Nicole Gluckstern

The Performant: Talk Lobster

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Killing My Lobster sends up San Francisco

“Funny can mean different things to different people.” Perhaps no tagline better describes the fluctuations of sketch comedy than that of veteran gagsters Killing My Lobster. And they should know, since they’ve been dishing up their irreverent brand of short-attention span comedy since 1997. Even if, as a performance format, sketch comedy isn’t really your thing, the variables built into its basic equation — rotating writers and cast members, wacky themes, and the unique juxtaposition of the ludicrous with the everyday — ensure that, like the weather, if you don’t like something, just wait 10 minutes, and you will probably be rewarded with something you do.

The blink-and-you-missed-it one-night run on Saturday of “Killing My Lobster Takes it to the Streets,” at Stagewerx naturally included the weather in their microhood-specific roundup of familiar, Bay Area moments.

Fog, of course, and even the sun (in the East Bay, natch) got referenced in sketches which ranged topically from botched muggings and marauding food trucks to a series of wildly ineffectual 911 dispatch calls and a night in the life of a drug-loving cabdriver. Using San Francisco as their canvas, the Lobsters created a humorous collage of snapshots of city living, in a city that takes making fun of itself more seriously than most.

Opening with a brief spate of beat-boxing from Tommy Shephed aka Soulati of Felonious, (whose creative partner Dan Wolf directed the show), the first sketch featured the aforementioned mugging. A menacing Brian Allen tried to divest a pair of yupsters of their cash only to have them snort derisively that they don’t carry “money” and obnoxiously compare his mugging skills to that of robbers past, until he was forced to flee out of shame for his poor performance. The obligatory roommates from hell trope got a ribald twist in the form of an orgy, and a flashback to the birth of MUNI gave insight as to why the Richmond District has been deprived of metro lines for all these years. 

Other highlights included a tearful wake being held for an amiable youth, Cody (Anthony Tupasi), who, it turns out, wasn’t dead at all, but might as well be, since he moved to the East Bay, a video of clip-board zombies soliciting donations on 18th Street, a retro-hipster faceoff which included the best line of the evening “I want to have your babies so we can watch them die of cholera,” and a visit to Blue Toad Farm which included the second-best line of the evening: “This is a locally-grown, artisanal, heirloom carrot root.” Maybe you had to be there.

Which brings us right back to that tagline. Humor is so highly subjective that conveying it adequately, sight-unseen, can be a tricky business, and it’s precisely why seeing it live is so important. Fortunately, this is a lesson that KML fans seem to have fully absorbed as the house was packed despite the torrential downpour. And happily this is a lesson that KML seems willing to teach often, the only real question being, what sacred cows will these Lobsters skewer next?  

 

Art school confidential

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Art school confidential

arts@sfbg.com

LIT If you’re seeking the perfect present for the music obsessive in your life, consider picking up a copy of David Byrne’s How Music Works (McSweeney’s, 332 pp., $32). A thorough exploration of the many facets of music-making, including music industry contracts, philosophical musings on the art of creation, and the scientific principles of tonality, Byrne’s book can be read like a field guide by aspiring musicians, and as an armchair adventure for those whose knowledge of music begins and ends with Pandora.

Intelligent without being overly-analytical, detailed without being didactic, what Byrne conveys most successfully is his own exuberant curiosity for his chosen topic. Like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which Bryson painstakingly researched the scientific foundations of the universe in order to be able to make sense of them himself, How Music Works often reads like an earnest inquiry conducted by a passionate amateur. That Byrne comes by his knowledge of the workings of the music industry a little more easily — as an elder statesman of art rock, he has decades of personal experience and anecdotes to draw on — fortunately doesn’t render his presentation self-aggrandizing or abstruse.

Although the title of the book seems to indicate a focus on the principles of music theory, a large bulk of the book actually focuses on the technological processes that music has been subjected to over the centuries — from the invention of the first musical instruments to that of Edison cylinder recorders and eventually MP3 players. In his first chapter, “Creation in Reverse,” Byrne presents the theory that specific music has been created to fit certain acoustical contexts. He examines a variety of musical styles — unamplified, percussive ensembles of West Africa, whose music sounds most optimal when heard outdoors, unconfined; long notes and modal structures of Medieval church music, created to fill the vaulted echo chambers of Gothic cathedrals — speculating on how they evolved first to fit the given architecture, and how architecture subsequently evolved to fit the music, as with Wagner’s uniquely-designed opera house in Bayreuth.

He points out how the architecture of even a respected venue like Carnegie Hall might actually be detrimental to the overall sound of a percussion-heavy, experimental rock band, while later he describes the perfect balance of architectural elements that conspire to support such a band and its satellites.

Organized in ten chapters, each tackling a specific thread of thought, the flow of the book can be likened to that of a rock album: a few obvious hits, a couple of minor throwaways. One of the latter is the chapter entitled “How to Make a Scene,” which is also one of the shortest, a moderately interesting rumination on what it takes to create an identifiable music “scene” in terms of architecture, policy, and business philosophy (his exemplar being the now-defunct CBGB). While it makes some interesting points, it could just as easily be missing from the book and no one would particularly mourn its absence. Another, entitled “Collaborations,” is similarly brief, and its appearance between a chapter on the mechanics of recording and the financial realities of the music business doesn’t make for a smooth transition, tonally or thematically.

On the other hand, chapters such as the two entitled “Technology Shapes Music” (covering both analog and digital) are as thorough as they are fascinating. Beginning with the earliest sound recordings in 1878 to an in-depth user’s guide to the music software that has become the industry standard (even for confirmed oddballs such as Byrne), these chapters offer a thoughtful analysis on not just how music works, but also how it’s worked. Finally, in chapter ten (“Harmonia Mundi”), a mere 302 pages in, Byrne turns to the scientific and spiritual principles of music and music theory. Music, it appears, has been around about as long as human beings have, as fragments of 45,000 year-old flutes and pictorial evidence found in Mesopotamia and Egypt help prove. He veers off into Pythagorian territory by expounding upon the so-called Music of the Spheres, and ventures into tantric philosophy, which asserts that the vibration of the universe is generated by Shakti and Shiva having sex.

The book ends on a note of bittersweet optimism, contemplating a future where human composers could actually become obsolete. It’s a future Byrne claims not to fear — while still expressing admiration for music makers past and present, and gratitude for his own place, in this moment, within their ranks.

The Performant: Game theory

Andrew Lam
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Play is a powerful tool in almost every human society. The dynamics of play are found in most forms of human interaction as well as in the foundations of problem-solving and analysis. Play provides a learning-by-doing environment that is difficult to replicate in a classroom. Plus, high-minded assertions aside, play provides something even harder to quantify but no less vital to our development — a vehicle for joy. 

Since 2006, the Come Out & Play Festival crew has been throwing festivals of interactive games, from New York to Amsterdam to San Francisco, providing a space for players of all ages to gather and game. In between wrangling the many details of her innovative brainchild, festival co-founder Catherine Herdlick graciously let me interrogate her via email as to what San Franciscan’s can expect at this year’s festival (which runs through December 2), and on the importance of games in general. 

SFBG: Navigating the festival’s schedule can be daunting, what games do you feel are going to be absolute standouts this year? How many games are represented in total, and how many of them are new or new to the festival?

Catherine Herdlick: There are 35 total games including Art Boy Sin, which we just added. Absolute standouts include Journey to the End of the Night (which happened Nov. 10) as well as Undercover Assassins (Nov. 27)—both are well-established and tuned. Another game that will be amazing is Sloth Chase (Dec. 1), a parkour-inspired game designed by two champion parkour practitioners. 

I’m also really excited to play The Hush (Dec. 2), which is a pervasive game with a different tempo than our usual games. It invites players to moments of silence and reflection. Finally, The Third Person OuterBody Experience Labyrinth (Dec. 2) by local artist Jason Wilson is a really interesting way of navigating yourself and a space.  

SFBG: What prompted the creation of the festival in 2006 and how has it grown since? 

CH: A group of five of us game designers were working together on computer games at Gamelab in NYC in 2006. We were all making different kinds of real world games on the side, staging each of our events as one-offs. We decided to converge and run a festival so that our respective audiences could cross-pollinate. Greg Trefry, who still runs the show in NYC, was able to take the helm and he oversaw the production of the festival as part of his master’s thesis at ITP. When I moved out to SF in 2009 it was a no-brainer to bring the festival with me as there were already so many designers out here that had been involved since the beginning. In terms of playership, we estimate that well over 10,000 players have played at Come Out & Play in NYC or SF. We’ve also directly inspired a bunch of other festivals around the globe in places like London, Bristol, Berlin, Athens, DC, and Pittsburgh. 

SFBG: Gaming is a huge part of your resume. What do games provide its participants that can only be received through gaming? What is the socio/cultural value of games? 

CH: This is a big question. I heard Ian (Kizu-Blair, from Journey to the End of the Night) say he wants to inspire people and that succinctly sums it up for me as well. We created a new tagline for the exhibition and festival this year: “United By Play,” which also sums it up. Games are a great equalizer. Everyone, everywhere plays in some ways at some ages. Being in the ludic space frees up the mind to see things differently. Further, we love seeing spectators transform into producers, not just participants, but the very creators of the experience. Street games and less-digital games tend to have more “grey areas” for house rules and that’s a very interesting social space. 

SFBG: What is your favorite game ever and why? What makes a “successful” game?

CH: It’s successful if I never wonder who designed it and if it leaves enough room for me to express myself in some way. My favorite game? I can’t pick one! If I had to I’d say the first game of Junior Yahtzee I played with my nephew — it was the first game where I didn’t let him win, after watching him learn how the strategy worked. I also love overnight puzzle hunts a lot, Undercover Assassins (gentle use of space), Air Hockey, Zelda, and Super Mario.

Come Out & Play Festival 

Through Dec. 2, free

Various times and locations

www.comeoutandplaysf.org

 

The Performant: Strindberg sans helium

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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A singular marathon

Preparing for a marathon of theatre is similar to preparing for any other kind. Of paramount importance: lots of rest, good hydration, comfortable layers.

This year’s test of my theatre-going tenacity, clocking in at 11.5 hours, came courtesy of the ever-ambitious Cutting Ball Theater, who, with translator Paul Walsh, have been preparing for this event for years: the production of a five-play cycle of August Strindberg’s “chamber plays,” written in the last years of his life. After a year-long series of staged readings, and creation of an archival website, the Strindberg cycle debuted in repertory on October 12, including four all-day marathons of the entire cycle of which I attended the first (the last will play this Sunday, November 18). 

Here’s the play-by-play:

High noon: Settled in our seats we get the obligatory rundown of the planned marathon route, safety announcements, and acknowledgments, after which the cycle kicks off with both bang and whimper. The lonely howl of a night wind groans above the figure of an elderly man haunted by memories of a lady, dazzling in a red, floor-length gown and long velvet gloves, holding her hand out to him. These silent vignettes precede each piece, boiling down the heart of each into a single powerful image.

The first leg lasts just under three hours. Written in 1907, the plots of both “Storm” and “Burned House” revolve around a pair of elderly brothers, played in both instances by James Carpenter and Robert Parsons. The tone is somber, grim, accentuated by the heavy dark wood of Michael Locher’s set, the almost soporific murmuring of Cliff Caruthers’ sound design, and the ice-cold lighting palette of York Kennedy. The pace is deliberate, unhurried, almost languid, the action mostly confined to verbal showdowns and uncomfortable revelations. The calm in the center of “Storm,” the practical, incurious housemaid played by Ponder Goddard, points to a redemptive path not taken, while in “Burned House,” the crime of arson tarnishes even the most innocent characters with a patina of suspicion, almost noirish in its relentless besmirch. 

4:30pm: After a coffee and stretch break the second leg of our journey, “The Ghost Sonata” quickly assumes a level of domestic intrigue only hinted at by the first two plays. Another elderly man nearing the end of his days (James Carpenter again) takes on a youthful protégé (Carl Holvick-Thomas), promising to make him his heir. That’s about the most prosaic moment of the play, as ghosts wander in and out of each character’s periphery, an elderly woman who believes she is a parrot becomes an avenging angel, and a young woman surrounded by “virginal” hyacinths succumbs to her own death perhaps for no other reason than that she’d nothing left to say.

6pm: A welcome dinner break arrives, a time for fortification and rumination, or anyhow Thai food and Irish whiskey. 

8:30pm: The last laps of our journey are, by design, the most harrowing. “The Pelican” features the most dysfunctional family yet (it hardly seems possible). A cruel mother played to the hilt by Danielle O’Hare, who might be about thirty years too young to portray a matriarch who recently celebrated her silver anniversary, but whose fierce, uncompromising demeanor give her villainy an enjoyable heft. Her sleazy, social-climbing son-in-law Axel (Carl Holvick-Thomas) and her cringing, abused children (Caitlyn Louchard and Nick Trengrove) give her ire plenty of reach and when her own comeuppance comes its hard not to feel disappointed that such a witch could not be suffered to live.

By contrast, O’Hare’s self-absorbed character in the evening’s final play “The Black Glove,” gets an opportunity to redeem her reputation in the eyes of her household, as well as those of a pair of supernatural beings (David Sinaiko and Ponder Goddard) sent to teach her a lesson on Christmas—shades of A Christmas Carol. It’s described as Strindberg’s most light-hearted chamber play, but by 11pm weariness begins to take its toll, and my patience for redemptive speechifying worn thin. But when at last the marathon ends at 11:30 a sudden rush of adrenaline buoys us all up and over the finish line, everyone a winner. 

 

 

GOLDIES 2012: Anna Ishida

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: Anna Ishida

GOLDIES One of the very first things you’ll notice about Anna Ishida, onstage and off, is an aura of self-possession that simultaneously grounds her and yet sets her ever-so-subtly apart in a crowd. But she also has a chameleon-like quality, a way of blending seamlessly into her surroundings, whether it’s a 49-seat black box theater on Natoma Street, or the hip buzz of Farley’s East in Oakland, where we meet over coffee and sandwiches.

It’s this very quality that helps make her such a compelling actor to watch onstage. No matter what the role, Ishida appears born to it, whether appearing as an allegorical peasant in an imaginary land (in The Forest War at Shotgun Players), a horny Russian aristocrat with a mic (in Beardo, also at Shotgun), or a frustrated former drag queen forced to languish in the glitter-dusted shadow of her employer-lover (in Boxcar Theatre’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch).

Professionally, Ishida appeared first in The Color of Justice at Oakland’s TheatreFIRST in 2002, following up with roles with a miscellany of companies such as Woman’s Will and the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, plus a long association with Shotgun Players. But this year, after a powerful performance as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in Impact Theatre’s Titus Andronicus, Ishida’s been working to make herself even better-known as a triple threat: vocalist, actor, and independent film star. Her turn as Yitzhak in Boxcar’s summer production of Hedwig framed her trademark spiky hairdo in black leather and heartbreak, and matched her versatile vocals and formidable stage presence to the dozen glam-rock divas cast in the title role.

Her current show, Christopher Chen’s The Hundred Flowers Project with Crowded Fire Theater, casts her as an actor exploring the sprawling epic of China’s Cultural Revolution via the creative process. Earlier this year, she spent a week basically locked up in a room for 16 hours a day for her cinematic debut in HP Mendoza’s unsettling art house ode to the horror film genre, I Am a Ghost. The film — about a literal lost soul trapped in an unending routine — premiered at the 2012 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and has been getting raves elsewhere on the festival circuit.

Ishida was born in Tokyo; her family moved to the East Bay when she was four, where she first attended a mostly all-black kindergarten followed by an almost all-white Catholic school, which naturally meant she fit into neither. Gravitating towards music at a young age, she narrowly escaped becoming a business major in college and instead attended the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Southern California, where she connected on a deeper level to acting, and has mostly stuck with it ever since.

“The grass is always greener,” she confesses with a smile. “If I’m acting, I want to be singing; if I sing, I want to do Shakespeare; if I do Shakespeare, I want to dance. I’m fortunate I can do all three.”

Onstage, no matter what the role, Ishida never lets her focus flag, and her signature watchfulness gives her characters a feral, almost predatory depth. Perhaps most interestingly, in a climate of casting controversies particularly affecting Asian actors (such as a recent production of The Nightingale at La Jolla Playhouse, where a Caucasian actor played the Emperor of China), Ishida has successfully avoided being categorized by her racial makeup. With the exceptions of The Forest War and The Hundred Flowers Project, she’s been seen in roles she has successfully rendered colorblind.

“I’ve demanded that people see me as an actor, rather than as ‘Asian’ — and if I didn’t work, then so be it, but I was not going to be pigeonholed,” she emphasizes.

Then she laughs, considering some of her recent roles: a Russian tsaritsa, Poseidon (in Shotgun’s The Salt Plays, Part Two: Of the Earth), and Tamora. “I may have escaped being typecast as Asian,” she allows, “but now I’m typecast as the angry queen. The angry god-queen!”

The Performant: Paris is learning

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Adventures in ‘pataphysics

Well, pschitt! Although Alfred Jarry — schoolboy playwright, raconteur, and progenitor of ‘pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions” — died 105 years ago of decidedly prosaic malady tuberculosis, his outré influence lives on. Adopted and championed by generations of outsider artists, avant-garde writers, and revolutionary thinkers, the self-styled “Pere Ubu” gave artistic anarchy a nexus during his lifetime, an iconic figurehead after.

Last weekend, the four-day Carnivàle Pataphysique, part commemoration and part investigation, gave amateur pataphysicians, situationists, and conceptual artists a free zone to mingle, to expound, and to congeal, over lectures, concerts, puppet shows, and other unique performative opportunities in and around the practically imaginary stronghold of “North Beach,” a land where strip clubs and surrealists collide.

On Saturday, beneath an almost oppressive sun, a small group of eager urban explorers embarked from City Lights Bookstore on a situationist-inspired dérive — a psychogeographical walking tour of North Beach using maps of Paris (ala Jarry’s creation Dr Faustroll) to orient ourselves. Our intrepid guide, City Lights events coordinator Peter Maravelis hurried us along the less familiar side streets of Chinatown, stopping to exclaim over abstract, easily overlooked details. In a psychogeographical foray, murals become prophecies, placid streets become daunting Rubicons, oddball ephemera becomes omen. 

At St Mary’s Square aka “The Amorphous Isle,” beneath the stainless steel monolith of Beniamino Bufano’s sculpture of Sun Yat-sen, Frederick Young and Linus Lancaster demonstrated their latest attempt to make contact with the USS Macon, a military zeppelin which crashed in the ocean at Point Sur in 1935. Involving a slowly inflating weather balloon, soil from France, a stack of Heidegger texts, and a curious mechanical component best filed under “moves in mysterious ways,” (or, rather, doesn’t) Young and Lancaster’s absurdist experiment was conducted with all appropriate gravity until we were hurried off again to another park (“The Great Church of Snout Figs”) to watch actors Leonard Pitt and Kurt Bodden orate from a hodge-podge of cut-up texts beneath a gracious gazebo.

Marching onward, we found ourselves faced with a seemingly insurmountable mountain — the Vallejo Steps — leading straight into the sun. After our climb, more readings followed, courtesy of Mark Gorney and Josh Mohr, and a chance sighting of the Uniqlo blimp, shades of the USS Macon, and a jeering band of North Beach’s famous feral parrots, added local color to our border-blending dérive.

On such a journey, the most mundane minutiae becomes unaccountably fascinating. An abandoned pair of pants on the sidewalk raises the real question, who abandons their pants in the middle of a sidewalk? A cluster of television sets and sandwiches begs for an archeological explanation. Sloppy graffiti reads like a coded message. Empty streets twist unexpectedly, like lines of a labyrinth. 

“I think we’re lost,” Maravelis announced at one point.

“At last!” exclaimed a committed voyager.

Our final destination, Jack Early Park, renamed for our purposes as “The Land of Lace” involved one more sunward climb, and a rare treat worth the exercise—a command performance by dark folk duo Hazy Loper, whose sorrowful San Francisco ballad “The Graywood Hotel” should be required listening for all poet philosophers and vagabond flâneurs no matter which streets they wind up wandering, and for whatever purpose.

(Interested in more things ‘pataphysical? Festival co-curator Andrew Hugill’s ‘Pataphysics, a Useless Guide (MIT Press, 2012) is available at City Lights, as is Jarry’s seminal work, Ubu Roi.)

 

The Performant: Sometimes a great notion

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TAP Light Production’s “The Ballad of Michele Myers” goes for the jugular

The genre of the spoof slasher storyline is one always ripe for mining come Halloween season, and this year in the absence of The Primitive Screwheads annual offering, Raya Light and Todd Pickering stepped up to fill the void with their collaborative “The Ballad of Michele Myers.” A cheeky blend of high camp and low blows mixed into a frothy, bloody cocktail of makeovers and machetes, “Ballad” satiates that unique craving for slutty Nancy Reagan costumes, updated Aretha Franklin covers, and buckets of stage blood. Plus it gives trans-folk a misunderstood serial killer to call their very own. You’ve come a long way, baby!

You definitely don’t need to have ever seen a Halloween film featuring Michael Myers in order to follow the events unfolding onstage. “Ballad” amusingly mashes up references from a broad swath of pop culture’s most recognizable tropes including “Friday the 13th,” “The Facts of Life,” and “South Park,” with musical nods to Warren Zevon, Amanda Palmer, Tom Lehrer, and even Hall and Oates. Four moody teenage girls (three mean, one misfit) wind up at Camp Crystal Lake with their scatter-brained, spinsterish chaperone Mrs. Skerritt (Audra Wolfmann), in order to attend a ghastly adolescent rite of passage called “The Pumpkin Prance”. The queen bee of the clique is naturally named Heather (Trixxie Carr), a shapely package of malice and spite, who makes her long-suffering, if equally bitchy, besties Pat (Raya Light, in a fat suit) and Koochi (the formidable Miss Rahni) seem downright saintly.

After terrifying her impressionable charges with a spooky story about the mythical “Michele Myers” who supposedly haunts the Camp, Mrs. Skerritt conveniently disappears, leaving the lasses to their own devices, and setting the stage for some epic teen bullying and a surprise revelation from picked-on misfit Joe (Flynn Witmeyer) that she’s actually a he. Yes, dude looks like a lady (with a mullet), and furthermore, has a crush on Heather, who repays Joe’s advances by setting him up to get bashed: dressing him up in a hot pink, glam rock princess outfit and orchestrating a rowdy game of “Seven Minutes in Heaven” with a posse of doltish boyfriends.

That this sordid chain of events reverberates back to the legend of Michele (Kai Medieros) is lost on our “heroes” until she shows up to stab one of the clueless horndogs in the back and the chase is on! Mayhem ensues, plus extreme makeovers, shocking revelations, and the obligatory “Thriller”-inspired dance bit, while blood and accusations fly through the air. With its hilariously upbeat musical score (Todd Pickering), shrewd costuming (Daniella Turner and Joe Adame) and a cast packed with Thrillpeddlers’ alumni who know their way around a salacious splatterfest, “The Ballad of Michele Myers” satiates all expectations, and heralds (hopefully) the birth of a new Bay Area Halloween tradition. You know we can always use just one more.

West Memphis free

Andrew Lam
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West Memphis free

arts@sfbg.com

LIT When Damien Echols stepped out of the Craighead County courtroom on August 19, 2011 a free man, he’d spent more than half of his life on death row, for a crime he insists he didn’t commit — the gruesome murders of three young boys. His trial and quest for exoneration, along with co-defendant Jason Baldwin and a third accused, Jesse Misskelley Jr., are well documented in the Paradise Lost documentaries directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, and the subject of a fourth documentary, West of Memphis, due out in December. But for a more microscopically focused, day-to-day accounting of growing up behind prison walls, Echols’ book Life After Death (Blue Rider Press, 392 pp., $26.95) delivers a highly personal account of living under a sentence of death.

The timing of the book’s release could not be better for Californians, who are facing the opportunity to overturn the death penalty in the upcoming November election by voting yes on Proposition 34. For the undecided, reading about death row from the perspective of one who lived on it may offer one of the most compelling arguments against maintaining it. Echols’ book offers a vision of life on death row as bleak as it is banal: the glacial grind of the appeals process, the dehumanizing effects of institutionalization on both the incarcerated and the incarcerating, and the unsettling reality that there have been numerous factually innocent people sent to death row for sentences that have little to do with deterrence, and much with revenge. (More information on wrongful convictions can be found via organizations such as the Innocence Project, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Amnesty International.)

Even when you strip away Echols’ penchant for overwrought hyperbole (“I cannot explain it, the way everything in my soul gibbers and shrieks for some sort of closure”), he effectively paints a portrait of an isolated sovereign state characterized by rote adherence to pointless, administrative ritual. The primary focus of Echols and his fellow inmates seems to be staving off boredom and breakdown, chronic death row maladies on which Echols provides plenty of detail. Echols learns to sit zazen, increasing his ability to silently mediate from 15 minutes to five-hour stretches. He watches television — looking forward every year to each Charlie Brown holiday special and baseball season — and offers tips on cooking chili over a light bulb plus novel uses for magazine cologne samples. In fact, at certain points his discourse (written mostly while Echols was still in jail) reads a bit like a “Hello Muddah” letter from summer camp rather than a hardcore exposé of the prison system.

Since he was sent to death row while still a teenager, Echols’ essays and letters are frequently tinged with lingering shades of adolescent angst, and confined as he was to an effectively solitary existence, he can’t help but to come off sounding somewhat self-absorbed (“I look at the people who have done horrible things to me … and I know they would never have been able to rise above the things that I have”). When not writing about prison life, he writes about his poverty-stricken childhood and his side of the criminal case that catapulted him to an uncomfortable celebrity, vacillating between emotional extremes. In one paragraph he fondly describes the way his father could make him laugh, in another he describes being “disgusted” by his “childishness.” His mother, sister, and step-father are all singled out for similar treatment, and he even takes a swipe at onetime best friend Jason Baldwin, for hesitating over the deal that allowed the West Memphis Three to walk out of prison in 2011 with time served — but not with exoneration.

But Echols the person is more than just Echols the condemned, and Echols the writer is more than a one-note diva. Strewn throughout his narrative are wryly humorous observations, such as his glowing description of a sumptuous breakfast at the mental institution where he was temporarily confined as a youth (“The insane do not count carbs”), and his tongue-in-cheek recounting of his teenage attempts to find a summer job (“I was growing desperate because potential employers didn’t seem to value the exceptional intellectual giant who was presenting himself to them”). His glowing tributes to his wife and defending angel Lorri Davis are touching and truthful, and his penchant for poetic phrasing is transcendent when it hits its mark.

“I’ve seen ghosts in the lines of a woman’s face and heard them in the jangling of keys,” Echols writes urgently. “Sometimes I even mistake myself for one.” Fortunately for his audience his writing, at least, tethers him unequivocally to the corporeal world — a man after all, not a shade. *

 

The Performant: Pretend that we’re dead

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: Pretend that we’re dead

Zombie Vixens From Hell and Love in the Time of Zombies offer food for thought and brains for dinner

The living dead are kind of obnoxious. They’re dead, but unlike dead people you might actually want to hang out with for awhile if they happened to be around (Josephine Baker, Hunter S. Thompson) the only truly remarkable thing about them is their inability to lie down and stay put like respectable dead people do.

There they are, skulking around dark alleys and isolated cabins, focusing all of their limited decision-making abilities on trying to feast on human flesh, even though they couldn’t possibly have a working digestive system. The living dead just don’t contribute much to society, and it’s difficult to see what it is about them that we continue to find so fascinating, outside of that whole defiance of biological law thing.

For an answer, you need look no further than the Phoenix Theatre, where Virago Theatre Company’s Zombie Vixens from Hell by John Byrd takes a tired trope and injects it with a syringe of good old-fashioned Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll.

True to the title, these zombies aren’t shambling revenants in disheveled rags but rather a lusty bunch of voracious brain-munchers—clad in fishnets and wicked stilettos. Inadvertently set loose on the world by a timid, clumsy PhD student, Agnes (Kelly Rauch), who accidentally infects herself with an experimental serum and transmits the resultant “disease” to both her mother (Shelly Lynn Johnson) and her hot-to-trot best pal Tris (Kelsey Bergstrom) with a kiss, the zombie vixens are characterized by two major traits: their taste for brains and their desire for sex. Also, interestingly, only the female of the species is affected by the mysterious virus—leaving the men of the play to serve primarily as (mostly willing) zombie fodder.  

Tongue-in-bloody-cheek songs such as Tris’ ode to undead emancipation “You Don’t Bang Me” and Agnes’ escape-down-a-dark-alley anthem “Paranoia” are expertly scored by the “Shameless Passion Band” (directed by David Manley) and choreographer Lisa Bush Finn throws in plenty of sex kitten slinking and a few patented “Thriller” moves, all of which the zombies attack with vigorous zeal. In fact, everything the zombies do is with vigorous zeal, and therein lies the secret of their appeal. Confidence is so sexy in a reanimated corpse. Just ask zombie fan-boys Vin (Burton Weaver) and Nat (Donald Currie), whose infatuations lead them to blissfully enabling self-sacrifice.

Speaking of enabling, in SF Theatre Pub’s production of Kirk Shimano’s “Love in the Time of Zombies,” middle-aged mad scientist Melinda (Maggie Ziomek) traps four bumbling zombie-slayers in her isolated cabin in order to feed them to her very own test subject zombie, Clara, whom she may secretly love.

The premise behind her madness is that zombies crave not human flesh but human emotion, and by “feeding” Clara the four “major” human emotions as embodied by the clueless band of four, Clara might become human again. According to Shimano, these emotions are anger, fear, lust, and regret, which probably says more about Shimano’s emotional state than that of all humanity, but regardless, watching the experiment unfold, including a very funny lesson on zombie vernacular, does give the oddience the opportunity to empathize with the unique plight of the zombiefied, who frequently come off as far more likable than the living, despite their limited vocabulary (“me want eat you fuzzy”).

And at least with zombies, you know that they want you for your mind, so really, what’s not to love?

Zombie Vixens from Hell

Thursday-Saturday through Nov. 3, 8pm, $15-25

Phoenix Theatre

414 Mason, SF

www.viragotheatre.org


Love in the Time of Zombies 

Monday and Tuesday through Oct. 30, suggested donation

Cafe Royale

800 Post, SF

sftheaterpub.wordpress.com

 

The Performant: Boxed in at Boxwars

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Putting the glad into Gladiator

You are a warrior. Sheathed in armor of the finest corrugated paper pulp and armed with the righteousness of a hundred possible causes (pick one, any one), you grab your war hammer, fashioned perhaps from a couple of paper towel tubes and an empty case of 21st Amendment Brew Free or Die, and hie thyself to Dolores Park for the grand melee.

The last-gasp October sun beats down hot on the sloping hills of the park, which are covered in defiantly bared flesh and picnic supplies, while blimps slowly drift across the impossible blue of the afternoon sky. A gladiatorial spirit vibrates through the giddy ether, doubtlessly carried over from the Giants and 49ers games being played just a couple of miles away. It’s a good day to do battle. It’s a good day for Boxwars.


Entering the park you start sizing up the competitors, an assortment of deceptively nonchalant combat geeks nursing Tecates and sporting bulky breastplates, cumbersome helmets, cardboard shinguards, and Samurai-inspired shoulderplates. One calamity-courting individual has what appears to be a target centered on his chest, another, dressed like Captain America, pronounces himself “Middle Class America,” perhaps in honor of the ass-kicking he will soon receive at the hands of his fellow combatants. A creative array of medieval weaponry bristles from the hands of each box-warrior: lances, maces, battle-axes, and swords. Some people carry shields. Some have left no holes for arms and therefore carry nothing at all.
“That’s a poor choice,” observes one sage spectator near me.

Entering the battlefield is a man perhaps too congenial to be taken seriously as an uncontrolled berserker, holding a megaphone. This is Mat Kladney, co-creator of the UK version of Boxwars (which originated in Australia), and driving force behind the San Francisco edition. One by one, he introduces the combatants by their *noms de guerre*: the aforementioned Middle Class America, Robox, Tower of Power, I love Microwaves. Five year-old Ben Michaels captures the “aww cute” vote in his self-decorated cardboard cube, while Dapper Ehren (Tye) and Awesome Ashley (Raj) capture the “hell’s yes” award with a pre-battle marriage proposal and acceptance of same—moments before all assembled box-warriors are given the go-ahead to clobber the snot out of each other.

After a countdown from the crowd, the cardboard-clad foot soldiers rush into the mostly unstructured fray, pummeling whoever happens to be nearby. Alliances are forged and broken almost immediately, an armless Gameboy is beaten down and set upon by a mob. Awesome Ashley, recovered from her beau’s surprise announcement, swings her cardboard war hammer with experienced vigor, while a pair of disarmed legionnaires start wrestling each other instead. Just fifteen minutes after it begins, the battle is effectively over, a growing pile of destroyed armor and discarded weaponry left in the middle of the field. There is no clear winner of a Boxwar, which Kladney (whose fight philosophy is simply “have fun”) emphasizes as the point.

“Everyone wins at Boxwars,” he asserts. “When winning…comes into play, people start to take things way too seriously.

The Performant: Surrealistic mellow

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Doing the Lobster Quadrille at The Mad Hatter’s Ball

A singular bit of whimsy, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland may be one of the only childhood fantasias to be embraced equally by linguists, logicians, and users of psychedelic drugs. The setting of an unlikely hero’s quest undertaken by a pedantically logic-bound child, Wonderland’s curiously ordered chaos seems designed specifically to undermine any rote adherence to convention, even to those of storytelling.

In fact, one of the defining qualities of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that exactly none of the characters, including the protagonist, are particularly sympathetic, and Wonderland itself, unlike Oz, say, doesn’t have a lot to recommend it as a vacation spot save the prevalence of the aforementioned psychedelics. But as a cultural touchstone, Wonderland has proven to have some serious staying power, and continues to baffle and inspire children and adults who remember what it is to be a child, alike.


At Saturday’s Mad Hatter’s Ball—an offshoot of the Bay Area’s annual homage to Lewis Carroll and his strange creations, The Cheshire Rock Opera—a colorful array of musicians and masqueraders sauntered around the perimeter of Oakland’s 410 Ballroom, a weird little Wonderland all its own, tucked innocuously just off of Broadway. Including Red Queens, White Rabbits, Black Cards, and almost every color and character in between, their raucous cacophony appeared slightly muted, as if tinged with aural sepia. In fact, everything about the event emerged gently sepia-toned, serving as it did as a precursor to Sunday’s Steamstock festival, billed as a steampunk’d “Woodstock from an alternate past,” and featuring many of the bands playing the Ball.

The brainchild of Sean Lee aka One Man Banjo, the Ball opened with a brief set by the Mummy Dummies, one of Lee’s many side projects, setting the alt-Americana tone for the evening which included bursts of swamp rock (The Slow Poisoner), puckish honky-tonk piano-playing (Victoria Victrola), gypsy caravan cabaret (Vagabondage) and a healthy dose of ukulele-infused skiffle (5 Cent Coffee). In between guests, the anchoring group, Lee’s “Hatter’s Band” played selections of Carroll’s own nonsensical lyrics, including the aforementioned lobster quadrille and the inevitable sing-along “Soup of the Evening,” a Mock Turtle original set to an enticingly jaunty tune, inspiring even the timid to at least sway in time. Unlike the Cheshire Rock Opera, no jousting Jabberwocks appeared on the scene to do fearsome battle, but as herald to January’s event, the ball whetted our appetites for wonder, with a tantalizing amuse-bouche of crustacean ballet, (Mock) turtle soup, and jug (band) wine.

The Performant: Drink up, Brunhilde

Andrew Lam
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Oktoberfest by the Bay pours it on

In vino veritas, aber in bier auch etwas.

Every year when Oktoberfestzeit rolls around, my thoughts turn nostalgic for liter-sized beers, chewy brezeln, and oompah bands playing “Country Roads.” And that this year’s Berlin and Beyond Film Festival fell smack in the middle of Oktoberfest’s traditional 16-day season only exacerbated the quasi-homesickness that feeds my Teutonic obsessions. Having lived for some time in Munich, and hoisted many a Maßkrug on the Wiesn, I’ve purposefully avoided its San Francisco counterpart, Oktoberfest by the Bay, for years. After all, Munich’s Oktoberfest is the largest beer festival in the world, boasting more than six million visitors a year, an adrenaline-pumping array of roller-coasters, and mountains of Bavarian food to soak up the rivers of beer. Any other city’s regional edition will naturally far short of this admittedly high mark.

But when it comes to beer fests, is it really the size that matters, or just the beers? I figured I owed it to myself to find out.

Unlike the pictures of this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich featuring lots of soggy umbrellas and cloudy skies, Saturday midday at San Francisco’s Pier 48 was sunny and hot, ideal conditions for cold beer and chintzy, costume shop St Pauli girl attire, both of which were in visible abundance. On a small dance floor in the middle of the cavernous warehouse, a group of folk dancers clumsily showed off their Schuhplattler skills to pre-recorded music and a smattering of applause, and the smell of grilled sausages and Underberg wafted temptingly. Patrons in hats shaped like beer steins and aprons printed with big-breasted barmaids mingled with those sporting real leather lederhosen and billowy, low-cut dirndln, as vendors hawked bags of cinnamon almonds, chicken hats, and weirdly inauthentic deep-fried pickles.

“I wonder what Adorno would say about all of this,” my fellow obsessive muttered as we searched the perimeter for the purveyor of liter-sized mugs, sold separately. Clever people had brought their own from home, and cheapskates merely purchased the beer by the pint in disposable plastic cups, but since beer-by-the-liter is really the one unalienable Oktoberfest rite, we went ahead and bought the one for sale, finding out too late that it was plastic. But it did hold a liter of beer, and getting it filled with Spaten Oktoberfest brew was definitely the highlight of our pilgrimage. The copper-colored märzen went down smooth and lightened our mood, as did the appearance of the Internationals, whose oompah renditions of American classics such as “Sweet Caroline,” and yes, “Country Roads” were torn straight from the Wiesn playbook. We amused ourselves further by checking out the German-themed t-shirts of the decidedly American crowd. Our favorite was definitely “I (heart) döner,” followed by one with an image of a St Pauli girl and the directive to “Drink up Bitches”. Not exactly the most enlightened sentiment, but certainly appropriate to the occasion.

Properly fortified the authenticity of the beer and our kulturpessimismus we headed on over to Berlin and Beyond for a special screening of Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum, the West Coast premiere of the director’s cut, and part of a tribute retrospective of the work of Austrian actor Mario Adorf, who plays the luckless, venal Alfred Matzerath. The downbeat film sobered us up faster than a plate of Schweinshaxe, and fully rounded out our quota of German-ia for another year. Or at least until Weihnachten.

 

The Performant: Love is (not) a battlefield

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Our Genocides and “Combat Paper” speak out for peace.

Along with playing host to all of the fun and fabulous festivals occurring this past weekend (hopefully you managed to make it out to at least one), San Francisco also played host to a more sobering event—the sixteenth play in a cycle of seventeen on the topic of genocide. Penned by Eric Ehn, all seventeen are being prepared and presented in various corners of the country before coming together at La MaMa in New York in November for a complete run entitled “Soulographie: Our Genocides.” Last May, the tenth play in the cycle, “Cordelia,” a Noh-inflected reimagining of King Lear was presented by Theatre of Yugen, and this weekend “Dogsbody”, directed by Rebecca Novick, turned the Mission Street headquarters for Intersection of the Arts into a Ugandan battlefield. 

Humming and singing, the three-person cast enters the room, clad respectively in the garb of a jungle soldier, the mismatched scraps of a peasant child, a flowing white garment and incongruous leggings.

We meet Scovia (Rami Margron), kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army, first as a kitchen slave, second as a spoil of war, with all the violent implications that entails. Over the course of the play we see the tape rewound to the moment when Scovia’s life is changed for the worse—hiding in a schoolyard tree where she is found first by bees, then by the LRA. In a dreamlike, non-linear narrative, Scovia recounts her traumas with expressionistic text and expressive dance (choreographed by Erica Chong Shuch), while a menacing Reggie D. White and sympathetic Catherine Castellanos flank her on either side, unshakable traces of an endless nightmare. 

Drained and devastated, Margron finally describes the moment she is forced to kill her own father, flour falling from her fingers to the stage as she speaks, like handfuls of graveyard dust. In the second half of the play, set in a futuristic, war-torn Texas, this same dust will be thrown over her body by White during a described act of violence, turning her, appropriately, into a funereal witness to her own destruction. In this segment, White as “Dogface” and Margron as “Nipple” navigate the chaotic battlegrounds of Texas, the days of arrows, the death of human compassion. Although not every Ehn-penned message is completely clear, the ultimate implication is: in the brutal arena of war, there is no place for love.

There might be a space for redemption, however, and at Southern Exposure this idea is being explored with a series of interactive paper-making workshops through September 29. Spinning old uniforms into new paper, artist Drew Cameron crafts the materials of war into a civilian statement of catharsis. Himself a former soldier, Cameron’s Combat Paper workshops have been presented on both coasts, geared particularly towards veterans and their families, but embracing participation from all. Just the act of cutting up and pulping a set of fatigues can be an emotional liberation of sorts, and the resultant paper perfectly embodies the idea of a blank slate with the potential to become an expression of peace.

 

The Performant: 13 reasons why

Andrew Lam
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Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo explores the numerology of loyalty

“What’s in a number,” asks the man onstage, a former gang elder undergoing a laser tattoo-removal procedure. He is middle-aged, weary-looking, and sports a huge number one emblazoned down one forearm. Americans believe in being number one. A three down the other, reference to the holy trinity. Taken together, the number thirteen—a denotation of his gang affiliation. Numerous other tattoos covering his arms, chest, back, even his neck. 

“My placas are my history,” he explains, somewhat ruefully. Removing them, a condition of his parole, is an arduous process, a physical equivalence to the mental challenge of rebuilding a life free from criminal activity. 

“It’s not the laser that hurts,” he’ll assert later in the play. “It’s the memories.” 

>>CLICK HERE TO READ ROBERT AVILA’S RECENT GUARDIAN COVER STORY ON PAUL FLORES AND THE CREATION OF PLACAS

Played by Ricardo Salinas of Culture Clash, himself a former Missionite of Salvadoran extraction, the character of Fausto is as tormented as his German counterpart. True, he’s made no visible deal with the devil, but the demons of his past refuse to stay away, and those that tempt his son Edgar (Ricky Saenz) to follow his footsteps into a life of crime are all too present. In a mean twist, Edgar’s solidarity lies not with the Sureño gang of his father’s misspent youth, but rather with the Norteños in whose neighborhood he has grown up, and when he receives his first placa, it’s a bold Roman numeral XIV.

Angry with his father for his abandonment of his nuclear family (due to a nine-year prison term), eager to embrace the “family” of the neighborhood gang, Edgar embodies the contradictory petulance and naïve optimism of adolescence, a likable youth with a wobbly sense of consequence. Meanwhile his strong-willed mother Claudia (Cristina Frias)—herself a former chola who still favors tight jeans and leopard-print blouses cut low to reveal her Virgen de Guadalupe tattoo on her chest — attempts to broker kinship between them despite her own reservations about Fausto as a role model. 

Focusing mainly on the dynamics of family, in and out of the gangs, Mission District-based playwright Paul S. Flores spent months interviewing former and current gang members, capturing the cadence of their speech, the fierceness of their loyalties. With Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo, he limits the scope of the complex historia to a small circle of characters: Fausto’s extended family, Edgar’s gang familia, a smattering of officials in charge of managing various aspects of Fausto’s rehabilitation.

Flores mostly avoids politicizing his characters, though shades of illegal immigration and exile color their everyday struggles, and he also studiously avoids passing moral judgment on his fallible protagonists, choosing instead to explore their often overlooked decency and sense of personal responsibility. The play ends on a downbeat note which feels somewhat rushed, unsatisfying, but does leave open the possibility of a companion piece or sequel, while illuminating and illustrating some of the shadowy complexities of gang influence in the Mission with stage lights and temporary tattoos.

Snap Sounds: Bibi Tanga and the Selenites

Tony Robles
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BIBI TANGA AND THE SELENITES
40 DEGREES OF SUNSHINE
(NAT GEO MUSIC)

From the bright electro-funk pulse of the opening track, “Poet of the Soul,” sunlight infuses Bibi Tanga and the Selenites’ latest album, 40 Degrees of Sunshine. An upbeat melange of esoteric samples, funky bass lines, polyrhythmic percussion, soulful, multi-lingual crooning, and Walt Whitman poetry, the twelve tracks distill the best of an array of influences into a potent brew.

Neither the vibrant Afrobeat-ish “Band a Gui Koua,” sung in Sango, the nouveau jazz inflections of “Attraction,” nor even the unsettling tone poem “Happy Dust Man,” would be out of place on dance floors from Bangui or Boston, despite their refusal to be neatly categorized. To this refusal, Bibi Tanga and crew offer a preemptive explanation, perhaps apology, on “Dark Funk”. “If you find a name for the music we’re doing…just call us.”

The Performant: Further

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The Performant: Further

You’re either on the bus, or you’re off the bus at Popcorn Anti-Theater’s Fringe Festival revival

As lovers of art, adventure, and reckless shenanigans might recall, the monthly Popcorn Anti-Theater bus shows last rolled about eight years ago, and while plenty of other groups have used buses as vehicles to drive a performance since, none have managed it with the same regularity and broadness of scope.

The aggressively anything-goes vibe of Popcorn events of yore combined theatrics, live music, dance, poetry, gibberish, urban exploration, and plenty of oddience participation into a series of unpredictable occurrences. Since the shows were pulled together by different collaborators each month, it wasn’t always necessarily “good” art (a specious qualifier at best), but it was almost always good fun, so when I hear that Popcorn is making a rare appearance at the San Francisco Fringe Festival, I immediately resolve to check it out.


Although the pristine white rent-a-bus is only half full as we pull away from the EXIT Theatre, the morale is high. As we settle into our seats, an attractive young woman in a lab coat, Assistant J (Crystelle Reola) passes out index cards and pens and instructs us to write down our deepest desires as the grey-wigged Professor Murnau (V.N. Von Boom Boom) introduces herself as dead. As the bus noses along, en route to our secret destination, we are treated to video footage of a group of cute kids undergoing a test of their willpower ala the 1972 Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. We also receive marshmallows of our own, which some folks eat immediately, and others save for later.

We wind up on Treasure Island where we encounter the rest of the cast who, according to the script, were mysteriously instructed to show up at a secret location for undisclosed reasons. An unlikely trio, a wealthy businessman, a self-important socialite, and an aging radical, they fuss and squabble, their action framed by a bright string of distant city lights. Gradually they come to realize that they were all part of the original Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, and that the dead professor and the beguiling Assistant J. have brought them back together to “conclude” the experiment. The world, it seems, is divided into “Gobblers” and “Resisters”. The marshmallow still tucked warm in my pocket attests to my abilities in impulse control, but *what does it all mean?*

Written and directed by Patricia Miller, “Sugar High: The Four Marshmallows of the Apocalypse,” heralds Popcorn’s return to the (very) small stage and monthly social calendar. Originator and ringleader Hernan Cortez promises to roll out the bus rides every first Friday of the month, with an emphasis on unconventional performance structure and scenic site-specificity, or what he calls “the diesel-driven processional spirit of adventure.”

“The idea is to be short, sweet, and mobile,” he explains of the hit-and-run style of Popcorn’s “thea-tours”. “Most performance (can be) executed in less than five minutes, seven tops. Basically if you can’t communicate in a short time span, you can’t communicate.” But he emphasizes that almost any artistic discipline can be a part of Popcorn. “If anyone musician, comedian, actor, scientist , cook, burlesque , variety act  has had a hard time finding a stage to perform on, you may find a home here.”

As we pull back up to the EXIT Theatre, left to ponder the concepts communicated to us during our brief sojourn to a parallel universe, I realize I still have my marshmallow and look forward to my reward. Sadly it appears that the reward for not eating my marshmallow early is only the opportunity to eat it late. Fair enough, I suppose. Marshmallows don’t grow on trees. But I’m not entirely sure the experiential portion of the show can be called complete without the possibility to win a second. Maybe next time.

The Performant: PortlanD.I.Y.

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The Performant puts a bird on it

There’re a lot of ways to while away 72 hours in Portland, Oregon, so I shrewdly place myself in the hands of a capable buddy who knows the ropes and we embark on a whirlwind bicycling tour of the five quadrants, from Sellwood to St Johns (yes, there are five quadrants, not four, go figure). We don’t really have a focus, and you could easily spend 72 hours just crawling from coffeeshop to bookstore to food cart to brewpub. While there’s plenty of all of the above on our itinerary, the theme that soon reveals itself during our pedal-powered perambulations is Portland’s obvious fervor for the DIY life, extending even to their entertainment options. Here’re a few of my favorite examples.


1) Marry-it-Yourself at the 24 Hour Church of Elvis. Although this dilapidated window display and coin-operated wedding ceremony has seen brighter days in other locations over the years, this quirky art installation will still pronounce a simple set of vows via an ancient Commodore 64 over any couple lucky enough to have a quarter on them. Apparently about to undergo a facelift of sorts, the 24 Hour Church of Elvis may be upgrading its technology, but one hopes it won’t lose its cluttered, junkyard charm or old-school video arcade aesthetic. 408 NW Couch, Portland, OR. www.24hourchurchofelvis.com

2) Eat-a-Bug-Yourself at the Peculiarium. Anyone excited about insectavorism will want to make a trek over to The Peculiarium, where in addition to a staggering selection of novelty packaged bug treats (tequila lollipops with worms, etc), they offer two very exclusive toppings for their ice cream sundaes and hot dogs: freeze-dried meal worms and scorpions. Customers who survive their culinary adventure get their photo taken and exclusive membership in the “Insectarian Club,” and even non-bug-eaters will get a kick out of the Fortean ephemera, gag gifts, and B-movie props that constitute much of the Peculiarium’s inventory and decor. 2234 NW Thurman St, Portland, OR. www.peculiarium.com

3) Homestead-It-Yourself at Portland Homestead Supply Company. This homey, welcoming, artfully-curated store leaves no possible outlet for creative homesteading energy unrepresented, with essential supplies for every kind of project from soap-making to chicken incubating, pickling to cider pressing, seed starting to grain grinding. Where else can you grab a one-pound slab of pure beeswax, a packet of kefir starter, the pasta maker of your dreams, and a 25-pound sack of worm castings and take a workshop on coffee roasting or candle-making in the same trip? Truly worth a pilgrimage, even for the most dedicated urbanite. 8012 SE 13th Avenue
, Portland, OR. www.homesteadsupplyco.com

4) Act-it-Yourself at Shakespeare Surprise Party. For times when even the redoubtable SF Theater Pub barroom shows feel over-produced, Surprise Party Theatre steps in with an even more audacious free-for-all concept, one that recruits roughly half the of its attendees onto the stage to perform, rehearsal-free. I see a rowdy adaptation of *As You Like It* in the basement confines of the Jack London Bar which lasts a good 40 minutes longer than it has a right to, but certainly doesn’t lack in sheer spunk and off-the-cuff inventiveness. A hilarious wrestling match between pre-cast Orlando (Joel Durham) and Charles (Matt Haynes), goofy improvisation by Jesse Graff as Touchstone, live music by musical duo Sound Semantics performing as Amiens, and plenty of dance breaks for all, infuse the Shakespearean comedy, to say nothing of the Jack London Bar, with lusty life. surprisepartytheatre.tumblr.com

The Performant: A late summer night’s dream

Andrew Lam
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All Ashland’s a stage at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

It’s 100 degrees in Ashland, Oregon, which makes the prospect of sitting in an air-conditioned theater an appealing one, even if it weren’t at the justifiably renowned Oregon Shakespe are Festival. An Ashland institution since 1935, the OSF has grown from a humble weekend-long affair to a nine-month-long theatrical juggernaut, and although it’s mid-week in August, all three venues are packed with festival-goers.

A few things reveal themselves to the festival tyro immediately, not least of all that there’s a whole lot more than Shakespeare going on at this festival. Of the 11 plays comprising the 2012 season, just four are written by Shakespeare, two others inspired by him, and the rest, including a rowdy rendition of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, have pretty much nothing to do with the playwright at all, save that they are plays.

My festival experience gets off to a rocky start with the puzzling Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, an adaption by OSF’s artistic director Bill Rauch and Tracy Young (whose first collaborative version of same appeared onstage in 1998). An attempt to highlight the similarities between the three disparate tales, the results can only generously be described as a disjointed mish-mash. Watching an irritatingly histrionic Medea (Miriam A. Laube) plot to murder her children as a lilting Rodgers and Hammerstein tune begins to swell across the stage is disconcerting at best, and leaves me both confused and cold.

Fortunately my frustrations are short-lived, as the next production on my list is the Rob Melrose-directed Troilous and Cressida, a visually stunning, disarmingly nuanced tale of the many levels of honor, and its interpretations.

Set in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, Melrose turns Cressida (played when I see it by understudy Brittany Brook) into a blue-jeaned tomboy with a gauzy veil and a quick wit, Troilus (Raffi Barsoumian) into a preternaturally handsome yet vulnerable youth in an all-too adult uniform, Ulysses (Mark Murphey) into a taciturn career soldier, and Ajax (Elijah Alexander) into an unstable sniper with little regard for rule or law. Smoothly-paced and forcefully performed by a strong, multi-ethnic cast, T&C easily becomes one of my favorites of the festival. 

Next up is a foray to Ashland’s iconic Elizabethan Stage, modeled on the 17th century Fortune Theatre, a rival to the Globe. The show, a middle-of-the-road production of Henry V, boasts a few distinctive twists, including percussionist Kelvin Underwood — firmly ensconced in the musician’s gallery on the second floor — providing vigorous accompaniment to the action on a variety of noise-making devices, and several multilingual interludes, not just Katherine’s (Brooke Parks) Shakespeare-penned, double-entendre-laden French but also the deliberate use of ASL by deaf actor Howie Seago as the Duke of Exeter and his speaking interpreter/boy (Christine Albright) which adds an unexpected layer to both the character and to my own definition of multilingual. 

I miss out on seeing one of the most buzzed-about shows of the season, All the Way, by Robert Schenkkan, about the first year of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, starring ACT’s Jack Willis. Instead, I saw Party People, penned by performance ensemble UNIVERSES. (Both plays commissioned by OSF as part of their ongoing American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle). Last, but definitely not least, I attend an astutely madcap production of Animal Crackers, directed by Allison Narver, starring Mark Bedard as Captain Spaulding/Groucho, John Tufts as Ravelli/Chico, and Brent Hinkley as The Professor/Harpo.

Considering that the evening before I had watched Tufts as a grim-faced Henry V murder a felonious Hinkley as Bardolph, my respect for their versatility and aggressively comedic chops grows with every scene. Quick on their collective feet, mixing in bits of off-the-cuff improv and oddience participation, the cast infuses each outrageous gag with sparkling vitality, never dropping a beat even when their characters drop their pants (“where’s the flash?”). In short, it’s a memorable end to a memorable weekend, despite not being written by the venerable Bard.

The Performant: Let ‘em eat cake

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: Let ‘em eat cake

While the Performant is off hugging trees in Oregon, please enjoy this series of interviews with the curators of three innovative performance spaces

There’s nothing about the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in North Berkeley that particularly speaks of abstract performance, but that element of the unexpected is possibly what makes it the perfect venue for Karen Penley’s fledgling performance series, Retard. Inhabited by out-of-the-box, outré performers such as Dan Carbone, Edna Barron, Herb Heinz, and Catherine Debon, Retard is a low-key, all-inclusive, no-judgment sort of event where the weird get a chance to shine, and everybody gets to eat cake. After an evening spent nibbling clafoutis and ducking clowns, I caught up with Karen via the magic of the Interwebs to pick her brain about her brave new experimental showcase.

SFBG: What was the original impetus for this showcase? What sets it apart?

Karen Penley: I have an interest in brave unconventional work and I wanted to be able to have room to let that happen instead of having to fit into the structure of poetry and music open mics…. I think the thing that sets Retard apart is a feeling of support for adventurous, innocent work.  I really love raw art, as well as the feeling of people being so immersed in…their artistic work and caring about it so much. It’s this feeling of creating different worlds as well. You can do anything, theater, movement, improvisation, music, or some hybrid of such. Also, it’s kind of homey, easy, non pretentious. I really wanted that. There are special Retards, the evenings called “Crack,” where I curate more carefully and then the other retards are more a jambalaya and are open to people I don’t know their work as well so they can just come and perform and I can get a sense of them.

SFBG:  What is your ultimate vision for these evenings?

KP: Well, ultimately, I would love to have them be ‘Crack’ every Friday, with lots of people coming, and I’d love to rent the church another day a week and have it be ‘Pretard’ which I tried to do for five months, but there wasn’t enough participation and I couldn’t afford it. ‘Pretard’ was a place to work on and develop material just for a warm audience, not a workshop, just a place to try out stuff, and then I wanted to take that work and curate it into cool evenings. But I’d love to connect with people that I admire, all different kinds of performers, and curate great evenings so that it really is a network of daring work.

SFBG: Do you bake your own cake? What do the cake and tea signify for you?

KP: I love cake and I can’t eat a whole one so this gives me an opportunity to bake all those great cakes on the internet that I couldn’t bake just for myself. I always like food to be involved in performing and watching performance. It feels more cozy and fun and more warm-y to have cake and tea for people. 

SFBG: “Retard” sounds intentionally provocative, though you do offer a rather nonconfrontational definition for it on the webpage. What prompted you to use that name, and has anyone had an uncomfortable reaction to it?

KP: I HAVE had some uncomfortable reactions to the name. One girl was labeled in her high school and I really liked her and wanted her to perform, but we had a long email back and forth about it and she just couldn’t condone the use of the word.  My feeling is that using it for my show changes the derogatory feeling associated with that word. I feel like a retard myself, always have. I want to be more retarded; i.e. slow down. In my mind, to be retarded is a good thing. Plus it’s just funny (the name).

Retard

Fridays 7-9pm, $10 sliding scale

1823 Ninth Ave., Berk. (side building next to The Good Shepherd Church)

theretardshow.wordpress.com

 

The Performant: Howard’s End

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The Performant: Howard’s End

While the Performant is off hugging trees in Oregon, please enjoy this series of interviews with the curators of three innovative performance spaces.

After five years of making the address 975 Howard synonymous with emergent dance, queer, and fringe artists, Joe Landini has packed up The Garage and relocated it further down SOMA way. Now tucked in an industrial zone next to an automotive repair shop, The Garage’s new location at 715 Bryant might lack the allure of being a hidden gem on ramshackle Howard Street, but has the distinct advantage of having fewer neighbors to annoy, a consideration no low-budget performance space can afford to completely ignore. Particularly one as active and prolific as The Garage—which has hosted over 1000 performances for some 50,000 people during its five-year tenure.

“We are awful neighbors!” Landini admits when I swing by to check out the new digs.

“We are loud. We host 120 choreographers a year, 230 shows a year, that’s a lot of music to listen to.” After looking around the Central Market area for three years without finding a space that was both affordable and allowed for public assembly, Landini set his sights on the section of SOMA he knew to have some of the lowest rental rates in the area yet was still mostly accessible via public transportation—a consideration for many of his performers and audiences.
       
After a cacophonous May Day parade from Howard Street to Bryant, led by a merry conglomerate of performers — familiar faces from The Offcenter and Garage performance series such as RAW and AIRspace — The Garage opened back up for business just 24 hours later. The space is still a work-in-progress a few weeks later (aren’t all moving projects?), but its current bare bones state will not seem unfamiliar to its fans (makeshift risers, a table over to the side for the board operator, minimal but effective lighting). What’s most important, from Landini’s POV is that they are finally ADA compliant, and they have repainted the front door red: “theatre’s love tradition.”

In addition to moving into a new physical space, The Garage is occupying a new psychic space, expanding its definition of incubation, by helping its emerging artists connect to spaces where they can create work for larger audiences. Recently, six Garage artists dubbed The WERK Collective, participated in a joint mentorship program between The Garage and ODC <www.odcdance.org>, culminating in a weekend of performance at ODC, the next step up the narrow ladder of professional possibility that defines the San Francisco Bay Area dance community.

“We’re the only free space in the city now and that does attract a very specific group of broke artists,” Joe muses. “We’ve been so lucky to have some of those artists stay with us for the whole five years, and that’s where the partnership with ODC came up, because I had to come up with a way to keep them involved, and they had clearly outgrown the space…so hopefully that’s going to be a model for the future, an artist could start here and then work their way into ODC (which is) pretty well-organized in terms of where they want their artists to go….(ODC Director) Christy Bolingbroke is very sharp, and she has a real clear understanding of the national profile, and what’s happening nationally.”

What has also changed for Landini is a deeper understanding of The Garage’s overall mission and impact on its core community.

“The old space was such a lark…we threw a lot of mud at a lot of walls and some stuff stuck, but that’s not going to work here…..we’re going to have to become a really shrewd organization. I didn’t really have a sense of the importance of the work we were doing. I mean I kind of knew in the back of my mind, because so many people were coming through…and that community rallied to move into this space…they really really got behind it.”

The Performant: Arctic mysteria

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Cold trippin’, direct from Berlin

Thirty seconds after we walk into Bindlestiff Studio, S. is sold on kInDeRdEuTsCh pRoJeKtS’ production of “Arctic Hysteria.” He instantly recognizes their preshow music as being a Neue Deutsche Welle song he’s currently enamored with, “Eisbaer” by Grauzone, in which the author expresses a deep desire to be a polar bear. “Alles waer so klar!”

“This is the song I was just talking about,” he exclaims with satisfaction (it’s true) as we settle into our seats to gaze at the Community Thrift meets Matthew Barney set (designed by Sue Rees): corrugated white pressboard walls, an easy chair and matching ottoman covered in leopard print, an uncomfortable-looking brocade couch, a static-filled television set in the corner, a silver decanter and goblets on a roller tray. An innocuous enough setting for a play named for a contested form of madness particular to the arctic, supposedly characterized by uncontrolled outbursts, mimicry, echolalia, and coprophagia; keywords which might also be used to describe a typical Saturday night out in San Francisco.


A musical introduction performed by Stefanie Fiedler, aka Cuddles, sets the tone, “we disappear into madness,” she croons, outfitted in a fantstical snowflake-white majorette outfit with a matching knitted polar bear cap. “I feel nothing…and I haven’t for a long time.” After she exits, her siblings Goneregan (Thorsten Bihegue) whose amalgamated name is one of several vague King Lear markers scattered throughout the piece, and Fool (another Lear reference, played by Molly Shaiken), enter the room, discussing their coerced reunion. A cantankerous voiceover begins to querulously direct them and finally to inhabit their bodies, repeating a promise to each that “this will all be yours someday,” deftly setting up an atmosphere of suspicion and sibling rivalry.

Veering away from Shakespearean cliché, their rivalry takes on animalistic overtones as Fool and Cuddles spar with and attempt to devour each other while rolling around the floor, growling and gnawing. A sequence of denunciation sessions in which each comes up with intensely creative insults for the others (“you little shit, I saw you picking lice and eating it!”) morphs into a long-winded soliloquy from Goneregan on ruling the sea, during which a staggering number of stuffed toys make their first appearance, quizzically peeking over the back of the sofa, floating through the air, propelled by the silent hands of Cuddles and Fool.

Lost yet? Us too, honestly, and we’ve only reached the halfway point. Still to come is a riotous game of musical chairs, colorful costume changes, a tender interlude with a polar bear, an incestuous cuddle puddle leading to the “happiest death ever recorded—death inside the anus of a walrus,” intense flirtations with a televised image of an Arctic hunter, German-language interludes, penguin dances, prospective eye-gouging, and a revelation of filicide. For a play set in a sterile white world, it’s a murky and fantastical carnival for the senses, punctuated with bursts of childish enthusiasm, nonsensical verbiage, and giddy violence, pushing the audience into the disorienting depths of the apocryphal Inughuit malady for which it is named. Indeed, it might be the only play running that makes the comparative excesses of life on Sixth Street seem relatively tame.

Through August 4
Bindlestiff Studio
185 Sixth St., SF
$15-$25
www.bindlestiffstudio.org
www.kinderdeutsch.org

The Performant: Storming the Bastille

Sue Vaughan
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How fortunate for lovers of patriotic display, that just as the last of the illegal Fourth of July fireworks have been shot off, the 14th should roll around, giving us all another excuse to celebrate liberty, equality and fraternity en français. Of course Bastille Day, France’s Fête Nationale, is much less the spectacle in Californi-ay than along the Champs Elysees, but you’ll still find the Francophones of (don’t-call-it) Frisco decked out in their own brand of red-white-and-blue sipping Bordeaux and nibbling on quiche, if not rioting in the streets.

A special Friday the 13th edition of French pop dance party Bardot A Go Go kicked off the Francophilic festivities at the Rickshaw Stop Friday night. Though the awkwardly laid-out venue, with its crowded entryway and underutilized upper level, is a far cry from a smoke-filled 1960s era Parisian boîte de nuit, a modish, mostly French soundtrack, heavy on the Gainsbourg, pulsated through the room. Psychedelic minis, tall boots, sleek bouffants, and frantic fruggers crowded the dance floor, gyrating to playful hits such as the growly “Roller Girl” (which sounds suspiciously similar to “Get off of My Cloud,” but cute … and French).

As with Paris-Dakar at the Little Baobab, opportunities abounded to brush up on one’s conversational French skills, no matter how rudimentary, and for the time-pressed coquette, free mod hairstyling was being offered at the door, which lent many a mane bobbing on the dance floor a certain glamorous je ne sais quoi.

It was good for me to get my French fantasy on early, as Sat/14 I landed smack dab right back in America, the Great American Music Hall to be exact, for a locals-only double header CD release party: officially for Joe Rut, and unofficially for opening band the Low Rollers. Shades of Santa Cruz color the laid-back Caliphorisms of both bands, a bit of the old Camper Van, manifesting itself in the wryly nostalgic, conversational lyrics penned by Joel Murach of the Low Rollers, and multi-instrumental jam magic orchestrated by Joe Rut.

One aspect of Joe Rut’s oeuvre that speaks more directly of San Francisco than Santa Cruz is his fondness for silly props, including an imposing, 12-foot flyswatter, giant inflatable Koi floating around the room, and a tiny, foul-mouthed robot named “Chatbot” who threw around some abuse before being literally thrown himself. But though Rut’s props and lyrics are mostly of the overtly humorous kind, think Mojo Nixon with a bigger vocal range, they don’t detract a bit from the sheer energy and passion underlying the composition, from the down-home exasperated twang of “Turn Signal” and the breakneck blues of his foot-fetish anthem “Barbie Feet.”

His new album, Joe Rut Live, recorded during his last show at the Great American Music Hall in 2010, is a comprehensive overview of his obsessions past and present (copyright law, myspace, hippie chicks) performed by a stellar guest lineup, many of who were in attendance for this triumphal reprise. Now that they’re practically regulars, hopefully it won’t take another two years for Rut and friends to grace the GAMH stage a third time.

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