Colleges and Schools Try to Do More With LessNEW YORK TIMES

When San Francisco State University’s theater arts department commissioned Mark Jackson to adapt and direct a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” he came up with the unusual idea of creating a version of the tragedy for 14 actors, all cast in the role of Juliet. But because of budget cuts at the university, less money is available for items that affect the look of a production, like sets, lights and costumes. So to save on wardrobe, Mr. Jackson has had to readjust his core creative concept: now he has just eight actors for his new show, “Juliet.”

San Francisco State University is among several Bay Area academic institutions whose resources have been vastly reduced amid California’s fiscal crisis and the recession. A recent rehearsal there was one stop on a survey of artistic endeavors at local schools and universities. Taken as a whole, these works reveal that budget cuts have hardly dampened creative output. Even though the disastrous belt-tightening measures have put tremendous strain on teachers and students, these institutions are continuing to produce remarkable work.

San Francisco State University’s College of Creative Arts is typical of a performing arts institution grappling with reduced finances. Its operating budget has been cut by 15 percent over the last 18 months, and its staff has been thinned because of widespread furloughs, a hiring freeze and the dismissal of most of its temporary teaching staff, said Kurt Daw, dean of the College of Creative Arts.

Even Mr. Jackson, who graduated from San Francisco State in 1993, lost his salaried adjunct professor position in 2008 after a year and half in the job, and is now freelancing as a guest artist — at lower pay.

But you wouldn’t know it based on the quality of his work. Mr. Jackson’s 2008 productions of “Don Juan” (which he adapted from Molière and Pushkin) and Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” remain among the highlights of my theatergoing career. They have eclipsed many professional productions I’ve seen, including those directed by Mr. Jackson at spaces like the Aurora Theater and the Ashby Stage.

The way the young cast handled the physically demanding and grotesquely witty sex scenes in “Don Juan” was particularly engaging: one hilarious moment involved the title character dueling with an enemy while enjoying a romantic tryst. And the student actors brought a canny 21st-century sensibility to Ms. Treadwell’s 1920s agitprop drama. The actors sent up the overblown mannerisms of expressionist theater through their physically extreme approach to mundane tasks like washing the dishes. The dehumanizing effect of their actions was at once chilling and comical.

Word has clearly been getting out about the high quality of performances at San Francisco State, where tickets range from free to about $15. So far, in the 2009-10 academic year, the College of Creative Arts has had a 46 percent increase in attendance at its performances over the previous year. Recent productions of “Twelfth Night,” directed by William Peters, and “High Fidelity the Musical,” directed by Stephen Brookins, had capacity audiences.

The Bay Area’s public schools show similar artistic excellence. The San Francisco School of the Arts produced a memorable Christmas concert last December in the face of falling budgets and run-down premises, where classrooms often lack basic supplies.

Parents are helping to keep the high school afloat by donating an average of $300 per year per student, said the principal, Carmelo Sgarlato, who added that some of that money helps to pay for guest artists.

Like many school concerts, the Christmas program was rather long. But the school’s music ensembles gave a polished and spirited performance of a diverse range of work. I was especially moved by the chamber choral ensemble’s spectral approach to plainsong during the opening candlelit processional, and the vocal jazz ensemble’s take on the Sting song “Fragile,” complete with a silken-toned 14-year-old male soloist. The full house responded enthusiastically.

Dynamic performances and creatively inspiring rehearsals are equally evident in Bay Area institutions that don’t specialize in the arts. A recent dance show at Berkeley High School featured a variety of genres, including hip-hop and contemporary ballet. The dancers executed the steps with passion and an engaging sense of ensemble.

The state now provides less money per student, and the school is facing potential cuts in the next academic year that may adversely affect two art courses. But many students have met the arts education shortfall by taking private classes.

The challenging financial climate is certainly forcing educators in the Bay Area to be more resourceful about creating art in schools. What our educational institutions are able to achieve in a time of financial disarray makes me look forward to the dizzy heights of artistic excellence that will be possible in a more prosperous climate.

But I can’t help wishing that the money were around right now to enable artists like Mr. Jackson to channel their entire creative energy into making art. He — and discerning audiences — deserve to see his original vision of 14 Juliets, rather than making do with 8.

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Music Festivals Are Siblings, Invisibly BondedNEW YORK TIMES

The British-born electronic composers Kieran Hebden, who performs as Four Tet, and Natasha Barrett are both in San Francisco for concerts. Although Mr. Hebden is closely identified with the indie-pop scene, and Ms. Barrett with the contemporary classical world, they could easily be on the same bill. These musicians, creators of spiraling musique concrète-infused compositions that veer between sound art and trance, allow us to pick out tiny textural details in their work while basking in the music’s overall ambience.

But instead of appearing on the same program, the composers’ music is reaching audiences in entirely different settings. Mr. Hebden’s scheduled appearance on Friday at the Independent was part of the Noise Pop Festival, an annual weeklong indie-rock music celebration, ending on Monday, that attracts around 20,000 people to more than 50 events.

Meanwhile, two of Ms. Barrett’s works will be performed this coming Friday at the Other Minds Festival of New Music, a yearly forum for contemporary classical composers. Its public performance series, held this year from Thursday through Saturday at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, features three concerts of nine composers’ works. Attendance is expected to total around 1,300.

Despite the obvious differences of size, scope and demographics (Noise Pop’s audience skews about 20 years younger on average than that of Other Minds), the festivals have much in common. The crossover potential of artists like Mr. Hebden and Ms. Barrett is just one similarity. Since being founded in the same year, 1993, the festivals have helped to shape the Bay Area music scene.

Each grew organically out of one person’s vision. Noise Pop began life as a one-night stand produced by a local promoter, Kevin Arnold. He was a booker for a small Emeryville agency when a San Francisco club (now the Independent) asked him to find bands to fill an empty January date.

“The original Noise Pop Festival was just a ‘five bands for five dollars’ show,” Mr. Arnold said in an e-mail interview. “But I called it a festival and silk-screened a poster to make it seem more exciting. It was way more successful than anyone expected.” The Other Minds Festival emerged from the composer Charles Amirkhanian’s experience producing a similar event in Telluride, Colo., from 1988 to 1991. When financing for that festival ceased, Mr. Amirkhanian recreated it with new backing in the Bay Area. Combining a private composers’ symposium (held under the auspices of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, of which Mr. Amirkhanian was executive director) alongside three days of public concerts and discussions, the inaugural Other Minds Festival featured Meredith Monk, Conlon Nancarrow and Philip Glass.

From the beginning the two festivals have shared a desire to bring together local, national and international artists at different stages of their careers. This year’s Other Minds Festival features work by young composers like Gyan Riley and Carla Kihlstedt of the Bay Area and Lisa Bielawa from New York, with more established names, like the American composer Tom Johnson, who is based in Paris, and Jürg Frey of Switzerland.

“By having different generations involved, we have a much livelier discussion and interchange of ideas,” Mr. Amirkhanian said in an e-mail message. “We also relish the opportunity to expose Bay Area composers to guests from outside California and vice versa.”

The current Noise Pop Festival lineup has featured international bands, like We Were Promised Jetpacks from Scotland; household names, including Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band; and Bay Area up-and-comers like Deerhoof, Thao Nguyen and Glaciers. It also included the innovative partnership of the Bay Area indie-pop band the Dodos and the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a San Francisco instrumental ensemble.

Both festivals pride themselves on spotting emerging talent. Julia Wolfe, a co-founder of the Bang on a Can ensemble, got a boost from meeting Mr. Glass at the first Other Minds Festival. The next year he invited her to put out her first solo CD on his Point Music label.

The Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Oscar-winning composer of the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” score, appeared at the festival in 1995. And the Noise Pop Festival gave early exposure to well-known bands like the Flaming Lips, the White Stripes and Death Cab for Cutie.

Even the most balanced musical lineup isn’t enough to keep a festival bubbling for nearly two decades. Though serving different markets, the two festivals have devised remarkably similar strategies to enhance the standard concert fare. Each presents films and a visual arts component; broadcasts recorded music (Noise Pop offers podcasts, and Other Minds presents a weekly public radio show, “Music From Other Minds”); and runs live music events later in the year.

The Other Minds Festival presents fall concerts focusing on the music of past luminaries like Henry Cowell. Introduced in 2007, Noise Pop’s fall two-day Treasure Island Music Festival is fast becoming one of the most talked-about Bay Area music events, not least because of its rare location: an island in the middle of the bay.

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Amirkhanian have never met, but they really should; they could learn a great deal from each other. The Other Minds Festival could draw on the Noise Pop model to open up the insular world of contemporary classical music, while Noise Pop could look to Other Minds to build stronger bonds and unusual collaboration among artists. It may not be too long before the two festivals start seeing some audience and artistic overlap.

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Feasting on Memories, Serving the FutureNEW YORK TIMES

Perhaps more than any other work on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “The Brown Sisters” by Nicholas Nixon captures the essence of the institution’s 75th anniversary celebration. The work is a set of 35 photographic portraits, made annually since 1975, of the artist’s wife and her three siblings standing in the same order. The museum acquired the artwork in 2000, and, as of now, there is no official end date to this act of creation.

Just as the past and future fuse in Mr. Nixon’s photographs, so the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1935 as the San Francisco Museum of Art, is taking a Janus-like approach to its milestone year.

Arts organizations often use anniversaries as an excuse for self-flattery and financial opportunism. The recent 30th anniversary celebration for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — with its ritzy gala headlined by Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi Ballet and a no-holds-barred campaign to raise $60 million — threatened to eclipse the opening of the museum’s important anniversary show, one of the largest exhibitions in its history.

Closer to home, the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s 50th birthday last year focused more on its glorious past than its uncertain future. But SF MoMA has managed to keep in balance the elements necessary to celebrate a major milestone, including innovative programming, fund-raising and outreach.

With new multimedia tours, inventive collaborations with local and international artists and, most significantly, ambitious new expansion plans, the museum is intent on looking ahead. Two weeks ago, officials said they had raised $250 million in just six months, letting the museum double its endowment and put $150 million toward the building of a new wing and other development. These plans emphasize that this institution, unlike others that have been around for a while, is as proud of its present and future as it is of its innovative past.

To be sure, the yearlong celebration, a series of shows and events, offers plenty of backward looks. The freewheeling core exhibition, “The Anniversary Show,” which runs through Jan. 16, 2011, features more than 400 works from the museum’s permanent collection. And “Focus on Artists,” which runs through May 23, explores the museum’s past relationship with 18 influential artists, including Richard Serra, Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol.

Still, the historical “Anniversary Show” doesn’t come across as the typical self-aggrandizing archival survey. The museum may have been the first art institution to give a then-unknown Jackson Pollock his first solo museum show, in 1945, but the exhibition, which features his “Guardians of the Secret” (1943) among others, doesn’t play up such accolades.

At first glance, the second floor appears to resemble the schizophrenic found-object collages of local Mission School artists like Barry McGee (whose “Untitled,” an undulating montage of hundreds of framed drawings and photographs, is on display). Works by such well-known artists as Pollock, Alexander Calder, and Arshile Gorky share space with a selection of 1950s bright watercolors by teenage artists from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Galleries devoted to the museum’s collection of antique Olivetti typewriters and archival footage of its television programs from the early 1950s contrast glaringly with Jeff Koons’s glossy ceramic sculpture “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” and Penelope Umbrico’s “5,377,183 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09,” which consists of snapshots of sunsets culled from the Flickr image-sharing Web site.

Yet for all its eclecticism, the exhibition proffers an interesting, if slightly obscure, curatorial logic, inspired by the museum’s founding director, Grace McCann Morley. By highlighting Morley’s curatorial interests and borrowing her aesthetic, the show provides fascinating insight into the life of this formidable but little-remembered West Coast art trailblazer.

Morley, who died in 1985 at the age of 85, was the sort of curator who responded to the horrors of war by presenting works that engaged directly with the theme of conflict, like Picasso’s “Guernica,” as well as by shows that served as a lighthearted distraction, like the museum’s 1942 exhibition, “Sawdust and Spangles: Arts of the Circus.” With her broad-minded legacy in mind, the seemingly wacky curatorial approach behind “The Anniversary Show” makes more sense.

That eclecticism extends to the museum’s overall engagement with the here and now. It places a welcome emphasis on local culture by commissioning Bay Area artists from a wide variety of fields to engage with works in its collection. For example, a new audio tour features the San Francisco electronica duo, Loop!Station, responding to James Rosenquist’s “Leaky Ride for Dr. Leakey” (1983) with a song that is as bold and angular as Mr. Rosenquist’s Pop Art painting. Similarly, the museum’s “Muse” advertising campaign pairs local cultural luminaries like the couturier Colleen Quen and the author Robert Mailer Anderson with well-known works from the museum’s collection.

As the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s current efforts show, anniversaries can have a galvanizing effect on an institution and its community. But they must be approached with caution. These celebrations should do more than dwell on the past; they should take stock of the present. And to have something to celebrate 25, 50 or 75 years from now, they should always keep an eye on the future.

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Two Cities, One Lasting Cultural ExchangeNEW YORK TIMES

To many people who have never been to China, myself among them, San Francisco’s Chinatown — the oldest and one of the largest districts of its kind in North America — still largely represents Chinese culture, despite the popularity of films like Zhang Yimou’s “Hero”; international tours by the country’s top ballet, opera and circus companies; and the fame of Chinese composers like Tan Dun. Most Bay Area residents see beyond the usual representations of Chinese New Year parades, dragon dances and Ming Dynasty vases gathering dust behind glass in museums. But even so, when lipstick-colored pagodas, soggy dim sum and mass-produced, paw-waving porcelain cats come to represent an entire civilization, it’s time to take a step back and look beyond the Disneyland view.

For years organizations like the Chinese Culture Center and Chinese Historical Society of America have been working hard to change this image by demonstrating a sophisticated view of Chinese culture that challenges clichés and pushes us to think differently about the relationship between our two nations. And the conventional notions of Chinese culture will continue to be challenged as San Francisco begins Shanghai Celebration, a yearlong arts festival honoring the longstanding cultural connection between the two cities through concerts, films, exhibitions, discussions and other special events.

Inspired by the 30th anniversary of San Francisco’s sister-city relationship with Shanghai, as well as by the 2010 World Expo there, an event of this scope is a significant step forward.

Leading the effort is the exhibition “Shanghai: Art of the City,” opening on Friday at the Asian Art Museum. In contrast to that institution’s last major exhibition of Shanghai art in 1983, which focused strongly on traditional representations of Chinese heritage, the new show surveys the tension between the forces of outside influences and the push to stay loyal to Shanghai’s own visual culture. The work on display extends from 1850 (when Shanghai emerged as an international city as a result of clashes over trade between China and Britain) to the present day, and it reflects an artistic perspective that is at once intrinsically Chinese and more international in scope.

For instance, a bedroom suite from the 1920s demonstrates a strong European influence, with its Art Deco-inspired asymmetrical contours and use of bold geometric shapes. But the furniture reveals Chinese interests too: it is built out of a locally grown rosewood and inlaid with a typically Chinese bamboo design.

Works by the 20th-century Shanghai painter Liu Haisu suggest the tension between newer, more Western-influenced styles and time-honored Asian approaches. Mr. Liu’s ethereal “Blue-and-Green Landscape” (1978) depicts a traditional Chinese scene with craggy mountains rising out of the mist, and delicate trees in the foreground. It was created using the standard scroll and ink, but he eschewed longstanding ideas about Chinese composition by painting the trees in bright reds and greens rather than muted hues and by arranging the foliage in horizontal clusters instead of opting for the more typical zigzag pattern.

Other local arts organizations involved in Shanghai Celebration are taking similar approaches. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music will be cementing its ties with its Shanghai counterpart on Monday night with a concert featuring the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, who is based in San Francisco, as well as faculty members, students and alumni from both schools.

A graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Ms. Cao will perform new works composed by members of each institution. Instrumental pieces on the program include the United States premiere of “San,” a chamber music piece written for Western orchestral instruments that features Chinese elements like pitch-bending.

Later this month the Bay Area Chapter of the American Jewish Committee is mounting a photography exhibition, “The Jews in Modern China,” that will explore a little-known area of Shanghai’s heritage. It chronicles the lives of Jewish immigrants who came to Shanghai in the 1840s from countries as diverse as Russia and Iraq to avoid persecution.

In May the Chinese Culture Foundation is presenting a music festival in Chinatown that will combine traditional Shanghai opera with Asian-American jazz and, for an extra twist, Latin music.

Representations of Chinese culture in the Bay Area have come a long way since Chinese immigrants arrived in the middle of the 19th century to work the railroads and gold mines. The evolution in the understanding of Chinese culture in the Bay Area can be seen in, among other things, the changes that have taken place in the programming of art exhibitions and the developing relationships between arts organizations.

In previous decades the Chinese Culture Center imported works from China for display, like a 1979 exhibition of Chinese woodcuts; these days the organization is offering innovative exhibitions like last year’s “Present Tense” show, aimed at creating dialogue among the work of native Chinese, Chinese-American and non-Chinese artists.

“In the past, we were borrowing from museums in China for our exhibitions,” said Mabel Teng, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center. “Now the two cultures have merged, and the art reflects the old and new.”

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Conservatory Theater Still Seeks Its OvationNEW YORK TIMES

Like the thrill of settling into a plush seat as the curtain rises on a highly anticipated production, there’s the excitement over the announcement every March of the American Conservatory Theater’s coming season, with its promises of innovatively staged classic plays, bold new works by powerful writers and acclaimed productions imported from beyond the Bay Area.

Yet every year my expectations are dashed. More often than not, I feel emotionally disconnected from what’s on the American Conservatory Theater’s stage. (Engrossing productions brought in from the outside, like John Doyle’s Broadway staging of “Sweeney Todd,” are an exception.) This is troubling. A bustling cultural hub like San Francisco deserves a jewel of a flagship theater company, one that, like the San Francisco Ballet, attracts the attention of the broader arts world.

The company’s current production of “Phèdre,” Racine’s tragedy about a Grecian queen’s illicit passions, underscores the problem. On paper, the play looks promising: it’s the world premiere adaptation by the British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker featuring actors from the acclaimed Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.

But Ms. Wertenbaker’s text, which retains all of the stiffness of Racine’s original but little of its lyricism, manages to excise much of the story’s poetic intensity and savage emotion. With a declamatory acting style and ponderous blocking, the work comes across as an intellectual exercise rather than a theatrical experience that engages both the heart and mind.

The same criticism could be leveled at many of the company’s recent productions, like “After the War” and “Happy End.” It took risks in staging these works, which all involved large casts and, in the case of “After the War,” significant development time. Although the productions featured impressive sets and lighting, the efforts did not pay off because of cumbersome mise-en-scènes and emotional flatness.

Founded in 1965 by the director William Ball in Pittsburgh before relocating to San Francisco a year later, the American Conservatory Theater became widely known for its expansive core acting company and dedication to training. During its first San Francisco season, the company staged 27 productions in two theaters to critical acclaim. Actors were sometimes cast in two productions at once and could occasionally be seen running from building to building between scenes.

The company’s fortunes have vacillated since. Initially, its work was well received; in 1979 the theater won a Tony Award for theatrical achievement and excellence in repertory performance. But eventually the resources dried up, the acting company faded out, and the theater’s reputation waned.

When the current artistic director, Carey Perloff, took over in 1992, she reinstated a small core acting company, expanded the educational offerings and earned praise, in particular, for her productions of Tom Stoppard plays. But other shows, like Mark Lamos’s deliberately shocking take on Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” turned many people off. These days the smaller Berkeley Repertory Theater is doing more innovative work and gaining national attention.

Box office figures suggest the audience’s growing discontent with the American Conservatory Theater’s output. According to company officials, in the past five years subscriptions have fallen to 14,939, from 17,574.

But the organization is working hard to attract audiences. As part of the recent centennial celebration of the theater’s historic auditorium, it instituted a two-day $19.10 ticket sale.

One former subscriber I talked to said she canceled her subscription after seven years partly because she found many of the productions too avant-garde. No one could accuse Ms. Perloff of pandering to the masses. Despite bringing in stars like Olympia Dukakis (who is starring in “Vigil,” starting in late March), Ms. Perloff’s programming choices are often inspiringly risky — especially in the company’s grand home theater, which is ill suited to difficult, small-scale works.

This season features a formidable three world premieres: a dance-theater collaboration with the San Francisco Ballet titled “The Tosca Project”; a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” directed by Mr. Doyle; and “Phèdre.” The theater has eight playwrights under commission, including a local rising star, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb.

Meanwhile, the organization continues to grow its core acting company — a remarkable investment in Bay Area talent — and remains committed to importing foreign productions.

Balancing a quest for innovation with the realities of producing theater today is undeniably tough. But the American Conservatory Theater is making moves in the right direction. The company is searching for a more convivial second space to nurture new work. (Its current alternate site, Zeum, feels like a sterile lecture hall.) The theater is also sending its students out to perform in the community.

The future success of the American Conservatory Theater may also depend on the leadership’s ability to understand its patrons better. “Our audience over time has grown to hunger for challenging material,” Ms. Perloff said in an interview. “If you expose people to great storytelling told beautifully, they will respond to it even if they spend all day on Facebook.”

What Ms. Perloff perhaps fails to recognize is that as much as theatergoers like to be intellectually stimulated, first and foremost they want to be moved, whether to tears or laughter. Finding an additional space and reaching out to the community are both laudable steps. But the effort is wasted if the company fails to connect with the audience at the visceral level when the curtain rises each night.

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Nonfiction Filmmakers Still Tell Rich StoriesNEW YORK TIMES

The Bay Area has long been known as a center for documentary filmmaking. Many local documentarians have won or been nominated for Academy Awards, including Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) and Robert Epstein (“The Times of Harvey Milk”). The area is home to the Independent Television Service, a major financer of documentary films, as well as some of the most respected film schools in the country.

But the success of local documentaries can’t be attributed to education and financing alone. The region itself seems especially tight-knit and supportive.

“The Bay Area is a very good place to be a documentarian because of the cooperative nature of the community,” said Janis Plotkin, a programmer for the Mill Valley Film Festival. “For a small city, San Francisco has amazingly supportive resources for independent filmmakers.”

But fundamentally, the success has to do with storytelling. Some local filmmakers, like Christian Bruno, are pushing the limits of narrative. Mr. Bruno’s jewel-like film “Strand: A Natural History of Cinema” mines the history of the region’s once-opulent movie palaces in a lyrical manner that makes it feel like an archaeological dig. He burrows through time with the aid of diverse interviews, archival footage and contemporary scenes shot on 16-millimeter film to convey the idea of cinemas as sites of social interaction and imaginative exploration.

But as three compelling new homegrown documentaries show, local filmmakers are also using more traditional storytelling techniques, like character-driven narratives with a strong three-act structure, in powerful ways. The Talbot Players’ “Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders” series; Katherine Bruens’s “Corner Store”; and David Silberberg’s “Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” tell engrossing tales by focusing on key characters.

The tried-and-true storytelling formulas clearly work. The slow-burning “Corner Store” follows the journey of Yousef Elhaj, owner of a Mission district corner deli, as he travels from San Francisco to his native Palestinian territories to be reunited with his family, which he hasn’t seen in 10 years. The film provides a moving insight into one man’s struggle to reconcile the kinship he feels for his adopted Bay Area home with his Middle Eastern roots.

“Corner Store,” which will be screened at next month’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival, trundles along languorously, with atmospheric shots of bustling Palestinian marketplaces and San Francisco streets.

Despite its meandering pace, the film is engaging because of Ms. Bruens’s deep, meditative portrait of the protagonist and the straightforward narrative arc. Moving from San Francisco to the Palestinian territories and back to San Francisco, the three-part structure makes viewers feel as if they were traveling alongside Mr. Elhaj.

The layout of “Sound Tracks” is equally pronounced. The documentary, which begins on Monday night on most PBS stations, comprises three distinct and fascinating narratives about the intersection of music, travel and politics. The segments provide fresh angles on relatively well-known subjects by offering miniature character studies.

The first story explores the genesis of the hit Russian pop song “A Man Like Putin,” a peppy piece of musical propaganda that has grown to be something of a calling card for Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. The segment focuses on the song’s composer, Alexander Yelin, a rock music dissident turned promoter.

The next section delves into the legacy of the Nigerian music pioneer and political activist Fela Kuti. It centers on Mr. Kuti’s youngest son, Seun, who stepped forward as a teenager to lead his father’s band after Mr. Kuti’s death in 1997.

The third segment follows the Kazakhstani virtuoso violinist Marat Bisengaliev as he tries to recoup the battered reputation of his country in the wake of “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s blockbuster 2006 mockumentary that didn’t do much for Kazakhstan’s global reputation.

“Sound Tracks” makes a virtue of its three-part structure; the individual narratives come together cumulatively to make its resounding overall point: music is a powerful agent of community building and social change.

Meanwhile, Mr. Silberberg’s engrossing documentary “Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” explores the life and work of Mr. Blank, a Bay Area artist and filmmaker best known for building art cars (vehicles festooned with different objects) and documenting that scene. The film, also showing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, not only creates a vivid, fond portrait of the eccentric Mr. Blank (a man who seems to love chickens more than people), but also provides a profound meditation on the pros and cons of rugged individualism. Although the film moves back and forth through time, it basically unfolds in three stages: Mr. Blank’s youth, his growing interest in art cars and his more recent activities.

All three films palpably demonstrate the power of traditional storytelling. But there seems to be a push on the local documentary scene for a more innovative approach, like Mr. Bruno’s, as well.

“There are many types of documentaries, and the form is not limited exclusively to stories driven by characters,” Michele Turnure-Salleo, the San Francisco Film Society’s director of filmmaker services, said in an e-mail message. “A compelling subject or inquiry can form the backbone of a nonfiction film, and funders are supporting work that extends beyond traditional character-driven storytelling.”

As long as the rich filmmaking community and resources continue in the Bay Area — and as long as the documentarians put their narratives front and center — the combination of experimental and trusted approaches should further the success.

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Broad Minds Encourage Broad LaughterNEW YORK TIMES

It’s often been said that stand-up comedy is the most subjective art form. What’s side-splitting to one person is seditious to the next. Yet while the evolving dynamics of the Bay Area entertainment scene have broadened traditional definitions of what constitutes comedy, some of the audience still takes a narrow view of what’s funny and what isn’t.

With its kaleidoscopic lineup, the SF Sketchfest comedy festival, which opened on Thursday, should help audiences understand that there are many paths to humor beyond the traditional setup-and-punch-line-centric patter. As in previous years, the program, which features some 200 artists of local, national and international prominence, stretches standard notions to their limits.

The festival includes the embattled talk show host Conan O’Brien (Sunday); impressionists, among them James Adomian (next Sunday); improv and sketch comedy troupes, like the San Francisco-based Kasper Hauser (Tuesday and Jan. 30); absurdist comedians like Animosity Pierre (Tuesday and Thursday); sitcom actors like Scott Adsit of “30 Rock” (Jan. 30); solo theater artists, including Sara Benincasa (Saturday); and even a comedic jazz outfit, the Be-Bop Heroin Hour (Jan. 29 and 30). The festival perhaps went a step too far by inviting the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, a musician whose plaintive ballads aren’t generally known for their laughter-inducing qualities.

Cultivating broad-mindedness toward these many forms of comedy is important. If audiences were open to a wider range of humorous performance, the demand for live comedy might grow. This would in turn lead to the rejuvenation of the once-lauded but sadly long-dormant San Francisco comedy scene, an arena that helped forge the careers of Phyllis Diller, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams.

If audiences were willing to expand their definitions of comedy, they might relax and enjoy themselves rather than fret about how what they’re seeing onstage doesn’t conform to their expectations. Their heightened pleasure would doubtless have an overall positive effect on the community. In these dark times we can use all the opportunities for laughter we can get.

Personal taste notwithstanding, the negative reaction to a recent show I attended suggests that some Bay Area audience members may not have caught up with the changes that have taken place on the local comedy scene over the past decade or so. Or perhaps they chose to ignore the words “unconventional” and “groundbreaking” on the flier advertising the “Not Your Normal New Year’s Eve” comedy night at the Herbst Theater.

“The worst comedy lineup ever, full of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness musings and pathetic revelations,” wrote one reviewer on the ticketing site Goldstar.com. Another wrote, “We only stayed because our car was not ready to pick us up.” Contrastingly, I was thoroughly entertained.

The comedy scene has transformed partly because of the shuttering of several Bay Area comedy clubs in the 1990s and early 2000s, which forced artists to develop their work in other settings, like theaters and the Internet. While many local stand-up acts once focused on observational or autobiographical material, these days the scene is much more fragmented.

But there are still plenty of observational comics around. Of those who performed on New Year’s Eve, many of whom are also on the SF Sketchfest roster, Brent Weinbach most closely reflects that tradition.

But the other acts demonstrated radically different approaches. Will Franken, named “Best Alternative to Psychedelic Drugs” by The San Francisco Bay Guardian, offers an erudite brand of stream-of-consciousness comedy that encompasses bits like a poetry slam match between George Milton reciting the opening of “Paradise Lost” and a poetically challenged modern teenager doing some rap.

Mary Van Note’s humor hinges on misplaced sexual advances; this comedian is best known for her 10-part online video series about trying to woo Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Meanwhile, the surreal theatrics of We Are Nudes balance the over-the-top physicality of a former Cirque du Soleil performer, John Gilkey, against the awkward introversion of his comedic sidekicks, Donny Divanian and Alec Jones-Trujillo. The group’s act reaches its zenith with a protracted tirade from a supposed audience member about the performers’ lack of comedic skill.

Of course, the many people in the Herbst audience who responded unfavorably to the entertainment may simply not share my sense of humor. It may be that people need to get out and see a diverse range of live comedy. But the incentive to do so lies partly elsewhere.

While the SF Sketchfest helps to expand an understanding of the art of comedy, local promoters and clubs need to play a role year-round too. Bay Area audiences are by and large enlightened. If they shy away from the stranger side of comedy, it may also be because of the local industry’s narrow approach to programming and reluctance to book any act that steps beyond conventional realms. The Bay Area’s eclectic landscape should operate along the same lines as many an effective comic act: with a good punch line set up to defy expectations.

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When a Word’s Look Counted as Much as Its MeaningNEW YORK TIMES

Typography is ubiquitous. A world without letters, numerals and symbols designed by skillful font makers would consist of boring billboards, pages and street signs. Yet unlike other forms of applied design, typography remains an obscure and little-understood field. When buildings are constructed, they make news. A new font barely registers in the public consciousness.

In the 1980s and ’90s, however, the Bay Area was at the forefront of a movement to change this reality. The work of the graphic design company Emigre, based in Berkeley, is the focus of an exhibition of artwork and artifacts at Gallery 16 in San Francisco. An accompanying book, “Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue — Celebrating 25 Years in Graphic Design,” further stresses the efforts of a group of graphic designers (mainly locals) to elevate design in general — and typography in particular — to an art form.

But over the years, frictions between the forces of art and commerce have hindered Emigre’s cause. In today’s environment, where fonts can be created and replicated by anyone with a personal computer (United States copyright law does not extend protection to typeface design), the idea that a font can be an objet d’art in its own right seems like a utopian reverie.

“Emigre was born out of a ‘digital dream,’ ” the graphic designer Erik Adigard, based in Sausalito, wrote in an e-mail message. “But it was short-lived. Emigre is history, even if still somewhat of a cult.”

Yet the marriage between a font’s beauty of form and the context in which it is employed is what makes the written word jump off the page. In striving to demonstrate this truth, Emigre deserves our attention.

Founded in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, Emigre was influential on the graphic design scene in the ’80s and ’90s. This was partly because of the company’s magazine, also called Emigre. First a quarterly and later a seminannual, it featured innovative typefaces and posters; eye-catching photography; offbeat profiles of writers and artists; and wide-ranging critical essays on subjects like the Bauhaus movement and the legibility of fonts. Although the magazine no longer exists, Emigre still operates as a font foundry; its library houses more than 300 typefaces.

From 1984 to 2005, Emigre magazine achieved cult status. With their unconventional and striking use of fonts, publications like Wired and McSweeney’s, both based in San Francisco, owe it a debt. In 2006 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the entire Emigre magazine canon for its permanent design collection, and put the magazines on display for a year.

“For me, like many others galvanized by graphic design during Emigre’s heyday, the magazine was the most consistently interesting design publication produced anywhere by anyone,” the design journalist Rick Poynor wrote in 2005.

Emigre chronicled a revolution in typography that went hand in hand with the birth of the personal computer, which brought new methods for creating type. (It’s perhaps no accident that Emigre and the Macintosh computer made their debuts in the same year.) The transformation also ran in tandem with the rise of postmodern theories then popular in art schools concerning the aesthetics of utilitarian design.

Such ideas helped to free font design from the constraints of functionality. Possibly for the first time since the elaborate but often illegible opening capital letters of medieval illuminated manuscripts, font designers didn’t have to worry about readability and reproducibility.

Going beyond the no-nonsense look of archetypal typeface families like Times and Helvetica, designers in Emigre’s orbit, like John Hersey, Joachim Müller-Lancé and Ms. Licko, saw font design as a form of creative expression. With its thick-contoured, cartoonish forms, Mr. Hersey’s Blockhead typeface won’t be used for street signs anytime soon, but the fonts are eye-catching. The same could be said of Ms. Licko’s aggressive and angular Oblong typeface.

For all the theoretical debate and creative output inspired by Emigre, the font-as-art movement seems to be over. The commercial interests in the fast-paced digital age have reduced typeface design to cookie-cutter templates and formulas. Unbridled innovation has largely been supplanted by nostalgic exhibitions and commemorative books.

Emigre magazine’s demise may be symptomatic of the fact that it was primarily a showcase for the company’s fonts. Its journalistic endeavors often supported the founders’ business goals, as is evidenced by its numerous articles denouncing designer-unfriendly typeface copyright laws. But Griff Williams, owner and director of Gallery 16, wrote in an e-mail message: “For me, the lesson learned from Emigre is that business and art can coexist. The typeface business was a guise to deliver content in profoundly interesting ways. Not the other way around.”

Mr. VanderLans was grappling with the tension between art and commerce while publishing his magazine. “The entrepreneurial element, which is crucial to the existence of any subculture, avant-garde or underground work, is largely overlooked when assessing the work, because to most people, whenever the commercial aspects become prominent, it somehow taints the work and renders it less pure or authentic,” he wrote in Emigre in 1995. “Yet it’s difficult to imagine how any movement can operate without a concentrated effort to make money.”

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Asking Stars Not Just to Play, but Also to StayNEW YORK TIMES

The relationship between the rock stars of classical music and the orchestras and audiences that interact with them can generally be characterized as a series of memorable one-night stands. When the Lang Langs, Joshua Bells and Renée Flemings of the world arrive in town for an evening or two, tickets fly, and standing ovations shake concert halls. But no sooner has the applause died down than the artists are on a plane to the next city.

Lately, however, orchestras across the country have been looking for ways to deepen their relationships with top-tier musicians. Artist residencies, ranging from one week to two years, are now de rigueur. The baritone Thomas Hampson and the composer Magnus Lindberg have lengthy residencies with the New York Philharmonic; the Chicago Symphony recently announced the appointment of the Bay Area composer Mason Bates as a composer in residence; and last year the Los Angeles Philharmonic created the position of creative chair for another Bay Area composer, John Adams.

In a similar vein, the Berkeley Symphony recently hired the composer Gabriela Lena Frank as its creative adviser. She will help shape programming and guide outreach projects.

Now the San Francisco Symphony’s new Project San Francisco aims to enhance the audience’s appreciation of classical music through a pair of residency programs with the composer George Benjamin (Thursday through Jan. 16) and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma (Jan. 20 to 26). The program will include performances, educational activities and community events.

But whether the orchestra succeeds in enriching the experience of San Francisco’s rather conservative classical music audiences will depend on how much it can realistically hope to derive from the artists’ intensive yet still truncated sojourns. One thing is sure: the Symphony intends to make the most of its visiting artists’ time and energy.

In addition to conducting the San Francisco Symphony, Mr. Benjamin will play the piano in a chamber music concert alongside Symphony musicians; give a series of pre- and post-concert talks; take part in a colloquium with San Francisco Youth Symphony players; and mentor students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Mr. Ma (also recently named creative consultant to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) will give orchestral and chamber music concerts, as well as a recital with the pianist Emanuel Ax. He will coach two student chamber music ensembles as well.

Building on the success of similar pilot residencies with the Chinese pianist Lang Lang and the respected though not widely known Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, the orchestra is taking an approach to Project San Francisco that is artistically and fiscally canny. Ms. Gubaidulina’s two-week residency last February helped to familiarize Bay Area concertgoers with her work; the performance I heard, featuring the North American premiere of her “Violin Concerto No. 2,” was well attended. Meanwhile, Mr. Lang’s high profile most likely helped to offset the financial risk of devoting so many concerts to a relatively unknown composer.

The Symphony seems to be repeating this formula with the combination of Mr. Ma, a household name, and Mr. Benjamin, who is not well known to American audiences despite having a more than 20-year relationship with the San Francisco Symphony. Mr. Benjamin’s local recognition is likely to grow this June when he serves as music director of the Ojai Music Festival.

It is worth noting that tickets for Mr. Benjamin’s concerts are not being bought as swiftly as those for bigger-name artists; the same was true for Ms. Gubaidulina.

“Yo-Yo Ma’s performances are selling strongly, with very limited availability at the present moment, and George’s residency continues to sell, and we expect more last-minute sales as people learn about the concerts,” said Louisa Spier, a Symphony spokeswoman.

(In March the Symphony will announce next season’s residencies, the first of which will take place before the end of the year.)

Orchestral artist residencies are a relatively new phenomenon. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra broke ground in this area, starting in 2004, with its appointment of diverse artists like the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the conductor Roberto Abbado and Nicholas McGegan, music director of the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

The San Francisco Symphony also played a role through its partnership with Mr. Adams, who served as resident composer from 1982 to 1985. “More typically, these composers in residence amounted to an ephemeral phenomenon,” said Joseph Horowitz, a classical music historian. “But Adams really became integral to the orchestra.”

While residencies seem to be fashionable, and are a positive step for orchestras, maximizing their productivity is hard. The amount of time an artist works with an orchestra and the depth of the engagement are probably the two biggest factors in determining the success of these residencies. The San Francisco Symphony is certainly capitalizing on the time it has with Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Ma. But packing so much activity into three weeks may end up exhausting both artists and audiences.

It takes time for concertgoers to familiarize themselves with an artist’s work. Ten days may not be enough to persuade ticket buyers to take a chance on Mr. Benjamin. Although logistically challenging, a slow-burning residency lasting several months or longer, like the one now under way between Mr. Hampson and the New York Philharmonic, may ultimately be more fruitful than the fast-paced model favored by the San Francisco Symphony.

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Guerrillas of Agitprop Fight to Stay RelevantNEW YORK TIMES

As part of its 50th-anniversary celebrations, the San Francisco Mime Troupe recently led its first “Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Consumption” street-theater workshop. That afternoon-long event culminated in a performance outside the flagship Old Navy store on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

Pretending to be sales assistants and shoppers, troupe members led the workshop participants underneath a gaudy “Time to Shop” sign and then mechanically exchanged fake dollars for bits of cardboard with the word “stuff” scrawled on them. At the end of the sketch, counterfeit coins flew, as the performers engaged in a frenzied stampede for last-minute bargains.

Ed Holmes, the workshop leader and a longtime company member, said the three-minute “live political cartoon” attracted around 15 passers-by with an additional 5 to 10 stopping when the fake money started flying. “A few people got the point,” he said.

With television, blogs and social networking Web sites able to disseminate political messages far more widely than live theater, you have to question the relevance of the Mime Troupe’s polemical approach today. For the first three decades of its existence, this political theater group openly questioned United States policy and helped root out political hypocrisy.

But times have changed, and the company’s brand of broad political satire steeped in zany commedia dell’arte traditions feels outmoded. Theater can still be taken seriously as a medium for political discourse, but the Mime Troupe — with its limited reach, old-fashioned aesthetics and small budget — struggles to make a political and theatrical impact these days.

The dancer, director and mime artist R. G. Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1959 as a vehicle for radical political commentary and theatrical experimentation. Despite the word “mime” in its name, the group was far from silent. For a while its brand of guerilla theater, performed free in public spaces throughout its Bay Area home and as far away as Berlin, earned the company a reputation as a grass-roots political power. Troupe members were arrested on obscenity charges on more than one occasion in the early 1960s. The group was also one of the first American theater companies to perform in revolutionary Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua.

In 1967 the troupe caused an uproar when it traveled around universities in the Midwest presenting “L’Amant Militaire,” a Vietnam War satire adapted from an 18th-century Carlo Goldoni play, at the same time recruiters from a napalm manufacturer were visiting those campuses. Closer to home, the early troupe helped derail a proposal to use public funds to tear down a building that housed grass-roots community organizations for the construction of a parking lot for Davies Symphony Hall.

In recent years, however, the Mime Troupe’s efforts have had considerably less impact. It still performs free shows in parks around the Bay Area and other parts of the state, and its longstanding appearances in Dolores Park on the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends continue to attract hundreds. But many people seem to attend the productions these days to have their liberal political views confirmed or simply to enjoy a picnic and show in the sun.

Every now and then the company creates a production that engages the intelligence. In 2006 “Godfellas,” a show about the ills of spiritual dogma, married a wisecracking text with pithy musical numbers to examine not just religion but also blind faith in all its guises. More often than not, however, Mime Troupe productions end up subverting artistry in favor of left-wing dogma.

This year’s “Too Big to Fail,” about the implosion of the credit system, bashed audiences over the head with simplistic moral fables and told a tale of a greedy lion named Citibank. And the boringly liberal “Doing Good” (2005) was less effective as an agitprop pamphlet against American intervention in the third world. Meanwhile, a decade has passed since the troupe performed its last guerilla theater act: a version of “Ubu Roi” outside the Federal Building to protest cuts in arts financing.

It’s telling that the Mime Troupe is celebrating its golden anniversary with documentary screenings and exhibitions that focus on its early heyday; the company’s more recent history just isn’t all that enthralling.

Yet political theater is alive and well in the Bay Area, as proved by engaging productions like “This World in a Woman’s Hands,” Marcus Gardley’s drama for the Shotgun Players of Berkeley, about female workers in the Richmond, Calif., shipyards in World War II. And the Mime Troupe, with its intimacy, ability to respond quickly to current events and stealthy approach to infiltrating public spaces, can demonstrate that live performance is still, in some ways, an ideal medium for political commentary. Getting the message across, however, requires a level of subtlety and imagination that lies beyond the reach of many theater artists.

To survive, the Mime Troupe may need to find a new theatrical vocabulary for expressing its political viewpoints and work harder to question lazy liberal mores. The members may also have to take greater risks again. A three-minute sketch outside Old Navy might make an impression on just a few onlookers. But taking their antics inside the store would most likely get greater attention.

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When Businesses Move Out, Art Moves InNEW YORK TIMES

No one likes empty storefronts; they make streets look like gap-toothed smiles. Now that San Francisco’s business districts are feeling the economic pinch, city officials, like dentists, have been scouting for ways to fix the cavities. Whether business picks up next year remains to be seen, but in the meantime, civic leaders and neighborhood associations have turned to artists for a temporary solution.

The Art in Storefronts initiative, introduced in the fall in San Francisco, is probably the most comprehensive project of its kind in the city. The program, which has received applications from nearly 200 local artists to date, has filled 20 empty commercial storefronts in four areas — the Tenderloin, Bayview, Central Market and the Mission — with temporary art installations. Plans are afoot to expand the project to additional neighborhoods like Chinatown.

According to Kate Patterson, public-art project manager for the San Francisco Arts Commission, the proposals are chosen for aesthetic appeal, innovation, neighborhood context and diversity of subject matter, content and media. Each selected artist receives a $500 stipend.

A city’s artists are often the first to be shut out in hard times, and these recent projects are certainly thought-provoking. On the one hand, the artwork in windows formerly occupied by electronic gadgetry and mannequins dressed in designer denim seem to make time stand still: They encourage passers-by to take a break from the holiday shopping frenzy to linger over something unusual and, in some cases, beautiful.

On the other hand, the transience of these projects — and the “placeholder” mentality behind them — points to the perpetually fraught relationship between commerce and art.

Alexis Amann and Jonathan Burstein’s “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” at 986 Market Street, is a wonderful example of storefront art. This duo’s luminous, marine-hued installation depicting an underwater landscape — complete with sharks, seaweed and a newspaper-reading deep-sea diver — playfully stands out against the strip clubs, boarded-up facades and 24-hour doughnut shops of Central Market.

The cardboard-cutout montage has a children’s comic-book feel. But on closer inspection, the piece has a satirical, dystopian edge more akin to the work of Art Spiegelman or the local graphic novelist Jon Adams than to Richard Scarry. The diver’s newspaper carries the headline “Homeowners Underwater! Tsunami of Foreclosures”; miniature human heads bob forlornly atop seaweed strands; and a menacing shark has the word “loans” painted on its side.

Although delivered with humor, the message is clear: the Central Market neighborhood is underwater, and locals must fight to stay afloat.

Chris Treggiari and Billy Mitchell’s installation at 144 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin has a similarly powerful neighborhood connection and strong visual appeal. Unlike the other projects around town, their work, “Fight for Your Neighborhood,” stands in front of a derelict restaurant — a shuttered facade that once belonged to the San Francisco institution Original Joe’s — rather than behind the safety of glass.

This colorful, street-level artwork, with its painted prizefighter and wooden boxing ring surrounded by posters of local residents with their fists raised, pays homage to the neighborhood’s boxing history. It also physically mimics the challenges facing the area as it fights for survival in a depressed economy.

Mr. Treggiari said his artwork had been vandalized a few times. (When I recently visited, a piece of wood had been torn off and thrown into the boxing ring.) But residents have reportedly rallied around the installation.

“The neighborhood has truly taken ownership over the project,” Mr. Treggiari said. “I’ve recently received reports from friends who have seen paintings left by my piece. I hope it continues to inspire creativity within the community, because this is really what it’s all about.”

Just as this artwork mutates over time, the other San Francisco installations (as well as similar storefront projects in cities as diverse as New York, London and Cape Girardeau, Mo.) face change — and ultimately eviction.

According to Daniel Hurtado, executive director of the Central Market Community Benefit District, planned retail projects in the area will soon force out two artworks. And in the Tenderloin, Elvin Padilla, executive director of the Tenderloin Economic Development Project, expects the Original Joe’s site to be developed in 2010.

The Art in Storefronts project is undeniably laudable from a social and cultural standpoint. Both residents and artists are benefiting. Christopher Simmons, one of the creators of the work “Everything Is O.K.,” at 998 Market Street, said that he had had an increase in visitors to his Facebook page since the unveiling of his installation, and that he was in talks with galleries about future commissions.

It’s great that San Francisco is taking an art-forward stance during the recession. Care, however, should be taken to preserve these artworks and prevent commerce from dictating all the rules. Let’s hope that the city continues to support local artists when its “storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light” — as Allen Ginsberg irreverently depicts the urban metropolis in “Howl” — once again ring with the sound of jangling cash registers.

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A Vanished San Francisco, Black, White and ColorfulNEW YORK TIMES

In 1952, when the budding photographer Gerald Ratto was a 19-year-old student at the California School of Fine Arts, he spent much of his time in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Wandering around the neighborhood with his Rolleiflex camera and a bottle of brandy, he shared drinks and conversation with the residents and snapped pictures of the local kids as they played in the street.

Nearly six decades have passed since he photographed those children. Mr. Ratto, now 76, went on to lead a successful career as an architectural photographer. And the neighborhood, a bustling hub of black culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, underwent an ill-conceived redevelopment in the 1960s and then significant growth in recent years.

When viewed against the backdrop of that tremendous transformation, Mr. Ratto’s images poignantly recall a vanished landscape. Although the pictures demonstrate an artist’s promise, his photographs do not quite satisfy as either works of art or social documents.

On display in downtown San Francisco at the Robert Tat Gallery, a space specializing in vintage photography, the compact show “Children of the Fillmore, 1952” consists of 52 silver gelatin prints, 18 of which are on display. (The other 34 pictures can be viewed upon request.)

The quality most evident in Mr. Ratto’s photographs is their innocence. Images like one depicting three small girls cuddling and smiling at the camera in what looks like their Sunday best (No. 5 in the series) and another of a boy with a cardboard box on his head and a clownish, gap-toothed grin (No. 14) convey a sense of pure-spirited delight. Meanwhile, there’s an arresting candor and warmth to the photograph of a boy sitting on a staircase with his elbows propped up behind him (No. 20). His posture and face display unfettered openness.

Most of the pictures are posed. They are also uncompromisingly shot head-on and close to their subjects. Yet they refreshingly lack affectation. Clearly, taking the time to get to know the people he photographed paid off for Mr. Ratto. Using the kind of camera that could be operated down by his waist rather than in front of his face, thus allowing him to maintain eye contact with his subjects, doubtless also helped him to earn the trust of the local youngsters.

But pictures depicting the freshness of childhood, though they look great on kitchen calendars, can veer into cutesy cliché. There’s something static and lifeless about Mr. Ratto’s portraits that undercuts their artistic strength. The images of great chroniclers of urban life, like Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, avoid this problem. Levitt’s famous picture of two children, one white and one black, dancing in the middle of a New York street, and Cartier-Bresson’s image of a boy rounding a corner cradling two enormous glass bottles, possess a kinetic energy and distinct personality that ultimately tell the viewer much more about the lives — and environments — of their subjects than Mr. Ratto’s photographs.

The grown-up worldliness that tinges Ms. Levitt’s pictures of children sharply undercuts their sweetness. “In each child, from very early, the germ of the death of childhood is at work,” the author James Agee says of Ms. Levitt’s photographs in his preface to her 1965 book, “A Way of Seeing.” It is this germ that makes Ms. Levitt’s photographs so powerful from a social as well as an artistic perspective. Lacking this quality, Mr. Ratto’s pictures don’t carry the same weight.

If they don’t function completely satisfactorily as works of art, the “Children of the Fillmore” images similarly lack strength as social documents of a neighborhood’s lost heritage. To the extent that the figures depicted in Mr. Ratto’s photographs appear frozen in time, the series draws attention to the vast gap between the neighborhood’s glory days and now. But with their atmosphere of utopian innocence and no hint of foreboding for the neighborhood’s future fall, the images seem naïve when viewed with contemporary eyes.

Gentrification has changed the face of the neighborhood once again. Although the area has revived, thanks to the appearance of institutions like the jazz club Yoshi’s and the spruced-up Sundance Kabuki cinemas, the black population has dwindled, owing to steep rises in the cost of goods and housing.

The district has been trying hard to reconnect with its past in recent years, with the Fillmore Heritage Center at the forefront of the campaign. The center presents historically oriented art shows, like the current exhibition of photographs of musicians shot by Dan Dion at the famed Fillmore Auditorium and a recent show of Mr. Ratto’s work.

These exhibitions might pique the curiosity of a tourist, rock music fan or local historian. But nostalgia for a bygone era ultimately isn’t very helpful to a neighborhood like the Fillmore, which, like most communities, can never hope to recapture its past in any concrete sense.

“Children of the Fillmore, 1952” continues through Jan. 30 at the Robert Tat Gallery, 49 Geary Street, No. 211; (415) 781-1122, roberttat.com

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An American Export Comes Home, Still PoppingNEW YORK TIMES

Krumping, clowning, strobing, turfing, breaking, locking. Few art forms boast as many subgenres as hip-hop dance. Though the differences between its various styles may be inscrutable to most people, mavens like Popin Pete of the seminal West Coast hip-hop dance crew the Electric Boogaloos have been known to split hairs over its terminology. “There are people who wave, and there are people who tut,” he told Dance Spirit Magazine last year. “They’re not popping.”

But at this year’s San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, an annual festival held last weekend that showcases the work of dance crews worldwide, being able to tell “tutting” apart from “waving” hardly matters. Instead of compartmentalizing the myriad subgenres that fall under the hip-hop dance umbrella, the event, in its 11th year, illustrated just how easily all the different styles bleed into one another — even across geographic boundaries.

If this year’s event is anything to go by, what sets a Bay Area dance crew apart from, say, a South Korean one doesn’t really have much to do with the local group’s immersion in turfing — a hip-hop dance genre that started in Oakland and stresses theatricality and gliding footwork. The South Korean crew Last for One makes as much use of these elements as regional ensembles like Funkanometry and the DS Players. It is the level of artistic finesse versus attitude that seems to be the greatest differentiator between American groups and those from abroad.

Just as the music that accompanied the festival’s acts fused rap staples like Lil Wayne and the Wu-Tang Clan with Beethoven, Bjork and Britney Spears, among others, the choreography brought together steps from the different subgenres. “Invasion Involved,” a piece from New Style Motherlode of Oakland includes a heady array of hip-hop and hip-hop-derived movement. The dancers shake their bodies intensely, execute machinelike robotics, zoom around on skateboards and perform kung fu-inspired kicks and jabs.

Loose Change, a San Francisco ensemble, combines earthy, contemporary dance choreography with steps informed by funk and jazz. In his Michael Jackson tribute, Kenichi Ebina, a Japanese dancer based in New York, pushes Mr. Jackson’s signature steps like the moonwalk and the slide to their aesthetic limits.

A presentation by ILL-Abilities, a Chilean-Californian-Canadian break-dance crew whose members have a variety of physical impairments, powerfully demonstrated the innovative, inclusive and international state of hip-hop culture today. At one point, the dancer Lazylegz (who has arthrogryposis, a joint deficiency that affects his legs) leapt on his crutches over the prostrate frames of his cohorts Guns (who spins on his head with the ease of revolving vinyl though his right leg is amputated at the knee) and Kujo (whose deafness doesn’t prevent him from bouncing around the stage on his forearms with the rhythmic precision of a jackhammer).

Hip-hop dance is of course an urban art form that came of age on the streets, not in the studio. Improvisation and aggressive competition is a central component; it grew out of 1970s New York gang culture, after all. So many of the American groups in the Hip Hop DanceFest take a scrappy-streetwise approach to their art.

The Los Angeles crew One Step Ahead’s playful yet formless piece “Escalate” riffs on classical music themes. The three performers wear mismatched orchestral conductors’ coattails and dance to a distorted version of Pachelbel’s Canon, among other standards of the classical repertory. Their movements have a roomy, improvisatory feel but lack focus. Meanwhile, the raunchy “Final Call,” from Mind Over Matter of San Francisco, recalls the steamy videos of Madonna’s “Erotica” period. Dressed in assorted ’80s-style street clothes, the dancers perform simulated sex routines under sultry red lights. These efforts, though brimful of attitude, feel obvious and canned.

In contrast, the international groups have among the most technically precise and artistically imaginative performances at the festival. The six members of the Norwegian dance crew Deep Down Dopeizm move in perfect synchronicity in their playful piece “The Cube.” Their bodies morph together at various intervals during the work to create a compact human cube. This recurring motif is as visually arresting as it is physically demanding.

Last for One builds its piece, “Soul River,” on standard break-dancing and popping moves. But the physical agility, ball bearing-like bounce and showmanship of the six-strong group outpace similar pieces by others on the festival program. And in the London group Plague’s “Embodiment of MUSIC!” a reeling, kinetic tap-dance sequence performed in sneakers, sometimes on tiptoe, to Ray Charles’s “This Little Girl of Mine,” reinvigorates an old dance form. The performers in these three groups wear loose hip-hop clothes. But unlike the American ensembles, their Adidas and Pumas match perfectly.

Synchronized footwear isn’t terribly important though. What matters most is innovation. It’s telling that in this respect, the United States, though the originator of the art of hip-hop dance and its many subgenres, could learn something from the rest of the world.

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Bad RapSF WEEKLY

Celebration of Jewish affinity for black culture skews more vaudeville than hip-hop.

The Jewish love affair with hip-hop — a romance grounded in the art of the Beastie Boys, the High and Mighty, Lyor Cohen, MC Serch, DJ Steinski, and Blood of Abraham, among many, many others — has been thoroughly documented over the last few years. Countless books and blogs by Jewish authors, most of them male, describe the historical and cultural affinity Jews feel for black culture. "Hip-hop is the music of struggle, and we, because of our history of oppression, are naturally drawn to narratives of resistance and civil rights," author Jason Tanz (Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America) wrote in 2007.

A Jewish rapper and actor's passionate engagement with hip-hop culture is at the heart of Stateless: A Hip-Hop Vaudeville Experience, a rap-and-beatbox–infused world premiere theater production at the Jewish Theatre. Stateless is primarily the work of performer Dan Wolf and his frequent artistic partner, African-American beatboxer and actor Tommy Shepherd. Shepherd and Wolf comprise the live hip-hop band Felonious, and last year joined forces for the engrossing stage adaptation of Adam Mansbach's novel, Angry Black White Boy, at Intersection for the Arts.

Inspired by Wolf's ancestral roots in German-Jewish vaudeville, Stateless reconstructs his legacy through weaving together old-school, Mittel-European stage traditions with hip-hop to create an intriguing if ultimately unsatisfying visual, choreographic, and musical collage. Low-slung pants, turntables, and breakdance steps are as much a feature of Wolf and Shepherd's performance as are jazz hands, Holocaust references, and songs about German cuisine. But as much as their latest collaboration aims to fuse Jewish and black traditions to demonstrate a shared heritage of persecution and "statelessness," the production ends up feeling lopsided. Despite the equal billing of the progenitors, this "hip-hop vaudeville experience" feels more vaudeville than hip-hop.

This is partly because Stateless places the greatest emphasis on Wolf's personal story, specifically his journey to Hamburg to learn about his past. The history of his vaudevillian ancestors is fascinating: Under the stage name of the Gebrüder Wolf (the Brothers Wolf), a German-Jewish performance troupe of the 1920s, Wolf's great-grandfather and great-granduncle composed what grew to become a popular German tune. According to Wolf, "Tüdelband," a comic song that takes its name from the then-popular children's pastime of chasing a rolling metal hoop while hitting it with a stick, became such a huge hit that the Nazis declared it too German for Jews to sing.

Contrastingly, Shepherd's poignant personal narrative about returning to his hometown of Lake Charles, La., feels comparatively inconsequential. It just doesn't get the same amount of airplay and depth of development as Wolf's more exotic tale of international intrigue. This is a shame, as Shepherd is a charismatic storyteller and soulful musician. One of the highlights of the show is "Durge," a slow-burning, intricate vocal solo written and performed by Shepherd. He uses loop pedals and the simple refrain "My people come from ..." to build a beautiful, thick-textured musical contemplation on our complex relationship with our roots.

The production's core performers come from entirely different backgrounds. Hip-hop culture is their main shared point of reference. As such, the movement vocabulary of Stateless marries vaudevillelike shtick (lots of flapping arms, hammy facial expressions, and fast footwork) with the looser-limbed, earthbound body language employed by MCs. Meanwhile, the musical soundtrack, much of it created by the New York–based whimsical alt-rock band One Ring Zero, leverages the beats, rhymes, and structures of rap. But Wolf's Jewish heritage remains a near-constant presence throughout. Many of the musical numbers, such as "Comet Song" (which showcases Allen Willner's gorgeous starry-night-sky lighting design) and "Scheisse" ("Shit") are based on original material by the Gebrüder Wolf.

The cultural mashup makes for some inspiring scenes, such as a hilarious rap version of a Gebrüder Wolf song about gorging on "Snuten und Poten" — a German, if not very kosher, delicacy consisting of various parts of a pig. But Stateless never quite jells as a whole. The show was developed over six years through intermittent workshops and miniperformances. Today, in its full-length form, it still feels like a series of isolated, work-in-progress moments rather than a full-fledged piece of theater with a strong dramaturgical shape — and, most crucially, a sense of balance between the disparate cultures it seeks to mesh.

That balance issue in Stateless might simply reflect the reality of the relationship between Jews and blacks in contemporary culture. Hip-hop has many Jewish fans: An online search for "Jews and hip-hop" brings up millions of hits, but blacks don't seem to share nearly the same level of interest in Jewish culture as Jews have for theirs. (There are only a handful of hits for "African-American and klezmer.") Where, for instance, are the black community's answers to Danny Hoch and the Klezmatics? Why are there so few black rabbis? Perhaps that's why the Borscht Belt factor in Stateless overpowers its B-boy side. Ultimately, the black experience of struggle and oppression may have less in common with that of the Jews than the Jews would like to think.

Signing-off note: After nearly five years as SF Weekly's chief theater critic, I am moving on. Thanks, dear readers, for your attentiveness and to the ever-creative local performing arts community for continuously engaging my heart and mind. You can now read me every Sunday in The New York Times, where I am the Bay Area culture columnist, and I can always be found online at www.chloeveltman.com.

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In Chant, Listening and Singing Become OneNEW YORK TIMES

Chant, the practice of intoning sounds or words rhythmically and repetitively, has been a staple of spiritual systems for millenniums. Owing to the popularity of recordings like the 1993 album “Chant” by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain, and Enigma’s 1990 crossover hit, “Sadeness (Part I),” which juxtaposed chant with a dance beat, Westerners have become familiar with Gregorian chant, the early Christian liturgical genre.

But chant exists in many forms — including mantras, hymns, prayers, Shigin (a form of Japanese chanted poetry) and plainsong — and can be found in religions as diverse as Judaism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Hinduism.

Perhaps in response to the growing velocity and techno-centricity of daily life, more people have sought out chant. The sounds of “om” and “kyrie” are filling Zen meditation centers, Buddhist retreats, plainsong-infused candlelit church services, and yoga studios around the Bay Area and beyond.

Meanwhile, chant has been on the rise as an artistic pursuit. Vocal ensembles like Anonymous 4, Sequentia and Cappella Romana have garnered critical acclaim for their concerts and recordings. The field is clearly evolving. But is chant as engrossing to hear as it is to sing?

In theory, listening to a chant should be roughly the same as singing it. In practice, however, most of us aren’t relaxed, psychologically present or in tune enough with ourselves to be mindful of this effect, which is, after all, quite subtle. As a result, listening to chant, especially without the aid of a religious framework to guide your engagement, can be frustrating.

This was certainly the case last weekend during the Sabbaticus Rex performance at Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. The three-member ensemble, which is based in the Bay Area, lays deep, throat-sung mantras over dense instrumental layers created by a bazantar (a five-string upright bass fitted with 33 extra sympathetic and drone strings), Japanese bamboo flutes and gongs.

The group’s anti-melodic, seemingly directionless soundscape drove my guest to the point of distraction. She called the music “primitive” and “annoying.”

I didn’t entirely share her feelings. Perhaps it’s all the yoga I’ve been doing lately, but by concentrating on my breath and listening for subtle textural and rhythmic changes, like the quiet roar of a gong or the interjection of a rippling flute motif, I was intermittently able to climb inside the ensemble’s musical meditation.

The vocalist Cornelius Boots’s occasional bouts of chesty, resonant chanting helped immensely by bringing much needed focus to the meandering instrumental lines. Still, my mind wandered often, and it was ultimately quite a relief to leave the church.

The next morning, I visited the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church across town, where I participated in the Medieval Sarum Chant workshop led by Susan Hellauer and Marsha Genensky of the New York all-female a cappella quartet Anonymous 4. In contrast to the previous evening’s experience, I didn’t want to leave.

This all-day class — open to anyone, even those who can’t read music, at an affordable rate — was surprising in some ways. From an aesthetic standpoint, our attempt to sing “Ave Maris Stella,” an English liturgical chant composed in honor of the Virgin Mary, left much to be desired, even though producing a pitch-perfect performance was not the aim of the day.

We weren’t particularly in tune or in step with one another. And learning the chant by rote (as the monks would have done in medieval times), rather than by reading music, added an entirely new level of complexity.

But as we were singing together, time vanished. I had no idea what “Solve vincla reis, profer lumen caecis” meant, but the act of chanting these words en masse had the same effect on my mood as eating good, dark chocolate. (By the way, it means “Dissolve these earthly chains, give light to the blind.”)

By relating these contrasting experiences, I don’t wish to imply that chant isn’t worthy of performance. Listening to Anonymous 4 sing “Ave Maris Stella” on its “Four Centuries of Chant” CD (released this year on Harmonia Mundi) or in concert demonstrates just how sublime chant can sound to the listener’s ear when the performers follow the contours of the language, flow through the lines and generally possess what Ms. Hellauer calls a “unity of intent.”

Listening to the great Lebanese vocalist Sister Marie Keyrouz intone Middle Eastern Christian chant or Tina Turner sing a Buddhist chant has a comparable effect.

As the Oakland Nada yoga (yoga of sound) expert Ann Dyer put it in a recent phone interview: “Fundamentally, chanting and listening are not that different in terms of how we respond as organisms. Even when you’re listening to chant, the whole body is responding, experiencing the vibration, and the vocal cords will vibrate in sympathy if relaxed. It’s a very kinesthetic response.”

But inasmuch as any activity in life tends to be more meaningful than experiencing it from the sidelines, chant derives much of its power from active participation.

“There is a difference between listening to someone chant and actually making those same sounds in your own body,” Ana Hernández writes in her 2005 book, “The Sacred Art of Chant.” “There’s a difference in the way the vibrations affect you, depending on whether they come from outside or within you.”

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A Fulbright in Nigeria That Turned Into a ShowNEW YORK TIMES

Many things have happened since Dan Hoyle performed in the premiere of “Tings Dey Happen,” his incendiary and brilliant solo show about Nigerian oil politics, nearly three years ago at the compact theater the Marsh in San Francisco.

His career has been on the rise. “Tings Dey Happen” won the Will Glickman Award for best new play in the Bay Area and was featured, to critical acclaim, in 2007 at the Culture Project in New York. (Wilborn Hampton in The New York Times called Mr. Hoyle “a first-rate reporter and actor.”) Last month the State Department invited Mr. Hoyle to return to Nigeria to perform “Tings Dey Happen” as part of an official diplomatic tour. Now back in San Francisco, he is reprising his production at the much grander Marines Memorial Theater.

Meanwhile, Nigeria — the land where Mr. Hoyle spent 10 months in 2005-6 as a Fulbright scholar researching his project — has spiraled downward. Known as much for its corruption, kidnappings and violence as for its ample oil reserves (Nigeria is the fifth-largest oil supplier to the United States), the country has been hemorrhaging blood and money like crude from a plundered pipeline. In the most recent wave of unrest this summer, clashes between Islamic militants and the police led to dozens of deaths. Olabode George, a prominent figure in Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party, was convicted of corruption charges in October.

Bizarrely, few of these events make it into the latest iteration of “Tings Dey Happen.” Besides the slicker lighting and sound effects, minor textual cuts and the addition of supertitles to help audiences understand some of the Nigerian characters’ Pidgin, the present production is pretty much like the past. Getting the most from this latest version requires attending a post-performance discussion or reading an as-yet-unpublished essay by Mr. Hoyle. But he misses an opportunity to address the inadvertent impact of well-meaning outsiders like himself on the lives of the Nigerian insiders.

As a performance, Mr. Hoyle’s theatrical journey through the Niger Delta’s remote and lawless hinterlands continues to arrest audiences, even in this less intimate setting. Over 90 minutes he embodies a variety of African and other foreign characters with warmth and energy.

Foremost among his sharply drawn creations are a warlord who wields multiple cellphones and whose Jabba-the-Hutt-like aspect belies a sentimental side (he keeps a photo album); a loutish Scottish oil industry worker; and a physically awkward, slow-spoken 23-year-old sniper who dreams of going to a university. Mr. Hoyle captures these characters so vividly that he seems to disappear inside their stories, much as Anna Deavere Smith (“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” “Fires in the Mirror”) does in her stenographically precise reproductions of real-life characters.

Yet Mr. Hoyle still maintains a shadowy presence onstage despite a desire to remove himself from the narrative. When asked in a 2007 interview with The Huffington Post about the most important decision he had made while creating the work, he replied, “Taking myself out of it.” His characters address their invisible interlocutor directly and even poke fun at him: “No, Dan, please sit down. Let us dance for you,” some Nigerian characters jovially insist when this Westerner takes ham-footedly to the dance floor. Try as he might to remain an outside observer, Mr. Hoyle can’t help putting himself in the frame.

His relationship with his interview subjects is particularly complex in the case of Okosi, the young sniper. Okosi is based on Williams Ajayi, a real-life militant whom Mr. Hoyle befriended during his first visit to Nigeria. In the play Mr. Hoyle grippingly recounts Okosi’s decision to throw his guns away to pursue his undergraduate ambitions. What Mr. Hoyle doesn’t address onstage is the impact he himself has on the character’s life. Only one desperate utterance from Okosi — “Dan, please, when are you coming back?” — hints at the American’s influence on the Nigerian.

Only beyond the realm of the play do you start to get a sense of Mr. Hoyle’s true agency in the Niger Delta. In prose and conversation he tells of being reunited with Mr. Ajayi in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, during his recent visit. At the meeting Mr. Hoyle learned that the real-life Okosi narrowly escaped being killed by gang members for turning his back on a life of crime. These days, Mr. Hoyle said, the former militant lives a life of poverty, “a sometime day laborer, sometimes just wandering the streets hoping to run into old friends who will buy him a meal.”

As demoralizing as this story is, discovering Mr. Hoyle’s role in shaping Mr. Ajayi’s life is even more unnerving: “When he met me,” the performer writes in his essay of being reunited with Mr. Ajayi, “it was like a light to his life. After hundreds of performances in the U.S., I couldn’t really point to any impact my show had made on the Niger Delta. But during my research I had impacted Williams enough to change his life.”

The fortunes of individuals and nations rise and fall every day. The genius of “Tings Dey Happen” is its ability to help us understand how filling the tanks of our cars here in the United States might spark countless wars in a far-off land. If only Mr. Hoyle, full of fresh insights from his recent trip, would confront the consequences of his presence in Nigeria more openly, instead of through his characters’ oblique references to an invisible white guy named Dan.

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Dual RolesSF WEEKLY

Sometimes a playwright is the best person to direct the staging of his work.

I recently asked several local dramatists whether they thought playwrights should direct their own plays. The question arose following a performance of the Magic Theatre's world premiere of Mrs. Whitney. John Kolvenbach, the play's author, also directs.

Kolvenbach's beautiful directing job somewhat caught me unawares. The last couple of productions I had experienced at the Magic Theatre that were directed by the people who had penned the scripts were far from impressive despite the star power of the auteurs. Bill Pullman's gimmicky Expedition 6 and David Mamet's rambling-shambolic Dr. Faustus left much to be desired from both writing and staging perspectives.

Of course, this issue isn't particular to the Magic. Most theater companies specializing in contemporary plays avoid putting dramatists in charge of rehearsals. All too often, the results are disappointing. The main criticism commonly levied against director-playwrights is that they are too close to their scripts, so they aren't ideally positioned to make them work onstage. Being responsible for the mise-en-scène also makes it difficult for authors to undertake rewrites during rehearsals.

You might equally argue the opposite: that playwrights, being intimately connected to their texts, are in the best possible place to bring their characters, stories, images, and themes to life. Edward Albee, for one, feels strongly about staging his own work, and often acquits himself well. "I like to direct the first productions of my plays, because I like an audience to see and hear what I did when I wrote my plays," he told a talkback audience in Denver in 1997.

Kolvenbach doesn't make a habit of directing his own work, though he helmed the world premiere of his drama, Fabuloso, at Cape Cod's Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater in 2008. "As director, Kolvenbach keeps the choppily episodic momentum moving along merrily," the Boston Globe reviewer noted of his staging abilities.

The same could be said about Mrs. Whitney, the second in a pair of tangentially related works by the author currently playing in repertory at the Magic. (Artistic director Loretta Greco directs Goldfish, the other piece.) Kolvenbach's production, a bittersweet domestic comedy, marries rhythmic pacing and lively blocking with sensitive performances from the entire cast. The positive qualities of the staging make it possible to forgive the shortcomings of the writing — namely the use of narration, the dramatist's penchant for bad poetry consisting of quirky lists of ideas, and the schmaltzy denouement.

The play centers on the character of Margaret Whitney, a middle-aged, middle-class divorcée who lives alone. In the wake of her daughter's marriage and flight from the family nest, Margaret's deep and longstanding feelings of loneliness bubble uncontrollably to the surface of her being. Against her better judgment, she decides to go looking for her ex-husband, Tom, a ne'er-do-well she hasn't contacted in 20 years. Her desperate need for connection is such that even the discovery that he has remarried four times (and is busy fouling things up with wife number five when we first meet him) doesn't deter her from reinserting herself into his life. As is so often the case in human relationships, the heart generates emotions powerful enough to overrule the mind.

Mrs. Whitney feels pedantic as a text. Margaret delivers too many clunky, fourth-wall–breaking narrated passages in which she divulges her feelings to the audience. The characters spout their sensations with overbearing, pseudopoetic repetitiveness. "Your rightness, your morality, your judgment, your competence, your stiff spine, your quick knife," Tom eulogizes at one point about Margaret. At another, the two engage in similarly ripe repartee:

Tom: What if I've changed?

Margaret: I'll welcome it.

Tom: What if I haven't changed?

Margaret: Then I'll make allowances.

Tom: What if I'm old?

Margaret: I'll take comfort in that.

Tom: If I sag? If I stink? I'm tired?

Margaret: Join the club.

Tom: I'm forgetful. If I repeat myself?

Margaret: I'll smile and nod.

However, Kolvenbach's direction and the performances make the writing sing. The play glides along, even through the lengthy interscene blackouts where stagehands move worn couches and sideboards about the naturalistic (and aesthetically uninspiring) living-room environment. His decision to leave the actors onstage during the set changes if they're performing in adjacent scenes is a powerful one. There's something mesmerizing about watching the sparrow-framed yet emotionally strong Patricia Hodges, who plays Margaret, putter aimlessly in semidarkness while stuff happens around her. The shadows and shuffling bodies deftly serve to highlight the central character's loneliness.

Kolvenbach and his actors handle the timing of the play's many tragic-comic moments with arch suspense. When Charles Dean as Margaret's protective neighbor Francis threatens Rod Gnapp's Tom with a gun, we can't tell what will happen next. The tension onstage is wire-taut. And when Tom's long-suffering fifth wife, Louisa (a hilariously hamstrung Arwen Anderson), and college-aged son, Fin (played on the brink of testiness by Patrick Alparone), first meet Margaret, their surprise and incredulity propel the action without ever seeming forced. As a result of the seamless staging, it's difficult not to enjoy this theatrical ride.

Ultimately, asking my dramatist friends about whether playwrights should direct their own plays might be irrelevant. As local playwright-actor-director Mark Jackson recently wrote in an e-mail, "I think it depends on the individual. Should this playwright direct his own work? That is the question to ask, I think."

In the case of Kolvenbach, the answer is emphatically "yes."

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