic/lighting designer Sarah Sidman) gives just the right lift to three fine, exuberant performances and full rein to the 20-something playwright’s delicate, volatile drama set in and around a Louisiana bayou housing project.

Ogun is an important but secondary character in the first play, In the Red and Brown Water (now up at Marin Theater Company, as part of an unprecedented three-company production that includes an offering by ACT in late October). That play focuses instead on his onetime love, Oya. Her dire fate gets alluded to in passing here, with understated pain, as Ogun (played by the impressively dynamic Joshua Elijah Reese) recounts neighborhood news to brother Oshoosi (a vital and wry Tobie Windham). Recently paroled, the excitable, silver-voiced, and perennially irresponsible Oshoosi is very reluctantly working alongside (and under the wary eye of) his older brother in the latter’s automotive repair shop.

Ogun’s wary eye soon also falls on Elegba (played with a magnetic, mercurial charm by a terrific Alex Ubokudom), the third and final character in a coiled little story of love, loyalty, jealousy, and desire that teases meaning from notions of brotherhood while brooding on the inevitable singularity and alienation at the heart of life. Elegba was already deemed complex by Oya in the first play, but here he is both more lifelike and ethereal, grounded in an almost preternatural obsession to have and control his former prison mate, Oshoosi. The jealous battle for Oshoosi that ensues is alternately boisterous, eerie, and wrenching. In the end, we watch Ogun Size grow larger — an expanse of feeling that increases the capacity of a heart bereft but open — as he finds himself, per force, alone again. Expanding like the universe itself, Ogun’s fate makes the infinity of his love still larger.

GOING OUT TO PLAY


A friend and I went to a restaurant the other day, and while it’s always a little like being in a play, this was ridiculous — also stimulating, and even quietly ecstatic. I won’t give you the intimate, somewhat bizarre details of our half-hour interaction. Not because it’s private, but because it’s up for grabs: you can have it yourself if you want, exactly as we did.

True, it was never going to be an ordinary lunch. We expected something unusual since, although we entered a real San Francisco eatery, it wasn’t a meal we were after but a performance, designed by the London-based experimental troupe Rotozaza. Etiquette, which runs through this weekend courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is participatory theater approaching some sort of outer limit: the audience goes Ark-like by twos (you can be paired up with another bewildered stranger or go with a friend) and performs the piece for one another. This takes place amid a roomful of unwitting patrons there strictly for the usual, namely a meal.

The first thing you notice is that this table doesn’t come with a menu, not even a bar list. There’s a glass of water, but you’ll hesitate to touch it. Instructions come via headsets. There are other intricacies best not revealed here, but as the encounter unfolds you find the lines between theater and "real life" dissolving, and your identity softening at the edges like a once-crusty crouton atop a bowl of soup. Meanwhile, the headphones, the concentration of your partner, the voice in your ear, the world of the tabletop, the knowledge that you are in a play, watching a play, and that, hell, you are the play — all this makes it surprisingly easy to shrug off any inhibition you might otherwise feel about making a "scene" in a restaurant.

The scene is your own in that you inhabit it, but then it is also dictated to you, bound by certain constraints. This tension is part of the delight generated by the piece. The audience-member-as-performer accepts, just as any actor does, the work of the playwright and instructions of the director. Within that there is room for individual choice and interpretation, but any action or decision comes circumscribed by the larger form. Day-to-day we all play our parts, of course, more or less self-consciously. But I never realized what a relief it might be to have your everyday encounters literally scripted for you. I suddenly thought I knew why pirates have parrots on their shoulders. I’d naively assumed it was the man feeding lines to the bird.

While Etiquette‘s parts are gender-specific, the participants might be of any sex, no matter the role. In fact, the idea of liberation from ascribed roles comes woven, in subtly layered fashion, into the very narratives unfolding and overlapping across the table. If the foundation of identity relies on the cultural and social forms we inherit, how liberating it is, even momentarily, to sit down in public and embrace play in all its forms.

THE BROTHERS SIZE

Through Oct. 17, $20–$60

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

ETIQUETTE

Through Oct. 3, $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

“Red” bayou

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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“Red” bayou

STAGE The young woman has something wrong with her; a chorus of women tell us so. They’re neighbors in the same particular, yet nebulous, time/place: a housing project in a nameless small town in the Louisiana bayou, some time in the “distant present.” As if floating on water, the young woman, an African American teen named Oya (Lakisha May), lies prone on a dais at the center of an otherwise bare stage as they speak of her. Her name, like those of all the characters in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water, evokes African folklore, but there is something of the classical Greek tragedy about all this too, something of Lorca, and more. This is meta-theatrical terrain as hybrid and multifarious as the culture of the bayou itself.

As we circle back to the beginning of her story, Oya seems destined for great things. She’s an exceptional runner, a natural in fact, and it brings her great joy as well as the offer of a scholarship to the state school. But she defers the offer to be with her ailing single mother (Nicol Foster) and soon finds herself not moving at all.

Oya’s hopes shift to love. But the great love of her young life, a lothario named Shango (an excellent Isaiah Johnson), soon joins the military, leaving Oya to the care of a fallback sweetheart, the big, gentle, stuttering Ogun Size (Ryan Vincent Anderson). She continues stagnating, restless, unhappy, spending all her time on the porch of her house. It seems a baby might save Oya, but she appears incapable of becoming pregnant. Her desperation grows, since her womb and her world will not. Left with no room to breathe, no air, no forward motion, Oya’s fate is all but sealed.

It would be something for any new play by a playwright under 30 to live up to the hype that greeted McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water, which opened last week at Marin Theatre Company. Fortunately for playwright and audience alike, MTC delivers a solid production, attractively staged by its own producing director, Ryan Rilette (whose relationship with the playwright goes back to a production at Rilette’s former stomping grounds, New Orleans’ Southern Rep), and featuring some fine performances by a strong, engaging ensemble. But if the Bay Area premiere of this first work in McCraney’s much touted trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays — all being staged over the coming weeks in an unprecedented coproduction by MTC, the Magic, and ACT — well serves the real talents exhibited by the acclaimed newcomer, the play itself still falls short of its ambitious scope.

Rilette’s impressive cast and fluid staging take the poetry and humor in McCraney’s words and run with it. The playwright has his characters voice their own and others’ stage directions — calling knowing attention to the artifice of theatrical storytelling as well as the narrations we make of our own lives — and the actors handle this aspect with aplomb, deftly shifting from bland utterance to in-character performance of the emotion or action described. There’s much well-throated song and some affecting sensuality here too. But the theatrical style only partly makes up for some thinness in plot and character. Oya’s is a humble story, at one level, and the strength of the play comes in recognizing her as worthy of our attention. At the same time, the playwright’s urge to cast her along a trajectory of classical-tragic proportions ends up feeling overblown instead of quietly poignant.

Bay Area audiences have the opportunity to see The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy over the coming weeks, which is no small thing, marking an unprecedented collaboration between three major companies. The Magic Theatre opens The Brothers Size this week (Size having first brought attention to McCraney when it was produced by New York City’s Public Theater in 2006) and American Conservatory Theater will follow in October with the Bay Area premiere of Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet. Qualifications aside, this is an unusual and enticing project all around. 

IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER

Through Oct. 10, $32–$-53

Marin Theatre Company

397 Miller, Mill Valley

(415) 388-5208

www.marintheatre.org

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