Chad Deity enters the Aurora, elaborately

A couple of Thursdays ago I was in Berkeley seeing a play with an all-female cast and then the Tuesday after I was back in Berkeley seeing a play with an all-male cast. It seems as if there should be some larger cultural meaning to this, but I don't think there is; I think it's merely one of those odd striking coincidences that look significant but are just haphazard. Both plays actually dealt more with class and cultural grouping than with gender.

Anyway the play with the all-male cast was The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a very recent (2010) work by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by Jon Tracy at the Aurora. It's set in the world of professional wrestling, so right there I'd like to commend the Aurora for taking it on, as I'm doubtful most of their regular audience has ever seen any wrestling matches outside of Orlando and Charles in As You Like It. Back when I lived in Boston the two main local companies were the Huntington, near Symphony Hall in Boston, and ART, the American Repertory Theater, in Harvard Square. The latter had the reputation as the more daring and experimental theater, but I used to disagree when people would say this, on the grounds that it was more daring for the Huntington to present Congreve to their more mainstream audience than it was for ART to present Beckett and Ionesco to their Harvard crowd. A play that takes professional wrestling as its prism on American life is as they say these days outside the wheelhouse of the typical Aurora audience. But most of them seemed not only open to it but to enjoy it thoroughly, though there were a couple of defections at intermission. One woman near me who was enjoying the show but hadn't been to the theater before asked me if this play was typical of what the Aurora did. I said, "Well, they're saying 'fuck' a lot more often than they do in most of the plays here," which amused her, as it was intended to.

If you haven't been to the Aurora before, it's a very small theater, with four rows of seats in a U-shape around a central stage. There were platforms in the back part of the stage but the central stage area was mostly taken up by a large ring. As we entered there were flashing red, white, and blue lights and flashy video projections on the back. Dave Maier, who was not only the Fight Director but also played several characters in the play, stood in the ring before the show and warmed up the crowd with a steady stream of comical patter, calling one large guy with big arms "Hercules" and pretending that a young woman was defeating him with her stare. He brought up a couple of volunteers from the audience and gave them quick, whispered instructions on a few pro-wrestling moves, which he then very convincingly pretended had knocked him flat. The first was a lanky teenage boy in a hoodie. The second was a tiny older woman who looked both fragile and enthusiastic. He gave each of them stage names. I forget what the teenager was called, but the woman had red hair - as someone shouted out, "She's a red-headed woman!", which made me think of Crown's song from Porgy and Bess - so I think he called her the Flamethrower. It was all very good-humored and cleverly brought the audience into the spirit of the world we were about to enter. (I did not have the usual dread and anxiety I have whenever I am threatened with any sort of audience participation.) The brief matches with the audience volunteers not only got the audience involved before the play even started, they actually helped illustrate a major theme of the play - how the "loser" of these scripted wrestling matches actually has to be a better wrestler and a better actor, using all his skill and knowledge to make it look as if the charismatic but less skilled hero is doing the work.

The scripted loser of these matches, and our Virgil through the world of pro wrestling, is Macedonio "The Mace" Guerra (Tony Sancho), a charming and talented athlete-actor who is serious about the heritage and artistic possibilities of his profession (and why not? it's completely theater). Guerra is Puerto Rican, and grew up poor in America. He ends up recruiting a smooth-talking Indian, Vigneshwar Paduar (Nasser Khan), whose patter on the basketball court had entranced Guerra's older (and less thoughtful) brothers. Their ethnic identities are crucial to the persona created for them in the arena, often as negative stereotypes (Paduar gets cast as an vaguely Middle Eastern terrorist and Guerra as a Mexican revolutionary and probably illegal immigrant, though both men want to use the story-telling possibilities of wrestling to tell different, positive stories about their people). They wrestle against various super-patriotic whites (Billy Heartland and ex-Marine Old Glory, played by Dave Maier), but the ultimate prize is the hero of the arena, Chad Deity himself. Interestingly, since this is a play very much about ethnicity/cultural stereotypes and power in America, Chad (Beethovan Oden) is a black man, whose glittering overblown boasting hides a canny, perceptive mind. But the real power behind the wrestling organization, though not exactly its brains, is a white man, Everett K. "EKO" Olson (Rod Gnapp), whose main skill (and it's not an insignificant one) is to know almost intuitively which emotional/political buttons to push to separate his audience from their money.

The whole cast is excellent, though I should single out Tony Sancho as Guerra, since he carries most of the burden of wrestling as well as narration. It's a very high-energy show, with, as you might imagine, lots of wrestling, some of it elaborately choreographed, and with lots of oversized personalities and big moments, but the actors keep their characters this side of caricature (so kudos to director Jon Tracy as well). Diaz constructs the story very skillfully, giving us enough background in wrestling so that we can read it as more than just a couple of guys in tights tossing each other around, showing us what drives these men to do what they do, and giving us enough insight into the psychology of the wrestling audience as well as the wrestling organization itself so that after Paduar goes off-script in the ring, when Guerra thinks EKO is going to be furious, we can guess that he's wrong, because of the audience's response to Paduar.

It's a very entertaining play. But there were a few moments when Guerra reminded me of the old Mad TV skit in which a proud Latino waiter would give detailed, historically informed recitations of his people's glorious culture to groups of clueless white Americans who only wanted to order cheap pseudo-Mexican food or get blasted on Cinco de Mayo or something like that. The thing is, though I recognize the importance and value of ethnic uplift, I just do not respond to it artistically; I find it limiting (anytime uplift is your main goal, you're going to have to omit a lot of reality). Guerra's impoverished but dignified Puerto Rican family is swiftly and expertly drawn in his story-telling, but doesn't he realize that his narrative of strong and proud families is ultimately just as contrived and regulated, and even stereotypical, as the wrestling narratives he objects to about patriotic "real" Americans fighting evil foreigners? What really struck me about Guerra's position in the wrestling world had nothing to do with ethnicity - he's someone we've all seen, or perhaps have been, in any corporation - he's the hard-working, hard-luck employee whose skill and dedication get things done, but whose type of intelligence and personality exclude him from stardom. In short, I think Guerra would have had a similar story no matter what his ethnic background, which is one of the reasons I find identity politics limiting and ultimately pointless. Still, there's enough other stuff going on here so that I'd recommend the show. It runs through 30 September; more information here.

Anatol and the eternal machine

I've started going to the Aurora Theater pretty regularly, but I decided to skip Annie Baker’s Body Awareness, because I have minimal interest in “hot button” theater, and whatever interest I had in seeing the show dwindled as the talk-show issues piled up in the plot description – women’s body images! same-sex couples with children! children with Asperger’s Syndrome! (or some other trendy syndrome – I know that sounds brutal and dismissive of people struggling with real problems, but in this theatrical context it’s also accurate). I’m not usually drawn to plays by their plots, but you have to start somewhere in deciding whether to attend or not; given world enough and time I might have taken a chance, but of course none of us have world and time enough. Nothing I heard about the play made me regret not going.

I did go to Anatol, an Arthur Schnitzler play newly translated by Margret Schaefer and directed by Barbara Oliver. Many years ago in Boston I saw a production of his best-known play, La Ronde, which is a series of two-person scenes, beginning with a prostitute and a soldier, then moving on to the soldier and his married mistress, then the mistress and her husband, then the husband and whoever he's sleeping with. . . . I’m going by memory so I may not have the personnel and the order of the scenes quite right, but you see how the chain works: we ascend the social scale person by person and betrayal by betrayal, until in the final scene we plunge back into the lower depths, as we see some high-level aristocrat who is patronizing (in every sense) the prostitute from the first scene. Running through all the social divisions and sexual liaisons is the fear of spreading venereal disease – people make social distinctions, viruses do not. In the production I saw the audience moved from one partitioned scene to another, intensifying the voyeuristic quality of the experience. I think having the audience rather than the actors move is kind of a trendy thing now, but it was pretty unusual then. I recall the play being very dark, physically as well spiritually, with a sardonic tone, and sadness beneath.

I had a similar experience of Schnitzler’s work watching Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which was adapted from a short novel by him. I liked the movie very much. I realize not everyone feels that way; my theory was that your reaction to that movie came out of your feelings about sex. If your experience was sunny and positive, you wouldn’t like the movie; if it was tense and troubled, you would. All this is to give you an idea of why I wanted to see Anatol, and what I was expecting from it.

The show was entertaining enough, but much lighter than I expected. Schnitzler wrote a series of short plays about Anatol, a man about town in early twentieth-century Vienna, whose main interest in life is his series of love affairs. Each play centers on a different woman, but his worldly-wise friend Max is a constant presence, counseling and mocking his idealistic friend. We were given six of these short plays, three before and three after the short intermission. Each play is roughly twenty minutes – that is, roughly the length of a sitcom, but it wasn’t only the length that kept me thinking of sitcoms.

There’s also the light tone, with the occasional deeper touch, and the way the characters keep falling into the same patterns as we chuckle in affectionate recognition exactly because familiarity tells us in advance how they will behave. When Anatol invites his current flame to an expensive dinner so that he can break up with her, we already know (or at least, I already knew) that not only will she show up intending to break up with him, but that he will feel not relief but comical outrage. In fact I think I saw that particular story on Frasier. I kept thinking of that show during the performance, possibly because of the hovering spirit of Viennese psychoanalysis. And I was never much of a Frasier fan; episodes frequently had a creamy soft center that I disliked, and I felt that the cultural and intellectual interests of the two brothers were mostly there to be mocked and belittled, as surefire evidence of their pomposity and pretentiousness. But at least Frasier was more consistently funny than Anatol.

Max, who is, in sitcom terms, pretty much the sassy gay best friend, is supposed to be the main purveyor of cynical wisecracks. He constantly purses his lips, cocks the eyebrows just so, adopts a knowing air, contorts his face into a preparatory moue, and otherwise clanks through various mannered machinations in order to squeeze out a weak little squirt of wit. The material just isn’t there; the effect is supposed to be terribly clever and shocking and generally Oscar Wilde-ish, but  . . . well, it's not. Initially I thought Tim Kniffin as Max was giving a terrible, affected performance. Then I realized that I have met people exactly like this – people who spend their lives giving a bad performance , imitating some (usually stereotypical) role they just don’t have the personality or wit to carry off successfully. (Who knows if they ever speak or move naturally, or if they even have a natural nature?) So I then started to think that maybe Kniffin was giving a really brilliantly satirical portrayal. I’m still not entirely sure whether he was terrible or brilliant, but since the result of my mental dispute was that I often couldn’t take my eyes off him, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Delia MacDougall played all six women, nicely differentiating each of them, and if I occasionally found her effects too broad, I think the fault was Schnitzler’s. She was quite poignant as a married society woman who runs into Anatol on the street while he’s trying to buy a Christmas gift for his new, lower-class girlfriend. She has strong feelings for him herself but lacks the daring (or, perhaps, is too clear-sighted) to act on them. This episode was wisely placed right before the intermission; I know it made me decide it was worth staying to see the rest. The actors were just slipping off stage and the mood from this evocative interlude was still hanging in the air when it was promptly shattered by the shriveled bird-woman sitting to my right, who announced, “That was a good one.”

Mike Ryan played Anatol. When he first walked out, I thought, uh, I don’t think so – he was short, stocky, balding, with a pug nose; not at all what I expected from the romantic lead. But he played Anatol with such sensitive charm, such tender sincerity, such endearing idealism and naivete, that within ten minutes I was completely convinced that all those women did, in fact, find him irresistible. (I also won’t rule out the possibility that all those women are less superficial than I am.) That's theater magic!

And that was Anatol, and Anatol. I felt a bit let down by Schnitzler. But when you concentrate on a character like Anatol, a person of privilege, leisure, and cultivation; a person, most of all, of a certain class and income, both of them apparently impervious to shock or loss – when you concentrate on such a person, things are going to slide along on a fairly even keel. Schnitzler's original audience may have enjoyed these love fantasias as a refuge from the world, and it was certainly pleasant enough, but I can get pleasant at home. Is a bit of syphilis or the occasional love-suicide too much to ask for as my evening's entertainment?

the devil's disciple

The Aurora Theater is currently presenting The Soldier’s Tale by Stravinsky, a dark little fable brightly told about a soldier who foolishly gives the Devil his violin in exchange for riches (well, there's more, but it's better not to know it in advance). Donald Pippin of Pocket Opera did the clever rhymed translation of CF Ramuz’s book, and Jonathan Khuner did the musical arrangement of Stravinsky’s 1918 work, with “musical collaboration” (which I think means “performance,” though maybe they also worked on the arrangements) by Earplay. The music is very attractively jazzy; if I were listening to it cold I would have guessed that at least parts of it were by Kurt Weill in his Berlin days.

I went to a preview performance on a Tuesday, since Aurora’s Tuesday shows start at 7:00. The work is slightly over an hour, so it occurred to me that if they’d started on time (instead of about ten minutes after the hour) we would have been getting out around the time most theaters were just starting their performances. I’d rather have the time after the performance than have to waste it beforehand, so I love the Aurora's Tuesdays.


The show was conceived by former SF Ballet dancer Muriel Maffre, who also played the Daughter of the King, operated the soldier puppet, choreographed the work, and co-directed it with Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross. Not surprisingly she dances exquisitely and memorably in her bit at the end, though equally memorable in a different way is the Devil’s flailing contorted dance which follows; the Devil, billed as The Devil in Various Disguises, is Joan Mankin, with a wild mop of reddish hair and a progressively greener face. Mankin has a weirdly sexy Lotte Lenya-type vibe going on, and it says a lot for the power of Maffre’s quieter performance, and for L. Peter Callender as the elegant narrator, that they can hold their own against her manic energy.

I do wish they would rethink the design of the marionette soldier, which has a large moon-white cranium tapering down into a narrow pointed chin and dark almond-shaped eyes – the total effect is just too Roswell/Area 51 and I initially found it kind of off-putting. After a while, as with most puppets (except the human kind) I got used to the looks and stopped seeing him as a puppet, but I kept getting occasional space-alien flashes from him.

Other than that, I found the whole thing generally delightful, with enough twists and enough ambiguity to hold the interest. I was amused to see that this work, like Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, also has a key scene involving a card game with the devil featuring the Queen of Hearts; I have no idea what to make of this, but it might make a stumper of a trivia question for those so minded.


This show would make a wonderful holiday treat for sophisticated children. But don't let the lack of children, sophisticated or otherwise, stop you from going, since it's also a wonderful holiday treat for adults (I thought about going to the Nutcracker this year, since I haven’t seen it in many years, but then I realized that I felt kind of pervy going solo to the Nutcracker, which I realize is a weird reaction, but there it is. Anyway, no worries about going solo to this enjoyable show).

It runs through Dec 18; call the box office at 510-843-4822 or go on-line here if you don't mind that they assign you a random seat rather than let you see everything available (I do mind so I always call the box office, and they are always very helpful).

A Delicate Balance at the Aurora

I’m not a big Edward Albee fan, but I was tempted by Aurora Theater’s preview sale ($25 tickets) and 7:00 start time last Tuesday and I went to A Delicate Balance. I had a very good time. I’m still not quite won over to him, but I liked this play the best of the ones I’ve seen or read, and the ensemble was really strong.

My problem with him basically is that he doesn’t go far enough into Theater of the Absurd territory for me to find his plays convincing: I keep wondering why people don’t just leave, tell their hosts/guests to shut up, get out, whatever. Samuel Beckett’s people, while entirely plausible as actual humans, are so far on the social edge that you can accept what happens to them as real, no matter how arbitrary or cruel it is. They’re in a way purified of social conventions and expectations. Albee’s people are firmly situated in the middle class yet when arbitrary and cruel things happen to them – when their hosts turn on them in a game of “get the guest,” when their spouses have affairs with goats, when their best friends (as in this play) show up and move in with little explanation other than “we’re frightened” – they often react in ways that do not seem those of middle-class people of their time and place – if they did, there goes the play. They look like people in a living room, but they talk like people on a stage.

The time and place are evoked very precisely by the comfortable and stylish but somewhat formal furniture in Aurora’s realistic production (they even have New Yorker magazines from the right month and year – I think it’s March/April 1966 – on the coffeetable; the Aurora is such an intimate theater-in-the-round that you can see the dates of the magazines). As you might have gathered, I had mixed feelings about this: on the one hand, Agnes and Tobias, our long-married protagonists, seem unduly reticent about quite a lot of what goes on around them. On the other hand, that pre-feminist-movement setting explains to some extent why their 38-year-old daughter Julia, about to initiate her fourth divorce, moves back in with them to no one's surprise, rather than get an apartment on her own, and the pre-AIDS setting explains why sensitive middle-class people refer occasionally to "fags," and the pre-"tough love" setting explains why they don’t take stronger measures with Agnes’s alcoholic sister Claire (though by contemporary standards they all drink so much and so constantly that it seems a bit arbitrary to label Claire as the alcoholic).

I thought the play went on too long (it’s roughly two and a half hours, but I’m talking about the material, not just its duration, and maybe I should point out I was fairly heavily drugged on OTC allergy medications); the third act especially bogs down with overly simplistic revelations of cause and effect (“because you did X when Y happened . . . therefore Z – and now our lives are explained!”). Some things (like Claire showing up with an accordion) seem like sort of fun but arbitrary ways of upping the action; would anyone in the middle of a serious quarrel realistically just let her provide ironic incidental music? Moments like that might be more convincing in a more stylized stripped-down staging, but then such staging would unbalance other moments.

As I’ve noted before, the problem with plays about addiction and other compulsive behaviors is that such behaviors by their nature are repetitious and cyclical – therefore, when something happens (drunken outbursts, revelations of the shocking truth, etc) that clearly must have happened many times before, it seems stagey to me when characters react as if they’ve never dealt with these things before, as if some strong wall has been breached – these are middle-aged people, edging into elderly; surely they’ve figured out how to deal with this sort of thing, and if they haven't, then they're playing along. (That applies mostly to Claire's and Julia's behavior; it really is brilliantly shocking yet inevitable when the stolid best friends, Harry and Edna, not only move in because of sudden existential terror, but start making themselves too much at home.)

So I had some mixed feelings about the play, though I mostly enjoyed it, but what really carries the evening is the superb ensemble cast: Kimberly King as Agnes, Ken Grantham as Tobias, Jamie Jones as Claire, Anne Darragh as Edna, Charles Dean as Harry, and Carrie Paff as Julia, and there's not a weak link in the bunch (directed by Tom Ross, Aurora Artistic Director). At various points they all made me laugh or surprised me with something unexpected. The play runs until October 9; call the box office at 510-843-4822 for tickets (they also have on-line sales, but use the stupid “best seat available” system rather than letting you see all available seats and choosing your own, so I always buy their tickets over the phone – the staff is very helpful).

buggy

I re-entered the insect world a couple of days after The Insect Play when I went to Aurora Theater’s production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, adapted by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson, directed by Mark Jackson. The Aurora not only has frequent specials on their tickets (mine was only $25) but (at least on Tuesdays) we are spared the silliness of waiting until 8:00 since the show starts at the reasonable hour of 7:00 (and they don’t seem to have any trouble filling the theater at that hour). These things encourage me to go to plays I might otherwise skip, which is great because Aurora has a very interesting season coming up.

I enjoyed Metamorphosis, but perhaps more in retrospect than during the performance, since I had made what turned out to be the mistake of re-reading Kafka’s story a few days earlier. The play is insistently described as Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but it is oddly dependent on the audience knowing the basic story but not remembering any of Kafka's details. The drastic change that has come upon Gregor Samsa (the adeptly physical and moving Alexander Crowther) goes undescribed in the play; presumably the audience already knows that this is the story of a man who wakes up one morning as a giant bug. But so many details are changed that if the story is fresh in your mind you’re likely to spend the whole time wondering why they were changed.

Some of these changes work and some don’t and some are half-and half. This version is set in mid-century America, and though the new setting conjures up associations with 1950s horror films and the underlying fear of the nuclear bomb, it also creates incongruities, even if you are willing to accept that an all-American midcentury family would have children named Gregor and Grete. The original stage adaptation was, according to the program, set in Europe before the outbreak of the Second World War, a setting in which the lodger’s speech about “cleaning up the vermin” makes more sense. And in 1950s America, why would the lodger (now an up-and-coming manager in the department store where Grete works, and a single character, without the two companions found in Kafka) be taking a bus instead of driving his own car? People like that do not take the bus, at least not in America.

The family itself is now more mainstream and conventional than the struggling and somewhat forlorn Prague family in the original, and their presentation as an idealized mid-century middle-class middle-American family is by its very nature almost inescapably satirical. The apple that his father throws at Gregor, which gets stuck in his back and starts rotting, a detail that for many readers creates an indelible sense of the physicality of the transformation, is here transformed into a loaf of French bread with which the father beats him back to his room – but why would anyone, let alone someone concerned about grocery money, hit a filthy insect with a fresh loaf of bread instead of grabbing a newspaper or slipper?

The Lodger (a sharp and funny Patrick Jones) is now presented as a possible love interest for Grete (the sympathetic Megan Trout). But by making that change they make the Lodger’s rudeness during her performance inexplicable – if he’s attracted to her, why is he suddenly treating her with such contempt? Also, for reasons I don’t understand, Grete is now a ballet dancer instead of a violinist. I can see that she might play the violin for a dinner guest, but it’s bizarre for a grown young woman to prance around the living room in a pink tutu before dinner. More significantly, setting him up as a possible love-interest for Grete mutes the astonishing moment at the end of the story when the three surviving Samsas leave their apartment and take a trolley ride to the country, and the parents suddenly realize that Grete is now an attractive young woman who could have plenty of suitors. If they realize that earlier, and she actually has at least one promising suitor, then that ending, with its sudden awareness of vibrant physical health and love, loses its punch.

Changes like that (there were many others, large and small) kept pulling me out of the story; it’s difficult to accept a new version on its own when you keep wondering why certain changes were made or why certain incongruities weren't smoothed out. This is a general problem with adapting famous novels to the stage, with the possible exception of the RSC’s triumph with Nicholas Nickleby, which I saw on Broadway many years ago. But I’ve seen some that were completely inexplicable to me, such as the version of My Antonia at TheaterWorks a few years ago that was such a foolish travesty of the novel that I made V, who accompanied me, promise that she would read Cather’s original – something which could have been done in about the length of time it took us to get to Mountain View, sit through the play, and then drive back. I’m still befuddled by what was billed at ACT a few years ago as Gogol’s The Overcoat, which changed every single thing of significance about the story, turning it into a sort of sentimental sub-Chaplin pantomime. It was OK, but why would you take a weird and unsettling and utterly original work and turn it into something generic?

I should probably make clear at this point that I would recommend The Metamorphosis, even though you can read the original in about the time it takes to attend the play (though for maximum enjoyment wait until after you see the show to do that). The performers were all excellent (I haven’t yet mentioned Allen McKelvey and Madeline H.D. Brown as the parents, both of them equal to the rest of the outstanding cast). And there’s always the curiosity factor: how will they handle the bug? Given director Jackson’s interest in theatrical movement, I wasn’t really surprised to see it was all done through movement rather than some papier-mâché thorax. As soon as I saw Crowther upstage in a suit and tie, I knew what was going to happen: as he became more settled in bug-life, and more despairing, he started losing articles of clothes (though he never gets completed naked, which I thought was a brilliant touch; the naked human body has a beauty and vulnerability that appeals to other humans naturally; instead, he is in a wifebeater and a pale pair of boxers, which make him seem appropriately drab and diminished).

Nina Ball’s set makes excellent use of the Aurora’s stage; the lower part, which is surrounded on three sides by the audience, is a normal, realistic living room set, but above is Gregor’s room, an Expressionistic nightmare of sharply tilted confined space.

As the audience was leaving I saw a woman with a video camera planted at the passage to the street, asking people what they thought of the performance. I thought she was filming her group for some reason but then I realized she was apparently with the theater and filming anyone who answered, presumably for advertising. I have never seen this done before and would like to discourage it. I do not want to be ambushed by cameras as I leave a theater and am unlikely to be persuaded to see a show by random strangers exclaiming, “I loved it!”

The show has been extended through July 24; check it out. Ticket information here; I recommend calling the very helpful box office since their on-line system is "best [sic] seat available" instead of showing you all available seats and letting you choose the one you think is best.

I wanted magic

I had been undecided about going to Aurora Theater’s production of Tennessee Williams's Eccentricities of a Nightingale, but then they combined a 7:00 start time with a bargain price, so off I went last Tuesday. The hook was that live theater is “the ultimate 3-D viewing experience” so the ticket prices were $12, which is apparently what a movie costs these days, which is yet another reason to stay home with a big-screen TV and a pile of DVDs. Actually, I think 3-D movies might cost more, making the Aurora’s price a real bargain, even with the $5 service charge for calling the box office, which you have to do because their website uses the idiotic “best seat available” method instead of letting you see every seat available and deciding which one you think is best. In fact it was buying a ticket for an Aurora show a few years ago that made me determine never to buy tickets on-line unless I could see every seat. That time I clicked about three or four of the “best seats available” until I finally found one that really was the best, waiting there all along. The woman I spoke to at the box office was very nice. And when I arrived (with plenty of time to spare before the curtain rose – the Aurora is a small theater with four rows of seats on three sides of the stage, so that’s very much a metaphorical curtain) they had free bags of popcorn in the lobby, to keep with the movie theme, which was very charming.

On to the show. I realized with some surprise that I had not actually seen many Tennessee Williams plays. In fact, except for the Glass Menagerie on Broadway with Jessica Tandy as the mother, this might be the only one. I’ve seen the film of Streetcar Named Desire many times, but I’ve never seen it on stage (I’m excluding the operatic version, which I did see). In the pre-VCR days I used to go to the Harvard Square Cinema every time they showed Streetcar, but I haven’t even seen that many of the other movies. Sometimes I wonder what it is I do with my time.

And yet, I already knew all the characters we saw in Williamsworld, as surely as if they were a commedia troupe: the domineering mother; the young man who is somehow . . . sensitive, and therefore slightly weak; the rejected eccentrics and the unimaginative conventional people who rejected them; and above all, the slightly frantic yearning virginal woman whose desperate efforts, as her youth passes under the lengthening and lingering shadow of death, to find a moment, however brief and transitory, of the fleeting poetry, the only true and living poetry in this harsh and unforgiving world, that is a soulful union with a kindred and understanding spirit, a quest which leads her, like moth to flame, into rash and self-destructive acts, whose burning fire at least convinces her that there is some vivacity possible amid the ashes. (Please, I’m not just dashing this stuff off – go back and read that last part again, and this time do it with a lilting southern accent.)

The woman in this case is Alma Winemiller, daughter of the Episcopal priest in the small Mississippi town of Glorious Hill, shortly before the First World War. She sings (hence the Nightingale), but with an excess of emotion that is considered strange by her neighbors (hence, among other causes, the Eccentricities). She loves, hopelessly, the handsome young son of their neighbors. He is a doctor like his father and though he is clearly interested by Alma’s unusual character he is also dominated by his dainty snake of a mother, who objects to Alma’s oddity even though her own grotesquely obvious and psychologically incestuous interest in controlling her son is clearly the oddest and most perverse thing we see. The story is told through a series of holiday scenes, starting and ending with Independence Day, with Christmas and New Year’s Day in between. In the epilogue (look, I’ll issue a spoiler alert, but really you can see this coming) we find that Alma is now, if not actually a prostitute, pretty much the equivalent, picking up traveling salesmen, Blanche duBois-like, with a smooth line of patter. In this scene Alma seems subtly stronger and more centered than before, finding some measure of peace in rebelling against the restrictive conventions of the town.

According to the program book, Williams used to proclaim in interviews that he was Alma. Yeah, no kidding. I think that’s the problem – he didn’t quite manage to separate her from himself enough to get a convincing perspective on what her life would be like outside of his wishful view of what it should be like. He’s too indulgent with her; take the concept of her “eccentricities” – that’s such a charming and endearing way of putting it. Try “the annoying and endless affectations of a nightingale” or “the relentless speechifying of a nightingale” – not quite so charming and endearing, is it. It’s all a matter of phrasing things a certain way, and then maintaining that perspective so that we see things in a certain light. Williams convinces you with his sinuous purple rhetoric, but once the swirling poetic clouds start to clear away, it’s difficult to remain convinced. (Sometimes Williams’s poetic effects themselves are piled on too thickly; there’s one scene in which a remarkably cooperative fire burns, dies, and revives in perfect harmony with the sexual emotions in the room, just as in a 1940s film.)

Despite the immense skill of Beth Wilmurt as Alma, I found it a little hard to accept that a life of impoverished promiscuity/prostitution was really what you might call empowering or even satisfyingly rebellious for an aging solitary woman in that particular time and place. But if we take that point of view, we’re clearly siding with the awful and unimaginative inhabitants who reject Alma’s essentially harmless ways. When she's criticized by her father for such alleged eccentricities as feeding the birds in the public park, you of course are going to sympathize with her, even as you can't help feeling that the deck is being stacked. As with the recent production of Albert Herring, I felt that we’re encouraged to take an overly simple view: we’re looking back, and down, at restrictions that seem obviously ridiculous to us. The program book assures us that this is a timeless, universal story, but that’s always an attempt to distract us from the specific situation of a particular story. Given the period costumes, the period attitudes, the southern accents, the Williams mode . . . the story starts to feel nostalgic,and even a bit campy, and Alma doesn’t feel dangerous or rebellious in any seriously threatening way. So we end up not taking her too seriously. There's a scene in which she starts drinking a little too freely, to keep her courage up, and there was lots of chucking in the audience. I don't really understand why: it's pretty clear this is not a woman who's going to have the occasional sip from the wise and Rabelaisan glass; this is a woman who's going to have major problems with alcohol. It shouldn't be cute or endearing when she starts drinking.

That’s why I felt that the play was sentimental rather than compassionate. Compassion is like a religious discipline; it’s a long-lasting way of accepting others (and ourselves) while acknowledging their (and our) awfulness. Sentimentality is more of a short-term mood, a way of overlooking anything that would keep you from seeing Alma and her circle of fellow artistic rejects in a certain noble light. You sit there admiring their brave efforts to find some beauty and dignity in life, and you walk out, start thinking of people you know like them, and have to confess you couldn’t stand living with them for very long. I felt that my judgment of them was temporarily suspended rather than deepened or changed.

These are after-thoughts. I enjoyed the play quite a lot while watching it. But despite the excellent performances, the elaborate costumes and furnishings, the smooth and effective staging, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all too safe and nostalgic. If they can reboot Spiderman and Batman, why not Williams? Strip away the period dresses, rethink the staging in a more stark and abstract way, and, above all, get rid of all the southern accents. I know they’re fun to do, but they place the speakers in a certain time and place which is automatically distant from our time and place. Yes, I’m asking for regie theater – thoughtful, provocative regie theater.

(This has been more about the play than individual performances, so I’m just going to list all the actors here, since they were all very good: Beth Wilmurt as Alma, Charles Dean as her father and Vernon, Amy Crumpacker as her mother, Marcia Pizzo as Mrs Buchanan from next door, Thomas Gorrebeeck as her son the doctor, Ryan Tasker as Roger and a Salesman, Leanne Borghesi as Mrs Bassett, and Beth Deitchman as Rosemary. Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross directed.)

John Gabriel Borkman

I went to the Aurora Theater’s recent production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (in a new version by David Eldridge), because how many chances am I going to get to see that – though having said that, I suspect that this play will be making the regional rounds, since it can be sold as an up-to-the-minute expose of financial misdeeds. Borkman is a bank manager who arrogantly and illegally speculates with client funds, and you can draw the comparison to whichever recent Wall Street gangster you like (Bernie Madoff is referenced in the program).

The problem with describing the play this way, though, is that it really isn’t about the financial chicanery. When we see Borkman (the reliably excellent James Carpenter), he has been out of prison for a while, and though his reputation has suffered, his family didn't lose enough money to cause them difficulty, nor is there much exploration of the masses who did lose money, or much guilt expressed about them. Instead money just represents part of the shame and the will to power among the family (some other type of scandal might have had the same effect, only not as fully and, let me say, economically).

The center of tension is the tight triangle among Borkman, his bitter wife Gunhild Borkman (Karen Grassle), and her unmarried sister Ella Rentheim (Karen Lewis), who lost Borkman to Gunhild years before. John Gabriel had not speculated with Ella’s money, so she is still quite wealthy and owns the house the Borkmans live in. The Borkmans have a grown son, Erhart (Aaron Wilton), on whom all three project their plans: Borkman wants Erhart’s youth and vigor to join him in working again towards Borkman’s great plans of economic development and power; Gunhild wants him to restore the family’s name and reputation to respectability (in effect, to achieve what his father set out to do, only honestly); Ella, the dying Ella, wants him to be the son she never had.

Borkman is one of those Ibsenite master spirits (like Halvard Solness the Master Builder, or like Hedda Gabler, or Nora in A Doll’s House) who struggle to force reality to conform to their idealistic sense of their own superiority. The financial crimes are just a way of getting at the real subject, which is the struggle among Borkman and the two women for dominance (even if it comes in the guise of love), and their struggle to achieve their goals as their time runs out. This is another of Ibsen’s plays which look as if (and are described as if) they are realistic works about pressing social issues when they are actually weird expressionist psychodramas on poetic, epic themes. (Same with August Wilson, which is why he strikes me as the American Ibsen.)

Erhart beautifully evades every choking, conflicting demand of the older generation with the simple answer, “I want to live.” Usually what people mean by this is they want to have lots of sex in a warm climate. And that’s exactly what Erhart means, as he’s heading off to Italy in what is pretty clearly a ménage-a-trois with a shady divorcee, Fanny Wilton (Pamela Gaye Walker) and the young Frida Foldal (Lizzie Calogero, who also plays the maid Malene), a musician who is the daughter of a somewhat silly, naïve and idealistic, poet, Vilhelm Foldal (Jack Powell), who has stuck by Borkman in his troubles. Erhart's ability to pick up and flee is what convinced me that the financial shenanigans are not really what the play is about – whatever its effects on unseen others, the money loss isn't crimping the freedom of any of the Borkmans. The restrictions on their freedom are mostly internal – mostly, because with all their grand schemes, they simply run out of time – they run into the fact of Death, which cuts short their hopes and ambitions.

I give full credit to Aaron Wilton for being able to carry off a potentially dangerous line like “I want to live” with simplicity, conviction, and truth. (There is no camp echo of Susan Hayward here.) His escape, which might have seemed cowardly or evasive, instead seems right and even sensible. One of my many, many problems with August: Osage County was the way it denied this truth: sometimes running away is the only way.

And the last time I saw James Carpenter, he was Frankenstein’s Monster in The Creature, Trevor Allen’s adaptation of Frankenstein. Carpenter was astonishing, hunching his body in ways both ape-like and noble, threatening and supplicating. Here he was a completely different type of monster – a visionary, upright and strict, who considers himself unbound by the rules that bind the multitude. This was a cast where the men were definitely stronger performers than the women, which I guess makes up for all those evenings (this often happens at the opera) when the women outshone the men. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the women; I just felt they (particularly the two sisters, Gunhild and Ella) could have gone deeper, been more nuanced and intense. Possibly on other nights they were. But moments like the climax of the first half, when Gunhild for the first time enters Borkman’s part of the house, bursting in on him and Ella, just fell kind of flat.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: April

April 8, 10, 11, and 13, Nicholas McGegan leads Philharmonia Baroque in Handel’s great opera, Orlando (one of the first operas I ever saw!).

Berkeley Opera offers Copland’s The Tender Land on April 10, 16, and 18.

As always San Francisco Performances has a lot of exciting stuff going on: On April 2, Alice Coote, recently announced as the replacement Charlotte in San Francisco Opera’s upcoming Werther, gives a recital. I was looking forward to hearing Garanca, whom I’ve never heard, but frankly I think Coote, whom I have heard, is going to give the audience a more interesting evening. On April 6, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Lera Auerbach perform Shostokovich’s 24 Preludes for Piano (arranged for cello and piano by Auerbach) and Auerbach’s own 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano. The brilliant young pianist Yuja Wang gives a recital on April 22 featuring Schumann, Schubert, and Prokofiev. Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson read and perform from The Rest Is Noise on Saturday morning, April 24, and Yevgeny Sudbin performs Chopin, Stevenson, Liszt, and Ravel on April 25.

The Aurora Theater offers a rare chance to see Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. I’m already thrilled with this one – not only did my Tuesday night ticket cost me less than $40, but the play starts at the more rational weekday hour of 7:00, and not the standard 8:00. It can be a little tricky to call the box office, which has limited hours, but it’s worth it because the Aurora’s on-line system uses that horrible “best seat” system. I’ve decided I’ll only buy tickets on-line if the system shows me exactly which seats are available. I’ll decide which is the best seat available, thank you.

April 23-25 Magnificat performs Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (in a different location each day).

At the San Francisco Symphony, Edwin Outwater leads an interesting program April 7-11, featuring music from Whisper House, a new composition by Duncan Shiek (of Spring Awakening, which I haven’t seen or heard). Shiek’s piece replaces the previously announced Five Shakespeare Sonnets by Rufus Wainwright, which will allegedly happen next season. The program also offers Zipangu by Claude Vivier (I’ve heard a lot about the late composer and am very eager to hear this) as well as Gounod’s ballet music from Faust and Poulenc’s Suite from Les Biches. The wonderful Symphony Chorus gives its annual concert on Sunday April 11. On April 15-16 the symphony accompanies Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Gold Rush. Me, I’d happily stay at home and watch the DVD, but if you don’t have the DVD and a big screen TV and can stand to watch movies in a crowd, then go and have a wonderful time. This is probably my favorite Chaplin film, though my favorite Chaplin moment remains the last scene in City Lights, which I can’t even describe because I break down and sob helplessly. Since the symphony is accompanying the film, I assume this is the original 1925 silent version, and not the inferior version Chaplin released in 1942 with some cuts and his overly fey narration replacing the intertitles. April 29-May 1, Christoph Eschenbach conducts Schumann’s Fourth and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, with wonderful soloists in Christine Schafer and Matthias Goerne, and that brings us into May.

smiles of a summer night

Strindberg’s Miss Julie is one of those odd gaps in not only my play-going, but my play-reading, so off I went to the Aurora Theatre’s recent production, which was directed by Mark Jackson, who had also done Salome there. Even though this was billed as a “version” by Helen Cooper, I’m assuming that the story and psychology basically match the original and only the language was updated or arranged for our twenty-first century ears. I found it an extremely well-done production of a surprisingly flat play.

The three actors – Beth Deitchman as the maid Christine, Mark Anderson Phillips (an outstanding Jokanaan in Salome) as her fiancé and Miss Julie’s lover, the servant Jean, and Lauren Grace as Miss Julie – all gave convincing and thorough presentations of characters who could seem arbitrary or limited. I suspect we are meant to see Christine as narrow-minded and conventional, but by the end of the ninety-minute show she was the only one I was really interested in listening to – at least she was talking sense; however limited her view of the world, she was aware of how it worked and what she needed to do in it for her comfort (qualities which admittedly I probably like because I lack them).

Miss Julie is a country aristocrat who varies between ordering Jean to polish her boots (with her in them, of course) to throwing herself at his feet. Though these switches make her seem dramatic, she really only has the drama of a seesaw: she’s up, then she’s down, then she’s back up again. She’s one of those women who despises men who don’t dominate her and resents men who do. (An arrangement of more-or-less equals is out of the question here, not because of society but because of individual psychology.) Once you figure this out about her, she’s of limited interest because Strindberg doesn’t vary her circumstances enough for her character to show deeper or different aspects. (Compare Miss Julie’s limited range of interactions with the variety of people and situations that confront Hedda Gabler, and you can see why I find one character fascinating and the other not.) I remember when I first met a woman of this type and I was pretty pleased when I finally figured out what the deal was; of course I was just out of adolescence and since then my patience with figuring out that type has dropped considerably. I think the censored theater of Strindberg’s day could be compared to a boy just out of adolescence, and I can understand why Miss Julie caused great shock and interest, but presumably the theater has matured some in the intervening years and the novelty has worn off.

Though she’s definitely an actual type, it’s difficult not to feel that it’s a type summoned up by Strindberg’s anxieties. I don’t even consider her an example of his famous misogyny (a word I don’t really trust, and I don’t think the several other Strindberg plays I’ve seen allow me to make a judgment on that). To me she’s not about men fearing the strength of women, she’s about men fearing their own weakness.

Jean is a poor boy who has risen to a respectable position, albeit as a servant; he plans to rise farther and one reason for his entanglement with his mistress is to persuade her to take the money he thinks she has (or has access to) and to run off with him, so that they can run a swank hotel in Switzerland, a scheme which under the circumstances and considering the personalities involved seems utterly nutty (though I didn’t get the feeling we were meant to see its comic side). The secret subject of the whole drama is not sexual anxiety but social anxiety and status maintenance and status climbing, which makes watching the play oddly similar to reading The New York Times.

The set (nicely designed by Giulio Cesare Perrone) is dominated by an upside-down tree hanging over the table in the kitchen; this is both a realistic decoration for the Midsummer’s Eve feast and an almost surrealist symbol of nature turned upside down. I couldn’t help feeling that a little more surrealism would have helped –the situation is claustrophobic (that is, repetitive) in a way that made me long for another perspective, even that presented by the conventional maid. As with the Albee plays I’ve seen, the drama is hampered by having its absurd essence trapped in an overly realistic hold – I can see why Miss Julie and Jean are tangled together, but I kept thinking that in reality (and even given the more limited possibilities of the time for both of them) either one could have stepped aside in a variety of ways, ways which would have made for, to my mind, a more interesting play.

what's Hecuba to him?

Remember back in the disastrous last years of the Vietnam War, when theater companies around the country dusted off The Trojan Women? Sadly, the Greeks are still relevant to our latest ill-advised imperial adventure: first there was Lysistrata across the country during the build-up to war, then after a few years we had many productions of The Persians, and now here comes The Trojan Women once again. It was Aurora Theater’s superb production a few years back of The Persians as adapted by Ellen McLaughlin that made me so look forward last spring to their Trojan Women, also adapted by Ellen McLaughlin.

Actually, this version was billed as “by Ellen McLaughlin, inspired by Euripides” and it is a much looser version of the original than was her version of the Aeschylus. It was also, surprisingly and hugely, a disappointment. The changes start immediately: the divine prologue is retained, but Athena is dropped and we had only Neptune, dressed with inexplicable jauntiness in spanking nautical garb, as if he had a sideline as captain of the Love Boat; he strolls through and makes a few appropriate remarks and disappears. The problem with dropping Athena is you miss her sudden, vindictive switch in feelings so that she now opposes the Greeks who violated her temple (or angered her in similar fashion): when you miss that, you miss a sense of the arbitrariness of the gods’ favor (that is, the arbitrariness of destiny), you miss the overriding irony that the Greek victory so lamented by the Trojan survivors will end tragically for the momentary winners, and you miss a complicating factor in the play’s examination of women, status, and power. I know Athena is everyone's favorite goddess, and it's difficult to accept her as destructive and petty, but that's part of the original's complexity.

The role of Talthybius, the Greek messenger, is also cut back significantly, so you miss the entire arc of his character, as he gradually moves from the indifference of a victorious professional soldier towards a compassionate understanding of the price the losing women have paid and will pay, in present suffering and future hardship. Needless to say, all the men on the losing side have been slaughtered, though there is some debate (at least in Euripides) over whether that’s truly a worse fate than continuing to live. What these women really face is loss of status – they once had servants who provided the services they will now have to provide to the victors, though this point too was blunted in this production, this time not so much by the adaptation as by the sets and costumes. Hecuba looked like a respectable middle-class matron who had just had her hair done, and the chorus of women was dressed in a strange assortment of contemporary costumes – skater, plaid-skirted schoolgirl, semi-punk – which, combined with the set’s startling resemblance to the Vaillancourt Fountain, made me think we were viewing The Women of Justin Herman Plaza. (The women of the chorus were mostly played by theater students, which would have been completely obvious even if they hadn’t made a point of saying it.)

Helen does show up, as she does in the original, though here there is no debate between Hecuba and Menelaus over whether she should be killed. Helen is basically an impossible role to cast, and though the woman who played her was indeed very attractive, she also looked a little too much like Bebe Neuwirth and Julia Louis-Dreyfus for me to avoid distracting memories of NBC sitcoms (great throaty voice, though). So Helen talks a lot to the women about her mythic role, but of course she doesn’t mention any actual myths that might confuse the audience; her point seems to be that The Prettiest Girl in the Room has a certain destined role, which is true. The other women don’t like this, and haul her offstage to rough her up. And that’s the point where I wondered what exactly McLaughlin and company thought this material was about: the essence of the Trojan women’s plight is that they, formerly powerful and respected, are now powerless and policed. Is it likely that they would have been allowed to damage the prized victory trophy of the Greeks? If they can do that and get away with it, what exactly are they all bitching about? I don't object to changes in the original material, but to the way those changes dilute and obscure the drama.

The play was over in about an hour, and in a rare example of BART mitzvah, the right train had pulled onto the platform about the time I did, so even with the 8:00 start time I was home by 9:40, making a cup of tea. I had really been looking forward to this performance. I had considered subscribing to the Aurora’s season, mostly because I wanted to see The Trojan Women. I had read or re-read three different translations of the play beforehand (Lattimore, Morwood, and Roche, in case you’re interested). And yet a couple of days after the performance, I had forgotten I had seen it until I looked at my calendar and saw it written there.

Anticipation is a strange thing. I buy so many books, DVDs, and CDs that I now feel I’ve somehow missed a key and satisfactory part of the experience if I read, watch, or listen to them right away; they need to ripen on the shelf first, like fruit. But you can also wait too long, and end up with a less satisfying experience as a result. Decades ago as a student at Berkeley I went to a sale at the library and bought, for $2.50, a copy of One of Our Conquerors, because who can resist an obscure novel by George Meredith? It sat there unread for many years, traveling to Boston and then eventually back to California, still unread, and eventually it became sort of A Thing.

I finally read it last year. It’s an interesting novel, though sometimes overly obscure in the Meredith way. It’s also stained with a weird anti-Semitism. (I’m not referring to standard Victorian references to “Jewish moneylenders” or “Moses the old-clothes peddler”, but to occasional discussions of “Anglo-Saxon culture” versus the rising Jewish members of the wealthy professional class all the characters belong to). And the story is based on an anguished dilemma that seems bizarrely exotic to a contemporary reader – Victor (“one of our conquerors”) Radnor has had a long and satisfying relationship, and a child, with a woman he lives with but to whom he is not legally married – his elderly first wife won’t give him a divorce. He is now very wealthy and socially prominent, a social powerhouse in fact, and his daughter is of an age to enter society, so she must find out The Truth –it sounds overly melodramatic described that way; there’s much subtlety of thought and elaboration of expression to convey the refined suffering of all involved.

If I had read the novel before it became A Thing, I probably wouldn’t have felt as let down by it. Anyone looking for a Meredith novel to read – can I see a show of hands, here? you in the back, maybe? – should probably stick with The Egoist, which is hilarious once you get past a certain preciosity in the beginning (get past it, or just get used to it perhaps). There’s also the Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which I read when I was seventeen, and all I really remember is a passage when Richard Feverel looks across the river and sees the girl he loves. I don’t know quite what that passage did to my seventeen-year-old hormones, but it struck me as one of the most strangely erotic passages I have ever read. I would prefer not to re-read that particular book; there’s a good chance I wouldn’t even notice the passage anymore.

you're the moon over Mae West's shoulder

The hilarity ensues immediately once you buy a ticket for Sex, the Mae West play which has been making the national rounds: do you write “Sex” on your appointment calendar? Do you tell people you’re going to see “Sex”? I generally settled for “the play at the Aurora Theater” in my discreet way, but you’ve got to hand it to Mae – you might think society has moved past her particular brand of naughtiness, but she’s already sauntered ahead of you, because her good-humored innuendo not only outsmarts our blunt ways, she’s also as aware as Jane Austen of social class and money.

The script is similar to those West wrote for her movies – she (called Margy LaMont this time around) is a good bad girl; a rich and innocent young man, ignorant of her background, falls in love with her down in Trinidad; when he takes her home to meet his parents, she realizes that his mother Clara is the ungrateful society lady she rescued in the first act from a misadventure in slumming. Margy eventually decides that her future happiness lies in marrying her old-time friend and lover, the recently retired Lieutenant Gregg, who knows all about her life and keeps proposing anyway, and moving with him to Australia, an ending which satisfies everyone except the love-struck young man, who will get over it.

The play is actually similar to most of Oscar Wilde’s plays; like them, it is basically an ironic melodrama about class boundaries leavened with sexually subversive epigrams. I don’t want to oversell the comparison; I’m not saying West could have written anything like The Importance of Being Earnest (though even Wilde only managed that once), and she never wrote anything like Salome (though I would love to have seen her version). And her play is a lot looser than, say, An Ideal Husband, which is a disadvantage or an advantage, depending on how you feel about plot machinery. Her play has plenty of vaudeville moments, and the first half ends with a very entertaining and very extraneous series of song and dance numbers (Robert Brewer as the lovestruck young man had a particularly nice voice, sounding at times remarkably like an actual 1920s Irish tenor – I guess I’m thinking of the John McCormack sound).

The Aurora is one of those tiny theaters (four rows in a U-shape around the open stage) that like to claim there are no bad seats, but I had one, at the right-hand tip of the U, behind the stage couch. For quite a bit of the play I was looking over the actors' shoulders or observing their necks. I would have just accepted this as my bad luck, but I saw a woman buy a discount ticket at the box office half an hour before the show started, and her seat was much better than mine. You’d think that buying in advance at full price would give you the better seat. Apparently I have a lot to learn about the ways of the theater.

Seating discontent aside, this was an enjoyable evening (oh, all right, I’ll give in and say it – I really enjoyed the Sex, thanks so much, the money is in the box office), though I couldn’t help feeling that if this had actually been a film from the 1930s, the class drama would have been more sharply delineated – there’s something antiquated and formal about the dress, movement, and speech of the upper classes in those films that is alien to our society, and difficult to convey with modern actors in a stripped-down set. I wish the Aurora had trusted the material a little more and relied less on its curiosity value and period charm. They opened and closed the show with unnecessary historical background – a sketch of the usual jazz age pizzazz, some shocked contemporary reviews, the eventual arrest for obscenity after packing the house for months. I’m not sure why they thought this fairly straightforward, enjoyable play needed all that – they wouldn’t have done the same for Lady Windermere’s Fan.

The attempt to recreate the atmosphere around the original play may also have been the reason for the production’s major miscalculation, which I’m guessing was the fault of Tom Ross, the director: having Delia MacDougall, the actress playing Margy, imitate Mae West. There are certain artists, like Gertrude Stein or Groucho Marx, who have such strong styles that attempts to discuss them usually end up as attempts to imitate them, which is always a mistake. You’re just not ever going to see a better Mae West imitation than the one Mae West did. And the exaggerated voluptuousity that is the West physique provides a built-in punchline that just can’t be supplied these days, since the red hot Mama body type seems to have disappeared with vaudeville.

The basic question is whether a star vehicle can survive without the star. I think Sex is a solid enough play so that it would have been worth trying, and MacDougall brought enough interesting flashes to her performance so that I wish she had been encouraged to form an independent interpretation. One of the best plays I saw last year was a star vehicle without the star – Charles Busch’s Red Scare on Sunset, performed by the student actors at the American Conservatory Theater. Usually it just seems to work out that I post late, and basically I’m OK with that, on the grounds that it’s all based on memory the minute you leave your seat anyway, and sometimes it helps to have things shake out over a few weeks, and also it’s not as if anyone is waiting to hear what I think before buying a ticket. But sometimes a little too much time goes by even for me (though never say never – I may paper over poverty-induced gaps in my upcoming schedule with reminiscences of past theatrical glories, like some superannuated theater ghost who can’t wait to regale you with the time he was the understudy Guildenstern for the greatest Hamlet of three generations ago), and I do wish I had posted about Red Scare, mostly so I could salute the genius of Charles Busch.

I think I just had a vague sense that he was one of those guys who put on a dress and did bad Bette Davis imitations; I have nothing against that, but on the rare occasions when I’m drunk enough to laugh at something like that I’m usually preoccupied with wondering how to make the room stop spinning. I didn’t even bother going to see Tales of the Allergist’s Wife when it played here a few years ago. I don’t know what tipped me off that I might be mistaken, but I have recanted my heresy. Busch recreates, subverts, and glorifies a grand tradition of theatricality that goes back to Bernhardt and no doubt farther; and if you doubt me put Die Mommy Die in your Netflix queue. About halfway through viewing it I thought, Sweet Jesus, this is the Oresteia! with suppositories!

Last year the young conservatory actors created a Red Scare that was true to his spirit but independent of his presence. It was not only probably the most consistently well-acted play I saw last year, it was hilarious from start to finish (assuming that you find funny, and I do, a plot that centers on a Communist conspiracy to abolish star billing and the Arthur Freed unit at MGM and replace them with black-and-white ensemble dramas). It also dealt in a deeper way than many more ponderous plays with the function of art and fame in a democracy, with the easy American way of switching personal identity and its confusing results, and with the American attempt to define a cohesive social identity through demonizing outsiders. People tend not to see comic cross-dressers as holding the mirror up to our profounder nature, but I’ve gotten more out of Busch’s work than I have out of a lot of Eugene O’Neill’s. Charles Busch and Mae West, raffish provocateurs on the far shore of the mainstream! Is it universal, or peculiarly American, that it’s the marginal who tell all the truth, but tell it slant?

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.

Die Frau ohne Music

Last September I saw the Aurora Theatre’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. It was like a doughnut, rich and delicious and probably not as healthy as it should be. Also like a doughnut, it had a great big hole in the middle, which was a truly terrible performance of the lead role. Miranda Calderon has probably the greatest name for a performer since Siegfried Jerusalem, and we maybe don’t quite have the culture in which a young woman can weaken a man’s knees by offering to toss him a little green flower, but there’s got to be another way to convey Salome's attractions besides throwing tantrums and badgering the underlings. Her looks are fine, but not really enough to suspend disbelief that anyone would put up with her unrelieved harsh tones. Maybe because I was in Berkeley I kept picturing a slightly drunk sorority girl with an inflated sense of entitlement.

It’s too bad, because the rest of the production made a convincing case for seeing Salome without hearing Strauss. After all, what fades faster than yesterday’s decadence? Mark Jackson, the director, had the cast talk in clipped, stylized tones, which added enough Art Deco vinegar to undercut the overripe jeweled dialogue and renew what the Decadents would have called its strange fascination. Mark Phillips as Jokanaan, half naked for the duration, really did look like a fanatic carved out of white ivory. Best of all was Julia Brothers as Herodias; in fact, by the time Salome’s final monologue rolled around, after an odd, kick-boxy dance, I was so over her that I spent the whole long speech watching the subtle, understated play of expression on Herodias’s face: fear, contempt, horror, and finally amused indifference.

I had prepped by watching once again Nazimova’s 1923 film, one of those extravagant masterpieces of silent-film making. It’s notorious for the sets and costumes based on Aubrey Beardsley and for the rumors that Nazimova insisted everyone involved in the film had to be gay in tribute to Wilde, and also for bombing and thereby pretty much ending Nazimova’s screen career. But if you get past the Hollywood Babylon reputation it’s a wonderful and provocative production, not silly or camp. And Nazimova is fantastic – except for the occasional close-up you wouldn’t believe that the actress was a middle aged woman and not actually a selfishly petulant, seductive teen. And that’s decadence done right.

My Master Builder!

I saw Ibsen's The Master Builder on March 1, at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley. This was only the second time I'd been there; I was there last year for an excellent production of Aeschylus's The Persians, a play that unfortunately is newly relevant (arrogant empire comes to sorrow in the middle east. . . .). It's a small theater, with an open stage in the middle surrounded by four rows of seats. So your view is sometimes blocked by the actors, but to make up for it you can see everything close up. It sounds dismissive to say this was a really solid production, but I mean that as high praise. It was one of the most consistently cast and performed works I've seen recently. James Carpenter as the Master Builder was the right combination of attractive and reptilian; Lauren Grace as the odd, troll-like young woman who enters his life was strange enough to be unsettling but not so strange as to be off-putting. So much was conveyed with glances, suppressed smiles, little movements. . . .
It was actually pretty amazing. I think Ibsen, much as I love him, is very difficult to stage these days. His symbolism can seem too obvious. And the social issues that once got him banned are too close to us to be merely historical but different enough so that he's not really talking about the same thing -- this is particularly true of the "women's issues." Despite the oppression fantasies of most of the Bay Area population, the life of a middle-class woman in the Bay Area is a very, very different thing from that of a comparable woman in 19th century Norway.