The Performant

The Performant: People are Strange

Sue Vaughan
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Ape faces and hocus-pocuses

She was a medical marvel in an age where such marvels were not entirely uncommon. Forced into sideshows or the superficially more genteel lecture circuit, these Victorian-era human wonders were often exploited by their handlers and employers, but in an age where there were already limited possibilities for earning one’s keep, the ability to transform a physical disability into a money-making attribute was at least a more attractive proposition than starving.

For Julia Pastrana, the so-called “Nondescript,” her unusual condition — a form of hypertrichosis which covered her body in thick black hair and deformed her face — touring the world was better than staying in her home state of Sinaloa, Mexico, where she was a marginalized house servant. By all accounts, many of which are recited verbatim onstage in May van Oskan’s The Ape Woman, which played at the EXIT Theatre last weekend, she was an intellectually curious woman who spoke three languages, had a beautiful singing voice and a gracious manner, and even believed in romantic love, even though to outsiders her own marriage had the appearance of an exploitative measure on the part of her husband, Theodore Lent, who also happened to be her “manager”.

In van Oskan’s musical enactment of the Pastrana saga (billed as a “rock opera” despite long passages of spoken text), Julia, at last, is given a voice — and a ukulele — plus a backing band of folksy musicians. Portrayed by van Oskan, who eschewed appearing in “apeface,” which would certainly be a distraction, this Julia lulled us into a kind of melancholy trance as she related her troubled childhood; her escape, of sorts, into the exhibition business; and her journey into adulthood as medical curiosity, wife, and, briefly, mother to a child whose difficult birth resulted in both of their deaths.

Her external circumstances mainly described by a parade of carnival barkers, anatomists, and her exhibitor-turned-husband, Julia’s internal landscape was illuminated through song, a blend of harmony and shimmering introspection, of gracious acceptance of her strange lot, and a wistful yearning for normalcy.

“I keep letting the dreams in,” she confessed in song, as she reminisced over her unusual life path, from obscurity to celebrity, like a reverse kind of supermodel, an exploitable image for others to hang their fantasies and preconceived perceptions on, without taking into account the human soul beneath the exposed skin.

Unusual life paths are what the Dark Room Theater’s summertime Twilight Zone series is all about. Now entering its tenth year, The Twilight Zone is a collection of new plays written to vaguely resemble the Twilight Zone episodes of yore, taking ordinary people and dropping them into unexplainable scenarios that defy reason. This past weekend, a small-town hanging in I Am the Night, Color Me Black, became a metaphor for a creeping wave of hatred that threatened to engulf, not only the stage, but the entire world, and a small-town liar became an unlikely ambassador to the outer reaches of the galaxy in Hocus Pocus and Frisby.

Spoof commercials, a dreadlocked “Rod Serling,” and an intriguing implication for pool noodles reminded the odd-ience that they were no longer in Kansas, nor even in any stale remake, but in a uniquely San Francisco kind of world, where the unlikely lurks around every corner, and the curiosities are all of us.

The Performant: A Declaration of Independence

Sue Vaughan
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Taking the road less traveled with the Independent Eye

In a cozy living room in Cole Valley, a small but attentive oddience gathers to watch a trio of short theatrical vignettes performed by maverick theater-makers the Independent Eye.

Entitled Gifts, the three pieces have been performed over the years in previous incarnations, but never together, and the subtle commonalities that bind them are elegant and startling in equal measure. Focused primarily on human relationships, the complexity of desire, and the precarious yet universal nature of a journey into the unknown, Gifts follows three couples on their respective paths as they encounter all the unexpected complications and mysterious rewards that life throws at them along the way.

For Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, who have been both the creative partnership behind the Independent Eye and also life partners for over 50 years, revisiting these pieces with a deepened perspective honed by the implications of entering their final decades has been a process as revelatory to them as when they were created the first time.

“Everything resonates differently,” points out Fuller, with a gracious smile.
After celebrating their Quinquagenary touring their joint memoir of the life artistic, Co-creation, holding readings in the private homes of friends and acquaintances scattered around the country as well as the usual arts venues, the two began developing a show that could be toured in the same way, in order to utilize the unique intimacy that only a house concert-style performance can capture. A way to demystify and decommodify the theatrical experience, as well as a way to inexpensively return to their touring roots, during which they would perform upward of 200 performances a year, criss-crossing the country in a van, kids and puppets in tow.

What they ended up with was Gifts, a series of tenuously-linked duets, compressed enough in form and expansive enough in intention that Bishop refers to them as “dramatic haikus”.

Completely contained within the parameters of a throw rug, a small table and a pair of stools form the entirety of stage and set, while an array of props and puppets issue forth from a modest pair of suitcases, transforming the small space into an endless series of freeways, the tree of life, an amorphous dreamscape, a three-story walk-up, and the ephemeral realm of a pair of hungry gods. In fluid succession, a wrong turn on the freeway becomes a 40-year commitment to a path that feels as much like a mistake as a destination, the prospect of receiving a major award becomes a bittersweet comitragedy of errors, a couple facing the erosion of their golden years by the leaden weight of market forces experience a visitation from the gods — forces much more powerful than the merely mortal ones that have previously formed their trajectory.

And through it all, the almost subversive notion simmering, that a life lived creatively is a life worth whatever the material drawbacks, and that the transformative nature of the journey is by far the greatest reward.

Or, as Fuller succinctly puts it, “these pieces are a validation of different ways of getting ‘there’.”

See Gifts at the Garden Gate Creativity Center:

Fri/28, 8 p.m.
Garden Gate Creativity Center
2911 Claremont Ave, Berk.
www.gardengatecreate.com
www.independenteye.org

The Performant 150: We are the 99% (gay)

Sue Vaughan
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The Performant 150: We are the 99% (gay)

Celebrating Pride Month in the the-ah-tah

We’re already halfway through Pride Month, but there’s no end in sight for the mad whirl of activities you could be availing yourself of. Proud or not, there’s no excuse for a blank social calendar at this time of year. Hate the club scene? Don’t overlook the très gay possibilities of a night in the theatre (Truman Capote wouldn’t). For starters, you might check out one of the ongoing shows over at the venerable New Conservatory Theatre Center, or one by queer theatre stalwarts Theatre Rhinoceros, but for campier fun, The Performant has a few favorites of her own to recommend (being gay not required).

What’s more gay than Marga Gomez at the Mission’s beloved Latino drag bar, Esta Noche (which thankfully seems to have staved off closing, for now)? It’s Marga Gomez at Esta Noche with a stellar line-up of out-and-proud comedians, a special Pride Month version of her regular weekly “Comedy Bodega” shows she’s entitled The 99% Gay Comedy Fest. I’m not sure who comprises that other one percent — perhaps some asexual socialite who’s slumming on the queer comedy circuit — but as laughter is a universal experience, they’d doubtlessly fit right in. Unlike most other comedy shows around town, Comedy Bodega is totally free, and although there is a one drink minimum (it is a bar, after all), well drinks are only $3.50, leaving you that much more money in your pocket to tip the performers. Everybody wins.

Speaking of wins, psychedelic-era, gender-bending performance troupe the Cockettes have permeated both sides of the Bay with the ongoing (extended to July 27) Thrillpeddlers’ revival of one of their outrageous stage shows, Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, as well as an entire room of historical memorabilia at Mills College Art Museum as part of their “West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977” exhibition, which runs through Sept. 12. Also free to the public, the exhibition includes a June 26 screening of a pair of short films, Palace and Elevator Girls in Bondage, featuring key Cockettes including Rumi Missabu, Fayette Hauser, Hibiscus, and Miss Harlow.

Not free to the public, but always worth the price of admission, Tinsel Tarts is the fourth revived Cockettes’ show at the Hypnodrome, and it’s quite possibly the most outrageous one to date. In 1971, critic Rex Reed described it as “a spangled chaos of flesh, a seething mass of lurching bodies in lavish hock-shop costumes, doing their thing for freedom,” which well describes the Thrillpeddlers’ experience to a tee. If you’re lucky (as I was) you might get a chance to see not one but three original Cockettes strutting their stuff onstage: Missabu, Sweet Pam Tent, and fearless musical director (and “Chico Marx”) Scrumbly Koldewyn.  
 
And on the subject of ongoing revivals, if you’ve yet to see Boxcar Theatre’s rambunctious revamp of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now is the perfect time to remedy that. Not only has the show scored a float in this year’s Pride parade, but it just celebrated its 100th performance of its high-octane version of the John Cameron Mitchell/Stephen Trask musical, featuring an octet of sexy Hedwigs swarming the stage at the same time. Punks, trollops, glam girls, rocker boys, and soul singers, each more endearing than the last, no matter which performer lurks behind the wig (the cast rotates every few weeks). After numerous extensions, the show will close for good on August 10, so get proud, get drunk, and get a ticket while you still can.

The Performant: (Somewhat) lost in translation

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The Performant: (Somewhat) lost in translation

“Infinite Closeness” was a little ways off

Reminiscent of Mission parlor-art space The Red Poppy Art House, Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley, upon entrance, is a lot like entering the living room of an artsy friend. Comfortably mismatched chairs and a few scattered cushions, a kitchenette behind the stage curtains, inviting visitors to endless cups of tea, hardwood floors gleaming below a strand of primitive lighting instruments.

Just four years old as a venue, the Arthouse nonetheless gives off the vibe of a place that’s been around forever, lurking just below the radar, if not actually under the ground (unlike La Val’s Subterranean, it’s actually located at street level). In short, it’s about time I got around to attending an event there.

The piece, “Infinite Closeness” is a solo offering of Hungarian performer Csaba Hernadi, an entirely mimed evocation of the poetess Mari Lukacs, whose life spanned the horrors of the Holocaust, the communist regime, and the usual traumas and blessings of a life lived for poetry.

The stage is set with a few scattered props: couch, table, coat-rack, a cracked and legless mannequin. Some pieces such as a dressmaker’s dummy and what appears to be a kneeling refugee from a carousel menagerie lurk in unclaimed corners of the stage, perhaps conjuring the crowded edges of a mind in turmoil. Truthfully it’s not entirely clear what purpose they serve, which is presumably the point.

Clad in a modest high-collared blouse of cream and long black skirt that hangs just above unwomanly large bare feet, Hernadi “awakens” on his couch as a swell of sound, murmur and rushing wind, moves him forward. Stiffly seated at a “dressing table,” Hernadi as Lukacs brushes his/her hair and then takes up an onion, peels it, and presses it abruptly to his/her eyes, a visceral pantomime of grief.

Or at least that’s what it appears to be. Even more enigmatic than the unfamiliar strains of Hungarian would be are the broad strokes of silence that shield the piece from easy interpretation. My trusty theatre-companion V. gets restless. “There should be subtitles” he mutters near the end, though as the piece is silent, maybe he means inter-titles. I know what he means, though. Context is everything.

For just as art interprets us, so do we interpret art. And while we are by no means unwilling to follow Harnadi’s Lukacs’ down the various rabbit holes that turbulent times pulled her down throughout the years, lacking any prior knowledge of her biography makes extrapolating it from the raw movement onstage a challenge. Even the presence of a blurb in a program or a single line of her poetry would have served to round out our interpretation of the event in a way that Hernadi’s tender dances with the broken mannequin and an empty suit jacket don’t quite manage.

And while his reverence for his subject is evident and moving, ultimately the focus of the piece remains on him rather than her, as he is in the room with us in a way she is never quite allowed. Still, I’m grateful to Hernadi, and by extension Lukacs, for bringing me to The Subterranean Arthouse at last. I’ll be sure to not let another four year go by before I return.      

The Performant: Sympathetic resonance

Andrew Lam
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An evening of good vibrations at the Decameron

While there’s plenty of art created around post-apocalyptic themes, what frequently characterizes it is a sense of bleakness, struggle, and violence. Only rarely does the sheer resilience of the creative spirit get recognized, let alone celebrated by our visionary futurists.

But in the here and now, perched right on the edge of the city, lies an autonomous zone where the citizens of an imagined future have banded together not just in a sheer survivalist mode, but in a life-affirming one. Calling their temporary territory Oekolos, these merry pranksters ameliorate their straightened circumstances through their continued artistic endeavors, even as evidence of outside turmoil continues to rage around their peaceable kingdom.

It is in this celebratory spirit that the citizens of Oekolos welcome outsiders into their insular microcosm to experience the Decameron, a 10-day festival of 10 unique works per night (for a grand total of 100), presented by a rotating cast of performers.

Since each night is comprised of different acts and artists, my personal experience on one particular evening (last Wednesday, May 29’s grand opening night) can only roughly forecast what a later visitor might encounter on their own foray.

Ensconced in and around the historic Fort Mason Firehouse, the citizens of Oekolos have prepared all manner of entertainments to share with the intrepid visitor. Outside the Firehouse, I encounter a trapeze dangling daringly above the concrete ground, a flatbed truck quixotically enhanced by a gracious loft, a pair of masts, and a uniquely immersive musical instrument known as a “soundcave,” built mainly of the stringed innards of pianos, an enigmatic length of cable stretched 600 feet across the water, an intimate, semicircular amphitheater overlooking the bay, a wall of windowpanes being slowly painted over with vibrantly colorful vignettes. Inside the Firehouse a room of singular sculptures with movable parts and a room with a stage await inspection as night slowly falls, and the oddience gathers near.

Upon demonstrating the soundcave’s ability to respond to a note played independently within it by vibrating harmonically around it, creator Tyson Ayers uses the term “sympathetic resonance” to describe this spontaneous reaction. It’s the perfect descriptor of the effects such a miscellany of performance arts might provoke in both its participants and its observers.

For myself, the resonance comes in the form of the physical — a lone trapeze artist (Shannon Gray) struggling against the confines of gravity and her own body, the imposing figure of an erstwhile music “professor” (Andreas Bennetzen) attempting to distill the entire history of the music of Oekolos on the spare curves of his “detachable” double bass, an operatic aria swirled against a backdrop of dark night and bright flames (sung by Julia Hathaway), a boldly vulnerable figure (Allie Cooper) twisting along the length of cable stretched across the water to the boom of an electronic soundscape, the sensuous coil of a pair of dancing bodies (Bad Unkl Sista and Michael Curran) circumnavigating a pool of spotlight.

Each striking image vibrating a path into my memory banks, plucking my strings on the way in, staking future claim. There’s no telling in advance what part of the shape-shifting event might resonate with you, but it’s a pretty sure bet that you’ll encounter something in Oekolos to linger inside you, even after it disappears from the map for good.

Decameron

Through Sun/9

7:30pm, $35

“Oekolos” (Fort Mason Firehouse)

Fort Mason, SF

www.thedecameron.org

The Performant: Cracks in the pavement

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The Performant: Cracks in the pavement

Gentrification-proof poetry

Although the ongoing eviction saga (and upcomng relocation!) of Adobe Books, “the living room” of the Mission, from its 16th Street digs dredges up memories of all the neighborhood bookstores that have closed/moved in recent years, it’s worth being reminded that the book trade has only ever had a limited impact on the persistence of the written (and spoken) word, particularly where poetry is concerned.

In fact, the more tenuous the economic climate, the more tenacious poetry becomes, pushing itself like a hungry weed through the unavoidable cracks left in the superficially smooth pavement of gentrification. That poets are themselves accustomed to staying hungry yet artistically fruitful is a condition immortalized in the famous Robert Graves quip that “there’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either.”


There’s not much money, but plenty of poetry outside the 16th Street BART Station every Thursday night, rainy or not, when a constantly rotating crew shows up to the unnamed, (un)official poetry jam, armed with the essential tools of urban poets everywhere—tall boys in brown paper bags, open ears under fleece hoods, and a cache of words waiting to be unleashed.

As nightlifers in expensive shoes stroll out of the station en route to the increasingly upscaled Valencia Street, they pass by the chalk circle ringed by a throng of scrappy street poets, belting out their offerings with the hoarse-throated projection of people without a microphone to hide behind. Instigated in 2004 by a passel of performance poets from the now-defunct New College up the road, Thursday nights have continued to attract a wealth of wordsmiths for almost ten years: some published some not, some regulars some newbs, some lifers some dilettantes. There’s may be some good-natured vying for stage time, but the bottom line is anyone with something to share is welcome to jump into the circle, and there’s almost always at least one participant who electrifies beyond anticipation, making even the otherwise mostly oblivious passerby stop in their tracks and pay attention.

Meanwhile, in the Lower Haight, a more carefully curated reading series takes place at The Squat, attracting its own adherents with its appealing blend of irreverence and celebration. Conceptualized and commanded by one “Janey Smith,” The Squat is less of an actual squat (no-one actually lives in it) than a liminal territory for an underground intelligentsia to congregate without the burden of pretension.

Beware the published starting time—the real determiner is the setting of the sun, since readings at The Squat are conducted, perhaps by necessity, in the dark. After night falls sufficiently, the group is led in abrupt silence from Smith’s iconic San Francisco apartment to the “venue,” a completely empty apartment upstairs, barely illuminated by rows of flickering tealights (“if you have hair, try not to catch on fire” Smith cracks). We squeeze into the “living room” together, encircling a pile of sawdust, the “stage.” 

Of the four readers, three locals (Ben Mirov, Erica Lewis, and Cedar Sigo) and a special “guest star” from the East Coast (Alex Dimitrov), the one whose poems most stick in my mind are Mirov’s, whose chilly distillations of word and image and deliberately affectless tone perfectly suit a body of poetry written in and for a digital age. Lewis reads from her latest project, a linked series called darryl hall is my boyfriend for which she provides mixed tapes of Darryl Hall’s music for emphasis, Sigo, most recently published by City Lights, presents a series of short poems rife with lush imagery, and Dimitrov works the increasingly vocal crowd with his confessional anecdotes, both written and spontaneous. The police don’t show and no-one catches on fire, so the event is deemed a success. Housing scarcity being what it is in this town, surely this apartment can’t stay empty forever, so get down there while you still have a chance, or head down to 16th Street on any Thursday around 10 p.m. Either way you’ll quickly discover that though our bookstores might be under siege, our poets refuse to surrender the fight.

The Performant: Dare to DIVA

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: Dare to DIVA

A yearly performance fest supports XX creatives

Spring is in the air, and so is DIVAfest, the EXIT Theatre’s annual celebration of female artists and theater-makers. Founded in 2002 by Christina Augello to give female creators a secure space to showcase their craft, DIVAfest has hosted an estimated 500 participants have come through in the last 11 years, from visual artists (Sophie Kadow, Kathy Jo Lafreniere, Michelle Talgarow) to playwrights (Kerry Reid, Lee Kiszonas, Margery Fairchild) to music-makers (Beth Wilmurt, Shannon Day, Carrie Baum Love), to burlesque dancers (Odessa Lil, Red Velvet, If-N-Whendy). This year, the fest hits the stage May 9-June 2. 

If the idea of having such a space sounds redundant or unnecessary to you, I refer you to Valerie Weak’s excellent piece at Theatre Bay Area on gender parity which breaks down, in unambiguously hard numbers, exactly how wide the underrepresentation gap is between male and female theater artists in the Bay Area of the moment. Or consider this recent observation made by Lindy West in an open letter to white male comedians: “women are 50 percent of the population, yet when it comes to our interests and grievances, we’re treated like a niche group.” Sound familiar? If you’re a woman in the arts, or practically anywhere else in the public sphere, then it probably does. 

So it’s heartening to see DIVAfest not just thriving, but expanding its scope and mission. Now in its 11th year, DIVAfest has morphed into its own stand-alone, non-profit organization, in the process of developing a year-round season and artist incubation opportunities in addition to producing the annual festival, which Augello envisions as having the potential to someday go national.

“Festivals are great because … there is power in numbers to create more work and draw more audience,” she muses over email. “New companies have been born out of coming together, (and) networking and artistic collaboration also thrive.” Those would be staple side effects of the now-venerable San Francisco Fringe Festival, also co-founded by Augello, in 1992.

This year’s festival, which runs through June 2, presents as broad a spectrum of works as ever, including a new play, You’re Going to Bleed, by Melissa Fall, a staged workshop of an interconnected “modular” play The Helen Project, by Megan Cohen and Amy Clare Tasker, a storytelling-short works showcase and a performance art one, curated respectively by Catherine DeBon and Erica Blue, a songwriter evening hosted by Melissa Lyn, and a burlesque cabaret, Rebel Without a Bra, directed by Amanda Ortmayer.

Education and outreach being very much a part of the DIVA experience, theater-goers and makers will also have the opportunity to dialogue with each other and a panel of Bay Area creators including Valerie Weak, Fontana Butterfield Guzmán, and Susannah Martin at the “Yeah, I said Feminist” symposium on Saturday, May 25, from 3pm to 6pm.

And what exactly is a DIVA, apart from its original descriptor of a celebrated opera singer, or a slang term for an impossible pop star? Augello, who expresses a fondness for all of her fellow DIVAs, past and present, has a definition at the ready, which can be applied to pretty much every artist who has passed under the festival’s auspices over the years.

“A DIVA is a self-realized artist … committed to creativity, with a passion that endures the successes and failures and learns from them to become a better artist and human being.” Long may they thrive!

DIVAfest

Through June 2

Various times and prices

EXIT Theatre

156 Eddy, SF

www.divafest.info

The Performant: Forever young

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Rocky Horror turns 40, still crazy after all these years.

Who doesn’t have fond memories of their first Rocky Horror Picture Show experience? Ok, mine are mixed since the first time I saw it was on an old black-and-white television with my father, avoiding eye contact and trying not to laugh too hard at the ribald bits. It wasn’t until I finally saw it on the big screen in the company of peers — armed with rice, noisemakers, and snarky quips — that the full potential of its subversive pleasures revealed themselves more fully.

Part of the fun of repeated viewings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is emulating the character you most want to be, and for a curly-haired, goth-inclined teenager, the clear choice was Magenta, whose stone-faced cool and extraterrestrial sensuality were so beyond the straitjacket of smalltown teenhood, that to walk an evening in her spike-heeled shoes was akin to a declaration of, well, something. Call it freedom. Peaches Christ does.


“The Rocky Horror Picture Show was my ‘It Gets Better’ video,’ she told the cheering oddience assembled at the Victoria Theatre for the 40th anniversary of the original Rocky Horror Show, the slapstick, Ed-Wood-meets-Charles-Ludlam Rock Musical that, two years later, became a film destined to be the best known midnight movie of all time.

Deviating from the tried-and-true Midnight Mass formula of movie screenings, this Rocky Horror birthday bash took the form of a tribute concert at a respectable 8pm, with multiple singers cast in the iconic roles of the universes’ best-beloved Transylvanians, live music provided by the Whoa Nellies, and quick-and-dirty narration by Peaches Christ herself, synopsizing the negligee-thin plotline that happens between all of those undeniably catchy songs: “The Time Warp,” “Touch-a Touch-a-Touch Me,” and “Hot Patootie, Bless my Soul”. Channeling her inner Tim Curry, PC also provided the vox and corseted eye candy on “Sweet Transvestite” slyly replacing her planet of origins, “Transsexual, Transylvania,” with “San Francisco, California”.

But by far the highlight was the moment that the original Magenta — Patricia Quinn — stepped onstage in a sleek leather suit and handfuls of glitter, to sing the opening song she’d been cheated out of 38 years ago when Richard O’Brien took it over for the movie version, accompanied by a visual of her bright red “stunt lips.” My still-practically-teenaged heart be still. Quinn’s still got. It. That elusive, effusive cool. As does the whole freaking musical, which, stripped of the mostly laughable dialogue and B-Movie special effects, really rocks. Not bad for a 40-year-old who regularly stays up until 3am and can’t ever seem to remember to wear pants. Oh, Rocky!

Lest a single inch of stage space go wasted, almost every role was played by a minimum of two performers, including Dr. Frank-N-Furter portrayed mainly by seasoned Rocky Horror vet Jef Valentine, with a counter-point appearance by former X Factor contestant, Jason Brock, who sang a soulful “I’m Going Home” to an interstellar techno backing track provided by Marc Kate aka Never Knows. Exceptions were Musical Director Peter Fogel who pulled double duty as the titular boy toy and the imitable Leigh Crow as Eddie, ‘cause there can only be one Eddie, and really, that Eddie can only be Leigh Crow. And now that such a stellar lineup is already in place, here’s hoping Peaches will do a 40-year bash for the film version, too, come 2015. Don’t dream it, darlings. Be it!

The Performant: The dame, the dick, and the dismembered torso

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The Performant: The dame, the dick, and the dismembered torso

Extreme adventures in storytelling

 In noir, it’s the clichés that play best: the hardboiled Private Eyes with sharp reflexes and the hardhearted women with secrets to keep. Archetypes, almost, they stand in for something larger than themselves, larger than us, extravagantly idealized Everypersons colored with just enough of the mundane to seem believable, each tawdry crime scene standing in for a twisted version of the American Dream gone horribly awry.

In Dan Harder’s “A Killer Story,” playing at the Berkeley Marsh through May 18, the detective, Rick (Ryan O’Donnell) cuts a familiar figure in a shabby suit, wise-cracking his way through seemingly endless interrogations of his clients, the dame and the duped business partner, both of whom have cause to suspect the other of treachery. Throw in a missing man, a ground-breaking scientific discovery, and an undercurrent of sexual licentiousness, and stir them together with a swizzle stick, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a martini of “Killer” suspense.


The dame, a ferociously icy Madeline H.D. Brown, and the dupe, a furiously twitchy Robert Parsons, flank O’Donnell from opposite sides of the moodily-lit stage (lighting courtesy of Erich Blazeski). He plays the suspicions of each against the other, waiting for one to break, inadvertently setting them both up for a far greater fall from grace than even he can predict. Harder’s grasp of the tough talk of classic noir juxtaposes nicely with his humorous references to present-day markers such as email and anti-smoking regulations. A bit less successfully rendered are the experimental sections of “zippered” dialogue—overlapping lines of cleverly complementary phrases—which call attention to themselves every time they’re trotted out and do little to propel the momentum of the piece. But there’s a wicked pleasure in a crime story that holds not just human nature but the art of the tale culpable for murder, a juicy twist tastier than any lemon rind.

 In the usually hushed galleries of SF MOMA, the stories one typically encounters are of a quieter kind: didactic curator statements of the various artworks on display and biographical information of the artists plus the viewer’s own internal interpretations of what they see. That these interpretations might take fanciful flight into a realm of random association and spontaneous fiction is an undeniable yet under-acknowledged part of the museum experience. It’s this silent side of art appreciation the experimental Storytelling in the Galleries program attempted to give voice to, with some heady results.

Four local solo performers — Victoria Doggett, Sharon Eberhardt, Mia Pashal, and WL Dherin — each wrote and performed a story inspired by a quartet of unique art works. Doggett’s tongue-in-cheek love letter to the untitled, undefended Robert Gober torso crafted from beeswax and human hair was the first story on deck, followed by Eberhardt’s odyssey of an art student enraptured by the muted palette of Philip Guston. Pashal passionately dissected the concept of the artist’s muse while positioned before Jim Dine’s textured canvas of a giant heart bloating around a c-clamp while Dherin narrated a tale as witty and wondrous as the Fred Tomaselli work that inspired it. It wasn’t immediately clear what the effect of these articulated fantasies had on the museum-going public at large, but they certainly added a fascinatingly interactive layer to the typically hands-off gallery experience.

“A Killer Story”

runs through May 18

The Berkeley Marsh

2120 Allston Way

$20-$50

(415) 282-3055

www.themarsh.org

The Performant: The real weekend warriors

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Holding down the weekend of the weekend with the Dark Room Theatre’s “Ghostbusters: Live” and Har Mar Superstar

Among the true creatures of the night, Saturday Night has always been passé, amateur night if you will, when even the most accommodating of dive bars or clubs are suddenly jammed tight with lightweight dilettantes, whose allegiance to the night life is as superficial as it is truncated. But the real weekend has always begun on Thursday, straddling the line between Wednesday’s hump and Saturday’s slump, a connoisseur’s indulgence.

Though San Francisco is happily full of those who understand that Thursday is when the party starts, any number of theatres can still attest that packing the house on that particular evening can be a tricky prospect, a trend I can attest to from the personal experience of having attended many a Thursday show where the actors outnumbered the oddience. Awkward. Which made entering the oversold, packed to the rafters performance of “Ghostbusters: Live”! at the Dark Room Theatre that much more refreshing. This is one Mission Street outpost that has thus far ably resisted the siren song of gentrification and co-option, and remains a place where silly good fun can be had for the price of cheap, with an additional calendar of ten p.m. comedy shows that caters specifically to the committed night owl crowd.

“Ghostbusters: Live” was a perfect example of the Dark Room aesthetic from start to finish, one which other no-budget production companies would do well to take note of. Eschewing a set, which would really just impede the action on the tiny, 12’ x 8’ stage, but expending just enough effort on costuming, lights, and sound to support the storyline and bolster the humor, “Ghostbusters: Live!” opened with the three researchers (played by Adam Curry, Tim Kay, and Thomas Apley) looking for signs of a haunting in the public library, the best lines about great sponge migrations, family psychosis, and menstruation left intact. With clever puppetry standing in for any number of ghostly apparitions, and a strong supporting cast including Adam Vogel as a pitch-perfect Louis Tully, and Alexia Staniotes as the acerbic Janine Melnitz, “Ghostbusters: Live!” managed to capture both the essence of the movie it was sending up and the heady geist of a Thursday night out on the town, framing the possibilities for the rest of the weekend to come.

If Thursday Night is the prelude to the weekend, then Sunday night is its final salute, and the true testing ground of the dedicated denizens of the dark. Which made it perhaps the perfect day of the week for the rarified talent that is Har Mar Superstar to perform. True, the tough sell that is Sunday night kept the crowd at the Bottom of the Hill from swelling to the epic proportions you might expect for a performer of his caliber, but wasn’t that just more elbow room for the rest of us?

Often compared to the lovably schlubby porn star Ron Jeremy, the Bay Area celebrity Sean Tillmann most closely resembles is Josh Kornbluth, although Tillman’s a whole lot more exhibitionistic. His alter-ego’s double-entendre filled lyrics, funky dance moves, catchy hooks, and unabashed libido combine into a stage persona of pure sweaty id, while his true weapon, a silkily soulful croon, tongue-bathes the oddience in its liquid smooth. While a lot of his songs skew towards the humorous, including the trashy-pop “Tall Boy” and his boy-band ode to “the male camel-toe” “Almond Joy,” when Har Mar gets serious he wields an epic howl such as when he turns on the retro-soul for “Lady, You Shot Me” and further unleashes his formidable upper register on “Sunshine.”

And while there was some initial trepidation on the part of the crowd, perhaps fearful of the unpredictable intentions of the lascivious songster, by the end everyone was getting into the spirit of the moment, rubbing Tillman’s proudly bared belly for luck, swapping saliva, getting down. Rounding out the set with a literally stripped-down (to the briefs) acapella version of “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” provided the appropriate closure for the weekend’s last hurrah, and set the mood for all the weekends to come, the sunshine and the rain.    

 

The Performant: More than words

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Sheetal Gandhi and Ragged Wing Ensemble stretch their forms

If an image is worth a thousand words, how much dialogue does the art of dance encompass, when every flick of the wrist can denote whole unspoken volumes? As dance in the Bay Area moves ever further into hybrid territories, where language and limbs combine to stretch the parameters of storytelling, patrons of more traditional theatrical fare may find familiarity in the broadened scope of this increasingly amalgamated artform.

Sheetal Gandhi’s “Bahu-Beti-Biwi” at ODC is a great example of this heterogeneity, bringing to life a series of characters who speak as much in gesture as with words on an almost ascetically bare stage.

When Gandhi does speak it is often in song, and just as frequently in Marwadi, a dialect of Rajasthani, a language obscure enough that it’s guaranteed to be unfamiliar to a large portion of her audiences. Which means it’s through her nuanced physicality that she connects best, blending traditional dance forms such as Kathak with the modern, inhabiting the skin of each of her creations as easily as she wraps herself in a length of striped fabric which serves sometimes as a sari, sometimes a veil, and sometimes as an evocative hobble.

Ghandi is light on her feet, even when she portrays the hunched figure of a family elder, but many of her characters do bear an internal weight—from the smiling auntie who serves the multitudes with a stretched smile to the veiled woman threatening to throw pepper in the eyes of her father-in-law to blind him, a regretful groom on the other side of an arranged marriage to the young girl being wrapped in a length of golden satin in preparation for her own wedding day. Alone and onstage for the entire piece, Gandhi’s more dramatic shifts of scene are expertly heralded by Tony Shayne’s lighting design, which expands and contracts according to the limits of her characters’ perspectives while the elegant compositions by Joseph Trapanese that frame each portion of her performance are equally atmospheric, mixing electronica and field recorded samples with the distinctive tones of the sitar, the insistent rhythm of the tabla.

Across the Bay Bridge, in a vaulted room dubbed “The Sanctuary,” Ragged Wing Ensemble debuts a new play written and directed by Artistic Director Amy Sass called “Time Sensitive.” Just as dancers such as Sheetal Gandhi are experimenting with theatrical techniques within a dance context, so are collaborative arts ensembles such as Ragged Wing creating works of theatre that incorporate far more than the spoken word as the building blocks of narrative.

In “Time Sensitive,” ensemble members don featherlight robes and enter singing “Da Pacem Cordium” (“Give Peace to Every Heart”) before morphing abruptly into suited, scowling business-persons who scuttle back and forth across the stage chanting “gotta GO GO GO” and position themselves in the manner of a flock of early birds demanding worms. In two of several alternating storylines an old clockmaker and his faithful automaton (Addie Ulrey and Keith C. Davis) travel beneath the cracks of the known world on an existential quest, while an adrenaline-seeking elevator-repair guy (Soren Santos) hurls himself from the top of the city’s tallest building and hopes his parachute (artfully rendered with a bobbing line of umbrellas) doesn’t fail. At two hours plus intermission, punctuated by a series of choppy transitions, the ambitious piece does lose some of its initial ballistic momentum, but none of the curious beauty of its dialogue-defying, sumptuously-devised ritual.

“Time Sensitive”

Through May 18, $25-$40

The Sanctuary

496 38th St, Oakl.

(800) 316-8559

www.raggedwing.org

 

 

The Performant: Burning down the haus

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The Performant: Burning down the haus

The Arsonists at Aurora Theatre crackles and sears
 
If there was ever a time to revive a play best known for its condemnation of the silent complicity of the comfortable classes in times of civil unrest and encroaching disaster, this might well be one of the best. And Max Frisch’s 60 year-old classic Herr Biedemann und die Brandstifter, newly translated (in 2007) by Alistair Beaton as The Arsonists, might prove to be one of the timeliest of cautionary tales to revive. Currently playing at the Aurora Theatre, two years after its bang-up American premiere at the Odyssey Theatre in LA, this Mark Jackson-directed farce might play on the surface as a cheerfully absurdist comedy of manners, but the pointed cultural critique that underlies it is deadly serious.

“It’s hard just lighting a cigar,” observes Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) plaintively at the top of the show, as a trio of uninvited firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Micheal Uy Kelly) menaces him into putting said cigar and lighter away, before introducing themselves as the “guardians of the city,” and its unacknowledged conscience.

The brilliance of Biedermann, whose very name can be alternately defined as “upright,” “honest,” or “conservative,” is how well his character skewers expectations of his supposed role as the play’s protagonist, even when it becomes clear that he is also its biggest dupe. His classist hypocrisies and dogged belief in keeping up appearances paves the road to his undoing, as surely as if he had set a noose around his own neck. Flanked by his appropriately haughty Hausfrau, Babette (Gwen Leob) and his harried serving-girl, Anna (Dina Percia), and bolstered by his inflated sense of personal worth, even as he is gradually revealed to be an amoral bounder, Biedermann manages to encompass the most troubling elements of both the belligerent right and the ineffectual left, defending, above all else, his right to “not think anything at all,” under his own roof.

By far the most fun characters to watch on the stage are the titular Arsonists, played respectively by Michael Ray Wisely and Tim Kniffin. Wisely’s Schmitz, the very picture of a gone-to-seed wrestler with his softening bulk encased in an immodest tank top and a spiky Sonic-the-Hedgehog hairdo, appeals to Biedermann’s vanity by praising his humanity and acting the role of a borderline mentally-incapacitated buffoon, even as he deftly manipulates the hassled homeowner into letting him stay in the drafty attic—and fills it with drums of gasoline. Meanwhile Kniffin’s Eisenring at turns obsequious and shrewdly blunt, subtly flatters Biedermann by pretending more than a passing familiarity with Beidermann’s social ranking, even as he gleefully maneuvers him into physically assisting in his own destruction.
 
The insistent rumble of Matt Stines’ sound design at times overwhelms the fragile human element onstage, but the action is well-served by the incomparable Nina Ball’s graciously appointed set, and Mia Baxter’s perfectly-detailed props. And while the humor in the script does provoke its share of laughter, much of it is the kind of horrified laughter emitted by an oddience that reluctantly recognizes its own complicity in its perhaps inevitable downfall. But there is hope too, lodged within this “moral play without a moral,” as right from the beginning the firefighters remark that “not every fire is determined by fate,” meaning preventable, so long as inaction and passivity do not carry the day. Think on it. And see the play.

Through May 12

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berkeley

$32-$50

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

 

The Performant: Band(s) of a thousand faces

Andrew Lam
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Borts Minorts/Fuxedos/Polkacide fux shit up at Bottom of the Hill

It had been awhile since I’d stood in slightly gape-mouthed awe before the glorious mania of Borts Minorts, who last played the Bay Area some five years ago, the jerk, depriving me of my Dadatastic fun fix for far too long.

For the uninitiated, Borts Minorts is not a band so much as an alien invasion for the senses. Front-creature Borts Minorts (a.k.a. Chris Carlone) appears clad in a shiny white unitard, which makes him look like a giant cartoon spermatozoon, his frenetic dance moves are the stuff of legends and nightmares. He frequently plays a ski, though for this show he played a cabinet door strung with bass strings instead. When last spotted ‘round these parts, his ballsy backup crew had consisted of dancing girls, an unsmiling Norwegian on a flute (a.k.a. Melting Razor), and someone of indeterminate gender blowing endless bubbles—a deliberate hodge-podge of askew confusion.

But Saturday’s lineup at Bottom of the Hill kicked it up to a whole new dimension, thanks mainly to the addition of a horn section, even more dancers, and a glittering diva who sang operatically and took over the poker-face duties from the absent Melting Razor. Plus, somewhere along the way, the Borts Minorts “look” has been tweaked to include a giant blonde rocker-do complete with Richard Simmons sweatband, which somehow managed to dehumanize his freakish facade even more than his previously shiny-smooth Spandexed pate had done.

Shortly after the mighty Minorts crew exited the stage, the Fuxedos took it over, clad in their signature blood-splattered tuxedo shirts, laden with props. The bizarre brainchild of LA’s Danny Shorago, the Fuxedos can be best described as one part metal, one part big band, one part free jazz, and one part carnival sideshow in which Shorago is both the ringmaster and the principle freak.

I get the feeling that Shorago was one of those kids who spent a lot of time alone in the house playing dress-up, what with his penchant for inventive costuming and character-creating. From his eager sales huckster for “Clams and Flan” (the fast food emporium of all our dreams), to his sword-bearing villager with a “real god” (a giant porcupine named Reggie), to his insulation-clad astronaut whose distressed mantra “I feel the air slipping out of my space suit” precedes an epic death metal roar, to his signature sulky sideshow attraction “Mimsy,” to his cane-swinging, Clockwork Orange-channeling crooner singing the song “Leonard Cohen wrote for me” (“The Future”), Shorago’s unique shapeshifting abilities definitely steal the spotlight. But the fact that he’s backed by truly talented musicians and complex composition really elevates the whole Fuxedos experience from mere tomfoolery to actual art, albeit hilarious art.

And speaking of hilarious art, there really is no better way to describe the imitable, unflagging insanity that Hardcore 2/4 crew, Polkacide, bring to the stage. They’ve been raucously rawking it since before half of their oddiences were born, and their punk rock polka is a true San Francisco treat. Each musician in the band has a musical pedigree as long as the string of sausages that clarinetist “Neil Basa” strategically hangs down his lederhosen, and the practiced patter of frontman Ward Abronski guides the faithful Polkacidal around the world in 80 (give or take a few dozen) polkas—from Warsaw, Poland to San Antonio, Texas.

You’ll just have to imagine the mayhem, as by that point I was dancing too much to remember to take many pictures—but better yet, you should probably just go to their next show and experience it for yourself.

The Performant: The sacred and the profane

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Putting the “good” back into Good Friday at “Sing-Along Jesus Christ Superstar” and Zombie Christ Haunted House

They might seem merely irreverent, or downright blasphemous, to conservative churchgoers, but I’m pretty sure the original JC Superstar would have dug the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — you know, the water-into-wine Jesus who supported sex workers and preached tolerance and respect for the marginalized.

The Sisters, who have been preaching the same since 1979, really get a chance to shine (and glitter) come Easter Weekend. One of SF’s most singular events, Easter Sunday in Dolores Park grabs the lion’s share of the attention, what with its iconic Easter Bonnet contest, the sainting of local community heroes, and the ever-popular Hunky Jesus competition, being rescheduled as we speak due to spring showers. But for those of us who find it difficult to get up early on a Sunday morning, hardbody of Christ or no hardbody of Christ, the Sisters have expanded their influence across the weekend, creating plenty of opportunity for the nocturnal among us to grab a little of the resurrection gusto for themselves.

Thus it was the holy day saddled with what must surely be the world’s greatest misnomer—“Good” Friday— that played host to two separate events dedicated to the mystery of the risen dead. The Zombie Christ, if you will.

Kicking off the evening at the endearingly ramshackle Victoria Theatre, the second (hopefully annual) “Sing-Along Jesus Christ Superstar” gathered the faithful together to wave palm fronds and cheer for the last days of cinema’s most notorious Rock Star Jesus (Ted Neeley).

Fortunately it’s not bring-your-own, since I don’t know where one goes to source official Easter weekend palm fronds, nor the communion wafers that get blessed pre-show by Sister Connie Pinko and passed around during the Last Supper scene. The Sisters work in mysterious ways. Props and palm fronds aside, the real fun is bellowing “What’s the buzz?” “So, you are the Christ,” and “just watch me die” along with the brooding, scantily-clad, long-haired Jesus freaks on the screen.

Produced by Bad Flower Productions, and co-hosted by StormMiguel Florez and Sister CP, that the Sing-Along is also a fundraiser for the Trans March makes it a Holy Week “must-do” that I hope finds a permanent spot on the Sisters’ Holy Week calendar.

Later that night I found myself hanging with a pack of monster messiahs, in the Gay-Glo labyrinth of the Zombie Christ Haunted House on Market Street. Another fun(d)-raiser the interactive setup included communion with the holy blood of Franzia (died for our sins), a disco inferno, “glory” holes, a giant pope puppet (scary!), strewn body parts, a smidgen of hardcore pornography, and a variety of cannibal Christs jumping out of dark corners and demanding brains.

“Not much there,” I tell one eager ghoul with fantastic bloody makeup.

“Christ not expecting much,” he reassures me.

More than anything it reminded me of the early days of Bunny Jam, when it was still all about pin-the-tail on the Trailer Trash bunny and less of a fashion show, ragged but vibrant; a fun, freaky kickstart to our famously irreverent Eastertide bacchanal.

The Performant: Life is but a dream…

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: Life is but a dream…

Bouffonery and W. Kamau Bell’s stand-up at Stagewerx

Theater history is full of stories of legendary shows that caused riots at their opening night, difficult to imagine in these more apathetic times. We go to the theatre to be entertained, more rarely to be provoked, and more rarely yet, to be stirred to an action greater than the act of merely applauding at the end.

But the theater of Bouffon turns that theater-going complacency on its head. The entertainer in the room is not the curious creature onstage with exaggerated buttocks and an evil smile, but the squirming oddience stuck in the crosshairs of its merciless gaze.

When Eric Davis, a.k.a. the Red Bastard tumbles onto the stage, imitating the slightly baffled faces that gaze up at him in a brilliant, Tourettic flash, a slight tingle of danger vibrates around the room. A dawning awareness, there’s no place to hide. Even those of us who have cleverly ensconced ourselves in the back can tell we’re being scrutinized in the dim lighting of the anonymous warehouse space we’re crammed together in.

“As an audience, you have absolutely no presence,” the Bastard complains. Backs straighten. Chins raise. Challenge us will he? That wobbling, unitard-wearing freak stuffed suggestively with balloons and venom. Of course he will. That’s the whole point.

Red Bastard mocks us. He cajoles. He flirts. He leads the group in a series of physical exercises, dividing the room in two and forcing us to compete, exhorting us to GO BIG. He sticks his bulbous, balloon-stuffed bottom in the face of a pretty girl and makes her dig around for a five-dollar bill. What price dignity. He hocks a loogey onstage and calls it “art” — later he sits in it, “fucking art.” And just at the point where he could become just another one-trick provocateur, he softens the schtick and turns inward. Pressing the buttons of our emotional vulnerability as easily as he pushed our sense of outrage just moments before.

“The more you risk, the more you are rewarded,” he counsels. “If you can’t articulate your desires, you can’t achieve them.” Encouraging the crowd to shout out their deepest desires (“sail around the world,” “naked scuba,” “have a dog,” “fall in love”) he fills an invisible bag with them and pushes it up a “dream mountain” chanting “sissy fuss sissy fuss.”

“What’s difficult about falling in love?” he demands. What’s difficult, he insinuates, about achieving any of our dreams? What indeed.

The ultimate provocation comes when he urges a disgruntled worker bee to call her boss up and quit on the spot, which she gamely attempts but is foiled by the lack of cell phone reception in the room. “T-Mobile,” she explains, as we nod sympathetically. But the seed has been planted, and who knows what fruit it will bear later on.

Then, like the Buddha you kill on the road, Red Bastard sends us away, filled, if only for a moment, with the feeling we truly own our own destiny, a feeling worth every bit of humiliation it took for us to get there.

******

Speaking of owning our own destiny, and following our dreams, local comedian-making-good W. Kamau Bell performed a sold-out weekend at Stagewerx, his spiritual San Francisco home. The theme of much of the show spoke mainly to the heady weirdness of the nature of “celebrity”. Even the kind of ground-level celebrity of having a new television show (Chris Rock-produced Totally Biased on FX) comes with a set of unexpected side effects. Being forced onto The View, auditioning for a spot on The Howard Stern Show, moving to a non-gentrified part of Brooklyn from the Inner Sunset, it’s all fuel for the funny as life’s most awkward moments so frequently are. He’s still the same Kamau, and thank goodness. But the dream, and the comedy, has grown.

The Performant: Oakland, We’re For You

Andrew Lam
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Oakland Nights….LIVE! makes a scene

Clear your calendars everybody, Oakland’s own untelevised late-night talk show has returned from a wintry hibernation and found itself some indoor digs, all the better to display their charmingly populist showcase.

The brainchild of art teacher and science nerd Julie Crossman, and sound artist Jeremy Dalmas, Oakland Nights…LIVE! is a giddy mashup of brief lectures/guest speakers, interviews, contests, music, and general goofing around, loosely adhering to a pre-determined theme. Newly located in the recently outfitted hackerspace, the Sudo Room (it used to play in Dalmas’ backyard, and once, memorably, on BART), ONL’s spartan “set” resembles a picked-over yard sale in the late afternoon: a few mis-matched chairs, a desktop crowded with knickknacks, a rotary telephone, a pile of seemingly random toys, including an old fashioned porcelain doll named Spooky Lucy, a basket of (vegan) cookies for participants. A video screen hovers behind the stage, primed for live-cam action, and a winningly upbeat house band, the Hats, stand at the ready.

After an opening monologue about hemorrhoids and hot doctors delivered by Channing Tatum (just kidding, it was Oakland comedian Channing Kennedy who also provides most of the onscreen visuals) the show begins in earnest. There were cue cards (applause, maniacal laughter, awkward cough), and the first oddience competition of the evening “Who’s New?” — the highlight of which was a video of baby goats at the Oakland Zoo, because the highlight of just about everything in this cruel world is a video of baby goats.

The theme of the evening was “The Human Body,” so the first guest lecturer was a dermatologist, Ingrid Roseborough. First thing I learned over the course of the evening from the opening monologue is that there are four kinds of hemorrhoids (lovely). The second, during Roseborough’s Q&A, was about the lines of Blaschko, invisible stripes on the human body that become visible only in conjunction with certain skin conditions. Education and entertainment. It doesn’t get much better.

Except that it does. Among the guests wrangled by the impossibly buoyant Crossman and her laid-back co-conspirator Dalmas are Exploratorium Explainer Raha Behman who dissects a cow eye on the live-cam to predictable gasps and giggles, a duo of intensely-focused dancers, Christine Bonansea and Justin Morrison, whose aggressively industrial soundtrack would fit right in on a Throbbing Gristle album, swallowing expert Lauren Scheiner, who leads the room in a series of tongue exercises, and comedian David Cohen whose stated goal is to uncover  what constitutes the perfect smooch.

He raises some hackles with his San Francisco-based safari video, the popular sentiment being that Oakland should be the representative demographic at ONL, a stance that comes off sounding somewhat defensive to my own San Francisco-dwelling perspective (relax, guys, we all know you’re awesome!), but is enthusiastically supported by the general majority.

Cohen promises an Oakland edition, and the crowd settles back down just in time for the grand finale sing-along “Oakland, We’re For You,” a perfect tongue-in-cheek ending to the evening’s many shenanigans. Best of all, ONL’s quirky good fun is scheduled to continue indefinitely on each first Saturday, so plan to tune in, turn it up, and drop by soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DujCHFWHKQI

 

The Performant: Our selves

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: Our selves

The body does not lie — Anne Sexton

So often in the arts it seems like we spend an inordinate amount of time focused on how art engages our minds as opposed to our bodies, as if body were a mere vessel whose primary function was to shelter and nourish the brain. In fairness, this is how we treat our bodies in a non-artistic settings too, at best a cumbersome weight which anchors us to the physical world, at worst, a burden we long someday to be free of.

This constant mental disavowal of the body is one of the reasons the art of dance can appear so bold and so transgressive—the encumbrances of the body transformed into its greatest triumphs. In Brontez Purnell Dance Company’s “The Episodes,” playing at the Garage through March 16, everyday routines become ritual, and Purnell, Anthony Lucas, and Sophia Wang explore the mundane with an evening of choreographed mayhem and experiential frolic.

The evening begins with Gary Fembot-Brontez Purnell collaborative dance film “Free Jazz,” a hodge-podge of footage from various dance improvisations and “happenings” organized by Purnell over the course of an unspecified amount of time. In one scene, Punell races shirtless through the city streets carrying an immense tree branch over his head which he lays at the feet of a waiting coterie of fellow dancers, who encircle it solemnly and bend low to the ground.

In another he jumps around, fully clothed, in the midst of a wriggling, ecstatic house party, where dewy youths in hip sunglasses gyrate to the rhythm-heavy soundtrack. Bodies of every shape and size become vehicles of the beat, and the beat becomes a framework to encompass the onslaught of bodies, who strut and leap and cringe and embrace in riotous abandon.

Onstage, seated in galvanized washtubs, the dancers immediately draw attention to their bodies by forcing our brains to imagine the clammy indignity of sitting around in wet jeans. Wordlessly they mimic the functions of cleansing, stripping down and wringing the water out of their sopping denim, before rushing across the stage to put on their dance attire. On the video screen, a hand without a body scrawls chalk circles on the pavement, while the dancers roll deliberately on the ground, contracting and expanding their circle on the floor like breaths. To a cacophony of bells and crashing gongs, they leap into the air and slam themselves back to the ground, embodying the everyday frustration of reaching up only to be dragged back down, the constant tension between the possible versus the probable.

This tension thus established, the piece develops it further in several directions — relationship ruts versus artistic creation, morning rituals versus dreaming, avoidance versus acceptance.

In one scene the stage becomes scattered in drifts of crumpled paper, discarded words, like fallen leaves that can never be completely cleared away. A wave of Sisyphean hopelessness washes over the scene as Lucas doggedly chases every last scrap and Wang continually adds to the disarray. In another, the three sit on a striped couch, stupefied, static playing on the video screen, studio applause ringing hollowly across the stage before they “melt” away from each other and into their own fantasies.

The final scene brings the focus back on human interrelationship, a disembodied voice muses on being “torn between two lovers” while the trio collides in a series of twos and threes on a messy mattress, ending with all of them together in a nurturing cuddle puddle that appears to simultaneously define a connection between the three, without shutting out the oddience which surrounds their stage like a empathetic embrace. A body of bodies in a communion of flesh.

The Performant: Whose story?

Andrew Lam
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Sifting through the past at The SF History Expo

If history is a tale written by the victors, one wonders who San Francisco’s victors are. A chimeral concept as much as a destination, represented by a Phoenix rising from its own destruction, San Francisco has been lauded as a land of opportunity and “the city that knows how,” and detracted as “ingrown (and) self-obsessed,” a “golden handcuff,” and a “Babylon-by-the-Bay” ever since it surfaced in the national consciousness. A city where eccentrics are celebrated, “family values” extend beyond heteronormativity, and the very real threat of natural disaster colors the mundane with an idealized wash of importance.

This past weekend, the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society’s SF History Expo offered a gateway to the various and colliding stories of San Francisco for people interested in delving into what lies below the surface of the present day, assembling around forty exhibitors and presenters in once spot, to confab, to network, to recruit, and to educate.

Held in San Francisco’s Old Mint, built in 1874 and a rare survivor of the 1906 earthquake, just wandering around the building is a rare treat. The lower level is a veritable warren of small rooms, former vaults with ominously heavy doors, slippery stone floors, old graffiti, and no ventilation, situated off a long brick corridor lined with gas lamps.

Upstairs the rooms are larger, airier, with high ceilings and plenty of light streaming in through large windows, encircling a rather bleak courtyard like a prison exercise yard with high sandstone walls. Crowded with exhibitors, the smallish rooms overflowed with maps, pamphlets, sepia-toned photographs, and glass cases of ephemera,

In a central room, folks from Actions Past in period dress gave demonstrations of Victorian parlor arts, while down the hall the volunteers from the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park encouraged people to hoist the mainsail on a scale model of historic scow schooner the Alma. At one end of the hall, four neighborhood historical societies from Portrero, Bernal, Visitacion Valley, and the “Western Neighborhoods” (including the faraway lands of the Sunset and the Outer Richmond) shared one room, while on the opposite end the “Guardians of the City,” a historical society dedicated to the Police and Fire departments, rubbed elbows with proponents of “alternative” histories, Shaping San Francisco/FoundSF and Thinkwalks.

Despite this welcome nod to the stories of the typically underrepresented, it did highlight the fact that of all the neighborhood and community historians in attendance, there was hardly a radical element to be found. To be fair, organizations such as the Chinese Historical Society and the GLBT Historical Society did have tables, so the event wasn’t completely devoid of more-than-geographic diversity, but it still could have used a few more nods to the Tenderloin, the Bayview, the Fillmore—or even just a single Sister of Perpetual Indulgence in Victorian drag.

Still, the value of assembling so many various stories under one roof shouldn’t be underestimated. If we consider history not as a static and one-sided document, but a constantly evolving perspective, then the opportunity to compare and contrast a variety of viewpoints has to start somewhere, and who better to spearhead the conversation than a roomful of enthusiasts each advocating the awareness and preservation of a different one?

Most important and interesting to the conversation was probably the attendance of so many amateur historians who gathered around each exhibit to share their personal perspectives on the overviews being offered. One hopes that their contributions to the collective chronicle will not go uncollected, so that future voices will not go unheard.

The Performant: An expedition report from the All Worlds Fair

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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A visitor to the inter-dimensional, pan-galactic celebration known as the All Worlds Fair has to be prepared to fulfill the bureaucratic requirements, which are, by Earth standards, unusually rigid. In order to enter this portal into a unique realm which contains all possible and alternate realities under one roof, travelers must fill out both a visa application and an immigration form and additionally agree to adhere to the more-or-less strictly enforced dress code (black-and-white) and no-digital device accord.

Ushered first into a tented holding area of the sort that will seem familiar to seasoned travelers waiting to embark on a voyage across international waters, travelers are urged to fill out an additional form, as a bevy of extraterrestrial functionaries in matching red-and-black dresses and pillbox hats topped with twitching antennae, scuttle to-and-fro, monitoring progress.

Travelers are then funneled through passport control and given that most essential of documents, embossed gold on red, with plenty of pages for exhaustive stamp collectors. Upon entering the portal to the Fair, aka the side entrance of San Francisco’s Old Mint, the route taken and wonders encountered by each explorer will be effectively unique, as a dozen different directions and dimensions become immediately possible in the cramped warren of small brick rooms that make up the first level of the historic “Granite Lady.”

I am whisked down to the far end of the hall by a brusque docent in a bellhop’s uniform who ushers me into a room full of giant plushy mustaches on rockers and urges me to take a ride. Just outside, a more titillating ride awaits—a trip on the “time-folding” massage chairs of Wrinkle Inc. The friendly proprietors offer me a handful of official AWF currency — “genuine” Emperor Norton banknotes — and wish me luck with me “upcoming appendectomy.” Clairvoyance, it seems, is a side effect of time travel, or maybe it’s actually appendicitis that is. A tentacled oracle further predicts my future, the Aixiodimensional Adventure company offers me brochures for the Planet Ckikyuu and Urataint, a destination recommended “only for hardy, experienced dimension-jumpers.”

I’m temporarily kidnapped by mermaids, challenged to a cardboard cutlass duel by a lusty wench, serve on the jury of the All World’s Court, and undergo the necessary formality of the Open Secret Cabaret, where all the esoteric and practical knowledge assembled by permanent Fair inhabitants is presented in lulling sing-song interspersed by manic outbursts of a caged studio musician. I’m told later of wonders such as a penny arcade, an endless tea party, and a Merkin Tile where Norton bucks can be exchanged for goods, but hustled up to the second level too soon, I can only hope to experience these in another point along the time-space continuum.

The Upper Floor contained, among other wonders, the splendid collection of “Wrongitudinal Flora” at the Botanarium, including the delicious-looking fried egg plant and a pair of comfy, deciduous sofas, an interactive “live sculpture garden” and solemn retelling of the horror story (and intergalactic bestseller!) that is the Book of Revelations, and the centerpiece of the event: a dance performance imported all the way from the Andromeda Galaxy, which combined familiar elements of earthly disciplines such as Butoh, polyrhythmic percussion, occasional throat-singing, and acrobatics in a strobe-lit, rooftop spectacle as well as a more intimate portion performed in rooms filled with clouds, enigmatic musicians, and writhing bodies dressed in their traditional garb of white-on-white layers (the Andromedans have no developed sense of color).

This energetic display regrettably marked the end of the All World’s Fair for another eternity (give or take a few millennium), and with hardly a moment to regroup, we were whisked out of the building and deposited back onto Fifth Street, where gravity and the Gregorian calendar conspired to anchor us firmly back to Earth. And thus concludes my expedition report, at least within this dimension.

*End Transmission*

The Performant: Love bites

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Celebrating romance with power ballads, Spandex leggings, fancy panties

Although there are about 364 days of the year when I can do without it—one day of the year seems custom-made to celebrate the ignoble rise of hair metal and its greatest contribution to the musical landscape — the power ballad. From “Love Bites” to “Is This Love,” “(I Can’t Live Without) Your Love and Affection,” to “The Power of Love” — all the saccharine sentiment of brooding, pouty millionaires in ripped jeans, tight leather, and all those glorious manes — power ballads can and probably should form the soundtrack to Saint Valentine’s Day now and forever. They so perfectly tap into both the cynicism of the single person facing “the dread VD” alone, as well as offering a soaring guitar-solo boost to the cuddly nostalgia of the happily coupled.

While innamorati for hundreds of years have used February 14 as a date to shower their beloved in flowers and cards, Jeff Ross and the SF IndieFest team have used it as another excuse to party, with an annual Power Ballad Sing-along at the Roxie Theatre. Just three years after its San Francisco debut (a similar party tears it up each year in Brooklyn), PBS pours its sugar and motors through the packed house, screening subtitled MTV videos turned up to 11 of all the best bands you’d love to forget to a theatre full of eager inebriates, cutting loose in a veritable bacchanalia of communal song.

If you’re lucky enough to squeeze into the perpetually sold-out event, you’ll be handed a lighter at the door, the essential prop of the power ballad lover and although no extra credit points are handed out for costumes, this being San Francisco, plenty of people do show up in them. Spandex leggings, ripped stonewash denim, studded wristbands, and plenty of Aquanet. One enterprising soul even comes dressed as Slash — right down to the guitar — a handy prop during the obligatory screening of Guns ‘N Roses’ nine-minute orchestral dirge “November Rain”.

Unlike a karaoke night full of awkward people who have to be cajoled into singing at all, let alone bellowing REO Speedwagon songs at full volume, a sing-along allows everyone to a) hide in the dark and b) therefore sing with the full confidence that almost everyone around them sounds even worse than they do, especially after the effects of cheap whiskey and rampant silliness settles in. It’s about as egalitarian as it gets, and even though this year’s blowout was marred by technical difficulties, my sorrow at missing out on the ultimate elation of singing “You Give Love a Bad Name” en masse couldn’t spoil the gleeful satisfaction of mangling an otherwise extensive playbook of all the worst bands with the best hair: Def Leppard, Cinderella, Whitesnake, Journey.

Meantime, just up the block at the Little Roxie, Liz Worthy’s window display aka “Heist Boutique” offers a poignant love letter to the ever-changing landscape of the Mission district via a few carefully-curated *objets d’art* used to represent a psychogeographical survey of “old-school” Mission businesses taken over by others in recent years. There’s the Self Edge VHS tape (asking price $714, in honor of the address), commemorating previous tenant and nostalgic favorite Leather Tongue video store (represented cheekily by a pair of red jeans), a pair of Modern Times sunglasses ($888) named for the bookstore that until recently inhabited the space where Fine Arts Optical now resides, a Wang Fat Fish Market bikini in turquoise and red ($2199) honoring the fish store of yore, (now Zoe Bikini). The display will be up until at least the middle of March, so swing by soon to relive your own fond memories of a Mission gone by. It may be too late to hang out at the Café Macondo or Jivano’s Cutlery, but, like the power ballads of the past, it’s still not too late to reminisce about them awhile.

The Performant: Playing in the Sandbox

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Performant: Playing in the Sandbox

SF Playhouse’s Sandbox Series puts play back into playwriting

It’s getting harder each year to determine when exactly the “off-season” is in terms of things to do in the City, considering that this past, random weekend in February alone saw collisions of three major festivals — SF Sketchfest, SF Indie Fest, and SF Beer Week — on top of all the usual openings and closings and goings on. In fact, it’s been so hectic (albeit muy divertido) that the Performant is going to break protocol and look ahead to an event lingering just on the horizon, to ensure it doesn’t get lost in the onslaught of events to come.

Founded in 2010, SF Playhouse’s Sandbox Series is a play series (beginning Feb. 27) that inhabits a region somewhere between staged reading and full production — offering new plays a full run and technical support, without breaking the bank on design and promotion.

Past playwrights have included William Bivins (“The Apotheosis of Pig Husbandry”), Daniel Heath (“Seven Days”), and Kenn Rabin (“Reunion”). This year, the ladies will take centerstage with Inevitable, penned by SF Playhouse’s own Literary Manager, Jordan Puckett, and the next play in the series a commissioned piece from Lauren Gunderson on the life of artist Rudolf Bauer.

I caught up with SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English and artistic associate Lauren English to get the scoop on playing in the “Sandbox.”

SFBG When you founded the Sandbox Series in 2010 did you anticipate it having this kind of staying power?

SF Playhouse (Initially) we were worried we were taking on too much by starting an alternate season of World Premieres, but this is our fourth year and the funding has miraculously kept up with our needs.

SFBG What’s the selection process for plays like?

SFP We started by soliciting scripts from the outside and three of our Sandbox plays were commissions of Playground—a new play incubator—that provided part of their funding. Now we are trying to feed our own commissions into the Sandbox, while still accepting scripts from outside SF Playhouse

SFBG It appears that these productions straddle a line between staged reading and full production, care to break down the dynamic a bit.

SFP The gulf between readings and full productions is an area where not many theatres dare to tread, but one where there is a great need. Sandbox offers a unique experience for both the playwright and the audience. It’s not a full production nor is it a staged reading, it’s in that gorgeous “in-between” phase of play development that is not often seen by the public. We look to create simple design gestures to support the story, while keeping the focus on the story itself. We try to stick with scripts that have five or less actors and fairly simple technical demands.

SFBG Have any of these plays gone on to fully staged productions at SF Playhouse or elsewhere? What is the future for a Sandbox series play?

SFP Not yet, but we are still working on some of them and our aim is to have Sandbox plays track to the mainstage or productions at other theatres. We always meet with the playwrights after run closes to do a post mortem and make recommendations.

SFBG Anything you’d like to add?

SFP If theater is to continue to be a part of our culture and thrive into the future, it is essential to develop new voices. Playwrights are the prophets of our culture, with sensitive antennae poised to see, hear, and feel the essentials of being alive in our time and to translate those insights into stories that give us much needed perspective on our lives. We need them and our Sandbox program is our commitment to nurture these voices.

SF Playhouse Sandbox Series
previews begin Feb 27, $20
Unscripted Theatre
533 Sutter, SF
(415) 677-9596
www.sfplayhouse.org

The shape of stage to come, part two

Andrew Lam
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The shape of stage to come, part two

Training with foolsFURY for the stage and for life

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a round-up of some of the theatre companies in the Bay Area who offer classes and actor trainings for professionals and non-professionals alike, but since there are far more companies than I had word count with which to cover them, I could only feature a representative few, and therefore focused mainly on smaller, more underground companies specializing in one or two specific disciplines or techniques.

One company I regretted not having space for was foolsFURY, whose devotion to training their own actors has given rise to an extensive schedule of workshops open to the public since 2006. I finally caught up with associate artistic director Debórah Eliezer to get the details.

SFBG: What is foolsFURY’s main goal in offering actor trainings?

Debórah Eliezer: Our trainings offer a window into the world of ensemble-theater creation, which is very process-oriented and specific to those in the room. It’s our hope that the general public and artists alike gain skills they can take away to create their own life as a work of art, back to their own profession to influence team building.

SFBG: How closely do the classes you offer resemble the rehearsal/creation process foosFURY uses in creating its own works?

DE: All the workshops we offer are a “way in” to our signature training process. That is to say that everything we teach we use as a platform for making work. Our Vital Act two-week intensive (June 2013) remains our signature program of foundation skills and includes a compositional element to give students a taste of what it’s like to create work as we do in ensemble.

In rehearsal for a play, foolsFURY will always use the Viewpoints to massage our understanding of character relationships, location, and text, or just plain blow off some steam and get together as a group. We’ve found the Suzuki method to be the single quickest way for actors to get present and focused. It’s also a constant reminder of the theatrical potency of rigorously challenging oneself. We always incorporate vocal training and improvisational circle singing even if there is no singing in the production.

Some by-products of our training reflected in our work would be characterized as very clear body awareness. To us, theater, voice, and dance are very closely connected. By the time we bring a show to production, we’ve made deliberate choreographic choices about our bodies in time and space — what the audience sees is a distilled “best of” our process spent weeks and sometimes years in rehearsal.

SFBG: You mentioned earlier that you felt that performing arts training was “training for life” not just for art. Care to expand on that?

DE: I teach and personally follow the belief that theater training informs how I live my life and, life informs my theater training. The same principles of space, time relationships, and creative strategy are applicable and translatable for both making compelling theatrical experiences and having a rich, satisfying life.

SFBG: Care to hazard a guess as to how many students in total have taken at least one foolsFURY training/workshop?

DE: Our adult programs serve 125-200 students per year, depending on if we’re also teaching workshops outside of SF and if we’re offering a festival that year. That number includes our internship program, which serves about 10-15 young artists per year. Swivel Arts, our youth spring and summer camp program, which ran from 1998-2010, offered two-to-six weeks of camp per year and served about 150 elementary and teen kids each year. In total, over the years? This would have to be well over 2000 students!

 

The Performant: Sexcapades, no ice

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“SPANK!” and “Sex and the City: Live!” heat things up a little

The Regency Ballroom is awash in estrogen and vodka martinis, overrun by neatly-coifed former sorority sisters sheathed in tasteful rayon suits and drop earrings. The few men in attendance fall into two distinct camps—balding bruisers wrestled into button-down shirts, and fidgety-looking younger men who know they have just been dragged into the theatrical equivalent of a chick flick. One only hopes that a reciprocal arrangement involving the Super Bowl or some racy bedroom activity was reached earlier on, the latter being the most appropriate to the occasion — an evening of E.L. James-inspired comedy, “SPANK! The Fifty Shades parody.”

Apparently not to be confused with “50 Shades! The Musical,” nor “Fifty Shades of Grey: a XXX Adaptation,” “Spank!” bills itself as a musical review, and features just three performers as writer E.B. Janet (Amanda Barker), “smoldering” anti-hero Hugh Hanson (Drew Moerlein) and the painfully two-dimensional ingénue Tasha Woode (Michelle Vezilj).

As Soft Cell blares from the Regency’s imposing bank of speakers stage fog begins to drift across the stage and Moerlein bursts through the giant red curtains, gyrating to the music with the practiced wink-and-nudge finesse of a Chippendale. Eventually the two others join him, Vezilj dancing, and Barker drinking Chardonnay from a giant wineglass, her constant companion. Barker is our narrator and guide into the world of grey we are about to descend into.

She’s also about the best thing in the play — with a flirty dirty attitude and brazen laugh, she controls the stage far better than the supposedly dominant Moerlein, whose “dark” character is likened multiple times to that of Batman, but whose goofy antics including a pitch-perfect Gilbert and Sullivan song, instead bring the Tick to mind. He does get a moment where he strips all the way down to his Wonderoos, by far the raciest vignette in the otherwise bare-bones, vanilla-beige show, which still appears to satisfy its target oddience, who laugh at all the appropriate moments and even inject their own humor into the event during the potentially-awkward participatory bits, ring-led by Vezilj. And isn’t it the potentially-awkward participatory bits what we remember most in life? In love?

Speaking of bits, fan favorite, live action glamour-com “Sex and the City: Live!” is staging a revival down at Rebel, with all-new episodes and plenty of costume changes for all you drag-fashionistas. Dragonistas.

Starring the redoubtable Heklina as Carrie, Lady Bear as Miranda, Trixie Carr as Charlotte, and D’Arcy Drollinger as the best-known cougar since Mrs. Robinson, Samantha, the “Sex” crew promises to be as racy and raucous (if not more so) as the televised version. “Airing” on hump day Wednesdays, at both 7 and 9 p.m. each performance features two episodes, highlighting themes of promiscuity, dirty talk, romantical quandaries, and expensive shoes, a campy cocktail of fun escapism to get you through the week. And for the risk-adverse, fear not, the only participation the “Sex” ladies demand of you is laughter. Now that’s hot!

Sex and the City: Live!, open-ended run
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Rebel
1760 Market, SF
$20
www.trannyshack.com

The Performant: Manic pixies

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‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ and ‘The Witch House’ roil with fantastickal energies

It was only a matter of time before the familiar genre of the comic book movie migrated to the stage. But don’t expect any muscle-bound jocks in colorful spandex roaming the aisles of A.C.T.’s intimate mid-Market venue, The Costume Shop. Not only is the titular “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” of their current production not a superhero with mutant powers bestowed upon her by a quirk of DNA or gamma rays, but in a twist, the comic book involved actually originates from the play — not the other way around.

The play centers mainly around a youthfully shiftless, struggling painter Tallman (Joshua Roberts), whose dire straits and afternoon drinking habits lead to a chance encounter with one of cinematic fiction’s most enduring tropes, the Nathan Rabin-dubbed MPDG Lilly (Lyndsy Kail), a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventure.”

It’s a problematic relationship model on so many levels it’s hard to even know where to begin. Lilly is conveniently mute so she never has to share her feelings, or even her last name, but somehow, within an afternoon of their meeting, she’s moved into Tallman’s hovel, from which he is about to be evicted (by his ex-girlfriend’s new lover, smarmy real estate agent Rick [Lucas Hatton] no less). She never expresses a desire for anything beyond colorful scarves and starburst candy, and Tallman, in the middle of a painting frenzy, is so self-absorbed he can’t bring himself to question his “luck.” Even his sympathetic-to-a-point best friend Porter (Michael Barrett Austin) becomes disgusted with his lack of awareness. “Liking the way someone makes you feel is not the same as liking an actual person,” he observes astutely before abandoning Tallman to his fate.

The comic book, or rather, graphic novel, is represented as a series of projections which serve as backdrop and counterpoint to the live action unfolding onstage. Drawn by local actor and graphic artist Rob Dario, the panels form a silent but urgent backdrop to the narrative, adding visual heft to the bare bones set of stools, a humble futon, and primer-splotched countertop/bar. Or rather, presumably they do. Due to technical glitches, many of the images refused to project when cued, and the promise of a wholly symbiotic graphic-novel-play was under-realized the evening I went to see it.

But the images that did make it through, deceptively simple black-and-white line drawings somewhat reminiscent of the art of Brian Wood, gave Tallman’s inner struggles an external medium to be expressed through as his mysterious affair unfolded. Doubtlessly constrained by budget and time considerations, what the company failed to produce (but should have) was a companion comic as takeaway. I could have filed it next to my oft-referenced Transmetropolitan collection.

Meanwhile, up the road a ways at The Garage, Morgan Bassichis’ “The Witch House” involves a whole panoply of characters who are not quite pixies, but certainly manic. A pair of pre-adolescent boys dabbling in witchcraft set off for Salem in order to cast a spell for a third youth, and all three find themselves possessed by the restless spirits of witch trial accusers Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr., and Mary Walcott.

A fairly oblique examination of gender roles and the justice system, what “The Witch House,” does offer is a wealth of intriguing visuals mainly provided by the largish cast of “bees” (also shades of the accused) who writhe and dance across the stage, simulating the emotional storms brewing thereon. Also, the company has designed a series of original “playing cards” to give away, with art by Lis Goldschmidt and a poetic speech penned by Bassichis, a savvy promotional tactic that even PlayGround (who coproduced “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”) can learn from.

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