Robert Avila

Beyond borders

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An uneasy double consciousness attends the able and purposeful world premiere of Benedictus — now up at the Thick House — whose plot concerns a back-channel effort to avert an impending US invasion of Iran. An international collaboration two years in the making, Golden Thread’s 10th anniversary season opener moves in uncanny lockstep with today’s headlines, which reflect the increasingly aggressive push from the outlaw centers of American power for yet another and wider war in the Middle East.

Benedictus (a project cocreated by Iranian director Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, Israeli playwright Lotti Lerner, dramaturge and Theatre Without Borders cofounder Roberta Levitow, designer Daniel Michaelson, and Golden Thread artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian) opens with the secret reunion of two old school friends, one Muslim and one Jewish, both Iranian born, and both former activists in the politically broad-based mass uprising that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s CIA-installed dictator, in 1979. That revolution was, of course, eventually co-opted by the right-wing fundamentalist bloc under Ayatollah Khomeini, and since then Asher Muthada (Ali Pourtash) has emigrated to Israel and become an arms merchant, while his friend Ali Kermani (Al Faris) has become part of the reform movement within the Islamic republic.

A mere 72 hours before the United States plans to launch its secret attack, Kermani (wise to the countdown) has arranged the meeting with his old chum in the relatively neutral and secluded grounds of a Benedictine monastery. But Muthada arrives first. He’s a nervous ball of energy, and after shooing away his overly solicitous hostess (a nun played by Lisa Tateosian) he habitually overturns the decor in an effort to unearth any microphones. This first impression of supreme distrust amid a web of John le Carré–type espionage is belied, or at least made more complex, by the affectionate reunion of the two men. In the smooth and genial performances by Pourtash and Faris, Muthada immediately becomes expansive and dryly witty as Kermani, with a gentle air of cosmopolitan tact, arrives in his mullah’s robes and wire-framed glasses and inquires into his friend’s health.

In the conversation that follows they rehearse (in dialogue inevitably somewhat didactic but overall nuanced and unforced) the historic events that have passed through their lives, the betrayed promise of the revolution, the political machinations in each of their countries that play on external fears for internal gain, and so on. But there’s a more immediate concern and a deal to be brokered. Kermani, with his eye on the Iranian presidency, wants Muthada’s help in getting his peace proposal to the Americans in time to avert the bombing. For his part, Muthada wants his sister and her family ensured a safe exit from Iran, which is loath to let her go.

(The quasi-familial complexity of relationships here is inspired by a real-life incident: the 2005 chance meeting between then–Iranian president Mohammad Khatami — on whom Kermani is clearly based — and then–Israeli president Moshe Katsav, who were seated alphabetically beside each other at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and ended up exchanging pleasantries in Farsi, being compatriots from the same Iranian province.)

The tentative arrangement reached by Muthada and Kermani leads to an increasingly revealing but politically frustrating set of further meetings, some involving a US ambassador, Ben Martin (Earll Kingston). Martin — Muthada and Kermani’s would-be channel to the US government and a fluent Farsi speaker who was among the hostages taken by Iranian militants at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 — is a hard-drinking and hard-bitten man (played with engaging conviction) who turns out to have a close if fraught relation to Kermani, a moderating influence and protective presence during Martin’s captivity.

While the play’s premise is a look behind the headlines at the real interests and history roiling the Middle East, these behind-the-scenes encounters have depth of their own, as each character pursues and cloaks distinct ends that hopelessly entangle personal and geopolitical perspectives. As the clock ticks down, Kermani’s parallel effort to urge the intercession of the pope (one of several references made by the play’s title) seems as desperate as it is unexpected.

In the end, the plot’s impasse is another jarring reminder of the play’s real-world immediacy. Resisting any solution within the terms of the discourse represented by the three main characters, Lerner’s script suggests something about the incommensurable contradictions not of language (since everyone speaks the same one here) but of the discourse of the political world they share, which has become too degraded, too warped by the interests and logic of power, to grant any way out but catastrophe. This bleak circumstance doesn’t necessitate fatalism, however, but implicitly puts the onus for an alternative elsewhere. Our perspective as audience — implicated in but also outside the power games that define the limits of the possible onstage — allows perhaps for another set of possibilities for transcending the old discourse and inaugurating another, built (like the play itself) on new alliances across an overwhelmingly common interest. *

BENEDICTUS

Through Oct. 21, $12–$25

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat, 2 p.m.); Sun., 5 p.m.

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 401-8081

www.thickhouse.org

Gay times

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A series of slide projections cycling through a gamut of theater posters greets audiences taking their seats at Theatre Rhinoceros’s 30th season opener. Ranging in design from the openly trashy to the quietly tony, many of these posters offer eye-catching portions of skin and equally intriguing titles: Cocksucker: A Love Story, Deporting the Divas, Pogey Bait, Show Ho, Intimate Details, Barebacking, and Hillbillies on the Moon. It adds up to a hefty if scantily clad body of work that owes its existence to a good extent to the advent of Theatre Rhinoceros. Begun in 1977 by Alan Estes in a SoMa leather bar with a production of Doric Wilson’s The West Street Gang, the Rhino today is the longest-running LGBT theater in the country.

Thirty years like these call for a moment of reflection, and the Rhino’s lasts a brisk and enjoyable 70 minutes. Conceived and directed by John Fisher, who became artistic director in 2002, Theatre Rhinoceros: The First Thirty Years takes a jaunty look back at a raucous, at times traumatic, but overall remarkable theatrical career intimately tied to the social and political history of the queer community. While making no attempt to be exhaustive, or exhausting, Fisher’s swift, celebratory pastiche (with dramaturgy by actor and associate artistic director Matt Weimer) neatly suggests the range of artistic output and the sweep of events and personalities that have gone into defining the theater and its times.

The bulk of the show comprises a choice selection of scenes and songs from productions past (with some original compositions and arrangements by Don Seaver and snazzy choreography by Angeline Young), put on by a capable five-person ensemble, all but one veterans of previous Rhino shows. Sporadically introduced by Fisher — who as MC strikes the right note at once, with a deadpan motorized entrance onto a stage decked out (by designer John Lowe) in a shimmering red glitter curtain worthy of Cher or Merv Griffin — the selections progress more or less chronologically, though the cast leads off with a rendition of "Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid," from the musical of the same name by lyricist Henry Mach and composer Paul Katz, which was a hit for the Rhino in 1990. It’s an apt piece to introduce part one of the show, "Coming Out/Living Out," the first of four sections charting the development of the theater and its audience.

Other highlights include a scene from Theresa Carilli’s Dolores Street, an early lesbian-themed play that marked the Rhino’s (at the time somewhat controversial) turn to more inclusive queer programming. It’s a still tart and funny comedy about the relationships in a young lesbian household in San Francisco, at least judging by the scene expertly reproduced by Laurie Bushman and Alice Pencavel.

The live sequences come interspersed with videotaped interviews of Rhino founders and associates, including Lanny Baugniet, P.A. Cooley, Donna Davis, and Tom Ammiano. The cast also reads excerpts from letters to the theater from subscribers and some well-known playwrights, most offering praise and thanks, others caviling at the quality of a specific production, expressing indignation over liberties taken with a script, or offering resistance to the changes in programming that opened the stage to lesbian themes and, eventually, many other queer voices. (It’s indicative of how far things have come that a letter like this last one, which pointed to once serious divisions in the larger gay community, elicited only comfortable laughter from the opening night’s audience.)

In part two, "AIDS," the ensemble re-creates highlights from the Rhino’s historic long-running revue, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival. A collaborative venture between 20 Bay Area artists and an unprecedented, defiantly upbeat response to the terrifying onset of the AIDS crisis, the show took aim at the still largely repressed issue of safe sex through such numbers as Karl Brown and Matthew McQueen’s cheeky sizzler "Rimmin’ at the Baths" and their equally clever and forthright "Safe Livin’ in Dangerous Times" (both beautifully rendered by the full cast of Theatre Rhinoceros), as well as the terrible toll in drastically foreshortened lives (seen here from the perspective of a mother, affectingly played by Bushman, in Adele Prandini’s "Momma’s Boy"). The AIDS Show, which went on to tour the country and put the Rhino on the national map, premiered to packed houses in 1984, the year its creator and Rhino founder Estes died of the disease.

This show’s parts three and four deal with the growing diversity of voices and issues in the years of relative liberation and mainstream exposure for the LGBT population. A scene from Brad Erickson’s Sexual Irregularities (played by Weimer and Kim Larsen) broaches the conflict between homosexuality and religion, a theme increasingly explored in new work for the stage, while one from Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas (played by Larsen and Mike Vega) points to the increasing presence of minority voices, reporting on the gay experience from the perspectives of particular ethnic subcultures.

In the postmodern micropolitics of sexual identity characteristic of the new millennium (and spoofed hilariously by Weimer, Larsen, and Vega in a scene from Fisher’s Barebacking), queer theater is characterized by increasingly hybrid categories and a plethora of voices from all sectors of experience. The cast sums up the road thus far with a characteristically proud and wry glance at the possibilities ahead in the show’s final, original number, "The Rhino" (by Seaver, with lyrics by Weimer). But, to invoke an older song, anything goes.

THEATRE RHINOCEROS: THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS

Through Oct. 14

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $15–$35

Theatre Rhinoceros

2926 16th St., SF

(415) 861-5079

www.therhino.org

Cell mates

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Dance theater remains a thriving genre in Bay Area performance. To call it a subgenre of one or the other just doesn’t allow due respect for offerings by the likes of Jess Curtis, Joe Goode, inkBoat, Rebecca Salzer, and Deborah Slater. Erika Chong Shuch’s ESP Project, the resident company at Intersection for the Arts, is among the leaders in this field. Playful and romantic, with an irresistible urge to investigate the darker regions of inner and outer space, Shuch’s work partakes freely and idiosyncratically of all that the bare stage might offer in the way of strategy, including dramatic action, unconventional movement (often incorporating nonprofessional dancers), voice-over narration, taped interviews, singing, video installations, and puppetry — all of which went into the alternately eerie and euphoric poetry of 2006’s Orbit (Notes from the Edge of Forever).

Shuch’s latest work moves still further away from dance-centered performance, using movement as only one element in (an almost subordinate) relation to others, especially text and song. But perhaps because of the especially personal nature of 51802, which bares a real-life love story in veiled disguise to interrogate the mixed feelings and existential crises arising from a lover’s incarceration, this latest piece sometimes feels weighed down by a too concrete need to voice some definitive explanation or conclusion.

Nonetheless, Shuch and her ensemble (Dwayne Calizo, Jennifer Chien, Tommy Shepherd, and Danny Wolohan) create some memorable moments, and the mise-en-scène conveys flashes of real inspiration. Moreover, there’s a poetic and pertinent irony in the bitter symmetry offered by the central story, which can be said to begin and end on opposite sides of a wall. The first one divides the apartments of two urban strangers but not the music they create in their seemingly separate worlds, setting up a flirtation in sound that starts as a competitive call-and-response and ends in literal harmony, all before any physical meeting. Composer Allen Willner’s score and original, acoustic guitar–based songs — soulful, bluesy, and romantic — serve as a kind of reincarnated version of this elemental discourse as music becomes the primary medium for connection on a stage inhabited by otherwise lonely bodies, often captured (courtesy of the elegant lighting design, also by Willner) in isolated spots of soft, almost burnished light.

The second wall is, of course, that of the prison. Also literal and figurative at once, it intrudes into an intense love affair whose history is by now fraught with emotional dissonance and even psychological abuse. But love — albeit a more complex and ambivalent version — breaches this wall too, mediated by letters, memories, and imagination. This imagery remains suggestive though underdeveloped (Shuch relates the beginning of the love affair in a few lines about midway through the 60-minute performance). For the most part, the story comes to us more obliquely, through the songs and fanciful scenes and characters deployed to plumb the depths of the isolation gripping both parties to the separation. In one memorable sequence, a man (Wolohan) stranded at the bottom of a well befriends a blind mouse to whom he confesses a childhood act of violence. In other sequences Shuch or Shepherd play stir-crazy shut-ins desperately coaxing a lover’s ghost to haunt the room.

These scenes and others we understand to be inventions of the lover left behind on the outside, walled in by her involved and evolving connection to the incarcerated other. But if 51802 is about absence, its emphatic drive to fill theatrical space with a superfluity of words and dramatic gestures to that effect can end by pushing that absence just out of reach. Words, to a significant degree, have taken the place of movement here, as if furnishing their own jail cell that allows little space for the body.

When raised in song (as when Shuch softly sings the refrain, "I ain’t wavin’ babe — I’m drowning"), they can still seem liberating in their (physical) evocations. But even the more suggestive lines in Shuch’s interspersed text can feel incomplete. A refrain is heard in both dialogue and song states: "There is no perfect good-bye"; this key piece of wisdom sounds true enough. But as Shuch notes with a flowing sweep of the arms, good ones require one person to remain still while the other moves off in a rush of motion. This — a dancer’s insight — sounds like the germ of a larger idea, the opening of some larger movement. But when it comes along, near the end of the 60-minute performance, there is little room or time for much more.

51802

Extended through Oct. 12

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m., $10–$25

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org

Lean and meaty

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The word musical normally connotes light fare. But in its latest Broadway reincarnation, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street lends, in addition to bravura performances, a bracingly morbid bite to American Conservatory Theater’s new season.

Of course, that doesn’t stop Sweeney from delivering vigorous entertainment. Director-designer John Doyle’s attractively reconceived, Tony Award–winning revival of the groundbreaking Stephen Sondheim musical serves up a theatrical feast from, yes, soup to nuts. And it does so with a cost-effective ingenuity that would no doubt impress the economizing baker–cannibal maker Mrs. Lovett (played with inviting brio by Broadway vet Judy Kaye).

Kicking off a national tour in San Francisco, the show’s impressive cast members, drawn overwhelmingly from the 2006 Broadway run, not only act and sing beautifully but also (in what has become a trademark of Doyle’s work in the UK and on Broadway) play all of the instruments themselves. Using brilliantly pared-down orchestrations by Sarah Travis (who also collected a Tony for her effort), Doyle and his cast render Sondheim’s exquisite score an even more integral part of the drama.

To "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd," the drama follows a disturbed barber formerly known as Barker (a memorable David Hess), who returns to Victorian London after 15 years’ penal servitude in Australia on trumped-up charges engineered by Judge Turpin (Keith Buterbaugh), who fancied the barber’s beautiful young wife, subsequently raped her, and now keeps Barker’s daughter, Johanna (Lauren Molina), as his ward. Seeking a room to rent under his new name, Sweeney Todd, the barber finds a garrulous but incompetent pie seller named Mrs. Lovett and befriends her after she breaks the news that his wife committed suicide in the wake of Judge Turpin’s conquest and (clearly smitten as well as sympathetic toward the anguished Sweeney) agrees to help him seek revenge.

Meanwhile, Anthony Hope (Benjamin Magnuson), a young man returning to London at the same time as Sweeney but in the optimistic mood reflected by his name, meets and falls in love with Johanna, only to become the rival of the judge, who has determined to marry her himself. With motives nearly as straight as his razor (the revenge plot soon spirals out of control, taking in all of the inhabitants of his detested London), Sweeney dispatches his victims with a single flourish across their throats — a gesture that in Doyle’s production invariably evokes a single piping wail of woodwind as the lights go red over Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop (done up with deftly augmented plank-board modesty in his striking scenic design), and the victim, after an expressionless pause, dons the blood-streaked apron symbolizing his or her quick passage from palpitating body to lifeless flesh. That’s flesh that the enterprising Mrs. Lovett eagerly bakes into her publicly traded treats, to great repute and profit. (Adding a further Grand Guignol touch, Mrs. Lovett simultaneously occupies herself downstage at such moments in slowly draining blood from a bucket; the attendant noise, as the liquid hits the pan, produces a choice chill in the bone.)

Musically, those opening lines calling the audience to "attend" use a terse melody and a staccato rhythm that wind their way throughout Sondheim’s complex and beguiling score and devilishly clever lyrics. Along the way come passages that, under the circumstances, take one by surprise with their easy, slightly ribald charm (as in Mrs. Lovett’s good-natured confession, "The Worst Pies in London") or their breathtaking gentleness and grace (as in Anthony’s love song, "Johanna," later snatched up by his rival, who lends its lilt a sinister echo).

Hess’s turn in the title role, as the broken husband and father turned cracked serial killer, projects an imposing, warily sympathetic combination of the addled, the fierce, and the weary. Sweeney is at once a towering and a stooped presence, with a somber masculine charisma that commands our undivided attention whenever he’s onstage. That is, except when he shares the spotlight with Kaye’s lovably insouciant (if that word can be used for a woman who bakes people into pies) Mrs. Lovett. Then Sweeney and the audience have together found an ideal match.

It’s all over much too soon, but it leaves a memorable aftertaste that keeps on giving. Which just goes to show what really makes a great piece of musical theater. A great story? A great composer? The answer is both more general and more particular: it’s people!*

SWEENEY TODD

Extended through Oct. 14, $22–$82

See stage listings for schedule

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

Once more unto the Fringe

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The San Francisco Fringe Festival, second oldest in the United States, is a full-blown teenager this year and intends, by the look of its sneak preview, to act its age. Sixteen candles equal roughly 500 performances from 100 acts reliably ranging all over the place — from an ex-Christian throwing down (Jesus Rant) to a two-woman portrait of transgressing poet Anne Sexton (Her Kind) to a new musical ("RM3") set inside a Southern Congressional campaign that incorporates songs by Ben Folds. Whatever else there is to be found along the way, the following should be well worth checking out:

Perennial Fringe favorite Banana Bag and Bodice flows into town with The Sewers, an earlier version of which proved a highlight of FoolsFURY’s Fury Factory showcase of new work a couple of seasons back. From the people who, in 2004, brought you the delicious Sandwich comes this fine, funny, and poetically deranged underground morsel of mordancy, love, and more mordancy. It’s since had a successful off-off- run in New York and for its SF bow will park just off the usual Fringe track at the Garage. Totally worth the trip.

The latest from San Francisco worthies RIPE Theater (Best of Fringe winners 2002, and Best Ensemble 2006) is And Billions More, which finally posits the ever-popular apocalypse with some down-to-earth realism: after all, it will most likely come to you via execrable 24-hour news coverage (to wit: "Earth in Crisis: Black Hole of Death"), it will probably not much move your stoner roommate, and it will be simply impossible to dress for — which is just to say, it will probably be really lame. The hysterical sages at RIPE know, even if Tim LaHay doesn’t, everybody’s working for the weak end.

Terry Tate’s Shopping as a Spiritual Path sounds like it works a rather tired joke in Christian consumerdom and, judging by the excerpt at the Fringe preview show, it amounts to little more than a stand-up routine. But what grace it has on sale! Whatever she may have been before life threw her for a serious loop, Tate’s near-fatal brush with cancer has left her very witty as well as wise to life’s better bargains.

Surviving Harvard is the life-and-debt theme of low-key wag Kurt Bodden’s class act, Class Notes, in which the sweaty, thumbed pages of his alumni magazine provide all the material this underachieving graduate needs to meet with ivy-league success in comedy futures (as an alumni mag might put it). And on the subject of surviving schools, few testimonials outmatch Steven Karwoski’s Adventures of a Substitute Teacher, amusingly self-effacing notes from the edge of special ed. One wonders what kind of sub Stevie Lee Saxon’s Korean Badass would make. He certainly lives up to his billing on stage, in a spunky stereotype-chopping solo show presented by Asian American Theater Company. (Robert Avila)

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Sept. 5–16

Various venues

www.sffringe.org

A fine ‘Mesh?

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A defining characteristic of the US imperial program in Iraq, we are often told, is the resolute refusal to learn anything from history. True to the TV-weaned attention spans of our triumphant culture, history here usually means the past four years — at least before stretching to include the eerily identical adventures of the British Empire less then a century ago, let alone anything going back any further. But as Bush’s recent Vietnam-Iraq comparison suggests with trusty ass-backwardness, it’s not losing track of history that the current administration does so well as it is roundly and brazenly bastardizing it to suit present purposes — namely, the perennial ones of greed and power.

It falls to others without quite so much of a vested interest in conquest to actually learn from history, by which we mean something more than crudely customizing it to serve nefarious opportunities. This is part of the impetus behind Berkeley-based TheatreInSearch’s exploration of the earliest of Mesopotamian adventurers: an ancient Sumerian king of way back in the BC who comes down to us via 12 clay tablets draped in legend and myth, in the guise of history’s first superhero.

But what exactly can we learn from so historically remote a text? TheatreInSearch’s production itself seems unsure. As if to at once employ and distance us from our own contemporary intellectual and aesthetic lenses, director George Charbak’s free adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (retitled here The Epic of Gilgamesh with a Long Prologue) frames the ancient hero’s exploits with certain knowing modern references, including a comical couple of Beckett-like pseudo-philosophizing gadflies (Michael Green and Elias D. Protopsaltis) and, more centrally, a seemingly all-knowing, modern-day narrator (Ana Bayat).

The narrator, addressing the audience like a museum docent, literally pulls the veil from the archaic literary figure — seated statue-like at the summit of a pyramidal series of steps at the center of set designer Kim Tolman’s clean, uncluttered gallery of ancient artifacts — while furnishing the title’s not overly long but definitely muddled prologue. Half ironical and half indignant over her semidivine subject (played with an at times penetrating boyishness by the soon walking and talking Roham Shaikhani), she asks her audience in somewhat mocking tones to study Gilgamesh as a specimen of outrageous hubris and mindless destruction.

Rather statically staged and inconsistently acted, the more dramatic scenes get some added lift from off-stage musical accompaniment by Larry Klein on the oud. The more successful humor in the play, meanwhile, arises not from the strained (and overly intrusive) vaudevillian posturing of the two philosopher-commentators but from smart use of the text’s repetitive language and its human situations.

The serious aspects of the play are less consistent. Certain characters lack adequate definition, while some scenes could do with some judicious trimming. If, as the play’s narrator suggests, superheroes from Gilgamesh to Rambo (to real-life superhero manqués like George W. Bush in his flight suit) represent nothing so much as a flight from history, with its attendant lessons and responsibilities, then they deserve only our scorn. But a superannuated superhero like Gilgamesh, confronting death as man and myth together, would seem to provide other opportunities.

In this respect, our narrator is far from a reliable one. Perhaps intentionally (though in truth text and performance are too confused to really say), her one-note "modern" perspective is itself being held up for critique, as if to demonstrate the pitfalls of too superior an attitude to barbarisms past and present. Either way, by the time of the accompanying epilogue, the narrator’s indignation and sarcasm devolve into little more than an awkward rant that closes the play without any sense that the journey in between has counted for anything.

When at the end the veil is again tossed over Gilgamesh, however, his posture is no longer erect, and his features bleed through; he leans desperately forward, his face just visible through the gauze, twisted into a frightened mask of everlasting perplexity. Shaikhani’s expression tells us infinitely more here than any expert could and in doing so almost saves the show single-handedly at the last moment. A neat feat that would have been for a fallen superhero.

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH WITH A LONG PROLOGUE

Through Sept. 2, $12–$20

Fri–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m.

Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 262-0584

The curtain calls

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Theater is where you find it this fall. For instance, at a warehouse party where assembled guests — artists, authors, bons vivants, goatees, and rockers of all stripes — get so carried away that a play suddenly breaks out among them (it can happen). Or in the offices and cubbyholes where a group of Dutch actors retreat midperformance to mine universal truths about the minutiae of mundane alienation. Or hovering just above the stage, where astrocosmonautical new best friends, stranded like circus performers, orbit together after a space shuttle disaster. Or on a kitschy converted kid shuttler known as the Mexican Bus, which a trio of disembodied Chicanos use to cruise the Mission. Theater, in short, is going to be a ubiquitous presence, maybe even the stranger eyeing your canapé, so watch out.

Sweeney Todd Kicking off its national tour in San Francisco, John Doyle’s pared-down, blood-bespattered hit Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller also begins the American Conservatory Theater’s new season on a guaranteed high note.

Aug. 30–Sept. 30. Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2ACT, www.act-sfbay.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival It’s the 16th annual array of 50-minute feats, under-an-hour undertakings, and terse tirades. Perennially fast, cheap, and out of control.

Sept. 5–16. Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF. www.sffringe.org

Expedition 6 San Francisco hosts the world premiere of playwright-director (and well-known actor) Bill Pullman’s theatrically stylized, documentary-based take on the real-life encounter between Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts stranded in space after the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster. Think of it as Apollo 13 with a trapeze.

Sept. 8–Oct. 7. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org

The MagiCCal Mission Tour Albeit now in Los Angeles, the performers of Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza) are forever local theater champs with deep roots in the Mission District. In a unique take on the guided tour, they climb (virtually) aboard the rolling fiesta known as the Mexican Bus to act as your (prerecorded) guides through their own private Mexico (del Norte).

Sept. 10–16. www.mexicanbus.com

Kommer This Yerba Buena Center for the Arts engagement marks the Bay Area debut for Kassys, the acclaimed Amsterdam-based Dutch theater company. A physically exact multimedia work, Kommer (Dutch for "sorrow") begins as a comical and poignant play about a group of friends gathered in mourning, then shifts gears to follow the individual actors out of the theater as each returns to a separate little workaday world, shedding light on "private and public moments of human frailty."

Sept. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

Lies You Can Dance To Flyaway Productions — known for athletic, risk-taking, society-critiquing, and female-empowered dance performances in venues from rooftops to industrial cranes — previews a work in progress at the Marsh: Lies You Can Dance To, an investigation of "how the human body responds to lies told over and over at the level of national policy," by artistic director and Bay Area dancer-choreographer Jo Kreiter, with music by Bay Area composer-musician Beth Custer.

Sept. 14–16. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org

Continuous City This work in progress exploring postmodern interconnectivity and our changing sense of place in a global context is a tech-savvy performance piece that attempts to extend the reach of theater by, among other things, uploading video contributions from a social networking site. It’s a collaboration between Bay Area actors, UC Berkeley students, and New York’s the Builders Association (responsible for the visually stunning Super Vision at the YBCA in August 2006).

Oct. 5–14. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. (510) 642-9988, theater.berkeley.edu

After the Quake As part of its 40th season, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre hosts the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of a new play by renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), helmed by Tony Award–winning director Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime). Adapted from Murakami’s 2000 collection of short stories, After the Quake is an intimate tale about a shy storyteller and registers the tremors of an unstable world while confronting the challenge of living with fear.

Oct. 12–Nov. 25. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk. 1-888-4BRTTIX, www.berkeleyrep.org

Des Moines Campo Santo premieres Denis Johnson’s fast-paced, darkly poetic, hilarious, and fascinating multicharacter stream of confession and moral conflict. The brilliant author turned playwright’s past collaborations with the company include Psychos Never Dream and Soul of a Whore. In what Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo are calling their take on dinner theater, the play will unfold amid a hip cocktail mixer in a warehouse not far from the company’s usual digs on Valencia.

Oct. 19–20. www.theintersection.org

Slouching Towards Disneyland Inimitable radio and stage personality Ian Shoales (a.k.a. Merle Kessler) and quick-fingered, ever-versatile musician-composer Joshua Raoul Brody team up for this wry, cranky song and rant, purportedly "a wild ride in words and music through world history from Genesis to George W."

Nov. 8–Dec. 1. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org

Your neighborhood streets on wry (hold the Sesame)

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"Who are the people in your neighborhood?" Wasn’t that the consciousness-raising question we were coaxed into asking as tots by the irresistibly catchy song stylings of public television? Well, if they’re the mix of humans and Muppet-esque monsters of Avenue Q, they’re strikingly but only superficially reminiscent of the denizens of that sidewalk utopia propagated by PBS children’s programming. After all, Sesame Street began way before anyone could stay shut up all day surfing the Internet for porn, like Trekkie Monster (Christian Anderson), let alone sing about it.

The inhabitants of Avenue Q are also the friends, allies, love interests, and fellow losers whom a recent college grad with few prospects and an elusive purpose — puppet protagonist Princeton (voiced and operated by Robert McClure) — can sort of maybe count on to get him through a disillusioning world that already seems downhill the moment one’s rolled off the university assembly line.

Such is the premise and highly qualified promise of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s much-hailed musical comedy, which makes a vibrant San Francisco debut at the Orpheum Theatre in a Broadway touring production happily packed with energy and a talented, impressively versatile cast. Many jaded years after Big Bird was first through with watching you, Lopez and Marx’s reappropriation of such small-screen indoctrination serves up a deflated age writ Broadway large, an arch nostalgia tailor-made for an overeducated, underemployed population of thirtysomething slacker-searchers.

Avenue Q mines TV and Broadway in equal measure, with knowing references to each in a kind of pop cultural marriage overtly joined in one show tune–<\d>loving puppet named Rod, a closeted stockbroker who plays a kind of veiled Bert to sloppy but good-natured roommate Nicky’s Ernie. And if disappointment, humiliation, and an understated resilience are things everyone shares to varying degrees on Avenue Q (a run-down row of New York City brownstones with off-the-beaten-track rents — a decidedly grubby version of Sesame Street nicely realized by set designer Anna Louizos), they also come together in one neat, compact package that isn’t even Styrofoam based: Gary Coleman (voiced and operated by Carla Renata), the has-been TV child actor and ignominious tabloid fixture here turned, in one of many inspired touches, into the building super.

Smart, lively, and consistently funny, Avenue Q pretty well lives up to the heap of praise that brought the 2004 musical a small mound of Tony Awards. The show lags a bit in the second act (where, in medium-funny numbers like "Schadenfreude," the formula can begin to wear thin), but it’s never a bore. And if there’s inevitably a sentimental aspect to the "it sucks to be you and me" universality of its theme, it winds up on what is probably the best possible note — contained in the double-edged line "Everything in life is only for now" — which at the last moment smuggles in a defiant optimism clothed as ambivalence and compromise, much as throughout the play a certain felt reality (admittedly of a decidedly middle-class variety) comes agreeably filtered by felt puppets.

OTHERS MATTERS


Insignificant Others is a new musical comedy featuring its own assortment of lovable college grads unleashed in another big (or anyway biggish) city, by San Francisco playwright-composer-lyricist L.<\!s>Jay Kuo. It may not have anything like the budget of Avenue Q — and in truth doesn’t manage the tightrope walk between its sentimental theme and a cutting comic irony as smoothly either — but while uneven in both conception and execution, Insignificant Others nevertheless has some significant talent and inspiration behind it.

The story concerns a circle of five twentysomethings from Cleveland who relocate to San Francisco with hopes of embarking on lives of romance and adventure beyond the workaday world’s cubicle walls. At the center of these tales of the city is a buxom young firecracker named Margaret (the strong and winning Sarah Kathleen Farrell) on the lookout for Mr. Right — a designation given considerable latitude in a city with a scarce supply of heterosexual men, which becomes the excuse for three of the show’s most crowd-pleasing and clever numbers.

Friendships drift, but a crisis draws the characters together again, though this central thread comes over as both weak and overblown, and its resolution too pat and syrupy. Insignificant Others‘ best parts remain the more comedic ones, wherein Kuo’s generally polished lyrics and able if less consistently original music tend to reach their highest points.<\!s>*

AVENUE Q

Through Sept. 2, $30–<\d>$90

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

Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

www.shnsf.com

INSIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Through Sept. 23, $35–<\d>$39

Thurs.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.

Zeum Theatre

221 Fourth St., SF

www.isomusical.com

Two for the road

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"This is the first day of my life<\!s>/ I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you." Yes, it almost feels like that in the afterglow of Kiki and Herb’s Alive from Broadway tour, which wound up a too-brief engagement at the American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater on July 29. As a longtime duo pulled from retirement after their 2004 Carnegie Hall farewell (and for purported septuagenarians), Kiki (Justin Bond) and Herb (Kenny Mellman) are in incredible shape. And their chosen form, the lounge act writ large, smells equally fresh these days, even as it did its brazen best to stink up the enormous stage at the Geary.

To begin with, Bond’s Depression-schooled Kiki: at first glance, her look, like the 1970s incarnation of a louche and dangerously idle Malibu mom, was enough to draw unconscious childhood traumas swiftly to the surface. Outfitted (by costume designer Marc Happel) in a chiffon explosion that brings to mind a giant multicolor drip candle balanced on two liquor bottles, Kiki stormed onstage evoking a perfect pastiche of iconic torch singers, celebrity chanteuses, and other glamour goddesses, belting out fearsome interpretations of (in her hands) immediate pop schmaltz from all quarters of the music charts. Not only the Bright Eyes number "First Day of My Life" but also other (eventually) recognizable ditties by the Wu-Tang Clan, the Mountain Goats, and Bob Merrill came tumbling out in renditions that have to be heard to be believed. Suffice it to say that, in its diabolical way, it all worked, much like the popular songs in a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms siege operation.

Kiki’s renowned stage banter — which included a recounting of the duo’s personal and professional history and a sodden, delusional tale about a stuffed animal and the manger where Jesus was born — came punctuated with tantalizing hanging pauses, of a duration no longer than that needed to fill a very large glass of whiskey. As the evening’s single act waxed on, Kiki treaded from tipsy to sloppy with the incomparable poise of a true showbiz lush. Her remarks ("I always say, if you weren’t molested as a child, you must have been an ugly kid") ranged from off-color to off the hook to, at least once, right off the stage (as a now decidedly tight Kiki found herself literally up an artificial tree).

Mellman’s blowzy Herb, meanwhile, piped in from behind the piano on a near-continual tidal wave of notes like a hideous mashup of Liberace and McCoy Tyner. Herb doesn’t just tickle the ivories; he fellates them with the gusto of a rising porn star. He turns the grand piano into the instrument of a grand mal. Over this outrageous cacophony and sustain-pedal abuse, Herb (a laconic underdog whom pal Kiki publicly pities as not only gay and Jewish but a technical "retard" to boot) barks out harmonies like a tuxedoed Tourette’s victim.

Music and mayhem this precisely, hilariously awful may require something approaching genius. No wonder Bond and Mellman, the real-life performing team who created Kiki and Herb after meeting in San Francisco 20 years ago, have been doing this sort of thing for a while. If a cabaret drag act in San Francisco is not what you’d call new terrain, Kiki and Herb remind one of the enduring strength of the form when in the right hands and shoes.

First of all, cabaret’s devil-may-care insouciance masks the premium it places on skill, and Bond and Mellman, extremely clever and agile talents, have skill to kill. Bond’s performance in particular dazzles. You could watch it nightly and still revel in every detail of its perfect execution, the arch beauty of its take on the atrocious. And his voice, notably powerful and supple in its coarse histrionics, never falters in delivering full-throated commitment to the task.

But cabaret since the Weimar Republic is also the theatrical medium most closely associated with eye-of-storm moments in ages of cultural decadence and political peril. Kiki’s brash social commentary, giving vent to, among other things, her bottomless contempt for George<\!s>W. Bush (whom her lawyer has advised her she must not wish mortal harm to from the stage) and all the rest of them, is frank, funny, and unforgiving — and it strikes just the right notes somehow, as her politics boil down to a slurred Rodney King–<\d>like sound bite that’s as sensible as it is unabashedly innocent: "Just be nice, for Chrissake."<\!s>*

www.kikiandherb.com

The love below

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Flexing muscles new and old, the 34-season-strong Asian American Theater Company bounds into its new home at Thick House with young Los Angeles playwright Michael Golamco’s wry 2005 comedy, Cowboy vs. Samurai, a clever nod to Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac set in Breakneck, Wyo., among its modest Asian American community.

The town’s Asian American population is so small that it actually doubles (and a community technically forms) with the arrival of high school English teacher and Korean American Travis Park (Chuck Lacson), an easygoing if increasingly exasperated LA transplant. Even this tight-knit society begins fracturing beyond repair with the arrival of a beautiful, self-confident Manhattanite named Veronica Lee (Melissa Navarro), a Korean American who dates only white men. Her sights soon fall on Travis’s friend, PE teacher Del (Wylie Herman), a winsome bit of lanky, twangy beefcake in a rumpled cowboy hat whose eloquent love letters, filled with wonderfully offbeat anecdotes and homespun ruminations on the meaning of love, have her swooning.

But in Golamco’s shrewd and droll calculation, nobody is quite what he or she seems, or is supposed to seem, in this backwater galumphing into multiculturalism. The most unexpected disguise relates to the sure, mature drama that emerges from behind the mask of puerile comedy. If, as Golamco suggests, identity politics in 2007 lie far beyond simple formulas, the AATC’s well-cast and nicely paced production (deftly helmed by San Francisco Mime Troupe veteran Keiko Shimosato) does plain, straightforward justice to this smartly contemporary take on love’s muddled p.c., post-p.c., and pre-p.c. negotiations.

THE LOVE BEYOND


Second Wind Production’s West Coast premiere of Bay Area playwright-director Ian Walker’s latest, The Gravedigger’s Tango, is currently up at A Traveling Jewish Theater, which last year housed Walker’s tightly written, engagingly original play A Beautiful Home for the Incurable. Unfortunately, Gravedigger falls short of that mark, though it continues to reflect a restlessly inventive pen wielded by the creator of works like Vigilance, Ghost in the Light, and The Stone Trilogy.

The new play folds two stories in one: a young woman (Kathryn Tkel) disguised as her couch-bound trailer-park honey, Trick (Joseph Rende), turns up for a job exhuming graves for a cranky caretaker (Doug Thornburg), soon becoming entranced by the rejuvenating story behind a young woman’s dateless tombstone inscribed with her lover’s timeless pledge.

The romantic ghost story feeds an interesting if fuzzy theme of natural and unnatural life, though the tango twist feels more tacked on than fully integrated. The complexity of the interwoven plotlines is a lot to pack in, moreover, and each suffers from underdevelopment and a lack of sustained attention amid dialogue that occasionally sparkles but elsewhere proves flat or stilted. There’s good work among an uneven cast, but some thinly drawn parts can leave even solid actors like Forsman at a loss. Given these limitations, Gravedigger is definitely mixed fare. Even so, its fresher aspects and sizable ambition bode well from a playwright who, like the romantics he juxtaposes on either side of the grave, has much more to give.*

COWBOY VS. SAMURAI

Thurs/19–Sat/21, 8 p.m.; Sun/22, 2 p.m.; $20

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

1-800-838-3006

www.asianamericantheater.org.

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S TANGO

Through July 28

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $15–$25

Traveling Jewish Theatre

470 Florida, SF

(415) 508-5614

www.secondwind.8m.com

If the “Shrew” fits

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By early last week the pace of rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew had picked up at the Magic Theatre. It was time for the Cutting Ball Theater to try a run-through of the whole play, and performers and crew bustled in preparation. Sound designer Cliff Caruthers, seated at a computer console halfway up the raked house, was busy cuing invigorating blasts of Italian hip-hop and other atmospheric sounds. Actors, with obvious gusto, practiced leaping on one another, tumbling onto the floor, shouting, screaming, and miming outrageous slapstick violence. Three hip-hop dancers, meanwhile, legs and arms jabbing and swinging in ecstatic synchronization, swept on and off the stage.

In a rather striking contrast to this commotion, director Rob Melrose sat quite still, with only the occasional consultation here or brief suggestion there, as if calmly situated in the eye of a storm. But then, it would be better to say that as the Cutting Ball’s artistic director, he is the eye of the storm: ever placid, ever watchful, and very much at the center of all activity.

The Cutting Ball’s mission, as its Web site will tell you, is geared to experimental new plays and "re-visioned classics" through thoughtful, stylish productions that reach for "poetic" truths over "naturalistic or realistic" ones. And its shows — including, notably, last season’s exquisite staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World — invariably have a distinct sense of expertise, passion, and intelligence.

With its latest venture, a high-energy, cleverly updated, localized take on Shakespeare’s Shrew, the small but serious San Francisco company that Melrose founded in 1999 with partner and actor Paige Rogers (this production’s Kate) moves out of the 60-seat venues of the past and into the medium-big time of the Magic’s 160-seat Northside Theatre. It’s a significant step for a company still going places. Moreover, when the Cutting Ball premieres its very particular take on Shrew at the Magic this week, it will represent the culmination and confluence of several passions and pursuits for Melrose, Rogers, and their company, including the techniques and themes of commedia dell’arte, hip-hop, and, not least of all, a theater that reflects the diversity and particularity of its Bay Area environment.

Momentum for the current show began last season during a successful run of Macbeth at the Exit on Taylor.

"We were thinking of what our next Shakespeare was going to be," Melrose remembers. "David Sinaiko joined the cast when we extended, and I thought how Paige and David would make a great Kate and Petruchio. I [had also been] studying commedia dell’arte for a while, and in the summer I got a grant to go study with Antonio Fava in Italy, to kind of get it from the master. I love the influence of commedia dell’arte on Shakespeare’s work, [and] the most commedia dell’arte Shakespeare play is The Taming of the Shrew. The other thing is that my day job for the past eight years has been at the Marin Academy, [where] I’ve done lots of these big comedies — [A] Midsummer [Night’s Dream], Comedy of Errors, As You Like It. Because it’s at a school and I don’t have a lot of the limitations you have in the professional world, I’ve let my imagination run free. I’ve been a lot more bold there than I have in my professional world. Just free and easy."

That’s where he asked students versed in hip-hop dance (some of whom have since graduated) to perform during the transitions between scenes. "That worked so well that we kept doing shows with them, and it’s been really fun," Melrose said. "I also taught my students commedia. All those influences kind of fused and made for really live, fun, and no-holds-barred productions."

Rogers adds, "Those comedies had a feeling of real joy about them. I said, ‘Robby, what is going on here that you can be so free, take all these risks, and feel fine about it?’ He said, ‘Because they’re my students and they will love me no matter what I do and their parents are going to love the show no matter what.’ I said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s get some of that going at Cutting Ball!’"

If the roots of this production were in the inspiration of chemistry and coincidence, the Cutting Ball soon had to grapple with a play that comes especially freighted with political and theatrical conventions. Faced with the decidedly un-p.c. "taming" plot in which the smart and willful Kate finally submits to Petruchio’s abrasive wooing stratagem, modern productions have tended to try to subvert (often by making simply ironic) the play’s patriarchal thrust. This works against the text, as Melrose points out. His solution is to emphasize the prologue or induction scene at the outset (often cut from other productions) in which the drunkard Christopher Sly (played by Sinaiko) is made to believe he is a wealthy aristo by a mischievous lord (played by Rogers). By emphasizing this framework, which serves to make the taming plot a play within the play, and by doubling up Sinaiko and Rogers in parts that place them in alternating positions of dominance and deception, the production cleverly opens up the comedy’s themes of role playing and the social construction of self.

Finally, by rooting it all in a contemporary San Francisco milieu that includes a porn-industry wrap party, a transvestite bar in the Mission, and the Folsom Street Fair, this Shrew celebrates the fluid nature of identity in Bay Area drag, where everybody knows all the world’s a stage.*

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

Through July 29, $15–$30

Previews Thurs/12–Sat/14, 8 p.m.

Opens Sun/15, 5 p.m.

Runs Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.

Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

www.cuttingball.com”>www.cuttingball.com

All-consuming consumption

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Copping to her fashion juju at curtain rise, amid a litany of designer labels rattled off at the audience, Fe, the heroine of the sordid story to follow, makes a pretense of having broken the solemn rules of drama by giving her big secret away at the outset. In fact, there’s plenty of mystery yet in this intriguingly mercurial, restless hedonist (played by a charismatic, unstoppable Margo Hall), who anyway reverses herself in the next line when she coyly concedes the covert nature of her splendid appearance. "Face? François Nars. You can never go wrong with the French. François’s motto? ‘Makeup is not a mask.’ A load of tired crap, but I forgive him."

We never get more than a glimpse behind Fe’s mask, but then, appearances are what count — for all and nothing — in Fe in the Desert, the latest world premiere collaboration between Philippine-born American playwright, novelist, poet, and performance artist Jessica Hagedorn and Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts. After the outwardly fearless but inwardly insecure title character reveals her deceptive fabulousness, she seeks the psychological safety of her estranged husband’s brand-new Cadillac Escalade, with its aloof suspension and promise of indestructibility, as she drives to their desert home.

Narrowly avoiding a head-on with a meat truck, Fe nearly loses her life. This puts her in an existentially acute mood for the duration of her subsequent adventure-nightmare in a seemingly empty Mojave, where she and husband Bill (a coolly flamboyant, then persuasively unhinged Danny Wolohan) are interrupted in their shaky reconciliation by two armed intruders. But even that irony is no proof against the power of the all-American Caddy to ward off bad spirits. The juju of the mighty Escalade — and of the general wealth of Fe’s ultimately helpless epicurean husband, and of showbiz, whose allure also figures significantly, if somewhat obliquely, in the narrative — may falter, but never dies.

The prequel to 2005’s Tenderloin-set Stairway to Heaven, also launched with Campo Santo, Fe in the Desert cunningly puts the usual codes of identity in playful motion (with their hierarchy of class, gender, and ethnic markers) to explore the deeper social and cultural context of Fe’s existential crisis. Indeed, the play’s spacious and opulent setting (as well as its predominantly comic mode) offers a seemingly stark contrast to Stairway‘s grim inner-city tale but in fact provides no escape from the same world of contradictions, which dramatically swoop down on the reconciling couple in the form of ex-cons Tyrone (a sophisticated sociopath with a thing for good English, smoothly played by Robert Hampton) and his volatile ghetto-Pygmalion protégé, Mook (a credibly wild Jonsen Vitug). On their trail follows an unlikely rescue party made up of a producer (Michael Torres, in an amusingly sly turn) and his foreign-born secretary (a solid Sara Hernandez).

The American desert here is at once full and all-encompassing, being the desert of capitalism, consumerism, haute culture, pop culture, and the Hollywood dream factory. This soup of oneiric consumption tends to undermine any hard-and-fast identity, including those cast in multiethnic hyphenates and hoary stereotypes. Instead, various strands of the cultures still referred to as high and low flow into one another with abandon, sometimes comically, sometimes violently, but always ecstatically.

That slipperiness partly excuses the rather thin construction of some of the play’s characters, but only partly, in a production that provides little real punch despite high-octane performances and director Danny Scheie’s ever-inspired staging of a story that loops repeatedly back in time, confutf8g multiple perspectives on the same horrific and absurd encounter. Fe, on the other hand, memorably realized by the always formidable Hall, has a certain staying power. In the desert of American dreaming, she’s at least a consummate survivor, a Prada-clad pioneer who never stops moving. *

FE IN THE DESERT

Through June 25

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m. (also June 25, 8 p.m.), $9–$20, sliding scale

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org

Tongues and tales

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The unconscious, the underworld, the undead — what is it that under-the-mattress anxiety points to, exactly? And what might it have to do with a pack of powdered French fops in Louis Seize costumes? Given the blissful nonchalance with which Dark Porch Theater’s Under the Bed tackles that thing called plot, it’s probably best not to mull it over too much. Suffice it to say that all of the above and a live band serve as lower bunkmates to Leonard Pinklestein (Chris Carlone), a World War II soldier crashed out on a fluffy brass bed, the limbo life raft for a lost soul that slipped its earthly mooring on the beaches of Normandy.

It’s a testament to the grace in some brands of lunacy that this swift, enjoyably madcap dance musical — a self-styled fairy tale set in purgatory, created and directed by Margery Fairchild and copresented with SafeHouse at a new Howard Street venue known pretty aptly as the Garage — can seem so endlessly expansive on an otherwise cramped (if nicely atmospheric) stage. Under the Bed not only draws a dozen or more bodies from beneath its title furniture; it also sets them exuberantly in motion.

But back to that willful plot: run aground on a patch of purgatory under the management of a sort of manic night nurse named Harriette D. (a comically adept Fairchild), Leonard finds himself the pawn in a battle royal between his gleaming but slightly sinister hostess and the Greek goddess and maiden huntress Artemis (a vigorous Alexis Blade Perry). The latter storms Hades, or whatever, with the intention of reuniting Leonard and his lost love, the cheerful would-be revolutionary Rosemary Short (Hilde Susan Jaegtnes), who arrives soon after him as another Lethe-headed amnesiac, though with raised fist ever at the ready.

Harriette, who for assistance is wont to call on a member of the band, the somewhat reluctant Mr. M. (a laid-back Patrick Simms), also conjures the French courtiers previously mentioned. When not mincing, they act as willing executioners and wield the same device that left such prominent scar lines on their own effete necks.

A fairy tale naturally allows for all manner of incongruities, and Under the Bed‘s just sweeten the pot. No doubt the unusually collaborative nature of the production has something to do with them, as do a winsome score (composed of more than a dozen droll and dreamy songs), eclectic choreography (by Fairchild and Perry), and some nicely offbeat dialogue. Add to that the production’s generally sharp and always game performances, beginning with a fine, versatile turn by Carlone as the slumbering soldier, and the unlikely spell cast by Under the Bed is complete.

ANYTHING BUT STILL LIFE


Art in Artemisia is a dynamic, multifaceted force, skillfully and thoughtfully realized in just about every aspect of the Dell’Arte Company’s thought-provoking dramatic study exploring the life and work of the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Barbara Geary). In director Giulio Cesare Perrone’s well-acted and visually striking production, which closed its run at the Magic Theatre last weekend, the rape of the artist by Agostino Tassi and the sensational trial that followed in 1612 — as well as the biblical story of Judith, whose beheading of Holofernes served as a heroic subject for Gentileschi at a time when female painters were rare and deemed unable to handle such material — become the ever-present, intervening background to a physically choreographed dialogue set in 1635 between Artemisia and her model Giulia (Keight Gleason).

If the script (cowritten by Perrone and Geary) veers at points into an awkward mesh of heightened speech and contemporary frankness, the production design carries the theme of art’s transformative power in several directions. From the cleverly abstract yet functional use of painting materials and everyday objects in Perrone’s scenic design to Greta Welsh’s dynamic chiaroscuro lighting, composer Youn Joo Sim’s transporting score, and choreographer Yong Zoo Lee’s incorporation of the histrionic postures of the painter’s canvases, Artemisia‘s mise-en-scène elaborates a vision of symbolic and psychic redress that echoes down the centuries. *

UNDER THE BED — A FAIRYTALE SET IN PURGATORY

Thurs/7–Sat/9, 8 p.m.; Sun/10, 7 p.m., $12–$20

The Garage

975 Howard, SF

(415) 793-8030

darkporchtheater@gmail.com

Tokeville

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There’s a section in Josh Kornbluth’s new show wherein the veteran (but weirdly ageless) monologist, waxing on admiringly about Sheldon S. Wolin, notes his old Princeton political science prof’s capacity for turning a student’s half-baked ideas into $10 notions. It reminded me of a professor I knew who was adept at the same thing. I’ve forgotten the exact metaphor Kornbluth employs to describe this pedagogical magic act, but I used to liken it to pushing a battered old Dodge across the seminar table and having the professor transform it into a Rolls Royce before sending it gliding back with your name on the license plate.

Of course, as anyone who knows his style will attest, the same might be said of writer-performer Kornbluth — or Citizen Josh, as his solo play premiering at the Magic Theatre has him. Kornbluth, though, works his similar magic with his own thoughts, the detritus of a quick but wandering mind: the memories, spontaneous associations, and clumsy social encounters of daily life. He manages to swirl these together, with plenty of humor, into a big, inquisitive stew, until they coalesce into a solution to the problem he has set for himself and his audience, whether it’s growing up in (and out of) a red diaper, negotiating the nightmare that is the federal tax system, or, in the present case, coming to terms with the meaning of democracy in the United States.

It’s in keeping with Kornbluth’s at once self-deprecating and knowing humor that this exploration of the American institution takes place on a stage efficiently made up to suggest a classroom. He and director-collaborator David Dower (along with production designer Alexander V. Nichols) proffer a short bookcase, an American flag on a freestanding pole, and a slide projector and screen. But Kornbluth stands there as teacher and student, we soon realize, and we’re merely along for the ride.

The spark sending him back to civics class comes from his frustrated disillusionment following the 2004 election, a response challenged by his Berkeley neighbor — an old-school chum and political scientist — as not in keeping with a democratic ethos. (You too may be wondering exactly how democracy fits into national elections these days. But as our guide suggests, for the purposes of this exercise, "Let’s just say it’s not passé.") Before giving up on democracy altogether, Kornbluth agrees to do some digging into the subject. (There’s a more fundamental incentive than saving face with his neighbor: Kornbluth’s son, while not a very detailed or developed character in the show, nonetheless provides his father with a certain critical perspective throughout. Fatherly instincts demand he do something to save the world his child will inherit.) The research sends him bouncing across a lot of time and territory, including his first year at Princeton, his graduation day four years later (when the desultory student did not officially graduate but rather began a 27-year incomplete that he finally decided to remedy by contacting senior thesis adviser Wolin), and even 1957 Little Rock, Ark.

In this last instance (a particularly well-written and engaging passage), he unpacks the image of the famous photograph depicting African American high school student Elizabeth Eckford — one of the Little Rock Nine, who tried to enter a previously all-white school — and the white woman spewing racial epithets behind her, one Hazel Bryan, whose democratic skills were none too desirable. Since Kornbluth catches himself "going Hazel" in a playground dispute (literally) with another Berkeley neighbor, this is also a self-effacing and humanizing reference that eschews simple dichotomies of good and evil in the name of the hard, imperfect work of talking to, rather than past, one another. (Much of Kornbluth’s monologue takes place, figuratively speaking, in Berkeley’s Ohlone Park, known as People’s Park Annex during the student protests of the late 1960s and still host to the lumpy lattice dome welded together there by protesters, which the unsuspecting Kornbluth uses as a cell phone reception platform and refers to in aesthetic horror as "the structure.")

It’s a bumpy ride, all said, for this self-fashioned Don Quixote of democracy. The first 15 minutes or so feel almost too neat, too presentational or precious. Then, as Kornbluth relates the story of his brother’s troubled beginning as an extremely premature newborn — and his (by now famous) nonconformist father’s startling intervention to save the baby — the performance moves suddenly to a new and altogether gripping register. Although it’s not entirely sustained afterward, the next hour proves an engaging one. At the same time, the show ends on an upbeat note of liberal defiance and optimism that is hard to credit in an era when even Wolin can write, in 2003, that "a kind of fascism is replacing our democracy." The show’s overt politics is less satisfying than the nuance and complexity that emerge from the more personal and idiosyncratic passages. Citizen Josh is at its most charming and compelling when the accent falls on the second half of that moniker. *

CITIZEN JOSH

Through June 17

Tues.–Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 and 7 p.m.; $20–$45

Magic Theatre, Sam Shepard Stage

Fort Mason Center, bldg. D

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

Serious games

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Two weeks before the world premiere of Aaron Loeb’s First Person Shooter, a play that explores the controversial relationship between video games and violence in the aftermath of a Columbine-like school shooting, Virginia Tech suddenly made the subject almost too relevant. SF Playhouse and PlayGround, the coproducing companies, considered a postponement — according to excerpts from e-mails between the theater’s cofounders, the director, and the playwright, which were reprinted in the program — but in the end went forward with the opening. Loeb’s argument to his colleagues for doing so, reasonable enough in itself, echoed the central dramatic thrust of his play: "We need to connect as people, as human beings in the face of this kind of tragedy, not just try to find who’s to blame and move on with our lives."

Even without the uncomfortable timeliness lent the play by the latest massacre on a US campus, First Person Shooter broaches the twin problems of violence and compassion in American society in a way that feels immediate and compelling. Of course, Loeb’s words carry unintended irony, given that for most of the country (released after only a few days from the condensed, media-scripted period of shock, mourning, and introspection reserved for national tragedies of a certain newsworthiness), the Virginia Tech killings are already yesterday’s papers and a fuzzy memory. Just as predictably, the shootings prompted another facile, recycled exercise in blame casting (into which the militarized and imperial system responsible for similar and bigger rampages abroad, needless to say, never enters), since which we’ve all been tacitly encouraged to move on with our lives.

Although it doesn’t go as far as it might, First Person Shooter admirably refuses the usual package of talking points that passes for a discussion of American violence. The plot’s deceptively narrow focus on a boisterous set of twentysomething business execs and video game makers on the one hand and the unassuming farmer parents of a slain student on the other moves beyond stale gun control debates and scientific studies of child brain chemistry to take in the intersecting legal, corporate, media, and racial logics determining how violence plays in the mainstream.

Loeb’s play, moreover, enters this fray from a particularly invested perspective: the rising playwright is also chief operating officer of Planet Moon Studios, a San Francisco video-game-developing house. That background lends a certain insider authenticity to the Bay Area start-up world depicted here and makes the play’s honest wrestling with and socially wide-ranging approach to the issue of video games and violence all the more striking.

Within a sharply written and straightforward drama (imaginatively staged with sustained verve and precision by director Jon Tracy), Loeb sets up a series of relationships and imaginary identifications that resonate increasingly as his story moves forward. In the opening scene, for instance, we see whiz kid programmer Kerry Davis (a terrific Craig Marker), the genius behind JetPack Games’ most violent and popular seller, at the keyboard wearing a pair of headphones, gangsta rapping with gusto in what he assumes is private abandon. Standing behind him, however, is his amused peer and JetPack’s rogue of a CEO, Tommy (an equally strong Chad Deverman). The comic effect of Kerry’s blind spot — an unawareness that his private fantasies might have public aspects — soon comes back in the grimmest guise: a masked shooter named Billy (alternately played by four cast members) posts a fan letter on the company’s Web site praising Kerry’s game as excellent training, shortly before going on a killing spree with a friend at an Illinois high school. As if this weren’t bad enough, among their victims is the school’s lone African American student, a boy, we come to learn, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the villain Kerry has programmed into the game as a secret (virtual) revenge on the man who murdered his wife.

Kerry’s guilt and anxiety are impossible to contain, invading both the haunted dream world where he relives the brutal attack on his wife (scenes impressively rendered in a bold, cinematic style on Melpomene Katakalos’s spare stage of toppled chairs and tables, augmented by Brian Degan Scott’s excellent two-panel video design and Ian Walker’s atmospheric soundscape) and the JetPack offices. Further, the legal and media uproar that results from the killings shakes the tight little team — rounded out by a hip young programmer named Wilson (Sung Min Park) and a forceful MBA named Tamar (Kate Del Castillo) — just as the now notorious and endangered company is set to launch the game’s successor. Enter lawyers all around, played by Park and Susi Damilano, who also plays a slain student’s well-meaning stepmother. They pursue winner-take-all strategies on behalf of the victims’ families and the embattled corporation, respectively, as Kerry and his counterpart on the other side of the battle, a dead student’s father (played movingly, in shades of turmoil and dignity, by Adrian Roberts), grope their way out of the dehumanizing machine that’s caught them up, toward some kind of contact, some identification, grounded in a shared suffering and understanding. *

FIRST PERSON SHOOTER

Through June 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 3 p.m.)

$18–$60

SF Playhouse

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596

www.sfplayhouse.org

May day

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The May Day rampage of the Los Angeles Police Department over peaceful protesters and journalists at an immigrants’ rights march lends an undeniable immediacy to America Tropical, a new and at times poignant chamber opera by composer David Conte and librettist Oliver Mayer that addresses the legacy of racial and class exploitation built into the very fabric of the City of Angels.

The compact 60-minute work, which premiered April 27 at the Thick House under the auspices of San Francisco’s Thick Description, takes its cue from América Tropical, a 1932 Olvera Street mural painted by the great Mexican social realist artist David Alfaro Siqueiros (sung with appropriately formidable presence by a swaggering, tempestuous Mark Hernandez). Meant as a mirror held up to the past and future of Los Angeles, Siqueiros’s wall pointed back to the city’s 18th-century Mexican founders in a group of pobladores (played here by six capable singers led by an impressive Antoine Garth) and ahead to the grim strife of an ethnically and racially stratified class system.

That strife culminates in America Tropical as the conflagration of the 1992 riots sparked by the police beating of Rodney King (played by Garth), famously witnessed and transmitted to the world by private citizen George Holliday (Chad Runyon), whose videotape thus becomes something of the equivalent of Siqueiros’s politically charged mural.

In an apt, indeed concrete metaphor for an increasingly divided and dividing age, walls as sites of division, reclamation, toil, and creative resistance pervade the poetic libretto provided by playwright Mayer (Blade to the Heat, Joe Louis Blues), which effectively brings Sisqueiros’s social realist language into 3-D relief. "Tell me what a wall can do," Siqueiros sings. "I’ll show you what a wall can be."

Meanwhile, Conte (whose beautiful, ghostly desert opera Firebird Motel was commissioned and produced by Thick Description) has fashioned a score featuring serrated melody lines and lush choral harmonies to augment the work’s three centuries, succinctly blended in Mayer’s libretto. The music moves determinedly forward through alternately agitated, wistful, angelic, and angry passages provided by an excellent sextet of piano, strings, and woodwinds conducted by John Kendall Bailey.

At the same time, Siqueiros’s emotionally powerful and provocative visual allegory can translate awkwardly to the stage. Those walking in cold without any knowledge of the opera’s deeply rooted relationship to Siqueiros’s mural may find some of the mise-en-scène (such as the crucifixion) a trifle hokey, despite graceful staging by director Tony Kelly, not to mention the excellent singing, generally decent performances, and arresting music. Some preparation for the audience — a description of the mural on a lobby poster or somewhere in the program — might have been in order.

Siqueiros’s Olvera Street mural was one of the earliest examples of the Mexican urban art movement that publicly portrays the local narratives of ethnic and indigenous people. But in 1932 the police arm of the ruling class had a brush of its own, and soon after the mural’s unveiling the LAPD whitewashed it into what turned out to be temporary oblivion. (It was partially uncovered and rediscovered in the 1960s and has recently been undergoing restoration.)

It’s more than merely ironic that the mural’s images of workers and an indigenous American woman, named the India (sung by Sepideh Moafi), crucified on a double cross of American imperialism, were staging a second return in Conte and Mayer’s America Tropical even as LAPD clubs and rubber bullets rained down on workers and families at MacArthur Park. The redemptive force of the opera’s historical ghosts rises on a wave of events that gives distressing currency to the libretto’s emphatic assertion, "There is no present / There is no future / Only the past, happening over and over again." *

AMERICA TROPICAL

Through May 20

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m., $15–$25

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

www.thickhouse.org

Meeting acute

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REVIEW In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the only voices raised on behalf of understanding Timothy McVeigh — that is, as someone slightly more complicated than a Hollywood-style incarnation of pure evil — was that of Gore Vidal. Vidal insisted on pointing to the obvious: the bombing of offices that included the local headquarters of the FBI and the ATF — although utterly cruel and misguided in leading to 168 deaths — was not arbitrary wickedness but a carefully considered act of revenge. As Vidal put it in his article on McVeigh for Vanity Fair, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City "was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas."

McVeigh — a decorated military hero of the Gulf War, as it turned out — had counterattacked a government he claimed was waging war against the American people. In this opinion, McVeigh, who insisted he had no accomplices, was not alone. He represented a growing libertarian movement afoot in the American heartland. Moreover, as Vidal, a critic from the left of federal tyranny, pointed out in a 1998 piece for Vanity Fair, "Shredding the Bill of Rights," the government had violated Posse Comitatus in laying its siege of the Branch Davidians.

For Vidal’s attention to the matter, McVeigh began a correspondence with him, even inviting the writer to attend his execution — an invitation Vidal declined. This immediately sounds like a fascinating, even dramatic dialogue. But stageworthy? Edmund White’s two-hander, Terre Haute, shrewdly ups the ante a bit, imagining an actual date between Vidal and McVeigh — respectively cast as the lightly fictionalized writer James Brevoord (a fine John Hutchinson) and the transparently McVeigh-like terrorist Harrison (a fiercely magnetic Elias Escobedo, who even bears a strong physical resemblance to the original). They encounter each other in the flesh in a series of brief meetings across a plastic security screen in the maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Ind., during the days preceding Harrison’s execution.

On death row Harrison has had time to think over his actions. Neighbor Ted Kaczynski, we learn, has suggested he would have done better to blow the building up at night, when it was empty of innocents. But Harrison remains unrepentant, even if we see the burden of responsibility close over him when the lives of innocent "collaterals," particularly the children at the day care center, get mentioned. Brevoord — who is there to write on the meaning of Harrison’s act and to boldly ask the whys so studiously erased in the media — sympathizes with Harrison’s anti-imperialism while provoking the younger man with mounting scorn for his embrace of feeble right-wing conspiracy theories.

Besides a political tête-à-tête, the meeting is the occasion for a clash of personalities, temperaments, and backgrounds, all of which White brings out starkly in the dialogue: Brevoord, for instance, is the kind of man who has no trouble using kerfuffle in an idle sentence, although an indeed is more than enough to throw Harrison for a loop. The tension here is often lightly comical, but the point about education, intellect, and political opposition (and the art of the interviewer) is well made. And if the script feels overly expositional at times, the actors offer strong and credible performances throughout.

The New Conservatory Theatre Center’s US premiere is a sharp and intimate production, staged by director Christopher Jenkins with intelligent assurance, including a concentration on character that garners moments of alternately subtle and electric intensity between two men negotiating an extraordinary situation. Yet the director can’t resist kitschy flourishes, introducing the McVeigh character, for instance, with a short piercing scream of sound and a light that illuminates Harrison standing like Hannibal Lecter behind the see-through wall of the visiting cell. Scenic designer Bruce Walters’s visiting room, meanwhile, is a simple but convincingly dire arrangement of wire-woven Plexiglas walls, yellow-taped borders, and blinking security cameras.

White draws the facts of the case, as well as the style and argument from Vidal’s relevant essays, into well-crafted if sometimes information-laden dialogue. It can be too clashing and unnecessarily confrontational, but it is generally graceful and filled with absorbing ideas, especially in the monologues given to the Vidal character. Unfortunately, the play gets distracted from the meat of its story. That tale not only sports an intriguing tension between two very different sorts of rebels but is politically urgent and deep, ranging from the correct response to a truly totalitarian encroachment on fundamental liberties to the dissolving relation between cause and effect in a culture dominated by mind-numbingly interchangeable images of good and evil.

Instead, the play ends up veering off into carnal considerations of repressed desires, a layer to the characters’ relationship that was probably best left hinted at. The best you might say about it is that it further humanizes a figure too quickly passed off as a cartoon rather than a riddle that needs solving. But in practice it tends to trivialize what’s gone before, inevitably mixing an unhelpful pinch of Freud into the media-repressed why of a terrible public act. *

TERRE HAUTE

Through May 6

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

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Still evolving

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The human race either sinks or swims. That’s evolution as Charles Darwin first saw it. But flippers and a seal pelt, that’s pure Kurt Vonnegut. The novelist plays God like no other, wresting the species from its self-destruction, then sending it on its wobbly way with a childlike capacity for invention and a wry if discontented grasp of human folly. That’s Galápagos, anyway, his 1985 best-seller in which evolution saves humankind from its big and mischievous brains by sending it back to the sea. And although the transition from page to stage is probably as slippery as that first fin step on dry land, Vonnegut fans (a species unto themselves) will no doubt flock to see the book’s adaptation in the world premiere of Galáp, by San Francisco’s Boxcar Theatre.

In a year that found the young company variously pitched in the sand at Baker Beach and careening onboard the Mexican Bus’s rolling party platform, it hardly surprises one to see the itinerant Boxcar pulling into the Cadillac Building at 1000 Van Ness to occupy the vacated offices of an online shoe company as it brings its inaugural season (aptly titled "Journeys") to a close. And indeed, a better-sounding setting for a play inspired by a Vonnegut story is hard to imagine.

Artistic director Nick A. Olivero wants to make the most of it too. His imaginative, kinetic staging contains continual surprises, aided by the aquatic and exotic atmosphere summoned through Lisa Lutkenhouse’s resourceful costumes, Norm Munoz’s puppets, and David Sophia Siegel’s jaunty original score. The room itself is divided into several stages, more or less enveloping the audience in the play’s fractured story line, which looks back one million years through the eyes of a ghost (Josh Truett) at the troubled but pivotal year of 1986 as several hapless tourists aboard "the nature cruise of the century" to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands become the progenitors of the next wave in human evolution.

The six-member cast cycles through a number of characters, sometimes sharing duties in a single role. If the hardworking cast begins to win us over, it also never masters the rigors of the material or Vonnegut’s satirical style. Poor sight lines, moreover, make some scenes impossible to view from certain seats. Boxcar’s ambitious closer is a mixed bag, in other words, but like Vonnegut’s relentless survivors, the company shows it can adapt. (Robert Avila)

GAL&AACUTE;P

Through April 27

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $12–$28

AMC Cadillac Bldg.

1000 Van Ness, SF

(415) 776-1747

www.boxcartheatre.org

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Home run

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HOME RUN: AFTER THE WAR LUCIDLY STRIKES HOME

Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War, enjoying an exceptional world premiere at the American Conservatory Theater, is set during 1948 in a Fillmore boardinghouse run by a laid-back jazz musician and second-generation Japanese American named Chester "Chet" Monkawa (Vancouver’s Hiro Kanagawa in an impressive US debut). The bustling Fillmore District of ’48 was a highly diverse neighborhood that in particular mixed an African American business-owning and working class (whose members had recently arrived in the Bay Area from points south to fill jobs in the burgeoning defense industry) with "Japanese Town" residents returned from the horror and shame of forced evacuation and mass incarceration by the US government during the war.

Chet’s laissez-faire boardinghouse (and Donald Eastman’s brilliant two-story revolving set) puts a cross section of the neighborhood under one roof. This tangle of lives grows affectingly more snarled as the story unfolds. The fragility of the characters’ bonds, fraught with divisions between and within various communities, is soon apparent. At the center is Chet, whose background as a no-no boy (one of the interned men who refused to sign a pledge to the US government or volunteer to fight for it) puts him at odds with the tightly coiled local moneylender, Mr. Goto (longtime Gotanda associate Sab Shimono, in a deft performance of supple humor and menace). The latter’s disapproval reflects the bitter divisions among Japanese Americans struggling to regain dignity and a social foothold in the aftermath of traumatic isolation and victimization by their own, racially combustible country.

Given Gotanda’s recent and successful foray into more experimental work with Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts, After the War marks a return of sorts to the finely crafted realistic dramas — centered on Asian American scenes, yet of delicate existential and social import — that have made him an internationally celebrated playwright. This beautifully conceived and executed period piece, commissioned by the ACT and helmed by artistic director Carey Perloff, places that work on an unprecedented scale. It reminds one that few American playwrights are as capable as Gotanda of carrying on the kind of dialogue on race, identity, and history that the late August Wilson turned into a broad theatrical canvas embracing the evolving American experience. (Robert Avila)

AFTER THE WAR

Through April 22

See stage listings for showtimes

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

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“Good German,” bad German

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The title of David Wiltse’s 2003 play, The Good German, points in two directions at once: there’s the image of the individual who stands up to the injustice being perpetrated by his or her government, and there’s the image of the individual who follows the flag, however reluctantly, wherever it may lead. Of the play’s four characters, only one looks even remotely like a saint, and she’s killed early on. The other three, all of them men, have to negotiate a more twisted path between these two poles.

Wiltse’s supple and engrossing drama, now making a stellar West Coast debut at the Marin Theatre Company (and which, incidentally, has no relation to the recent Steven Soderbergh film), takes place entirely in the middle-class home of a middle-aged couple. The flawed but sympathetic Dr. Karl Vogel (Warren David Keith) is a professor of chemistry, and his wife, Gretel (Anne Darragh), is a nurse. Gretel has brought home Herr Braun (Brian Herndon), a German Jew who recently lost his wife and his child when his home was deliberately set ablaze with the intention of sequestering him. Karl is reluctant, being timid and aloof by nature and harboring an all too typical strain of anti-Semitism, which makes him "philosophically" antagonistic to the desperate man at his doorstep.

Karl nonetheless can refuse his beloved wife nothing and allows Braun to stay as a servant even after learning about his Jewish identity. Karl’s good friend Siemi (Darren Bridgett), meanwhile, initially appears only too willing to help a stranger in distress. As a member of the Nazi bureaucracy, though, he slowly gives himself over to the organized mass cultivation of hatred sweeping through the country at large. In the end, the bourgeois domesticity all three men cling to — even more so after Gretel’s death — is no guard against the spiraling madness of the outside world: sooner or later they have to face a life-and-death decision about who they are and what they stand for. Or rather, what they will and won’t stand for.

That choice — their dilemma — is very clearly our own. Wiltse’s play deliberately sets itself in Adolf Hitler’s Germany in order to address George W. Bush’s America. Although this is not the first time the Nazis have served onstage as a mirror to America’s totalitarian tendencies (John O’Keefe’s brilliant 2002 drama, Times Like These, and Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day are just two examples), The Good German proves exceptionally vital. Confidently helmed by director Kent Nicholson and featuring riveting performances, it’s a provocative mediation on questions confronting average — that is to say, flawed — individuals in extraordinary times.

WOYZECK


There is no escape into domesticity for Franz Woyzeck either. Georg Büchner’s classic antihero, a lowly 30-year-old soldier beset by the complementary machinery of the military and medical science, finds only mockery and infidelity in the home and hearth he shares with his mistress, Marie, a former prostitute, and their illegitimate child. In his fevered brain a rebellion of sorts, prompted by a blood-red moon, is on slow boil. It’s a tragedy of minor and quintessentially modern proportions that is so apt, so portentous, that it has inspired countless productions and adaptations since its unearthing in the late 19th century (including Alban Berg’s opera and at least a couple brilliant films) and still amazes one to think it was penned (and left unfinished) in 1836 by a brilliant young chemist and revolutionary carried off by typhus at age 23.

But despite its popularity, Woyzeck is not an easy play to get right. Cutting Ball’s current stab impressively conveys the work’s jagged protoexpressionist spirit. Artistic director Rob Melrose’s able new translation also serves the play’s coruscating imagery. And yet director Adriana Baer has not managed to find a compelling way into the play. Casting accounts for part of the trouble. Moreover, there’s something staid in a scene like the opening tableau, in which all the characters peek from behind the set’s back wall of shelving to whisper maddening things into the ear of a progressively agitated Woyzeck. In the end, we never quite hear what all the fuss was about. *

THE GOOD GERMAN

Through April 15

See Stage listings for show info $29–$47

Marin Theatre Company

297 Miller, Mill Valley

(415) 388-5208

www.marintheatre.org

WOYZECK

Through April 7

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $25

Exit Stage Left

156 Eddy, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.cuttingball.com

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Angel’s wing

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Kudos to SF Playhouse for its part in introducing Bay Area audiences to Stephen Adly Guirgis. Guirgis is a member of New York’s LAByrinth Theater Company — a collective that includes playwright John Patrick Shanley and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Guirgis has been making a name for himself during the past decade as an actor, director, television writer, and more particularly, the author of several engagingly sharp and gritty off-Broadway comedies.

SF Playhouse had a hit on its hands last season with its slick West Coast premiere of Guirgis’s 2002 Our Lady of 121st Street. In that play, a circle of former Catholic schoolmates from Harlem reconvenes in the old neighborhood for the funeral of their bad ol’ but beloved teacher, Sister Rose. Alternately saint and sinner, more or less like the rest of them, Rose is seemingly larger than life now that she’s gone. Really gone: as the play opens, someone has swiped her embalmed remains from the mortuary, throwing the whole service into limbo as the characters, in a state of anxious expectancy, rip open both fresh and long-festering wounds. Together their stories slyly interrogate the nature of free will, right and wrong, and our ambivalent reliance on forms of moral accountability. Artistic director Bill English’s shrewd casting and razor-sharp staging brought the high-spirited ensemble work and Guirgis’s loosely interlocked scenes to life.

In Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, a Guirgis play originally produced in 2000 and now at SF Playhouse, a young Puerto Rican man named Angel Cruz (Daveed Diggs) finds himself in jail — after bursting into the church of a cult leader responsible for brainwashing his best friend and shooting the former in the ass. Angel, having tried every other means of rescuing his childhood pal, cannot see much of a crime in this desperate act. Mary Jane Hanrahan (Susi Damilano), the public defender initially assigned to his case, begs to differ. Yet something draws the haggard but upright lawyer to the recalcitrant Angel’s side. In a monologue addressed to the audience, she recounts a childhood memory of a similar (if not quite as illicit) act by her working-class Irish father.

Angel’s plight and Mary Jane’s legal defense make up one half of the play. Brutally assaulted in jail and in dire threat of being killed after his target, the Sun Myung Moon–like Reverend Kim, unexpectedly dies, Angel soon finds himself in a special protective custody lockdown wing at Rikers Island prison. The wing is overseen by a guard named Valdez (Gabriel Marin), whose frustration with institutionalized justice has given way to sadism. A deeply shaken Angel shares the yard with a kindly born-again serial killer named Lucius Jenkins (Carl Lumbly) as the latter fights extradition back to Florida, where he would face the death penalty.

As an exploration of ethics and the nature of personal responsibility, Jesus Hopped the "A" Train takes a slightly different route from Our Lady but winds up in notably similar territory. It teases out volatile questions from complacent notions of faith and justice while demonstrating the playwright’s marked gift for dialogue that is gritty but also dazzlingly vibrant and ferociously funny. English again shows judiciousness in direction and casting, and Lumbly in the role of Lucius is a real coup. Lumbly (the Berkeley actor best known for work in films and television shows such as Alias) turns in a finely tuned performance that is one of the best things on a Bay Area stage at the moment. Also, Diggs, a relatively young actor recently seen in Magic Theatre’s production of Elaine May’s triptych Moving Along, continues to prove himself capable of great things. The resulting production is a winner, no matter what a jury may decide.

UNDER THE RADAR


Last week Jess Curtis/Gravity’s Under the Radar slipped into San Francisco from Berlin for a smooth and gentle (except when it didn’t want to be) landing on the CounterPULSE stage. It’s a decidedly unsentimental and altogether moving night of dance theater that is, despite the name of the company, anything but heavy.

Two years in the making, this cabaret-style movement-based exploration of virtuosity and disability — or the mental limits we set for one another and ourselves — features an international seven-member ensemble. It’s composed of dancer-singer-musician-performers from the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and (in the case of the Chico-born, longtime Bay Area–based Curtis) the United States. Under the Radar‘s winning chemistry includes casual, puckish humor (the performers, who variously play instruments as a band or climb into harnesses for aerial solos or duets, watch each other perform with admiring and catty commentary that is surely meant to prod stultified consciences). The evening’s almost nonchalant quality belies its technical rigor, striking eclecticism, and inspired invention.

Axis and other dance companies have long made integrated work (for disabled and other performers) a staple of the Bay Area dance scene, and the addition of circus and cabaret elements is not in itself new either. But Under the Radar‘s highly theatrical amalgam is nonetheless freshly inventive, fun, and lovely to behold. What willingly comes down to earth can rebound to heavenly heights. *

JESUS HOPPED THE "A" TRAIN

Through April 21

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; $18–$60

SF Playhouse

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596

www.sfplayhouse.org

UNDER THE RADAR

Through April 1

Wed.–Sun., 8 p.m., $18–$30

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 435-7552

www.counterpulse.org

www.jesscurtisgravity.org

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“Rust” never sleeps

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Between Kirsten Greenidge’s rumbling and ambitious Rust and Chantal Bilodeau’s titilutf8g if more staid Pleasure and Pain, a metatheme is already emerging from the Magic Theatre’s annual three-play Hot House festival. Both Greenidge and Bilodeau merge a contemporary identity-focused story line and a fractured mise-en-scène to explore the porous border between mundane reality and individual and collective fictions.

Rust centers on a troubled patch in the high-flying career of football star Randall Mifflin (Mikaal Sulaiman). The Mighty Miff, to his fans, has temporarily retired for vague reasons having to do with the corruption of the game’s ideals, setting off a controversy embodied by two comically artificial-looking TV sportscasters (Eric Fraisher Hayes and Lance Gardner) complete with navy blue blazers, puffy microphones, plastic hairdos, and even banks of stadium floodlights strapped to their backs. Miff, meanwhile, stays home in edgy seclusion playing video games and collecting antique mammy-shaped cookie jars (and other fixtures of a commercial culture once saturated with antebellum black caricatures). To the growing concern of his wife (April Matthis) and friends (Nicole C. Julien and Donald Lett), it becomes clear Randall is being haunted over the phone by the ghosts of product icons Aunt Jemima, here known as Ella Mae Walker (Cathleen Riddley), and Uncle Ben, or Mr. Peale (L. Peter Callender), who plead with him to deliver the race.

A subplot features a yuppie brother (Gardner) and sister (Matthis) in the process of selling their late parents’ old house. Out of one wall steps a life-size version of Mary-Mary-Anne (Julien), a pickaninny the brother instantly recognizes from childhood as Farina, the cereal icon, one of many racist commercial images their mother bitterly pasted behind the wallpaper in a kind of symbolic burial. Mary-Mary-Anne leads the siblings on a hunt for the cookie jar now in Randall’s possession, as the two plot strands come together — along with an eerie set of lantern-wielding Gold Dust Washing Powder twins, Omas (Lett) and Snipe (Hayes) — in an antique shop operated by a drunken dealer named Gin George (Callender).

Setting these grotesque caricatures in motion among flesh-and-blood moderns is just one of the ways Greenidge’s uneven but vital, imaginative, and ambitious comedy theatrically realizes the uneasy blending of stereotypes and real life. It does so in a way particularly reminiscent of Suzan-Lori Parks’s work. As the enduring force of blackface caricature, and the white supremacist ideology behind it, threads its way into the present day, it becomes clear that the subtle negotiations and compromises attendant on personal and collective identity in 21st-century American culture stand in need of a little schooling, if not an exorcism.

The protagonist in Bilodeau’s Pleasure and Pain has her own problem with private demons bearing down on her social world. Peggy (Jennifer Clare) is an attractive, perky, semiawkward, almost unbelievably sheltered 21st-century young woman groping toward a more or less ’50s-style sexual awakening with an overactive fantasy life she half worries, half hopes will leave her "out of control." Needless to say, she gets her ambivalent wish. Her daydreams — ruled by a strapping dominator (Andrew Utter) dressed in casual S-M gear — soon spill out into her workaday world, which is split between secretarial duties alongside former babysitter and comically unguarded confidant Ruth (a sharp and amusing Catherine Smitko) and a prematurely settled home life with her schluby fiancé (Max Moore).

Not exactly new territory. Pleasure and Pain lacks anything like the imagination — let alone psychological or social import — of Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour or even a film by Catherine Breillat. Its limited journey is fairly dull. All the passing allure of bare midriff and lash could have come out of a Good Vibrations catalog circa 1978. *

PLEASURE AND PAIN RUST

Through April 1

See Web site for schedule, $20–$45

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, bldg D, third floor

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

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Ouroboros rising

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Never mind the ides of March, here comes year four of the Iraq War. Believe it or not, this whole illegal invasion-and-occupation business brought to you by the generally scary US government — that consortium of oil companies, political marionettes, neoconquerors, military wonks, and other capitalist heavies operating behind the flimflam of democracy and terror — is about to celebrate another birthday. (In various offstage boardrooms, we hear the muffled sound of champagne corks not so discreetly popping.)

It’s unclear how many people are still fooled by the flapdoodle spewing from the faces fronting for this enterprise. For most of us in the big Green Zone back home, questions about the Iraq War have moved decidedly into the cultural realm, where the conflict lingers and ferments like others before it in the atmosphere generated between the TV and the dinner table — or, more insidiously, in the mute wasteland of adolescent malaise, surrounded on all sides by a dysfunctional society in lofty denial of its serious penchant for destruction.

Although written in the aftermath of the Gulf War, that media-sanitized prequel to contemporary carnage, playwright Mickey Birnbaum’s Big Death and Little Death squarely occupies the latter territory. But suburban death metal–laced teenage angst is more than the terrain of Birnbaum’s sly and ferocious black comedy — now enjoying a feisty West Coast premiere by Crowded Fire — it’s a beachhead from which the play gleefully lays waste to the universe as a whole.

Birnbaum’s fully fledged two-act (originally intended as an opener for death metal bands) posits some distorted family values, amplified by the sublimated horrors of a world on fire. Its main characters are a brother and sister, Gary (Carter Chastain) and Kristi (Mandy Goldstone), two sympathetically screwed-up teenagers whose modest nuclear household (an evocative panorama of linoleum, Formica, and faded wallpaper in Chloe Short’s deceptively spare set design) is vaguely overseen by their father, a troubled Desert Storm vet (Lawrence Radecker). Since returning from the Gulf, Dad likes to take pictures of road accidents (your quiet, volatile type, in other words, wonderfully fashioned by Radecker as an opaque yet sympathetic psychopath in desert fatigues). Completing the picture for a time is Mom, or Dad’s unfaithful wife (Michele Levy), whose history of sexual indiscretion while her husband was off sauntering through hell comes tumbling out of her in a series of Tourette’s-like confessions.

In the role of a highly inadequate support circle are Gary’s friend Harley (Ben Freeman), an awkward adolescent with an ambivalent thing for his friend’s sister; Gary’s twisted guidance counselor, Miss Endor (Tonya Glanz), who invites him to a death metal concert before diving into a crank-fueled nihilist rant; and Gary’s inappropriate Uncle Jerry (Michael Barr), a Navy sailor who becomes even more inappropriate as the oxygen leaves the stranded sub from which he makes a farewell call.

When a litter of pups is carted off by a classic suburban tweaker (Barr) in exchange for a gun and a bag of drugs, one of the pups (Mick Mize, in a dog suit) is left behind somewhere to haunt the house and mind of the posttraumatic paterfamilias. This subplot is interspersed with scenes from a family car trip from hell and Kristi’s anorexic adolescent anguish as Gary ponders whether to go to city college or "destroy the universe." In the end, as the characters make love, war, art, and friends in no particular order, the second option looks increasingly enticing to our hero, if only to clear the way for something new.

Smartly staged by Sean Daniels (moonlighting from his position as associate artistic director at the California Shakespeare Theater), Big Death and Little Death speaks to this imploding universe loudly and affirmatively, forefingers and pinkies extended. In Birnbaum’s optimistic apocalypse, there’s a difference between the annihilation of the system and the creative destruction that envisions a new beginning on the horizon.

The umbilical link between big and little deaths brings to mind the Vietnam-era "little murders" in Jules Feiffer’s even more prescient black comedy of an American culture of self-destruction. One’s tempted to call Birnbaum’s play the Little Murders of our day.

But neither can really compete with the culture they so sharply critique nor prove as strange or fitting as the news of the dean of West Point ganging up with human rights activists, the FBI, and military in-terror-gators to chastise the creators of 24 for feeding US soldiers too many tantalizing torture techniques. Seems almost a chicken-and-egg problem at times, this relationship between big death in Iraq (and Afghanistan and beyond) and little death on the tube. It’s quite a food chain too, bringing to mind that serpent devouring its own tail. Come to think of it, Ouroboros would make an excellent name for a death metal band. *

BIG DEATH AND LITTLE DEATH

Through March 4

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.

Traveling Jewish Theatre

470 Florida, SF

(415) 439-2456

www.crowdedfire.org

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Worth a shot

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Sam Small (Jud Williford) is an unemployed man in a fraying bathrobe with a limp Jimmy Dean sausage in his pocket, living off the bacon brought (literally snuck) home by his wife, Mary (Beth Wilmurt), a waitress. Sam’s situation, aggravated by his well-thumbed copy of Hamlet, has led him to contemplate suicide.

Albert (Marty Pistone) — right across the hall from Sam and Mary’s apartment 86 in number 69 — is sympathetic. He’s on the rebound from a dot-bomb himself (not to mention a dead wife) but is rebuilding his future by recycling the detritus of a lavish consumer society on eBay and shooting Web-ready video with a well-worn vixen named Margaret (Denise Balthrop Cassidy). Joblessness need be no impediment, Albert proclaims. "Nobody has to hire you, Sam. It’s the 21st century!"

And then the brainstorm: Albert’s entrepreneurial instincts latch on to Sam’s suicidal tendencies to conjure a Web-based raffle for the right to Sam’s martyrdom. Soon various people-cum-causes come calling, and Sam and Mary’s fortunes are on the rise. This is the story of American Suicide, presented by Z Plays and the Encore Theatre Company.

It is also the story of American can-do despair in its most contemporary form: breathing the Internet ether of a post-postindustrial economy and the giddy dreams of the self-unemployed. That the play feels so effortlessly precise makes one appreciate even more the achievement of writer-director Mark Jackson, whose brilliantly staged adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide turns the Soviet playwright’s banned 1929 tragifarce into a piercingly funny satire on the American way of death.

For every individual fantasy in this country rests on the bones of some victim or other. In this case, it’s Sam, the classic American little guy, whose iconic aspects Williford expertly underscores to comic but also telling effect with a Depression-era clip to his speech. Sam’s gotta die, or no dice. But the deal is so sweet even he gets caught up in it.

Our hapless hero even finds himself pursuing a lifelong dream of becoming an actor (lifelong — ay, there’s the rub), which pitches him into the middle of another squalid little tale of diminished lives and desperate schemes. This one involves a washed-up film director (Michael Patrick Gaffney) and a 22-year-old Norma Desmond named Chloe Banks (Jody Flader), who’s bent on a comeback via a torrid suicide note from a leading man–slash–lover. Both are played, like all the characters in American Suicide, as delightfully precise caricatures by a very fine cast. This includes Delia MacDougall, whose larger-than-life turn as major thespian Gigi Bolt, a representative of the embattled American theater living down the street from Sam’s apartment building in her car, effortlessly projects to the back rows and back several times over.

The histrionic theme is one of the more self-referential of Jackson’s many original contributions to Erdman’s story line, and he clearly has fun with it. So bright is the suicide scheme’s promise to all involved that not even the scandal-starved Chloe’s willful intrusion into the conjugal poverty of Sam and Mary’s water-stained studio apartment (a principle component of James Faerron’s slick and versatile set design) throws a wrench into the works. Indeed, the hard-bitten note in Mary’s natural sweetness at the outset of the play drops away completely by the time worldly fortune and a life of leisure appear on the horizon. Wilmurt’s excellent and endearing play on the supportive wifey adopts something of the wide-eyed, guileless, endlessly grateful manner of a game show contestant.

Liam Vincent rounds out the terrific cast in the roles of two mysterious men who together push the play’s social critique a notch higher, or lower, into the realm of politics and an ever-encroaching state power.

The issue of martyrdom naturally calls forth from among the other eager suicide opportunists a certain bearded fellow (played with wonderfully dignified comic assurance by Vincent) in Middle Eastern garb. Jackson eschews cheap shots here, instead going for the jugular with some of the play’s funniest dialogue as Sam’s political ignorance (a classic American virtue never too far from an equally classic rapaciousness) before the jihadist prompts the latter to narrate a kind of preschool allegory of anti-imperialism — a story later used for cross-purposes by a shadowy government trench coat (Vincent again) who’d like to use Sam to do something about the dearth of Americans willing to die for ideas. *

AMERICAN SUICIDE

Through March 11

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $25–$30

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 437-6775

www.zspace.org

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