wild at heart

Last Sunday night I went to Berkeley Rep to see the Kneehigh Theater’s production of The Wild Bride, which is an adaptation of The Maiden Without Hands, one of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. A couple of years ago I missed Kneehigh’s production of Brief Encounter at ACT; I really love that movie so I was wary of any adaptations and by the time I heard enough praise to make me think I should go it was too late in the run for me to make the schedules work. I thought I was going to miss The Wild Bride as well, which made me kind of sad since it sounded like something I’d really like: a folk tale staged with lots of music and theatrical savvy and the suggestive and creative use of props (similar in style to some of the Mary Zimmerman plays I’ve seen and enjoyed). Then Berkeley Rep extended the run to 22 January, so The Wild Bride became my first performance of 2012, and my first big disappointment.

The short version is that the staging is often clever and inventive, but the script just isn’t there. Here’s the long version:

To start with, everything – dialogue as well as music – is miked, so all the sound has that slightly off-center, flattened quality. All the actors had ugly little body mikes taped to their heads, and at least one had a long wire snaking down her back, which was distracting when she danced. The sound itself wasn’t all that bad – I’ve experienced much, much worse on Broadway – but I’m wondering why the miking was done at all. The Roda Theater is fairly small, and if your voice can’t fill it, you probably shouldn’t be on stage. But this seems to be standard procedure at Berkeley Rep these days; in fact the playbill had an interview with Elliott Ares, holder of the first Harry Weininger Sound Fellowship, who spoke casually about body mikes as if there was no question they were standard issue. Why should I go to live theater if I’m not getting live sound?

Speaking of the playbill, it contained an extremely odd “Prologue” from managing director Susan Medak, gushing on and on about the late Steve Jobs with his “rich capacity to dream” and “unfettered imagination” and what a “wildly creative visionary” he was etc etc and oh yeah here’s a little afterthought we’re presenting this theater group called Kneehigh – can boilerplate gush? Because we all saw reams of this standard-issue ass-kissing right after Jobs died, and with all due respect to him and his influence, I don’t really get it, but then I’m not a tech groupie-cultist or a CEO groupie-cultist, and I think most of his products actually help further marginalize live performance, and so much for theater that is “trying to change the world, one play at a time,” to quote another part of the playbill.

Speaking of changing the world, I hope all those little Chinese child laborers assembling Apple products are appropriately grateful that their nimble and pennies-per-hour fingers are helping to implement the creative vision of the Great and Beloved Leader! (Talk about accidentally selling your children to the devil! which, by the way, is the starting point of The Wild Bride.) Can we acknowledge that "creative visioning" is just more readily available to those who can afford Berkeley Rep's ticket prices in this economy? (In fairness to Ms Medak, I will assume that in a later “Prologue” she will say something about the late Vaclav Havel, a genuinely great man who actually had something to do with theater.)

Here’s another random complaint, before I get to the problems with the play itself: the evening would have been much better without the intermission, which doesn’t do much besides stall whatever momentum has been developed (there were no set changes or other technical reasons that I could see for needing a pause) . Played without an intermission, the performance would be about an hour and forty-five minutes, which is not unreasonable, and it would have been easy enough to pare back some of the more repetitious dancing and singing to bring it in at 90 minutes – I really enjoyed the bluesy music, but how many times do you need to hear about Ezekiel and the dry bones now hear the word of the Lord? As it was, the performance lasted just long enough to make me miss my train by one minute, so that I had to sit in the station for almost twenty minutes, stewing in my disappointed juices.

I’m going to give a bit of a plot summary now, so consider yourself spoiler-alerted. Playwright and director Emma Rice, who is also the co-Artistic Director of Kneehigh, changed the story in some interesting and significant ways from the original, which I read after seeing the play, though unfortunately she didn't always substitute anything but theatrical flash:

There is a loving but perpetually drunken woodsman who meets a stranger, who offers him great wealth in return for whatever is in his backyard. The woodsman thinks it’s just his old apple tree, not realizing his beloved daughter is climbing the tree. (The girl is portrayed by three different women at three different stages of her life, and they don’t particularly look, act, or sound alike, which I liked because it gives a nice sense of the different possibilities in the one character.) The stranger turns out to be the Devil, who comes to collect his payment, only he can’t because the girl is too clean, and the Devil hates anything clean (though he does manage to pick her up and mime raping her before he realizes he has that little problem).

So the Woodsman is ordered to dirty her, which he does with a bucket of slick beige mud. But she weeps so much her hands become clean, and the Devil still can’t carry her off, so he insists the Woodsman chop off her hands. He does so, in a scene that is both highly stylized and completely terrifying (the woman next to me covered her eyes): she extends her hands one at a time, sobbing; his axe comes down on the tree-stump in front of her (which is of course a safe distance ahead of the actress's arms), and one of the other two women takes that hand and dips it into a bucket of shiny dripping red paint. It's simple but striking and effective and the kind of effect that can only work in the theater. The mutilated girl is still too good for the Devil, so he declares he will let the world dirty her, and when it does, he will be back for her. Pause for unnecessary intermission.

The armless girl leaves her father. She discovers an orchard with numbered pears (cleverly presented by lightbulbs with large numbers hanging from them). She is hungry but cannot reach the pears without hands. The trees benevolently bend down so she can eat a pear. She is discovered by the orchard owner, who is the King. He is inexplicably Scottish, complete with kilt, though he becomes less Scottish as the evening progresses, and his mother doesn’t sound Scottish at all. The Scottish king is played by the same actor who played her father (which is kind of creepy), only then he had an Irish accent, which also seemed to be the only such accent in the vicinity. Kneehigh is a British troupe and presumably all this tomfoolery with accents makes some sense to them. Since I am part Irish I feel I should at least note the possibility of offense, if not from giving the only drunkard the only Irish accent, then from the moldiness of the stereotype.

The king falls instantly in love with the strange silent handless girl, because that is the role of men in these stories: if you’re not of high (in fact, the highest!) social status and willing to fall instantly in love, you might as well be a dwarf or a weakling father, abandoned after a paragraph or two. In the original story the King has a pair of silver hands made for the girl, but here they are big ungainly instruments of steel or iron; one ends with strange straggling twig-like fingers and the other with a scimitar. No use is made of these extensions and it’s unclear why he gives her such ungainly implements, especially since he makes jokes about how dangerous they are during their cheerfully, relentlessly vulgar and overextended sex scene, during which they enthusiastically act out a variety of positions.

The King goes off to fight a war, battling amid much dry ice and many strobe lights. The Wild Bride gives birth. His mother sends him the news. (The mother is portrayed, in another clever bit of staging, by a large portrait of an elegant woman in the eighteenth-century style with large holes where her hands would be, so that one of the actresses not playing the Bride can insert her hands through the holes and gesture appropriately; there are golden pears on the frame and a white wire chandelier hanging nearby that is also shaped like a pear, so there’s definitely a pear thing going on.)

The Devil intercepts the letter and substitutes one saying the child is half-dog. The King says to love it anyway. The Devil intercepts that letter too and substitutes one saying to kill the Wild Bride and the child and to save her eyeballs and tongue as proof that his order was carried out. His mother can’t bring herself to do this, so she warns the Bride to flee with the child. The mother then, with her bare royal hands, rips out the eyeballs and tongue of a delightful large puppet doe. Red streamers shoot out from her violated orifices, and the gentle creature dies, deserving better.

I might be making this sound a little more entertaining than it was. The bluesy music was certainly enjoyable. I kept wishing that the jogtrot rhymes weren’t so often clumsy and obvious, and padded out, and that some of the singing and dancing had been tightened up a bit.

The Bride heeds the warning and wanders in the frozen forest for years. We are told she and her child are in imminent danger of starvation, but she actually seems to be fine and does a little kick-boxy dance indicative of – ugh, let me hold my nose with one hand and extend the meaningless jargon term out to arm’s length with the other – “empowerment.” It seems to me she’d be better off figuring out how to fish or hunting for berries or something actually helpful and specific rather than indulging in some generic emotional mood that would in reality crumple in no time against the hardness of the world, but I am impressed at how clearly her stance and fist-pumping and striding indicate “empowerment” without also looking completely hacky and ridiculous, so good on ya, choreographer! The meaning was clear enough to the well-dressed, middle-aged frosted blonde in the middle of the front row (I was at the end of the row) who raised her glass and went, “Yeah!” Earlier in the second act the same woman had started talking a bit too loudly. Berkeley Rep might want to rethink its policy of allowing beverages in the auditorium, at least when it comes to wine.

The Wild Bride’s hands have now grown back – for no particular reason, they just regenerate, apparently as a result of her feeling “empowered,” because that is how cells behave. The regeneration makes sense in the original story, which is filled with benevolent Heaven-aided miracles, but less so here. Compassion for suffering creatures is a spiritually and socially valuable feeling, but the Wild Bride is going instead for improbable wish fulfillment and generic uplift.

Another result of her "empowerment" is that she seems to gain her voice, though it’s a little unclear if she was born mute or if muteness just happened early on. In either case “gaining her voice” is such a hacky and obvious symbol that it moved me to eye-rolling rather than wonderment. Why not let her speak all along, like the girl in the original story? Rice has given her a voice, but not really anything to say. Rice sure likes to pile on the Bride’s suffering. And indeed it did seem to be one of those stories in which we are invited to luxuriate in the spectacle of a woman’s endless victimization, with a bit of bogus “empowerment” slapped on at the end to make the self-pitying wallow acceptable – the spoonful of medicine that helps the sugar go down.

The King returns, finds out what has happened, and goes searching for his wife and child in the forest, where grief and solitude drive him mad. He is cured when they are reunited. So the Devil comes back to collect his beloved Bride, and – she punches him a couple of times and he falls down in defeat and then runs off.

And that's all. That's it.

Let me step back for a minute here to the original story, which turns out to be a story of suffering redeemed by piety and goodness – the tale of a dutiful daughter. Her father is not a vaguely comic drunkard, but a poor, frightened man whom the Devil tricks and then terrifies into cutting off his daughter’s hands. He explains his dilemma to her and she, like Iphigenia stepping between her warring parents, freely offers herself as a sacrifice. She also has the dignity to then refuse the help of her now-wealthy father, and wanders off, where her goodness and piety gain her an angel helper, both in the pear orchard where she meets the King and in the forest with her child, where she is eventually reunited with her husband through the angel's help.

The problem is not that Rice has altered what is after all a fairly grotesque tale of a woman who is rewarded for her pious submission. It’s that she hasn’t put anything dramatically or psychologically convincing in its place. Sorry, the whole final scene fell as flat and as quickly as the Devil, and he took a dive like a regular patsy. I kept assuming this would be one of those stories where a clever, brave girl outwits the Devil. Nope. It just took a left hook. (It's like seeing The Merchant of Venice only when Portia stands up at the trial, she doesn't blather on about the quality of mercy or taking the flesh but not any blood, she just walks over to Shylock and slugs him, and then the case is dismissed.) For someone who fights dirty and has supernatural powers, the Devil sure gives up easily. So why didn’t she punch him earlier? If she now has super boxing powers thanks to her life experiences, then what has she learned and how has she changed and grown? We’re not told, except for that little “empowerment” dance, which was mildly entertaining but not really enough to defeat the Devil. If he couldn’t touch her earlier because she was too good for him, why doesn’t he have the same problem now, since she’s not only still good, she’s better? If her hands had to be chopped off because otherwise they were too clean for the Devil to endure, why isn’t he also put off by her regenerated hands?

The play is a mash-up of the plights of Griselda and Job (with a dash of Faust), with the Devil taking the place of Griselda’s paranoid husband. The Devil describes the story early in Act 2 as "a feminist fairy tale," with (I'm quoting from memory, so this isn't exact) a bit of everything: humor, thrills, excitement (end attempted quotation, and I kind of resented being told this, as if I were at a restaurant and the chef came out halfway through the meal and told me that I was certainly enjoying my dinner, and it had everything I like – thanks, but I can taste for myself). But – even granted that “feminism” is a capacious and slippery term – in what serious way is this feminist?

The Wild Bride remains a passive victim throughout, until that last scene, which I found unconvincing and arbitrary in the play’s own terms, a slapped-on and modish "happy ending." The Bride doesn’t do anything: she doesn’t use her wit or cunning, she isn't particularly brave or bold. She isn't actively good, and doesn’t even get to be pious and pray for help, since this is a world which contains devils (though their power seems to vary considerably, depending on dramatic convenience) but no angels. If she’s learned anything, we don’t know what it is. Look, this isn’t Chekhov – it would have fit in perfectly with the tone of the piece to have the Bride impart some rhyming wisdom to us, some cheerful words about fighting back or not trusting the Devil or maybe even just laying off the moonshine, Dad.

There’s an interview with Rice in the playbill in which she announces “I’m not a huge lover of words. I do use words in my work, but I always think they’re the sprinkle on top.” Yeah, that would explain why the staging is so often striking and even poetic but the words are mundane and the action often doesn’t make sense outside of its immediate moment. The tone shifts wildly and unevenly; sometimes horrible things are treated terrifyingly and sometimes comically; sometimes the Devil is all-powerful and sometimes he’s laughable and weak. It all seems to depend on what’s dramatically convenient at the moment, and whether the performance needs to be goosed a bit with some vaudeville laughs or some thrills and chills, as opposed to what makes sense in the overall context of these characters and what happens to them.

I could have gotten past most of this, if Rice hadn’t let me down in the big scene. Where was the clever heroine I was expecting?

As the auditorium was filling up before the show, I noticed a woman with her little dark-haired son. I think he was the youngest person there. Seeing him made me think of going to the theater with my mother when I was a child. As I was leaving, I saw his eyes shining as his mother asked him if he wanted to go up and look at the stage. I hope they enjoyed the performance. Would I have, when I was his age? I no longer know.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December

It’s sugarplum month, but we don’t need to let that stop us. There will be Christmas-tinged items on this list, but that’s hardly avoidable, even if I wanted to. I will proceed along my usual arbitrary and personal lines (no Nutcrackers, but the Hard Nut would be listed if it was being staged this year in these parts, which it isn’t being). There will be Messiahs! I know it’s one of the ultimate holiday chestnuts, but this is the season for chestnuts, and even though I should be tired of it I’m not. In fact I’m listening to it right now. Because I probably won’t make any of the live performances, due to conflicts beyond my control.

Thursday, December 2, the Pacific Film Archive, Paramount Theatre, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unite to present Carl Theodor Dreyer’s astounding 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, an oratorio inspired by the film. Information here. Go and marvel!

John Adams and El Nino return to the San Francisco Symphony December 2-4. Later in the month there’s a little more Adams and a lot more Messiah.

Philharmonia Baroque presents Messiah on December 3, 4, 5, and 7, in various locales as is their wont. And American Bach Soloists presents Messiah on December 16, 17, and 18. If the calendar or location don’t decide for you, you can compare casts and other relevant information: here for Philharmonia Baroque, here for American Bach Soloists, and here for the San Francisco Symphony.

Magnificat mixes it up by presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit, which uses old French carols as its basis, along with other seasonal music. December 17-19 in various locales; details here.

Berkeley Rep revives Mary Zimmerman’s fun production of The Arabian Nights, December 11-30.

Cutting Ball Theater extends its production of The Tempest to December 19 (my thoughts here, but in case you don't want to click through, it's a recommendation). And if you want more of the Elizabethans, Cutting Ball’s Hidden Classics Reading Series (which is free), has Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, on December 5. (Opera fans may know the play as the source for Richard Strauss’s Die Schweigsame Frau, though the opera is possibly done even less often than the play. I have actually seen the play staged, but never the opera.) By the way, can anyone explain to me why there is no good (that means affordable and scholarly yet meant for the public) complete edition of Jonson’s plays and masques? He must be fuming over how his rival Shakespeare has outstripped him.

I would be at Epicoene on the 5th if I didn’t already have a ticket for Elza van den Heever’s solo recital, presented by San Francisco Performances, part of their always worthwhile Young Masters series.

And Cal Performances has a full slate, including Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on December 4, and Nicholas Hodges on the 12th, with the Hammerklavier and Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October

Cal Performances gets things off to a terrific start with several west coast premieres from the Mark Morris Dance Group: Socrate, Looky, and Behemoth, September 30 to October 3. Jeremy Denk appears Sunday October 24, with a wonderful program: the Ligeti Etudes, Books 1 and 2, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And from the 26th to the 30th, Benjamin Bagby is performing Beowulf (with surtitles) in what the series brochure calls Anglo-Saxon – do they not call it Old English anymore? Ah, tempus fugit. . . They have a bunch of other interesting stuff as well, but that’s what I have tickets for so far.

San Francisco Performances presents the Takacs Quartet on October 9, playing Haydn, Bartok, and Beethoven. Again: they have other interesting stuff this month, but that’s what I have a ticket for so far.

Cutting Ball Theater starts its season with a Hidden Classics Reading Series presentation of Andromache, by Euripides, on Sunday October 3 at 1:00 p.m. (The Hidden Classics series has free admission.)

Between the Lines, directed by Nicole Paiement, presents Riding the Elevator into the Sky on October 9, featuring Chiaroscuro Azzurro by Laura Schwendinger with Wei He on violin and David Conte’s Sexton Songs, with Marnie Breckenridge, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 415-503-6275 for tickets.

Magnificat presents a rare opportunity to hear John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, 8-10 October, in a different location each night, so check out details on their website.

In further baroque developments, Philharmonia Baroque presents a variety of works by Bach, including the Wedding Cantata, the harpsichord concertos in D minor and D major, and the Orchestral Suite No. 1; October 15-19 in various locations, so check out details on their website.

The Beethoven 7 is perhaps my favorite of his symphonies, so I’m glad to see the San Francisco Symphony has it scheduled October 7-9, with some interesting accompanying pieces by Revueltas, Villa-Lobos, and Varese.

The Shotgun Players offer Mary Stuart, writer-director Mark Jackson's version of Schiller's play.

At the end of the month (starting October 22), Berkeley Rep starts its run of the three-part, twelve-playwright west coast premiere of The Great Game: Afghanistan.

And at the very end of the month, October 30 and 31, Urban Opera presents The Witch of Endor, a pasticcio version of Saul's visit to the witch of Endor (familiar from Handel's Saul, if not from The First Book of Samuel) based on music mostly by Purcell. The title role is sung by Shawnette Sulker, who was so good in Carter's A Mirror on Which to Dwell.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October

Support your local arts organizations by buying tickets to events that look interesting!

The San Francisco Symphony concludes its Mahler Festival with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Scelsi’s Hymnos and the Mahler 5.

San Francisco Opera presents Il Trittico, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Salome. Trittico has been getting raves and has an outstanding cast, from rising stars like Brandon Jovanovich to the semi-legendary Ewa Podles; Patricia Racette sings all three soprano roles (click here for Lisa’s interview with her over at San Francisco Classical Voice). Unfortunately most of the performances of this three-and-a-half hour work started at the idiotic time of 8:00 on a work night, so I’m not seeing it until Saturday October 3, the final performance.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players begin their season on Monday October 5 with the music of Steve Reich, Edmund Campion (the contemporary composer, not the Elizabethan martyr), Charles Wuorinen, Morton Feldman, and John Harbison, with Harbison and Campion (again, not the martyr; it’s not that close to Halloween) giving a pre-concert talk at 7:15.

The touring company of South Pacific is in San Francisco, with Rod Gilfry as Emil de Becque.

Magnificat and the Carter Family Marionettes present La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina by Francesca Caccini (based on the same episode of the Orlando Furioso that inspired Handel’s Alcina). Baroque opera! Ariosto! Puppets! My God, catch me; I’m swooning!

The San Francisco Jazz Festival opens. I was really tempted by ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, but decided Davies Hall was not really the best venue for a ukulele recital. I’m at Salome that night anyway. But there’s lots of other good stuff on their schedule.

As a long-time theater-goer I should probably be slightly embarrassed that I’ve never seen anything by Tony Kushner. Berkeley Rep is offering Tiny Kushner, a night of one acts, so I have to decide if that’s the place to start.

Volti has a 30th-anniversary concert and CD-release party on October 18.

The San Francisco Girls Chorus presents music by Betinis, Holst, and Tavener based on prophetic words and mystic visions from Hafez, Mohammed, and the Rig-Veda.

Cutting Ball Theater officially opens its season with The Bald Soprano. Their previous Ionesco production, last season’s Victims of Duty, was outstanding.

Thick House presents The Creature by Trevor Allen, a re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story.

Jack Curtis Dubowsky has a new opera: Halloween in the Castro, A Horror Opera. This sounds much more fun and interesting than the actual thing. Art so often does!

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek & find

I haven’t seen a lot of Mary Zimmerman’s work, and I’m not sure why – maybe because it’s usually marketed as something to take the kids to, and I tend to avoid those performances, though children are in fact usually better behaved than adults, and if they’re not, they have excitement and inexperience to excuse them. I had seen The Secret in the Wings, based on some of Grimm’s fairy tales, at Berkeley Rep a few years ago and liked it a lot, so I trekked out there again when they presented her latest work, Argonautika, the story of Jason and the golden fleece. I liked this one too, but not quite as much; during the performance the dazzle of the staging distracts you from weaknesses in the script, especially in the second act.

The set is relatively simple and so are the props, but just about any trick that could be done with them was done, to fantastic effect (though to continue with my sea monster thing: the billowing blue cloth that went from waves to menacing monster would have been even better if the creature hadn’t looked a bit too much like Cookie Monster). That’s the part you have to experience live to appreciate. Unfortunately it’s easier to talk about the script flaws than to convey the basic theatrical excitement that can be created with a few ropes and sheets, but that’s what I’m going to do.

The whole approach to the characters was a little cartoony for my taste, and tended to limit the characters to anachronistic caricatures; just to take the goddesses, Hera is a bitchy suburban matron, Athena sort of like the butch best friend in any girl-detective story, and Aphrodite a silly giggling flirt. Hercules is a bit of a buffoon, as he often is, and Soren Oliver was large if not ideally muscular, but he was also surprisingly subtle and moving, especially in his refusal to rejoin the expedition and move on after the death of his young lover, Hylas (Justin Blanchard). In the most profoundly moving exchange of the evening, Hylas half-emerges from a trap door, transformed to a shining river god, to comfort and still the mighty man’s grief with the distant pity and long perspective of the newly immortal. (Oddly enough, though Zimmerman says in the program that Hercules and Hylas are “clearly boyfriends” they are never described in those terms during the performance; they are always called “good friends” in a way that reminded me of the New Yorker cartoon from the 1940s showing a teacher crooning to her class, “Now, of course, Anthony and Cleopatra were the very best of friends.” I don’t know if this is some misguided attempt to be family friendly or merely a laudable reluctance to insist on the semi-obvious.)

Jake Suffian as Jason had an interesting solemnity and sense of duty that might have been better suited to Aeneas; I’ve always had the feeling that Jason is sparkier. Atley Loughridge as Medea had a perfect quality of oddity and apartness about her, but the play would have benefited with less of Medea; instead of shoe-horning the whole history of Jason, Medea, and eventually their murdered children into the second half, Zimmerman should have followed the example of L’Incoronazione di Poppea and left us with the happy couple and the clear knowledge of their unhappy future, for there are two things that everyone (and by “everyone” I mean “anyone likely to buy a ticket to a show at Berkeley Rep called Argonautika”) knows about Greek mythology, and one of them is that Oedipus marries his mother, and the other is that Medea kills her children (though years ago in New York I saw Zoe Caldwell as Medea, in the Robinson Jeffers translation, with Judith Anderson as the Nurse – yes, I actually saw Dame Judith Anderson on stage; I was of course a mere slip of a lad, and she was already encrusted with legend – and when Medea came out at the end with her hands covered in blood announcing that “the stars that scorn the weak shall not be mocking me!” the man next to me, suddenly roused, exclaimed, “Did she just kill her kids? She’s nuts!” which is semi-accurate without being quite adequate).

Not only does the whole child-killing angle swamp everything else, as such a thing would tend to, but I had the feeling Zimmerman was stacking the deck on Medea's behalf. I realize there are variants to all the legends, but I’ve always read that the brother she kills to distract Jason’s pursuers was a youth; here, he’s not only a fully grown man, he’s a vulgar bully, and she’d be justified in offing him just on those grounds. We also never see or know the children, and their murder takes place offstage, so we’re not really forced to confront what she did, which might lessen our sympathy for her, but only why she did it, which increases our sympathy. So much time is taken up with the extended Medea saga that we don’t even see the fulfillment of the prophecy that Jason will kill King Pelias; that storyline, the main plot engine at the beginning, just disappears. The script is entertaining despite its flaws, but it’s the images that really make the evening; at the end, the actors slowly come out and one by one all the elements of the story are turned into the starry constellations of the zodiac, using just some twinkling lights and posing actors, and it’s pure theater magic.

I also saw my second play by Adam Bock: The Shaker Chair, with the Shotgun Players. I had seen The Typographer’s Dream at the same theater about a year ago. The Shaker Chair was a little more problematic, I felt, because it’s an issue play, and that doesn’t necessarily fit in with what I see as Bock’s strength, which is the creation of evocative conjunctions in suggestive, verbally fluid ways, which is much more entertaining on stage than it might sound. He has a Hawthorne-like touch with ambiguous symbols, such as the Shaker Chair itself, which is ornament, rebuke, luxury, and discomfort all at once. It is a recent purchase by Marion (Frances Lee McCain), a single older woman whose generally sensible attitudes can hide her quietly questioning side; she likes the new chair because it is cleanly built, and carefully designed with a reverent purpose, but she admits it’s not very comfortable. The overstuffed, possibly too comfortable chair across the living room is occupied by her sister Dolly (Nancy Shelby), whose main occupation in life is fighting with, fleeing from, and then forgiving her husband Frank (Will Marchetti). Their friend Jean (Scarlett Hepworth) enters, because Marion has the kind of house where friends naturally gather, and it turns out she’s involved in increasingly violent acts of vandalism against a local factory farm that mistreats its pigs, and Marion slowly becomes an activist.

The characters are all quite vivid, and they talk about issues the way people really do, which is actually kind of a problem in an issue play, because the way people really talk involves not thinking things through, and leaving things out, and getting flustered and forgetful, and insisting on things they know are wrong, or just wish were right, and repeating meaningless stuff loudly just because they heard it on TV or the radio. It’s very easy to lose the balance between a fairly thorough airing of the issues and the lived experience and personality of the characters. And that’s why issue plays are surprisingly difficult to write, and why Shaw, who managed the balancing act over and over, really is such a great playwright.

At slightly over an hour, the play is too brief for full coverage of the complex entanglement of agricultural mass production, looming ecological disaster, evolving humanitarian concerns, and corporate control that makes up our machine for living. I kept waiting for someone to make some obvious points about switching to a vegetarian/vegan diet, or buying locally grown and humanely raised food, or, especially, about car culture as a main cause of the world’s sickness, especially since the action starts with Jean needing to borrow Marion’s car for her mission of sabotage, but no one seems to think that there’s any choice except indifference or arson. And the issues aren’t presented in a way that would make the typical Berkeley audience question its assumptions about the whole corporate farming issue – and I’m not disagreeing with those political views, I’m just saying that you need to subvert the audience’s assumptions and smug certainties (something Shaw did regularly) for the play to be more than an evening telling us how right-thinking we are. There’s a brief moment when a live piglet is brought out (proving yet again that live animals on stage are generally a mistake, because the place fell apart; the woman two rows behind me could not shut up the whole time the piglet was trotting about), and with inadvertent irony it shows how alienated the audience is from the life of a farm; actual farm folk are much less sentimental about animals, and manage to control themselves in the presence even of cute little pink ones with delightful curly tails.

The handling of the issues is fairly schematic, but the characters make the evening interesting and complex. Dolly’s romance can seem ridiculous, or even pathetic, but she knows what’s important to her in life, and there’s a lovely moment at the beginning when she talks about her husband walking by when she’s mad at him, and smiling, and she can’t help but forgive him; and you bear that in mind, and it’s a bit of a shock, but also makes complete sense, when we finally meet Frank, and see how calculating and reptilian he actually is – though not with his wife. At the end, Marion, radicalized by the shooting death of Jean during one of her raids, sits in her Shaker chair and ponders her next step as an activist: “I could always loosen one bolt. . . .” The bolt she’s planning to loosen is obviously a symbol for the small things we can do to undermine the machine, but unlike the Shaker chair, it felt too forced and a bit fake to me. I didn’t believe for a moment that a woman like Marion, who has been concerned throughout with possible injury or damage to innocent people, would actually become that sort of violent activist, and that moment of falsity is a tribute to how skillfully and deeply Bock has let us know his characters.

through a glass darkly

A little while back, over in The Standing Room, the recently revealed M. C- (Hi, Sid!) asked who could have guessed that the triumph of the SF Opera season would be Iphigenie en Tauride, in a minimalist and modern production. I’ll blushingly admit it – I knew. I even bought an expensive ticket for a second viewing before I’d had the first. More about Iphigenie anon, but I had to record my triumph of insight only because I’m so often wrong about what will turn out to be a season highlight. (To take just one example, several years ago I urged a Strauss-loving – though maybe it's really more Strauss-liking – friend of mine to accompany me to Arabella, only to realize with horror when I actually saw it that it’s the only opera by him that I can't stand, a kitschy yet dull ode to social climbing. The plot would have made for a great fin-de-siecle Viennese novel, one filled with acrimonious satire and grotesque intimations of sexual perversity; as an opera, well, it’s a long and absurdly superficial meander to that glass of water. That’s what I get for listening to operas on CD and being lazy about reading the librettos. Just as well she didn’t accompany me.) Live performance is chancy by nature. Certain performers or works pique the viewer’s interest, and it’s going to vary from viewer to viewer, and I don’t envy artistic directors (Hi again, Sid!) having to figure out what will make for memorable evenings (or memorable box office). I mean, I think I would come up with a riveting season of theater, and for about a dozen audience members and another dozen performers it would be a highlight of their lives, and then we’d be out of business before the season ends because you need thousands and not dozens. I was pondering this recently when I saw that Berkeley Rep had replaced an upcoming production I was interested in – Rita Moreno in a solo show about Florence Foster Jenkins – with one I have no interest in seeing, Carrie Fisher in a solo show about herself. (Berkeley Rep giveth and Berkeley Rep taketh away: the same article in which I read about that switch said that Theatre de la Jeune Lune, which did a brilliant and inspired version of Moliere’s Miser a few years ago, would be back this spring with their version of Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays.) If you had asked me why I wasn’t interested in the Fisher show, I’d have said I’m tired of theaters skimping by doing one-person shows and I’m tired of the cult of celebrity taking the place of real theater, but if you get right down to it, both shows are about the cult of celebrity and both are solo turns; I just find Florence Foster Jenkins more interesting and moving than Carrie Fisher. I saw the first Star Wars film when it was new, and frankly it bored me, and I figure if Star Wars doesn’t appeal to you when you’re a seventeen-year-old boy there’s little point in pursuing it later in life. (Actually, maybe thirteen is the right age for Star Wars.) I’m sure the cult members will sell out the house, though, and I wish a pleasant evening to all of them. In my public-minded and benevolent way, I’m offering a Carrie Fisher drinking game: do a shot every time Fisher mentions (1) how Hollywood has no good roles for women over 35 or (2) some fanboy confessing to her his Princess Leia sex fantasies. I was going to come up with some more, but why bother? with those two you’ll be smashed in half an hour. The theater should sell the shots and make enough to mount some real plays.

standing by and seeing it done

Right after my return from Pittsburgh and DC, I saw Oliver Twist, adapted and directed by Neil Bartlett, which has been touring around and ended up at Berkeley Rep, and which was fairly enjoyable, unlike the disastrous To the Lighthouse earlier in the season. But, again, when you adapt a novel to the stage, the big moments are preserved, but out of context; the plot is simplified in ways that inevitably distort the story; and any sort of interior monologue tends to be lost or distorted (more of a problem with Woolf than Dickens, but more of a problem with Dickens that one might think). The idea here is that Oliver Twist comes out of the world of Victorian melodrama, and should be presented as such, with plenty of bold action and stark lighting and big gestures. Oliver Twist actually seems a bit early for Victorian melodrama, though it certainly has affinities with that world, but it also has affinities with Romantic literature in the doomed figure of Monks (even the name conjures up Maturin and Radcliffe), who disappears from this version, and with eighteenth-century prison stories of the sort Fielding parodied in Jonathan Wild, so concentrating on melodrama narrows the style of the novel already. Mr. Bumble (Remo Airaldi) and Nancy (Jennifer Ikeda) particularly suffer from compression. You can tell that Dickens has a soft spot for Bumble, cruel and stupid though he is; Bumble, among his great sympathy for himself, has some glimmers for Oliver, and there’s something laughable rather than contemptible in the greed that motivates his marriage to Mrs. Bumble. Many of the novel’s memorable moments (Oliver wants more, it’s meat ma’am, if the law thinks that the law is a [sic] ass the law is a bachelor) center on him. Airaldi was rotund and self-satisfied but the character might just be too far from contemporary experience to be understood when you only see peaks and not the whole range. Ikeda as Nancy sported the disheveled unkempt hairstyle that signifies moral disrepair, streetwalker-division, in the theater. She’s also extremely beautiful, which the novel’s Nancy is not – it’s interesting to wonder if it’s just our contemporary theatrical convention that prostitutes are beautiful, or if it’s an early nineteenth century convention that a lower-class prostitute would not have the delicate beauty of Rose Maylie (who, like Monks, isn’t in this version – and has any version ever kept Henry Maylie, the most unlikely clergyman in nineteenth century fiction?). I’m guessing, given general conditions, the nineteenth century version is closer to actuality than our version is. In any case Ikeda, probably to make Nancy less of a victim, gives her a feisty edge, but given the stage’s compression of events, her whipsaw conversion back-and-forth from capturing Oliver from Mr. Brownlow to defending him from Bill and then handing him over again to Bill for the robbery and then telling Mr. Brownlow where Oliver is makes her look not so much like a woman struggling towards goodness while trapped by her love for an unworthy man as a woman who is simply emotionally unbalanced. Bill was the muscular and threatening Gregory Derelian, who also doubled as the muscular and threatening Mrs. Sowerberry. Carson Elrod was outstanding as the narrator and as the Artful Dodger, though again his character gets misrepresented when he, rather than the sneaky Noah Claypole, is the one to spy on Nancy – such low activities would be beneath the Dodger’s sense of himself, and if you miss a nuance like that, you miss the whole Brechtian underworld Dickens presents. (Also, despite Bartlett’s claims that almost every word came from the novel, Dodger does not die in prison but is transported to Australia – like Bumble, he’s a bad guy that Dickens finds endearing.) As Oliver himself, Michael Wartella met the main challenge, which is to keep Oliver from looking like a simp. Fagin (Ned Eisenberg) is of course a bit awkward for contemporary audiences. The word “Jew” is never uttered in the play, though Fagin is repeatedly referred to as such in the novel (nor does it appear in the film of the musical, even though all of Fagin’s songs sound like out-takes from Fiddler on the Roof – rather endearingly, he is not executed at the end, possibly because the murder of Nancy and hanging of Sykes were considered enough deaths for musicals not involving meat pies; instead, he and the Dodger toddle off together into the sunrise, practically hand-in-hand, to continue their jolly life of crime). Several years ago I read an interesting article by Garry Wills in which he suggested that Fagin’s Jewishness is a covert reference to his pedophilia, both groups being outside and opposed to the normative masculinity of the time (a view also discussed, though not in specific reference to Fagin, in George Mosse’s The Image of Man, which I read recently). The Fagin of this production is not the mild-mannered, sneaky insinuator of the book; he licks his lips and speaks boldly in lascivious tones. His accent and mannerisms are those of a stage Jew, though sometimes more so than others and I wasn’t sure if this was some comment on the construction of stage stereotypes or if the actor was simply inconsistent. And before his execution, when Dickens makes a point of saying he rejected the ministrations of holy men of his own persuasion, this version has him bursting out into “Hear, O Israel” in Hebrew, no less. Perhaps this is meant to show a desperate mind casting around for any comfort, but it seemed like an odd addition. Fagin’s last night is a striking scene in the novel, given from inside Fagin’s mind, sort of early stream-of-consciousness only with punctuation, as he varies between frenzy and flatness, blankly noticing strange little details and then frantic with dread. This is exactly the sort of interior mental shift that loses much of its detail and insight on stage, where the outer necessarily swamps the inner. This is a valid, powerful way of presenting the world – we tend to see the outer with most people, and can only guess at their interiors. But what the novel can do is try to clue us in to someone else’s interior, which makes it a very different animal from the stage. Which brings us to my plea: This was a pretty successful evening, but can we maybe give a rest to adaptations of novels on stage? If the feeling is that they are known properties that will draw in audiences, then I don’t see why Woolf and Cather are bigger magnets than, say, Ibsen or Marlowe would be. The RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby was one of the greatest days I’ve ever spent in a theater, but it took over eight hours and the full resources of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and that is a fairly episodic novel. More tightly plotted novels suffer accordingly. In the past few years, and a merciful memory may be causing me to forget some, I’ve seen My Antonia vandalized at Theatreworks in a wretched travesty that a few good performances could not save, The Overcoat at ACT that was mainly interesting for the thoroughness with which it altered absolutely everything that makes Gogol’s story distinctive, and the utterly awful To the Lighthouse earlier at Berkeley Rep. Kids, if you really can’t think of any other actual playwrights to produce, there’s always Shakespeare.

got my Irish up

I used to be pretty thrilled in a low-key, understated way about the Irish side of my background until PBS disillusioned me. They showed a documentary on the Irish and I realized that I had been thrilled about the Anglo-Irish, who were the overlords from whom my actual ancestors had to flee, leaving behind their brutish sod cottages and mealy potatoes for the crowded tenements and filth of America. (That’s not why I stopped supporting PBS, though. That was when they started ignoring opera and theater in favor of nostalgic band reunions for aging wealthy hippies. If PBS doesn’t do it, who will? Well, VH-1 for starters. Who needs that?) My disillusionment was not really a watershed event, given my tendency to avoid any group to which I might reasonably belong. I’ve always hated St. Patrick’s day, from the silly "pinches if you're not wearing green" in grammar school to the adult form, which is vomiting up cheap green beer. I knew a guy in Boston who did a hilarious impression of South Boston residents the rest of the year (stereotypical Southie accents) versus St. Paddy’s Day (out come the faith and begorrah brogues). I imagine my patron saint himself was a fairly fierce and driven man, not some boozy twinkler dancing with the leprechauns, whom he probably would have considered imps of the Devil if he thought about them at all. I tend to avoid Irish plays too (again, not Anglo-Irish, so the boycott doesn't include Wilde, Shaw, or Beckett), having a fairly low tolerance for sorrowing spinsters and drunken dreamers and The Troubles, so I had completely missed out on Martin McDonagh’s work until I was urged to see The Pillowman at Berkeley Rep a few months ago. It’s pretty fantastic, in every sense, and the outstanding production helped make up for the evening I wasted at To the Lighthouse. The playbill articles, in what may have been either canny promotion or Irish self-mythologizing, acted as if his works were sui generis, whereas I felt that certain scenes picked up exactly where Pinter’s The Birthday Party (which I had seen the week before) left off; there are trace elements of Pinter, Mamet, and Orton, not to mention the grotesqueries of the Jacobeans, who can never resist making adulterous liaisons incestuous as well, and scorn murder by knifing when poisoned lipstick might do. Anyway, McDonagh is now on the list of Irish writers with whom I feel affinity. Once in Boston I saw an animation festival that featured a short based on one of Edna O’Brien’s stories. I don't remember the exact plot, except that I assume it had an unhappy ending, since that’s the sort of thing that gets my attention, but what really got me was the realization that if that story had been by a Jewish author I would have bought the book on the way home from the theater. I’m sure that if I were an actual Jew instead of just an honorary one my interests would be reversed. Irish and Jewish brings us to Leopold Bloom – I’d like to wish a very happy (is that the right word?) Bloomsday to all of my mountain flowers out there. And here’s a fun website to check out: http://www.james-joyce-music.com/. Since I re-read Ulysses just a few years ago, I think I will start re-reading Portrait of the Artist today. I last read it when I was thirteen, and I suspect I missed a few subtleties.

M. Proust, don't bogart those madeleines

I’ve seen a number of plays this year that I had first seen on stage years ago in Boston. This is much less common in theaters where actors speak instead of sing their lines: Tosca and Turandot show up every few years reliably like a comet, but even Shakespeare’s greatest hits are spaced out farther in the rotation. You get odd coincidental resurgences (of Marivaux for example) that seem to crop up in regional theaters like wildflowers after a desert rain, but then years go by without a revival.

First up was Mother Courage at Berkeley Rep. When Bush and Co. deceived this country into its latest imperialist quagmire, there was a national day of staging Lysistrata. The warning went unheeded and the war started to go not quite as planned and then we had a series of productions of the earliest Western play, The Persians (excellent production by Aurora a couple of years ago), in which a powerful invading empire is defeated by a lesser power fighting on its own ground. Perhaps Aeschylus’s compassion and insight in presenting the story from his enemy’s point of view further confused our easily confused administration; we are now at the stage in the war in which the appropriate irrelevant rebuke is to stage Mother Courage, the story of a war profiteer struggling to remain a capitalist in the face of increasing personal loss. This was a good production, but it was competing in my mind against a spectacular production that Peter Sellars did with Linda Hunt at the Boston Shakespeare Company. As with To the Lighthouse there was the puzzling annoyance of amplifying all the songs, which sure alienates me but not in the way Brecht intended. Ivonne Coll was solid in the title role, but I found her occasionally too sentimental – too wistful or too satisfied when contemplating past romances. Mother Courage is not really meant to be a sympathetic or inspiring figure; she’s meant to be a revealing one.

Travesties, the season opener at ACT, was also enjoyable but perhaps a bit too slick. I really love this play (and I feel safe that I’m not just being a snob about catching the references because I loved it when I first read it in high school when I had little idea who Tristan Tzara or even Lady Bracknell were). I really liked the Magritte-like set of randomly floating empty gilded frames against a lightly clouded blue sky. And it was a preview, which would explain some muffed lines and perhaps also why some scenes, such as the librarian’s striptease while shouting Marxist-Leninist slogans, fell flat. But I first saw the play at the Huntington Theater in Boston in a production that brought so much more emotional depth to some of the speeches, particularly in some of Lenin’s speeches.

And then last month at Aurora I saw Pinter’s Birthday Party – again, a solid, enjoyable evening, and I have to cut them some slack because the actor playing Peter was out with laryngitis and we were warned that his substitute, Richard Louis James, was not off book (though he was very impressive – even with script readily available he turned in a solid performance, not just a line reading). But back in Boston, again at the Huntington, I saw a production that still sticks in my mind – I can vividly recall the weirdness and power of Goldberg telling McCann to breathe in his mouth.

Is this just what happens as we get older? If something has lasted in our memories for decades does it automatically have more power over us than what we’ve just seen? Am I doomed to be one of those who haunt the theater saying, “Oh, you should have seen X in the role. . . “? Perhaps these moments made more of an impression when they were new, or when I was.

After seeing Travesties again, I realized that one of the subterranean reasons I had for loving it is that it enacts on stage the weird jumble of random moments, desire, and delusion that the performance will eventually become in our memories.

Maybe it's best to be afraid of Virginia Woolf

Berkeley Rep, having apparently presented every play worth doing, turned to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as adapted by Adele Edling Shank for the show I saw last Friday. I can see the interest an artist would have in turning Woolf’s introspective poetic novel, filled with shifting meanings and perceptions, into another form, but I don’t really see that the stage, with its emphasis on dialogue, action, and interaction, is the right form, as opposed to a film or a symphonic treatment. The play is filled not just with soliloquies but with characters turning to the audience and giving them bits of narration, expostulation, and interpretation of other characters as well as of themselves. I should just say right now that the whole thing doesn’t work. If you take a mosaic apart and then put the tesserae back in even a slightly different way, you will end up with a different picture. If an omniscient narrator sidles up to you and tells you that X notices the flowers but Y doesn’t you get one effect; if X has a fleeting thought that she notices the flowers and Y doesn’t you get a different effect; and if X announces in condescending tones to Z that Y never notices the flowers, you get a completely different effect, and one which might say more about X than about Y. This dislocation ends up changing the impressions of the Ramsey family and their guests, and some miscasting doesn’t help either.

Radiance is a lot to require from an actress, but Monique Fowler as Mrs. Ramsey seems too ordinary and self-absorbed to act as the center of this group; the adaptation increases the emphasis on Mrs. Ramsey’s conventional side but misses out on her social work among the poor. Lily Briscoe is supposed to be a bit odd, a bit dry, and not the smiling beauty Rebecca Watson presents. David Mendelsohn as the awkward, striving Charles Tansley looks much too handsome and distinguished for us to understand his position in this socially superior group. During the dinner party scene he wears a suit and tie rather than evening clothes, and he talks to the audience about his father being a chemist (and Shank should really have made the point clear by using American English), but still – he’s dressed for dinner. Most of us don’t even dress for the theater anymore. I don’t think it’s an accident that Woolf has the uncertain Tansley rather than the patriarchal Mr. Ramsey tell Lily women can’t write or paint – his opinion is coming out of his insecurity and lack of social standing. The presentation of Tansley, like the omission of Mrs. Ramsey’s good works among the poor and the omission of Mrs. McNab the housekeeper in the middle section, narrows the scope of Woolf’s novel by avoiding the experiences of the lower classes that she tried to include. (The boeuf en daube is a triumph – how does Mrs. Ramsey do it? they all ask – she does it by having a cook who spends three days under her direction – though I have to say Woolf doesn’t really point out the irony there either.) Mr. Ramsey, the aging philosopher who has, if thought were the alphabet, reached Q if not R, is a figure that one might expect to resonate with a Berkeley audience. Instead he (portrayed by Edmond Genest) is made to look ridiculous. Unless he is an intellectually imposing, distant yet uncertain figure his children’s struggles against him don’t make any sense. When he walks through the garden reciting Tennyson out loud, it’s because he is so intensely absorbed in his inner life that the outer world slips away, not because he’s a mumbling old fool. And the end of the first part of the novel, Woolf’s amazing lyrical crescendo of unspoken depths between the long-married couple, which ends with the clinching evidence of Mrs. Ramsey’s radiant comprehensiveness, turns into a scene of jaw-dropping vulgarity as the Ramseys resolve their standard-issue stage bickering with her exiting while smiling an invitation and Mr. Ramsey jumping up to follow, perkily adjusting his jacket in the expectation that he’s about to Get Some.

And maybe they should have avoided the accents altogether. After hours of fluting, giggling, and archly affected accents I was longing to hear a normal voice. Instead what I got about 20 minutes before the end was a bizarre and inexplicable outburst of song. The thoughts expressed were similar in substance, style, and intensity to those expressed earlier, only they were (poorly) sung, to the inoffensive ineffective music of Paul Dresher. (The composer who should have set Woolf to music is Wagner, with his leitmotivs, his curling pooling melodies, and his psychological insight; one of the amazing things about Woolf’s novel is how she manages to compress without distortion the techniques of Wagner and Proust.) The effect is so bizarre that I felt momentarily giddy. The singing did explain why these Edwardians were all wearing earpiece microphones, though I have to say I am puzzled by the acoustical situation – singers use mikes when they have spoken dialogue, and actors use them when they have to sing – shouldn’t it be one or the other, scientifically speaking, assuming that both houses are roughly the same size? The sudden use of song, the narration delivered directly to the audience, and the many projections all seem like efforts to expand the stage to encompass the world of Woolf’s novel, but they’re also a way of pointing out that the usual resources of the stage can’t really handle this material.

The play’s failure to present Woolf’s work accurately or adequately wouldn’t matter so much if it created something different, if not necessarily better. But what we have is a simplified, distorted view of Woolf’s novel that at some key points doesn’t even make sense unless you’re familiar with the source (it’s not clear that Andrew Ramsey is killed in the war and that Prue dies in childbirth around the same time, something that could have been made clear with a few lines of dialogue – the point is further confused by having the actors who played Andrew and Prue show up at the end as the older James and Cam, on their way to the lighthouse at last). This adaptation isn’t a disaster on the order of TheaterWork’s vandalism a few years ago of My Antonia, but to make the point I made afterwards about that fiasco, the novel is not that long, and if you took the travel time plus the running time of the play and just a fraction of what you would spend on the ticket and transportation, you could buy and read the book and have a much richer aesthetic and intellectual experience. In the meantime, Berkeley Rep may want to look into, oh, Shakespeare or someone, whose stuff actually works on stage.

Why ask for the sun, when I've given you the stars?

To prove my point about Ibsen, here's my review of the Berkeley Rep's Ghosts from a year or so ago (the years, how they jumble together. . . .): I found the evening a mixed bag. There are some powerful performances and moments, but a lot of weak ones as well. I think they needed to think a little more deeply about how to present Ibsen to a Berkeley audience. Pastor Manders (James Carpenter -- OK -- I just realized he's the guy who was so outstanding in The Master Builder -- so as I surmised it was the direction of him in Ghosts that was at fault), the voice of social convention, was pretty much a foolish, dried-up prig, and that's a traditional interpretation that was well performed, but it just doesn't work for a contemporary audience. When a clergyman starts talking about duty (especially wifely duty) and what others will think, a Berkeley audience is just going to laugh at him. If there's no sense of power or reason behind what he says, where's the drama? We're just patting ourselves on the back for laughing at him and wondering why Mrs. Alving listens to him. He should at least be goodlooking enough and unconsciously seductive enough (which is how successful preachers are) for us to understand why Mrs. Alving ever found him so attractive. If they had thought of him as an aging hippy, I think that would have conveyed the right blend of idealism, foolishness, and sanctimony. They could have adjusted the translation so that instead of talking about duty (a cue for laughter) he talked about "social responsibility" -- it's another way of saying the same thing that would have given Manders's point of view a little more credibility with a contemporary audience. The man playing Jakob Engstrand (Brian Keith Russell) was pretty much a complete failure at conveying the man's greedy calculations and his whining manipulation and his menacing presence. He just seemed like a fairly nice guy who was trying to watch out for number one. You don't really get that this is someone who's trying to prostitute his daughter (well, stepdaughter, but still) and who burns down the orphanage to blackmail the Pastor (and again, a contemporary audience is only going to be pleased to see the Pastor hoodwinked). I also am not sure the audience really got the nature of the sailor's home he's trying to set up (even though they kept referring to it as a "seamen's home"; I guess they hoped the pun would make it all clear). The daughter Regina (Emily Ackermann) was fine but they (especially the son) keep describing her as a robust and vital and shapely young woman, and though she has an offbeat kind of goodlooks she just isn't that type. The last time I saw Ghosts Cherry Jones was in that role and she's more the type -- a big strapping healthy girl. Mrs. Alving (Ellen McLaughlin) was powerful and gave a ferocious and compelling performance, but I wasn't entirely convinced by some of her choices -- especially at the end, where she's throwing herself around and hurling the morphine -- she just comes off as too strong for us to understand why she would go back to her husband, why she would cover up her husband's real life, and why she would be torn about her son's demand for euthanasia. I've always pictured her at the end as physically constricted and almost bound, not throwing herself on the floor writhing. The son (Davis Duffield) was fine, though for some reason he played the entire second half shirtless (though he keeps talking about the cold -- is this meant to convey a high fever?) and I kept wondering what weird vanity or lack of vanity (he's not buff, which he shouldn't be for the part) was at play here and why he didn't shave the hairy patches on his back. The staging of his scenes with Regina was too physical and almost absurdly overdone, and there wasn't enough irony in his confrontation with the pastor about the immoral lives of the artists -- he already knows he has syphilis, he should be a lot more tentative with Regina and should be trying to convince himself as well as the pastor of the purity of the artists' lives. Again this argument is a stacked deck for us, so you need to play the scene for something other than the social views presented. The initial set, some large bare walls and a few basic pieces of furniture, was pretty ineffective; there's no sense of suffocation or tradition because it's too large and too bare. Put a looming picture of the Captain on the wall or something! After the orphanage burns they lift the walls and the rest is played against the large back wall with a flame-like and semi-abstract painting of bodies in reds, pinks, and oranges -- it tied in Oswald's painting and the fire and the syphilis very well. The music was mostly absurdly melodramatic (with lighting to match) though at the end they played a conventionally effective but weirdly anachronistic sort of alt rock song. It kind of worked but was more distracting than persuasive. Look, if someone gives you a ticket, go -- it's a fairly solid though conventional production of Ibsen, so if you're thirsting for Ibsen it's worth it.