Annie Hall The Opera?

Woody Allen is, at this late stage in his career, embarking upon a new role: opera director.

Alongside Hollywood director William Friedkin (who has directed at an opera before) Allen will direct one part of a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Il Trittico at Los Angeles Opera. Allen will make his operatic debut next year directing Gianni Schicchi, (the third part of Puccini's triptych) and Friedkin will take on the other two parts -- Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. The production will open on September 6, 2008.

Domingo, Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera (Broad General Director? The title makes him sound like a 400-pound military leader) says in the company press release that he's been pursuing Allen for four years.

Here's what Allen has to say on his new job: “I have no idea what I am doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.”

I wonder how the collaboration will fare? Allen is a great musician and used to be a great storyteller. In recent years, though, his films have left much to be desired, with stringy narratives, mawkish characters and an old geezer's sensibility. But given that he won't be making up the plot, dialogue or music for his operatic debut, we might be in luck. Also, Gianni Schicchi is very funny. Set in medieval Florence, the opera depicts a farcical family squabble, as the survivors of a wealthy gentleman persuade Gianni Schicchi to pose as the deceased and rewrite his will in their favor. It sounds like the plot of one of Allen's movies.

If Allen's gig at L.A. Opera goes well, I'd like to see him turn one of his great films into opera. Manhattan, Might Aphrodite and Annie Hall would lend themselves very well to operatic treatment, I think.

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre Under Stress (And The Bristol Old Vic)

It's proving to be a tough week for two unique theatre companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre is going through tough times. The San Francisco-based company is one of the most respected producers of work by black theatre artists in the nation whose prolific output ranges from new plays like Bee by Prince Gomovilas, to classic African-American works such as Fences by August Wilson. It's also the only African-American company with a home in downtown San Francisco - a neighborhood flush with theatres but hardly ethnically diverse from a performing arts standpoint.

San Francisco Art Academy University has bought the company's building on Sutter Street and wants the 26-year-old theatre ensemble out. The Academy of Art University informed the theatre on June 5 of its intention to revert the theatre space to the private use of its students and end its use as a cultural facility benefiting the community and The City. A petition is going around to try to protest the takeover, which I just signed.

It seems ironic that a fight like this should be going on between two arts organizations. The Academy of Art should be supporting a fellow member of the local arts community, not acting like an ugly corporation.

Further afield in the UK, the Bristol Old Vic is on the brink of closure. The Bristol Old Vic is the oldest working theatre in the country. An article in The Independent says that the company "admitted that it was under threat of closing for good as it launched a last-ditch appeal to secure £2m for its survival."

"Despite mixed fortunes over its 200-year history, the Old Vic has managed to thrive in the most adverse circumstances, including the bombing raids of the Second World War, and has a distinguished record for nurturing many of theatre's biggest stars.But the now-dilapidated venue is depending on the goodwill of individual benefactors - and has even launched a telephone hotline for public donations - to save it from permanent closure by Christmas."

I Want Terry Teachout's Job

Terry Teachout has the best job in the world as far as I can tell. The Wall Street Journal's theater critic covers theater on and off Broadway but also spends quite a bit of time on the road, traversing this massive country in pursuit of performing arts gems in communities large and small.

This week, Teachout went to Greensboro, North Carolina to review Triad Stage's revival of Tobacco Road, which, Terry writes in his blog, hasn't been performed anywhere in America for the past 25 years. Then he headed for to Roanoke Island to review The Lost Colony, Paul Green's 1937 outdoor drama about the colonists. Then off he went to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C. for a production of Hamlet. He's now going to Gatlinburg Tennessee to catch another outdoor drama, Unto These Hills. Then it's back to New York with him to write up his reviews and see more plays in his home town.

The reason I have so much admiration for Terry and what he's doing at The Journal is because he's one of the very few theater critics in this country who's willing to get out of the claustrophobic preening bubble that is New York and experience the full vista of this country's kaleidoscopic culture. I don't think there's a lot of glamor in his job: As someone who travels quite a bit myself, I imagine all the plane journeys and rental car rides and roadside diners and drab hotels must wear thin pretty quickly. But Terry delights in all the places he visits and offers us a glimpse of the creativity that's going on everywhere with humility, good humor, and a sharp critical eye.

As mass culture becomes more an more homogenized in people's eyes, it's important that we understand that this isn't really the case -- that individual communities are expressing themselves in very different ways all over the place. It's not all about Paris Hilton and YouTube and Shakespeare and Beethoven. Terry's work reflects the diversity that this country so easily forgets because it's mostly ignored outside of the local press.

The French writer Frederic Martel wrote a book earlier this year entitled De la Culture en Amerique. Martel traveled all over the country for several years documenting cultural policy, and what's going on in the arts in communities of all sizes. His conclusions surprised most people in the U.S and elsewhere. People abroad think they know American culture because the U.S. exports the same homogenous products everywhere from Coca-Cola to J. Lo. But Martel showed that at home, U.S. culture is much more diverse than the domestic culture of many other countries, including his native France.

Teachout and Martel are basically proving the same thesis. It's a powerful one. When more people in this country grasp their ideas, this country's culture will be in safer hands.

Steampunk Hero

Retro is a constant in our culture. We are always looking to the past to make sense of the present. Usually, though, trends run in 20 year cycles, with ideas from the late 80s currently (and traumatically in the case of the return of the puffball skirt) recycling themselves back into our daily lives today.

It feels like the 80s have been here forever so I feel particularly excited these days when someone becomes interested in resurrecting ideas from completely different eras. On stage, I appreciate local actor-writer Sean Owens' interest in Victorian mannerisms. Now I have a new hero in the visual art/design world in the shape of Jake Von Slatt.

Von Slatt makes 21st century devices look like objects dreamed up by H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. It sounds horribly kitsch -- like a Jeff Koons statuette in porcelain and gold leaf. But the artist-engineer's brass-encrusted, be-levered computer consoles, kerosene lamps and other gadgets are things of beauty. In an era of ugly plastic boxes (not even design-minded Apple can get away from the essential dullness of a modern computer console) Von Slatt merges modern technology with a Victorian aesthetic to create new objects that are familiar yet strange.

Von Slatt, according to a story in Wired, is becoming something of a hero in the Steampunk world, an environment which harks back to the Industrial Revolution for inspiration. Von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop churns out beautiful devices. His website is full of information and blueprints concerning how to create your own archania like telegraph sounders for RSS feeds and flat-panel screens with a Victorian twist.

I'd like to meet Von Slatt. It's not the artist's real name. I wonder if he looks and acts like a quintessential mad scientist out of an Victorian novel?

Marathon Man

Mike Daisey's monologues which link four remarkable figures in history with episodes from his own life were probably not conceived to be performed all in one go. But during his run at Berkeley Rep, Daisey is undertaking several "marathons" consisting of performances of the four works in one day. Usually, audiences get to experience only one "genius" per setting as each monologue runs at between 75 and 90 minutes in length.

The thing about attending marathons like this is that you end up looking for connections between all the works, whereas in this case each work stands better on its own. With this marathon, connections end up being more about looking out for stylistic repetitions than understanding something about the world that wouldn't otherwise be possible if you experienced each part in isolation.

Daisey is, of course, a powerful, hilarious, touching monologist. His face is an elastic ball of expressiveness. He has a great way of building each segment of his story to a climax. He makes us laugh. There's also something very gentle about him too. He never takes the obvious route with his stories or goes for the predictable laugh. His take on each of the four "geniuses" on the program - Tesla, Brecht, Barnum, and Hubbbard - made me wish I'd had him as a history teacher at high school.

Instead of making obvious links between the historical subject and the details of his own life, Daisey allows us to draw our own conclusions. This is subtle and sublime. And sometimes the non sequiturs are startling. At one point during his piece about Barnum (my personal favorite of the quartet) Daisey went from talking about a group of his wife's friends learning how to rotate the tassles on pasties on their breasts (depending on whether your arms are up above your head or down by your waist you can make the tassles rotate in different directions) to discussing Barnum's most famous employees.

But seeing all four pieces together took its toll on me in the end. The main problem is the repetitiveness of the mise-en-scene. Daisey always performs his work sitting behind a table, dressed in black, with nothing but a set of handwritten notes on yellow lined paper, a glass of water (which he rarely touches) and a black hand towel (which he frequently uses to mop his brow) before him. He's such an engaging storyteller, that his words, face, upper body movements and some subtle changes in lighting are enough to keep the viewer entranced over an hour and a half.

But after a three hours, the staging starts to become stale and formulaic. Daisey structures each monologue in exactly the same way: He begins with some words about the genius in question, and then moves into an anecdote about his own life. Then he returns to the genius, then once again to himself and on and on until the end.

Even the whacky non-sequiturs become predictable after you've been through a few. I found myself yearning for more information about his fascinating subjects and less about Daisey's own life. In the same way that the monologues are structured in a repetitive way, so, also, is the lighting design, which brightens and dims with almost every segment break.

And while the subtlety of the links between Daisey's life and those of his subjects is wonderfully freeing, I would have liked to have a little more connecting the four pieces together from a thematic standpoint, besides similarities in structure. When I heard the word "Medea" come up in each of the first two monologues (Brecht and Barnum) my mind started working overtime to think of how the Greek tragic heroine might fit into all four stories about these men. But it was a waste of time. Medea stopped appearing after Barnum. The connection between "high culture" and "low culture" seemed to be something to hang on to at the start of the show, but the character had vanished completely by monologue three. The idea of the fine line between genius and madman was another potentially interesting route of inquiry. I felt that Daisey could have done more with it though.

I think audiences are probably better off returning to the theatre four times to experience each monologue fresh rather than barreling through them all as I did yesterday. It's an exhausting endeavor, both for the performer (I'm sure) and for the audience. By the time we were done with L. Ron Hubbard at about 10 pm last night, I'd had my fill of geniuses for one day.

Sort Of Like Samba

This morning I took a Brazilian dance class. I had never attempted Brazilian dance before. I didn't even know what it was. A 30-something British woman names Susan Jane who's lived in Oakland for past 8 years described what would follow as being "sort of like samba." I don't know anything about samba, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless. The class was led by a Brazilian woman called Isaura.

The steps were pretty simple, though I don't think I had my "wiggle" right. There's an ease to the way that Isaura moves in her white linens. Her hips, shoulders and arms undulate like gentle waves. She's able to isolate parts of her body that I didn't even know existed. There's a deliberate rhythm to every stamp of her feet. My body, on the other hand, more or less moved in time with the music. I went mostly in the right directions and didn't tread on anyone else's feet. But I felt very stiff.

Still, there's something about stamping one's feet, gyrating one's hips and waving one's arms about that puts a smile on my face at 9am on a Friday morning. I am going to go again next week.

Theatre Trailers

In an effort to appeal to new audiences, the National Theatre in the U.K. has launched its own YouTube Channel with trailers of three of its productions. The theatre company also developed its own Facebook page a while ago.

This isn't really news of course, as many theatre companies have YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook pages. These technologies are presenting the non-profit arts world with a creative way of getting out the word about its creations.

Theatre trailers can be, if well-made, a great way of enticing audiences to see a production. Some people grumble about the fact that trailers are apt to give away the plot, which is something movie trailers do all the time. I would argue that the plot usually isn't the most engaging thing about theatre. Spoiler warnings don't generally detract from the magic of seeing just how a story is staged. The director's ideas for the mise-en-scene, the interpretations by the actors, the use of sound, lighting, costumes and props, and the temperature of the house are far more interesting than plot, in my opinion.

The National Theatre's trailers aren't extremely good. I think the Guardian's blogger, Henrietta Clancy, does a good job of summarizing them:

"I must admit that the Rafta, Rafta... one is not a particularly convincing advertisement for the production. Unfortunately, the replacement of words with some Bollywood-style backing sounds makes the clip took like a trailer for a silent movie crossed with a substandard Channel 5 drama. The trailer for A Matter of Life and Death shows a definite improvement, but if you stumbled across it you'd be forgiven for assuming it was promoting a film not a play. Philistines by Maxim Gorky is the most recent opening at the National and the latest addition to the trailer archive. This trailer is the best at capturing the essence of the stage. Having seen Philistines, I can confirm that the trailer definitely shines a light on Gorky's play. It successfully embraces the real grit of live performance, yet I feel sure that it could be pushed further. The trailer could benefit from some footage of the rehearsal process or a few shots of the audience being shown to their seats and buying programmes."

The National's foray onto YouTube brings back memories of serving on a committee a couple of years ago of Bay Area theatre professionals who were keen to develop systematic program for creating and airing trailers of shows by all local theatre companies. We bandied the idea around for a while. Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area even submitted a grant proposal to get funding for the endeavor. But the proposal was rejected and our plans stalled. This was a shame as a centralized repository for theatre trailers, perhaps connected to TBA or the TIX half-price ticket booth in particular, would have served the community well and created more buzz around shows.

It seems like some funding bodies are now catching on to the idea though. I've just been informed by Karen McKevitt, editor in chief of Theatre Bay Area Magazine, that TBA recently successfully obtained $10,000 from the NEA for audience development initiatives including the development of e-trailers for local productions on its website. Thanks to Karen for taking the time to read my original post and emailing me with an update. Here's what she writes:

"The fact that Theatre Bay Area’s grant proposal on trailers was rejected was last year’s news. We wrote another proposal which was approved, and rather than our plans being stalled, they are starting to move forward. Happily, in the funding world, one rejection doesn’t mean the proposal or the idea is dead—oftentimes there’s another funder who’s excited about the idea.
We’re very excited about this as obviously theatrical trailers are a great marketing tool and the technology is getting easier."

It'll be fascinating to see how this project develops.

Tiny Tony

Critical and financial success in the arts rarely go hand in hand. It's common knowledge. But Campbell Robertson's article in yesterday's New York Times' about the "sell by dates" of several Tony Award-winning productions suggests a certain amount of surprise at the idea that a show can be both critically successful and close early.

"Of the winners of the four top awards, two — “Journey’s End,” winner of the best play revival, and “The Coast of Utopia,” a record breaker for most awards won by a play, with seven — have already closed and have no current plans to tour," writes Robertson. "Another — “Company,” winner of best musical revival — has been in critical condition at the box office for weeks."

Just like the Oscars, the Tonys present a skewed version of reality. And while every producer wants to make money on a show, there are all kinds of reasons why turning down the lights and putting away the greasepaint makes more sense than keeping things going -- even if the trophy cabinet is bulging with accolades.

Theatre is an ephemeral art. Productions come and go. If the Tony-lavished Broadway closings listed in Robertson's article tell us anything, it's how little currency the Tonys have.

Two Old Queens Go At It

It seems that Gore Vidal is getting bored with his life of hobnobbing and eyeing up young men: The gay writer/pundit is planning on suing fellow gay writer/pundit Edmund White. Canada's National Post reported on June 6 that Vidal is unhappy about White's play, Terre Haute, which is loosely based on Vidal's interest in Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber who was executed in 2001. Vidal never met McVeigh but corresponded with the death row inmate and came out publicly in support of him in print.

White's play fictionalizes the relationship between McVeigh and Vidal (in the drama, they actually meet in person,) and loosely speculates about the writer's sexual attraction to the bomber. The characters' names have been changed by White (McVeigh becomes Harrison and Vidal, James.) The playwright wrote in a recent essay for Britain's Guardian newspaper, that Terre Haute "is about strictly imaginary visits that a Europeanised American, much like Gore Vidal, pays over a period of several days to a death-row prisoner, much like Timothy McVeigh."

The play debuted on British radio in 2005 and received its North American stage premiere in San Francisco a couple of months ago. I wrote an essay about New Conservatory Theatre Center's production for SF Weekly.

No one paid much attention to White's reasonably interesting though by no means fascinating play then, though the production was quite good. But now that the drama has hit the West End, Vidal is baying for the playwright's blood.

By all accounts, Vidal has not bothered to see the play. He really should as he'd quickly understand that there's nothing to wave his walking stick about. The drama portrays the "Vidal" character, James, in an entirely positive way. There's nothing slimy or sleazy about the character's relationship with the prisoner, Harrison. In the production I saw, "Vidal" actually comes off better than "McVeigh." He's almost a cliche of the liberal, American intellectual: sensitive, smart, strong-willed, impeccably turned out, and mildly turned on by a handsome young prisoner in tight-fitting prison fatigues.

I can't say I'm surprised by the news of Vidal's decision to take legal action against White. He's clearly just looking for attention -- a way to kill some of the long, painful, wheelchair-bound hours left of his esteemed life.

What mystifies me more is how a play like Terre Haute could find its way on to the West End in the first place. Though the perfect project for a gay-oriented theatre company like NCTC in San Francisco, the play doesn't go far beyond the surface situation of a gay writer and a prisoner -- it doesn't offer deep insights into the way the world works beyond the immediate circumstances. It's no Angels in America in other words.

Though Terre Haute is a slight play, it's by no means "disgusting" -- as Vidal reportedly attests. The old queen should be happy to have such a flattering portrait of himself up there under the lights on the London stage.

The Great Theatre Book Giveaway

Calling all performance-oriented organizations:

Limelight Books is looking to donate a large portion of its inventory. The Bay Area's specialist film and theatre bookstore is, according to a press release, "trimming down" its current stock of film and theatre-related books. The reason? "We are moving out of one of our storage facilities and will be cutting down on our non-script & playbook stock to make room."

Limelight is looking to partner with an organization that fits the following criteria (though the inclusion of private schools and "other related business(es)" makes me think that the organization may be willing to expand its requirements beyond just the non-profit world):

1) has transportation to the bookstore's office (in Oroville, CA) to pick up the books (a truck would be fine, or a large carload or two.)
2) is a bona-fide non-profit (or public or private school) and able to provide a legitimate receipt for the books it receives for tax purposes.
3) is involved in the promotion of theatre and film studies and entertainment, either as an educational institute or theatre company or other related business.

Limelight hopes that the donated books "will be used by [the recipient] organization to help in the education of more readers about the rich history of theatre and film studies."

I've emailed proprietor Joel Enos to try to find out the titles of some of the most intriguing books that are going to be available to interested parties. If and when I find out more, I'll post the information on this blog. The press release says that Limelight is looking to make its donation this month and asks prospective donees to call 415 864-2235 or email wendy@limelightbooks.com to set up an appointment.

Addendum to Fluffy Fe posting

Thanks to reader "D" for pointing out that Stairway to Heaven was not Jessica Hagedorn's first play. It would have been more accurate to say that it was the first play of a trilogy developed by the playwright in collaboration with Campo Santo.

I don't want to make excuses for my lack of attention to detail over the past week or so (another vigilant reader caught an error in a posting a few days ago.) But I've been in the throes of traveling and moving house and have not been as careful with my blog postings as I should be.

Thanks again for setting me straight, dear readers.

Viva Amateurs

John Van Rhein's essay about amateur musicians in the Chicago Tribune calls for a greater appreciation by the professional music world of amateur musicians:

These are people who play for the love of the music, he says, adding: ''How many 'professional' musicians truly delight in the music they are paid to produce?''

Blogger Andrew Taylor picks up on the article and says:

"Whatever the reason, the gap between the amateur and professional is one of the most troubling and damaging elements of our current cultural landscape. And fostering that gap is one of the dumbest moves for an industry struggling to reclaim relevance, connection, and meaning. Says von Rhein: 'Musicians who play for love rather than money can teach even jaded ears something vital about what it means to make and experience music. They are one reason classical music remains a living art.'"

Speaking as an amateur musician myself, I don't think amateurs are particularly interested in how the professional world perceives them. We carry on meeting and playing and that's all that matters.

What Van Rhein's essay (and Taylor's comments in response to it) fail to acknowledge is the enormous blur between professionalism and amateurism in some artistic fields.

You only have to look, for instance, at the rise of the citizen journalism movement or the plethora of "you too can do it!" TV talent shows calling for everyday individuals to show off their dancing, acting, and singing skills.

So while there is a degree of cultural snobbery with regards to amateurs, I think things are moving in another direction.

Basic Humanity Of The Arts World -- We Hope -- Transcends Race

The title of this blog post comes from an article by the San Francisco Chronicle's cultural commentator, Steven Winn which appeared in yesterday's paper. In the article, Winn discusses two recent Bay Area arts scene mishaps which may have (but probably did not) involve a level of racial discrimination.

Winn helpfully summarizes the two stories. I'll quote him directly:

1. YOSHI'S 10TH ANNIVERSARY CD OMITS BLACK ARTISTS:
Acting with what they later called unthinking haste (and what others ascribed to unthinking racism), Yoshi's released a 10th anniversary CD last month with no African American performers included. Some people noticed and began talking and e-mailing one another and discussing it on radio. Linked to another story, about the racial composition of the forthcoming Berkeley Downtown Jazz Festival bookings, the news made the front page of The Chronicle. Yoshi's issued an apology the next day and withdrew the CD, which they were selling only on their Web site, and vowed to issue a replacement.

2. SAN FRANCISCO OPERA FIRES BLACK OPERA SINGER
At San Francisco Opera, three days before the opening of "Don Giovanni," soprano Hope Briggs was fired and replaced by Elza van den Heever in the role of Donna Anna. Instead of colluding with management on some face-saving euphemistic excuse, Briggs agreed to the company announcement, that she "was not ultimately suited for the role in this production." Briggs, who is African American, said she did not think race was a factor in her firing, saying instead that she had been given no advance warning that her work was substandard. That, in turn, raised the question of whether the company may have been reluctant to criticize a black singer during rehearsals.

Winn ends his article with a plea to people to remember what purpose the arts serve: "The arts, we believe, we hope, are different, a realm where we really can connect -- beyond race and class, beyond identity. We shouldn't have to count and keep score and pay attention in that way. But music and the other arts don't change or obliterate who we are. They show us the glimmer, the possibilities, the aspiration. That's why we keep listening -- to the music and maybe, if we're lucky, to each other as well."

Of course, Winn is correct. But what he doesn't go into in his article is the obsession that many artists themselves have with race. The theatre, in particular, is packed with race-related plays each year and public talk-backs about race issues. Artists don't seem to be able to get beyond the most basic debates about skin color in this country, whether it's Anna Deavere Smith creating the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue as a forum for the discussion of these ideas, or Equity getting uptight about colorblind casting, or playwrights like Lydia Diamond writing didactic dramas like Voyeurs de Venus.

Until American artists start moving beyond dealing with race in a ham-fisted, remedial way, I think we can expect the petty angers resulting from such incidents as the two that happened in the Bay Area this week to flare up again and again.

In Cafe Slavia With Jitka Sloupova

At the end of my sojourn in Prague last week, I had the pleasure of taking tea with Jitka Sloupova at Cafe Slavia, the Czech equivalent of Sardi's in New York or Joe Allen's in London. Slavia is a cavernous 19th century cafe-bar situated across the street from the National Theatre on the banks of the River Vlatva. The acoustic is loud and clangy and when there's a pianist playing at the grand piano in the main cafe area, you have to crane your neck forward to hear what your companion's saying.

Jitka is one of the most formidable people on the Czech theatre scene. She's a prolific translator of contemporary British and American plays and the head of the Czech Republic's foremost literary agency. Her clients include Vaclav Havel. She's translated the plays of Tom Stoppard, Patrick Marber, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Sam Shepard. The day we met, her translation of Stoppard's Rock N Roll was playing at the National Theatre. One of the actors from the production walked past our table at one point. Jitka bobbed her blond head politely and smiled. She has rosy cheeks and a sweet smile ornamented by tiny, pearly teeth.

She told a funny story about attending the world premiere of Rock N Roll in London last year. Havel took her along. She found herself sitting next to the playwright during the show. "I don't think he wanted to sit next to me," she said. "He would have preferred to sit next to Vaclav or maybe Mick Jagger." Jitka is planning on attending Stoppard's 70th birthday party in London in July. She is taking Havel with her. "Stoppard attended Vaclav's birthday, so he ought to return the favor."

Jitka says that she doesn't spend much time in Cafe Slavia, though it seems she's been there quite a lot lately. Before I showed up for our 5pm rendezvous, she'd already had another meeting at the venue. And she's been having play development sessions with Havel in the cafe a lot too. Havel has just written his first play in 20 years and Jitka has been working with the playwright on refining his drama. During the editing process, the two of them met regularly at Cafe Slavia, where passersby would frequently interrupt the pair in order to ask for the former Czech President's autograph. Jitka says Havel's play has come a long way since they started honing it together. "The first draft was different to the one we have now. The ending in particular needed some work."

Fluffy Fe

Jessica Hagedorn's new play Fe In The Desert is nothing like the author's first play, Stairway to Heaven. It's also quite unlike most of the productions I've seen at Intersection for the Arts under the auspices of Campo Santo.

As a friend of mine put it over dinner before last night's show, "Campo Santo basically does the same play over and over again." This is, to an extent true. In the past few years, I think I've seen only one Campo Santo production -- Octavio Solis' The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy -- which hasn't take itself extremely seriously and didn't involve tortured souls howling at the moon. The souls in Pancho and Lucy were tortured alright, but they made us howl with laughter.

While Stairway to Heaven fit firmly into the usual category of Campo Santo play, Fe is much lighter and more goofy. Hagedorn has rediscovered the sense of humor of her novels in this hard-edged comedy about a couple of ex-cons who hold-up a wealthy couple in their well-appointed desert home.

The play is breezy and insubstantial with little in the way of subtext or character development. But it's a lot of fun to watch, thanks to Danny Scheie's creative use of the space (which includes the incorporation of an upstairs balcony as an airport restaurant and plane cockpit) and some mesmerizing comic performances. As Fe, Margo Hall creates a loony cartoon portrait of a lady of leisure. She's balsy and endearing as well as spoiled and sad. Michael Torres brings swagger to his role as movie mogul Ramon. Danny Wolohan has the most difficult job of all the cast members. He is the only straight man in the play, Fe's loving but spineless husband Bill, and as such, has to swim the doggy paddle in the middle of a sea of careening free-stylers. True to form, he's brilliantly understated throughout and provides the important straight foil to the other characters' funny-man antics.

The play occupies very different terrain both literally and figuratively to Stairway to Heaven. It's set in the hot desert rather than in San Francisco. And it offers a vision of life as an absurd journey with ups and downs, rather than a pit of despair from whence death is the only escape.

As I watched the play, I couldn't help being reminded of oddball films like The Big Lebowski and Dog Day Afternoon. I think Fe would make a better indie movie than a stage drama at the end of the day. I think the jumping time-frame, the cookie characters, the desert setting and the plot-driven denouement would lend themselves particularly well to celluloid treatment. Hagedorn should seriously think about turning her script into a screenplay if she hasn't already.

Still, I think the play makes for a sweet way to spend an evening at the theatre. If nothing else, it's worth seeing to get a feel for the sweeter side of Campo Santo.

The Winter Of Our Discontent

There's nothing quite like attending a production of Richard III in freezing fog to make you glad you don't live in the Dark Ages. The temperature plummeted throughout the opening night performance of California Shakespeare Theatre's new production of Shakespeare's history play directed by Mark Rucker on Saturday evening.

Cal Shakes' productions all take place in a beautiful outdoor amphitheatre in Orinda where the view, the wine, and the cameraderie usually more than make up for grey skies. But for the first time in my history of attending shows at the venue, I was frozen to the bone. By intermission, I was wearing two padded jackets, two blankets, a hat and gloves. And my wine was nicely chilled. But Reg Rogers' madcap performance as the malignant king unpredictably defied the ice.

Richard III is a nasty piece of work. He usually makes our blood run cold. But Rogers plays up the character's zany side, turning him into a bitter clown rather than a straightforward devil. Rogers treats his character's every monologue as a vent for private glee. He chuckles like a child. The entire right side of his body is palsied -- his right arm is a withered root. But he looks like he picked up his weird, hiccuping gait at Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks. It's more of a skip than a stride.

Many actors who play the role look for the comedy in the character. The last Richard I saw, a cross-dressed Katherine Hunter's at the Globe in London several years ago, was witty and grotesque. However, Rogers' Richard finds the business of bumping off his peers more fun than most. It's like something to do while playing hooky from school. It's not for nothing that Rogers' bears a startling resemblance to Judd Nelson's John Bender -- the prankster rebel in John Hughes' 1985 teen movie, The Breakfast Club.

The childishness of the actor's approach to the character is particularly striking -- a source for both laughter and disgust. He's able to manipulate those around him because he puts on an act and plays the fool. People are duped into thinking he's harmless. And Richard can't believe that they buy his shtick. But the decision to infantilize Richard, to turn him into an arrogant, japing schoolboy, doesn't always come off. The wooing scene with Anne over her dead husband's coffin is particularly problematic. The characters exchange one-liners like they're whacking a ball at a tennis match with the coffin as the net. We're in no doubt that this is nothing more than a jolly way to create more mischief for Richard. But Anne appears confused and we're left with no other option than to think she's mad. I just don't buy this romance.

Then again, the production seems to be all about the artificiality of human emotion. The stage is covered with naked light-bulbs and rows of tinny-looking stage lights. The "glorious summer" of the opening line is, after all, nothing more than an empty dream created by an arch manipulator and the souls who desperately want to believe that the light is warm and real.

Certainly, as I limped freezing to the parking lot when it was all over, I felt like I had had more than my fair share of the cold and dark for one evening. I wonder how the production will play on a warm and balmy night?

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Just got back from a wonderful week in Prague, working on a feature about architecture and a story about a missing Czech playwright. On my way to the Czech Republic, I stopped for a few days in New York to see friends, have some meetings and see some plays.

If I have a few days for theatre-going in New York, I usually divided it between uptown and downtown, which is to say, Broadway and off- / off-off Broadway. Perhaps it was because I was staying at my friend Chris' place in Hell's Kitchen, which is very close to Times Square, or because of the Tony and Drama Desk hype surrounding Broadway shows right now, or because the friends I was meeting all wanted to see big, splashy productions rather than things in basements in Williamsburg involving mime, but I ended up seeing three Broadway productions and nothing else.

Frost/Nixon was the best of the bunch. Especially Michael Sheen who imbued his slimy, cocky David Frost with more than a touch of the Amadeus that brought him last to the Great White Way. But the theatre was very big and the actors ended up shouting half the time.

Less interesting was The Year of Magical Thinking, which I saw at a packed matinee. The simple, bleached wood floor and monochrome silkscreen backdrop sets were beautiful, like steely gray landscapes of the mind. But the whole play was exceeedingly drab and lacking in vitality. I love Didion's book. It's full of wonderful insights into the way a grieving mind works, conveyed through such minutiae as the food she cooked for dinner on various evenings. But the colorful details were completely missing from the flat, sensible stage version. And Vanessa Redgrave wasn't in the slightest bit believable. The whole performance felt stiff and rote-learned. I'm disappointed to hear that HBO is planning on capturing the performance on screen. Frankly, I think the network should save itself the trouble. The book is all anyone needs to read.

Worst of all, I'm afraid to say, was Spring Awakening. I went because of all the fuss the production is getting as a result of Tony and Drama Desk interest. It was hard and expensive to get tickets. The theatre was packed. But I left feeling like I'd seen Rent for the Teletubby generation rather than the fresh, dangerous musical theatre work that I'd been promised by virtually all the critics. Most of the songs, bar a spiky, Cure-like ballad in the middle of the first half whose title I can't remember, were stock rock fare. The contrast between Frank Wedekind's austere 19th century German society and the contemporary sensibility conveyed by the lyrics and music felt forced. The on-stage sex was embarrassingly bad and I was left feeling like the young female protagonist wanted to go along with it rather than was raped, which had the effect of decreasing the power of the tragic denouement in the second half. The splattered neon lights were overdone. The actors were condemned to using a tiny square space in the middle of the stage throughout almost the entire show. And I don't understand the conceit of putting a few audience members on stage. There doesn't seem to be any context for it in the musical.

In short, I don't think I've experienced a musical this ridiculous since Lennon, which never even made it to Broadway after its flat-footed, pre-Broadway San Francisco run a couple of years ago. Wish I had gone downtown to see Betrothed, an experimental dance theatre piece that looked promising instead.

Another Unlikley Oboist Story

A couple of months ago, I blogged about oboist David Meyers' brush with the law -- the top-tier player was charged on three counts of operating an illegal gambling business and money laundering. Meyers could receive up to 20 years in prison.

A couple of days ago, another oboe player scandal broke the news headlines. Playbill Arts reports that a former oboist with the Buffalo Philharmonic has brought legal action against the orchestra for anti-gay discrimination. J. Bud Roach, formerly the BPO's second oboist, was dismissed in February 2004, and he claims that his firing was due to homophobia in the orchestra.

What's up with these people? Perhaps they're blowing down their horns so hard they're not getting enough blood to their brains.

In other news, on Monday I will be leaving for New York and The Czech Republic. My schedule will be very busy and I don't know how much Internet access I'll have, much mess whether I'll even get any time to write. So I'll probably be taking a break from the blogosphere until I return on June 1. Please check back in on that date.

Transformation Versus Revelation

Michael Billington's lovely portrait of Laurence Olivier in yesterday's Guardian in honor of the great thespian's 100th birthday, makes some graceful points about the art of acting. Billington's observation about Olivier as an actor who was capable of a largely forgotten art -- lively transformation -- resonated with me in particular. He writes:

"If I stress Olivier's physical range and shape-shifting quality, it is because that is something that today has largely gone out of fashion. We see acting more as a form of self-revelation than of impersonation: aside from Antony Sher, I can think of few actors now who share Olivier's delight in transformation. A mastery of external details was Olivier's map towards a character's inner being. As a result, there was all the difference in the world between the desolate pathos of his Macbeth in its climactic stages and the glittering vengefulness of his crazed Titus."

What Billington says about Olivier makes me think of watching Notes On A Scandal on DVD a few days ago. Judi Dench's performance made me believe that the art of transformation is alive and well in the best acting today. I was glued to my seat during the film. Dench's embodiment of the elderly schoolteacher Barbara Covett clogged my pores. There are so many adjectives I could apply to her character in the film -- closeted, scheming, spinsterly, lovable, lonely, educated, tough... I don't know how to pin her down and yet she seems so believable, so much like someone I might know.

When a string of long adjectives doesn't get you close to describing a character, then you know you're in the presence of a great actor.

Sort Of Like A Library Without The Free Part

I was struck by an article in yesterday's Minneapolis Star Tribune about a shortly to be released online service by the name of BookSwim. According to the article,

"BookSwim aims to be the "Netflix of books."...For $15 to $20 per month, the company will send your top five book choices. Return three books in a prepaid envelope, and your next three choices will be mailed to you."

It's an ingenious idea for the lazy suburban generations who don't want to go to the local library or bookstore, or don't have either of these institutions available to them within a 50 mile radius (which I think is, sadly, the case for many people living in the US today.)

I don't want to shoot the concept down before it's even got on its feet, but I do feel somewhat skeptical about the scheme. Here are some of my main concerns:

1) Books are not like wafer-thin DVDs. Even the average paperback weighs half a pound or more. This makes shipping an expensive proposition.

2) The company claims it has over 150,000 titles, but according to the article, it favors "best-selling paperbacks that generate repeat rentals and are cheap to ship. Don't expect to find many textbooks or obscure tomes." If users find themselves unable to use the service for anything more than Harry Potter and the latest Oprah recommendations, they won't see much point in using the service, as these books are the sorts of titles that can be picked up at any gas station. I stopped going to my local Blockbuster because nine times out of ten, I could never find what I wanted to watch on its shelves. I don't think my tastes in movies are particularly obscure, but sometimes I want something other than the latest Will Smith flick. Diversity is key.

3) The creators and publishers of popular titles might not take too kindly to the service if it is successful, as it will represent a major loss in book sales. I wouldn't want to incur the wrath of Stephen King's lawyers.

4) Paperbacks are easily lost and damaged. Come to think of it, so are hardbacks.

5) People often like to write in their books, keep notes in the margins etc. This service would fall apart if readers did this to the books they received. The defacement of library books is a terrible thing, but if you borrow a library book and it's got someone else's scrawlings in it, you don't mind so much because you haven't paid for the book, you've just borrowed it.

6) Which brings me on to my next point: The title of this blog post comes from the headline that accompanied the Minneapolis Star Tribune story on ArtsJournal, where I first read the story. BookSwim is essentially providing library services. But people are more accustomed to borrowing or buying books, not renting them. I wonder how the company will drive buy-in.

7) The company eschews the idea of offering electronic books, at least for now. To my mind, this is where new online publishing enterprises should be heading. NetFlix was founded to fill the gap between the end of DVDs and the beginning of downloadable movies. Already the company is looking to the future by offering 2000 titles for direct download to a PC. Electronic books and readers are more sophisticated than online video streaming technologies at this point. I read many books on my little Sony Clie PDA which is about four years old. It won't be long before the quality of the electronic reading experience will be superior to that of its paper counterpart. Let's also not forget that eBooks allow the reader to make notes and create cross-references on the pages. You can't mark up or in any other way personalize a BookSwim book.

8. BookSwim needs to tweak its website (which is currently in BETA version) or it might offend its customers and potential customers. When I did a search for Joan Acocella's Twenty Eight Artists And Two Saints, which isn't Maeve Binchy but equally isn't a treatise on guinea fowl written in 1861, the following message came up on BookSwim's the search page:

"Sorry. Whatever jiberish you just searched for did not produce any book results. Please try again using our Advanced Search."

I don't think calling readers' book desires "gibberish" is going to Swim.

The Mystery Of The British Pub In California

There are lots of British people in California, so it's no surprise that there are lots of British pubs here too. I use "British" in the loosest sense of the word, as I don't think many native Britishers would be fooled by what passes for a pub experience here.

Even when a drinking establishment calls itself a pub rather than a bar, is decorated with dusty antique stags heads and distressed wood, serves flat, warm beer and shows soccer games on the TV, there's always something missing. The trouble is, it's difficult to put my finger on what that something is.

The most British of all British pubs around the Bay Area is probably The Pelican Inn at Muir Beach. It's pretty much a dead ringer for country drinking spots back home, down to the talkative bar staff and the Ploughman's Lunch. Its lonely location, at the intersection of two tiny roads several miles away from the nearest small town, reminds me of one of my favorite pubs in Kent, where I grew up -- The Duck at Pett Bottom. (Ian Fleming wrote some of his James Bond novels there.) But even at The Pelican, things don't feel quite right.

I feel the same way about The Edinburgh Castle, another favorite place for a drink. Tonight I'll be meeting a few friends there for fish n' chips, beer and trivia night. The Edinburgh Castle goes as far as to serve its fish n' chips British style, in old newspaper pages. The place smells of stale beer and is a favorite haunt of British literati like Irvine Welsh, who always frequents the place when he's in town. And still, you know you're in California even in this little anglo-centric oasis.

Obviously one of the main differences between a pub in, say, London, and one in San Francisco is the absence of smoke in the latter. But once anti-smoking laws kick in in British pubs this Summer, even this contrast will disappear. I wonder whether the true identifier of a real UK pub is much more subtle than anything you can easily describe. It's probably something to do withe the atmosphere, the kinds of conversations at the bar, and the ratio of talking to drinking.

The irony is that every time I go to my homeland, the number of pubs seems to be dwindling faster than a keg of Bud at a frat house party. For the past 15 years or so, the big chains have gradually been taking over and "modernizing" all the lovely old establishments, replacing smoke-stained tin ceilings with plaster, steak and kidney pie with salade nicoise, and beers made by the local beermaker with ones produced by mega-breweries. British pubs are becoming more and more homogeneous -- and less welcoming. Soon, Californian attempts at recreating the British pub experience will start to look more authentic than the original thing. What a bizarre paradox.

How Soon Is Too Soon?

One of the most interesting things about Aaron Loeb's new play, First Person Shooter, is its ability to tell a story about very raw current events with such a panoramic point of view. Loeb wrote his play about a video game company that finds itself blamed for a teenager's gun rampage around a Midwestern high school in response to the Columbine shootings in 1999. But just a few weeks before the play opened at SF Playhouse, the American conscience was hit by another round of gunfire in the guise of the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Most films and plays created about news headlines tend to take a single perspective on these events. A cursory glance at the upcoming slew of movies based on the present war on Iraq underscores the point. No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, stars Harrison Ford as the general leading the 2004 charge into the western city controlled by insurgents. The Los Angeles Times says this film "resembles the straightforward tales of heroism Hollywood turned out during World War II." Even more unconventional fare, such as Stop Loss, starring Ryan Phillippe as an Iraq veteran who refuses to return to the country when ordered to do so, very much looks at events from a unified point of view.

The unified perspective allows artists to make artworks about events that are still very fresh in people's minds. Lacking the clarity and thought offered by distance, a strong, single-minded viewpoint helps people to make sense of events when emotions are running high. If an artist attempted to create a more diffuse view of an event, seeing it from multiple perspectives when it's still so new, the project would most likely be shelved completely, because the subject matter would be considered too raw and immediate and close to the bone for people to handle it being approached in such a multi-faceted way.

Loeb's play allows the audience to see a 360-degree view of the fallout after a school shooting. We see the story from the perspective of the video game company, the killer, the parents of the deceased, and even the lawyers and consultants hired to mediate between the different parties. The playwright is able to do this because of the time that elapsed between Columbine and the opening of his play. Now that another calamitous piece of news has by chance given this work extra significance, it appears strangely both timely and detached from current events. It's an odd phenomenon, one which I haven't deciphered completely. I am going to write my next essay for SF Weekly on the production, so maybe I'll be able to figure it out by then.

The Center For The Advancement Of Urban Theatre Audiences

John Wilkins of Last Planet Theatre Company in San Francisco, thinks -- and I agree -- that there isn't much creativity around engaging audiences in the theatre. The typical efforts that companies make here in the Bay Area include post-show talkbacks with playwrights, actors, and directors (more usual for midsize and larger companies) and (in the case of Fringe companies) raffles in the intermission, where the lucky winner wins a tube of Mentos in exchange for handing over their precious contact information for the company's database.

The raffle approach is deplorable, I think (though it may seem cute first time around.) And the talkbacks, often not much more productive.

One idea John has for inspiring greater involvement from audiences is by setting up what he terms "The Center for the Advancement of Urban Theatre Audiences" or "CATS" for short. CATS aims to increase the size of theater audiences as well as the amount of time those audiences spend talking about theatre. Some of the activities of the Theatre Salon that a few of us launched two weeks ago over dinner at Last Planet Theatre might fall under the auspices of CATS. Other programs might include:

1. The Chair Awards -- a series of awards for audience members who achieve such goals as attending 100 or more shows a year (the ticket stubs would act as proof of attendance), attending the most eclectic or edgy or mainstream range of shows, attending the most opening night receptions, walking out of the most shows etc.

2. The Drink With A Critic Night (the less said about this the better.)

3. Theatre Essay Competition for theatre bloggers and theatregoers who send out post-show postmortem emails to 100 of their friends. I don't personally know any people who fall into the second category, but John probably does, otherwise he wouldn't have included this type of award on his list.

John's treatise on the subject of CATS makes for an excellent read. It's very witty too. And parts of it are eminently doable.

Take These Broken Wings And Learn To Fly

The other day, I received an email from an SF Weekly reader, wondering why I "have it in for Carey Perloff." It's true that my essays about ACT's work have not been all that favorable in the past. But, as I pointed out to the reader in my response to him, my negativity has nothing to do with Ms. Perloff. In fact, I walk through the doors of The Geary Theater every time hoping and praying that what will happen to me in that auditorium over the next few hours will galvanize my brain, if not my heart. And if I really had it in for the artistic director of San Francisco's flagship theatre company, I wouldn't bother attending most if not all of ACT's productions, which I do, regardless of whether I'm reviewing them or not.

Such was the case last night, when I went to see ACT's production of Blackbird by Scottish playwright David Harrower -- a show I am not writing about for the Weekly but wanted to see nevertheless. The play is a solid, tautly spun drama about a woman in her 20s who confronts the much older man who deflowered her 15 years previously when she was only 12. I rather think that the world has witnessed too many plays about deviant sexual relationships with children in the last few years, from John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (sex with a minor in a church setting) to Nicky Silver's Beautiful Child (sex with a minor in a school setting.) And it's by no means a great play, as it works us over in a fairly predictable way and the tone of the piece is very unchangeable throughout. I'll never understand how it could have won the 2007 Olivier Best Play Award.

Still, I was engaged throughout and ACT did a fluid job of producing the west coast premiere of Harrower's work. Steven Culp nailed his British middle manager character Peter so precisely I thought I was watching an episode of The Office, as it might be played as a drama rather than a comedy. Jessi Campbell was less successful as Una. Her accent was a major distraction for one thing -- she sounded like she was from New Zealand at times. In fact, I don't know why ACT didn't just Americanize a couple of words in the script (e.g. pavement to sidewalk, biscuit to cookie etc) and let the actors speak in their natural voices. After all, there's nothing intrinsically English about this play. It's as much an American story as it is an English one. Given that it's being performed for an American audience, there seems little reason to preserve the Anglicisms. Also (and I think this might have been the fault of the playwright rather than the character) I didn't buy Una's motives for coming back to haunt the man who molested her. Still, Loretta Greco's production was tight and slick. And I think this might be the first time I've ever seen a homegrown ACT production with an elegant set. Robert Brill's trash-strewn office cafeteria design, with its harsh strip lighting, institutional furniture and frosted glass through which you could watch the ghosts of Peter's coworkers gliding past, tells a story of frustration all on its own.

I'm sorry I didn't get to review this play for the Weekly. The aforementioned reader would have seen that I don't have it in for Ms. Perloff or ACT if he'd read my words.

There are two famous songs about blackbirds. If I were to pick one of them as an expression of my feelings about ACT, I'd choose the Beatles' version over Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson's. Far from singing "bye bye blackbird" to that theatre and never going to see or review its work again, I'd much rather subscribe to Paul and John's lyrics about redemption, healing and survival:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Reviewing Or Enjoying A Work Of Art. Are The Two Mutually Imcompatible?

In his latest blog posting, Wall Street Journal theater critic and Commentary music critic Terry Teachout makes a brave observation (which he dubs an "embarrassing confession") about his relationship to culture these days:

"The sad truth is that I now spend more time reading and listening for professional reasons than I do for pleasure. As one of the characters in The Long Goodbye remarks to Philip Marlowe, "I make lots of dough. I got to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice in order to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice." That's not a bad description of my aesthetic life: I spend too much time having experiences in order to write about them and not enough having them purely for their own sake. This isn't to say that I never enjoy myself--I very much enjoyed the afternoon I spent reading Donald Westlake's new novel, for instance--but it strikes me that my priorities have gotten slightly out of whack."

Kudos to Mr. Teachout for noticing this about his life and also for wanting to do something about it (a point he goes on to make in the post) by engaging with various cultural experiences purely for pleasure rather than professional research.

The post got me thinking about my own relationship to the culture that informs my professional work. It's true that I experience many live performances, concerts, films, art exhibits and books for professional reasons. But in any given week, I'd say that at least a couple of experiences are personal. Take last week, for instance, when I went to see Morrissey in Santa Rosa, rehearsed for and performed in a concert with my vocal ensemble, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, watched To Catch A Thief on DVD, read a couple of Grimm's fairytales, and played the oboe. And let's not forget all the fabulous culinary experiences I had over the course of seven days, from the cleansing simplicity of the bowl of tea soup I ate at The Samovar Tea Lounge after a yoga class, to the pungent Pasta Puttanesca I ate at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Santa Rosa, pre-Morrissey.

I think the best way to restore the balance between pleasure and work when it comes to writing about arts and culture professionally, is by participating in the arts oneself (e.g. by playing a musical instrument regularly, making short films, being a slam poet or whatever.) Another method I employ to I make sure that I'm not only experiencing cultural events in a purely professional way is by frequently going to see plays, dance performances, readings and concerts etc. simply because they sound interesting, rather than because I'm writing about them.

While it's true that every show I see could be considered a tax write-off in the sense that all cultural experiences inform my writing about culture, I feel very different sitting in a theater when I don't have to write directly about the play before my eyes than if I do. So in the coming week or so, I'll be seeing Blackbird at ACT, Prince at the Orpheum Theatre (a fiendishly expensive ticket but worth it, I think, to experience one of pop music's most charismatic performers in such an intimate setting) Dancing Henry V at ODC, Notes on a Scandal on DVD, and the Picasso exhibit at SFMOMA all without the least intention of writing reviews about these experiences (though, who knows, one or two of them might end up with a mention on my blog.)

I salute Mr. Teachout for thinking about his life in such an unflinching way. Critics are natural navel-gazers, but I wish that more of us would have the presence of mind to take a look at how we're living out lives more closely. Doing so might make all the difference between being a stale writer and one with sparkle.

Postscript: Mr. Teachout just posted an interesting piece of news on his Blog: He's being commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera (a musical version of Somerset Maugham's "The Letter," a 1924 short story that Maugham turned into a play three years later) for Santa Fe Opera . I rest my case.

Program Confusions

Does it matter if a concert program says one thing and the performers perform another?

A few days ago, I went to hear a choral concert by the Artists Vocal Ensemble (AVE), a great professional singing group that specializes in performing the sacred repertoire of the Renaissance and Medieval periods.

If it weren't for the fact that I was reviewing the concert for San Francisco Classical Voice, I don't think I would have guessed that the group had decided to substitute in different movements or even completely different pieces to those listed in the program. I don't pretend to be an expert on early church music (the secular music of the period is more my thing) but I was keen to hear this group perform, which is why I accepted the commission. But it was only through the process of writing the piece that it became apparent to me that the audience was being misled in its attempt to match the works listed in the program notes to the singing going on up on stage.

In one sense, I suppose the name of a piece of music or its composer don't matter all that much. Not knowing these things doesn't necessarily detract from our appreciation of the music. On the other hand, the group's inability to even indicate that the program had changed shows a remarkable disrespect for the audience. At the very least, someone should have notified us at the start of the performance. What if I'd enjoyed the music so much that I went out and bought recordings of the works, only to find that they were not the same ones that I had heard in concert? Also, knowing some basic facts about a piece of music helps anchor it in the listener's mind, helps get us ready to listen.

I hope AVE doesn't slip up in this way again. It's a shame, because they gave such a mesmerizing concert.

America Tropical

Chamber opera is one of my favorite artistic forms. Its capable of packing a big punch in a small package. Sometimes, though, the package is too small for the punch. This is the case with composer David Conte and librettist Oliver Mayer's new opera, America Tropical.

The work, which runs to barely an hour, weaves together three narratives about Los Angeles. The first, and most interesting, is the story of the Mexican muralist and activist David Alfaro Siqueiro's famous 1932 mural, La America Tropical. Depicting an Indian being crucified on a double cross capped by an American Eagle, the symbolic work makes a powerful political statement about the oppression of the worker by American imperialism.

The mural was painted over soon after it was completed. In the 1960s, it was rediscovered and is currently being restored. But these fascinating details about the mural's history are omitted from the opera, which focuses on linking Siqueiros' story with the story of the founders of Los Angeles -- a band of Pobladores who arrived in 1781 from Mexico to build the city that would become L.A. a century later, and the story of George Holliday, the plumber who caused a media sensation in 1991 when he caught the beating of Rodney King on video with his handycam.

Despite a warm, lush score by Conte performed by a chamber orchestra consisting of flute, clarinets, cello, bass, violin and piano, a cast of eight wonderful singer-actors, and director Tony Kelly's evocative staging, America Tropical fits uncomfortably into the chamber opera format. It's an incredibly ambitious piece that might work if it were a full-scale opera, with room for these three narratives to develop properly and space for different moods. But as it is, the whole thing feels truncated and overwhelmingly didactic. Even with the aid of the synopsis in the program, it's hard to follow how the stories interrelate. And despite the variety in Conte's musical palette, the pacing and atmosphere of the piece remain the same throughout. The whole denouement is played for maximum emotion and intensity. It's exhausting to watch.

Conte and Kelly's last collaboration, Firebird Motel, in 2003, is a perfect chamber opera. Much less ambitious in its storytelling, yet more resonant and subtle in its theme, the work is everything that America tropical is not. Here's the short review I wrote about it for the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

In Firebird Motel, a haunting new chamber opera by composer David Conte and librettist David Yezzi commissioned by Thick Description, the graveyard shift in a lonely Mojave Desert motel literally becomes a graveyard. Visited by the ghost of a young woman who was murdered, Ivan, the seedy motel’s shy night clerk, tries to save the life of another girl destined to meet the same fate. Weaving influences of ragtime jazz and Baroque Cantata into strands of weeping, dissonant strings and melodious clarinet and vocal lines, Conte’s music is as mesmerizing as the eerie purple light that shrouds the stage every time Julie’s specter appears. Gutsy performances by Mark Hernandez, Milissa Carey, Julie Queen, Shawnette Sulker and Micah Epps counterpoise Mikiko Uesugi’s soulless set and Cassandra Carpenter’s trailer trash costumes to create an arresting balance between the squalid and the sublime.

At it's best, a chamber opera is a perfectly formed jewel. The collaborators on American Tropical, however, wanted to forge an entire crown.

975 Howard

Exciting things happen in garages in the Bay Area. There's an entire mythology that's grown up around stories about Hewlett Packard and Apple Computer starting in garages. Now, San Francisco has a new performance space that's evolved out of a garage on Howard Street in the South of Market (SOMA) area of the city.

I caught a show at 975 Howard for the first time a few days ago. The space is small and cramped and very shoestring. It's drafty and the seats are uncomfortable. You can hear the sound of sirens and revving engines from the street outside. It would take very loud music to drown those noises out.

But there's something special about going to see work at this venue. It fosters a strong sense of community and you enter through the door thinking that something unlikely will happen to you on the inside. The house beer and wine served in the tiny vestibule/cafe/gallery area at the front of the garage is also of a higher quality than you find in most underground theatre spaces in town. And they let you take your drinks to your seats.

The venue seems to be focusing on dance productions though it amazes me that dancers want to perform in the space as it's so small. I saw a production of Beckett shorts by local company Performers Under Stress. It wasn't a bad venue for Beckett though it was hard at times to tell whether the sound effects were coming from the stage or the road outside. I am looking forward to returning to this garage in the future.

Morrissey In The Flesh

Within 10 minutes of being on stage, sweat marks from his nipples caused patches of damp to appear on his black silk shirt. He changed his shirt twice during the course of his act, but doing so only exacerbated the nipple stains -- they looked much worse on the red and white shirts he changed into than they did on the initial black one. And yet, when he removed the sweaty article of clothing and threw it out to the crowd, people descended upon it like piranhas in a near-death scene from a James Bond film.

Morrissey performed in Santa Rosa last night but the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts wasn't sold out. "What's going on tonight?" said the singer in his sonorous, Manchester-tinged voice. "Is Entourage on TV?" Seeing the performer was a bittersweet experience. It basically reaffirmed everything I wrote about him three years ago in an essay about Morrissey's transmogrification into a Messiah for The Believer. (Funnily enough, I spotted the magazine's editor, Vendela Vida in the crowd last night with her husband, writer Dave Eggers.)

He still has his voice -- the purring baritone bursting out like a boy on the cusp of manhood into a violent soprano. The fans were devout as usual. They clawed him. They tried to jump on stage and hug him. The shrieked words of adoration between songs. But the figure is definitely going, both in the literal and figurative sense.

The songs that made the most impact were the early ones. Every time Morrissey sang one of the songs that had made him famous as the lead singer of The Smiths in the 1980s, the auditorium seemed to expand and contract. Few of the newer numbers had the same impact.

Nostalgia was heavy, not just for the audience, some of whom turned up dressed up Rockabilly style in tight jeans and pompadours as is customary for the true Smiths fan. Morrissey's shows are an act of historic preservation in and of themselves. Before he came on, we were treated, as many past audiences of his have been, to snippets from old films he loves. Throughout the concert, the quizzical face of James Dean stared down at the stage from a huge backdrop poster. And all of Morrissey's band members were dressed in pale pink shirts, white pants, black shoes and red velvet dickie-bows, like waiters at a 1950s all-American burger joint.

The concert was a remarkably civilized affair. I sat in my seat throughout, along with most other people sitting in the balcony. Even though the fans were more rapacious below, they mostly swayed gently and the disruptive element was very small. People clapped politely and left quickly after one brief encore.

As I drove back to San Francisco after the concert, I began wondering if I'd actually enjoyed the concert I attended a few years ago in Los Angeles by Morrissey/Smiths cover band Sweet and Tender Hooligans more than this one -- the authentic Morrissey experience. Given that nostaglia plays such an important role in the business of experiencing a rock icon, seeing that icon perform live long after his sell-by date, with his sweat stains and love handles on show, somehow doesn't have the same impact as seeing a group of younger people reanimating the very best songs from the icon's cannon, with all the moves and style that made him famous. This is the experience of attending a Sweet and Tender Hooligans show. The experience of attending a Morrissey show these days is slightly sad. It makes you feel old and a little lost.

This probably explains why I won't be attending The Police's upcoming Bay Area performances. This band probably has more meaning for me than any other group during my formative years. My music collection began with a 45 of Walking on the Moon and I was obsessed with Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland. I even tried to dress like them and would write things like "The bed's too big without you" and "bring on the night" in my diary growing up. Seeing the band today would probably ruin those memories.

San Francisco Moment

A few days ago, my friend Jade and I were strolling down Hayes Street, shirking work, when we chanced upon a young man selling his artwork on the street. His tiny, whimsical works were about the size of an airport paperback and painted on pieces of wood. The subjects were the kind of thing one would expect a male hippy-retro-artist in his early/mid twenties to be interested in: submarines, robots, creatures from the deep. The backgrounds were mostly smeared with colorful paint and the figured were penned on top. A lady standing next to us had picked up picked up an image of a robot with an unnaturally large, brown right mitt. "If I fuck up a hand, I usually put a glove on it," he said, by way of explanation.

I'm ashamed to say that I've forgotten the artist's name, though we spent about 15 minutes chatting with him while Jade picked out a couple of his pieces to give to a friend as a house-warming gift. "How much?" asked Jade. "I dunno," said the artist, who had floppy blond hair in a sort of grown-up version of a bowl haircut and was sporting a black headband and enormous glasses which were purely decorative: they had no lenses and were cut out of a piece of yellow cardboard. "I just let people pick up the work and if it's a good match, I pretty much let them have it for what they want to pay." Jade ended up paying $20 for both pictures. She chose images of submarines with blue and peanut-butter colored backgrounds.

The artist told us he moved to the Bay Area recently from the mid-West and lives in a shared apartment with a friend. He spends his days playing his trumpet and keyboards and selling his artwork. He wishes he could make a living from music, but for now, earning his keep as a painter suits him fine.

He also told us he likes setting up shop in Hayes Valley more than anywhere else in town. "The Mission is too much," he said. "It's a little more low-key here." He said he manages to cover his rent with the money he makes from selling paintings. That's a pretty remarkable accomplishment for anyone living in San Francisco. Though I don't imagine he's living in a penthouse in Pacific Heights.

As we thanked him and prepared to leave, he mentioned he had gigs coming up. I told him I'd like to hear him play sometime and asked him how I could find out information about his upcoming appearances. "I don't have a website right now," he said. "My great grandmother's building it for me."

Making Theatre As Vital To The Body As Food

The title for this blog entry isn't a joke.

A group of six theatre people in San Francisco -- Rob Avila (theatre critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian,) Mark Jackson (director and co-founder of Art Street Theatre,) Beth Wilmurt (actor, singer and co-founder of Art Street Theatre,) John Wilkins (co-founder of Last Planet Theatre,) Kimball Wilkins (ditto) and myself -- had been mulling over how to get people within the community to talk to one another more. We wanted to inject a bit of fun and much-needed glamor into the local arts scene and make people reconnect with the reasons behind why they do their work and what it means in terms of the world at large.

So we decided to hold a Theatre Salon. We invited around 40 performing arts people including directors, actors, producers, critics etc to a gathering at Last Planet Theatre. John and Kimball spearheaded an amazing feast. Somehow we managed to cook a five course, sit-down meal for everyone as well as coordinate entertainment. Local actor/magician Christian Cagigal performed some tricks and Beth sang the Josh White song One Meatball accompanied by the rest of us on guitar (Rob) as well as various pots and scrapers and shakers purloined from the kitchen.

The evening was a lot of fun, but best of all, it made for a sublime way to kick off a conversation about theatre. Each dinner course was served with a new question, which we asked our guests to discuss. The questions ranged from the one at the top of this blog entry, to considering how we might encourage audiences to talk about theatre more and what elements have to be in place to create a great theatrical experience.

Some people I talked to at the soiree were intrigued as to how two people like Mark Jackson and myself would wind up hosting a party together given our recent confrontation over my review of his last production, American $uicide, for SF Weekly. In fact, the entire Theatre Salon came about as a result of an initially acrimonious email conversation. Mark and I wound up going out for a beer to hash out some stuff and we ended up thinking it might be good to get people from all parts of the theatre community talking to each other more regularly. The topic came up at brunch with Rob Avila the next day. Turns out he'd had practically the same conversation with John Wilkins. So we set the ball in motion for some kind of theatre salon.

It'll be interesting to see how these developing relationships with the people I write about as a critic affect my writing. I think that it can only nourish it for I always get a better understanding of the culture from talking to people about their work. I do not subscribe to the New York Times philosophy of criticism that says critics need to keep their distance from artists in order to remain objective. There is no such thing as objectivity. I have always been able to write honestly about artists I know. The reason this is possible is because I wouldn't be interested in hanging out with and getting to know anyone whose work was mediocre or who didn't have the intelligence to understand that my words as a critic -- both positive and negative -- essentially come from a place of love and respect. I believe this state of affairs makes it possible for me to both write honestly and engagingly about theatre.

Steve Haskell, a writer/director who just moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles whom I met for the first time at our party, sent me a couple of paragraphs from an essay by Cynthia Ozick from a recent issue of Harper's Magazine. The piece refers to the role of criticism in literature, but as Steve says (and I agree), Ozick's comments apply just as well to theatre:

"What is needed is a broad infrastructure, through a critical mass of critics, of the kind of criticism that can define, or prompt, or inspire, or at least intuit, what is happening in a culture in a given time frame. What is needed is critics who can tease out hidden imperatives, and assumptions held in common, and who will create the contentious conditions that underlie and stimulate a living literary consciousness. In this there is something almost ceremoniously slow; unhurried thinking, the ripened long (or sideways) view, the gradualism of nuance.

...something instinctually different might begin to hover: a hint of innate kinship, a backdrop, the white noise of the era that claims us all. In times that are mad conscious of themselves-a consciousness that only a critical infrastructure can supply-the varieties of literary experience become less antagonistic than inquisitively receptive. [We can create] a certain virtuoso interplay: we know this because criticism has taught us how to see it."

In The American West

Richard Avedon's series of portraits exploring the faces of the American West has achieved iconic status in the photography world over the past 20 years or so for good reason. The exhibition consists of 124 portraits of working class people from states like Wyoming, Ohio, and Texas, which Avedon took between 1979 and 1984 on a commission from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

The first thing that hit me as I walked around the exhibition, currently on show at The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, a few days ago, were the eyes. The subjects stare out at you as if to say "take it or leave it, this is the truth." None of them smile (though a slight flicker of approval plays at the corners of one young man's mouth as he poses alongside his brother an father.)

The sheer size and steely definition of the images is impressive. There's nothing soft or friendly about them. It's no wonder that westerners took offense when the exhibition was first mounted in Fort Worth in 1985. Instead of depicting the west as a heroic frontier or the domain of wealthy oil barons, Avedon showed its everyday side -- the miners and hairdressers and truckers and hobos. Many people found the photos to be depressing and ugly. Those familiar with Avedon's work as a fashion and celebrity photographer thought he had gone off the deep end by portraying this grimy, totally unglamorous world.

I found myself transported to another time and place by those pictures, though in actual fact, you don't need to go far outside San Francisco today to find subjects very similar to those in Avedon's pictures.

Cool As Hell Theatre

When I first heard Michael Rice's Cool As Hell Theatre podcast a few years ago, I thought it was kind of weird. Here was this twenty-something guy spouting like an MC about "pimps and hustlers of the theatre world..." or something like that. Every episode, which featured an interview with an actor, director, producer or other performing arts person (he even talked to critics -- me included) about their work and their view on the state of theatre in the Bay Area and beyond, would finish with "the stupid ass question segment." In this segment, Rice would rip through a battered paperback full of idiotic questions. The time he interviewed me, I was asked if I'd rather mud wrestle in a bikini or slam beer cans against my head. I chose the former.

There's something so fresh and fun about Rice's approach. It's so far removed from the typical stuffy theatre commentaries you find. He's always laughing with his guests and getting them to lighten up. It's great. But it's not all fluff: He asks serious questions and gets people to talk about the art and their work in an engaging way. Issues are covered. Debates unfold.

So I was extremely happy to hear that Rice's podcast has now been picked up by KQED. I gather from Rice's announcement, which popped into my in-box last night, that the producers are going to let him do his shtick just the way he's always done it. I just subscribed to the podcast via iTunes. Hopefully he'll turn more pimps and hustlers on to theatre.

Mike Daisey and Mozart

I don't mean to beat the Mike Daisey incident at A.R.T. into the ground, but a comment I received from a friend of mine regarding what happened during a performance of Daisey's solo show Invincible Summer a few days ago, brought the relationship between the artist and the xerox machine to mind.

When I first heard about Daisey's confrontation with the high school group, I emailed my friend a link to Daisey's blog. I did this because my friend, a technology journalist here in San Francisco, knows Daisey personally. (He wrote about Daisey's first tech-themed show -- 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com -- when it played at Berkeley Rep a few years ago.)

"Poor Mike, sounds like he got pretty traumatized," wrote my friend. "Why would he use the "original of the show outline" on stage, though? Weren't copy machines invented for a reason...?"

A valid question, this. It takes a tech journalist to ask it. I glibly responded, "He's an artist! Copy machines weren't invented for the likes of him!" However, my friend brings up a serious point.

Why does Daisey bring the only existing copy of his performance notes on stage with him? Why doesn't he make copies? The danger of nutty Christians marching on stage and destroying those notes is, after all, not half as much of a risk as losing them through simple negligence or a house fire.

I understand that some artists prefer to create using pen and paper rather than a computer. I also know that Daisey's shows involve a lot of improvisation. Things change from night to night. Little is prescribed, hence the lack of a complete, fixed script. That's part of the magic of what Daisey does.

On the other hand, in this day and age, there's little excuse for not pottering over to Kinko's and making a few copies of an important handwritten text. Mozart didn't make copies of his scores. People talk about this as a sign of the composer's genius. I personally consider it to be more a sign of his instability. For even in pre-Kinko's times, artists made copies of their work (or copies were made, both with and without the artist's permission.)

I feel terrible for Daisey. The destruction of his one and only set of performance notes on stage before hundreds of people must have felt like public gang rape. I wonder if the incident will inspire him to make copies of his notes in future? As my friend put it it the end of his email message: "Well, live and learn."

Drenched Daisey

Melissa Hillman, artistic director of Impact Theatre in Berkeley responded to yesterday's posting about Yale's ban on stage weapons and the incident at Harvard's American Repertory Theatre during Mike Daisey's show. Thanks Melissa for sending me back to read Daisey's blog, in which the performer explains in more detail what happened to him on stage and his subsequent response.

Daisey is not only a fine performer but also a courageous human being. It turns out that the group that assaulted him during a performance of Invincible Summer wasn't a Christian group after all (though they repeatedly identified themselves that way as they fled the theatre, according to Daisey.) They were one of two high school groups present at the performance.

In an effort to understand what motivated one member of the group to drench Daisey's handwritten text in water, the performer called up the school and spoke to the perpetrator, a teacher named David. The two apparently spoke for an hour. Daisey tried to get David to understand what he had done. David, in turn, tried to explain his behavior. Who knows what really went on in the mind of the miscreant, but it seems that some strong language used in the show (fears about the "cleanliness" of the production) were the probable cause of David's outrage.

Here's what Daisey says about David:

"He has three kids--one is 21, and two are 17--and he's terrified of the world. Terrified by violence, and sex, and he sees it all linked together--a horrifying world filled with darkness, pornography and filth that threatens his children, has threatened them all his life. They're older now, but he says he still sees things the same way--and that the only way to protect his children and himself is to lock it all out of his life."

And a few words about the reason for the assault:

"He [David] reiterated the administrator's line that it had been a "security issue" (his words) and that "we had to get our kids out of there". He said at one point, "You're probably more *liberal* than I am" and the word *liberal* had this hook on the end of it, one that he probably didn't even intend, but it was unavoidable for him--it sounded edged, like a slur..."

From reading Daisey's post, it doesn't seem like a consensus was reached, though I am staggered by Daisey's open-mindedness in picking up the phone and attempting to reason with the guy.

Fear makes people react in strange ways. It takes a great deal of bravery to get up on stage and tell stories in front of a live audience. The creators of solo shows (many of whom draw on experiences from their own lives, as Daisey does) are more vulnerable than most and have to be superhumanly brave to do what they do. They also have to be very talented to do what they do well and make it art rather than public therapy. Daisey has learned to be braver than most through his work. That's probably why he had the strength to get on the phone and talk to David. Without this kind of inner force, Daisey wouldn't have been able to get back on stage since then and continue performing his show.

Theatre Of The Absurd And The Asinine

I don't know whether to feel delighted or troubled by two strange news items I read just now:

1) A Yale administrator has banned the use of any kind of weapon on stage in student productions out of fear of how audiences might react in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings last week. Dean of Student Affairs at Yale, Betty Trachtenberg is reported in to have said in an email to a student director:

“Given the events of a few days ago in Virginia I question, at this time, the use of even a prop hand gun in this (or other productions). I suggest that you find another way.”

2) Monologist Mike Daisey was severely traumatized when a Christian group confronted him en masse in the middle of a recent performance of his latest solo show, Invincible Summer, at Harvard University's American Repertory Theatre. Daisey's blog entry on the A.R.T. website describes the incident as follows:

"I am performing the show to a packed house, when suddenly the lights start coming up in the house as a flood of people start walking down the aisles–they looked like a flock of birds who’d been startled, the way they all moved so quickly, and at the same moment…it was shocking, to see them surging down the aisles. The show halted as they fled, and at this moment a member of their group strode up to the table, stood looking down on me and poured water all over the outline, drenching everything in a kind of anti-baptism."

On the positive side of things, I am excited that live theatre still moves people to do such drastic, crazy things. But, really, this news scares more than thrills me.

What happened in Virginia was horrific, but banning the use of wooden swords and plastic revolvers on stage is not a way to send out a message to student body about gun control issues. What have the events at Virginia Tech got to do with a Yale student production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist? The blogosphere might be full of posts comparing Virginia gunman Cho Seung Hui and anti-government nut-jobs like Timothy McVeigh, but there's nothing linking Cho's actions and those of the suspected bank bomber in Dario Fo's play other than the shadow of death.

And with regards to Daisey's ordeal at A.C.T., all I can ask is this: What was a bunch of theatre-hating god squadders doing wasting their time and money at Daisey's show in the first place?

Asinine and Absurd are the two main adjectives that spring to mind when I think about what happened on the Yale and Harvard campuses. I don't know, those Ivy League schools...

Truth Serum

Someday, this blog and the website that surrounds it, are going to be worth a lot of money. Not necessarily because of the content per se (though that would be nice) but because of the design.

My friend Jon Adams, who's responsible for the design and layout of this portal, has just been nominated for two Eisner Awards -- the comic book industry's Oscars. Jon's book Truth Serum, which was released last year, has been nominated in both the Best Graphic Album Reprint and Best Humor Publication categories.

Jon never ceases to astound me. By day, he works as a graphic designer for Loud Dog, a San Francisco-based web design firm in North Beach. By night, he creates anarchic worlds of dystopian disrepute in comic book form. The scary and hilarious thing about Jon's version of anarchy though, is that it lacks glamor. The "super" heroes that people his tales all have thinning pates and paunches. They are heroes for a planet beyond rescue.

Jon's just completed his second Truth Serum Book, Truth Serum: The Lonely Parade. And all this while volunteering one morning a week at 826 Valencia, where he lends his wry pen to illustrating stories written by kids from local schools.

Some little-known facts about Jon:

1. He's obsessed with the number 3.
2. He used to keep a blog entitled Midnight Sausage about one of his ex-roommates.
3. His favorite drink is Mike's Hard Lemonade.

FURY factory

As the producer of the annual Fringe Festival and Divafest, the Exit Theatre has long ruled the Bay Area’s freeform theater fiesta scene with a rod of box-office splits and free pretzels. But the local bastion of underground performance is about to face some stiff competition from San Francisco theater group foolsFURY. Bringing together the work of 13 companies from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, foolsFURY’s FURY factory celebrates the art of ensemble theater – that is, original productions developed through an ongoing creative collaboration between all artists involved rather than the more traditional method, where the power lies mostly with a director, star actor, or playwright.

The three-week festival launched last week with a party at Hotel Utah sponsored by The Onion and ends with a weekend-long symposium devoted to raising the profile of ensemble theater. In between, the festival offers an eclectic program of full-length productions, works-in-progress, and workshops with ensemble theater experts like Jubilith Moore.

Full-length works by local groups include foolsFURY’s adaptation of Henry James’ novel The Turn of the Screw, mugwumpin’s Still Standing Still, and Traveling Jewish Theatre’s Death of a Salesman. Visiting groups such as Zoo District, Ghost Road, and ARTEL from Los Angeles, and New York’s Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble will perform The Defenders, Orestes Remembered, We Play Devil’s Advocate (Variation #50) and 10 Brecht Poems respectively. The works-in-progress part of the proceedings, meanwhile, includes work by Dandelion Dance Theater and Aadika Singh.

Last night I caught two shows from the festival. mugwumpin's Still Sitting Still was a surreal and madcap duet between company founders Christopher W. White and Denmo Ibrahim which revolved around the relationship between a mother and her young son in a small-town community. There was a lot of humor in the language and physicality. The performers moved with the glassy perfection of synchronized swimmers. The world they created on stage with a couple of beaten up wooden doors, two Japanese paper umbrellas and a half-eaten pie was funny but also very dark.

I felt less convinced by foolsFURY's Turn of the Screw, adapted by Jeffery Hatcher from Henry James' novel. The text flowed well, but director Rod Hipskind got rather carried away with theatrical gimmicks that really got in the way of the storytelling for me. Some moments, like when the actors used a wooden bench and a fake horse's head to create the illusion of a coach journey across country, and when the actors trampled barefoot over the auditorium seating to suggest picking their way across rocks on a beach, were ingenious.

But I couldn't understand the reason behind turning the theatre around. Why have the audience sitting up on stage and the actors performing in the rest of the auditorium? There didn't seem a strong motive for it in the director's vision of James' text and the sight-lines were lousy. I started to get a headache from the constant use of hand-held lights. And I couldn't understand why two of the four actors spent most of the time fondling each other or messing about on the sidelines when it would have made most sense to give them the children's lines.

Still, foolsFURY's celebration of ensemble theatre is a wonderful addition to our local performing arts landscape. I hope it inspires more people to participate in and watch this kind of work in the future.