Slick
17 January 2007

Dan Hoyle is everyone he met in Nigeria, but not himself — and that's impressive.

Solo shows fall into three basic categories: the autobiographical (in which the performer tells his own story), the biographical (in which the performer portrays another person — usually someone famous), and what I'll call the multi-biographical (in which the performer inhabits many different personas that have nothing to do with his own life). But whether we're watching Billy Crystal reminiscing about his golden childhood, Tovah Feldshuh embodying Israeli premier Golda Meir, or Ron Campbell morphing into 37 different characters from Nazi officers to Ali Baba's Forty Thieves, one thing always remains intact: the actor's ego. Even when a solo performer successfully hides his identity behind countless other masks, the sheer virtuosity of the endeavor — the "Wow, I can't believe that guy played every member of the Trojan army, including the horse!" factor — reminds us that we're watching a brilliant individual on stage.more...

Pull the Plug
10 January 2007

Bright lights in the big city don't make a show.

Why do people in the U.S. bother attending fireworks displays? In the country that popularized the neon sign, gave birth to the Burning Man festival, and encourages its citizens to create spectacular Christmas light shows featuring 10-foot candy canes and LED-studded Santas in their own front yards, there seems little reason to stand in the cold with thousands of other people, waiting for hours to go "ooh" and "ahh" as a few glorified sparklers make a bruise of the night sky. Yet we're drawn to public displays of pyrotechnic prowess every year, like moths to a flame. The lights are, of course, very pretty. Making momentary sense of hostile darkness through primary colors and geometric forms, fireworks speak a primal language that everyone understands. But that's not enough for real drama. more...

The Year of Playing Dangerously
3 January 2007

Suzan-Lori Parks is either crazy or brilliant. Perhaps both.

I don't know at what point the business of doing something eccentric over the course of one calendar year became fashionable, but these days it seems as if 365 days is the standard time necessary to accomplish anything worth talking about. In our culture of instant gratification, where attention deficit is no longer a disorder but part of everyday life, the idea of keeping up an activity — particularly one that's physically or mentally challenging or just plain wacky — without pause for 12 months boggles the mind. A friend in Minneapolis recently told me about a couple he knows who took a year out to run a marathon in every state. That's almost a marathon a week. Just thinking about this act blisters the feet. Even an endeavor as physically undemanding as recreating all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a tiny Queens apartment every evening for 12 months (as Julie Powell of Julie & Julia fame did) is apparently worthy of a book contract and far too much national media exposure.

Of all the crackpot 365-day-long schemes to have been dreamed up lately, the one concocted by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has to be among the most bonkers. One morning in 2002, Parks (best known for her Pulitzer PrizeÐwinning play Topdog/Underdog and her screen adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God for Oprah Winfrey) suddenly got it into her head to write a play every day for a year. Beginning on Nov. 13, 2002 (only hours after coming up with the idea), with a piece fittingly entitled Start Here concerning a Waiting for GodotÐesque conversation between the mythical Hindu figures Krishna and Arjuna, and finishing on Nov. 12, 2003, with a dialogue-free work involving lights shining on a bound manuscript of the collected plays, Parks composed 365 short dramas. They cover everything from the war in Iraq to the death of Johnny Cash to a lost sweater. more...

Myth Maker
20 December 2006

A familiar tale, told well, is a thing to behold

The blurbs on the jacket of the 25th anniversary edition of The Princess Bride belie the widely held belief that endorsements tell you little about a book besides the names of its author's drinking pals. Never have two statements of approval been more in conflict: The Los Angeles Times describes William Goldman's timeless adventure story as "one of the funniest, most original, and deeply moving novels I have read in a long time." Newsweek, on the other hand, calls it "a 'classic' medieval melodrama that sounds like all the Saturday serials you ever saw feverishly reworked by the Marx Brothers." Can a story be loved for being both "original" and "like all the Saturday serials you ever saw"? How is it possible for a work of art to attract such startlingly contradictory compliments? more...

Turn the Dial
13 December 2006

Enthusiastic but undercooked, this radio-esque Life isn't as wonderful as it could be

Perhaps it's because I'm not a native of this country, but I'll never understand why It's a Wonderful Life has become such a Christmas television staple. There's no denying that Everyman George Bailey's journey of self-discovery has its mawkish side. Hearing the brat Zuzu lisp, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings" is enough to send even the most ardent viewer of yuletide specials to the kitchen for a glass of mulled wine. But though the film was initially released — and partly takes place — in late December, features a guardian angel, and espouses good Christian values such as self-sacrifice and community-mindedness, It's a Wonderful Life isn't very festive at all. more...

Between a Rock and a Hard Place
6 December 2006

Underneath all the Latin smolder, this overly serious play might be quite hilarious

The Spanish word "duende" is notoriously untranslatable. Most dictionaries define it both as a fairylike, mythical figure and a concept in art to do with soulfulness, emotional authenticity, and the fuzzy line where pleasure meets pain. But many people agree that experiencing flamenco music or the work of the Andalusian poet-playwright Federico Garca Lorca is the best way to grasp the idea.

The impenetrability of duende — its relationship to the mystical, abstract realm of feeling — is what gives the concept its power and cultural resonance. But dealing with sensations that are more easily experienced than explained does have its downside. Because we're more accustomed to the spoofy Hollywood version of duende as depicted in movies like The Mask of Zorro and Once Upon a Time in Mexico than the brittle emotions that forged dramas like Yerma and Blood Wedding, it's hard to take duende seriously these days. more...

Hopeless Springs
29 November 2006

When an adaptation slips from honest homage into unintentional parody

In the most memorable moment of Tim Burton's 1990 movie Edward Scissorhands, the protagonist, an artificial human being with scissors where his fingers should be, puts the finishing touches on a massive ice statue of his heart's desire, the angelic, unattainable Kim. As the sculptor's frenzied movements send ice flakes flurrying into the air, an ecstatic Kim dances around the statue to the sumptuous swells of composer Danny Elfman's musical score. The scene might be as tacky as a drugstore snow globe, but it's utterly enchanting.

Something unfortunate happens in the transition between Burton's conception of this scene and British choreographer Matthew Bourne's take on it. At the moment when we should be reveling in the magic of the snow-kissed Kim twirling in the moonlight as Edward completes his masterwork above her head, Bourne's stage adaptation presents us with a sight that's definitely tacky but not in the least bit enchanting: As the scissor-fingered man hacks away at the effigy, sending a single spray of snow shooting outward as if from a leaky dam, Kim's likeness in ice appears to be hemorrhaging from the neck. more...

Greed is Good
22 November 2006

Foxes is still a terrific potboiler, but its message is no longer revolutionary

When writer and activist Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes first appeared in 1939, some critics warmed to the play's brittle social message about the destruction wreaked by rampant greed. "The Little Foxes is a play to put into a small box and tuck under your pillow at night," wrote The New Yorker's Robert Benchley. "You may have nightmares, but they will do you good." Conversely, many commentators were lukewarm in their praise for the playwright's narrative powers, deriding Hellman's story about the power-hungry machinations of three siblings in the Deep South for being melodramatic and contrived. more...

Mere Words
15 November 2006

Moving Hamlet to Oakland doesn't show us anything new

Theater groups are always fretting about how to make Shakespeare relevant. Fearing that plots peopled with long-dead Scottish thanes and Egyptian queens (not to mention iambic pentameters riddled with "thees," "thous," and "vouchsafes") might clash with modern sensibilities, community-minded companies have long tried to reimagine the playwright's work in ever more meaningful ways. Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, a collaboration between California Shakespeare Theater and Campo Santo, follows that tradition. Developed over more than three years through a series of writing workshops, public forums, and interviews with a broad range of Oaklanders, from church groups and high school students to prisoners and exÐBlack Panthers, playwright Naomi Iizuka's adaptation of this tragedy from 1600 seeks to connect the windswept battlements of Medieval Elsinore with Oakland circa 1989.

How strange it is, then, to attend a performance of this thoroughly contemporary, painstakingly plugged-in play and find myself feeling more distanced from the action on stage than I've felt in a long time. more...

Mystery, He Wrote
8 November 2006

The playwright of one of these one-acts seems to have vanished without a trace

It seems unlikely that a theater company specializing in new plays would be clueless as to the identity of one of its playwrights. After all, it's one thing for Shakespeare nuts to haggle over whether Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford — rather than that bloke from Stratford — wrote The Tempest, but quite another for a company working with living authors not to know the creative force behind a brilliant script written just 12 years ago. Yet this improbable state of affairs now seems to have arisen at the Magic Theatre. more...

We've Got Issues
1 November 2006

Community theater worth watching

In the past, the expression "community theater" pretty much meant one thing to me: endless church-hall productions of Annie Get Your Gun starring the local dentist and his wife. Though the role amateur dramatics plays in communities — providing an outlet for artistic energy, bringing people together, raising money to fund Grandma Brown's hip replacement, etc. — is doubtless positive, its general lack of quality has led me to turn my patronizing theater critic's nose up at these well-intentioned stabs at creativity. What, me review a production of Charley's Aunt at St. Timothy's Episcopal in Danville? I don't think so.

Despite my disdain, I've come to realize that community theater doesn't always mean a group of rank amateurs staging old chestnuts. As Shotgun Players' Love Is a Dream House in Lorin and other community-based projects (like the work of Los Angeles' Cornerstone Theater Company) prove, "community" can apply equally to productions — professional or otherwise — that create an intimate relationship between a particular group of people and their environment. more...

Risky Business
18 October 2006

One man, two wives, and their messy lives on an intimate stage

Plays can be dangerous, but I've always considered the buildings in which they're performed to be relatively safe places to spend a few hours. At least, that was true until a couple of weeks ago, when I read about the Russian Ministry of Culture's new plan to introduce insurance policies to protect theatergoers against the possibility of terrorist attack or other "unfortunate occurrences" that might disrupt a live performance. A delayed response to the October 2002 hostage crisis in which 129 audience members were killed after Chechen militants seized a Moscow theater, the Russians' novel insurance scheme initially struck me as bizarre, if not flagrantly opportunistic: The 2002 crisis was devastating, but this kind of thing rarely happens at the theater. It's not for nothing that most people who purchased a policy in the program's pilot phase did so, according to a local newspaper, in order to insure themselves against being stood up by their dates — an "unfortunate occurrence" unsurprisingly not covered by the plan. more..

Just Desserts
11 October 2006

An imaginative, pie-filled play feels a bit undercooked

In Don McLean has remained famously cryptic about the meaning of his famous 1971 song "American Pie." "It means I never have to work again" has been his stock response. While an entire cottage industry has grown up around arguing over the significance of lines like "Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry," most people agree on what the song's about: the end of an era and a general hankering after a lost, possibly mythical past.

Something similar could be said about Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's Colorado, a murky comedy involving a missing teen beauty queen, shattered dreams, and pie as a metaphor for suffering. If McLean's song laments the day the music died, Nachtrieb's play — with its cast of vacuous, self-obsessed suburbanites — paints an even sorrier picture of the day after. more...

Pinter Love
4 October 2006

Spoofing for a great playwright

"I hate Pinter." "I hate Pinter, too." These words don't sound like the most obvious way to kick off a series of one-act plays inspired by the work of Harold Pinter. The Nobel PrizeÐwinning author (who turns 76 this week) has become such a figurehead over the past 50 years that he has even joined the rarified circle of authors considered so influential that their very names (Shaw, Chekhov, Kafka, Joyce, Brecht, etc.) have spawned adjectives. As a result, you'd imagine that most attempts by other playwrights to capture Pinter's spirit to be either acts of groveling worship or jaunty pastiche. more...

Town and Country
27 September 2006

A new look at an old Shakespeare draws a clever link between urban and rural

In the most dramatic moment in Jonathan Moscone's production of William Shakespeare's As You Like It, cousins Rosalind and Celia step off the cramped, cagelike platform where they've been virtually trapped for the entire first act, walk to the front of the stage in their elegant cocktail dresses and stilettos, and strip. After the bitter claustrophobia of the opening scenes, which culminate in the forced banishment from court of the two young women by Celia's father, Duke Frederick, the sudden nakedness comes across as a defiant act of emancipation — a powerful physicalization of their break from the stuffy trappings of courtly life.

After this revolutionary statement, I half expected Susannah Schulman and Julie Eccles to perform the rest of the play (as Rosalind and Celia, respectively) in the buff — or, at the very least, braless in bell-bottoms, tie-dye T-shirts, and floral leis. So it struck me as particularly odd when the two of them reappeared in the second act, embarking upon a strenuous backcountry hike into the Forest of Arden to seek out Rosalind's exiled father, with Schulman dressed in a tailored pantsuit and fedora and Eccles in a taffeta ball gown and matching heels. It seems that old habits die hard: Slumming it in the woods is one thing, but doing it sans Giorgio Armani and Vera Wang is quite another. more...

The Write Stuff
20 September 2006

Why making a play out of a book is so hard

When it comes to articulating his disdain for the world, Gustav von Aschenbach is a pro. Tossing out criticisms like used Kleenex, the eminent, elderly writer (played by Giles Havergal in his staged adaptation of Thomas Mann’s famous novella, Death in Venice) treats nearly everything he sees and everyone he meets with unmasked derision; nothing and nobody comes close to meeting this aesthete’s exacting standards. But when Aschenbach finally runs into something worthy of his admiration — Tadzio, a 14-year-old Polish boy with a “winning mouth” and “clustering honey-colored ringlets” — he can barely get his lips around the syllables to express his feelings. “The boy was entirely beautiful,” he stutters, the final word uttered with such ferocity that it sounds almost obscene. In fact, von Aschenbach’s expression of beauty is plain ugly.

Describing beauty has always been a self-defeating proposition. We only know perfection exists because we feel it when we perceive it. But we lack the tools to communicate these subjective feelings to the world. Mann deliberately sets himself up for failure with his story about the upright von Aschenbach’s illicit passion for Tadzio and his subsequent self-destruction after spotting the youth while vacationing in Venice. That the protagonist’s overwrought attempts to describe the object of his desire in terms of characters from Greek mythology merely turn the boy into an expressionless face on an ancient marble frieze makes exactly this point: Words don’t convey raw emotion half as well as silence. more...

Wake-Up Call
13 September 2006

Taking the measure of our once-a-year DIY theater festival

The cable car turnaround at the corner of Powell and Market was the usual melee of tourists, panhandlers, commuters, shoppers, and boom-box body-poppers on the evening of Aug. 9. Few people seemed to notice the man in the bowler hat and tuxedo rolling a massive papier-mâche rock up Eddy Street, though he was surrounded by an entourage of odd-looking, noisy individuals, from a guy dressed as an alien to a bunch of besuited bouncer types with false eyebrows.

That performer Jack Halton's Sisyphean labors attracted so little attention from downtown crowds points to one of the best things about San Francisco — and one of the worst. While it's liberating to live in a city where taking your pet boulder for a walk elicits merely a sideways glance from passersby, the Bay Area's "anything goes" spirit backfires when it comes to drumming up publicity for one of its most "anything goes" performing arts events. more...

Girl Gone Wilde
6 September 2006

Is Salome a comedy, a tragedy, or both and neither at once?

Featuring a scene in which a woman kisses a severed head, a soothsayer ranting oaths from the bottom of a septic tank, and love poetry so bad that only actors with an overdeveloped aptitude for faux sincerity like Groucho Marx or Owen Wilson could get away with uttering it, Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Salome, has all the makings of a comedy. But unlike most of Wilde’s other works for the stage, such as The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance, Salome isn’t meant to be all that funny — at least not in the typical Wildean sense of the word. more...

The Wayback Machine
23 August 2006

Two Broadway blockbusters offer more than just nostalgia

On Carole Shorenstein Hays remembers standing in line outside the Curran Theatre to catch A Chorus Line when it arrived in San Francisco in May 1976 from its triumphal Broadway run. "I was so full of excitement," she recalls. "The anticipation was explosive." The same could be said of the atmosphere outside the Curran earlier this month, when the lauded theater owner and producer debuted the new Broadway-bound revival of the hit musical about a group of high-kicking hopefuls trying to make it through a cutthroat audition. I, for one, have never felt such tremors of expectation on Geary Street, and the sensation had nothing to do with the magnitude 4.5 earthquake that rumbled through Northern California that night. more...

You Spin Me
16 August 2006

The ethnomusicologist and the flack tell a beguiling tale of influence

There are probably few people in the history of the 20th century less likely to crop up in a play together than Harry Smith and Edward Bernays. Considered by many to be the father of public relations, Bernays (1891-1995) was as brilliant at selling ideas and products to the masses as he was at selling himself. He turned America on to everything from Ivory soap to Calvin Coolidge, all the while promoting himself as a "counsel on public relations" and the nascent PR industry as a bona fide social science. Harry Smith (1923-1991), on the other hand, was a terrible businessman. A beatnik ethnomusicologist, archivist, experimental filmmaker, artist, and practitioner of kabala, Smith sponged off his acquaintances and lived from hand to mouth. Besides his abstract movies, Smith's best known contribution to modern life was his record collection. The Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), comprising three volumes of two vinyl records each culled from Smith's vast treasure trove of 1920s and '30s American ballads, gospel, and blues songs, played a major role in the folk music revival and cultural shift of the 1950s and '60s, influencing the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. more...

Home Again
9 August 2006

A veteran Method actor's comeback is marred by a musty script

It's been 30 years since Jean Shelton has performed on stage. I don't know if the Method actor-turned-celebrated acting coach suffered a Daniel Day-Lewis moment during her turn as Martha in a 1970s production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Day-Lewis — also a proponent of the Method school — collapsed during a performance of Hamlet after allegedly seeing the ghost of his own father), but Shelton, like Day-Lewis, has stayed away from the boards ever since. more...

More Play Than Porn
2 August 2006

Looking for the love story beneath the kink in The Censor

Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson's The Censor has the distinction of being the second Last Planet production in a row — after the run, earlier this year, of Farmyard by Franz Xaver Kroetz — to feature a scene in which a woman takes a shit onstage. The trend (if you can call it that) is alarming, but not because of the shock value. More contentious, to my mind, is the notion that one of the city's most audacious theater companies might become known first and foremost as the place to go to watch simulations of bodily functions, and only a distant second as the place to go to have your world turned upside down. more...

Only Connect
26 July 2006

A dance theater piece asks, If it's so hard to bond with those closest to us, how do we expect to contact aliens?

For almost half a century, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence research movement has spent millions of dollars and at least as many hours ransacking the night sky in search of aliens. Given that the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across and contains approximately a hundred billion stars, the chances of exchanging handshakes (or antenna-rubs) with a little green man are unlikely, to say the least. But no matter; the search goes on. The Berkeley-based SETI@home project — a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of Internet-connected computers to analyze radio telescope data — is testimony to our obsession with assuaging our loneliness as a planet: Today, more than five million computer users in over 200 countries have collectively contributed 19-plus billion hours of computer-processing time in an effort to make new friends.

Erika Shuch Performance Project's latest, and very beautiful, movement theater piece, ORBIT (Notes From the Edge of Forever), is all about humanity's frenzied and largely frustrated attempts to forge connections with worlds beyond our own. Combining live and recorded music, choreography, spoken text, video projections, televised images, and an interactive set, ORBIT playfully explores the notion that it won't be too long before we'll be eating breakfast on Pluto and sending our kids out to play with the Martian offspring next door. more...

But Now I See
19 July 2006

The Mime Troupe makes us laugh and think

On a trip to the South a few months ago, I visited the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis to hear the Rev. Al Green preach. Like about half the congregation, I was more interested in watching the R&B legend cavorting about in a clergyman's robes than in receiving Jesus into my heart. More than three hours later, I staggered out of God's house famished and bemused. Only a couple of things stood out from the experience: One, how the minister's preaching was no match for his singing; and two, how much my ass ached from sitting still for so long.

I hadn't given my very temporary stint as a member of the Rev. Green's flock much thought until I saw the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform its new religious doctrine-themed show Godfellas. My memory wasn't simply jogged by the butt-numbing effort of perching on the precipitous slopes of Dolores Park; it was as if the troupe had kidnapped the Motown Messiah, pushed him on stage, and ordered him to bathe us in his holy, spiritual light. more...

Wake-Up Call
12 July 2006

A promising one-man show lacks cohesion

Question: How does a grassroots performance artist armed with a flute, a rock-hard diaphragm, and a couple of woolly hats start a fire? Does he a) squander three months of his rent on the services of a publicist, b) spend an entire week stapling flyers to lampposts when he could be rehearsing, or c) solicit coverage from members of the local theater press (assuming that even a bad review is good publicity)? The answer, of course, is all and none of the above. Regardless of whether you're endowed with an ACT- or Berkeley RepÐsized marketing budget or relying entirely on a MySpace page and word of mouth, the bottom line is this: You gotta have something to start a fire about.more...

The Fall of Man in Three Acts
5 July 2006

An imaginative play uses dark humor to show our decline

An effective way to gauge how far civilization has progressed in the last 200,000 years since the species Homo sapiens first roamed the planet is to consider the evolving function of the living room rug. Neanderthals wore theirs to keep out the wind; medieval lords and ladies hung them up to bring a bit of color to stony fortress walls; and Victorian-era grave robbers favored a rolled-up, silk-knotted Persian weave as the most effective method of carrying a corpse. Our own period in history has witnessed ever more refined developments in the terrain of carpet use: When not being deployed as a luxurious surface for fireside sex in daytime soaps, the shag pile doubles as street wear for the fashionable household pet.

If the above doesn't prove our ability, as a species, to climb to the highest echelons of sophistication, I'll crawl back under the floor covering from whence I came. Yet when two characters in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's Hunter Gatherers use their living room carpet not to make love or outfit a dachshund but to slaughter livestock for the evening meal, human civilization looks dangerously like it's about to have the rug pulled out from under its feet. Nachtrieb's riotous new comedy observes what happens during mankind's fall, showing that the distance between 21st-century, middle-class Northern Californians and cavemen might not be so great after all. more...

All you need is ‘Love’ (and some great songs)
30 June 2006

Apple Corps Ltd, the company created in 1967 to oversee the business interests of The Beatles, isn’t known for its open-mindedness. The London-based organization –supervised by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison – has generally met requests for permission to use the iconic band’s recordings on stage and screen over the years with a resounding no, and waged legal battles against everyone from EMI to Apple Computer in its ardent protection of The Beatles’ good name.

So when a press release arrived in my inbox a few months ago announcing a “joint artistic venture” between Apple Corps and Cirque du Soleil, I was puzzled. That the Beatles’ protectorate had, for the first time ever, authorized the use of the band’s recordings in a theatrical setting was remarkable enough. But to choose to make cultural history with Cirque du Soleil, a company whose own musical legacy can at best be described as watered-down Enya, and at worst – to borrow a phrase of John Rockwell’s in a recent story about the Canadian conglomerate in The New York Times -- “the sort of music mimes would make if mimes made music,” seemed too bizarre to be true. I had to witness this odd alliance for myself. more...

Oz-Mosis
28 June 2006

A play about Munchkin debauchery might really be about power and how to get it

The morning after watching the world premiere performance of their new play, Babylon Heights, Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh sat munching bagels (Welsh) and smoking cigarettes (Cavanagh) by the pool at the Phoenix Hotel, mulling over the previous night's denouement. "How did it go?" I asked, having seen the play a couple of evenings earlier, in preview. The co-playwrights didn't have much to say on the subject. "I got such a buzz seeing it come to life," managed Welsh, his pale, bald pate glinting in the morning sun. "We just want it to grow organically and let the people who are doing it find the play," said Cavanagh. He later added: "We're very forgiving." more...

Precarious
21 June 2006

An extraordinary set tips a comedy into tragedy

In one of the most famous scenes in Charlie Chaplin's movie The Gold Rush, the star's Little Tramp character — a lone prospector fortune-hunting in wintry Alaska — finds himself marooned in a dilapidated log cabin with a fellow gold digger. The two comrades endure severe hardships, from boiling and eating a shoe to the Tramp's cabinmate deliriously imagining his companion as an oversized chicken. When the shack suddenly starts tilting at a sickening angle, throwing the two men onto the floor, an exterior shot reveals the true precariousness of the prospectors' situation: Their impromptu home teeters on the brink of a cliff. more...

Bebop Beauty
14 June 2006

A glimmering production rescues a riveting but dense play from the ivory tower

Suzan-Lori Parks' cataclysmic The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is — to the detriment of the whole entire world — a play often discussed but rarely seen. The subject of countless articles about "reconfiguring African-American history," "the new literary vernacular," and other similarly weighty themes in scholarly publications like the Drama Review and Theatre Journal, this play, with its radical take on history and Joycean narrative disruptions, is the sort that has academics drooling down their corduroy jackets with excitement. Unfortunately, it often has the reverse effect on theater producers: Besides defying traditional notions of plot, character, and structure, the work calls for a sizeable cast of 11 actors, all of them black, and a facility on the part of the entire team to make sense of lines like "do in dip diddly did-did." more...

Babylon Heights
14 June 2006

Unlikely as it seems, the diminutive, eternally perky inhabitants of the Land of Oz are the focus of Irvine Welsh’s new play. But, true to form, Welsh is determined to show that we are not in Kansas any more.

Irvine Welsh does not seem like the sort of author interested in writing a play about Munchkins. From the Scottish writer’s 1993 debut novel Trainspotting, about the drug-addled existence of a gang of disaffected Edinburgh youths, to his forthcoming The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, concerning a womanising alcoholic’s journey towards self-knowledge, Welsh’s writing has earned him notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic as a chronicler of urban depravity. more...

Novel Gazing
7 June 2006

A shimmering play about the darkness of the past

Mark Twain is often quoted as having said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." Although the author probably never uttered these words, the sentiment holds true. Yet even taking into account the eccentricities of our local climate and the wildly premature hawking of tinsel and fake fir trees in department stores around town, June does seem like a strange month in which to stage a play about Christmas. Nevertheless, that's how Paula Vogel would have it. In the script notes for her 2003 drama, The Long Christmas Ride Home, the playwright specifies that "this play be produced in January, in October — any month except December." more...

Hatchet Job
31 May 2006

Making a mess of a mess of a play

Titus Andronicus is a terrible play. So terrible, in fact, that some commentators have suggested that the creative force behind Hamlet and King Lear never penned the drama at all, or that if Shakespeare was indeed responsible for the gruesome revenge tragedy, he wrote it as a joke. "It seems rather a heap of rubbish than a structure," said playwright Edward Ravenscroft in 1687. Scholar Harold Bloom called it "a blowup, an explosion of rancid irony well past the limits of parody" in his 1998 tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Even critic Kenneth Tynan, who quite admired Andronicus for its extremes, once teasingly referred to it as "the worst thing Marlowe ever wrote." more...

Rita Moreno Carries A Rep
31 May 2006

The diva shines in a refreshed Menagerie

Margaret Mitchell might have conceived the world's most famous portrayal of a Southern belle in her 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, but Tennessee Williams arguably created the nuttiest. Having grown up in St. Louis, Mo., under a bossy mother, whose idealized visions of the gallant South would later find their way into plays like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, Williams had firsthand experience of the archetype — and made ample use of it in his writing. (Even in later plays, such as 1975's Out Cry, the playwright's female characters betray Blanche DuBois–inspired touches.) Relying on the kindness of strangers or pinning their future happiness on the arrival of gentleman callers, the genteel ladies who ornament Williams' works like antique lace are as much overbearing prophets of doom as they are figments of a quaint and bygone era. more...

No Man's Land
24 May 2006

How a war plays out within individual lives — and entire nations

It's been more than a decade since the Bosnian War ended. But like all major human traumas, repercussions from the fighting among Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims — which left more than 100,000 people dead and close to 2 million displaced between 1992 and 1995 — will be felt for a long while. Two weeks ago, Bosnia's war crimes court launched its first genocide trial of 11 Serbs charged over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims. Meanwhile, reports about terrorist groups' current attempts to recruit disaffected, Bosnia-based "white Muslims" who might be able to blend more easily into western cities and execute attacks have put intelligence units throughout Europe and the U.S. on high alert.

The idea that war can touch entire nations as well as individuals far beyond the time and geography of any specific conflict enshrouds French playwright Fabrice Melquiot's drama Le Diable en Partage, receiving its American premiere under the title The Devil on All Sides. Melquiot's depiction of the ravages of the Bosnian War — as seen through the eyes of a Serbian military exile — presents a view of conflict that is as personal as it is universal. more...

Creature Discomforts
10 May 2006

Drawing an indistinct parallel between a 10th-century Islamic fable and modern politics

There are few graduates of MFA acting programs in this country who haven't, at some point during their education, been forced to spend a day at the zoo. Staring at animals in cages and then attempting to mimic them in front of classmates — who then try to decide whether they're in the company of a marmoset, a guinea fowl, or a sloth — has become so fundamental a component of an actor's training that you'd think the only roles available to theater studies graduates were in The Lion King or Cats. more...

I Am Woman
3 May 2006

Four plays redefine the word diva, for good and bad

Once upon a time, becoming a diva depended upon more than making it to the semifinals of Pop Idol or appearing on the cover of Hello! The original diva — as derived from the Latin term for goddess and meaning "a female opera star of rare talent" — had to possess both looks that could kill and a voice capable of bringing the dead back to life. Today, as celebrities like Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera have proved, ravishing beauty and a dazzling vocal range aren't prerequisites for entry into the ranks of superstardom. A Time magazine article from October 2002 defined the modern diva as "a rampaging female ego redeemed only in part by a lovely voice." I'd go even further by saying that achieving prima donna status requires little more than a great pair of tits, a tan, and a reasonably hard-working PR agent. more...

Paying For It
26 April 2006

Fury, injustice, humiliation — and humor — in Campo Santo's four-story program

The final scene in Denis Johnson's play Soul of a Whore featured a man in a clown suit hanging from a cross. In Haze, a new stage production woven together by Campo Santo from the letters, short stories, and novel excerpts of four authors, including Johnson, the man with the red nose and big, floppy shoes — fittingly for an Easter weekend world premiere — appears to have risen again. more...

Coupling
18 April 2006

How I landed onstage with my husband, and what I did about it

Reviewers, by definition, tend to shy away from audience participation opportunities. When the actors start scouting the stalls for potential victims in the middle of a show, you can identify the critics in the house by their compulsive twitching, near horizontal posture, and sudden, intense fascination with the contents of their playbills. Given an additional aversion to bright lights and greasepaint, it was not without trepidation that I found myself, along with my husband, on stage before an audience of about 50 for one and a half hours the other evening while a bunch of performers made up songs and sketches based on our love life. more...

No Kidding
12 April 2006

Flawed but funny, Eric Coble's play is brighter in idea than execution

Small children are at the heart of Eric Coble's Bright Ideas. They're so small, in fact, that they can't be seen. The absence of little people is quite remarkable when you consider that Coble's drama revolves around one middle-class American couple's effort to get their three-year-old into the right preschool, and that the majority of the scenes take place in environments like a playground, a classroom, and a full-blown kiddies' birthday party complete with balloons and a guy in a beaver costume. But that's precisely the point: This play about children has no children in it because it's not really about children at all. It's about a bunch of demented parents. more...

Swoosh Buckling
5 April 2006

How a Zorro clothed in pop culture makes us laugh and think

If I could find two words to link several otherwise very different productions I've seen over the past few weeks, they would be "Dick" and "Cheney." From The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee to Voyeurs de Venus, playwright Lydia Diamond's new drama about racial stereotyping (which I caught the other day in Chicago), the vice president's name has been mentioned numerous times lately — his little hunting faux pas being fair game for an easy laugh, especially among predominantly left-leaning theater audiences.

Plays that lay topical or contemporary references on thick tend to turn me off. For one thing, stuffing scripts with allusions to Starbucks, weapons of mass destruction, and text messaging might generate a few knowing nods or half-hearted titters, but the technique fails to connect with audiences in anything but the most superficial of ways. For another, productions too much entrenched in the daily news or the humdrum trappings of modern existence risk becoming dated. I mean, who's going to care about Cheney in 50 years' time? A work whose lifespan extends well beyond the lifespan of its author is one capable of uncovering the truths of its era, whether it uses a ducking stool or an electronic lie detector to do it. Shakespeare deserves Ben Jonson's famous compliment — "He was not of an age but for all time" — partly for this reason. more...

Spell Me
29 March 2006

The bee may be just a game, but in Putnam County we see a dark side, too

The dawn of the 21st century brought with it many preoccupations, from the War on Terror to Paris Hilton. Of all these national obsessions, the current fascination with spelling bees has to be one of the most revealing of the contemporary American psyche. The moldering schoolhouse tradition has inspired a cultural deluge of late, from Myla Goldberg's 2001 novel Bee Season (adapted into a movie last year, featuring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche) and the Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound to the forthcoming feature film Akeelah and the Bee, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, and James Maguire's nonfiction book American Bee, due out in May. The "Spellympics" even became the focus of a February 2003 episode of The Simpsons. more...

Don't Kick the Baby
22 March 2006

It's not their loss that causes a New York couple to disintegrate

People deal with pain in many ways. Some go to therapy; others turn to religion or drink. Then there are those — such as Carolyn Goldenhersch, the character at the center of Courtney Baron's new play, Morbidity & Mortality — who use their wounds as an excuse to behave in ways worthy of a daytime TV soap opera.

When Carolyn and her husband, Michael, two middle-class Manhattanites in their early 30s, lose their first child owing to medical complications soon after their daughter's birth, Carolyn moves in mysterious ways: She has an affair with, as she terms it within the first 30 seconds of the production, "the doctor who killed my baby." It's a pretty extreme form of escapism. While her copywriter husband mopes around the house, dusting off a little-used set of Sabbath candles in a pathetic though understandable attempt to find comfort in his Jewish heritage, Carolyn seduces Dr. Anil Patel, a young and inexperienced Southeast Asian doctor, who's attractive to the troubled woman both for what she perceives to be his exotic looks and background and for his inadvertent role in the death of her newborn. more...

The Organization Man
15 March 2006

Why is this tale of a criminally undervalued FBI agent told backward?

Denis Johnson's new play, Purvis, receiving its world premiere under the auspices of longtime Johnson collaborators Campo Santo, recounts episodes from the life -- and afterlife -- of one of the most fabled figures in the history of U.S. law enforcement, FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Purvis may not be as famous today as he was in the 1930s, when he earned folk hero status for the capture of high-profile hoodlums like bank robbers John Dillinger (famously apprehended by Purvis outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre in 1934), George "Baby Face" Nelson, and Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd. Nevertheless, Purvis' crime-defying résumé remains formidable: By the time of his resignation from the FBI in 1935, he had bagged more public enemies than any other agent in bureau history, a record that still stands. more...

Novel Gazing
8 March 2006

Self-consciousness steals the show in an adaptation of Daniel Handler's writing

There are few things that Stephen King hates more than adverbs. In his part-memoir, part-manual On Writing (2000), the best-selling author expresses his deep misgivings about that part of speech. King believes that a writer's need to qualify a sentence with a word describing how an action is played out stems from his fear that he might not be getting his point across. Adverbs, therefore, are synonymous with a lack of confidence, and must be avoided. Says King: "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

I wouldn't go so far as to prophesy damnation for those whose prose is littered with -ly words. (After all, I'd be banishing myself to Dante's Ninth Circle.) But having experienced 4 Adverbs, Word for Word's theatrical realization of four chapters from Adverbs, Daniel Handler's forthcoming novel about the complexities of modern relationships, I think King, self-important as he is, might have a point. more...

Less Than Kind
1 March 2006

A lack of directorial focus mars an otherwise promising Hamlet

In the wonderful Canadian television dramedy Slings and Arrows (the first season of which aired in the U.S. last year on the Sundance Channel), Geoffrey Tennant, a tortured and brilliant director played by Paul Gross, manages against all the odds to pull off a remarkable production of Hamlet. What makes Slings and Arrows compelling viewing isn't just watching Tennant overcome such obstacles as a conniving board member, a temperamental leading lady, and various personal demons on the way to theatrical glory. It's equally fascinating to see how the director gently coaxes his neophyte Hamlet -- a famous young movie actor cast more for his looks and box office allure than for his acting ability -- into delivering the goods. more...

Masterful
22 February 2006

A new production of a difficult Ibsen classic helps with the play's slippery heroine

What's up with Hilde Wangel? No matter how hard I try, I just can't get my head around Henrik Ibsen's most elusive female character. I mean, Nora from A Doll's House and Rosmersholm's Rebecca West have their peculiarities, but at least there's a modicum of logic to their actions. But "logic" is as dirty a word as "duty" to "forest bird" Hilde. (Strange bird is more like it.) From the moment she pitches up in the middle of the first act of The Master Builder -- the Norwegian bard's 1892 drama about a middle-aged architect's ill-fated attempt to stem the onrush of time -- babbling on excitedly about a palace in the sky or a kingdom in the air or some such to a man whom she met only once for about 10 minutes when she was 12, one cannot help but wonder if the mental hospital in her hometown of Lysangen wasn't short-staffed that day. more...

This And That
15 February 2006

Renewing the energy of the classic double act

My comedian friend, Will, and I were having lunch the other day when the subject of double acts came up. I'd been reading Two for the Show: Great 20th Century Comedy Teams, in which the author, Lonnie Burr, charts the rise and fall of the comedic duo from its roots in vaudeville through the black-and-white films of Laurel & Hardy to more recent partnerships like Cheech & Chong and the Smothers Brothers. I asked Will if he concurred with Burr's assertion that double acts have been in decline since the early 1980s. "Yeah, that may be so," he said between bites of bacon and cheese pancake slathered in syrup. He thought the whole straight man/funny man thing had gone out of style a while ago. "TV and movies kind of destroyed the traditional double act," he said. "Now all we have is buddy movies."

Until I experienced a performance of Daniel MacIvor's In on It, I was inclined to agree. I'd resigned myself to watching Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson flicks and thinking that the closest I'd ever get to witnessing a successful live comedy duo would be going to see Penn & Teller perform magic tricks at the Rio in Las Vegas. A depressing thought indeed. But MacIvor's play imbues the classic double act with renewed energy, exploiting the dynamic between two people so fully that we're left wondering if it's comedy we've been watching or quite the opposite. more...

Devise and Conquer
8 February 2006

A Mugwumpin double bill offers a lesson in not taking oneself too seriously

"Devised" is a dirty word for many theatergoers. The notion of performance as existing without a written text and a single author is by no means a new one: The reputations of such venerable institutions as London's Complicite, New York's Wooster Group, and the Parisian Théâtre du Soleil, as well as those of directors like Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson, and San Francisco's own Liebe Wetzel, have long rested upon an ability to conjure spellbinding theater out of everything from farmyard noises to the weather report. Yet for some reason, works woven together from fragments of mime, dance, or honking noises made while waving the flag of the Principality of Liechtenstein don't tend to attract mass audiences. more...

Little Bites
1 February 2006

An entertaining tasting menu of sweet and savory short plays

Last summer, at an SF Weekly party, I suggested to my editor that all the critics at the paper switch jobs for one week. "The art critic could review theater, the food critic could write about exhibitions, and I could try my hand at covering restaurants," I shouted above the din of a packed SOMA club. "It would be an interesting experience, don't you think?" I don't know whether the music was so loud that my boss didn't hear me or if she doubted that the experience would be of interest to anyone besides myself, but the conversation quickly turned to other topics.

I haven't brought the subject up again. But having recently tasted Sean Owens' "Odd by Nature" at the Exit Theatre, I now realize that I don't need to hijack Meredith Brody's column in order to write about fine dining. For Chef Owens' evening of short plays brings to mind the experience of supping at Gary Danko or the French Laundry -- and at a fraction of the calories and price. more...

Getting It On
25 January 2006

Is Sexual Perversity still relevant?

Lately everyone's been talking about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain -- and rightly so. With its slow-burning exploration of the clandestine love affair between two handsome ranch hands thrust together on a Wyoming mountainside while herding sheep one summer, the film confronts (among other things) conventions surrounding the depiction of cowboys on screen. Brokeback Mountain has garnered praise for intense performances from its two leading men (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) and for its smoldering, tight-lipped script, based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx.

More profound, though, is the film's ability to go beyond the time and place of its setting, the sexual orientation of its protagonists, and the specifics of its conception as an "examination of country homophobia in the land of the Great Pure Noble Cowboy" -- as Proulx puts it on her Web site -- to strike a universal chord. "It's a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it," wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "The two lovers here just happen to be men."

The connection between Lee's "gay cowboy movie" (as the film is popularly tagged) and David Mamet's resoundingly straight comedy about the experience of four young singles (two men and two women) in the dating pool, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, may not seem obvious. more...

Defanged
18 January 2006

Like Anne Rice's novels, Lestat employs metaphysical chest-beating at the expense of storytelling

Besides Madonna and John Travolta, there are few people in popular culture who know more about the power of reinvention than Anne Rice. Fans were understandably shocked when the mass-market fiction world's reigning queen of the damned made the announcement recently that she'll be supplanting a longtime literary interest in the undead with a series of novels about eternal life -- specifically the life of Jesus Christ. The author's instinct for transformation is also evident in her earlier work. Rice's best-selling series of "Vampire Chronicles" books might seem a little long in the tooth today, with its homoerotic overtones and Prada-wearing devils. Yet it arguably altered the way in which contemporary audiences think about the nature of evil. For instance, you won't catch any of Rice's fashion-conscious befanged ones hissing "I vant to suuuck your blood" before they go in for the kill. Neither do her creatures of the night fear crosses, garlic, or stakes. Instead, their greatest fear is themselves. more...

Don't Go Changin'
11 January 2006

Entertaining, yes, but Menopause doesn't go far enough in erasing taboos

Menopause. "The very word is a room-emptier," as editor Tina Brown once put it. Until recently, a woman's journey toward post-fertility was a subject as inappropriate for the dinner table as diarrhea or public execution. In her icebreaking 1992 book The Silent Passage, Gail Sheehy dubbed menopause "the last taboo," while in a 1997 article for the New York Times headlined "As Conversation Stopper, It Has Few Equals," Anna Quindlen discussed the widespread reluctance among women to talk about the natural process that affects every female over the age of 40. "I should know as much about menopause, from talking and listening, as I do about pregnancy," wrote Quindlen. "But I don't."

In a (hot) flash, things have changed. Having spent the 1960s heralding an era of unprecedented sexual, social, and economic freedoms for the female sex, baby boomers are taking the "pause" out of "menopause." A quick search on Amazon.com reveals dozens of books on the subject, from Healthy Transitions to Menopause for Dummies. Menopause-related Web sites, support organizations, and discussion groups abound. And if all this weren't enough, "the change" has become the subject of a musical-theater franchise phenomenon that's fanning out across the country faster than middle-age spread. more...

Smiles, Everyone
4 January 2006

Bringing terror back to the Cabaret

In the middle of Shotgun Players' Cabaret, the audience gets to sing along with one of the numbers from John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Masteroff's beloved musical. The production is so engrossing and the melody of this particular song so sweetly infectious that -- at least on the night I attended -- even the most inhibited and tone-deaf among us couldn't help but join in. Soon the theater was full of heads bobbing to the oom-pah-pah beat provided by the live five-piece band. It wasn't until the second verse, when I was belting out the lines "The branch on the linden is leafy and green/ The Rhine gives its gold to the sea./ But somewhere a glory awaits unseen/ Tomorrow belongs to me," that I realized, with horror and no small amount of embarrassment, that I was enthusiastically singing a Nazi torch song.

Cabaret has enjoyed immense popularity since its multiple Tony Award-winning original Broadway run in the late 1960s. A 1972 film based on the musical turned Liza Minnelli into an international star. The show has been revived twice on Broadway to great acclaim: The most recent production, which transferred to New York from London in 1998, is the third longest revival in Broadway musical history (after Oh! Calcutta and Chicago -- the latter Kander and Ebb's other hit). Cabaret's power isn't surprising. Besides the cracking songbook, the story of Clifford Bradshaw -- a young American writer who pitches up penniless in Weimar Berlin and quickly succumbs to the topsy-turvy hedonism of the local night life, not to mention the wiles of the ditsy British expat and cabaret performer Sally Bowles -- possesses the two main ingredients of a best-seller: sex and violence. As composer Kander once put it: "I guess it just proves, much to our delight, that corruption never goes out of fashion." more...

Clay Feet
28 December 2005

A new version of the homemade-monster legend feels unfinished

In the opening scene of Traveling Jewish Theatre's Dirt and Glory: Return of the Golem, three scientists wrestle with a complex problem: how best to animate an inanimate being. Having crunched numbers, performed chemical reactions, and stared at an oversize egg in a glass box for untold amounts of time, the biotechnologists finally substitute their test tubes and beakers for time lines and books, and look to history for answers. The past, however, is as muddy as the clay from which the golem -- one of the most important figures in Jewish folklore -- was created. When the scientists re-enact the classic version of the golem narrative in an attempt to understand the moral implications of their lab work, they soon discover that there are as many ways to look at a giant breathing lump of clay as there are outcomes to an experiment. more...

Christmas Present
21 December 2005

ACT's new Carol brings out the best and the worst in a favorite holiday tradition

When it comes to Christmas, people don't much care for innovation. Those averse to extracting pine needles from the carpet may opt for a plastic tree, and vegetarians invariably substitute a nut roast for the holiday ham, but that's about as far as it goes. Dec. 25 tends to inspire an unbridled obsession with all things traditional. Try confiscating your average yuletide reveler's stocking or suggesting that he refrain from eating and drinking himself into a stupor, and you'll be deemed a traitor to all humanity. Worse still, you might be branded a Scrooge. more...

Surreal Life
14 December 2005

A challenging, confusing gender-bender of a play strikes a brilliant note

Few critics have had anything particularly flattering to say about Pierre Marivaux's The False Servant (La Fausse Suivante) in the 280 or so years since La Comédie Italienne first performed the play in Paris on July 8, 1724. Despite being popular in its day, this twisty satire on the lengths people will go to make a fast buck, with a woman masquerading as a man for a protagonist, was chastised by commentators well into the 20th century both for the moral turpitude of its plot as well as for its perceived dramatic failings.

Today -- especially in the wake of acclaimed recent productions at New York's Classic Stage Company and the U.K.'s National Theatre -- it's easy to mock the prudish critics of yore for expressing shock at Marivaux's depiction of a female character as apparently unfeminine as the one at the center of The False Servant. After all, it's hardly as if the playwright invented the concept of cross-dressing onstage, and female-to-male disguise pops up elsewhere in his comedies -- in The Triumph of Love, for instance. Yet having made several aborted attempts over the past couple of days to articulate my feelings about Abydos Theater's new production (including a version that rambled on for some 500 words before I abandoned it in disgust), I am beginning to understand why commentators routinely condemned this comedy: It's just damn hard to write about. more...

Cracked Crystal
7 Deecmber 2005

Too much nostalgia and not enough spark spoil the comedian's autobiographical show

There comes a point in many a celebrity's career when he or she feels compelled to get out of the fast lane for a while and concentrate on something more wholesome. Some, like Paul Newman, make salad dressing; others, such as Madonna, write children's books. Then there are those who take it upon themselves to turn the events of their lives into solo theater productions. more...

Cirque Spectacular
30 November 2005

No heavy plot, just supernaturally breathtaking acrobatics

This week I was quite looking forward -- in a perverse kind of way -- to writing an essay about how much I dislike Cirque du Soleil. Ever since experiencing the Canadian company's work for the first time (Alegría, at London's Royal Albert Hall in the mid-1990s), the puritanical part of my warped little theater critic's brain has reacted violently against the transformation of circus -- that most Rabelaisian of arts -- into blockbuster, multinational business. The company, privately owned by its founder and CEO, Guy Laliberté (who may be the world's only billionaire combination stilt walker, accordion player, and fire eater), boasts five permanent productions in Las Vegas and Disney World, Orlando; six touring shows visiting cities as far-flung as Guadalajara, Mexico, and Osaka, Japan; and successful music, film, and merchandizing spinoffs.

It wasn't just the corporatization of the art form that turned me off, with its inflated ticket prices, in-your-face sponsorship deals, and VIP specials. It was also that after the initial excitement I felt at seeing a Cirque show -- after all, the troupe revolutionized circus in the 1980s by blending cabaret, street entertainment, and eccentric costumes -- the productions felt evermore formulaic. From the overblown visual aesthetics and pseudo-atmospheric Euro pop-style music to the half-baked attempts to impose story lines onto what is essentially abstract material to the fact that almost every production celebrates some positive, intangible idea like "joy," "life," or "fantasy," the magic, at least for me, rarely endured past the final somersault. more...

Smiles, Everyone
23 November 2005

Is it possible to balance a fairy-tale surface with the darkness lurking beneath?

There's nothing quite like a group of children singing their little hearts out onstage to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. From the orphans in Oliver! and Annie to The Sound of Music's pigtailed and lederhosen-wearing Von Trapps, it's often quite difficult to see past the "cute factor" associated with retainers, bruised kneecaps, and bowl haircuts. Try as they might, child actors usually fall into two categories: the ones who look like they took a wrong turn on the way to the playground and landed behind the proscenium by accident, and those who shine with the sort of self-possessed precociousness that makes you spend the entire performance alternately thinking "Boy, that kid can act!" and "I'd hate to meet his mother." Either way, it's difficult to immerse oneself in the action. more...

Myth Interpretation
9 November 2005

Two thieves, six actors, and one enduring Mission District legend

In the opening scene of Campo Santo's The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, Matt Stryker, a feckless newshound and Sam Spade wannabe, turns up at a Mission District dive on the prowl for a scoop. He's received an anonymous tip-off that "the celebrated Lucy One-Eye and Pancho Pistolas" -- a pair of small-time crooks with a bar-robbing habit -- might be planning a stickup at the joint that very night. At first, the saloon's ragtag assortment of regulars denies all knowledge of the criminals. But as the booze flows, the collective amnesia lifts. It turns out that each character, including Orville Spudman, the bleary-eyed ex-cop, and ballsy barkeep Hortense, has a theory to share about San Francisco's "Latino Bonnie & Clyde," whether about how the couple came to be or how Lucy lost an eye. more...

Dirty Business
2 November 2005

There's not much passion -- at least of the sexual variety -- in a corporate takeover

Let's talk about sex. There's a lot of it about in the theater -- onstage, I mean; I'm not talking about what goes on out back -- and it's rarely got anything to do with the dull stuff that occurs between two consenting adults. In the past year alone, for instance, Bay Area audiences have witnessed everything from a mild-mannered grade school teacher's dalliances with an 8-year-old student (Nicky Silver's Beautiful Child at Theatre Rhino) to a middle-aged architect's carnal knowledge of a farmyard animal (Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? at ACT). And that's to say nothing of the business between a bored undergraduate and the ghost of a deceased older man in Berkeley Rep's production of Jordan Harrison's Finn in the Underworld.

With just about every sexual taboo firmly booted into the wings, you may well ask what today's seen-it-and-maybe-even-done-it-all audiences might have to learn about love and lust from a woman whose idea of sexual deviance is as laughably ordinary as falling for her stepson. Yet when it comes to exploring the mechanics of infatuation in the theater, there are few stories that have captured the imagination of playwrights and directors more than Phaedra's. more...

Only Disconnect
26 October 2005

A long-simmering play about the ties that bind tells us nothing new

Human beings, especially in the West, are obsessed with making connections. There's something very life affirming, it seems, about being able to draw a line between two formerly isolated phenomena and call it a theory. As the old journalistic saying goes, "Find two examples of anything, and you've got a trend. And if you've got a trend, you've got a story." (In Eastern philosophy, contrastingly, oneness is a given, which may go some way toward explaining why pronouns are less important in Asian languages than they are in European ones. But I digress.)

Our culture has long articulated this deeply held belief in the power of connectivity. Michelangelo expressed the idea succinctly in the early 16th century when he painted Adam's finger almost touching God's on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; E.M. Forster made the drive for unity and mutual understanding one of urgency with the mantra "only connect" in his 1910 novel Howards End. In more recent times, works like Paul Thomas Anderson's movie Magnolia and Albert-László Barabási's book Linked have helped to enrich our contemporary understanding about the ties that bind individuals together in an age of dislocated communities and increasing isolation. more...

Where the Wild Things Are
19 October 2005

A haunting mix of Indonesian music and Shakespearean mystery

Gamelan is probably Indonesia's biggest export after coffee. But mention the word to many people and they think you're talking about a character in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter rather than one of the most haunting and influential types of music to come out of Asia. The sometimes-ethereal, sometimes-riotous bongs, whistles, and clangs that make up the typical gamelan ensemble have become increasingly familiar to Occidental ears over the last few decades. Such ensembles abound (the American Gamelan Institute lists more than a hundred groups in the U.S. alone), and the art form has inspired many Western artists, including minimalist composer Steve Reich, the Velvet Underground's John Cale, and theater/movie director Julie Taymor. more...

The Nuclear Option
12 October 2005

An original opera about the makers of the atomic bomb fails to ignite

At a recent press conference for Dr. Atomic, a new opera about the events leading up to the first nuclear test on July 16, 1945, at Los Alamos, N.M., I made the mistake of asking the chief architects of the work, director and librettist Peter Sellars and composer John Adams, about how they planned to stage the detonation scene. My question was followed by an uncomfortable silence during which Adams shuffled and looked down at his feet and Sellars smiled as one does at a small child describing his pet goldfish. Instead of answering my question directly, Sellars launched into an impassioned lecture about modern culture's unhealthy obsession with flashy special effects. Dr. Atomic, he said, would have less to do with the literal, physical explosion of the bomb than with its impact on the consciences of those who brought "The Gadget" into being. The most dramatic combustion, in other words, would be internal.

The closing beat of Dr. Atomic -- with its rows of prostrate Los Alamos residents bracing themselves against the noise and glare -- may more closely resemble one of New York artist Spencer Tunick's famous mass nude installations (though the New Mexicans are fully clothed) than the climax of Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, but the opera doesn't quite match up to Sellars' vision. I'm not suggesting that the crux should consist of strobe lights, simulated mushroom clouds, and coloratura sopranos wailing, panic-stricken, over an ostinato of crashing timpani and blaring brass. Still, the restrained ending, while full of ghostly-calm portentousness, left me feeling disconnected and underwhelmed. more...

Gemini Descending
5 October 2005

A coming-of-age comedy whose dramatic structure is less than engaging

The climax of Albert Innaurato's play Gemini doesn't occur where you'd expect to find it. It's not the part where a drunk, middle-aged, Irish-American divorcee threatens to throw herself off a telegraph pole. Nor is it the moment when a mixed-up Harvard undergraduate with a weight problem and an infatuation with Maria Callas tells his girlfriend he's gay, nor is it when he suddenly announces that he's running off to Boston to kick-start a new phase of his love life. The peak of Gemini occurs, rather less dramatically, at the point at which the aforementioned Harvard undergrad, in a particularly mixed-up moment on his 21st birthday, sprays his neighbors, friends, and relatives with birthday cake and lurches offstage in a huff. more...

Flirting with the Times
29 September 2005

Shaw's Victorian-era comedy speaks to modern gay issues

"There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years," wrote George Bernard Shaw in the preface to his early comedy The Philanderer (1893). "In men it is called doting, in plays dating. The more topical the play the more it dates. The Philanderer suffers from this complaint." Shaw penned those words in 1930. The world had undergone a radical transformation in the 37 years since he wrote the play, what with the First World War, growing industrialization and globalization, and shifting attitudes toward race and sex. As a result, it's no wonder that Shaw deemed his quirky, Victorian-era comedy, which deals with the constraints of contemporary marriage and divorce laws, to be "behind the times." more...

A Wise Approach
21 September 2005

Interpretive improvisation that brings life (and dance) to talk-show topics

Now and again, people ask me how I go about choosing what to see at the theater. Given the fact that there are around 350 companies in the Bay Area, with at least 100 productions to pick from in any given month, I am often so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options that I wish someone at Google would invent a logarithm to help people like me decide on a schedule. But things being as they are -- and don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic about the richness of the local theater scene -- my choices are based on a variety of different criteria. Many are honorable, some less so. more...

At the Fringe
14 September 2005

Chloe Veltman's roundup of the notable in this year's wacky stage fest

Go Kibbitz

In an interview with the New York Times in October 1936, Albert Einstein said, "I do not play any games. There is no time for it. When I get through work I don't want anything which requires the working of the mind." In Claudia Barr's chamber play Go Kibbitz, we watch history's most mad-haired scientist being as good as his word: Hanging out with a couple of his cronies in an apartment in wartime Berlin, Einstein kvetches about money and noshes on pickles while his companions, Emanuel and Edward Lasker, play a round of the ancient Chinese board game Go.

It's a congenial scene. The Laskers -- both expert gamers (Emanuel was a long-reigning world chess champion and his cousin Edward, an engineer by profession, wrote definitive books about chess and Go) -- play on amiably. Einstein, who doesn't know the first thing about Go, observes (or "kibbitzes") from the touchline. Unlike chess, the strategic heart of Go lies not in the middle of the square board, but at the corners and along the edges. It is this strategic fact about the game that underpins Barr's play: While the three men, later joined by Einstein's wife, Elsa, prattle on about everything from bridge to Bing Crosby, conflict flickers at the margins of their cozy world. more...

Wearing It Well
7 September 2005

CanStage's wordless version of The Overcoat explores the soul of a dreamer in a workaday world

Smack in the middle of CanStage's whirlwind theatrical adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat" (1842), all activity screeches to a sudden halt. Blinded by an intense golden light, actors playing the employees of an architecture firm stagger backward in awe, as if a UFO has just alighted in the wings, stage left. Orchestral music rises to a triumphal crescendo. The office workers hold their breath, as do we. After what seems like an eternity, a figure shuffles onstage. It isn't an alien, but it might as well be.

When the firm's most poorly dressed and widely despised employee, simply known as "The Man" in CanStage's production (Akaky Akakievich in Gogol's original), ditches the mangled old threadbare overcoat he's been wearing for years and turns up at the office wearing a stunning piece of haute couture, his co-workers are in shock. At first embarrassed but then delighted by his sudden popularity among colleagues who had previously ignored or teased him, The Man cavorts around the stage, spreading the tails of his smart new overcoat -- a regal creation made of the highest-quality purple fabric with an ostentatious fur collar -- like wings. He looks like a rare species of butterfly. more...

Political Puppets
24 August 2005

Napkins, chopsticks, and teapots bring a Japanese internment camp to life

Lunatique Fantastique's Executive Order 9066 is an unusual kind of concentration camp play. There are no verbatim testimonies from real-life prisoners to give the work a veneer of journalistic vérité; no graphic scenes of guard brutality to make viewers run out and buy every anti-war bumper sticker they can lay their hands on; no orphans, no songs about escaping into one's inner life, and no actors doing impersonations of political figures. In fact, there are no actors, in the traditional sense of the word, at all: The cast consists of a few napkins, a pair of chopsticks, a small suitcase, a teapot, a pair of old boots, and a motley assortment of other everyday objects. more...

Noses Off
17 August 2005

An economical Cyrano emphasizes the play's exuberant, gung-ho spirit

Edmond Rostand's 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac is a triumphant exercise in unmitigated hyperbole. The comedy is based -- extremely loosely -- on the life of Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, a 17th-century French dramatist and expert dueler. By all accounts, the model for Rostand's play was not a very gifted writer. And, although he seems to have been sensitive about his physical appearance, the original Cyrano did not have a humongous nose. Yet Rostand's hero is not only an intellectual rock star and a master swordsman, but he is also cursed with a colossal conk. more...

Howard's Bitter End
10 August 2005

A British playwright's violent, unsparing look at the aftermath of divorce

My friend Sophia, who used to date British playwright Howard Brenton's son, Sam, recently said of her then-boyfriend's father: "I never really understood how the man who made such excellent frittatas could write such brutal plays." Born in 1942, Brenton acquired a notorious reputation in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s with his aggressively political dramas exploring such themes as urban terrorism (Magnificence), local governmental corruption (Brassneck -- written in collaboration with David Hare), and class warfare (Weapons of Happiness). Though more domestic in character, the dramatist's 1979 play Sore Throats is as much of a punch to the gut as his other, more overtly political plays. As a result, it's hard, at first, to reconcile Last Planet Theatre's production of this anarchic, violent play centering on a broken marriage with Soph's image of the convivial middle-class dad prodding eggs about in a pan for his son and his son's girlfriend on a London Saturday morning. more...

View from the Top
3 August 2005

The rare story of a powerful female politician whose private life is secondary

In ABC's new fall drama series Commander-in-Chief, Geena Davis plays the United States' first female president. In contrast with NBC's political intrigue-heavy The West Wing, which features a male president in the shape of Martin Sheen, the new drama will focus as much on the protagonist's role as a wife and mother as on political issues. As Commander in Chief's creator and executive producer, Rod Lurie, put it in The Hollywood Reporter: "We're going to deal with East Wing stuff, residential stuff."

Why is it that depictions of powerful women on stage and screen so often focus on the tension between family and career? You wouldn't catch Ben Kingsley in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), or George C. Scott as the hotheaded military general George S. Patton in the 1970 movie that bears his name, fretting about picking the kids up from school or overcooking dinner. Yet powerful women, from Eva Perón to Jacqueline Kennedy, are constantly portrayed in pop culture in terms of the struggle to reconcile their personal and public lives. And all too often, the private lives of these female figureheads are seen to overshadow the public. more...

The Picnic Papers
27 July 2005

Cal Shakes' outdoor, sprawling Nicholas Nickleby moves fast enough to hold your attention

"To save the theater, the theater must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible," the legendary Italian actor Eleanora Duse (1858-1924) once proclaimed. Ms. Duse is widely credited for bringing a more understated, realistic acting style to the stage in comparison to many of her contemporaries (e.g., Sarah Bernhardt), but -- if the above outburst is anything to go by -- the rules that governed the actor's comportment onstage did not necessarily apply off it. At any rate, Ms. Duse thought that the conventional spectacle-obsessed theater of her day had lost its sincerity and freshness. So she called for a radical change: "We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner." more...

Soul Survivor
20 July 2005

A nostalgic song-and-dance show, in which music is one man's heartbeat

There's something weirdly Nick Hornby about Colman Domingo's autobiographical solo show, A Boy and His Soul. The flamboyant African-American Philadelphia native, with his penchant for ballet dancing and toned pectorals, might have as much in common with the pasty, cynical, list-making soccer louts that populate Hornby's novels as Gloria Gaynor has with Fatboy Slim. But Rob Gordon, the main character in Hornby's novel High Fidelity, would no doubt share Domingo's excitement at finding a crate of moth-eaten 45s and LPs in the basement of his childhood home.

The nostalgia-driven love affair with old vinyl is equally strong for the Domingos and Gordons of this world. It's just that they express that love differently: You would never catch a Hornby protagonist doing the Robot or the Hustle, grabbing his crotch Michael Jackson-style or falling to his knees like James Brown. But Domingo is so transported by the harmonies he rediscovers in that long-lost crate that he cannot help himself: Music -- and soul music in particular -- is more than simply the soundtrack to Domingo's life. It's part of his DNA. more...

Not Much To Say
13 July 2005

Snappy one-liners can't rescue the Mime Troupe's too-obvious political message

On Independence Day, Dolores Park was transformed into an open-air theater. Amid a sea of sun hats and sunburned holiday flesh, a young man -- wearing a tight green soccer sweater, a pair of enormous ski goggles, and jeans so low they exposed the cleft between his ass cheeks -- sat in the grass making soft whooping sounds while trying to catch invisible flies between his thumb and forefinger. After a while, he got up, fired a pretend arrow from an imaginary bow, and sat down again. A little way off, a grizzled old man who looked a bit like Saddam Hussein upon being dragged out of his spider hole, smoked a cigar and talked in a slurred voice. A red-faced guy in a baseball cap told Saddam to piss off. The old man responded by rolling around on his stomach, sputtering unintelligibly, and emitting smoke like a faulty car exhaust pipe. Planes flew loudly overhead; dogs barked; the J train rumbled by. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a group of people dressed in 1970s bell-bottoms and tie-dye shirts stood on a makeshift stage, ranting to anyone who'd listen about the ills of American intervention abroad. more...

Pièce de Résistance
6 July 2005

A one-man version of The Thousand and One Nights proves storytelling can be dangerous

Is there such a thing as an innocent story? Even the most apparently innocuous children's fairy tale or nursery rhyme is riddled with moral ambiguity, violence, and often death. Jack and Jill fall down the hill and crack their heads open; Little Red Riding Hood's sweet, bedridden granny becomes a wolf's lunch; and in one Native American legend, Coyote steals fire, but scorches a menagerieful of animals almost to death and pisses off the all-powerful guardians of those elusive flames -- the Fire Beings -- in the process. No doubt about it: Fairy tales are explosive things. And as performer Ron Campbell devastatingly demonstrates in The Thousandth Night, to tell them is to play with fire. more...

Cross-Dressed To Kill
29 June 2005

A pair of drag divas turn a Bette Davis cult classic into entertaining theater 

The Bette Davis vehicle Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte was widely panned when it appeared on movie screens in December 1964. Conceived as a sequel to the schlock hit What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which starred Davis and Joan Crawford, Charlotte boasted a bigger budget but received little praise. Writing in the New York Times the following March, reviewer Bosley Crowther called the film "grisly, pretentious, disgusting, and profoundly annoying." more...

A Role In The Hay
22 June 2005

Albee uses livestock and love to explore the nature of tragedy

Many reviews avoid mentioning it altogether; the ACT press release pussyfoots around it. But here at the Weekly there's no need for that, so I might as well come right out and tell you (if you don't know already) that Edward Albee's 2002 play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? -- currently receiving its West Coast premiere at ACT -- revolves around a 50-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect by the name of Martin who fucks goats. Well, one goat, to be precise. more...

Bringing Up Kate
15 June 2005

Mulgrew's Hepburn reveals the power and vulnerability of two extraordinary actresses

During her seven-year tenure as Kathryn Janeway, captain of the starship U.S.S. Voyager on Star Trek: Voyager, actor Kate Mulgrew was spirited and tough. She had to be: Leading a disgruntled crew back to Earth from the far reaches of the uncharted Delta Quadrant was a task of truly Vulcanic proportions. At the same time, there was great warmth in Mulgrew's portrayal. As the only female to have helmed a Star Trek vessel in the franchise's 39-year history, Mulgrew once commented on her character's unique complexity: "Beneath Capt. Janeway's extraordinary control runs a very deep vein of vulnerability and sensitivity. She is the quintessential woman of the future -- both commanding and discerning."

It is these exact same qualities that Mulgrew now brings to the role of Katharine Hepburn in Matthew Lombardo's play Tea at Five. Lombardo wrote his solo show about the four-time Oscar-winning screen goddess with Mulgrew in mind, having been inspired by her turn in an episode of Voyager. It's easy to see why Mulgrew would be a natural choice to personify the star of The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, and On Golden Pond. Beyond the no-nonsense command of her performance in Star Trek, which possesses the "devil may care" attitude of many of Hepburn's roles, Mulgrew, with her haughty cheekbones and wavy auburn hair, resembles Hepburn, too. more...

Rhythm Nation
8 June 2005

The passionate beat and sultry scene of Mambo overcome a weak script

The world-premiere production of The Mambo Kings probably incorporates more light bulbs and noble gas-filled tubes than all the casinos of downtown Las Vegas combined. The Havana and New York nightclubs in which much of the Broadway-bound musical's narrative and all of its rollicking dance numbers take place look like recent supernovas. While the Tropicana nightspot radiates an exotic aura, with its huge green leaves smattered with points of emerald light, there's enough gold wattage on the ritzy Palladium dance-hall set to satisfy King Midas. Elsewhere in the show, yellow washes daubed with violet give the sizable cast the glow of radiant health, and neon pulses from every corner. Even the performers are rigged like Christmas trees: In one sassy scene, red LEDs adorn the female dancers' chests and heads like lights on a radio tower. The electricity bill for this production must be enormous. more...

Heir Abhorrent
1 June 2005

This enthralling, confusing Macbeth posits childlessness as a source of murderousness

Sigmund Freud, the bewhiskered grand pooh-bah of psychoanalysis, often sought inspiration from literature. His remarks on the Oedipal scheme in Hamlet, his theoretical essay "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," and his psychobiographical essay "Dostoevsky and Parricide" attempted to understand the workings of the human mind through an exploration of literary figures. In "Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytical Work," Freud took on Macbeth in the same vein. The bulk of the essay focused on the couple's childlessness, blaming the Macbeths' ambition, bloodlust, and ultimate doom on the curse of being heirless. Then, in a sort of coda, Freud built on an idea first suggested by the scholar Ludwig Jekels: that Shakespeare's characters are often split into two people, and one can't be explained in full without the other. "Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime," wrote Freud of the psychotic Scots, "like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from the same prototype."

I have no idea whether director Rob Melrose conceived his version of Macbeth with this essay open on his nightstand, but Sigmund Freud's ghost haunts Cutting Ball Theater's production with far greater persistence than Banquo's. Before the play even begins, our eyes are greeted with an intensely psychological space. Set designer Michael Locher's trim, brightly lit, white performing area bordered by five white doors brings Being John Malkovich (or a padded cell) more readily to mind than a wind-swept and craggy Scottish moor. Here, doors are portals into Macbeth's mind, and barring perhaps one scene, the rendering pays little attention to what's going on in the outside world. more...

A Moon for the Miscast
18 May 2005

Eugene O'Neill's emotionally powerful drama lacks its misbegotten heroine

Director Edward Hall's new production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire recently opened at New York's Roundabout Theater Co. with Natasha Richardson in the role of Southern basket case -- sorry, belle -- Blanche DuBois and John C. Reilly as stage history's most prominent alpha dog, Stanley Kowalski. In an attempt to pry Stanley away, once and for all, from the character's longstanding association with Marlon Brando, who originated the role on Broadway in 1947, Hall cast against type. The critics varied in their responses to the show, but on one count they were nearly unanimous: Reilly, a wheyfaced, likable lunk of an actor, more naturally suited to playing parts like Roxie Hart's cuckolded husband Amos in the movie version of Chicago than the predatory male of Streetcar, has nothing of the raw power of Brando. "Reilly goes through the motions of sexual pleasuring, but he gives off hardly a whiff of sexuality," said The New Yorker's John Lahr. Ben Brantley of The New York Times concurred: "Mr. Reilly seems neither threatening nor -- how to put this? -- erotically overwhelming." more...

Giving and Getting
12 May 2005

A bold and passionate play whose soap-opera ending barely diminishes its power 

In perhaps the most startling moment of the Magic Theatre's production of The Rules of Charity, a young woman, Loretta (Arwen Anderson), who lives in a poky shoe-box apartment with her disabled father, Monty (Warren David Keith), sits on the kitchen table dangling her feet. Exuding the dreamy aura of the storybook mother-to-be, Loretta meditatively massages her potbelly. "I glow with goodness," she says, inhaling deeply as if practicing prenatal yoga. Then she pokes her stomach with a lit cigarette, deflating the balloon hidden under her shirt with an ear-cracking pop. more...

Lemmon
3 May 2005

Canonizing John Lennon on Broadway undermines everything the artist stood for

The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle said that biography is the only true history. But there comes a point at which the exercise of recounting the lives of certain cultural figureheads becomes largely pointless. The portraits of Shakespeare, Gandhi, and Princess Diana, for instance, have been retouched so many times over the years by the subjects' assorted biographers, hagiographers, and revisionists that they more closely resemble 5-year-old kids' finger paintings than sharply drawn representations of richly led lives.

John Lennon -- the Beatles' rhythm guitarist, singer, and songwriter who went on to lead a successful solo career and become a vocal proponent of the peace movement in the 1970s -- has been the focus of tireless rumination since being shot to death outside his New York home on Dec. 8, 1980. From the documentary Imagine: John Lennon and theater projects like One Night Only to Ray Coleman's 768-page book Lennon and Albert Goldman's hack-and-slash volume The Lives of John Lennon, biographers have sought to understand and explain a man who, during his short 40-year life, left an indelible impression on groups as disparate as screaming groupies, Berkeley peaceniks, and what used to be called the Immigration and Naturalization Service. more...

Don't Fence Me In
27 April 2005

One Window looks beautiful and makes us think, but its emotions fail to stick

Confinement is one of the most common themes for artistic exploration -- and one of the darkest. Over the centuries, artists have demonstrated an unmitigated horror of entrapment in works as diverse as Euripides' The Trojan Women, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (written and premiered during the French composer's years in a World War II prison camp), and British sculptor Rachel Whiteread's House.

In the current political and social climate, anti-imprisonment sentiments are running particularly high, no more so than on our local stages. From Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain's Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which explores the mistreatment of detainees at the U.S. military base, to Adam Bock's The Typographer's Dream, dealing with the way people feel trapped by their jobs, theatergoers are receiving the same message over and over again: Confinement -- no matter what form it takes -- is a bad thing.

It's liberating, then, to discover some members of the arts community taking a different point of view. more...

Spoken Word
20 April 2005

Shakespeare is hard to pull off even when you're not hyperventilating

In one of the most expressive moments of Peter Hall's As You Like It, Rosalind (Rebecca Hall) slips a gold chain from around her neck and offers it as a gift to Orlando (Dan Stevens). The young nobleman is so discombobulated by the girl's tender gesture that all the color drains from his face; Rosalind, for her part, turns as red as the dress she's wearing. Neither character utters a word, yet what passes between them is profoundly moving.

Over a career spanning more than 50 years, Sir Hall -- founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a former director of the U.K.'s National Theatre -- has been one of the most vocal guardians of Shakespearean verse. Railing against "naturalistic" performances of the Bard's plays, in which actors mumble their speeches, stress the wrong syllables, or (horror of horrors) ignore the ends of lines by running them together, the esteemed British director believes (and owes much of his reputation to this belief) that actors should pay strict attention to the rhythm and meter of the original poetry. Given Hall's obsession with Shakespeare's language, it's therefore somewhat surprising to discover that the most engaging parts of his production of As You Like It are the bits in which the actors stay silent. more...

Brothers in Charms
13 April 2005

Minnie's Boys is worth reviving, despite its original flop

Minnie's Boys, a musical comedy about the Marx Brothers' formative years, won't go down in the annals of Broadway history as one of the Great White Way's most resounding successes. When S.J. Perelman saw a performance of the original production at the Imperial Theater in New York in 1970, he was moved to dub the musical "a scalding descent into a tub of such merde as hasn't been seen outside a Catskill Summer camp show." Writing in the New York Times, the ill-humored humorist added, "Plot there was none, and laughter less." Groucho Marx himself, who -- by then an old man -- acted as a consultant to the show, reportedly said to the cast after opening night, "Well, kids, we're finally home -- and home is where I'm going. This is amateur night." The production shut down after just 60 performances, having lost $500,000.

Perhaps Perelman didn't go for Shelley Winters' turn as matriarch Minnie Marx; the serious Method actress was battling a virus during the run and allegedly had trouble keeping up with the many last-minute script changes. Perchance the famously obstreperous Groucho hadn't taken his meds. Or maybe the Broadway production just stunk. Who knows? But I can tell you this: I recently attended a performance of 42nd Street Moon's revival of Minnie's Boys and laughed so hard that by intermission, the muscles around my jaw had seized up. more...

Play as Weapon
6 April 2005

Discussing Guantánamo in terms of its theatrical merits is beside the point

In 1992, legendary Brazilian theater director, writer, and teacher Augusto Boal was elected to legislative office. Boal isn't the first or only stage artist to assume a position of political power in modern history: The playwright Václav Havel became president of what is now the Czech Republic in 1989, and in the U.K., actress Glenda Jackson has been a member of Parliament since 1992. But unlike the others, Boal's election to office came about almost by accident.

The force behind the "Theater of the Oppressed" -- a movement that searches for solutions to social problems facing individual communities (e.g., unemployment, inadequate health care, lack of housing, sexual violence, etc.) by letting actors and audience members interact directly -- Boal had spent many years in forced exile abroad. Under more favorable political conditions, the director returned to Rio in the late 1980s to develop his ideas further. But when a regime change led to a loss of support for his work, Boal threw his weight behind the Workers' Party in the 1992 elections. more...

Celestial Seasonings
30 March 2005

The human, political message of One Big Lie gets lost amid the divine fun. And we're glad.

Getting "god-fucked" -- as Liz Duffy Adams so eloquently puts it in her dark musical comedy One Big Lie -- is, despite the comedy part, no laughing matter. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, relationships between mortals and gods always turn out badly, at least for the mortals. Jupiter has his fun with Callisto; she gets transformed into a bear. Apollo pursues Daphne; to evade the god's clutches, she becomes a tree. So when, in One Big Lie, a particularly oversexed god by the name of Pow decides it's been too long since he last "tore off a hunk of mortal hoo-chah," we expect some poor, unsuspecting virgin's life to change forever. The most we can hope is that she gets turned into something a bit further up the food chain than a garden slug. more...

Terror and Justice
23 February 2005

The toned d