Robert Avila

Triggers

Andrew Lam
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Triggers

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER An average of 22 veterans a day committed suicide in the United States in 2010, according to a report last year by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. Chris Kyle, however, was not likely to be one of them. The former Navy SEAL and author of a best-selling memoir had returned from military deployment in Iraq with a bounding enthusiasm for succeeding in civilian life, not least by helping other veterans with war-related trauma. Last month, on a shooting range in North Texas, a fellow vet apparently suffering from PTSD shot and killed Kyle, by then renowned as the U.S. military’s all-time deadliest sniper.

Irony like this defies fiction. But then that’s something George F. Walker understands. When the acclaimed Canadian playwright levels his pen at his primary target — he cruelly exploitative class system we inhabit back here on the “civilized” and oblivious home front —the result is dark and powerful comedy. A case in point is Dead Metaphor, his new play about a well-intentioned former army sniper facing a dismal job market and family pressures back home who goes to work for a right-wing candidate of the Michele Bachmann stripe. The world premiere comes to the Bay Area courtesy of an admirable production by American Conservatory Theater under the astute direction of Irene Lewis. As very serious as it is very funny, Dead Metaphor rings like the report from a not-so-distant battlefield.

Five months back from military duty, and despite hearing nothing good about the government’s job placement services, Dean Trusk (a winningly cheerful, subtly shaded George Hampe) finally puts himself before the local job counselor (a dryly comical, increasingly disconcerted Anthony Fusco). After all, Dean has to consider his pregnant ex-wife (a smart, scrappy Rebekah Brockman) now that he’s defied expectations by coming back home alive and she’s accordingly re-marrying him. He also has an increasingly erratic and absent-minded father (a charmingly earthy, alarmingly volcanic Tom Bloom) coming unhinged by an as yet undiagnosed disease, and his brave but reeling mother (a heartbreakingly genuine Sharon Lockwood) who is faced with the prospect of having to soon place him in an expensive managed care facility.

The job counselor is unsettled by Dean’s ingenuous highlighting of his “high-level kills” on the battlefield as testament to his employable “efficiency” but, finally disarmed by the young man’s honorable sincerity, gets him a position as a coffee-fetching assistant to his politician-wife—a coldly calculating true believer of the now-mainstream Far Right (played with just the right mixture of acumen, conviction and parodic excess by an excellent René Augesen). The job exposes a rather blasé Dean to some campaign shenanigans his wife quickly deciphers as illicit, leading to a crisis for the couple as his moral compass swings first away from such dirty work and then back toward a desperate deal that might save his family from destitution.

Cast on a rotating set that moves an assortment of indoor and outdoor furnishing into and out of focus (against scenic designer Christopher Barreca’s semi-circular panorama of cloud-flecked sky), the story is a merry-go-round of insiders and outsiders, wheeling and dealing, war and peace, loyalty and opportunity, and truth and appearances. Act one in particular carries real force in the shrewd balance it strikes between razor-sharp comic dialogue and all-too-believable situations. This force attenuates somewhat in act two’s increasingly far-fetched details and strident humor. Nevertheless, the story remains anchored to a clear-sighted purpose, manifested in an unnerving and thought-provoking ending. Moreover, every scene along the way is engaging and often a sheer delight, propelled by fine acting, consistently hilarious and caustic dialogue, unexpected pangs of heartache, and a devilishly intriguing plot.

There seems to be a new raft of war-related dramas on stages lately (Word for Word’s You Know When the Men Are Gone being among the more recent, as ACT itself gets ready to bring in the internationally acclaimed Scottish production, Black Watch), but few use humor so powerfully to indict the hypocrisy and self-destruction of a society committed to permanent war. When tragedy repeats itself this long, suggests Dead Metaphor, it can only be played as farce.

DEAD METAPHOR

Wed/20-Sat/23, 8pm (also Sat/23, 2pm); Sun/24, 2 and 7pm, $20-$95

Geary Theater

415 Geary, SF

www.act-sf.org

 

Whereabouts of W. Kamau Bell: a Q&A

Sue Vaughan
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Whereabouts of W. Kamau Bell: a Q&A

Q Hey, whatever happened to W. Kamau Bell?
 
A Pretty sure the politically astute Bay Area comedian, writer, and director went on to fame in TV land as host of FX’s Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.*
 
*True, but he’s back this weekend for two late-night sets at Stage Werx.

The shows are benefit performances for the scrappy venue that served as an early home for many a Bell project, including The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour. By request of the performer, most tickets are just $15. But all proceeds from the shows go to Stage Werx, so no one will be turned away for excess of funds.

Sat/23, 10pm; Sun/24, 9:30pm, $15-$25
Stage Werx Theatre
446 Valencia, SF
www.kamau.eventbrite.com

Angels in Budapest

Andrew Lam
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Angels in Budapest

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER On two old VHS tapes in the collection of San Francisco’s Museum of Performance and Design you can watch the Eureka Theater’s 1991 world premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a response to the AIDS epidemic and the reactionary politics of the Reagan era. It’s a low-fi document, with poor sound quality, but it’s completely riveting. Something more than the play’s words and images, as striking as they are, cling to that worn magnetic tape: there’s the electric excitement of a work of art cracking open its historical moment.

A similar frisson passed through the main auditorium of the National Theatre of Budapest last week, where I joined a group of international guests and a local audience for Romanian-born American director Andrei Serban’s production of Angels in America, starring as Prior Walter the National’s celebrated yet politically embattled artistic director, Robert Alföldi, an award-winning international director in his own right and one of the country’s most famous actors.

The production was the capstone of an impressive weeklong festival featuring some of the best work in contemporary Hungarian independent and state-sponsored repertory theater. Presented by the Hungarian Critics Association, in international partnership with Philip Arnoult’s Center for International Theatre Development and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Hungarian Showcase (March 2–9) encompassed a revelatory range of styles and talents. It also highlighted a theater actively responding to a rising tide of reactionary politics — reminiscent (especially in its overt anti-Semitism, homophobia, and anti-Roma racism) of the ultra-nationalism of the 1930s — even as the arts in general and theater in particular reel under the economic strain of the conservative government’s neoliberal agenda and attempted curbs on free expression.

The National’s production of Angels is just one instance of theater’s critical role in public dialogue in Hungary today, but in many ways it was the most poignant instance encountered. That’s in large part owed to Alföldi’s powerhouse performance in the lead — a muscular, charismatic performance, extremely witty and wrenching by turns — and simultaneously to his history as artistic director over the last five years. Since Alföldi’s government appointment in 2008, something extraordinary has been underway at the country’s premier stage. Previously, Budapest’s National Theatre had been better known for its kitschy postmodern edifice (opened in 2002 and made to resemble a rather gaudy ship aimed vaguely at the nearby Danube) than for the unexceptional productions on display inside. Under Alföldi’s brilliant and maverick leadership, the theater has come to be widely regarded as one of the best — if not the best — in the country, and attendance has grown dramatically, including among younger audiences.

Alföldi’s attempts to make the theater a place of inclusion and dialogue, meanwhile, as well as his lively and provocative interpretations of classic Hungarian nationalist texts like The Tragedy of Man and John the Valliant, have earned the disfavor of rightwing politicians — including members of the ultra nationalist Jobbik party, who were not above demonstrating noisily outside the theater to demand his ouster, and slandering Alföldi on the floor of the Parliament. Alföldi, popular and unprecedentedly successful in the post, has managed to stay on for his five-year term, but the government denied his application for a second term in favor of a well-known director with conservative political opinions.

In Serban’s considerably pared down version, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika together come in at just under four hours, separated by a short intermission. There are naturally some sacrifices entailed. The subplot involving Roy Cohn (played by the National’s brilliant János Kulka), for example, takes a big hit in terms of stage time. But whatever the faults of the production, the exuberant, ironical tone feels aptly knowing, as does the rotating stage set up like a cross between a dance floor and a merry-go-round.

In just one example of the production’s winking conversation with the audience, an announcement over the PA system at the outset of Part II reminds patrons in this former Soviet bloc country that the play is set in a far off land bearing little resemblance to anything close by — only to be followed by the familiar twang of an electric guitar as the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” creates a musical bridge to a speech by the Oldest Living Bolshevik. Like Prior’s heavenly counselors, the Bolshevik urges a halt to history. The significance of the theme is unlikely to be lost on an audience facing the atavistic return to authoritarian models of the past.

While this isn’t the first time a Hungarian theater has essayed Kushner’s play, enough has changed politically in Hungary in the last few years to make this production, in which Alföldi assumes the role of the play’s cross-dressing openly gay hero, an act of brazen defiance as well as solidarity with all “outsiders” in the right wing’s narrow compass of nationhood.

“The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come,” says Alföldi as Prior. “The great work begins.” In its own call for “more life,” the National’s production captures something of the original life of the play all over again — defining the nation and its theater as a place of empathy and inclusion, of harmony in difference.

Meanwhile, tickets for Angels in America, widely seen as Alföldi’s farewell bow, are completely sold out.

 

Sort of and last

Andrew Lam
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Sort of and last

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER In a deceptively low-key but major theatrical event, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last weekend presented the local debuts of both the Wooster Group and the New York City Players, in their collaborative take on three of Eugene O’Neill’s seafaring “Glencairn plays.”

It’s striking and not a little frustrating that San Francisco has never before been a port of call for either of these two world-famous and globetrotting experimental theater companies. Moreover, because this was a first-time collaboration between the two influential groups, Early Plays (as the O’Neill program is titled) was not really representative of either one of them. Rather, it was an intriguing, at times euphoric, at times baffling exploration fusing actors from both companies with relatively bare-bones Wooster design elements — all under the signature directorial style of NYC Players’ playwright-director, Richard Maxwell. Even so, it was a stimulating evening in which the attentive, open curiosity of the audience was palpable.

The triplet of early O’Neill one-acts — all written between 1913 and 1916 and featuring polyglot crew members of the British tramp steamer Glencairn —included, in order of presentation, The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home. In these short and atmospheric plays, O’Neill explores the hard, often brutal lives of sailors and other working-class people swept along by the winds of trade. But in paying attention to their distinct cadences, relationships, and dreams, the playwright also points to the lyrical nature of their lonely yet social lives, as well as flickering moments of transcendent experience amid coarse routines and unruly bursts of energy.

In this sense, they are not all that different from (and nearly as contemporary as) Maxwell’s own plays (like House, Burger King, Boxing 2000, or People Without History), which often delve into the mundane musicality of ordinary, inconsequential lives sideswiped by half-understood forces, churned by bumptious pretentions and bumpy social interactions, bewildered by quiet epiphanies. Indeed, Maxwell’s work comes shaded by his own original songs in which the banal takes unexpected flight.

But whatever their resonances, their plays remain a fat century apart in theatrical worldviews. O’Neill, learning from Europe and especially Stindberg, was inventing an American theatrical vocabulary still not entirely free of a certain melodramatic tradition. Maxwell and the New York City Players, on the other hand, represent a distinct and sustained attack on the stifling affects of the theatrical artifice that has accrued since then. And the Wooster Group has maintained a visionary re-imagining of the stage, its strengths and capacities, for nearly four decades (a project whose power and scope was clearly visible even on video in the three-weekend series of Wooster Group work screened at YBCA in the lead-up to the Early Plays premiere).

And so, what audiences encountered last weekend was a purposively monotone rendering of O’Neill’s rather overwrought dialogue, laden with a variety of archaic-sounding dialects that the actors dutifully articulated as written but, for the most part, without further embellishment or affectation. The action, meanwhile, unfolded with a deliberately subdued, knowing amateurishness on a Wooster-like set (designed by Jim Clayburgh and Wooster leader Elizabeth LeCompte) whose exposed gray-planed design featured a floating stage floor, supported by thin vertical cables, on which a skeletal framework of piping, bulging light bulbs, ropes, and pulleys combined in vaguely nautical abstraction.

Not that theatricality per se was absent: three of Maxwell’s workmanlike yet stirring ditties, for example, stitch together the O’Neill plays with simple, poignant, uninflected harmonies and rhythms as the actors smoothly reconfigure the stage. During Bound East for Cardiff, moreover, the stage was plunged into semi-darkness, sculpted by the warm glow of a few lantern lamps and the looming, slowly dissipating clouds blasted at intervals from a smoke machine, as main characters Yank and Driscoll (played respectively by NYC Players’ Brian Mendes and Wooster veteran Ari Fliakos) conferred at the former’s deathbed in a recessed, beautifully haunted corner of the stage. And in The Long Voyage Home, NYC Players stalwart Jim Fletcher (a riveting presence who is perhaps the quintessence of Maxwell’s forthright aesthetic, deflating and commanding at once) donned a too-tight barman’s vest and a toupee that looked like an animal roosting rump-forward on his head; while beside him Wooster’s luminous Kate Valk burst into and out of tears with a kind of blank perfection.

But it was precisely the melding of the clumsy and the graceful — and the volatile tension that arose between the purposely anti-theatrical and the inescapable pull of the plays themselves — that marked the production’s dissonant, quasi-Brechtian approach. In eschewing the usual cohesion, the production gave itself over to an admittedly not entirely successful but fascinating pursuit of what is much more rare: a sense of raw immediacy and authenticity, and a poetic capacity for unexpected instants of reflection. It’s an approach that wrestled with itself as much as the material or the audience, but it led to a refreshing sense of possibility and inquiry, and in it too there were moments when the lyrical and transcendent were given new life.

Missing person

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Missing person

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER A filthy, forlorn world emerges in surreal half-light at the outset of Magic Theater’s premiere of Se Llama Cristina, the new play by celebrated San Francisco–based playwright Octavio Solis. But almost as quickly, its initially intriguing outlines begin to look artificial, becoming the bloated lines of caricature more than a poetical evocation of real life, as the sentiment at the heart of this sometimes forceful but finally thin and frustrating play steadily takes over.

It’s odd and somehow appropriate that the two wayward characters at the center of the story — an at first nameless Woman (a vital Sarah Nina Hayon) and Man (a sympathetic but inconsistent Sean San José) — so aimless and rootless in their own lives, find themselves confined to the same dingy drug- and trash-strewn apartment (nicely realized by set designer Andrew Boyce and lighting designer Burke Brown), with initially no conception of where they are, who they are, or how they are related — let alone the meaning of the baby crib in the corner with a piece of fried chicken in it.

In this shabby environment, time and memory and biography all collapse and rise again as if within the ether of sleep or a heavy nod. Checkered histories and nervous dispositions slowly present themselves in a compact but oversaturated 80 minutes of dialogue that, at its best, pivots bracingly between horror and hilarity, with a rough lyricism that is a trademark of Solis’s border-town noir aesthetic. Soon a jilted villain named Abel (a very able Rod Gnapp) appears, incarnating the menace in the air. Also in the room is the possibility that the Man and Woman are about to be parents — or are already — which throws further fuel on the fire of their desperate coupling.

When, near the end, a young woman (Karina Gutiérrez) blows into this increasingly claustrophobic and wearying ménage, it’s like a breath of fresh air — and that is almost literally so, since she enters through the window. We could take her monologue as the voice of their daughter, the Cristina of the title, from some not too distant future. But whether or not we do, her impact is transformative in a way more or less synonymous with parenthood: presenting the couple with the possibility of a salvation at once of their own making and a gift from beyond — a kind of daughter ex machina.

If the details of the couple’s situation are better left subject to dream-logic than to a realistic accounting of probabilities and physical possibilities, it’s nevertheless true that the play suffers from an erratic need to fill in gaps. Among other things, that can lead to dialogue overburdened by exposition and back story (as in the Man’s graceless retelling of his self-exile from romantic attachments). Less would have been more. In director Loretta Greco’s staging, the awkward tension between the violence and despair of circumstance and an almost impatient rush toward love and hope is sometimes apparent in performances that can betray an uncertain balance between comedy, violence, and dread. In a scene where the Woman appears about to birth her daughter into the wicked, greedy mitts of Abel, the visceral, sexual, messy heat of the dialogue feels at odds with the somewhat guarded blocking of the actors. That said, there are moments in which a potent balance of elements reigns, as when Abel appears as the Telephone Man, threatening a total domination of the couple’s fate. It’s spooky, funny, surreal, and convincing at once.

In the end, however, the stakes never feel high or real, despite an almost too-insistent ladling on of gory detail, foul language, and teeth bearing. Like the impetuous verse scrawled on the back of Cristina’s sonogram image by her wannabe-writer father, Se Llama Cristina is ultimately a passionate poem to the deliverance that a child can offer her parents. But it’s scribbled too hastily and self-consciously in the hand of a playwright whose best instincts balk at the maudlin habit it encourages. *

SE LLAMA CRISTINA

Wed/13-Sat/16, 8pm (also Wed/13, 2:30pm); Sun/17, 2:30pm, $22-60

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, SF

www.magictheatre.org

 

Festival of festivals

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2
Festival of festivals

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The chill air had no snow in it. Instead, a particularly nasty outbreak of influenza whipped through the city, leaving a fine coating of mucus on the ground. Still, New York City looked beautiful as the various performing arts festivals that cluster around the annual meeting of APAP (the Association of Performing Arts Presenters) all revved up for a fat two weeks of shows this January.

These festivals, pitched to out-of-town-presenters and general audiences alike, include Under the Radar (an international but New York– and American-heavy program at the Public Theater), PS122’s Coil festival (specializing in theater but including some contemporary dance and performance), American Realness (a concentrated dose of leading contemporary dance/performance on the Lower East Side), Other Forces (a program of new independent theater presented by Incubator Arts Project, itself originally a program of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater), and the brand new Prototype festival (whose niche is new, chamber-sized opera-theater).

Under the Radar is the daddy of them all. Founded by longtime new-work maven Mark Russell (formerly of PS122) and now in its ninth year, Under the Radar has become more concentrated of late, partly in reaction to the other specialized festivals that have cropped up alongside it.

Festival director Russell described the trajectory in a recent phone conversation. “It’s a very interesting time, because by the ninth year you’re a fact on the landscape. People are beginning to take you for granted,” he said with a laugh. “Yes, there are a lot of other festivals now; it’s sort of become festival central in these two weeks in January, which is a little crazy, and I don’t recommend it. But it has created its own scene, in a way. I think that’s great. We started out trying to be big and trying to encircle a lot of the work that was going on downtown and around the world. Now, I’ve actually shrunk the festival to be more surgical and specific. Two years ago we were doing 21 things, and this year we’re doing 12, which feels more comfortable and better. We’re trying to go deeper in each of these performances and support them better, and let other people curate their way with the other festivals as well.”

UTR’s program this year included premieres by some leading American new-work companies, including Philadelphia-based Pig Iron (whose Chekhov Lizardbrain came to San Francisco as part of the 2011 FURY Factory Theater Festival). Pig Iron’s Zero Cost House is a simply but shrewdly staged, intriguingly unexpected collaboration with Japanese novelist-playwright Toshiki Okada (founder of theater company Chelfitsch). It unfolds an autobiographical dialogue between the younger and the present-day Okada over Thoreau’s Walden across a shifting set of actors and related characters (including a downbeat and down-at-the-heel Thoreau). Its po-faced humor belies an ultimately serious exploration of enduring ideas about our relation to society, political commitment, and art’s function amid the insanity of a status quo represented by the overwhelming indifference to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This was a stimulating call to thought and imagination as nothing less than action toward survival.

Questions about art’s social role and power, as well as the lines joining the mundane to the great political and narrative arcs of the age, ran through much more work besides. One of the fresher, quietly unsettling surprises in this respect was Australian company Back to Back’s brilliantly staged Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, a deceptively low-key exploration of power and marginality by a five-member ensemble that includes actors with varying mental and physical disabilities. On a largely bare stage repeatedly transformed by large transparent curtains into a gorgeous shadowbox landscape of mythological proportions, the riveting cast plays out its own inner turmoil along an extremely subtle line separating the ridiculous and the profound, meanwhile complicating our perception of what is in fact real.

In a highly anticipated offering, New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma premiered eight hours worth of its Soho Rep–produced opus Life and Times (Episodes 1-4) — more episodes are apparently forthcoming — which channels the verbatim childhood reminiscences (replete with uhs, ums, likes, whatevers, and oh-my-gods) of a middle-class American 30-something (company member Kristen Worrall) through an evolving set of choreographed, highly stylized, mostly-musical ensemble performances. Again, as directed by founders Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, the banal is elevated to the level of the epic, but in a precious and ironic way that, for all its precision and the seriousness of its core idea, leaves one feeling mostly empty, bored, and frayed by the text’s endless assault of half-articulate and overly familiar riffs on family, friends, awkwardness, first kisses, religion, and so on. With the dialogue divvied up among an entire ensemble in coordinated outfits, vocal harmonies, and group dance steps, we’re being made to hear again what we hear all the time, which invites certain revelations, but they seemed precious little compensation for the tedium of it all.

Further downtown at American Realness, where founder Ben Pryor’s astute gathering of contemporary dance-performance is now in its fourth year, there was much greater and subtler impact to be had from a slim hour spent in a largely unadorned room with performance maker Jeanine Durning. She also set forth a barrage of speech, a continuous stream of consciousness that touched on many subjects and her own self-consciousness, but in that simple score came a powerful emotional encounter and myriad questions about language, communication, reason, madness, art, and subversion that left the audience slightly stunned and reeling in their chairs.

American Realness had its much-hyped disappointments as well, in particular Trajal Harrell’s Antigone Sr., a self-conscious and dull three-hour riff on fashion and voguing that is part of his seven-part opus, Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, which sets out to explore a dialogue between the post-modern dance movement of 1960s Greenwich Village and the voguing scene taking place uptown in the same era. A provocative enough project, but this piece had little to recommend in terms of ideas or movement.

There were more modestly-scaled but far more engaging works to be found at American Realness this year, including Miguel Gutierrez’s collaboration with Mind Over Mirrors (musician Jaime Fennelly), Storing the Winter, a supple, sinewy and raucous solo dance-for-keeps; and Faye Driscoll’s dynamic, ecstatically unhinged duet, You’re Me, which comes to SF’s CounterPULSE in March. While BodyCartography Project’s Super Nature (co-presented with the Coil festival) was a mixed success, it nevertheless made me want to see them again when they bring Symptom (also to CounterPULSE) in February. Another AR offering not to be missed is Frankfurt-based American and former Forsythe dancer Anthony Rizzi’s hilarious, ridiculously reasonable, and super-shrewd An Attempt to Fail at Groundbreaking Theater with Pina Arcade Smith, which plays locally at Kunst-Stoff Arts Feb. 7–9. *

 

SF Sketchfest founders reminisce (and look ahead) on the eve of their 12th event

Sue Vaughan
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The first SF Sketchfest, in 2002, was a good excuse to find a stage and some quality time for its organizers’ own sketch comedy troupe, Totally False People, but it has since become an annual comedy conclave of the first order. SF Sketchfest founders David Owen, Cole Stratton, and Janet Varney talk about the growth and philosophy of their annual comedy extravaganza and the humble beginnings that gave it rise.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Is SF Sketchfest a full time job by now?

David Owen Yeah, I think it is. It definitely gets more intense a few months out, but we’re always working on it, we’re always percolating ideas, as well as trying to do events throughout the year. We had a presence at Outside Lands this past year. We’re always trying to do stuff. But this time of year especially, from fall on, is beyond full-time for us.

SFBG Has it had to change a lot structurally as it has grown, or are you still pretty much running it as you always have?

Janet Varney We earned some pretty simple lessons along the way, including Cole, Dave, and I not driving every single headliner to and from the airport, and sell tickets at the box office, and sell our concessions, which is what we were doing the first few years.

DO The growth has been gradual. Over 12 years it’s been a little bit like a snowball, each year we add a little bit more. There are more performers, more shows, there’s more logistics, more general stuff to deal with. Twelve years in, it’s grown to a place none of us ever imagined. We never imagined we’d even get to the second or third year and have one Kid in the Hall, let alone have all the Kids in the Hall and all these comedy legends, who are our heroes. You said humble beginnings, that’s absolutely right. It was a local festival, just for us to perform at, and 12 years later we’re still surprised that it’s so many shows, with so many people that we like.

SFBG Have you gained a new perspective on comedy that you didn’t have before?

DO When we started, we were just fresh out of college and we wanted to write our stuff and perform it. Cole is still performing, he can speak to that, but from my point of view, just seeing it as a producer now, I think our first couple of years we thought, “Oh, there might be an audience in the Bay Area for this kind of comedy.” And now it’s clear that there is. There’s a big appetite for it, because we keep adding shows and people keep coming.

We’ve learned that laughter is important, that people really want to get out of the house, and in the dead of winter, to come to a comedy club or a theater and experience something with a group of people where they’re all laughing. There’s nothing else like that. I have to say that I’ve really learned that getting out and laughing is important for people. It’s a fun thing that people like to do. Hopefully we’re providing something that’s unique and different from other festivals or other shows.

JV We’re so proud of San Francisco and the way San Francisco receives the comedy we bring to the table. Cole and I live in Los Angeles now, Dave is still in the city, but we all have this fierce love of San Francisco. It’s such a wonderful way for us to interact with the people in the city that we love. We feel like they back us up every year by being the most savvy, enthusiastic, great, smart audiences. That’s why performers come back here year after year as well, they love performing for San Francisco audiences. The festival couldn’t be what it is if we didn’t have those kind of people, as Dave said, showing up to laugh together.

Cole Stratton What made our festival a little different form the start was, you know, we started as performers, we came at it from that vantage point — it’s about the comedy; it’s about making it as artist and performer friendly as we can. I think why a lot of people embraced it early on was that it wasn’t about doing work that there’s a lot of pressure on. It was come have fun with each other, try some stuff — let’s have fun and really celebrate comedy.

The audiences in the Bay Area totally get that too. There’s been this tremendous energy at all our shows. Everyone feels a part of something that’s really fun, unique, and different. That’s been the spirit of the festival year after year.
 
SFBG Is the social or political significance of comedy something you guys think about?

JV Absolutely. I think the three of us respond to comedians who are brave in that way. Who are willing to hold a mirror up, to what happens to us in society and what happens to us as humans, but who are willing to get really personal. We love silly comedy, comedy that isn’t necessarily about anything; we love the absurd, we love lighthearted, sort of childlike comedy. But we also respond really strongly to people who are unafraid to say, hey, this is me, are you like this? This is ridiculous.

Obviously those comedians become beloved because they are humbling themselves and they’re also reminding everybody in the audience that it’s ok to be a human being.

DO It can be cathartic, to come away from a show where someone has talked about mortality or heartbreak or environmental problems in the world — and all the things that trouble us — it can be cathartic to come from a comedy show and you’ve laughed about it, you’ve thought about it, you’ve learned a little bit about it. But I want to add that in our programming there isn’t an agenda — like, ok, we need to have ten socially conscious comedians, and we need to have five absurd ones.

Our only agenda is: Does it make the three of us laugh? That’s how we decide what’s going to be in the festival. We don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what’s going to make the most number of people laugh? We just hope people like our taste. Our taste, as Janet said, it really runs the gamut from infantile, silly, ridiculous stuff, stupid stuff, all the way up to really smart, socially aware, critical comedy. We like all of that stuff. As long as it’s funny. That’s what matters.

SFBG Are people approaching you more than the other way around at this point?

JV It’s still both. We’re very lucky because we’ve had wonderful experiences with people we sort of chased down and invited in the beginning. We have a lot of returning guests year after year that we’re still excited to welcome back, and audiences are excited about. People like David Wain, who want to come here year after year and are always thinking ahead as to what kind of new, interesting show they can bring to the table so that they’re keeping it fresh but still returning to the festival multiple times.

We still have our wish list. We still have our people that we like to chase down, and cross our fingers and hope for the best. The comedy community, luckily it can be kind of close. We’re really lucky in that we have this amazing pool of references. But we still write letters with our fingers crossed, and hope for the best, as much as people reach out to us and ask to come back, or we have agents calling us whereas before we might not get our phone calls returned.

SFBG The podcast has really become a major new platform for comedy, as the lineup this year reflects. Are you searching out new outlets as well as new shows?

DO The three of us all spend a lot of time scouting and looking around and trying to keep our finger on the pulse, just seeing as much as we can, whether it’s in person or online. We try to stay clicked in to what’s going on out there. But we’re also looking for something that’s new. What can we do that is a totally new format? We love standup and sketch and improv and film stuff, but we also like doing things like game shows, or live talk shows.

This year we have a walking tour of the Asian Art Museum led by Canadians, or we have a show that mixes comedians and musicians, or Reggie Watts with a dance troupe. We try to see how we can do something at this festival that you’re really not going to see anywhere else. Not just something that’s on tour or that you’ve seen on TV. What can we debut at the festival, premiere as a brand new idea or a brand new concept or format? Those are things we think about and try to pursue.

SFBG Is the tour of the Asian Art Museum by Canadians an example of an original idea?

DO That one, no. That was a show that existed in New York. They did it at the Metropolitan. They’re going to be doing it in San Francisco for the first time, but that specific show was not our idea. We do come up with concepts that we think might be good for somebody, and we’ll pitch them, and if the artist is into it then it might come to fruition.

[For example,] we’re doing a show called Yacht Rock Heroes. Mustache Harbor is this amazing San Francisco band that does covers of ’70s and ’80s soft rock classics, Toto and Hall & Oates and those kinds of things. We thought it would be fun to have comedians come out and cover the song with the band as kind of a mash up. Mustache Harbor liked the idea, and we found comedians who were into it, so we kind of put it together from there.

SFBG How did you all first meet?

DO Cole and I were in the same floor in the dorms at SF State as freshmen. He was on one side and I was on the other. Everyone else on the floor was either a jock or a party animal…

JV [Laughing] That’s the first time I’ve heard someone say “party animal” in a serious way. I just love that that happened.

DO Yeah. There was a nerd on one side, and a nerd on the other. We were both into comedy and movies and music. And everyone else was into, like, swimming.

CS I lived in the dorms for like a year or whatever. I remember it was time to push on when — there was one communal restroom and I had to walk all the way down to it in the middle of the night, and there was a party going on, and I looked down. Someone had thrown a starfish into the hall. Like pulled it out of an aquarium and threw it into the hall. I was like, “Ok, someone just murdered a starfish on my floor. I think it’s time to go anywhere else.”

DO And then we became roommates, and we were working at the same video store and were roommates for, god, how many years? Three or four years. Five maybe. And then Janet — Janet, where did we first meet, at the Castro Theatre?

JV Yeah, I think we met at the Talking Heads show, Stop Making Sense. It was the anniversary screening. Actually, we love this story because Dave and I met and  — Cole, you were there too, yeah? I don’t know why I only remember Dave. Cole, we met before this interview, right? We all went to an anniversary screening of Stop Making Sense with David Byrne in attendance. He actually was sitting right in front of us. We love that everything came full circle, and that we ended up doing a screening of True Stories at the Castro Theatre with David Byrne.

DO Cole and I had a mutual friend — this didn’t happen right away but not long after we all met, this guy wanted to start a sketch comedy group. We were all theater and film majors, and we were putting on plays or making little films. And this guy wanted to start in comedy. We were all into it. There was about maybe six or seven of us who started meeting up, trying to write sketches. One by one people sort of fell away, and then there was four, the three of us and Gabriel Diani. And that’s how Totally False People started.

SFBG Where was your first gig? Where would you perform at the beginning?

JV We started doing shorts at a couple of the comedy clubs, and I think, was Rooster T. Feathers the first gig?
 
CS That was the very first show, Rooster T. Feathers in, Sunnyvale? Yeah. Our thinking was let’s make sure we’re at least 45 minutes outside the city limits if it doesn’t go well.
 
JV We went up on a stand-up, kind of a showcase night. We did a few different shows there. On one occasion someone called and left a voicemail after we performed saying that they didn’t enjoy our, quote, play-acting. We were trying to do sketch on this standup comedy stage and apparently people did not know what to do with us. We were going up there with like costumes and wigs…

DO That was our first review: “Did not enjoy the play-acting.”

CS And we thought, let’s start a festival!
 
SF Sketchfest: The San Francisco Comedy Festival
Jan 24-Feb 10, prices vary
Various venues, SF
www.sfsketchfest.com

All kinds of work and one play

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All kinds of work and one play

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER SF Sketchfest, running this year Jan. 24-Feb. 10, has changed the face of comedy in the Bay Area. It has done this by importing faces, many very funny faces, and mingling them with a complement of local ones. The precise composite changes yearly but, 12 years on, the juggernaut founded by David Owen, Cole Stratton, and Janet Varney has developed one of the largest comedy profiles in the country. My spellcheck may still not recognize improv as a word, but there’s no denying the influence this festival has had on the Bay Area’s exposure to the greater world of comedy.

Fans of drama may wish to know that this year’s comedy feast — which again unfolds across everything from standup to game shows to film-related events — also includes a little theatrical soufflé called SEX a.k.a. Wieners and Boobs, a 1998 work for the stage penned by State cofounders Joe Lo Truglio, Michael Showalter, and David Wain. The play, although hardly what you’d call regional fare, has since been published, and gleefully mounted by amateur companies here and there. But its creators — who famously went on to other things, including films such as Wet Hot American Summer (2001) — are only now revisiting the work themselves.

Lo Truglio explains that the genesis of the play was owed to Maria Striar, founder of New York’s Clubbed Thumb theater company, who in 1998 called up her old Brown University classmate Showalter with a last-minute invitation.

“They were doing a summer series, and one of the plays had dropped out,” recalls Lo Truglio by phone from Los Angeles. “So Maria called Michael Showalter and said, ‘Do you guys have anything you want to do?’ He said yes immediately. The catch was that we didn’t have anything ready. So we had to write the play in about three days.”

They started with the title, according to Lo Truglio, only because Striar needed to place an ad in the paper the next day. Coming out of theatrical left field, he acknowledges that a grabber was in order. “We just came up with that title to get people to come see it,” he explains. Taking no chances, the ad also promised a scene from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross — a claim the authors later make good on in one of the play’s brasher non-sequiturs.

The plot was borrowed from High Noon and set in a Teaneck, New Jersey menaced by a cranky desperado named Tad Theaterman. That narrative spine supports some wayward elephantine flesh, including a meta-theatrical opening scene involving a Q&A with the audience, and the aforementioned segue into Mamet (pronounced “mam-AY” in the play). Other moments were derived from previously untapped material, as Lo Truglio remembers.

“We had some bits that might have come from, probably not the State, but some stuff that David [Wain] and Showalter did at Stella, when they were doing live shows in Time Cafe on Lafayette in New York City. I also performed there and did some characters. I think a few characters and maybe a couple of the scenes in SEX were born out of that. But the majority was just this new-sheriff-in-town idea. We have a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, because we just thought would be so cool to perform. [The process] went along those lines: what kind of thing would we like to see in a play? What bit do we have that we haven’t been able to use anywhere else?”

San Francisco audiences will be the first to see what this late 20th-century opus looks like in the garish light of a new millennium, with its creators in the roles they originated 15 years ago.

“I have no idea how it’s going to play after so many years,” admits Lo Truglio. “It’s very vignettey, which is a new word I’m coining. Looking back now, I think we would have cut out a lot of it. But it’s only about 55 pages anyway.”

A glance at the script suggests there’s still gold in them there pages, and anyway it’s hard to imagine the play’s triumvirate disappointing an audience reared on the State and all the subsequent work it has spawned. For his part, Lo Truglio looks forward to returning to a festival he recalls fondly and sees as essential.

“It’s fantastic that Janet Varney and the rest of those guys have created an annual event where really the best people in comedy go to perform,” he enthuses. “I think it’s important. It’s very similar to the way I feel about Marc Maron’s podcast, which I think is a terrific, really important record of some amazingly talented comics and actors. At Sketchfest there are so many people who are interested in comedy, different types of comedy, that it creates a terrific environment for it to thrive.” 

SEX A.K.A. WIENERS AND BOOBS

Feb. 8, 8pm, $30

Marines Memorial Theatre

609 Sutter, SF

www.sfsketchfest.com

 

 

Stage might

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Stage might

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN THEATER In addition to Christmas lights, the seasonal landscape would not be the same without a thick, shiny coating of awards. We reflect on some highs (and a few lows) from the year in theater with a nod of appreciation here, a nod of respect there, or just a nod, short and involuntary, before the house lights jolt us awake again.

Best theme, or, the year of living nervously Every year it seems like an unplanned, unintentional theme emerges from the collective theatrical hive mind, and this year it was definitely our ever-uneasy relationship with technology. From Mugwumpin’s Future Motive Power, an electric ode to the oft-overlooked genius of inventor Nikola Tesla; to Josh Costello’s dynamic adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s tech-age YA novel Little Brother at Custom Made Theatre Co.; to a stunning revival of Philip Glass’ 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach — technology’s omnipresence seeped onto the stage.

An incomplete list of other plays that variously explored this theme in 2012: Machine at the Crucible, FWD: Life Gone Viral at the Marsh, The Hundred Flowers Project at Crowded Fire, Status Update at Center REP, She Was a Computer by Cara Rose DeFabio, Zombie Vixens From Hell by Virago Theatre Company, and a quintet of newly-translated August Strindberg chamber plays at Cutting Ball Theater. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Best ensemble Choreographer-performer Keith Hennessy’s experimental project Turbulence (a dance about the economy) was the most unusual and fascinating piece to appear this year, hands down, and it featured a deceptively chaotic eruption of performances by a highly skilled ensemble of artist-generators whose sheer present-mindedness made me toss out my zafu in frustration. (Robert Avila)

Best “The Peasants are Revolting!” Just like a case of herpes, you just can’t keep a good revolution down, and who better to tackle the over-the-top outrageousness and poke-to-the-establishment’s-eye of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade than the wild and wily Thrillpeddlers? Set in a dilapidated insane asylum spray-painted with “Occupy” slogans and bathroom humor, starring the Marquis de Sade (Jeff Garrett) and a fully engaged complement of rabble and aristocracy, and stuffed with show tunes and moments of questionable taste, Marat/Sade played out like it was written expressly for the notoriously ribald and exhibitionistic Thrillpeddlers, right down to the “copulation pantomime.” (Gluckstern)

Pithiest acronym for a musical: Actor-musician-playwright DavEnd’s rowdy and saucy and smart new musical F.A.G.G.O.T.S. the Musical, directed by D’Arcy Drollinger, had a very long title (Fabulously Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!) but all too short a run when it premiered this year at CounterPULSE — so it was great to learn it’s coming back in February 2013. (Avila)

Best armchair cultural revolution The experience of watching The Hundred Flowers Project at Crowded Fire was like being trapped in a distilled version of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and all its ostentatious unpredictability. An unstable yet mesmerizing territory of shifting alliances and heightened paranoia, implicating even the colluding silent majority of the audience, Christopher Chen’s epic sprawl created a landscape of Big Brother totalitarianism with the deceptively innocuous building blocks of social media technology and theatricality. A recurring theme in the piece is that of zeitgeist, and Chen admirably captured the nervous implications of our own. (Gluckstern)

Best couple to give George and Martha a run for their money Megan Trout and Joe Estlack as Beth and Jake in Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind at Boxcar Theatre. Trout and Estlack were powerhouses, terrifying and devastating by turns, but director Susannah Martin’s production was a winner all around, fitting nicely into Boxcar’s generally outstanding four-play Sam Shepard festival. (Avila)

Most glam-infused baker’s dozen Another from Boxcar: its summertime take on beloved rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch was certainly the most vibrant live production of it I’ve ever seen. Filling the stage with 12 Hedwigs and one very kickass Yitzhak (Anna Ishida), director Nick A. Olivero enhanced the rock club vibe with his unique line-up of “fractured” Hedwigs in skintight gear dripping with sweat and glitter, a guest DJ, and plenty of interaction with the rowdy Hed-heads who packed the house. (Gluckstern)

Best supporting cast Rami Margron in Precious Little at Shotgun. A fine three-member ensemble (also featuring Zehra Berkman and Nancy Carlin) was made to seem much larger thanks especially to Margron’s nimble work as, alternately, a streetwise graduate student, the nebbishy daughter of an aging research subject, a chirpy medical counselor, a relentlessly talkative little girl, and an entire crowd of visitors to the zoo. (Avila)

Most pleasurable peeks behind the mask Although the subject matter of each play were completely different, what The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (at Aurora Theatre) and Truffaldino Says No (at Shotgun Players) had in common was their unmasking of traditionally disguised figures whose role in life is to entertain: professional wrestlers and commedia dell’arte stock characters. Masks off, a pair of truly memorable characters emerged — fall guy in the ring Macedonio “Mace” Guerra (Tony Sancho), and Truffaldino (William Thomas Hodgson), set to follow in the pratfalling footsteps of his father, the famous Arlecchino (Stephen Buescher). While neither play was entirely without flaw, these winsome protagonists bore their respective identity crises with wit, bravery, and heart. (Gluckstern)

Most prescient debut Mojo Theatre. It was in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, many miles away from the storm’s path, in an obscure upstairs theater of the old Redstone Building on 16th Street, that Lost Love, a little jewel of an existentialist comedy from director-playwright Peter Papadopoulos, marked the San Francisco debut of impressive newcomers Mojo Theatre — and prefigured the day’s events with humane intelligence and uncanny meteorological instincts. (Avila)

Best example of “I might as well have slept in and just read the press release” The art of the interview is a delicate balance of research and serendipity, and just as important as knowing what questions to ask is knowing when to let the subject take the lead — which made interviewing the truly legendary playwright Eve Ensler on her newest piece, Emotional Creature (performed at Berkeley Rep), so frustrating. She never deviated from her well-worn script with any fresh insights, to the point where it didn’t seem to matter what my questions were. My only consolation is the fact that every other interview I’ve read with Ensler on the topic has unfolded almost word-for-word the same as my own — so at least I know I’m not alone. (Gluckstern)

Sexiest scene in which the actors don’t move (but the stage does) Alex Moggridge and Marilee Talkington at a slowly rotating pub table in Mark Jackson’s Salomania at Aurora. Eros and Thanatos seemed in a slow dance with each other in this striking flirtation between a jaded frontline soldier and a war widow recently liberated from stultifying domesticity. (Avila)

Most graceful bow Becoming Grace at the Jewish Theatre. Naomi Newman’s potent solo play, built from the words and writing of author Grace Paley, closed the 34th and final season of San Francisco’s esteemed Jewish Theatre (formerly Traveling Jewish Theatre). (Avila)

Best musical theater collaboration The Ratcatcher at the Imaginists. This Santa Rosa company is a must see for lovers of smart, intimate, community-based theater, and their latest, a re-telling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend, is a pitch-perfect dystopian fairytale featuring a memorable cast and an irresistible musical score by full-partners in the production, the Crux. It’s worth the drive, but here’s hoping they bring it down to SF sometime. (Avila)

Best death scene Michael Zavala in Phaedra’s Love at Bindlestiff Studio. Do It Live!’s worthy production of Sarah Kane’s reworking of the Hippolytus myth climaxes with Hippolytus (a hipster hedonist in Zavala’s capable rendering), castrated and disemboweled, but finally interested in life. (Avila) *

 

Short takes by Robert Avila:

Best impersonation of a pervy authority figure Sara Moore as Mr. Roper in Three’s Company at Finn’s Funhouse

Best argument for going color blind Red at Berkeley Rep

Best approximation of a teenager Ann Lawler as Theresa in 100 Saints You Should Know, at Theater Rhino

Worst approximation of teenagers Jesus in India, at the Magic Theatre

Best actual teenagers Director Nick A. Olivero’s excellent, age-appropriate cast in Dog Sees God at Boxcar

Most existentially satisfying use of a digital delay Sara Kraft’s TRUTH++ at the This Is What I Want festival at SOMArts

Best lounge act without a lounge Anne McGuire (and Anne McGuire) and Wobbly in Music Again at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Misery over mistletoe

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Misery over mistletoe

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Cabaret, The Threepenny Opera, Macbeth — Berkeley’s Shotgun Players has a record of bucking the feel-good trend in holiday shows. More often than not, this comes as a welcome reprieve from the exhausting regimen of glib seasonal cheer. This year marks a case in point, as director Mark Jackson and the company mount the Bay Area premiere of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s musical adaptation of 19th century German literary giant Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. This version was originally conceived and staged in 2000, in Denmark, by American avant-garde director Robert Wilson (part of another creative triumvirate behind October’s revival of Einstein on the Beach at Cal Performances).

Although written in 1836, Woyzeck (inspired by an 1821 murder trial) feels utterly contemporary at its core. It’s the story of a poor, half-addled, half-haunted soldier who kills his faithless lover. Woyzeck (played by an aptly harried-looking, volatile yet achingly sympathetic Alex Crowther) just barely supports his girlfriend Marie (Madeline H.D. Brown) and their infant child by working as a servant to the local Captain (Anthony Nemirovsky) and by submitting to medical experiments at the hands of an avid Doctor (Kevin Clarke). Marie, though she seems to love him, is clearly troubled by Woyzeck’s erratic behavior: symptoms of what today would be labeled PTSD. In Woyzeck’s absence she succumbs to the seduction of a predatory Drum Major (Joe Estlack). Driven into a rage of jealousy and despair, Woyzeck stabs her to death. (Andy Alabran as dim-witted neighbor Karl; Kenny Toll as Woyzeck’s half-sympathetic pal Andres; and a mellifluous Beth Wilmurt as neighbor and prostitute Margaret round out the cast.)

Woyzeck is technically an incomplete work: Büchner died of typhus (at a mere 23 years of age) before he could complete the play, as the brilliant young writer, medical student, and devoted pupil of the French Revolution was trying to stay one step ahead of arrest for his social revolutionary activities. Nevertheless, the work he left behind has a definite shape and integrity to it that have made it an irresistible part of the modern canon since its first production in 1913 — a prescient year for a prescient play, whose jagged edges, violent laughter and harrowing visions anticipate our own time and the dehumanizing machine that gets underway in earnest with the mechanized slaughter of 1914–18.

Woyzeck, the worried lover, is also the lowly servant-slave-guinea pig of hubristic, ridiculous, hypocritical authority. Although stressed and bemused by the Captain (played as a bloated man-child in Nemirovsky’s spirited interpretation) and the Doctor (a maniacally cheerful deviant in Clarke’s finely sculpted performance), Woyzeck nevertheless manages moments of penetrating insight into the corruption of the “moral” order around him. Marie’s pure-hearted vitality, meanwhile, underscores its own impossibility in an inhuman regime of naked exploitation — one only made possible, it seems, by an ideological smokescreen of “enlightened” values, progress, and moral uplift (concentrated, of course, in the wealthy).

The tale of this hapless soldier becomes a deeply resonant murder ballad in the hands of Waits and Brennan, a poignantly tragic love story that encompasses a wider wicked world in every beat and snaking melody. From the resounding opening theme, “Misery Is the River of the World,” the music proves broodingly brilliant in its unfussy and crystalline poetry; alternately lilting, inebriating, and delicately forlorn in its inexorable pulse. An impressive five-member band (billed as Bob Starving and the Whalers) discharges its task with aplomb. Comprised of multi-instrumentalists Cory Wright, Josh Pollock, (musical director) David Möschler, Ami Nashimoto, and Travis Kindred, the band perches on the second tier of Nina Ball’s grimly urban split-level set behind the louche partition of a beaded curtain. The cast, meanwhile, renders respectable, if rarely exceptional, vocal treatments throughout. But the music is compelling enough that respectable works quite well.

Jackson (a Shotgun company member, and the principal conspirator behind last season’s worthy premiere, God’s Plot) takes a sure and playful approach to the staging, which pays off dramatically in several scenes (especially those involving the excellent performances by Estlack and Clarke). But the staging (including the costuming by Christine Crook) proves gratuitously naturalistic at times, drawing our attention in distracting directions through certain overloaded signifiers of status, like a fast food bag or, less intrusively, a candy bar that substitutes for a cigar (hey, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). The almost perfunctory attempt to ground the action in an immediate American context also flitters across some of the line delivery, albeit only slightly, as when Marie (a generally solid and enchanting Brown) sings, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” of forgotten soldiers from forgotten wars. While it may make perfect sense at one level, the production’s self-conscious emphasis on the here and now can also muddy the waters of a work that otherwise peers deep into the abyss of a much wider sea. *

WOYZECK

Through Jan. 27

Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm, $23-35

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk

www.shotgunplayers.org

 

London diary

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London diary

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Tom Cruise, clad in military drag, descended last week by RAF helicopter into Trafalgar Square in what is best described as forced entertainment but was in fact a time-wasting scene from his upcoming blockbuster All You Need Is Kill. Not quite simultaneously but with considerably more stealth, I advanced into South London’s Battersea area, in a completely uncoordinated foray, to see the latest from famed Sheffield-based pomo theater artists Forced Entertainment.

Battersea Arts Centre, a bright red and white 1893 former town hall, is midway through a restoration process called “playgrounding” (putting artists and audiences at the center of the architectural redesign), and its many arches, rococo balustrades, and mosaic tile floors thrive amid an attractive combination of new paint and weathered surfaces. The place is an enviable model for an arts organization: a warm and bustling hub of community activity that is also a serious arts incubator and presenter, boasting 72 performance-tested spaces and a live-in residency program geared to the truly experimental and exceptional.

A nice place for Forced Entertainment to land, enthused artistic director Tim Etchells in a short interview before the evening’s program. He said FE was in fact lucky to find itself there, space in London being at a premium. This is apparently true for even so internationally successful and storied a group as Forced Entertainment.

And speaking of stories, audiences would be up to their ears and eyes in them that night — or rather the loose ends of stories, volleys, and nose-dives from a meta-narrative barrage that manifested itself across a series of readings, performances, and neon. The sign aglow in the Café Bar, where I spoke with Etchells, said simply, “end of story.” Another one said, “Shouting Your Demands from the Rooftop Should Be Considered a Last Resort.”

(All the variously colored neon phrases spread throughout the foyer and adjoining bar were by Etchells, whose many projects outside FE include visual art and writing. The evening kicked off with a book launch of his Vacuum Days, a large hospital-green compendium of daily headlines and announcements — the result of a 2011 internet-based project in which Etchells riffed on the news of the moment in dada-esque fashion. Flipping through the pages was an instant reminder of two things: it had been a hell of a year, and headlines are always loaded.)

The centerpiece of the evening was The Coming Storm. Forced Entertainment’s latest piece (in an unbroken line of group-devised work going back to the company’s founding in 1984) begins unassumingly, with the six performers in their street clothes lined up onstage facing the audience. One of them holds a microphone, and begins by slowly articulating the necessary ingredients of a “good story.” Soon the other performers grow visibly dubious and restless, until one snatches the microphone away and weighs in with a whopper of a tale, never completed, because also interrupted by another greedy storyteller.

And so on through aggressive, sly, and puerile mic-swipings and gradual, unexpected permutations — as those without the microphone do any manner of things to create their own counter-narratives or merely sabotage the one dominating at the moment. It’s a confluence of fractured accounts arranged like a 20-car pile-up, or a game of keep away, or a gentle dance of despair, with occasional live score, random costume changes, and a cluster of branches embraced (and debunked) as a soothing shelter of forest.

The Coming Storm ends up an exercise in failure and resilience at once, since even if no one completes a tale, the audience rushes to fill the void —our minds trained to shape every squiggle into a recognizable human form, however personal or outlandish the starting point. In that rowdy mutual tangle comes quiet reflection from the interstices of language and history.

It left one in just the right frame of mind to receive the last performance of the night, Sight Is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First, Etchells’ monologue for New York actor Jim Fletcher (lately of the title role in Elevator Repair Service’s acclaimed production, Gatz).

Sight proved no return to narrative but rather a concatenation of eccentric observations and pronouncements, undertaken by a nameless po-faced character standing center stage and meeting the audience’s gaze in a free-associative unburdening of “meaning,” desultory definitions that went along the lines of “Socks are gloves for the feet. Snow is cold. Water is the same thing as ice. In America things are bigger. America is a country. Korea is also a country.” Then, some time later, “Cats are afraid of dogs. Dogs like to chase cats. Some dogs like to bite the tire of a passing car.” Throughout this eccentric cataloguing and its naïve reverie, the audience again acts to complete the work wordlessly. Subtle suggestions come, vistas briefly open, demurring exceptions and musings flicker by, as the audience is tossed one wry bone after another, and a slow vague pathos accumulates.

GOLDIES 2012: PianoFight

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: PianoFight

GOLDIES A PianoFight show can be almost as striking for its audience as for what the company puts onstage, even if few audiences will upstage a machine that blows ducks out of people’s butts, per Duck Lake. PianoFight crowds are conspicuously not your typical theatergoers — they’re closer to the boisterous women in office attire I noticed at the now-defunct Off-Market Theater, PianoFight’s old haunt, who had smuggled in a bottle of Chardonnay and were picnicking in a back row like it was Baker Beach. Such eager insouciance is one sign of this young company’s burgeoning success.

“We’re aiming for those people,” says Rob Ready. “We’re aiming our stuff at Giants fans. That’s who we want in the door. Our generation didn’t grow up with theatergoing as a habit.”

“On the contrary,” says Ready’s colleague, Dan Williams. “You grew up with theater as a joke, as a byline for something boring and stuffy. There’s no reason it has to be that.”

Let it be known that PianoFight is doing its part to insure it isn’t. A PianoFight show takes many forms — sketch comedy, original drama, new play festivals, oyster-fuelled theater al fresco, a rotten vegetable barrage, or the fowl comedy-horror-ballet-musical mash-up of 2012’s aforementioned Duck Lake — but it always includes a rambunctious spirit of collusion with an audience who, very often, take some part in the proceedings.

Ready and Williams, two guys whose laid-back nature belies their seriousness and savvy as theatrical entrepreneurs, first met doing theater in their Santa Barbara high school. After Ready got his arts degree at NYU, he moved out to San Francisco specifically to start a theater company with Williams, who was then working a day job downtown. In Ready’s hands was his own script for a play based on NYU’s string of student suicides called Roommate Wanted. With the help of friends and family, they produced a successful two-weekend run in 2007.

From this humble beginning, PianoFight has mushroomed into a multi-faceted, multi-armed organization that includes sketch comedy troupe Mission Control and its female-driven counterpart, Monday Night ForePlays. It regularly sells out shows, boasts a semi-official “flexible” roster of 46 company members (with many more in unofficial orbit around the company), and is building its own bar-theater complex on the site of the old Original Joe’s on Taylor Street.

Along the way, it’s toured the West Coast (twice), scattered a set of new playlets across an oyster bed in Tomales Bay (two years in a row), opened productions simultaneously in SF and LA, taken four company retreats, and generally developed ambitious programs that balk at the usual small-cast, three-weekend production model, while adding fuel to the fire of local playwrights like Tim Bauer, William Bivins (Pulp Scripture, The Position), Jon Brooks, Megan Cohen, Bennett Fisher, Daniel Heath (FORKING!, A Merry FORKING! Christmas), and Lauren Yee, among others.

Ready and Williams credit Matthew Quinn with taking a chance on their inexperienced but fervent selves when the producing artistic director of Combined Art Form Entertainment, who had co-founded Off-Market Theater in 2004, handed them the keys in 2007. PianoFight eventually left Off-Market when the rent rose, but by then it was on a roll, having proved resourceful and inspired in its own venue. When tenants Point Break Live! moved onto a bigger venue, for instance, Ready and Williams filled the gap by inventing “the nation’s largest audience-judged playwriting competition,” the (now long-lived) ShortLived series.

“So glad Point Break Live! dropped out,” muses Williams, “because ShortLived turned out to be an amazing community builder. It really was one of the biggest drivers of our company initially, since we had to get a bunch of actors, a bunch of directors, and a bunch of writers.”

“The R&D wing of the theater business is [made up of] small, scrappy companies,” says Ready. “If it was just us I’d be, ‘All right, we’re just that more awesome,’ but it’s not. There are a lot of people saying theater can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people.”

As for the name PianoFight, apparently there’s no short answer to that question. I was invited to come back some time with a bottle of whiskey and ask again. “Have at least 24 hours,” cautions Williams. “You’ve got to set aside some time, some whiskey … and bring a credit card, too.”

GOLDIES 2012: Mica Sigourney

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
GOLDIES 2012: Mica Sigourney

GOLDIES Regular appearances are not Mica Sigourney’s thing. True, most Friday nights you’ll find alt-persona VivvyAnne ForeverMORE! at the Stud hosting Some Thing, the boisterously resourceful drag cavalcade (formerly Tiara Sensation) started two years ago with drag mother Glamamore and dj down-E. Even there, though, you couldn’t call VivvyAnne’s appearance regular: one night it’s ersatz Dior, another it’s lipstick, hobo beard, and a jock strap.

Beyond that, you never know where or how you’ll see either VivvyAnne or Sigourney. This is an artist drawn not only to the spotlight (what drag queen isn’t?) but to the genuinely experimental and demanding, whose work runs the gamut from go-go to performance art to contemporary dance (the latter most notably as an all-out ensemble member of Laura Arrington’s Wag in 2011) and in the process bridges the nightlife and performance scenes with untiring ingenuity.

This crossover élan was on display at the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival with the unveiling of Martha Martha Martha, a drag piece co-created with Eli Magid (a.k.a. Elijah Minnelli) in which some maniacally looped dialogue from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gets refracted through a stage-full of renegade Liz Taylors. A year later, at the debut of Keith Hennessy and Julie Phelps’ “Too Much!” marathon of queer performance, VivvyAnne ForeverMORE! led an impressive roster of SF drag superstars into the proceedings (including Glamamore and Fauxnique, a.k.a. past Goldie winner Monique Jenkinson, another major influence).

That showcase brought the nightlife scene squarely into the realm of contemporary queer performance, and evolved into the sporadic Work MORE! series, based on crossover collaboration between highly distinct artists. Sigourney, who just produced its fourth installment in August, plans to tour it next year. Meanwhile, a 2012 CounterPULSE residency produced the winking hubris of MASTERWORK, marshaling a cast of po-mo drag queens under Sigourney’s control to question the egotism of the artist and the role of the audience. And in a highlight of 2012’s This Is What I Want festival, Sigourney re-purposed his performance fee to negotiate his sexual currency in real-time with his audience, while a chorus beside him voiced the testimonials of ex-lovers.

The brio and subtle play in these and other works keep Sigourney a vital presence on multiple stages, as well as an important catalyst for new work. But the more makeshift outings, without any stage at all, can be just as memorable: Sigourney in a crowded men’s room at SOMArts, for instance, seated at a table in a wife-beater beside a stack of his own poems, some pages from David Wojnarowicz, a fifth of bourbon, and a lot of shot glasses.

“It was the first time I’d brought my writing into a performance,” says Sigourney of the inebriated presentation in the john (mounted as part of SOMArts’ monthly new queer performance showcase, “The News”). “It was my writing and Wojnarowicz’s from two of his books, and the audience picked what I read.” Sigourney offered bourbon to anyone who wanted a shot with their request, and he committed himself to always drinking one with them. “I was trying to layer people on top of people. It was good for that,” recalls the artist, a little hazily. “Someone actually used the bathroom.”

Another sighting: a makeshift biergarten in Portland last September, during one of the nightly after-parties for that city’s Time-Based Art festival. Out of a small huddle by the fence rises VivvyAnne like a gibbous moon, flashlight held firmly to her face and balancing her leggy fishnets on a combination of high heels and patio furniture. After instructing the crowd in a few dance steps, she leads an impromptu off-program all her own, lip-syncing to a boom box that blasted Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.”

Surprisingly, the Long Island native, a longtime theater (and later, club) kid who moved to San Francisco in 2004 and birthed VivvyAnne ForeverMORE! in 2008, says drag was something he grew up admiring but never thought he could do. Maybe that’s why he can do so much with it.

“I’ll never be a ‘lady lady’ drag queen,” he says. “It just won’t happen for me. So I started out saying fuck the illusion, what illusion? I’d wear things where my chest was exposed or a see-through dress or just underwear. There’s no illusion here to ruin in the first place. Once we agree that it is an illusion [we’re after], then we can make it together.”

Next!

Andrew Lam
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0
Next!

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER/DANCE A bobcat sat in the grass beside the main building at Headlands Center for the Arts one quiet morning last week. He (I say he because he’s “bob”) took no notice of me but instead nonchalantly lifted a hind leg over his shoulder and took a short tongue-bath. I was told he’d been seen hanging around a lot over the last few days, closer than usual, clearly trying to pass himself off as an ordinary housecat. Or looking for field mice. Whatever he was up to, he seemed relaxed and in no hurry.

Inside the building — one of the repurposed military barracks comprising the Headlands’ bucolic campus — the mood felt very much the same. Melinda Ring assured me this was an illusion, at least as far as she was concerned. As a small group of fellow resident artists drank coffee and chatted in an opposite corner of the otherwise deserted dining hall, the New York–based and Los Angeles–bred experimental choreographer explained, in a calm and good-natured tone, the amount of work still before her in further developing and preparing two back-to-back sessions of her Mouse Auditions.

This intriguing and thought-provoking meta-dance — in which local performers try out for a work based on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis that will never actually be realized — makes its West Coast debut this weekend as part of Headlands’ annual Open House, featuring new works and works-in-progress from this season’s multidisciplinary array of artists-in-residence.

Ring’s Mouse Auditions had its premiere at the 2010 Whitney Biennial as a site-specific live performance built on artist (and Ring’s good friend) Martin Kersels’ 5 Songs sculpture. While she already had had the idea of a performance built out of an endless audition, the opportunity to choreograph around the five-piece sculpture inspired some specifics, including her title.

“It was my most immediate response to Martin Kersels’ sculpture,” she explains, “a rather cartoonish monstrous Playmobil thing. I thought, ‘I see this populated by disaffected mice.’ Then, I’m an experimental choreographer, so mice make sense in that they are often experimented on. Plus, the creature that [Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa] becomes is most directly translated as vermin, not beetle. So I thought that gives me a pass. The word is crossed-out in the title because I’m not certain that finally, in the never-to-be performed work, the performers will be cast as mice.”

Packed inside that set of associations are Mouse Auditions‘ questions and concerns about art and commerce, working bodies, and the pliable nature of social identities and relations. Ring’s project focuses her would-be (but also actual) performers on the moments just before and just after the novella’s opening line, as Gregor awakens “from unsettling dreams” to find himself transmogrified. The exploration undertaken in the room, among strangers, uses a script (posted on Ring’s website) that draws directly from her own longstanding reflections on the economic realities of art making — and specifically those confronting dancers as laboring bodies.

“The two things that I’ve been focusing on with Metamorphosis are this idea of Gregor as a worker, the stress of his being a worker, the relationship with his boss, the obligation he has to his family — somehow mixing that up with the relationship that I’m trying to make with these people who would supposedly be my workers. And the other thing is this confusion and chaos that he experiences; that his body isn’t recognizable to him. It connects very directly to the way I’m working in [my] other highly choreographed dances. That really interests me, that experience he’s having.”

The Headlands residency is part of Ring’s ongoing development of a piece whose potential she feels is still unfolding. Indeed, though it originated in a museum gallery, Ring sees Mouse Auditions as applicable to a wider set of spaces and social settings, since its themes and structure are rooted in a provocative examination of some basic material and social realities.

The Marin setting, with its distinct environment (and competing wildlife), will no doubt set up its own reverberations, not least because the participants (unlike in New York) will be almost entirely strangers to Ring. But wherever it lands next, there’s something in the piercing comedy, subtle negotiation and absurd, Sisyphean optimism of a potentially endless audition — in which every applicant is already a performer in a piece about a piece that will never be made — that sure sounds close to home. *

MOUSE AUDITIONS

Sun/4, noon-5pm, free

Headlands Center for the Arts

Building 961

944 Simmonds, Sausalito

headlands.org/event/mouse-auditions

Intimate company

Andrew Lam
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Intimate company

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER With the exception of an occasional Miss Julie, the plays of August Strindberg (and there are more than 60 of them) rarely find productions anymore. Yet the iconoclastic and prolific Swedish writer’s influence on modern drama — including such American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee — is considered a given. This year marks 100 years since Strindberg’s death, and San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater has gone all out in satisfying a yen for a centennial embrace of this monumental (and definitely temperamental) artist who helped define the terms and concerns of modernism.

Capping a year of readings and discussions of the work and the man, Cutting Ball last week began an audacious program of five late “chamber plays,” to run in repertory through November 18. The project includes five new translations by Yale professor (and former American Conservatory Theater dramaturg) Paul Walsh, and the simultaneous publication of all five in a single volume by Exit Press.

Last week, The Ghost Sonata (1908) began stalking the stage of the Exit on Taylor as the opening gambit in Cutting Ball’s Strindberg Cycle. Its original premiere took place on a stage not too unlike this one, as artistic director Rob Melrose explains in a program note, being written (along with the other plays in the Cycle: Storm, Burned House, The Pelican, and The Black Glove) especially for the opening of Strindberg’s new Intimate Theater in Stockholm. This makes the chamber plays an especially apt choice for Cutting Ball’s stage. A pioneer of the chamber play form, Strindberg meant to foster an immersive experience for his audience with these deeply strange, poetical, dreamlike little plays he modeled on chamber music. The emphasis was thus on coziness, small casts in small houses, without the need for elaborate mise-en-scène. Moreover, a level of invention would dominate in these plays in which form would follow theme, rather than the other way around.

The Ghost Sonata is perhaps the best-known example among the playwright’s chamber works. It concerns a heroic and ambitious young poet named Arkenholz (Carl Holvick-Thomas) who, after saving some people from a burning building, finds himself seduced into the good graces of a fancy upper-class household of an aristo Colonel (Robert Parsons) by the machinations of a mysterious wheelchair-bound old man, Director Hummel (the formidable James Carpenter).

Hummel’s real motives become clearer as the play progresses through three short acts (the entire play runs only about 80 minutes without intermission). But the unfolding of all is like a dream, wherein Arkenholz confers unwittingly with the ghost of a Milkmaid (Ponder Goddard) that Hummel can’t see; pines for the beautiful girl (Caitlyn Louchard) in the fancy apartment building, confined to a sweet-smelling Hyacinth Room; and eventually finds his way into the social circle of the girl’s family, stunned old richies who are variously mad, morose, and generally not what they seem.

There’s an almost hilarious amount of exposition packed into the plot and its several reversals and revelations. But the chamber plays are works of a new era, and for a new era, and The Ghost Sonata — not unlike the naturalistic drama Ghosts by Strindberg’s hated contemporary and countryman Henrik Ibsen — seeks to cast a coruscating light on an older generation and its world, to expose and ridicule its corruption, bemoan its stultifying influence on the young, and generally bleed it out like a pus-filled old sore. As darkly shadowed as The Ghost Sonata is, its formal invention is full of air and light to remake the stage and the age.

That doesn’t mean it’s triumphal, or terribly optimistic. The uncertainties, ambiguities, and pitfalls of patrimony, a deep theme for Strindberg, snake through the surreal story like fissures in a crumbling wall. The Ghost Sonata has a quiet anguish running throughout — even in its touch of sardonic humor, as exemplified by the haughty butler, Bengtsson (played a little too broadly by David Sinaiko) — and it rages under all the delicate and sinister weirdness of its setting and action.

This trembling, contorted energy becomes incarnate, and altogether palpable, in Carpenter’s finely hewn and sensitive performance as Hummel, who even as a central demonic force is ultimately pathetic and even pitiable when his own reversal of fortune finally lands.

Carpenter is the best thing about this uneven if worthwhile production. If the play’s historical influence is one thing, its life on the stage is another, at least here. It does look very striking in the meticulous and persuasive design work of Michael Locher (set), York Kennedy (lighting), and Anna Oliver (costumes). The production also features a pervasive, ethereal score and soundscape by longtime Cutting Ball artistic associate Cliff Caruthers. The stage may be small, for instance, but Locher expertly creates a sense of a marble-cool expanse in which the play’s public street and inner chambers are seamlessly, miraculously evoked. A set of mobile dark-wood closets form a central edifice, first the outside wall of the apartment and then its inner parlor, with graceful economy. Oliver’s fine period costuming adds luxuriously to the dreamy world of the play, as does the vaguely macabre makeup on several characters.

Melrose, moreover, who helms each of the plays in the cycle, has assembled a strong cast, several of whom must carry the play with little or no dialogue and only minute gestures. But while individual performances show flashes of depth and charm, his actors rarely connect forcefully or convincingly. The ensemble may cohere further as the production continues in repertory. But it was plain enough on opening night that this vital element of so intimate and intense a play as this hovers somewhere just out of reach. *

 

“Strindberg Cycle: The Chamber Plays in Rep”

Through Nov. 18, $10-50 (festival pass, $75)

Exit on Taylor

277 Taylor, SF

www.cuttingball.com

Dog eat dog

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Dog eat dog

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Audiences arriving at Marin Theatre Company for director Timothy Douglas’ current, beautifully staged revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2001 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Topdog/Underdog, take in a shabby, dilapidated low-rent studio apartment with its meager and seedy furnishings. But looming overhead the whole time are the red-white-and-blue bunting of some half-forgotten political rally, depending from the flies amid three long strips sheared from the stars and stripes, hung equidistantly across the stage. These thin flags have tightened their belts, and look a bit dingy too, almost sepia-toned, and floating above the impoverished scene below somehow bring to mind that flag behind Ella Watson, the African American cleaning woman in Gordon Parks’ iconic Depression-era photograph, American Gothic, Washington, D.C.

If there’s thus a certain election-year ring to Mikiko Uesugi’s careful scenic design — present before the action even starts — it’s a sonorous and dissonant one, echoing back across a political past with a strange and disorienting nostalgia, a contaminated euphoria. What could be more appropriate?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Xll3eZJ8Y

At a time when mainstream political reality seems feverishly bizarre, almost surreal, Parks’ drama endures as a shrewd poetical remix of American history, an elucidating fever dream in a realistic mode: two African American brothers respectively named Lincoln (Bowman Wright) and Booth (Biko Eisen-Martin) by a runaway father who apparently found it funny, share a precarious perch and a tainted patrimony in a poor part of a nameless city — where they act out an overlapping series of fated roles. These mix race, class, sex, family, and money as equal facets of a brutally antisocial system — a racket, in fact, high above (but qualitatively the same as) the Three-card Monte scheme at center of the story.

But in the brothers’ tragic and absurd destinies, half-grasped at best by the protagonists themselves, the play plumbs a deeper understanding too, a historical current churning and moving below everything — and in that understanding opens a sense of possibility.

The apartment is younger brother Booth’s roost, but Linc, as he’s called, is bringing home the bacon (or Chinese food) in exchange for crashing on the La-Z-Boy. Linc has been kicked out by now ex-wife Cookie (an offstage character symbolizing perhaps a kind of standard “fortune” for a married man without economic prospects, something akin to the ambiguous forecast Linc gets with his Chinese takeout: “Your luck will change”). Booth’s offstage love interest is named, with even more symbolic resonance, Grace. Early on, it’s clear she’s pretty much unattainable.

Booth wants knowledge from his brother, more than anything else. Linc was once famous on the streets as a master of the Three-card Monte hustle — which itself has nothing to do with luck — but has given up the cards in the wake of a guilt-ridden incident. Eager brother Booth (played by Eisen-Martin with a nicely coiled energy, dangerous and comically hapless at once) is dying to become a hustler himself, but his efforts to learn the ropes meet with resistance from his jaded, wary older brother (whom Wright imbues with a perfect combination of wistful compassion and alpha-male contempt).

For his part, Linc’s guilty conscience finds a kind of half-bitter contentment in his current job: impersonating his namesake at a carnival sideshow, where he daydreams as sitting duck in white-face Honest Abe drag, before a ready line of customer-assassins. Indeed, Linc’s first appearance onstage comes in the Lincoln get-up, an eerily comic site that already loads the naturalistic performances with dreamy intensity.

If Parks’ drama (which premiered off-Broadway in the summer of 2001) preceded everything from 9/11, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina, the financial crisis, worldwide protest movements against global capitalism and empire, and the advent of the country’s first African American president, MTC’s apt revival shows it more than keeps pace with the times as a gritty and gripping allegory of endemic, convoluted civil wars.

TOPDOG/UNDERDOG

Through Oct. 21, $36-$57

Marin Theatre Company

397 Miller, Mill Valley

www.marintheatre.org

 

Insider/Outsider art: Paul Festa’s ‘Tie It Into My Hand’ at ODC Fri/21-Sat/22

Sue Vaughan
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Insider/Outsider art: Paul Festa’s ‘Tie It Into My Hand’ at ODC Fri/21-Sat/22

In a way, his first film, the experimental documentary Apparition of the Eternal Church (2006), did for Paul Festa what years of classical musical training and fiction writing never yet had: it put him squarely before the eyes and ears of the world as a serious artist. Ironically, he’d never trained as a filmmaker. He was following a musical muse, to be sure, but down an unfamiliar path.

Asking how we listen — why we listen — to music, Apparition gathered an eclectic assortment of interview-subjects (friends, drag queens, his Juilliard mentor Albert Fuller, even his old college prof, renowned critic-scholar Harold Bloom), had them strap on headphones, and then describe their reactions to Olivier Messiaen’s Apparition de l’église éternelle, the composer’s unrelentingly intense 1932 piece for organ. It was a simple notion that produced complex, and completely absorbing, results.

That unscheduled journey through film has been to the benefit of audiences literally around the world, as Apparition not only received awards and enthusiastic reviews but also toured widely in the lead-up to the centenary of Messiaen’s birth in 2008. In April of that year, it screened at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral as part of a larger program that included Festa on violin, performing the West Coast premiere of Messiaen’s 1933 Fantasy for violin and piano (only published in 2007).

It also marked a vital new turn in Festa’s career, which continues this weekend with the world premiere of Tie It Into My Hand, his new experimental documentary and a fascinating exploration of the artistic life, as rollickingly entertaining as it is insightful and stirring. The premise is again cunningly straightforward: ask a wide range of artists (but no violinists) to give the filmmaker a violin lesson. (After many years of serious study at Juilliard and elsewhere, Festa had retired from playing music in the wake of a hand injury. In the film, he attempts passages from Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.)

Going from the insular world of Juilliard, with its disciplinary rigor and institutional certitudes, to the wide-open prairie of independent filmmaking, is not a typical trajectory for an artist. Festa’s work both expresses and investigates precisely those tensions — between professionalism and amateurism, mentorship and independence, success and failure, glamor and alienation, opinion and taste, beauty and pain — stirred up in his own unconventional path through life and art.
Among the film’s invariably interesting interlocutors are many local artists as well as prominent national figures, but the variety lies as much in the breadth of artistic disciplines represented: actors, drag queens, performance artists (including an uncompromisingly blunt but ever-precise Penny Arcade), poets, musicians (barring only violinists), writers (Daniel Handler, for instance, an old friend from middle and high school years in San Francisco), at least one historian, dancers, theater directors, and playwrights (ACT’s Carey Perloff and Theatre Rhinoceros’s John Fisher being examples in both categories), and painters (including the last recorded interview with the late William Theophilus Brown, for whom Festa had previously modeled and who, as part of the project, produced three color drawings of the violinist-filmmaker).

“It’s a combination of people with whom I’ve had a long acquaintance, some people I had just met at [the Yaddo] artist colony, or wherever else, and then people I was referred to. Apparition of the Eternal Church was really skewed more toward people in my circle. There were only two people in Apparition of the Eternal Church who I met for the first time at the interview.”

If Apparition of the Eternal Church asked questions about the perception of art, and specifically music, for different people, Tie It Into My Hand asks questions about the artistic impulse itself. But the conversations, culled from roughly 120 interviews, range widely, and Festa’s shrewd editing clusters the themes that arise in purposefully harmonic and dissonant clusters, while threading certain leitmotifs throughout. Tie It Into My Hand screens tonight and Sat/22 as part of a triptych of short films (the full program is discussed below), culminating Festa’s theater residency at ODC.

The filmmaker talked about his process, and his circuitous artistic career, while attending to some final color corrections at ODC a couple of days ago. Sitting in the control booth at the back of ODC’s theater, Festa admits he’s not gotten enough sleep of late, but speaks thoughtfully about the necessity of bridging strikingly different artistic terrains.

SFBG You were saying how this project transitioned from a theater piece to a film?

Paul Festa How it went from a theater piece into this film. It’s funny. Carey Perloff has this wonderful line in the film about how men have their nervous breakdowns ten years earlier than women. Well, I had mine right on schedule, six months from my 40th birthday. It had to do with the theater piece, and it had to do with the death of three of four really central mentors to me. Three people died in a four-year period. The first one was George Dusheck, who used to be a reporter here in San Francisco and he dated my mother. He became a really central father figure and mentor. He moved up to Mendocino and introduced me to this whole group of amazing artists and musicians up there. And he died in 2005.

And then Albert Fuller, who you see in this film, who was also the star of Apparition of the Eternal Church, who was the great mentor whose philosophy and whose teaching about music, ostensibly about music, is really what created me as a filmmaker. His imagination about music, his harpsichord music — it had nothing to do with opera or ballet, it wasn’t like he was in the theater, but he had his own theater going on up here. Exposing that to us, he was the origin, and he was the first interview of Apparition of the Eternal Church. And in a sense that whole film is an expression or a crystallization of his teaching. And he died in 2007.

And then this woman Juliette died in 2009. And about three weeks later I had a conversation [about the proposed theater piece at ODC] with a guy who had helped me put on the Grace Cathedral evening. And he kind of looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What are you talking about? First you did music, and you didn’t make a debut or cut a record. And then you were a writer and you didn’t finish the novel.”

He basically accused me of being a dilettante. He said, “Wow. You’re middle-aged. Do you know that? Are you aware that it’s difficult to get funders and audiences and everyone else to take you seriously?” He didn’t phrase it in quite such a judgmental way; that’s how I took it. He was more amazed that I had the nerve to do that. He’s very wealthy, and he said, “I would be concerned about my own security. Do you have no concern for your own security?”

Well, that’s how I had my nervous breakdown. I became morbidly concerned with my own security. “Holy shit. What have I been doing? Have I been asleep for the last 25 years?” And so at that point I stopped sleeping. There were a lot of practical things [concerning me]. One of the practical things was you can’t even apply to an artist residency or a lot of different things unless you have work that is less than four years old. And Apparition of the Eternal Church, my only film, was about to age-out of that system. So I’d lay awake just trying to think my way out of this disaster that I had somehow engineered for myself. You know, kind of the worst-case nervous-breakdown anxieties.

And I thought, “OK, I’ll make a film, and I’ll introduce the theater piece with this film, and I’ll sort of kill two birds with one stone or I’ll sort of rescue the theater piece and rescue my career with this movie. And it’ll be a silent film comedy, and I’ll accompany it live on the violin. So I’ll keep all the things in the air at once. Kind of like the Grace Cathedral thing, I’ll finally bring everything together. So that became this silent film called The Glitter Emergency, which is set to the second and third movement of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. So the idea was that that would be the prelude to the theater piece.

What wound up happening was that it ended up being the conclusion to a triptych of films called Three Short Films by Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. The first of which is this thing. The second of which is a ballet fantasy, which we’ll watch a text-based storyboard of, with me playing live, on [Fri/21]. And then there’s The Glitter Emergency. So it’s one kind of enormous short film and two 20-minute short films.

So that’s how it all came about. And every step of the way, ODC was right with me. When I told [former ODC Theater Director] Rob [Bailis] the theater piece had really evolved and would now be a series of short films, he was totally down. ODC has been a really incredible partner for the last three years.

SFBG Tie It Into My Hand does have elements of self-examination of course, which resonates with the context you describe, but part of why it is so very approachable and compelling is the way it invariably goes much further in what it explores. Did you have a sense of what you’d find?

PF It was like Apparition of the Eternal Church in that it was this big experiment. I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen when I walked into these lessons. I mean, I had an idea: I wanted to accomplish what Apparition of the Eternal Church had accomplished, which was to get people to forget that there was a camera on them. When the headphones went on, I realized that’s why you can watch Apparition of the Eternal Church and just watch talking heads for 35 of those minutes: because they’re doing something, and responding to something.

When you get the download from people, usually they become very cerebral and very careful and they speak in measured tones — and these people were kind of losing it, and that was fun to watch. So I wanted to give them something to do, and that’s what the violin lesson did — and it involved music without the headphone conceit. But also I learned, from everywhere I’d been to music school, that the best way to get someone talking is to have them teach. I heard so many great stories from my teachers.

So I hoped, and I think I was right, it would turn out to be a really productive pretext or device for an interview.

SFBG I would agree. In addition to longer conversations, there are just so many wonderful lines in the film; some very funny, others very perceptive, and often both.

PF What are some you remember?

SFBG For instance, one question was, “Is that as painful to play as it is to listen to?”

PF [Laughs] And the answer to that question is, actually, yes. Thank you, Mink Stole.

Tie It Into My Hand

Fri/21-Sat/22, 7pm, $15-$35

ODC Theater

3153 17th St, SF

www.odctheater.org

Life boat

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Life boat

THEATER “No one is stupid on a cruise.”

Now that’s a line that puts the dumb in wisdom, which is the point. For no one can be stupid where everyone is by definition stupid. And that, in turn, might become the basis for a transformation of some kind.

Not surprisingly, this refrain drops from the lips of a habitual cruise-line passenger (and, arguably, the goofiest, most awkward member in a set of goofy, awkward passengers) aboard the Crown of the Sea, the sleek tourist liner headed out into international waters and some secrecy-shrouded ritual in Port Out, Starboard Home, a new play by Sheila Callaghan (That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play) developed closely with commissioning company foolsFURY.

The culmination of a four-year collaboration between San Francisco’s foolsFURY and the New York playwright (whose We Are Not These Hands also premiered locally in a Crowded Fire production in 2006), Port Out is an ensemble-driven work of physical theater in a high-pitched comic-tragic vein, helmed by foolsFURY artistic director Ben Yalom. The production features some fairly elaborate choreographed sequences devised alternately by company and cast member Debórah Eliezer and SF choreographer Erika Chong Shuch (who, among other things, stages a balletic feeding frenzy at the all-you-can-eat buffet). The current run at Z Space marks the first half of a bicoastal world premiere (with the production opening at New York’s La MaMa in November). Cast and crew hail from both coasts too.

It’s an impressive achievement on the surface. Unfortunately, the play that opened last week is practically all surface. Despite its pretense, and operative nautical metaphor, it never ventures into anything deep, but contentedly bobs around the shallows of the familiar — the commodification of spiritual values and experience — in a satirical key that is more flip than ferocious. If there are things to enjoy along the way (the best scene is a group therapy session that allows fuller scope to some dynamic ensemble acting), they never lead to the storm we sense brewing (but which, at least for the audience, never really breaks).

Milling around a smooth, sloping two-tier white fiberglass hull (a marvelous setting in Dan Stratton’s large and impressive minimalist design), we meet an assortment of types — the repressed but giddy loser (Calder Shilling), the unshackled divorcée (Eliezer), the recklessly over-excited plain woman (Angela Santillo), the obnoxiously sloppy rich white guy (Josiah Polhemus), his meticulous and much put-upon son (Benjamin Stuber), and the half-wild and half-bewildered underage teen with a fake ID (Jessica Unker).

Managing the passengers are a brashly exotic cruise director named Johnny O (Brian Livingston) — sporting a tattooed torso reminiscent of Queequeg — and the mysterious Maya (Amy Prosser), a waifish woman with an abnormally small infant in a shoulder sling whose slow, deliberate movements and pacific mien stand in stark contrast to the frenetic and self-conscious energy of her adult charges (who she’s gearing up for some ominous ritual in international waters, where apparently anything goes).

Callaghan endows these characters with choice details often announced by the opining cast in choral unison: “Gary likes to quote movie lines … it’s fucking annoying,” or “Mack believes people need to think of themselves as unique, and they’ll do anything to preserve this façade. This makes him hate everyone. Especially himself.”

Such lines, reveling in unnecessary insights and an arch specificity, too often ring twee and smug, their garish particulars only rarely of more value than the occasional chuckle. The dialogue between characters or in direct address to the audience tends to retain the same superficial tone.

Much of the dialogue was reportedly digested and recast by Callaghan from improvisations and research conducted by the company (including, at one point, aboard a real cruise ship), but there’s little that feels true to life. The portraiture here is a long way, for instance, from the photographic portrait-masquerades in Cindy Sherman’s work from the 1990s and 2000s, currently on view in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Sherman’s art projects a series of worn-out debutantes, former prom queens, backyard pool bunnies, celebratory single ladies, and so on — types you might find on a cruise, in fact, but conveyed with a force wholly missing here because in Sherman’s work we can identify the real in the type, and the type in the real. This dissonance is powerful — mixing horror and humor, compassion and revelation — and it remains in the open seas just beyond Port Out‘s horizon. *

PORT OUT, STARBOARD HOME

Wed/19-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm, $12-35

Z Space, 450 Florida, SF

www.foolsfury.org

Pi in the sky, fig leaf optional

Andrew Lam
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1
Pi in the sky, fig leaf optional

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Aficionados of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, now in its 21st year, know that sorting out the clowns, puppets, relationships, rock operas, and foreskin on display or under consideration across 12 days and roughly 40 shows can be a real crapshoot. But that’s the deal — and at least part of the appeal — with a curator-free, lottery-based program in which anybody with an act and the luck of the draw can set up shop for an hour on one of the handful of stages in operation at the Exit Theatre complex and participating venues.

Invariably ranging widely across (to borrow a title from this year’s lineup) "the good, the bad, and the stupid," the whole usually proves greater than the sum of the parts, private or otherwise. There’s just no event quite like the Fringe. And a really good show can make up for a lot of boredom and horrified silence.

Take, for instance, that title just borrowed above: the Pi Clowns’ latest show may not be perfect in every respect, but you can’t help respecting their perfect portrayal of our general fallibility. The Bay Area–based six-clown physical comedy troupe wowed in 2008 at their Fringe debut (After-Party), and they wow again in The Good, the Bad, and the Stupid, with expert chops, serious smarts, and an undiminished instinct for the ridiculous. Highlights of said lowlights include a horse race on broomstick stallions, a feast of acrobatic juggling, and another delicious slo-mo melee. (Meanwhile, on the significantly darker end of the clown spectrum, there’s Naked Empire Bouffon Company, raucous devotees of the grotesque, whose You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting at a Play was not caught in time for review but remains on the must-see list.)

Moving right down the alphabet from clowns, one will find several Christian-themed plays among this year’s offerings. Granted, most of these involve an ironic or satirical approach — like San Francisco–based David Caggiano’s deft and witty solo play, Jurassic Ark, which I caught in an earlier version elsewhere and which concerns an evangelical preacher Hollywood-bound with an idea for a major motion picture selling Creationism to the heathen evolution-swilling masses.

Then there’s Bible-Not: Stories for Grown Ups, which sounds like it sports a subversive edge to its advertised retellings of popular Bible stories, from Adam and Eve to Noah and the Flood. In fact, the play, written by retired journalist and clergyman Charley Lerrigo, is a lifeless resuscitation of ye old adages in a flatfooted comedic-dramatic vein, wherein, for instance, God appears to Noah as a beautiful woman in a silk gown — but still carries out the genocidal flood because she loves people. The last of the proselytizing play’s four dreary episodes (bridged by overtly thoughtful narration from a "showgirl" played by Karen Biscopink) is the second coming of Christ (Tristan Cunningham) to a San Francisco pastor named Bob (Charlie Shoemaker), who is naturally converted from disbelief to rapturous wonder in the face of the ingenuous, miracle-wielding stranger. Overall decently acted by a dutiful cast, the preachy play nevertheless reaches only the choir at best.

In the realm of puppetry, The Collector, by San Diego’s Animal Cracker Conspiracy, begins promisingly, with delicately designed maquette sets featuring a humble debt collector overseen by a tyrannical monkey-manager, simultaneous video projections and animations on a screen above, and a dreamy, clinking, wistful musical soundscape. But the wordless plot is sometimes challenging to decipher, the pace sluggish, and the action repetitive enough that, by the end, you realize it’s just a nifty installation that thought it was a play.

Meanwhile, Legacy of the Tiger Mother, by Las Vegas–based Angela Chan and Michael Manley, manages to pack a very clear, funny, and compellingly heartfelt storyline about intergenerational tensions between a Chinese American mother and daughter succinctly into a very agreeable hour — with music and witty lyrics for good measure. Chan’s semi-autobiographical musical may have formulaic elements, but they’re executed with winning skill and verve by a smart team fronted by the fine duo of Satomi Hofmann and Lynn Craig, accompanied by Chan on a piano that segues slyly between erratic keyboard exercises, controlled classical recitals, and expressive Broadway-style outbursts. (Meanwhile, on the darker and definitely weirder end of the cabaret spectrum, there’s SF’s Dan Carbone and Andrew Goldfarb in The Wounded Stag & Other Cloven-Footed Tales of Enchantment, whose archness is so arch as to be uncomfortably sincere.)

915 Cayuga’s SF Fringe Fest Extravaganza is a more promising title than show, but the radio-style variety piece, recorded as a podcast before its "live" Fringe audience, has a low-key charm despite often clunky or corny writing thanks to a fairly personable and adroit cast.

Among the more misleading titles is Aerial Allusions — at least if, like me, you picture some serious acrobatic work happening on and/or over the stage at some point. True, there’s a little able and lithesome wriggling around a ladder near the outset, but this meandering and semi-inept duet by a Canadian couple is lopsided in talent and altogether rambling. It took only a few seconds for one gentleman at the back to clear a path through some empty chairs and burst out of the theater. My date followed him a few minutes later. *

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sun/16, most shows $10 or less

Exit Theatreplex

156 Eddy, SF

www.sffringe.org

More than ink

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2
More than ink

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER In 2009, Paul S. Flores was at work on his new play, Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo, in consultation with Alex Sanchez, founder of Homies Unidos, when a call came from Denver that brought everything to a standstill.

Federal agents were then cracking down nationwide on Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13), the notorious Salvadoran gang that arose in 1980s Los Angeles among refugees of El Salvador’s US-fueled civil war and later spread in a loose network across North and Central America. Locally, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had launched Operation Devil Horns on the Mission District’s 20th Street contingent. In Denver, flummoxed MS members called Sanchez (a staunch, internationally-respected Salvadoran-born peace activist whose former MS affiliation made him a natural confidant to some) with news of the raids.

Flores, whose play concerns a Salvadoran family impacted by gang life in the Mission, had already interviewed over 60 active and non-active MS members in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and El Salvador. No easy feat, it required a strict adherence to gang protocol, respecting the conditions set by the subjects for their cooperation.

“I had to hide all my video,” remembers Flores. “I had to give it to the reporter [who was helping us] so he could hold it under First Amendment rights — because I didn’t want anybody coming to my house looking for evidence on any of these guys. It’s not like they were telling me who they killed or who they robbed, but these were active and non-active gang members. If you wanted to find out who was who, you could have looked at my videos.”

The crisis passed, and Flores went back to work. But the moment speaks to the international context and complexity of the subject he had set out to dramatize.

In fact, the project, which did not originate with the playwright, was always rooted in the concerns of the local Latino community (particularly its Salvadoran population) as well as larger socio-economic and political realities. The idea for a play about Mission gangs came from Ana Pérez — executive director of the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), an organization devoted to immigrant family rights and well-being in the Bay Area — soon after the 2008 Bologna family killings in San Francisco’s Excelsior District, which were linked to MS-13 members. Pérez brought the idea to Andrew Wood, executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, who agreed to help produce it (with Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts coming in as third co-producer). Together they recruited Flores to write it.

Flores isn’t Salvadoran, he’s of Cuban and Mexican extraction, but as a longtime community and youth violence prevention activist as well as prominent Latino artist (a writer-poet well known for, among other things, his work as co-founder of Youth Speaks), he was clearly the most knowledgeable and expert person around. A Mission denizen since 1995, his work in juvenile hall and counseling centers already connected him to the marginalized and at-risk youth of the neighborhood. And his artistic work specifically bridged youth culture and political theater. Placas — a title referring to barrio slang for tattoos, graffiti tags, or a nickname — would be his sixth full-length theatrical production. Still, Flores admits he had no idea what he was getting into.

“I never thought I’d get in this deep, to being in El Salvador in a prison talking to MS members and getting their permission to interview them. That was very cool,” he says respectfully. “Then realizing what was at stake. Having to meet in secret with these guys, having to pay them to interview them — people’s lives were at stake.”

But his research proved remarkably fruitful, despite initial suspicion from people who thought he was probably a cop pretending to be a playwright. “They didn’t tell me about their crimes,” he explains, describing heart-to-heart conversations with young men eager to dispel characterizations of themselves as monsters or thugs. “They were going to tell me about what makes them hurt and what makes them feel love. And that’s what I was looking for.”

 

ENTER RIC SALINAS, NATIVE SON

Placas opens this week at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre — a venue chosen partly for its location in neutral territory outside the Mission, where the rivalry between Sureños and Norteños (Southern and Northern gangs) makes staging the play impossible.

In a crucial coup for the production, its main character, Fausto, is played by Ric Salinas, the Salvadoran-born co-founder of Culture Clash, the now LA-based but Mission-bred Latino theater trio and political-satirical juggernaut. Fausto is a middle-aged former gang member back after deportation and years in prison who hopes to reunite with wife Claudia (Cristina Frias) and teenage son Edgar (Ricky Saenz), who is himself just becoming involved with gang life and resists his father’s belated call to familia. As a condition of his parole, Fausto is also getting his old gang tattoos removed (a literal and serious issue that the play subtly expands into a metaphor for identity and renewal).

Salinas says he signed onto the project enthusiastically after reading Flores’s heavily researched script.

“I remember telling him, ‘Wow, I don’t think anyone has ever done this.'”

In a play that draws sometimes verbatim on the real lives of the gang members and former gang members, and the concerns and dynamics of the larger Salvadoran community, Fausto comes particularly indebted to the experiences of Alex Sanchez and another unnamed source the playwright has by necessity kept secret.

Salinas himself, however, shares a particularly violent but formative identification with Fausto, whose opening monologue describes surviving a near fatal shooting — and seeing it as a call to devote himself to his son. In 1989, at the height of the crack epidemic, Salinas was nearly killed in a gang-related shooting, as he attempted to prevent a fight at Harrison and 25th Streets. It had an impact not only on him personally, but on his then-budding career as an artist.

“A 17-year-old kid shot me with a sawed-off shotgun. I survived it; it was a miracle. It gave me a second outlook on life, and it also gave Culture Clash a new outlook: whenever we did something onstage [from then on], it was about something. We weren’t going to just be doing comedy for comedy’s sake.”

Salinas, whose gentle influence on the project has been another important source of the script’s vitality and verisimilitude, is confident the play will not only be involving but will begin conversations long overdue.

“If it starts with the gang, then it will continue with, ‘Ok, who are these people? Who are Salvadorans? What’s a pupusa?'” The actor then recalls with a laugh the song his mother thought should also be represented, a staple of every Salvadoran home.

“It’s ‘La Bala’ by Los Hermanos Flores. So it’s going to be in the play now. This is me educating Paul, and my mom reminding me. It’s really going to be rich in some authentic stuff that’s never seen, you know? But the thing is, it’s going to open up dialogue.”

PLACAS

Through Sept. 16

Opens Thu/6, 8pm; runs Thu-Sat, 8pm and Sun, 3pm, $13-$35

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre

450 Post, SF

www.sfiaf.org

Howdy, strangers

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0
Howdy, strangers

arts@sfbg.com

FALL ARTS Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse were obsessed with Americana long before the two Bristol-based performance makers (known collectively as Action Hero) ever set their cowboy boots in the United States. In fact, they’d performed their site-specific first piece, a barroom exploration of the Western (called simply A Western) for years before lobbing it into the belly of the beast, where it appeared as part of Austin, Texas’ Fusebox Festival in 2010.

“We were shitting it,” remembers Paintin, in a British phrase meaning mighty fretful. But the crowd loved it; Paintin calls it their best audience ever. She and Stenhouse have worked together since 2005 on pieces that engage the audience as co-conspirators as well as subjects in their own right. A good example is their piece, Watch Me Fall, which had the audience cheering on a series of ridiculous, slightly risky stunts from either side of a long runway, a work that Paintin explains was inspired by the duo’s interest in motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.

>>VIEW OUR FULL FALL ART 2012 PREVIEW

A diminutive woman with bright blond bangs, Paintin spoke last week at a sidewalk table outside BrainWash Café, fresh from a rehearsal at CounterPULSE, where she and James were in the fifth day of leading a collaborative performance workshop with a selected group of Bay Area–based American artists (Laura Arrington, Andrea Hart, Xandra Ibarra, Richie Israel, Elizabeth McSurdy, Mica Sigourney, and Ernesto Sopprani).

Stenhouse was not able to join the conversation — rehearsal had run long and he was following its willy-nilly course to a local karaoke bar, where he and the rest of the group were planning to take turns singing Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.” A couple of days earlier, the group had gone tailgating at a pre-season NFL game in Oakland. Such are the trails, happy or otherwise, down which the adventurer in Americana must travel. (You can follow some of the research results thus far — in a process McSurdy calls “aesthetically polyamorous” — in the group’s blog posts at www.counterpulse.org.)

The workshop sets out to investigate American cultural mythologies using the concept of the stranger or outsider as starting point. Hosted by CounterPULSE with leadership from program director Julie Phelps, the program is part of a major cultural exchange project by CounterPULSE’s collaborator on Stranger in a Strange land, the arts-based University of Chichester in the South of England.

“All the work of the Department of Performing Arts is about making radical new work, and we have a reputation for working with exciting and challenging artists, hence our connection to Action Hero,” explained Ben Francombe, head of the department, by email. “The University of Chichester has instigated this overall project as a way to explore different interdisciplinary working methods,” he continues, “which involve the idea of exchange.” Francombe adds that the University is keen to continue having a presence in the Bay Area.

“It’s been really fun actually,” enthuses Paintin, clearly pleased with how experienced and open-minded her American counterparts have proven with collaboration. “We’re trying to just be about the process.”

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

Mon/27, 8 p.m., $10-$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.counterpulse.org

 

TAKE ANOTHER BOW, LAZARUS

The fall theater season includes several worthy returns (in addition to shiny new premieres) worth keeping in déjà view:

Chinglish The new comedy about East-West miscommunication from David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) has already been to Hong Kong but rebounds to the West Coast courtesy of Berkeley Rep. Aug. 24–Oct. 7; www.berkeleyrep.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival It’s a phoenix, really, rising each September like a sassy, gangling, 41–headed bird of play. Sept. 5–16; www.sffringe.org

Invasion! Crowded Fire delivers its own politically pointed comedy of miscommunication and cultural misconceptions in its West Coast premiere of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s 2011 Obie-winner. Sept. 6–29; crowdedfire.dreamhosters.com

Geezer and The Real Americans The Hoyle boys — veteran clown and physical actor Geoff Hoyle and bounding son Dan, a theater sensation in his own right — return to the Marsh for re-runs of their respective, wildly popular solo shows. The Real Americans: Sept. 7–29; Geezer: Oct. 6–Nov. 18; www.themarsh.org

The Normal Heart Larry Kramer’s 1985 play returns (in the new Broadway revival directed by George C. Wolfe) at a time when the history of the AIDS crisis has become endangered by a vague “normalizing” narrative of American progress, or what Sara Schulman aptly calls “the gentrification of the mind.” Here’s an opportunity to remember lots of things, not least those who died and fought, a great play, a vital movement, a continuing health emergency, and the importance of mass resistance. Sept. 13–Oct. 7, www.act-sf.org

Roughin’ It 2: Theater. Oysters. Campfire. Booze. Again. Fresh from sold-out success with Duck Lake, PianoFight heads back up to Point Reyes for a second season of woozy waddling, shucking and jiving along the shore of Tamales Bay, featuring everything in the subtitle including brand new short plays harvested from a bed of delicious local playwrights. Sept. 15 and 22; www.pianofight.com

Assassins Shotgun Players mount the Sondheim musical about presidential recalls made and attempted from John Wilkes Booth onward, an election-year favorite directed by Susannah Martin. Sept. 26–Oct. 28; www.shotgunplayers.org

Rhinoceros Paris-based Theatre de la Ville’s production of the Ionesco play — a modernist classic on individual resistance to tyrannical conformity — is a remounting of the company’s acclaimed 2004 production, making its first US tour. Sept. 27–28, www.calperformances.org

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass “Be Here Now” all over again in Lynne Kaufman’s new play — not so much a theatrical return as a serious flashback — starring the exceptional Warren David Keith as the titular giant of 1960s counterculture, a Harvard prof turned LSD advocate and spiritual teacher. Oct. 4–Nov. 24, www.themarsh.org  

Einstein on the Beach Composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson reinvented the opera in 1976 as an enthrallingly weird-ass piece of avant-garde spectacle and the world has not been the same since. This remounting —overseen by the original team of Glass, Wilson, and choreographer Lucinda Childs — marks the first performances of the five-hour formalist extravaganza in 20 years. The international tour takes its highly anticipated Bay Area bow courtesy of co-commissioner Cal Performances. Oct. 26–28, www.calperformances.org

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