Robert Avila

A cold one

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Tennessee Williams was notoriously afraid of going insane — the fate of his sister Rose, a presence haunting several of his greatest plays — and in the latter half of his career, the great American dramatist wrestled mightily with a slump in his fortunes, depression, and addictions to pills and alcohol. It was the pills that finally got him, or rather the packaging: he choked to death on a bottle cap in his New York City hotel room in 1983.

This darkness in Williams’ life is well-covered ground but no doubt still fertile enough for a biographically based flight of poetic imagination, ruminating on the relationship between madness and creativity, which is what Bay Area playwright Joe Besecker proposes in New Conservatory Theatre’s revival of 1984’s popular and long-running Tennessee in the Summer. And yet Besecker, who has 25 plays to his credit including the 2008 SF Fringe Festival offering Loving Fathers, freights his poetical device with so much expository baggage that here at least, in director Christopher Jenkins’ able but somewhat miscast production, it never leaves the runway. It’s strange. Considering how flushed and feverish Williams’ plays could be, you’d expect a little perspiration to break out somewhere in Tennessee in the Summer.

The play opens, reliably enough, on a sweltering summer morning in N.Y.C. in 1972. Immediately recognizable at a desk in a dim, heavily wallpapered hotel room — handily rendered with a hint of disrepair by Michael Fink — is the aging playwright (Dale Albright), bespectacled and freshly groomed. He’s rewriting a would-be comeback and critical misfire, Out Cry. As he taps away at his typewriter, an overheated, restless woman (Alex Alexander) pecks at him from across the room, chiding him for his efforts, accusing him of wasting his time, of already being thoroughly washed up. He is testy in his responses — "Christ, I just refuse to become a total has-been in my own lifetime" — and downright ferocious the moment she lays a hand on his shoulder. "Don’t touch me!" he roars at her, with a glint of fear.

When, a moment later, the mysterious woman leans out the window and invites a sidewalk stud up for a visit, she proceeds to introduce herself to him as Tennessee Williams, a fact the young man (Jeremy Forbing) immediately accepts and admits to already knowing. Thus, we realize — if we hadn’t guessed already — that we’re in the presence of the writer and his better half: his own female side, that is, or anima, if you will, splayed on the nearby bed in something like standard attire for a Williams heroine — a white slip and a mint julep accent.

Time tripping ensues, as Tennessee-times-two relives scenes from his life, including encounters with sister Rose (Annamarie Macleod, doing decent work here but plodding along in caricature in the part of Edwina, Williams’ mother) and longtime and long-suffering companion Frank Merlo (Forbing, seemingly elsewhere and unconvincing in this crucial role), whose death in 1961 tosses the drug- and booze-addled Williams into a monumental depression.

At the center of the play, Albright and Alexander share a certain gruff but vaguely mechanical connection. Albright’s playwright is dyspeptic, morose, and callously lascivious, without much redeeming allure let alone a sense of talent. Alexander’s anima is fairly solid but limited in vacilutf8g between shrill complaint, self-pampering, and wilting empathy. Then again, they’re saddled with a fatiguing amount of exposition dressed roughly as dialogue, with only a thin sugaring of wit and charm. The work bluntly states as much as it dramatizes: "I need a companion at night," says Tennessee, "I fear death." And later: "I’m suffering from the affliction of loneliness." Or Frank to TW: "I’m sorry, Tom — I’m in the terminal stages of lung cancer …" Etc., etc. If the playwright had traveled a little lighter, there might have been room for more beyond the obvious and pedestrian. Rose’s last appearance reaches in this direction, as late in the game as it is. As is, the graceful arc the play would trace back to some reconciliation, some consolidation of halves and acceptance of self, is a surprisingly frigid ride.

TENNESSEE IN THE SUMMER

Through March 1

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $22–$40

New Conservatory Theatre Center

25 Van Ness, SF

(415) 861-8972

www.nctcsf.org

It’s a living?

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REVIEW Amid worsening violence between their respective Sunni and Shia communities, even old friends Adnan (Bobak Cyrus Bakhtiari) and Laith (Amir Sharafeh) are prone to argue along sectarian lines. But these squabbles are more than offset by a dire mutual predicament: as Iraqi translators working for the U.S. occupation in Baghdad, Adnan and Laith live as persons "in between," precariously balanced between glib and suspicion-prone American employer and outraged fellow citizen alike. Along with Green Zone coworker Intisar (Denmo Ibrahim), who as an Iraqi woman eschewing hijab and working for the Americans earns special disfavor with many countrymen, they risk being labeled traitors and becoming friendless targets of a ruthless insurgency. At the same time, they find the American bureaucracy less than willing to help, whether by upgrading their security clearances or, when all is lost, providing them asylum in the United States. Fortunately, there is one "good" American — isn’t there always? — who goes to bat for them, in this case a young information officer named Prescott (Alex Moggridge), whose strenuous efforts achieve mixed but significant results.

If you pretend it’s actual news, journalist and author George Packer’s first play, Betrayed, might at least have the merit of bringing us something we didn’t know already about the "situation" in Iraq, as it is still so often called. But who will be surprised to learn that Iraqis working for the extremely unpopular U.S. forces find themselves in a terrible double bind? Or that the American occupation seems lacking in its will to address its moral, let alone legal, obligations to the people it has invaded and made more desperate than ever?

Based on Packer’s 2007 New Yorker article of the same name, Betrayed seeks to put a human face on such in-between persons, and Aurora’s West Coast premiere, helmed by Robin Stanton, does a reliable and respectful job of rendering the action. There are moments of convincing dramatic tension, including Ibrahim’s affecting monologue about her life, relayed to an unseen reporter, and a confrontation between Laith and a harrying Regional Security Officer, played with credible aggression and conviction by James Wagner.

Still, it all feels less like urgent news than a somewhat wooden and familiar form of special pleading. Beneath its critical take on the American "mission" — truly a neat word for it — Betrayed puts Iraqi voices in the service of that other insular project: that of redeeming the myth of American moral superiority, even while chastising the failings of the George W. Bush–era government and foregrounding the play’s composite but real-life Iraqi protagonists. Thus, Betrayed‘s last lines go to Adnan, now a refugee, who rejects the accusation in the play’s title, confessing to a natural lack of faith in people while somewhat contradictorily continuing to "dream about America."

You have to wonder, did the Romans need to be liked this much?

BETRAYED

Through March 1

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.; $28–$50

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes

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PREVIEW What lengths will you go to for your art? If you’re a castrato it’s probably a sore point. For Mexico’s internationally renowned experimental theater company, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes (Certain Inhabitants Theatre), it’s the beginning of a lush and lively investigation into the complexities and contradictions of cultural power and refinement. Drawing from a variety of theatrical styles and incorporating multidisciplinary performers, director Claudio Valdés Kuri and writer Jorge Kuri have crafted a time-tripping escapade across three centuries of culture and cruelty.

Siamese twins — a surgeon and opera columnist in a single ungainly suit and two Louis XIV wigs — lead a journey that begins in the decadent 18th century court society of the Old World, in the throes of a circle that fed ravenously on the castrated children of the poor and elevated them to superstardom by the preservation and cultivation of their fine prepubescent sopranos. With Monsters and Prodigies: A History of the Castrati, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes the company makes its long-overdue Bay Area premiere, courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in what promises to be a resonant, dramatic outing whose operatic airs — in Spanish and Italian with English supertitles — hit an unfaltering high C for cutting, carnivalesque satire.

TEATRO DE CIERTOS HABITANTES Thurs/5–Sat/7, 8 p.m., $25–$30. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Night at the museum

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REVIEW American Conservatory Theater leads off its new season with a revival of John Guare’s rollickingly self-referential 1974 comedy, a madcap musical so quirky and of the moment in conception and mood that it comes shrouded in a sometimes dazzling, more often distancing veil of nostalgia.

New York playwright Bing Ringling (Brooks Ashmanskas) has received his first commercial production — after only several hundred attempts — in a dreary downtown theater haunted by an insane producer (Mary Birdsong) with a failure wish and a strong resemblance to a tottering Kate Hepburn. Shadowed by the billboard superstardom of movie actor and old neighborhood pal Tybalt Dunleavy (Stephen Derosa), Bing recoils from the scathing reviews of Etruscan Conundrum, leading to a desperate search for meaning that winds through his past, his parents’ couch, the home of his maniacal death-devouring composer (played to the hilt by an irrepressible Derosa), and finally to the dizzy heights of celebrity, from which old pal Tybalt (Derosa again) is preparing to sail down in one big swan dive. The point is not that dreams do come true, you see, but that they exist at all — and get in the way of real life.

Although Guare reworked the material for ACT’s revival, adding even more autobiographical touches as well as some bright if unexceptional new songs, Rich and Famous remains a hit-and-miss affair, with some flat notes and fewer high ones shaking up its middle register. The often overly broad humor has dated — though it can still work well, as in the scene with Bing’s obsessive, half-senile parents, played by Derosa and Birdsong. Moreover, the main character, while sympathetic, never becomes more than mildly interesting, which contributes to the sense of the intermissionless performance dragging on. Overall, the feeling is not unlike walking around inside a museum piece — which is just what happens in one vignette. But the play’s whimsy is so rooted in a specific moment, despite a stab at more timeless themes, that maybe that’s inevitable.

Rich and Famous is, however, expertly performed by a versatile four-person cast — including ACT’s priceless Gregory Wallace in a couple of scene-stealing flights — and directed with appropriately zany energy by John Rando. It’s also lovingly gussied up by scenic designer Scott Bradley in jazzy, period-evoking slashes of color, including set pieces drenched in the garishly comic shades of nightmares. All of which ensures Guare and Ringling’s one-ring circus is nothing if not a frenetically romantic spree. (Robert Avila)

RICH AND FAMOUS Through Feb. 8. Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., Jan. 21, and Feb. 4, 2 p.m. American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF. $17–$82. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

Return to deform

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PREVIEW One of the most exciting and unusual theatrical events of 2008 came from a small San Francisco–spawned, now Brooklyn-based company: the curiously named Banana Bag and Bodice. It almost sounds unexpected, but in fact BBB, which retains close ties to the Bay Area, has been doing shrewd, highly imaginative, often startlingly designed songplays — their preferred term — with practically no budget for about a decade. Habitués of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, most of the company’s work has appeared there in one form or another — almost invariably garnering Best of Fringe honors — beginning with 1999’s debut outing, The Bastard Chronicles, and running through such memorable encounters as the dadaist delight and vegetarian horror show, Sandwich (2004), or the haunted viscera and satirical apocaly-poesis of The Sewers (2007).

Nonetheless, last spring’s world premiere of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage — a slick, rousing performance-arty rock operetta-cum-English-lit-seminar that ran at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley — raised things to a new level for the company, especially in terms of production values. And thanks to the support of commissioning company Shotgun Players, BBB’s well-honed minimalist aesthetic, sardonic humor, enveloping musical designs, and performance rigor all proved more than capable of expanding to fill the bigger space and budget. It’s otherwise impossible — and still somewhat awesome — to imagine a BBB performance being mounted at a top-of-the-line venue like the Berkeley Rep. But that’s just where Beowulf will be reprised Jan. 8, expanding to fill the Rep’s cavernous Roda stage, in a single benefit performance ahead of the show’s New York City premiere in April at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center. A sign of things to come.

Since co-founding Banana Bag and Bodice in 1999, writer-actor Jason Craig and actor Jessica Jelliffe have led the extremely resourceful, highly collaborative ensemble — which includes stalwarts composer-actor Dave Malloy and actor-director Rod Hipskind — in far-flung productions that regularly straddle NYC, SF, and Craig’s hometown of Dublin, Ireland. While dazzling audiences with works as conceptually unconventional as they are hilariously clever, behind the scenes they take a tough-minded and committed approach that serves them well in the lean and unforgiving environment of NYC’s alternative theater scene, and the group’s recent productions there have gained enthusiastic audiences and reviews as well as plenty of street cred with their peers.

Meanwhile, nurturing longstanding ties to the Bay Area has helped ensure a consistent output as well as momentum. When Shotgun’s artistic director Patrick Dooley held out the offer of a commission for an opera, Craig says they took the plunge without hesitation, telling him they’d like to do something with Beowulf. The idea apparently came more or less out of a hat. "I didn’t read it until Shotgun agreed to do it," he confesses alongside Jeliffe and Malloy at Craig and Jeliffe’s comfortable roost in a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. "It’s just really not my cup of tea. Honor and machismo." But Dooley immediately agreed, providing BBB with what was, for them, unprecedented support.

Malloy — as composer, musical director, and actor in the role of King Hrothgar — reveled in the creative possibilities: "To be able to have an eight-piece orchestra — I’ve never been able to have that before, and it’s so rich and rewarding." For the NYC production he’s even adding two more musicians. "I’ve been rewriting all the music, making it thicker and denser," he says. "It’s just a real treat, because I’m so used to doing black box theater where it’s like, ‘oh, this actor plays violin — great.’<0x2009>"

Craig’s script, meanwhile, ended up brilliantly channeling his reluctance and skepticism toward the epic poem itself, turning his own discovery and questioning of the text into a set of theatrical subjects and productive dichotomies: a panel of seemingly empty academic experts — two of whom, including Jelliffe, double as Beowulf’s monster adversaries — and the titular hero, played by Craig, as an unlikely he-man gone slightly to seed, in addition to a showdown with monsters who are also a mother and son, and the sly morphing of Beowulf’s medieval warrior mythos with its 21st-century rock-god counterpart. The latter concept was already honed in BBB’s 2007 show, The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, which birthed a mock-legendary band with a life beyond the play. The results have shown BBB playing at the top of their game.

"It’s working with Shotgun that’s ramped up everything," confirms Jelliffe. "Not that we have to match that every time, but it has upped the ante, definitely. Usually we make whatever we can with whatever we can. With The Sewers, we made this incredible $20,000 set with no money because of the resources we are able to draw from in New York.

"We still do that, and will continue to do that," she continues. "But with Shotgun, I mean, having a budget?" It’s a modest one to be sure, but for now, without a doubt, as Craig says, "It’s cool."

BEOWULF: A THOUSAND YEARS OF BAGGAGE

Thurs/8, 8 p.m., $30

Roda Theatre

2025 Addison, Berk.

www.shotgunplayers.org

“The W. Kamau Bell Curve”

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REVIEW Standup comic W. Kamau Bell has reopened his frank, funny, and genuinely thoughtful one-man show at SF Playhouse, and it’s worth catching if you haven’t yet (I took in a recent performance at the Climate).

Subtitled "Ending Racism in About an Hour," Bell’s reflections on the recent election and Proposition 8, among other race-inflected personal and political matters still closer to home, are topical, to say the least, and run considerably deeper than the usual one-liners or simplistic oppositions of much race-based comedy. Meanwhile, Bell’s sure and charismatic stage presence, ready wit, and excellent comic timing ensure that the lines between scripted material, inspired tangents, and eager engagement with both the day’s headlines and his diverse audience remain all but seamless.

THE W. KAMAU BELL CURVE Opens Thurs/8. Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m. Through Feb. 28. SF Playhouse Studio Theater, 533 Sutter, SF. $25 (bring a friend of a different race, and get in two for one). www.wkamaubell.com

Lincoln flogs

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Barack Obama wasn’t the only lanky senator from Illinois to have a triumph on the stage, political or otherwise, this year. Abraham Lincoln took a couple of bows himself. Of course, many have noted the weighty coincidence of the country’s first African American president following Lincoln’s senatorial trail to the White House. But who could match Thick Description’s revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play — focusing on an African American protagonist whose calling involves dressing up in Lincoln drag — for political prescience? Special mention goes to playwright Aaron Loeb, who at SF Playhouse last week unveiled a bawdy frolic he calls Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party. This Lincoln thing just gets weirder.

I guess it would be pretty easy to call 2008 a year of triumphs and defeats, whether you were a politician, a voter, a banker, a shaken-down taxpayer, an Olympian, an artist, or just a serial theatergoer. So it was a year of triumphs and defeats. God, I feel cheap. Still, most of one’s life is lived straddling a slippery seesaw of success and failure. And no doubt 2009 will confirm as much. The following list accentuates the positive, the more victorious moments in the sweep of theatrical offerings this year, and eliminates the negative, minus an equivocating remark or two. Until this year is over, I’m not messing with Mr. In-between.

•<\!s><0x0007>The Andersen Project at Zellerbach Playhouse.

•<\!s><0x0007>The Ballad of Edgar Cayce (A Bluegrass Operetta) by Construction Crew Theater at Traveling Jewish Theater.

•<\!s><0x0007>Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage at Ashby Stage

Shotgun Players shrewdly gave a material foot-up to brilliant but low-budg Banana Bag and Bodice, leading to the New York City company’s most wildly enjoyable show to date. What would they do with some real cash? For a hint, catch the show’s one-night-only remounting at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Stage on Jan. 8, 2009.

•<\!s><0x0007>Billy Connelly Live! at Post Street Theater

The secret of success in theater remains elusive, but clearly one cheerfully roguish, foul-mouthed Scot is sometimes all it takes. (Check that — I’d also had a couple of pints.)

•<\!s><0x0007>Blade to the Heat at Thick House

Thick Description was doing more than just resting on its laurels when it devoted its anniversary season to remounting past successes, often with the original principals.

•<\!s>Survivors: In the arts — and in this economy — staying power itself counts as a triumph. Three milestone anniversaries this year: Thick Description at 20 years; the Exit Theatre, 25 years; and Traveling Jewish Theater, 30 years.

•<\!s><0x0007>Bone to Pick at Exit on Taylor

The Cutting Ball Theater and Magic Theater/Z Space New Works Initiative commissioned this fresh surprise, a clever and powerful reworking of the Ariadne myth by local playwright Eugenie Chan — a standout in Cutting Ball’s program of short avant-garde works.

•<\!s><0x0007>Bug at SF Playhouse

A great ensemble made the most of this weird and gritty tale by Tracy Letts, who won the Pulitzer this year for his latest, August: Osage County, due for a Bay Area bow in 2009.

•<\!s><0x0007>Curse of the Starving Class at American Conservatory Theater

Director Peter DuBois’ anniversary revival of Sam Shepard’s play was fairly terrific throughout, and included two outstanding female turns: Pamela Reed (the play’s original Emma), returning brilliantly three decades later to play the mother, Ella, and Nicole Lowrance, wonderfully filling Reed’s old shoes as the unstoppable firecracker of a daughter.

•<\!s><0x0007>Two by August Wilson: Fences at Lorraine Hansberry and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Berkeley Rep.

•<\!s><0x0007>Two Conor McFirsts: Irish playwright Conor McPherson received a pair of strong local premieres this year, both showcasing exceptional performances. The Seafarer at Marin Theatre Company and Shining City at SF Playhouse. There were no slouches in Amy Glazer’s production for SF Playhouse, but as the grief-haunted husband, Paul Whitworth’s persuasive performance was more startling than any phantom.

•<\!s><0x0007>Work Eats Home by Sleepwalkers Theater at Phoenix Theater.

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Barack Obama wasn’t the only lanky senator from Illinois to have a triumph on the stage, political or otherwise, this year. Abraham Lincoln took a couple of bows himself. Of course, many have noted the weighty coincidence of the country’s first African American president following Lincoln’s senatorial trail to the White House. But who could match Thick Description’s revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play — focusing on an African American protagonist whose calling involves dressing up in Lincoln drag — for political prescience? Special mention goes to playwright Aaron Loeb, who at SF Playhouse last week unveiled a bawdy frolic he calls Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party. This Lincoln thing just gets weirder.

I guess it would be pretty easy to call 2008 a year of triumphs and defeats, whether you were a politician, a voter, a banker, a shaken-down taxpayer, an Olympian, an artist, or just a serial theatergoer. So it was a year of triumphs and defeats. God, I feel cheap. Still, most of one’s life is lived straddling a slippery seesaw of success and failure. And no doubt 2009 will confirm as much. The following list accentuates the positive, the more victorious moments in the sweep of theatrical offerings this year, and eliminates the negative, minus an equivocating remark or two. Until this year is over, I’m not messing with Mr. In-between.

•<\!s><0x0007>The Andersen Project at Zellerbach Playhouse.

•<\!s><0x0007>The Ballad of Edgar Cayce (A Bluegrass Operetta) by Construction Crew Theater at Traveling Jewish Theater.

•<\!s><0x0007>Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage at Ashby Stage

Shotgun Players shrewdly gave a material foot-up to brilliant but low-budg Banana Bag and Bodice, leading to the New York City company’s most wildly enjoyable show to date. What would they do with some real cash? For a hint, catch the show’s one-night-only remounting at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Stage on Jan. 8, 2009.

•<\!s><0x0007>Billy Connelly Live! at Post Street Theater

The secret of success in theater remains elusive, but clearly one cheerfully roguish, foul-mouthed Scot is sometimes all it takes. (Check that — I’d also had a couple of pints.)

•<\!s><0x0007>Blade to the Heat at Thick House

Thick Description was doing more than just resting on its laurels when it devoted its anniversary season to remounting past successes, often with the original principals.

•<\!s>Survivors: In the arts — and in this economy — staying power itself counts as a triumph. Three milestone anniversaries this year: Thick Description at 20 years; the Exit Theatre, 25 years; and Traveling Jewish Theater, 30 years.

•<\!s><0x0007>Bone to Pick at Exit on Taylor

The Cutting Ball Theater and Magic Theater/Z Space New Works Initiative commissioned this fresh surprise, a clever and powerful reworking of the Ariadne myth by local playwright Eugenie Chan — a standout in Cutting Ball’s program of short avant-garde works.

•<\!s><0x0007>Bug at SF Playhouse

A great ensemble made the most of this weird and gritty tale by Tracy Letts, who won the Pulitzer this year for his latest, August: Osage County, due for a Bay Area bow in 2009.

•<\!s><0x0007>Curse of the Starving Class at American Conservatory Theater

Director Peter DuBois’ anniversary revival of Sam Shepard’s play was fairly terrific throughout, and included two outstanding female turns: Pamela Reed (the play’s original Emma), returning brilliantly three decades later to play the mother, Ella, and Nicole Lowrance, wonderfully filling Reed’s old shoes as the unstoppable firecracker of a daughter.

•<\!s><0x0007>Two by August Wilson: Fences at Lorraine Hansberry and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Berkeley Rep.

•<\!s><0x0007>Two Conor McFirsts: Irish playwright Conor McPherson received a pair of strong local premieres this year, both showcasing exceptional performances. The Seafarer at Marin Theatre Company and Shining City at SF Playhouse. There were no slouches in Amy Glazer’s production for SF Playhouse, but as the grief-haunted husband, Paul Whitworth’s persuasive performance was more startling than any phantom.

•<\!s><0x0007>Work Eats Home by Sleepwalkers Theater at Phoenix Theater.

Dig it

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REVIEW Long before Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog (2002) was bedazzling them on Broadway, an earlier and related work called The America Play (1990-93) was wowing Bay Area audiences in a small but vital production staged by Thick Description. Like the later play, the company’s 1994 West Coast premiere churned themes of memory, identity, kinship, and race in the maw of American history, all of it focused provocatively on a wonderfully fertile conceit: the image of a black man dressed as Abraham Lincoln, sitting watching a play — a human target and one big, very specific arcade duck for the pleasure of patrons reenacting the role of presidential assassin.

The similarities begin to diverge after that. Where Topdog centered with seeming realism on two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth, The America Play concerns a father and son, the son searching out the father by excavating a theme-park site specified as "an exact replica of the Great Hole of History." It also incorporates the wife and mother, and concentrates on the uncanny Lincoln-likeness of the father — known as the Foundling Father — as well as the life-altering inspiration he receives from the story of "the Great Man." Not least among its differences, the play operates on a more openly abstract, even abstruse plain, albeit one brimming with cultural significance and palpable irony.

The American Play may lack the edginess and also some of the tautness of the more concentrated 2002 two-hander, but revisiting the work in Thick Description’s exquisite revival, as part of its 20th anniversary season, shows it is still worthy and affecting in a sly, haunted fashion that gets its full due from artistic director Tony Kelly’s intelligent and lyrical staging, as well as a fine cast headed by 1994 veterans Rhonnie Washington and Brian Freeman, both brilliantly reprising their roles as, respectively, the gravedigger-turned–Abraham Lincoln impersonator and his son Brazil. Rounding out the enjoyable ensemble are Deirdre Renee Draginoff, Cathleen Riddley, and David Westley Skillman.

Setting us on the abstract expanse of history, "a great hole in the middle of nowhere," Rick Martin’s sublime set is a gorgeous cascade of plank-wood flooring falling in a graceful curve from the top rear of the stage out to the lip, where it meets a proscenium shaped as a large wooden picture frame. The Foundling Father addresses us from a wooden rocker center stage, a pasteboard cutout of Lincoln over his right shoulder, a small bust of "the Great Man" on a table downstage to his left. Sections of the wall/floor come out later to produce an excavation site and a mini stage for a play-within-the-play.

The action and the dialogue — rich, redolent, and blunt as freshly dug earth — resonate powerfully and strangely, taking gradual but firm hold. It’s all funny ha-ha and funny eerie, cuttingly ironic, and wonderfully suggestive — this play built up around the notion of an African American man as latter-day double and relation to the lanky senator from Illinois who became world-historic leader of the country. As for how it reads a decade-and-a-half after the first production, let’s just say the play’s excavations of history are as timely as ever.

THE AMERICA PLAY

Through Sun/14; Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m.; $15–$30

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF
(415) 401-8081

www.thickhouse.org

Couch-surf theater

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PREVIEW No sooner do they settle into their snug and versatile new alley roost on Natoma Street than the people at Boxcar Theatre go itinerant again. The company, founded just a few years back on valiantly environmental productions set aboard moving buses (2006’s 21/One) or on the sands of Baker Beach (2006’s Zen), is spending the holiday season couch-surfing its production of Edward Albee’s The American Dream in a series of private living rooms around the Bay.

Fair enough. This early one act — a scathingly trenchant satire of quote-unquote American family values — is as personal and autobiographical an assault on the hollow mores and manners of a vicious culture as anything Albee ever penned: it’s almost like it never left home in the first place. The cozy parable of Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma — plus special guest: a mysterious young man the spitting image of a son they once adopted and destroyed — unfolds proudly and loudly in a strikingly absurdist key while laying the groundwork for more intricate creations/dissections in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and A Delicate Balance (1966). Like the teen who calls the fam out on all its bullshit, it’s a play the author himself described as "a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen." Who says you can’t go home again?

THE AMERICAN DREAM Fri/12, 7 and 8:30 p.m.; Sat/13 and Dec. 19 and 20, 7 p.m. $25. Various Bay Area living rooms; call for location. (415) 776-1747, www.boxcartheatre.org.

Rolling out the carpet

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REVIEW Director Mary Zimmerman’s association with the Berkeley Rep goes back to 1996’s Journey to the West, her adaptation of the classical Chinese novel, famously followed in 2001 by Metamorphoses, a visually startling adaptation from Ovid’s collection of Greek and Roman myths for which she went on to receive a directing Tony. Since then and always in collaboration with Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, her home base, Zimmerman has returned four more times with productions in a similar vain: vigorously flamboyant, even cheeky stagings of classic texts from the ancient Greeks to the Brothers Grimm to most recently — in a revival of a 1992 work currently up on the Rep’s intimate Thrust Stage — the 1,001 tales of The Arabian Nights.

Zimmerman has gained wide acclaim for this kind of work, and although I haven’t seen them all, the few productions I have encountered have usually left me less than enthusiastic. When not just showy and underwhelming, they proved off-putting in their characteristic combination of baroque, antic staging and translation of "timeless" truths via an American vernacular of pop references, every-guy inflections, mundane sentiment, and low humor. At its worst, this meld of eye candy and "accessible" language feels like pandering and condescension at the same time, wedding a democratic instinct for dumbing down with a pretentious notion of what’s good for us.

Harsh, I know, and evidently a minority opinion, but that said, I’m relieved to add that The Arabian Nights is one of the more successful expressions of this normally problematic formula. It exhibits only mild versions of the excesses mentioned, hewing closer to the spirit of the original material and showing more restraint overall than, for example, Argonautika, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts’ quest for the golden fleece whose relentless capering marked Zimmerman’s last Berkeley Rep offering. The Arabian Nights is also restlessly inventive with staging, but more organically and less imposingly so. Unfolding with a versatile 15-member cast amid the luxurious minimalism of scenic designer Daniel Ostling’s bed of Persian carpets and soft cushions, beneath an inviting glow from low-hanging antique lamps, Nights already has a less lofty and more approachable feel — assuming one gets past the initial blush of Orientalism — than the extravaganzas that have landed next door on the Rep’s vast proscenium stage.

A co-production of Berkeley Rep and Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Nights was first staged in the wake of the first Gulf War. It was the mainstream media’s narrative treatment of that conflict, especially its cheerful echoing of militaristic euphemisms steeped in callous brutality — a casual discourse around bombing other people that is so familiar these days, even among "peace candidates" like President-elect Barack Obama, that it can go almost unremarked — that reportedly sparked the idea to dip into the treasure trove of tales making up the legend of Scheherazade (Sofia Jean Gomez) and One Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade, you’ll remember, forestalls her wedding night execution at the hands of her new husband, a serial wife murderer with trust issues named King Shahryar (played as a sort of dour every-guy with royal license to kill by Ryan Artzberger), by unfurling, Penelope-like, one tantalizing yarn after another.

Her gripping storytelling ability is the king’s and our pleasure both, as Scheherazade is granted one extension after another. The stories were indeed good enough in themselves to convince adapter Zimmerman to forego any heavy-handed political messaging in favor of foregrounding a choice selection of wonderfully improbable but often pointed tales concerning everything from infidelity to revenge, wisdom, and infamy — the last via a monumental breaking of wind.

The immediate political urgency and topicality take a back seat — and no doubt for the better, theatrically speaking — to the dramatic and comic power of the stories themselves, augmented by a robust ensemble performance, in which the actors also take care of the musical accompaniment, handling a small, efficient assortment of traditional instruments. In revisiting it after another and far more ghastly Gulf war, Zimmerman seems to have gone even further in letting the stories have their say — a tall-tale showdown is even improvised afresh each night for one particular scene.

There’s enough bitter irony after all in the repetition of Baghdad’s standard title as "the city of peace and poets." Beyond this, Nights adds only a quiet but hauntingly suggestive coda at the end of two enjoyable acts, wherein the animated bodies of Zimmerman’s hard-working cast suddenly fall silent and roll gently across the stage, like so many leaves blown by catastrophes natural or man-made, marking time and an evanescence to which there is no possible response.

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

Through Jan. 4, 2009

Tues.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Wed., 7 p.m.; Thurs. and Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.;

Sun., 2 and 7 p.m. (check site for exceptions); $13.50–$71

Berkeley Repertory Thrust Stage

2025 Addison, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Wonder as they wander

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The great Langston Hughes titled a volume of his autobiography I Wonder as I Wander, invoking the notion of the poet in terms entirely personal and inevitably representative of a whole people, violently unsettled by history and restlessly searching for meaning, home, dignity — in short, for themselves. In Hughes’ art, this dovetailed with the image of the poet as blues singer and the blues singer as poet. His writing signaled that vernacular music as secular and sacred verse to a population caught up in forces larger than itself, but marked nevertheless by millions of singular experiences given individual voice in song.

The same themes of displacement and song run compellingly throughout the late August Wilson’s magisterial 10-play cycle of the African American 20th century, and rarely as forcefully as in 1988’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, currently receiving director Delroy Lindo’s fine, impressively cast production at the Berkeley Rep. But Hughes’ title applies readily to another great historical population as treated in another revival this month, making the stories evoked in Joe Turner and Traveling Jewish Theatre’s less successful The Last Yiddish Poet touchstones of broadly but pointedly similar significance.

Set in 1911 during the great migration of African Americans northward, Joe Turner‘s action unfolds in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The setting is a boardinghouse operated by the basically decent but huffy Seth Holly (Barry Shabaka Henley) and his kindhearted wife, Bertha (Kim Staunton). Into this warm, burnished house comes a small assortment of transient borders, all more or less fresh from the South: the headstrong guitar player and manual laborer Jeremy (Don Guillory), the lovelorn Mattie (Tiffany Michelle Thompson), and the fiercely independent beauty Molly (Erica Peeples).

They join a more permanent lodger, pigeon-catching backyard shaman Bynum Walker (Brent Jennings). The Hollys are descendants of Northern freemen, but the others are a mere generation from slavery — possibly excepting Bynum, old enough to have been born a slave, and not counting the play’s lone white character, merchant Rutherford Selig (Dan Hiatt), who, as a descendant of slave catchers, has adapted unselfconsciously as a "people finder" among rootless African American migrants.

The main plot of Wilson’s evocative, earthy, and humor-laden tale of disunion, reunion, and fractured identities takes hold with the arrival of the grimly forlorn, vaguely menacing Herald Loomis (Teagle F. Bougere). Loomis’ story makes bitter sense of the play’s title, a blues lyric repeated throughout by Bynum and fashioned by Southern women whose men were disappeared and forced into labor by the infamous Joe Turner. Since his release from bondage, the anguished and haunted Loomis, a former deacon, has searched with trancelike focus for the mother of his shy daughter (Inglish Amore Hills, alternating with Nia Reneé Warren). The Hollys’ boardinghouse takes on the baleful aspect of Loomis‘ entombed soul as his violent outbursts of protest and revelation — and the mediating, ministering wisdom of the perspicacious, wondering Bynum — edge the play beyond naturalism toward a mythopoesis of half-submerged history.

The resurrection of history and half-buried tradition, as well as the literal voicing of experience and identity, is also at the center of The Last Yiddish Poet, an otherwise very different kind of play from Joe Turner. Originally produced by Traveling Jewish Theatre in 1980 and now revived to lead off its 30th-anniversary season, the production is aptly peripatetic in structure as well as theme: two actors in vaudevillian comic getup (artistic director Aaron Davidman and TJT cofounder Corey Fischer, also the play’s cocreator and half of the original cast) roam about a limbolike white-on-white set scattered with occasional detritus, most particularly and strikingly a pyramidal display at the far left of the stage on which a mound of books lie in disarray. The actors eventually mount a low stage within the stage, behind a row of modest footlights composed of painted tin cans, and amid knowing cornball lines they announce that they are speaking in "Yiddish" accents, despite not knowing Yiddish, so that the audience will recognize their Yankee selves as Jews.

What follows is a reclamation of the language as a search for identity and authenticity, in several dramatic and musical modes and moods and in struggle with manifold forces of history, from assimilation to persecution to the blunt inconstancy of time itself. Director, cocreator, and TJT cofounder Naomi Newman admits in her program notes that reentering the play after many years was not as easy as expected. Much has changed with respect to the place of Yiddish in Jewish lives. There is a quality of hesitation in the updated staging, which undermines some of its poignancy, although the awkwardness disappears at key moments, including Fischer’s hulking, half-masked portrayal of Nakhman — the rebbe known for contributions spiritual and literary in Yiddish — and second-generation TJT artist Davidman’s channeling of formerly unfamiliar Yiddish verses, in what amounts to an act of possession in at least two senses. *

JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE

Through Dec. 14

Tues. and Fri., 8 p.m.; Wed., 7 p.m.; Thurs. (except Nov. 27) and Sat., 2 (except Sat/22 and Dec. 11) and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.; $13.50–$71

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk.

www.berkeleyrep.org

THE LAST YIDDISH POET

Through Dec. 14

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $30–$34

Traveling Jewish Theatre

470 Florida

www.atjt.com

Rap-erations

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REVIEW Even if the rest of the "change" he’s been promising remains elusive, Barack Obama’s resounding electoral win is already change — and of a profound kind — given its undeniable impact on racial consciousness among African Americans, Americans at large, and no doubt people around the globe. Of course, nobody thinks racism disappeared overnight Nov. 4. If anything, the day marks an opportunity for a reinvigorated dialogue on the complexities of race and racism in the 21st-century United States. Dan Wolf’s vigorous and inviting stage adaptation of Bay Area author Adam Mansbach’s 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy, might seem like an ideal instance, but in fact, although very entertaining, it rehearses a fairly familiar angle without moving much beyond it.

Mansbach’s satirical but searching story concerns a white Jewish suburban hip-hop enthusiast, Macon Detornay (played appealingly by Wolf), whose guilt-tinged identification with African American culture and corresponding aversion to the white mainstream has him uneasily straddling two worlds, eventually bringing them into comically dramatic collision. Macon’s guilt stems partly from a great-grandfather who, as a professional baseball coach, tormented the only black athlete who dared to hold his own on an all-white team.

Macon’s familial history is also, along with hip-hop, his bridge to dorm-mate and fellow Columbia University freshman Andre (played with laidback poise by Myers Clark), whom Macon arranges to live with after learning that Andre is the great-grandson of the same ballplayer his own ancestor victimized. Andre is bemused but generous in the face of Macon’s attempt to make amends. More skeptical is Andre’s friend Nique (a potent Tommy Shepherd, also supplying the fine original music and soundscape). But Macon, a part-time cab driver, earns street cred when he begins robbing his fares (white dudes played by fourth ensemble member Keith Pinto) at the first sign of idle middle-class racism, becoming a notorious outlaw his victims improbably recall as black. The three new friends form the Race Traitor Project to capitalize on Macon’s ironic celebrity, organizing a "day of apology" wherein white America confronts its racist demons. Naturally, things don’t go as planned, and the pressure brings latent tensions surrounding Macon’s fraught identity to a boil.

While wisely concentrating on the ample humor in a story that’s a bit contrived even for satire, director Sean San Jose and cast (all but Clark are members of hip-hop group Felonious) propel the action through a fluid, combustible mixture of music and movement, with sharp choreography from Pinto. But as staged, the themes are less than provocative, in part because the other characters remain subordinated to Macon’s limited perspective, itself almost too "black and white." Nevertheless, the cohesive, versatile ensemble and Wolf’s sympathetic approach translates, under San Jose’s attentive direction, into an engaging theatrical hybrid, whose punctuations and rhythms carry their own share of emotional content and cultural meaning.

ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY

Through Nov. 23

Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., $15–$25

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

www.theintersection.org

The Cutting Ball Theater

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If you were at the latest Cutting Ball show, avantgardARAMA!, you entered a theater that looked like an art installation, already buzzing and flickering with video images on a screen suspended in front of a shimmering mirror-box set, accompanied by a soundtrack of voices and droning tones. It was like some serenely wicked room in a purgatorial funhouse, where all you’ve been and all you might become could be reflected at you, from every possible angle, ad infinitum. As it turned out, it was an environment perfectly suited to the material sharply staged that evening: three short experimental plays on war, power, and betrayal by three women writers — Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eugenie Chan — whose bold narrative loops and lacunae literally rebounded off the walls.

The stylish, jarring, exhilarating effect: our sleepwalking world was dramatically distilled into fractal-like figures that somehow made it real again. This is the oblique strategy of the Cutting Ball Theater, a passionately intelligent and skillful company with a declared commitment to poetic truths over superficial naturalism.

As it approaches its 10-year milestone, Cutting Ball transitions from dogged itinerancy into luxurious residency at Exit on Taylor, a satellite stage of the Exit Theater complex in the Tenderloin. Much as a ball rolls forward by turning full circle, the move marks something of a return for the company, which launched its career in a production of Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer at the Exit-sponsored San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1999.

"That was the last time you had to stand outside at 3 in the morning and camp out," associate artistic director and actor Paige Rogers recalls of that time, before the Fringe established its lottery system. Rogers, and husband and artistic director Rob Melrose, established both the company and a family that year, more or less simultaneously. Melrose did the camping out and rehearsed the play by night at an Alameda Catholic school where Rogers was teaching music.

(As with many a start-up theater, overlapping accommodations was the name of the tune: when the school’s principal expressed surprise at happening upon a late-night rehearsal of Foreman’s madcap dream-world in the kindergarten, Rogers deflected further inquiry by joyfully announcing, "Marilyn! I’m pregnant!")

Cutting Ball has mixed new plays and "re-visioned" classics ever since. The visual metaphor is apt since Cutting Ball productions are nothing if not strikingly designed. For years, the company has had a talented core of collaborators that includes designers Heather Basarab (lights), Cliff Caruthers (sound and electronic music), and Michael Locher (sets). Together in close collaboration with the astute, Yale-trained Melrose, they regularly produce some of the best designs to be found on any Bay Area stage, large or small. Add artistic associates like playwrights Kevin Oakes (2003’s The Vomit Talk of Ghosts) and Eugenie Chan (whose A Bone to Pick was a highlight of this theater season), as well as dependably strong acting from Rogers, Felicia Benefield, Chad Deverman, David Sinaiko, and David Westley Skillman, among others, and you have the makings of some great small theater.

The new residency marks another return. Its ninth season will be inaugurated by a rarely staged early play by Eugène Ionesco, Victims of Duty, a work Melrose says he’s waited 15 years to direct. Centering on the abrupt crisis-ridden invasion of a bourgeois couple’s placid bubble-world and their equally staid conceptions of theatrical art, Victims is a fever-dream of a play that not only sounds strikingly contemporary but echoes the company’s own MO. When theater "holds the mirror up to the world," it’s often the warped glass that furnishes the truest picture.

www.cuttingball.com

No-brainer

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REVIEW The title of David Szlasa’s peculiar, compact, and appealing new work suggests one ready avenue of flight from a world gone mad, but in fact fantasies of escape take more than one form in My Hot Lobotomy, now up at CounterPULSE. And while escapism is exactly what the piece concerns itself with, the import is anything but apathetic or disengaged. A cheerfully quirky, Beckett-like duet wrapped in luxurious silences, snatches of recorded dialogue, short blasts of song and free-style dance, and a dreamy videoscape of environmental disintegration, My Hot Lobotomy is full of restive thought.

Like Szlasa’s installation-performance work on the atomic bomb, 2004’s GADGET, My Hot Lobotomy pokes at that psychic terrain joining the human capacity for denial with man-made catastrophe. In this case, the catastrophe is the rapid warming of the planet, which remains stubbornly just beyond the necessary concerted and rational response. But Lobotomy‘s approach is both more traditional and more oblique than the environmental strategy employed in GADGET, which had audiences wandering around a noisy club-like atmosphere enveloped by video projections and spotted with localized audio segments.

Quietly trained on the internal and external minutiae of its main character — a mute and semi-vegetative post-op named Joey (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) — the play never feels crudely weighty or political, let alone like a piece of agitprop. Instead, it unfolds like a loopy, semi-looping trance, a restless and sardonic ditty, or a closet poem stashed away in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Lobotomy‘s low-key faux naiveté bristling with caged energies and subversive instincts — much as Joey’s shiny turquoise sneaks, popping out from under a bland ensemble of sports coat and chinos, hints at dormant life beneath a numbed surface.

The play acts to slow us down almost immediately — almost as much as Joey, who does nothing for the first several minutes but stare back at us blankly from a chair in the center of the stage. This mirror effect, uncomfortably amusing, grows in significance when we learn that Joey — in shades of the Ramones — has given himself a homemade lobotomy. Well, you might ask, who hasn’t? Szlasa gives us plenty of space to ponder the question, gradually unfolding the method and motive behind Joey’s condition as we share in the meditative, vaguely bemused mood he projects.

It’s a knock at the door that disturbs this waking slumber. A guy (Spencer Evans) enters delivering a pizza, a slice of which Joey chews with silent satisfaction. The man then returns with a boombox and a cassette tape, careful to demonstrate to Joey how they go together. On the tape, Joey speaks to himself with prerecorded words of instruction, clarification, and encouragement. The delivery guy, we learn, has been paid in advance to bring all Joey will need in his new, streamlined life. Returning to the stage with a guitar, he also delivers something to the audience, at odd moments and even odd angles: a series of witty songs — variously contributed by Carrie Baum, Cody James Bentley, Sean Hayes, and Joshua Lowe — telling the story of Joey in terms that slyly critique what they describe.

The limited world Joey has structured for his new self — with its prerecorded, too certain insistence that everything is "gonna be really, really great" — eventually unravels among a clutter of pizza boxes and, more alarmingly, a series of fraught dreams, as the unstructured world outside, which appears as a video montage of global warming over a gentle cloudscape at the back of the stage, slips in with growing insistence. The increasing dissonance provokes another transformation in Joey, and another attempt to scurry for cover. It’s a rush of new life whose meaning may be ambiguous, but hardly empty-headed.

MY HOT LOBOTOMY

Through Nov. 2

Thurs.–Sat. and Nov. 2, 8 p.m., $25

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

Sung and spoken wit

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PREVIEW Last year saw the re-release of performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut, Big Science (Warner Bros.). What a heady nostalgia its lo-fi cover invokes, a confidence now gone quaint with the one-time fad of robotic gestures, lab coats, and test-tube weirdness. It’s just cute the way the ’80s were catching up with the future.

But recently the recording’s opening track, the eerie and wacky "From the Air," has been on shuffle rotation in the iPod of the brain as one of the more apt commentaries on present madness. It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in than a surprise crash landing that seems somehow not to be a surprise at all. And while we’re at it, neither has time bled any of the force from "O Superman," the disc’s surprise chart-topper. How good to know Anderson is still successfully tackling this machine mother of an illusion, "America," in her latest venture: a witty, haunting, and even uncharacteristically irate collection of sung and spoken pieces under the spot-on title of Homeland. The tour makes its way to UC Berkeley this week. Possible bonus: punk rock’s grouchy godfather and Anderson’s companion, Lou Reed, reportedly has shadowed her shows and sat in on a couple of numbers.

LAURIE ANDERSON’S HOMELAND Fri/24-Sat/25, 8 p.m., $28–$56. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Let them eat rock

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REVIEW The prologue and opening salvo in playwright-director Steve Morgan Haskell’s spirited, fitfully inspired rock parable All You Can Eat — an offbeat, down-tempo call to arms — has a French accent, wielded by a woman named Camille de Tocqueville (a coolly assured Michelle Haner). A writer on a Jean Baudrillard–like quest for the quintessence of America — America the dream, the disease, the drug, the doom — Camille needed, she tells us, to get herself an American rock star, the cowboy icon of this decadent age of imperial decline. And she found one in Alexander Vanderbilt (a languidly potent Brian Livingston), an evocatively named, Jim Morrison–esque lead vocalist of the long-defunct band All You Can Eat, whose four members are about to reunite for a comeback tour after seven years apart. The math eventually becomes significant, too, since 2008 minus seven leaves us hovering around the smoldering fall of ’01.

Now, the idea of being criticized by a French person is supposed to be inherently provocative to great swaths of freedom-fry–loving Americans — if maybe not so many Bay Area denizens. But having the great-great-great-grandniece of Alexis de Tocqueville firing both barrels at us — a live babe clutched, with European nonchalance, to her breast — sets up a particularly intriguing series of associations that go well beyond mere cheek or caricature. The group’s name, after all, employs durable pop irony to flag a consumerist ethos that, in this context, functions as a latter-day democratic equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s dictum by inadvertently helping to kick off an apocalypse with the Dubya-like injunction to shop and devour your way to freedom and security. Revolution, it seems, is English for la plus ça change.

Collaborating productively with the sharp physical theater style of San Francisco’s foolsFURY, Haskell unfurls the combo’s story obliquely, in some shimmering dialogue and a music- and movement-fueled patchwork of disjointed, time-tripping scenes, prodded and punctuated by guitarist Tracy Walsh, stage left. The paint-dribbled set proffers three large semi-abstract canvases by artist Matt Sesow — crazed portraiture for an age inclined less to the revolutionary romanticism of a Delacroix than the bastard offspring of Francis Bacon and Ralph Steadman.

In their personal foibles, triumphs, and entanglements; their outsize ambitions; their seemingly omnipotent but ultimately caged energies; Vanderbilt and colleagues Gregory Ford (Ryan O’Donnell) and Banafrit Nut (Nora El Samahy), together with their manager (Deborah Eliezer) and one fiery and ominous groupie (Csilla Horvath), become the prism for a larger social crisis. Although the play’s expression may lack the dramatic girth Haskell sets out for, its dimensions are often smartly suggested. Moreover, All You Can Eat‘s significance won’t be lost on anyone in this crystalline moment of truth between Wall Street, Washington, DC, and the abused inheritors of democracy in America. *

ALL YOU CAN EAT

Through Sat/11

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; $15–$30

Traveling Jewish Theatre

470 Florida, SF

www.foolsfury.org

Do look back

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REVIEW By now, the Italian American mean streets of New York — that colorful bustle of energies shadowed so enticingly by the wickedly romantic lives of entrepreneurial mafiosi — are an immovable fixture on the post-Scorsese, post-Sopranos landscape of cultural memory. So much so that, in its more run-of-the-mill versions, this world strikes the outsider as virtual at best: no more than a manufactured dreamscape. But authenticity is hard to fake. And with Chazz Palminteri, you can’t help feeling one degree from the real thing.

This sensation is all the more impressive given that the actor-playwright’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story has a highly cinematic flavor and arc that on reflection seems maybe a bit too picaresque and neat, pitching his boyhood self between two competing father figures and two intimately entwined but distinct paths. Not to mention that it comes projected from a big Broadway-style stage, amid a set that looks like its serviceable sections. The head-on slice of a two-story apartment building and the street lamp announcing the intersection of 187th Street and Belmont Avenue might all have been borrowed from a backlot in Burbank, suggesting something like Sesame Street for wise guys.

But if these sound like reservations, they’re not. The revival tour of Palminteri’s A Bronx Tale, courtesy of Best of Broadway, is a vital and greatly entertaining piece of work, driven by a tour-de-force solo performance that must be every bit as deft as it was nearly 20 years ago off-Broadway, before it was transposed to the screen, with Palminteri starring opposite Robert De Niro. In fine trim, the now-50-something Palminteri holds Golden Gate Theatre’s ample stage effortlessly for the 90 riveting minutes of director Jerry Zaks’ razor-sharp production. Moreover, Palminteri’s playful, inextinguishable exuberance throughout suggests this is no mere attempt to cash in on an old hit, but rather a deep-seated desire to consider afresh a treasured patch of hallowed ground.

That patch — 187th and Belmont in the Bronx of the 1960s — comes initially bounded by the actor-memoirist’s nine-year-old stoop-bound world of baseball, pasta sauce, and corner doo-wop crooning. Until one day, that is, when little Cologio Palminteri’s refusal to rat out the perpetrator of a murder that unfolds a few steps from his house brings him under the paternal wing of the neighborhood’s rising mob boss, Sonny — setting up a conflict internal and external between Sonny and the boy’s upright bus driver father, Lorenzo. After leaping ahead to his 17th year, the focus shifts somewhat to a budding interracial romance between Cologio and a neighborhood girl, as well as a test of trust between the young man and his adopted gangster father figure. But the pace never flags.

In Palminteri’s expert quick-change characterizations, the story brims with an assortment of suitably outsize personalities carefully, lovingly etched by human idiosyncrasies, foibles, doubts, and contradictions. No doubt one sees here the hand of devilishly charming storytelling, but beneath the theatrical/cinematic veneer is an authenticity of place and passion that reaches to the bone.

A BRONX TALE

Through Oct 19

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., $40–$85

Golden Gate Theatre

1 Taylor, SF

www.shnsf.com

No Seth Rogen

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REVIEW Two young family-hungry couples, one unassuming victim of the staff Christmas party, and a lonely alky wife and mom-bonking boy-next-door all find themselves variously knocked up, around, and for a loop by the reproductive process in Imaginative Productions’ stage adaptation of its 2006 independent film, "conceived" and directed by Tonya Foster. And reproduction really is a process containing as much social baggage as genetic code in these predicaments which, while ranging from the urban banal to the tragically suburban, are all pretty much as thematically familiar as familial.

Unfortunately, the relatively slim potential in this otherwise pregnant theme is rarely pursued with much vigor or insight, as the multicharacter storyline meanders away from its subjects in seeming perplexity as to what to do with them. Further muting things is a muffled soundscape that sounds like unintended lobby noise. The more workable areas of drama and comedy, meanwhile, suffer from uneven performances and static direction — although, ironically, a visit by single preggy waitress Anna (a relatively strong and sympathetic Quinne Brown) to an actors workshop-cum-support group — led by a deeply histrionic drama instructor (a vibrant Erin Coker) — arrives as one of the more unexpected and apt scenes.

KNOCKED UP Through Oct. 18. Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $23–$25. Studio 300 Theatre, 442 Post, SF. 1-888-410-8355, www.imaginativeproductions.com

As the world turns

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REVIEW American Conservatory Theater’s season opener marks the 40-year anniversary of 1968 with the well-timed if less than well-executed Bay Area premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, which from the dual vantage points of Prague and Cambridge traces revolutionary politics and counterculture between 1968’s Prague Spring and 1989’s Velvet Revolution.

Stoppard’s latest but not greatest is almost a 20th-century coda to his grand three-part saga of 19th-century revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, building on the famed playwright’s ongoing interest in politics, media, culture, private vs. public life, and the motor of social change. But it’s also, by his account, a more personal play he’d long been considering, based partly on his own history as a Czech World War II refugee who settled happily into English life at a tender age.

Rock ‘n’ Roll‘s protagonist — and Stoppard’s stand-in — is Jan (a genial Manoel Felciano), a visiting exchange student at Cambridge. Within the familial embrace of hardheaded, hard-line Communist don Max (Jack Willis) and his wife, cancer-racked classics scholar Eleanor (René Augesen), Jan revels wholeheartedly in English life and ’60s counterculture — particularly its music. For Jan — whose LP collection is like a precious extension of his own person — tracks from the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and the Doors are the stuff of revelation and ecstatic community. But unlike the playwright — and despite his antipathy to stifling Soviet bloc authoritarianism — Jan returns home to Prague in 1968 after Soviet tanks roll in.

The rest of the play cuts back and forth as life goes on, with Max twice fatefully visiting an increasingly cornered Jan in the interim. In Cambridge, the seeds of the ’60s blossom in ways bleak and hopeful, shadowed by the gentle but tragic presence (offstage) of original Pink Floyd frontperson and madcap Cambridge denizen Syd Barrett, here a Pan-like figure inspiring the protective devotion of Max and Eleanor’s flower child daughter, Esmé (Summer Serafin and René Augesen), and later Esmé’s own radical teenage offspring, Alice (Serafin). In Prague, meanwhile, Jan and friends negotiate two distinct realms of opposition: the embattled dissident movement headed by Václav Havel and others, and a countercultural rock underground of disaffected youth that, despite its so-called apolitical stance, is inherently political and threatening to a totalitarian regime bent on monopolizing the social sphere.

Despite a critical edge — brought out, for example, in Max’s admirable rant against the compromises of a supposedly free press — Jan’s and the play’s embrace of Western liberalism casts a vague "end of ideology" tone, as if Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that "there is no alternative" was correct, however crude and ruthless the messenger. But the real problem with the play is its lack of sustained tension. Helmed by artistic director Carey Perloff, the production pursues an impressive visual dimension but often falls dramatically flat. Rare exceptions include a scene in Cambridge in which Max’s crude materialism — and cruder clinging to his CP card and shopworn shibboleths — runs up against the most personal of rebukes: his beloved wife’s diseased, disintegrating body, which she movingly denies can encompass her identity and humanity. Company member Augesen does fine work here, as well as in the role of grown-up daughter Esmé. By contrast, the normally brilliant Willis feels miscast as Max. He’s just not a very convincing Englishman, and the attempt is both disappointing and distracting. Sturdy work from regulars Anthony Fusco, Jud Williford, and Delia MacDougall can’t fully alleviate the overall lethargy.

A damp firecracker of a ’68 tribute, in other words, but the real show is turning out to be in the streets anyway, as the increasingly tumultuous anniversary year rocks and rolls ominously along.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Through Oct. 12

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 1 and 7 p.m., $20–<\d>$82

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

Live through this

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REVIEW Hey, kids! Wake up and smell the freedom! Outside the RNC, for instance, where a phalanx of Taser-wielding storm troopers recently did their dirty work on citizens practicing what civics classes used to call free speech. One 19-year-old there was beaten unconscious, hooded, hauled away, and beaten some more — subjected to what any dropout in years past would have rightly called torture. "Freedom" is Francophobe for fries, or else it’s merely the liberty of the ruling class to plunder with impunity, slurping up every last drop of blood from the rest of us like it was Heinz 57.

Am I exaggerating? My diction may have a salty 19th-century flavor, but it’s only appropriate, given this nation’s inglorious march backward to the future. It’s also appropriate, in its own way, that Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (written in the 1890s) should be making a raucous but compromised comeback courtesy of Broadway. Deemed pornographic when it premiered in New York City in 1917, the German proto-expressionist work’s categorical attack on the deathly sexual repression and moral hypocrisy of the age becomes — after a lag time of roughly a century — a financially sound formula of faux teen empowerment and positive messaging. In its big show biz incarnation, the teeth of Wedekind’s restlessly outraged, poetical, funny, and morbid little play are filed down to dust, even as Steven Sater (book and lyrics) and Duncan Sheik (music) channel VH1 rebellion into some kinetic, tuneful, and exciting moments (heightened significantly by Bill T. Jones’ choreography). The talented young cast rocks unabashedly to the end. But that’s also where the schmaltz lies heaviest — all things wicked and corrupt being made tolerable again as characters dead and alive reunite for a throaty anthem to hope and purple summer and god knows what. Roll over, Wedekind. And tell Bertolt Brecht the news.


Through Oct. 12. Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 1 and 6 p.m., $30–$99. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF. www.shnsf.com

Knuckleballin’

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REVIEW I don’t know if it helps to have a strategy at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The nature of this annual animal — the 17th installment opened Sept. 3 — resists forethought. You study the program, listen to the buzz while getting yours on in the Exit Theatre Café, read the audience reviews online, but in the end you never know what you’ll get. This year I led with my gut and — it being that kind of year — decided to go for all the dark stuff: the ugly, the brutal, the profane. So I started with clowns.

In truth, the choice to see physical comedy troupe Pi’s After-Party on opening night had less to do with anything inherently transgressive about clowns than with the juggling, which I’d glimpsed at the Fest’s Sneak Peak show last month, and which was great enough to merit a second viewing. I could watch those jugglers for hours: the courage, the concentration, the ingenuity, the balls. Also the bowling pins and knives. A glow-in-the-dark routine was nearly balletic; a bloody mishap with the blades, almost operatic — if in a jocular, low-key sort of way.

As it turned out, the rest of the troupe’s routines, while uneven — a few bits felt either too familiar or underdeveloped — offered fresh and fine moments, with antics delivered expertly by a youthful, progressively endearing ensemble. Themes touching my heart included varied use of a casket and several walk-on appearances by the Grim Reaper. The grand finale — an all-out bone-crushing melee done in slow-mo — could have gone all night judging by audience guffaws and my own joyful tears. These are serious clowns, and their work is extremely silly.

The evening only got better and darker as I headed into Knuckleball, a drama whose sophisticated, thematic blend of love and baseball begins, naturally enough, with a star-spangled blowjob. This excellent two-hander, produced by New York’s EndTimes in association with Mortals Theater, is the best dramatic work I’ve seen at any Fringe. It’s one uninterrupted, dynamic, wildly unpredictable conversation between Ross (Shawn Parsons) — a Midwestern welder whose former glory days of high school baseball are overshadowed by the loss of his teammate and best friend — and his high-class girlfriend Trish (Judy Merrick) — whose polyglot, jet-set life masks a sordid past Ross must unexpectedly confront. Sounding distant echoes of Tennessee Williams and maybe Richard Greenberg, William Whitehurst’s hard, unsparing, humorous, and humane play, sharply directed by Jeremy Pape, is lit up by two fine, gutsy, focused performances that grip from the first and don’t let go.

Next came My Friend Hitler, rounding out the evening with swastikas and a wicked little footnote to the history of the Third Reich. Yes, with friends like these, Ernst Röhm — the head of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary brownshirts, executed by Hitler’s minions in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives" purge — needed no enemies. But are we meant to feel sorry for Röhm? Hardly. Are we meant to sympathize with longtime friend Adolph’s tough choices? Nah. In this solo performance, inspired by Yukio Mishima’s play and delivered by Washington, DC performer Zehra Fazal in Hitler drag, there’s not much to latch onto beyond the (unconvincingly personalized) political machinations of a waxing tyrant. Larger themes remain indistinct in this set of one-sided conversations, which Fazal delivers with animated but histrionic conviction. Hard to believe Nazis could be so dull, but maybe there’s a political lesson in that somewhere.

The following night’s fare included two back-to-back solo shows by women travelers. With the sparest of stage properties and a cheery but overly static stage presence, Katherine Glover details adventures in Central America, Europe, and Africa in No Stranger Than Home. These rarely rose above what you might expect to hear from a 20-something, white, middle-class American woman, but to her credit Glover is not entirely unconscious of this, using it to advantage on occasion. My Camino, by Canadian Sue Kenney at least takes a stab at mise-en-scène by reutf8g the story of her 780-km trek across a medieval Spanish pilgrimage route while walking on a treadmill. Perhaps the most affecting aspect of Kenney’s natural delivery is her understated treatment of her private sorrows.

A trip to the Center for Sex and Culture ended night two with the lighthearted yet evangelical infomercial/tutorial/educational variety act, Peg-Ass-Us, a duet by a real-life couple exploring the joys of pegging (which Webster’s declines to define, but involves a woman with a strap-on and a receptive partner). Sporting Barney-esque songs, a little audience participation, and lots of lube, it actually lasts longer than sex, which may be a drawback.

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sun/14

For the schedule and details, go to www.sffringe.org

Curtain calls

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Fall arts resolution No. 1: have no faith in leaders. Obummer and McPain will only disappoint, or worse. (Probably worse.) If faith you must ooze, kindly direct it toward people who really care about you and have your interests at heart. Why did Gore Vidal write his play The Best Man (1960), for instance? Most likely it wasn’t to get elected (though he did try). And Frank Wedekind was even less enamored of the powers that be when he penned his way-pre-punk "tragedy of childhood," Spring Awakening, a late 19th-century cri de coeur against authority whose transition to Broadway and electric guitars has both an aptness and an irony going for it that might have amused old FW. As Tom Stoppard confirms, power is a compromised and compromising affair whatever side of history you happen to be on, but rock ‘n’ roll will save your soul. So will Teddy Pendergrass, for that matter, as soul-survivor and kinetic Philly memoirist Colman Domingo brilliantly attests. So this fall, remember who your real friends are. You can direct any remaining or follow-up questions to author-playwright Kobo Abe, as well as the other miscellaneous sage nonconformists referenced in the list below.

The Best Man A Broadway hit for Gore Vidal, this political comedy-drama remains fresh as a daisy, if such a sweet olfactory simile can apply to the mosh pit of electoral politics.

Now playing through Sept. 28. Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival The mighty Exit Theatre turned 25 this year. The SF Fringe Festival, the annual small-theater smorgasbord the Exit serves up each fall, turns a sexy 17. Judging by this year’s lineup, that means stripped-down, butt-plugged, bare-bones, rock-hard, strap-on sexy.

Sept. 3–14. Various venues, including the Exit Theatres, 156 Eddy, SF. www.sffringe.org

A Boy and His Soul (Thick House) and A Bronx Tale (Golden Gate Theatre) If only it were a double bill. These two solo plays about growing up (in Philadelphia and the titular Bronx) take place on radically different Bay Area stages, and deal with radically different stages in the lives of what you might call radically different actors (Coleman Domingo and Chazz Palminteri, respectively). Both are masterful, and as long as you’re at it, throw in Carlo D’Amore’s own deft and hilarious family-centered solo, No Parole, coming to the Marsh in November (www.themarsh.org).

Sept. 3–14. Thick House, 1695 18th St., SF. www.thickhouse.org

Sept. 23–Oct. 19. Golden Gate Theatre, One Taylor, SF. www.shnsf.com

Spring Awakening Best of Broadway brings to town this rock musical makeover of Wedekind’s great drama.

Sept. 4–Oct. 12. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF. www.shnsf.com

Rock ‘N’ Roll Here comes Tom Stoppard’s character-concentrated take on Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, as well as on leftist politics across several decades of Cold War history. It’s a good play to argue about afterward, in your highest pinko dudgeon, over pinot and tartare de boeuf at the Grand Cafe.

Sept. 11–Oct. 12. American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

HyperReal Bay Area performance artist Sara Kraft’s low-key brilliance by now merits a neologism: krafty (with a k!). Krafty = shrewd, inventive, technically savvy, wry, playful, tuneful, eerie, unsettling, and, generally speaking, not to be missed.

Oct. 10–12. CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/36251

War Peace: The One Drop Rule Living Word Festival 2008, titled "Race Is Fiction," features a new collaborative work by Youth Speaks alumni and Teen Poetry Slam champions Chinaka Hodge, Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs, and Nico Cary. Directed by festival curator Marc Bamuthi Joseph, War Peace imagines a drought-ravaged Bay Area as potential war zone.

Oct. 23–24. Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. www.youthspeaks.org

Angry Black White Boy Felonious’ Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd unveil a poetical rap-fused remix of Adam Mansbach’s satirical and incendiary novel about race and identity in the United States, adapted by Wolf.

Oct. 23–Nov. 16. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. www.theintersection.org

Continuous City Last year’s work-in-progress is this year’s full-fledged multimedia outing as New York City–based boundary pushers, the Builders Association, returns with a three-pronged narrative (incorporating much Bay Area–derived material) negotiating the ever-more permeable membrane between the global and the local, and our networked and unplugged experience.

Nov. 6–8. Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Friends Brava! For Women in the Arts’ new artistic director Raelle Myrick-Hodges carries forward the spirit of its founding mission with offerings eclectic and unexpected. The revival of Woman in the Dunes author Kobo Abe’s play Friends promises to be a timely and potent production, though Abe penned his scathing absurdist take on gentrification some four decades ago.

Nov. 6–17. Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., SF. (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org

Collage boys

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As we enter the intoxicatingly rich world of Zona, we encounter a deceptively simple melodrama. It unfolds in shadow play on a gold-hued screen fronting a kind of rectangular tent at the back of the stage. We see the silhouette of a mother cradling her newborn infant, swaddled in a blanket, as an old recording of an Italian operatic duet comes seeping through. The woman sets the baby down and briefly retires from the scene, giving opportunity to a snarling beast which promptly swoops in and snatches up the child. Returning to find the babe gone, she collapses in a fit of grief and anguish as the music swells to its climax, her gently unduutf8g hand rising from her swooning body in a kind of unconscious farewell.

This same gesture, delicate and precise, returns later as another woman, played by the same male actor (a deft Stephen Lawson, now out in front of the curtain in another of several consecutive female guises), finally greets the beast that has been pursuing her — a naked male figure with the head of a bear — with a frightened reflex that suddenly transforms into a come hither call.

In its straightforwardness, the shadow play at the start of Zona is anything but straight. It sets up a number of complex tensions that will wend their way through a layered 55-minute multimedia collage of drag performance, lip-synch, camp iconography, and dark revelry presented by Montreal cabaret performance duo 2boys.tv (Lawson and Aaron Pollard). These tensions include the art form itself, as Zona recycles the tropes of queer cabaret in a focused reclamation of an intensely dark strain in midcentury American film and theater brooding on madness, desire, and loss.

Not that Zona isn’t also immediately rewarding and funny. A scene in which Lawson repeatedly mimes a looped sample of Elizabeth Taylor’s screams in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) is as hysterical as it is, frankly, hysterical. But it’s less an excuse for knowing camp humor than part of an attempt to push the queer cabaret form in a more dramatically serious direction, while allowing it more self-reflexivity than ever. Enveloped in an often breathtaking series of video-based images and a haunting soundscape, Zona traces a somber, troubled mood throughout, while eschewing any easy resolution of its themes.

Although originally created for a 2006 theater festival in Calgary, Canada, rather than a bar or cabaret, Zona‘s design stays true to its roots in underground queer theater, and is so intimate and compact it almost makes the modest stage at New Conservatory Theatre Center look overly roomy. At the same time, Pollard’s video and audio direction add greatly to the show’s ingenious layering of textures, cultural references, and associations. In one achingly lovely movement, a reclining Lawson, as the actress whose love has led her to the brink of madness, opens a large book toward the audience from the lip of the stage. On its blank pages appear two small video projections: one of the naked beast with bear’s head, and the other of the actress’ character herself, both dynamic images subtitled in halting phrases of pain, regret, and remembered passion. Lawson’s mesmerizing performance, meanwhile, strikes an eerie balance between human emotion and jagged masquerade.

Zona marks the West Coast debut for the Canadian duo, with thanks due to NCTC’s artistic director Ed Decker for bringing the denizens of Montreal’s vibrant scene out to the Bay Area. Here’s looking forward to the next time the boys are back in town.

ZONA

Wed–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m., $22–$34

New Conservatory Theatre Center

25 Van Ness, SF

(415) 861-8972

www.nctcsf.org

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