Shotgun Players: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Last Sunday I was at the Shotgun Players production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by William Thomas Hodgson, the opening play of the theater's 2024 season. Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the Shakespeare play I have seen staged most often, & I've read it many times (I re-read it just a few weeks ago). & this production made me laugh out loud several times. That's really high praise.

The whole look (scenic design by Sarah Phykitt, costume designs by Ashley Renee as realized by Madeline Berger, if I'm reading the program correctly) is both hodge-podge & sophisticated. The set is a unit, with alcoves & cubbyholes built in, & passageway ramps going up & across, leading down to enough bare space in the front of the stage for fights (sword & verbal) & chases & sweet meet-ups. There are enough natural touches – tufts of foliage, tree trunks with rough bark – to make it plausible as the forest, but enough formal structure to let it pass for an interior in Athens. The costumes are a wild mélange of bright colors & wild patterns, harmonious in their dissonance.

The text is trimmed reasonably, with a few words thrown in to hilarious effect; not to give anything away, but one character starts off her speech with "Bitch, . . ." It was unexpectedly funny, as was the way they riffed on Bottom's inability to get the names of Pyramus & Thisbe correct. The "bergomask" at the end of the mechanicals' play, given in lieu of an epilogue, was a song from Twelfth Night; this journey also ended in lovers' meeting, so it did slide right into context. Egeus is now Hermia's mother instead of father, a change I am all in favor of; the authority there is generational & parental, not necessarily patriarchal. Titania's attendant fairies were, for I think the first time in the stagings I have seen, given distinct personalities, & some had comically negative reactions to the strange ass-headed commoner their mistress is inexplicably enamoured of, whom she had them serving.

Another noteworthy thing about this production, though I feel funny about mentioning it, as it always sounds so patronizing to say it, but clearly it's a point with this production, so here goes: they have a wonderfully open & diverse approach to casting, going beyond race- & gender-blind casting; some of the male characters are androgynous, some of the women are large; nothing is made of this (except for Helena's being taller than Hermia, which is canon), & nothing should be; they're all beautiful embodiments of their characters. Again, it seems condescending to talk about how wonderful that young lovers & heroic warriors look like ordinary people, & making a point of saying it even contributes, in subtle, indirect ways, to reinforcing the traditional standards of casting that are being ignored (in that it makes you conscious of those standards), but it's a good direction to go in, so . . . I mention it.

Such casting wouldn't be much good without strong performers, & the cast is by & large excellent. I was particularly impressed with Rolanda D Bell as Helena; often with productions of Shakespeare you feel they've learned the lines but not in a deep level, but Bell not only read the verse musically, but she spoke it as if it was very naturally the way this character would speak; you could see the shifting psychology underneath the pentameter. I don't know if she's done much Shakespeare (if not, this was particularly impressive) but I hope she continues. I also really liked Oscar Woodrow Harper III as Bottom, who is a character I can easily get enough of, but Harper, who had an inexplicable Southern twang & a bit of Elvis-like swagger, made him quite charming as well as hilarious – you really understood why the other mechanicals felt Bottom was the one man in Athens necessary for their play.

Mentioning those two isn't to slight the rest of the cast, many of whom play multiple roles. All of them give the audience giddy moments. Egeus, mentioned earlier, is played by Susannah Martin, who also plays Quince & Peaseblossom. Her attempts as Quince to rein in the rambunctious Bottom are an amusing echo of her attempts as Egeus to rein in Hermia; this is one of the serendipitous insights you get with such casting (she's also very funny as a Peaseblossom dragooned into serving Bottom, another, more distant, echo of her role as Quince). Aside from Bell as Helena, the quartet of lovers is rounded out with Celeste Kamiya, a lively powerhouse as Hermia (she also plays one of the fairies); she & Helena share some sweet sisterly moments amid the madness. Fenner Merlick is an insinuating Demetrius, just on the right side of shady. At my performance, Lysander was performed by Devin A Cunningham, who was apparently pulled in at something like the last minute, as he had to have a script with him – but he handled that so unobtrusively, & gave such a lively & physical characterization, that not being offbook was not intrusive. So Kudos to him.

Jamin Jollo filled the minor role of Philostrate & the major role of Puck, to which he brought an impish physicality, just on the right side of malicious. Radhika Rao has the traditionally doubled roles of Hippolyta & Titania, & Veronica Renner doubles as Theseus & Oberon, both authoritative in their spheres. Kevin Rebultan (Moth, a different unnamed Fairy, & Flute) was especially good as Thisbe, & Matt Standley (as Snug & Snout) gets more laughs out of less material than I would have thought possible.

My performance was a mask-mandatory matinee. I wonder how long those can continue, given that the majority of the audience was pretty careless about masking. With a few exceptions, they had them on, but often were wearing them incorrectly, were removing them to eat & drink in the theater, took them off during the performance (the young woman next to me had hers entirely off for most of the second act; she may have forgotten to put it back on when she finished her drink). & honestly, I don't see people getting more careful about masking. Either the theater is going to have to start enforcing the rule in a way that will . . . ruffle some feathers? annoy people? not sit well with them? be a burden all around? – or they're going to have to lift the "mandatory" part. I know some people deliberately choose the mask-mandatory performances, but others choose the performance based on date or time or some other factor. Personally, I am fine either way (despite the weird harassment I was subjected to at Shotgun's last play of last season), but I do think that people who are uncomfortable around people who aren't wearing masks are probably, at this point, just not going out at all. But the rule should be either enforced or modified.

Anyway: this season at Shotgun is off to an excellent start with this fresh, inventive, & very funny production. It's been extended to 27 April; go if you can.

(The photograph above is from the outside wall of the Ashby Stage; as usual, the mural changes with each play, & again as usual, it is by graphic artist R.Black)

Shotgun Players: Babes in Ho-lland

Recently I was at a Sunday performance of Shotgun Players' world premiere production of Babes in Ho-lland by Deneen Reynolds-Knott, directed by Leigh Rondon-Davis. It is the story of two Black women students in the largely white environment of the University of Pittsburgh (the Ho-lland of the title is a joking reference to a dorm on campus) in the 1990s: Ciara (Sundiata Ayinde), a freshman from a middle-class background (her mother works in finance) living in the dorms, & Taryn (Tierra Allen), a sophomore from a less financially stable background, living off campus, who fall in love with each other. There is a third character: Kat (Ciera Eis), a sort of grunge-goth-adjacent white girl who is Ciara's roommate.

Here's the short version: the performers are fine, the play is sweet, but dull. I think I read somewhere that it would be 90 minutes without intermission. That would be stretching it a bit, but OK. Then at the theater we were told it would be two hours & ten minutes, including a ten-minute intermission. The show ended up being two & a half hours. I've seen productions of Macbeth that are shorter. Before I go into how thin the material was stretched to fill that time, I'm going to talk about my experience in the theater.

We bring our baggage into the theater with us; ideally, the play will lighten our loads in some way: make us laugh, or think, or even just forget whatever we need to forget at the moment. The last few years in particular have been difficult ones for me – & for the world at large, of course, but I'm talking about my individual situation. I won't go into the details, because it's not the kind of thing I discuss here, but I'll summarize by saying when someone I know sent me a Christmas text wishing me "merriment & brightness coming my way" my immediate & visceral reaction was, Why are you making fun of me? Then I realized he wasn't; I'm just not expecting merriment & brightness from . . . well, anything.

So I went into the theater with that, hoping I would enjoy the play. If I weren't basically an optimist I wouldn't keep going to the theater, right?

It was a mask-mandatory matinee, which leads to the first incident. I took my seat in the front row, mask firmly in place (I am very careful about observing such rules). Between allergies & medication, my throat gets dry, which leads to coughing. Since that would disrupt a performance, I carry a small bottle of water in my messenger bag. While waiting for the show to start & without thinking much of it, I took the bottle out of my bag, briefly half-undid my mask, took a quick glug, put the mask back on, & replaced the bottle in my bag. Before I could finish putting the bottle back (please note I never fully took off my mask, & replaced it before putting the bottle away – I later timed myself doing this & the whole sequence takes about two minutes, during only about half of which time my mask is partly down), I heard screeching behind me: "TAKE THAT OUTSIDE!!!!: I was facing the stage, so I turn around, & there, quivering with rage, is a short pile of unruly grey curls in a lumpy tie-dyed sweatshirt. "What are you talking about?" I said. "TAKE THAT OUTSIDE!!!! THIS IS A MASKED MATINEE!!!!" I point out to the trembling troll that I am wearing a mask (by then it was fully back on). She kept screeching. She had been sitting in almost the back row of the theater. That means she must have charged down the stairs the minute I started reaching into my bag. (If I was exuding harmful viruses, wouldn't it be safer to stay back where she was? But of course safety isn't the point.) Best of all, in order to come down to where I was in the front row, she had to pass a woman who was sitting several rows behind me, blatantly flouting the mask policy: her mask was down around her chin & she was leisurely sipping her cup of coffee. The tie-dyed troll kept screeching at me, even though I was, let me reiterate, already fully masked with my water put away, so I'm not sure what more she wanted. Finally I nodded to the maskless woman, who must have heard what was going on but just kept sitting there, & said, "Are you going to go yell at her?" "YES I AM" she said, but of course she didn't yell; she quietly mentioned that it was a masked matinee & she should take her coffee outside (which the woman did).

I guess technically I did violate the rule, though I didn't even think of it that way as I was only partially exposed for a minute or two. I didn't even think of what I was doing as "drinking", I thought of it as "preventing a coughing fit". I certainly understand the exasperation & frustration of seeing people ignore the rules. But if you're so tightly wound about masking that a momentary & partial exposure on the other side of a substantial space is going to make you lose it completely, maybe you shouldn't be sitting in a theater audience quite yet. But of course the masking wasn't the point. The point was to scream at a man (I can state this firmly, as she ignored the mask-down woman until I made a point of it, & that's a fairly typical example of how my male "privilege" works for me). I'm so used to bizarre levels of hostility from random strangers that it wasn't even until the next day that it occurred to me she could have simply said something to me, or alerted the house manager, without screaming. I think she actually did alert the house manager, as I saw her poke her head in a few minutes later & scan my row, obviously looking for the law-breaker. Since my mask was firmly back on before the troll had finished her first screech, well, I'm not sure what she thought her point was. (For the record, during the performance people around me were lowering their masks to eat cookies. I know this because the cookies were wrapped in cellophane.)

So after that random attack I'm standing there at my front row aisle seat, still waiting for the show to start (I get places early). A white-haired woman sits next to me, eyes me up & down, & announces to me that we're in the movable chairs (the other rows are basically church pews) & I could easily move my seat over & the theater wouldn't even notice. I just stared at her. I am extremely careful about respecting other people's space, a courtesy that is often not reciprocated or even recognized. Moving my chair over would in fact have partially blocked the stairs, making it difficult for people going up or down. I hadn't even sat down. I don't know what her problem was, other than my existence.

Then, during the performance, the woman directly behind me, when not talking to her companion, grunted & moaned in agreement with any "political" points, & . . . sang along with the songs. She sang along. & there were a lot of songs in this show.

So let me move on to the show, starting with the music, which the theater kept highlighting. Pop music from the 1990s means absolutely nothing to me. Given the age of most of the rest of my audience (even older than I am), I can't believe it means much to them, either: maybe their children listened to it? I didn't hate it, but I sure didn't feel I'd missed anything by not hearing it before. The music helps define the personalities of the three (Kat in particular listens to more rock-type stuff), but once that point is made . . . well, it keeps being made, & then made again (hence the extended run time; anytime action threatens to develop, on goes the CD player). Sometimes the young women dance along or lip-synch the words. I can't even remember if they actually play air guitar or if I was just plunged back into the embarrassment of watching fellow dorm-dwellers do so: after your initial grin, to show you think they're so cool, when they keep going on, what do you do but pretend to still have a reaction while your soul slips away, its place taken by crushing emptiness & boredom? At least in the theater it doesn't matter if you don't have a reaction. You can just sit back, blank-faced, basking in the stereophonic stylings of the random woman behind you singing along in her very average voice to songs you've never heard of.

Speaking of familiarity, easily the biggest reaction of the evening came when Ciara says she wants to go into journalism & be on a TV show where she can make Pat Buchanan cry. Big laughs & applause for that – this aging Berkeley audience may not know Courtney Love from a Hole in the ground, but we know & despise Pat Buchanan!

The thought of a student in the mid-1990s wanting to go into journalism made me wonder why no one did the obvious thing with this material: compress the whole thing into a first act (under an hour) & then write a second act, set in current times, updating us on these three characters. If nothing else, maybe we could find out what happens to their sense of self when the music they use to define themselves turns into oldies or "classic hits" or nostalgia.

So these two young women fall in love, & that's kind of sweet, of course. But there's really no conflict as they slide together. Ciara is the less experienced of the two, but she doesn't have much angst over falling in love with another woman – the whole "Oh my God, am I . . . that way?!?" drama, & the coming-out drama, are a bit passé on the stage, though not in life. The two women don't run up against much homophobia. Kat is cool with it, as a young woman like her would be. There is racism, but mostly of the "white people are clueless" kind rather than the overtly hostile kind. At one point, when Taryn has financial problems, Kat asks about her scholarship. Both Taryn & Ciara are immediately offended by this. I was puzzled, as Taryn's financial problems have been a running theme & it seems unsurprising that she would receive financial aid, but apparently there's a racist thing I had not even heard of, in which all Black students are assumed to have scholarships "for diversity". Is this a variant on "you're only here because of affirmative action?" But the affirmative action thing is more insulting & the scholarship assumption is more along the lines of well-meaning but clueless. This is the sort of portrayal of racism that lets the Berkeley audience off the hook – we are so much more sensitive than that young woman! It was one of several points when the woman behind me grunted & "mmmm'ed" loudly to let everyone know she totally got it. (Do I even need to clarify that this woman was white? as was most of the audience.)

Taryn is portrayed as relentlessly cool: she wants to be a social worker! She loves kids, & they love her right back! She is pals with all the service workers on campus! Her mac & cheese is fire! She goes to poetry slams! She listens to the coolest beats! She sneers at people who watch Friends! She plays a mean game of pool! Her Granddad taught her, because her family is so close! When they party, the neighbors don't complain, they party with them!

The play is weirdly reluctant to criticize or question her. But let's look at some of these things, starting with palling around with the service workers: she & Ciara have a conversation about this. Ciara says these people are just doing their jobs. Taryn gives her a little lecture (one of several she gives, meant to enlighten Ciara & presumably us) about how her Mom worked at a hotel reception desk & some guests treated her like dirt but others were courteous because they knew she could make or break their vacation (yeah, Taryn, we know; we've all seen Fight Club). Ciara has no response & clearly has been both thrown for a loop & shown the light. But there's a pretty big spectrum of behavior between treating people like dirt & being friends who have lengthy conversations with them while they're working. Sometimes respect means letting people do their jobs, or realizing that maybe they're not there to give you a rounded social life, or even that they may not like you that much.

Here's an example from years ago in my working life: I was at a job where my desk was a bit out of the way. You could get to it, but you had to go around some low cubicle dividers that kind of walled off the area. So when the man would come around to empty our wastebaskets, I would pick mine up & carry it over to him. This was mostly to be helpful but also partly because it allowed me to move from my desk. One time when I did this, he thanked me & said I was the only person who handed him the basket like that. English was not his first language, or one he spoke well, so saying that was an effort for him. I thanked him. I was glad I could do that for him & show him that sign of respect. But we never were pals, the way Taryn is with the campus crew. I didn't feel I should take up his time with chat mostly designed to show how cool I am for talking to him. (Most people would assume I was, at least financially/economically, the privileged person there. I'm not sure that's accurate. I was unable to find a full-time job & so was working one in a series of long-term temp jobs at the same company, for which I basically received no benefits, only my salary – after the temp agency had regularly skimmed a huge amount off the top, in return for nothing but issuing me a check every other week. My bosses always wanted to hire me but HR kept insisting they had a "hiring freeze". It's possible the man who picked up the trash at least had a full-time job with some benefits. I mention this to underline how ambiguous & deceptive appearances of power & status can often be, in life though not in this play.)

Another point about palling around with the service workers: for all the dramaturgical talk of "intersectionality", Taryn's lecture, as well as the rest of the play, doesn't really seem to have any comprehension of how it would actually work. To take an obvious example, a man chatting up a service worker (particularly a woman worker) is going to be read differently from another woman doing that. (I once had a conversation with a retired librarian, a woman, about killing time before shows in Civic Center. She told me that she liked to go to the children's section of the SF Public Library & read, and "you're really not supposed to be there without a child, but they don't mind if you're reading the children's books." &, not for the first time, I thought, Oh, should I tell the nice lady why she can do that & a man can't?) There will be complicated cross-currents depending on the race of the person, & the age, &, of course, personality. & in a college setting, there's an inherent barrier between the students & the service workers, no matter how much some of the students may like to pretend there isn't.

Here's another example: Taryn lives in a house off-campus. She has trouble making her rent. She tries to make up for it by making her roommates occasional dinners (as mentioned, her mac & cheese is fire!). Eventually they have a house-meeting to let her know they can't keep carrying her rent & other bills & she needs to move on. She is a bit resentful but basically understanding. But we've all known or heard about people like this –people who owe money but provide some lesser service as compensation – & generally they tend to think that what they're doing should carry full weight. But of course to those to whom money is owed, it doesn't. Taryn isn't given that flaw, of course, as she is not given flaws. But the whole "I make them dinner" thing raised questions for me: who cleans up? who pays for the ingredients? If she's paying, I'm sure the roommates are thinking, "How come you can buy all this but can't pay your bills?" If anything, the dinners would make them feel guilty & resentful, though we don't hear any inkling of that. But they're also students, & why should they pay her bills as well as their own, despite the deliciousness of her mac & cheese?

Are there class & racial considerations here? We never find out, of course. The roommates never appear & we are given no details about them, other than that they are also students. Dorm residents other than Kat also never appear (not even to complain about the loud music late at night). I understand the economics behind having very small casts (three people is actually larger than in many other new plays I've seen), but if you're concerned about presenting & respecting many voices, you can't have said voices mediated through the filter of the two or three people we actually hear from on stage.

At one point Taryn, whom Ciara has been treating when they go out, wants to reciprocate, because suddenly she has money. Ciara asks where she got it, Taryn, it turns out, has signed up for a cash-advance card (she doesn't seem to know quite what it is or how it works). This happens at the point in the evening when they have to have a fight of some sort; everything has been mostly frictionless up to now, but something has to happen to produce some tension, so Ciara starts telling her how insidious those cards are, Taryn gets offended ("my mom uses them & you're calling my mom stupid!"), & she flees. Of course they soon re-unite, & Ciara apologizes (!!!), says she could hear her mother speaking through her & regrets that (!!!!!!), & Taryn grudgingly accepts her apology because deep, deep down she is sure Ciara meant well (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Ciara, honey: Your mother is right. Cards like that are one of the predatory ways financial institutions take advantage of people who are financially ignorant (not the same thing as stupid) or desperate for income. But that issue will not be addressed here. It's downright weird that Ciara is presented as the one at fault here, & typical of both the play's reluctance to interrogate Taryn & its superficial handling of any actual social issues, which is what I meant by putting "political" in quotation marks above. (We never do find out how Taryn managed to pay off the card or whether she continued to run into debt.) I understand that this is meant to be a positive portrayal of queer Black love, & that's great, but it achieves that positive feeling by skating swiftly over any unpleasantness. You know, the same thing that happens in real life!

One feels a certain amount of pressure to love this play: Women telling women's stories! Queer joy! Black joy! Queer Black joy! (Joy is very zeitgeisty). But the pressure to offer positive stories means much of what gives our lives texture &, you know, drama is elided here. We don't even know if the two women stay together after Taryn has to drop out of college at the end of the play. Looking back on freshman / sophomore year of college from a more aged perspective, how many such relationships last, especially when one party drops out of college & moves away? The class differences between the two women aren't made much of, & neither is Taryn's greater sexual experience. In fact the relationship that rang truest to me is the one between Ciara & Kat: initially Ciara thinks Kat is cool & different, then gradually she grows disillusioned with how self-centered & ultimately conventional she is; Kat is always going on about & mooning over her boyfriend, who is of course off-stage so we never see his perspective, but apparently he's ready to move on & she can't accept that. Towards the end of the school year & the play, Kat, pretending to be drunker than she is, propositions Ciara, in one of the few really dramatic events in this show. Ciara is disgusted by this & fed up with Kat in general, so she blocks off her side of the dorm room. That's what happens in the spring: the roommate you thought was hip & interesting in the fall is a bore & a burden by spring. But I can see Kat & Ciara gradually becoming some sort of friends in the future. I'm less sure of Ciara & Taryn; the happy ending here seems more like an artificial stop so that we don't have to experience their future troubles, or even just their drifting apart under the pressures of the different directions in which their lives have taken them.

All in all, an unsatisfying evening & an unsatisfying end to a very mixed season at Shotgun Players.

Shotgun Players catch-up: Yerma, The Wolf Play, Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Not many performances for me this month so I'm catching up on some past stuff, starting with Shotgun Players. Their first show this year, Marivaux's The Triumph of Love, was wonderful (my write-up is here). The second play was Lorca's Yerma, & when the season announcement came out it was the Marivaux - Lorca one-two punch that made me decide to renew a subscription that I had let lapse during the pandemic. For years I have waited to see one of Lorca's plays on stage. I'm still waiting, because this mess didn't count as Lorca.

Yerma: The play was translated & adapted (emphasis on "adapted") by Melinda Lopez & directed by Katja Rivera. In her director's note in the program, Rivera mentioned that 1934, the year Lorca wrote Yerma, a play (to summarize baldly) about a woman frustrated by her inability to become pregnant, was also the year her grandmother died from complications of childbirth (the child also died). This coincidence led Rivera to move the location of the play from rural Spain in the 1930s to rural southern California in the 1930s. With all due compassion for the director's family tragedy – though I also have to mention that it is not something that is going to resonate for anyone outside of her family, which would of course include pretty much all of the audience – the relocation was this production's first major mistake.

Rural Spain in the 1930s was a place where the strictures of family (which encompassed those of Church & State as well) lay heavily on individuals. You were to do as had always been done, world without end amen; otherwise you were disgracing yourself &, even more importantly, your family. The United States, however, even in isolated rural sections, even in the 1930s, is a place where change – moving on, moving out, remaking yourself – is practically a cultural imperative. Moving the action from Spain to California undercuts the stifling conventionality of Yerma's society. It also makes nonsense of the ancient pagan remnants still holding on in the countryside: for example, the strange fertility ritual that the desperate Yerma goes to towards the end of the play. In Spain it seems like some atavistic survival of pre-Christian times, lying beneath the official religion, still surviving because it speaks to some weirdly deep need. Transfer that to the California hills & it becomes . . . what, exactly? Some kind of weird musical comedy interlude, complete with Victor, the young man the married Yerma is longing for, dressed in a silly looking bull outfit. (During this episode Yerma is wearing just a slip, & the performer had what I first thought was a large bruise on her upper chest, which turned out to be a large tattoo, which pretty much rules out any time other than the last 10 or so years. I will never understand why actors get visible tattoos.)

Earlier Victor had told Yerma that his family has been ranching in these hills for 100 years, which is pretty impressive by California standards but not so much by Spanish. In Lorca's play, when he announces that he's moving his herds to a different area, it comes as a seismic shock: people just don't move around that much, & his departure means Yerma's longings will never be satisfied. When he makes the same announcement in California, it doesn't mean much because of course he's moving to a better place – that's just what Americans do. This is one of many moments that fall flat because of the switch in locale.

Lorca's character The Old Pagan Woman has been renamed (which, under the circumstances, makes sense: what pagan past could she possibly represent in a community that came to California from someplace else?), & we completely lose the sense that she is somehow outside of Church, State, & Family, a remnant of an older order, one rooted in Nature & the body. Here she's just another one of the conventionally & frankly tediously bawdy women, only a little older than the rest of them. In Lorca's play, when she tells Yerma that her husband, like the rest of his family, is sexually feeble, it has the force of someone speaking truths no one else dares to speak. But in this version, it is another line that falls flat; based on what we've seen of Yerma's husband & their relationship, the description is way off base. In this version, we are told repeatedly that the two have a warm, loving relationship. Yerma feels deeply for him. He feels deeply for her! Juan (Caleb Cabrera) is a charming & sexy guy. He's very sensitive to her desire to get pregnant; when he suggests adopting a baby, it is a considerate & thoughtful approach, not a dismissive one. This version of the play opens & closes with scenes of the two having sex together, & they clearly have a playful, considerate, affectionate, & very physical relationship. & that's the second big mistake this production makes. But before I go into that, a little digression:

Years ago at ACT I saw a production of Hedda Gabler in which Judge Brack came across as very obviously a gay man – not a repressed gay man, but the kind of happy-with-who-he-is guy who would go on Bear weekends with the hubby & bring you a casserole when your cat died. He clearly had no sexual interest in Hedda or any other woman. It was so cozy when he called her "Miss Hedda!" When he urges her to think over the details of her involvement in Lovborg's suicide, there was no undertone of menace or threat; he sounded genuinely anguished as he urged her, "Think, Miss Hedda!" If this production had happened more recently I might have considered that they were experimenting with "queering the classics"; instead I sat there somewhere between amazed & amused: did they really not understand the sexual subtext there? How were they making sense of the ending if they didn't have Brack setting a blackmailing sexual trap for Hedda?

Something similar happens here with sexual subtext. (Are people in these less repressed times just unable to interpret these things? Do they have to be spelled out before people will see them, no matter how obvious they are?) Yerma's inability to become pregnant may well be due to how her body functions, not his. We don't know because apparently she never goes to see a doctor – something else that makes sense in rural Spain & much less sense in California, even in a fairly isolated rural area in the 1930s. The only way we can be sure it's her husband's responsibility is if he's not sleeping with her, or having only a bare minimum of sex. I feel I should put that sentence in italics. He & Yerma do not have an affectionate, loving relationship. They insist they "love" each other because that is what husbands & wives officially feel, & to feel otherwise, to long for the more virile Victor, much less to cheat with him, is an unthinkable violation of social & religious norms (unless you're the Old Pagan Woman, who looks askance at these oppressive formalities). Think of the family name! Unless you see that Juan is neglecting Yerma physically, the action of the play doesn't make much sense – &, indeed, it didn't make much sense in this version.

No one really seemed to know what to do with this play. Lorca's lean drama is padded out with various irrelevant excrescences, including some extended musical numbers. Another example: when Juan berates his sisters for not keeping a close enough watch on his wife, he mentions that they're eating his bread & drinking his wine without being useful. Bread & wine have a certain sacramental resonance in a Catholic country, of course, but also that's just what you mostly eat & drink in rural Spain. But the mention of wine apparently prompted someone to decide that Juan should have a drinking problem. There had been no signs of it before, but suddenly he's lurching around the stage in ever-increasing states of inebriation – until the end, when he's suddenly sober & he & Yerma realize this has all been some sort of misunderstanding (I guess?), because they love each other so deeply, so they reconcile (again, I guess?), & have sex again. Which is when she kills him by choking him to death. Why? (To Lorca's point, though not this version's: Juan would have to be a physically fairly feeble man if he could be choked to death so easily by his wife.)

Lorca wrote a swift tragedy about a woman whose sexual longings, represented by a regenerative, Life-Force wish for a child of her own, are thwarted by the crushing conventional pieties of Family, Society, & Church (probably in that order), with tragic results. This version is the meandering tale of a sexually satisfied woman who is not dealing in any realistic way with her increasingly nutty (&, I have to say, increasingly tiresome) obsession with getting pregnant (& her failure to do so, again, may be due to her physiology, not her husband's), which leads her to murder her husband, who is a considerate, attentive, & sensitive lover & companion. Why exactly am I supposed to sympathize with her rather than with him?

Another thing, about those conventionally bawdy women & the sisters who are supposed to monitor Yerma (a purpose that was not made clear enough or oppressive enough in this production): the director isn't the only one with family associations with this story; my father's side of the family comes from a very similar Latin culture to the one Lorca portrayed, & I am old enough to remember some of these women in real life. The notion that they were slyly subversive of gender norms & of "the patriarchy" is a contemporary American fantasy. They would not be sympathetic at all to women like Yerma; they were there to make sure she toed the line. That is why Lorca had to speak for her.

Usually Shotgun's outside murals do a wonderful job capturing the essence of a play. Here they showed Yerma blowing seeds from a dandelion puff with the tag line "Give me something to hope for." This seems . . . awfully soft for a play about a sexually thwarted woman who murders her husband. Did no one involved have the slightest idea what this play was actually about?

The Wolf Play: Written by Hansol Jung & directed by Elizabeth Carter, this was a bit of a disappointment. It started off strong, with a kind of metatheatrical speech by the boy who thinks he's a wolf (his personality split was portrayed by having the actor voice his thoughts while he manipulated a puppet who interacted with the others on stage). Maybe it started off too strong, because I was expecting something a little wilder than the more straightforward "issue" play we got. The basic situation is that the boy had been adopted by a couple who ended up having another child of their own & decided to unload the adopted boy via the Internet. He winds up with an interracial lesbian couple, one of whom is a professional boxer being trained by her partner's brother. Then the original couple splits up & the man decides he wants the boy back, especially once he finds out that the new family is same-sex.

Maybe if I were more familiar with what is apparently an actual thing that happens – people unloading adopted children via Internet chatboards? that seems only dubiously legal, but what do I know – then some of what happens would have made more sense to me. For example, there is a lawsuit at the end which was staged by having the participants (first adoptive father, the brother, the two women) yelling at & over each other. It was pretty effective but would have been more so if I'd had a clearer idea of the legal issues in play. I was also a little disappointed that the brother (Caleb Cabrera again), who started off making some excellent points to his sister, who is trying to figure out how to raise this new child, about how boys & men are treated & expected to behave in the world, & how he (the brother) can help the child with that, is turned into an easily manipulated, guys-should-stick-together guy once he talks with the original adoptive father.

The child takes a dislike to the brother, & it's not clear why, as the only person he's drawn to is the boxing member of his new family. Why would he resist the brother, who also boxes & was trying to bond with him? It's almost as if the child has to like the Black lesbian boxer because not to do would be uncool. (This notion is reinforced by seeing that the original adoptive father, a fairly dweeby white guy, is really put off by having lesbians raise "his" son – that's a surefire way to damn someone in the eyes of a Berkeley audience.) The other woman was the driving force behind the adoption, barely got her partner's agreement, & seemed to have little idea about what she'd do with a child once she had one; she just knew she wanted one. Maybe I had residual impatience from Yerma a few months earlier, but I didn't have much interest in or sympathy with her. Children are not toys for the mother's amusement! Mikee Loria was very good as the adopted boy, but the whole "I'm a wolf" thing started to drag over the course of two intermissionless hours; the boy just keeps saying, "Wolves do X" or "as a Wolf, I feel X"  & nothing develops or changes.

On the whole, not a disaster like Yerma but a bit disappointing.

Hedwig & the Angry Inch: The John Cameron Menzies / Stephen Trask musical, directed by Richard A Mosqueda. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise, & aside from the Marivaux, the best thing this season. I didn't go in with high hopes; I had seen the movie years ago & liked it, but the words "rock musical" are not ones that set my soul ablaze with excitement & I frankly didn't remember much about the show. Also, Shotgun tends not only to amplify their musicals (for reasons I don't understand: it's a small space; if your voice can't fill it you probably shouldn't be performing professionally) but to over-amplify them. I saw Hedwig on one of the nights when Chris Steele was performing, & a lively & thoughtful performance they gave. The band, Skip the Needle, was energetic & fun. The show was about an hour & forty minutes, no intermission, & before & after I ended up having a pleasant conversation with the woman next to me. She & her wife were visiting from Denver (I think they knew people in the band; they had bought tickets at the last minute, so the wife had one of the stage seats & the other woman was in the front row with me). All in all a very enjoyable evening. I don't have much more to say about it. I have a lot to say about the final play of the season, Babes in Ho-lland, & its audience, but that will have to wait as this is long enough already.

The Triumph of Love at Shotgun Players

Marivaux, with his mixture of commedia-style tomfoolery, French philisophe musing, & subtle psychological/erotic annalysis, can be tricky to bring off, but Shotgun Players have succeeded splendidly with their current production of The Triumph of Love (in the Stephen Wadsworth translation, directed by company Founding Artistic Director Patrick Dooley).

The single set is the garden of Hermocrates, a philosopher living in the country who advocates capital-R Reason & vociferously opposes the whimsical vagaries of Love. It is a French-style garden, which means it is formal, ordered, & regular: Nature brought under control. But there are hints that Nature is not so easily controlled: the lovely fountain in the middle has a few tufts of grass growing up in the cracks, & the water is cloudy. Some of the hedges look, upon closer examination, as if they are starting to grow out of their trimming. You can see where this is going, but of course there are complications on the way to getting there.

There's no need to recite the whole plot; for one thing, there's a lot of it, & as is the case with baroque opera, it makes perfect sense as it unfolds in front of you but if you read a synopsis the story collapses into a confusing set of disguises, plots, & counter-plots. The basic story is a bit of a fairy-tale, & has some (I assume coincidental) similarities to As You Like It, which also involves usurpers, gender-swapping, & a restoration of order guided by Nature: the young Princess Leonide, heir to an usurped throne, disguises herself as a man so she can infiltrate the society of Hermocrates & his equally unmarried sister, Leontine, with the purpose of meeting & forming an alliance with the rightful heir, Agis, whom they have raised in secret, teaching him to hate both Love & the usurping Leonide. Achieving this end means Leonide, going under several different male pseudonyms as the occasions require, must verbally seduce both the spinster Leontine, who thinks she is speaking to a handsome young man, & the pompous Hermocrates, who recognizes that s/he is actually a young woman in disguise (it's surprising & refreshing to see the "no one will recognize me in these trousers" convention blithely upended like this, though throughout there are also teasing implications of confused same-sex attraction). In addition, Leonide has her maid, Corine, also disguised as a man, & there is a greedy & somewhat dim gardener, Dimas, & Harlequin, doing his Harlequin thing. That's a lot to keep spinning effortlessly in the air, in an elegant Watteau-style, but the cast beautifully keeps it all aloft.

The commedia elements were, to me, surprisingly successful: I love the look of commedia, & I love the thought that I'm watching something that I could have seen in 18th-century Naples, but honestly, as theater, it doesn't quite work anymore: scheming servants getting beaten, attempts to swindle "old" people out of their money so young people can get married . . . they may have worked when the theater audience was made up of frivolous young people while the old people stayed home counting their money, but nowadays the theater audience has reversed, & is mostly made up of the prosperous & aged – don't they see where they fall in this schemata? OK, bit of a digression there on my commedia issues, so let me bring it back to the Ashby stage by saying that Jamin Jollo as Harlequin (complete with facial half-mask, the only one in the cast, & the traditional diamond-patterned outfit) is, unlike most Harlequins, genuinely funny, both in his actions & his line readings, & Dimas the somewhat dim gardener (Wayne Wong) also goes beyond the stereotypical low-comic countryman to achieve a genuine personality. Susannah Martin as Corine the maid mostly gets to provide exposition & otherwise move the plot along with Harlequin & Dimas but she manages all that so that it seems effortless & natural, rather than mere plot scaffolding.

The central quartet is also strong. As Hermocrates, David Boyll brings humanity to the overly self-certain philosopher, a role that could easily become too much of a caricature. Mary Ann Rodgers as his sister brings off a difficult role with aplomb: there's a touching longing (or longing to touch) in her slowly opening to the unexpected love she thinks is being offered to her by the handsome young stranger. Both of these roles, but particularly that of the sister, could come dangerously close (in the commedia manner) to callously mocking an "older" (read: middle-aged) person for daring to think that Love might still be a possibility for them. As the end of the play approaches, it becomes clear that there isn't going to be an overly neat solution: too many people are in love with one person. There is just the right amount of bittersweet at the end: Hermocrates has been embarrassed, as is to be expected from the Enemy of Love in a play called The Triumph of Love, but his situation is not irreparable, & perhaps his philosophy will be broadened by the chastisement. The last moments of the play are Leonide apologizing for misleading the sister, realizing that her necessary plot has upset the sister's quiet life, but also acknowledging that perhaps Leontine will not be entirely unhappy to have her life upset. It's a poignant, ambiguous finale.

But I've leapt ahead to the ending without mentioning the other two members of the central quartet! Veronica Renner, looking dashing & convincingly androgynous in her masculine attire, keeps the whole thing running with clarity & warmth, switching seamlessly from one persona to another. By the end, she too has learned something about the power of Love, as we can see in her final remarks to Leontine. Edward Im as Agis, the isolated, therefore socially awkward, rightful heir, is both funny & ultimately deeply touching as a lonely young man desperately trying to find friendship & then love.

The set is by Malcolm Rodgers, & I wished I had booked one of the seats on stage, in the garden, even over my front-row seat. Ashley Renee designed the handsome costumes, basically 18th-century in style with modern touches. Spense Matubang designed the lighting & Michael Kelly the sound. The show runs through April & is well worth seeing (even more than once), though Shotgun often extends their shows so it's worth keeping an eye out for that.

(The mural outside the Ashby Stage is by graphic artist R Black; the painting right above is a detail of Watteau's The Foursome at the Legion of Honor.)

What I Did for Love: Heart-Shaped Nebula at Shotgun Players

I ended up at one of the preview performances of Shotgun Players' Heart-Shaped Nebula, by Marisela Treviño Orta, directed by Desdemona Chiang. It starts off as a relatively realistic drama about Miqueo (Hugo Carbajal) , a man in his thirties, who is still recovering from the death in a car accident years before of his longtime girlfriend Dalila (Marilet Martinez). He encounters Amara (Gisela Feied), described in the website's synopsis as "a rebellious teenager who is more than she appears to be," and the story gradually takes off into realms of magical realism. Since it was a new play, and a preview, none of us knew much more than that. Before it started I was chatting with the older woman in the seat behind me, who was diminutive but with a pleasingly self-reliant and weathered look, as if she'd spent a lot of time on a ranch. Suddenly she burst out, "I'm not too sure about this play! All this magical crap – it's just too Berkeley for me!"

There was no intermission and I didn't get a chance to ask her afterwards what she thought, but I have to say that I found the magical elements pretty charming (in both senses of both words) – it was the realistic elements that I had problems with.

Miqueo and Dalila grow up in Texas; she is passionately interested in science, particularly astronomy, and he grows up to be an artist specializing in murals. He has returned to a significant spot in the desert where the stars are clear to seek some sort of end to his grieving for her. We find this out gradually, as he tells his story to Amara. "Rebellious teen" Amara has broken into his hotel room and stolen some of the items he wants to bury, in particular a ring from his dead sweetheart. Miqueo returns to his room and realizes she's stolen the ring and he wants it back. Clearly the obvious thing to do is call the police, and the playwright realizes she needs to deal with this obvious objection and get the two talking. So Miqueo pulls out his phone, and Amara threatens to accuse him of attempted rape – and, since she's thirteen, that would be child molestation as well.

Sorry, this is not the behavior of a "rebellious teen": this is the behavior of a sociopath. Petty theft: not OK! Blackmail and false accusations of rape and pedophilia? Really, really not OK! (Anyone who thinks otherwise should check out Shotgun's reading of Hellman's The Children's Hour, coming up in January.) And if he really did try to rape her, why would he be calling the police and getting himself in trouble? No sane man would spend another minute alone with someone like that. Instead, he caves in, gives her his leftover pizza, and starts telling her the story of his great love. That is far more fantastical and improbable than the most extravagant manifestations of the wildest magical realist. It's not that I don't believe a girl would issue such a threat, or that a man would be stupid enough to give in to her blackmail; it's that he would then proceed to open up to her about the most significant events of his life. This sort of thing happens only on the dramatic stage; in real life, such an encounter would produce only sorrow and the sordid.

I felt that Treviño Orta was spending too much time on the mechanics of getting these two together, and doing it in a way that smacked of stagecraft rather than anything approximating real life. There were other, simpler ways she could have had them meet that would obviate the need for unsatisfactory explanations as to why they were together and talking: they could encounter each other in the desert, at an all-night diner, on the streets of Vegas where Amara has been doing a magic shadow show that turns out to echo significantly something from Miqueo's past (one of the first clues that Amara has a role besides petty thief and blackmailer). Almost anything else would have been better, because after about the first fifteen minutes I'm contemptuous of them both, and that's a lot to come back from in a 90-minute play.

It's a tribute to the script and the director and the actors (though I thought they were still feeling their way into their roles; it was a preview after all) that they did come back from that beginning. There were themes and metaphors drawn from science and mythology (the two meet in the constellations we claim to see in the stars) that were well-done and engaging. But awkward questions kept coming up: Dalila is terrified of darkness and has to have a flashlight with her in case she needs the light to dispel an anxiety attack. That flashlight failed two, maybe three times, and I'm thinking, Why wouldn't you carry a spare with you? I think the playwright's idea of moving slowly from realism to magical realism was a good one, but for me was the realistic parts were not real enough, and the magical parts were a bit too lovely.

I thought the play could maybe have used some of the grit and ugliness of reality. One danger with magical realism is that everything can get too pretty, your love becomes too momentous, and has an emotional significance that can seem (to outsiders) too much like wish-fulfillment. There's only one brief line in which Miqueo mentions how all of his non-Dalila relationships, with family, friends, and lovers, have failed. I would have liked to hear more about that, the ways in which he thinks they've failed, and why. I think we're meant to find his final reunion with Dalia heart-warming and inspiring, but to me it's awful and ludicrous that Miqueo can't find any meaning in his life after Dalila's early death: the play is all about feeling that a certain type of love is the only thing that matters (and remember: only one per customer!). And I just don't share that feeling. (I wonder if anyone middle-aged does?)

There was enough in this play that was compelling and promising so that I would be interested in seeing other plays by Treviño Orta, though I did feel this one was a mixed bag: there's some ungainly and, to my mind, unsuccessful dramaturgy in the first half, and then a lush romanticism in the second half that – well, I was going to say "that I don't respond to," but that's not quite true; maybe such stories need the stylization of the operatic stage and the beyond-speech power of music to unhook them enough from daily life. But even music isn't always enough, and I will admit that the failure there is probably mine. During this play I kept thinking about La Bohème: a great and beloved work, and if you told me it was your favorite opera of all time I would respect that and understand why, but . . . though I see where it's going, I can't quite follow it there.

(The second photograph shows one of the eye-catching murals, different for each show, that get painted outside the Ashby Stage; you can read more about them here.)

Daylighting with the Shotgun Players

Yesterday I was at the Ashby Stage to see Daylighting, the latest from the Shotgun Players. It was written by Dan Wolf and directed by Rebecca Novick. Like Cutting Ball's recent Tenderloin, it is based on interviews with actual residents in the vicinity of the theater. Like Tenderloin (my entry on which is here), it is fairly entertaining, but sentimental and not entirely convincing.

The main thread of the 90-minute play is the journey of Bee, an African-American girl who has just graduated from Berkeley High. She is supposed to leave for New York City and NYU, but now she's hesitating; somewhat tipsy and under the influence of marijuana and stress after the graduation parties, she decides to follow the often submerged path of Strawberry Creek back to the home she shares with her grandfather James (who has just sold the house, which adds to Bee's adolescent emotional confusion). Along the way she runs into lots of people who know her. Sometimes the whole cast gathers on stage, Greek-chorus style, and as in a WWII bomber-crew movie, we see the many different "types" all collected together: the wise old black man, the retired professor with a bit of a drinking problem, the Indian taxi driver, the young couple with a newborn, the undocumented worker from Mexico, the down-to-earth older white woman, the woman in the wheelchair. . . . Some of these characters (particularly the Mexican worker) are interesting, but there is a sense, when you see them assembled, of checking off boxes (and yet all these very different people are deeply, and somewhat arbitrarily, connected; it reminded me of my senior year at Berkeley, when I realized I was spending night after night alone, writing paper after paper about the "social web" that connected – that was a thing then, and I guess it's now back – various fictional characters . . .).

There's a bit of a generic feel to many of the characters and their stories, partly because the main thing that makes Berkeley such an unusual place – the University – is pretty much ignored. There is that retired professor, but his story is mostly about his drinking problems and the bitter fight he had long ago with James (something unfortunate, we're never told exactly what, was said while he was drunk). None of the characters are Cal students, or grad students, or work at the University, and there is little political or cultural talk, or even talk about the University sports teams; no one even wears a Cal t-shirt. This elision is a legitimate choice – there's more to the city than the University – but it's the academic environment, and specifically Cal's reputation for rebellion and free-thinking as well as intellectual depth, that draws in people with odd and eccentric interests, scholarly, artistic, and political. Once you remove that, you're left with your basic city with a greater portion than usual of footloose young people (we might just as well be in a town with an army base), and so we hear a lot about standard concerns: real estate, family quarrels, confused young people who party too much, older people worried about growing older, not understanding or accepting change. . . . Despite the occasional local reference (Berkeley Bowl, some of the better-known street people) you don't really get a strong sense from the play of what makes Berkeley distinctive.

Also, I just don't buy the cozy idea of "community" here. As Bee wanders home, she doesn't meet any strangers, or anyone threatening, which seems odd in a city with such a large homeless and otherwise transient population, some of whom clearly suffer from addiction and mental illness, and many of whom are young and heedless. Many of the actual inhabitants of Berkeley know they're only there for a few years, and behave accordingly, but in the play everyone is rooted there – even though Bee is planning to leave, you get the feeling she'll eventually come back. As she wanders, everyone she meets wants to help her, and is looking out for her. This is not a city of isolation, alienation, or even irritation. You see this in fiction and rarely in life: you move in and your neighbors turn out to be fascinating, colorful characters who bring you into their lives (I think of this as Sally Bowles syndrome). That shady, perpetually drunk guy two houses away whose noisy parties keep you and your baby from sleeping and who might be a drug dealer? He's actually a friendly (though slightly confused!) fellow who is going to offer you a beer and give you a little bio of Bernard Maybeck! That angry woman who screamed at your friend for cutting back the jasmine branch in front of her house that was hitting his legally blind face? You're all going to end up in her backyard eating home-made apple crisp and talking all through the night! Early on, Bee flirts and comes on physically to an attractive guy, a few years older, whom she knows slightly from school. (They're sitting, and she drapes her legs over his.) He's interested, and excited, but then she suddenly pulls away from him and tells him curtly she just wants to smoke dope with him. He leaves, disappointed and slightly annoyed. They're both kind of drunk and high, and there's no anger, no physical threat, not even a nasty word or two about what a tease she is? I mean, I'm glad there wasn't, but is such harmlessness really how life goes?

In the early stages of that flirtation, Bee had rapped with the guy and his friend. There's a lot of rap in the play. I don't dismiss rap – it's been around a long time now, and has appealed to a wide range of people, many of them very intelligent and musical – but I don't connect with it. And in plays like this, I feel that we (the mostly white, mostly older audience) are supposed to believe that there's something raw and "real" about it, a sort of youthful energy bursting out of the streets. But it seems to me an art form as elaborate and artificial as baroque opera. Later in the play (skip this sentence if you're planning to see the show) Bee runs into her mother, now a drug addict living in a park. After a tense encounter, after the mother has to run off because the police are coming to rouse the homeless out of the park, Bee delivers an angry rap at her departed mother. It reminded me, in its emotional effect and elaborate structure, of a rage aria in baroque opera. That's not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned, but to me it was part of the artificiality (like some of the melodramatic plot points, those single moments that changed everything) and not the authenticity of the play. But at least it's some sort of cultural or artistic element, which is otherwise lacking in the picture of the city (the retired professor does very briefly quote King Lear to the Indian cab driver, but that mostly just seems pretentious). The show does come through with some touching moments, particularly at the end, but I just didn't recognize the city I lived in for several years, or indeed any city I've ever seen outside of fiction. The play's heart is in the right place, but I wonder where its head is.

From the large cast I particularly liked Juan Amador as Manuel, the Mexican laborer, as well as in a few other roles, and Donald Lacy as the grandfather. Brit Frazier was Bee; the rest of the cast is Mary Baird, Christina Chu, Karina Gutierrez, Abhi Kris, Paul Loomis, Tim Redmond, and Megan Schirle. The musicians were Olive Mitra, Brian Rodvien, Hannah Birch-Carl, and (the night I was there) Alex Garcia, and for once Shotgun didn't brutally amplify the music. The show runs until 22 June; get more information here.

the sweet By and By

On a recent Thursday I went to the Ashby Stage to see the Shotgun Players presentation of By and By, a new play by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Mina Morita.

We plunge right into the story, with Denise's shocked reaction to her father Steven's announcement that she was cloned from his wife Denise, who died in a car crash about eighteen years ago. He is finally telling her this because a quasi-governmental agency has been trying to contact them – this is a slightly future world in which cloning humans is possible, but not all that successful; most of them die in their mid-teens, so the agency is very curious to find out why Denise has so far shown no signs of the usual illnesses. The downside to the immediate plunge into the action, though, is that we have no sense of what this family is like normally. I'm sure it would be a bit of a shock to discover you were cloned (I wonder how people react when or if they find out they were conceived through in vitro fertilization?), but Denise's histrionic, obscenity-laden repetitions make her seem like an annoying, self-dramatizing adolescent, not like the wonderful person Steven keeps saying she is. (The dead wife, also played by Jennifer LeBlanc, shows up for Steven's benefit after the daughter has run away, and is much more appealing.)

The cloning is very expensive – a cost of a million dollars per procedure is cited. We live in a country in which millions of people can't afford even basic health care, and there is angry debate over whether they should be able to. No one raises this issue. We live in a country in which reproductive rights and euthenasia and respect for life and what that means are also fiercely debated, but no one raises those issues either. We live in a country in which wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in a small percentage of the population, but here cloning seems widely and easily available. (No one seems concerned about overpopulation, either.) The only objection to the process seems to be that it doesn't work that well, which is why the quasi-governmental agency seems to be trying to shut down or at least control the process, despite the money to be made, a development which, how shall I say, does not seem congruent with long-term trends in American society. (As in last season's uneven Precious Little, the play is weirdly blinkered by a very narrow, class-privileged view of American realities). Some of the obvious (and potentially lucrative) possibilities of cloning are never mentioned at all: organ harvesting, for example, or the creation of a class of special workers or soldiers (that may seem too science-fiction-dystopian, but I recently saw an article on physiological research to increase wakefulness in combat soldiers; a huge amount of scientific research is funded by the military, and our society is increasingly militarized, but not in the world we see here).

Money is treated very vaguely throughout. The cost of the procedure is mentioned, but not how the families raised the money, or how the massive debt affects their lives; the only other clone we meet is a young black man who seems to come from an ordinary middle- or maybe working-class family. How did his mother get a million dollars to recreate her son? Steven (I wonder if he was made so nebbishy so he didn't seem like a Dr Frankenstein?) assures his daughter that he quit the lab after he cloned her, but though there's no indication he works anywhere else, he seems to have plenty of money – presumably he gets some sort of residuals from the process, since he invented it, though again this is never spelled out, and no one, even the angry receptionist at the clone support agency, accuses him of profiting from the pain of others, and he seems to think that quitting the lab absolved him of all further association with cloning.

I've gone on here about cloning and money because the play doesn't. It uses cloning almost entirely as a metaphor for trying to hang on to a loved one in spite of death. (Though it's an imperfect metaphor since, as Steven assures his daughter, cloning doesn't recreate the same person, because of the influence of environment and so forth – this raises the interesting possibility that some people paid a million dollars for what turned out to be an unsatisfactory reproduction of a missing original, but that possibility isn't explored).

As I mentioned, Steven's wife appears to him when his daughter runs off, and she is full of the sort of warm, loving wisdom not untinged with condescension frequent to spirit visitors from beyond as well as to wives. She finally urges him to let her go – in other words, he may be the agent of his actions, but she is the agent of his emotional growth. In life as on stage, that's certainly not an unknown situation, but it would have been maybe less conventional to have a more painful realization on his part – that his experiences as a father and widower and scientist had led him to grow past her, since her development had been cut off by her early death.

At the end, father and daughter are re-united; he has tried to shield her from scrutiny, but now, in an effort to move on and, in general, heal, he talks her into going public with him. Earlier his dead wife had chided him for not dating again (though she also expresses jealousy that he might do so) and had mentioned how restricted his life has been since her death, and even though this is because he's trying to protect his cloned daughter, I also thought that maybe Gunderson had noticed, as I have, how underpopulated a lot of plays are. But I guess I was wrong about that, since father and daughter head off into a future that seems clear of anything to trouble or harass them, outside of the committee: for one thing, there seem to be no media, social or mainstream, that might hound and exploit them (can't you see the headlines now? "Clone Girl Breaks the Silence! Clone Girl: 'I'm not my mother!' Clone Girl in DUI!"). There is no indication that there might be violence directed towards them, or even lawsuits, or other unpleasantness or danger. It's all about their personal emotional growth, which seems to happen in a social vacuum.

It's not that every play needs to be a searing denunciation of American realities, but if you're going to bring up a topic like cloning, you need to make it more than a hook. I had the feeling Gunderson really just wanted to write a play about moving on after the death of a loved one. And as such this play has some touching scenes – between father and daughter, and husband and wife, and with the ill young man, and with the wife's kindly, aging sister, whose mind is starting to wander. There are some beautiful speeches about appreciating each moment, because you never know which will be the last (I guess I envy people who haven't already been taught that by life). But the superficial handling of the cloning theme keeps weakening the play.

The cast is strong, though I felt they were sometimes a bit too emphatic, but then I often feel that, so maybe that's just me, though the Ashby Stage is such an intimate space, I wish more advantage were taken of the intimacy. Michael Patrick Gaffney is Steven, Jennifer LeBlanc is both wife and daughter Denise, Lynne Hollander plays the other female roles, and Bari Robinson the other male roles (it would have been witty, or at least interesting, to work the multiple roles played by two actors into the cloning theme). The play moves rapidly, lasting about seventy minutes with no intermission. It runs through 23 June; click here for more information.

Shotgun's Woyzeck

Last Thursday I finally made it to the Shotgun Players production of Woyzeck, with music and lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Mark Jackson, based on a concept by Robert Wilson. Originally I was supposed to go the first week of January, but I got sick, which was not how I wanted to start the new year. Luckily for me the run had been extended and the box office was able to  switch my reservation to another day. The Shotgun Box Office folks are always extremely helpful.

I had really been looking forward to this show. First of all: Woyzeck! Also, I had really enjoyed the previous Tom Waits/Robert Wilson work I had seen, The Black Rider, which ACT presented a few years ago (like Woyzeck, that was also based on a work better known as a German opera; in that case, Weber's Der Freischutz). I thought it was a cool bold choice for a relatively small theater. Its appearance on the schedule was one of the reasons I became a subscriber.

So sadly I have to say I just didn't connect with the show. I can't say I disliked it; in fact there were many things to like. But, as with their production of Sondheim's Assassins, the show was brutally, inexplicably amplified. Why? Why, in a theater as small as the Ashby Stage, would you need to do that? The advantages of a space like that are intimacy and immediacy and a sense of involvement: why would you sacrifice all that for a pointless wall of aggressive sound that pushes you back from the performance rather than draws you in? At times the amplification blurred the words. All the performers had those ugly little wires taped to their faces with what I guess is the power source bulging out of their back waistbands, which doesn't exactly help the illusion that these people I'm watching are anything but contemporary performers. I guess that's fine if you're going for that Brechtian distancing effect, but it really pushed me back from any emotional involvement with the characters.

It doesn't help that the ending is changed: in this version the child of Marie and Woyzeck is still a babe in arms, and so there is no heart-breaking ending when the little boy goes out to play with the other children and it turns out what they're doing is looking at his mother's dead body. She still dies - in fact, I realized that this is the third Mark Jackson show I've seen in the past few years in which the female lead has her throat slit, though in the other two (Miss Julie and Faust, Part One) she does it herself. The night I saw the play the Marie, Madeline H.D. Brown, was sick. Her understudy was fine, but I've really liked Brown in the other things I've seen her in recently, so I was disappointed not to see her. (I'm afraid I don't know the understudy's name; the substitution must have been a last-minute thing, since Jackson announced they would need to delay the start of the show by a few minutes so she could get ready, and there was no paper slip in the program or any announcement that gave her name.)

Tom Waits is a great songwriter, and a very distinctive one, conjuring up a very specific world and worldview in his songs, but it did cross my mind that maybe that world is just a shade too wistful and picturesque, just a shade too scruffy low-life colorful, for the harsh cruelty and caustic absurdity of Buchner's play. I thought Kevin Clarke as the Doctor and Anthony Nemirovsky as  the Captain were the best at capturing the cruelty and the comedy. The rest of the cast was also strong (Andy Alabran as Karl, an Idiot; Alex Crowther as Woyzeck; Joe Estlack as the Drum Major; Josh Pollock as the Carnival Announcer;  Kenny Toll as Andres; Beth Wilmurt as Margaret). But I just couldn't get past the awful fake sound.

killing me softly with his song

Last night I was back in Berkeley to see the Shotgun Players production of Sondheim's Assassins, a musical revue featuring presidential assassins and would-be assassins, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. Given the subject matter as well as America's tortured love affair with both guns and presidential power, the show became instantly (and I assume intentionally) controversial, though this seems to have helped as much as hurt its continuing stage life (it's already been revived on Broadway, after its 1990 premiere, and at least one of last night's actors has appeared in two other local productions, each time as a different assassin).

The stage is set up like a carnival tent, run by the Proprietor, a carnival barker selling chances at the shooting gallery, and our merry band take turns telling their tales. We start with Booth and Lincoln but after that the stories are woven together in an historical fantasia that follows a theatrical rather than a factual path. Each assassin plays supporting roles in the other's stories. The dead speak to the living, and the living speak to each other unconstrained by geography or mere fact. That is not meant as a criticism; though the show is in a sense a history lesson, it's a history of dreams and disappointments and possibilities and impossibilities, rather than of who did what when and where to whom according to reliable records. ("Why" is always up for debate, no matter what type of history it is).

The basic idea of the show is to take one of the primary delusions of American individualism - that anyone, just by hard work (apparently any sort of work, as long as it's "hard"), can become successful - can even become President! - and invert it to draw attention to the dispossessed, disappointed, and disgruntled: if you can't become President, maybe you can become a presidential assassin, and change history that way - the view being examined here is very much of individuals shaping history, their own or the country's, as if there are no larger historical or economic forces at work.

The ethos of Individualism as a significant and powerful force also emerges in the American love-hate relationship with celebrity, which is another major theme of the show: assassination (as Booth points out, "murder" is for lowlifes; when you kill a president, it's - he gives the word such an alluring hiss - assassination) is a way to become famous and even immortal (like Brutus, assassin of Caesar), or just to attract the notice of the celebrity you're fixated on (notoriously there's Hinckley with Jodie Foster, but also Squeaky Fromme with Charles Manson and Sam Byck* with Leonard Bernstein, among others). Booth of course was an actual actor and he shot Lincoln in a theater, but many of his fellow killers, in less formal and professional ways, are also acting various parts. Booth gives an extended talk on Death of a Salesman, in case we are missing the point that though the unsuccessful drop out of sight in most American media (which is after all driven by advertising dollars), they do have their significance in our theater.

The basic idea of the show is interesting and provocative, but it seems like one of those things that will always be more interesting and provocative as an idea, and maybe less so in its results. The problem for me is that though there seems to be a lot of potential in the general idea of using assassins rather than Presidents to take an inside-out and upside-down look at America, once you start looking at their stories in detail the general idea falls apart, because the actual motivations and circumstances of the assassins are all over the map. Some of them (like Charles Guiteau, assassin of James Garfield, and Hinckley) were mostly crazy; some (like Leon Czolgosz, anarchist assassin of William McKinley, and Booth) had definite political motivations; many (Sam Byck, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore, Giuseppe Zangara) fall somewhere on the spectrum between insanity and political conviction. And at least one remains somewhat mysterious (Lee Harvey Oswald).

Forcing all these disparate types into one thesis can't help but feel a little superficial, even though the work tries perhaps a bit too cleverly to use the superficiality and the carnival razzle-dazzle as a way of examining the superficial (such as the simplistic, naive thinking of the assassins - if I work hard, I will be successful! if I shoot the President, I will change the world!). The music and lyrics have that distinct Sondheim tang, but are verbally and emotionally less complex than in many of his other works. Some of the more extended sequences of John Weidman's book drag a bit despite the skill of the actors because they are so obvious: yes, we (that is, "we") see Presidents as fathers, and we want Father to take care of us, and we're angry when he doesn't; yes, we (again, "we") think we know celebrities, and are angry when our insignificance is magnified by the knowledge that they don't know us.

I thought some of the more entertaining and interesting moments were provided by the lighter interactions, such as those between the bumbling Sara Jane Moore and the delusional Squeaky Fromme. ("Oh, look!" said the woman behind me, examining the cast list before the show started, "there are women!" She was certainly old enough to remember those two, though maybe she can be excused given her British accent - who knows where she was living then?). Moore and Fromme are mostly played for laughs, as is Gerald Ford in his very brief appearance, though my memory of both those assassination attempts is that at the time no one was particularly amused.

But that's fine: as I said, there's a certain amount of superficiality built into the over-broad thesis of the show, so you might as well go for the frisson of shock, and the theatrical relief of comedy, when you can. Before the performance I heard a man sitting in front of me say, "I wonder if they'll do Lincoln?" I don't see how you can take up this subject and not "do" Lincoln. Though  his assassination can provide material for sharp, keen-witted comedy (see Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog) here the treatment is mostly serious, and any satire is directed at Booth: the Balladeer strums his banjo, asking Why did you do it, Johnny?, calling Booth a madman, mentioning bad reviews and too much liquor, while Booth protests that his aims were lofty and noble. The assassination of Lincoln is one of the great primal tragedies of American history, its effects rippling down the many decades since then, but the thing is, it was many decades ago, and we're distant enough for at least some irony.

Distance, or more specifically the lack of same, may explain the treatment of Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. I have no memory of it, but I've noticed that many people just a year older than I am do. It must be one of their very first vivid memories. Though it's debatable (at best) whether the Kennedy assassination had a political and historical effect anywhere near that of the Lincoln assassination, it was undeniably an emotionally traumatic event for the country. Unlike the other assassins, Oswald does not appear in the opening number and takes no part in the stories of the others. It was nearing the end of the show (100 minutes, no intermission) and I was starting to think that Sondheim and Weidman had oddly omitted Lee Harvey Owald. But as with Lincoln, I don't see how you can take up this subject without "doing" Kennedy. Then the other assassins ganged up on the Balladeer, stripped him down, and turned him into Lee Harvey Oswald. Booth appears to him and they have a long, earnest conversation in which Booth tries to persuade the suicidal Oswald to shoot the President instead, arguing that by doing so Oswald will somehow validate all the rest of them. (It seems doubtful that an egomaniac like Booth would offer that role to anyone but himself, but then he's had some time on the other side to put at least certain things into perspective.) Theatrically the scene is an attempt to change and deepen the tone a bit, to move beyond shock into a larger historical and psychological view, but it's also a way to contain and pay tribute to the emotions the Kennedy assassination still evokes among many. But, you know, time shouldn't reduce our empathy; those emotions surround anyone being shot, and anyone desperate, crazy, or convinced enough to shoot. I think Assassins will always be a show whose shock pulls us in while its emotional and political limitations can't help but put us out a bit.

As for this specific production, it's very good. (This is the first time I've seen it on stage, though I have both Broadway cast albums.) The cast is strong and the staging is sharp. However, and this is going to make the show a nonstarter for some, it is (unnecessarily and inexplicably) amplified. The Ashby Stage is a small house and if your voice can't fill that space, you shouldn't be a performer. I wonder why they decided to mike everybody? I wonder if it was even up for discussion, or if the automatic assumption now is that any singing should be amplified. It's possible that only the singing was amplified, since most of the dialogue sounded more or less natural (though they may also have adjusted the sound during the performance; there seemed to be fewer problems towards the end of the show). But even though as I noted above the lyrics aren't as sophisticated and twisty as they can be in much of Sondheim's work, the result of the amplification is that above a certain volume the words were almost impossible to make out (this is a particular problem with Giuseppe Zangara, would-be assassin of FDR). People tend to listen more carefully when the sound isn't artificially pumped up (this is why opera divas come out on stage for their recital encores and murmur their thanks to the adoring crowds, who fall silent and strain to catch every word). Maybe one odd result of our world of relentless loud noise is that many people train themselves to half-listen above a certain volume. It disengages you from the actors. I wish they had taken advantage of the intimacy of the space; the actors are right there in front of us, but we're not allowed to hear their natural voices. It's like sitting next to someone who insists on shouting in your ear. Weird.

The show was directed by Susannah Martin, with musical direction by David Moschler. The Blue Ridge Boys play the music; they are Derek Brooker, Jeremy Carrillo, Amar Khalsa, Andrew Maguire, Ben Malkevitch, Jeff Patterson, Rafa Postel, and Carolyn Walter. The talented performers are Aleph Ayin (Giuseppe Zangara), Rebecca Castelli (Sara Jane Moore), Danny Cozart (John Hinckley), Ryan Drummond (Sam Byck), Jeff Garrett (Proprietor), Steven Hess (Charles Guiteau), Cody Metzger (Squeaky Fromme), Galen Murphy-Hoffman (John Wilkes Booth), Dan Saski (Leon Czolgosz), and Kevin Singer (Balladeer). They all play other parts as well, but they're listed with their primary character.

The show runs through 28 October and schedule and ticket information is here.

* Sam Byck planned to assassinate Nixon by flying a plane into the White House, which I had completely forgotten about.

Not me baby, I'm too precious

Last Thursday I saw Madeleine George's Precious Little, which has just started its west coast premiere run at Shotgun Players in Berkeley under the direction of Marissa Wolf, the artistic director of Crowded Fire Theater. I liked a lot about the play, especially its very powerful final scene, but something about it just didn't click for me. After a day or two I realized what it was. You know how you feel when you're out with someone you don't know very well but you assume is a decent person and then she starts treating a waitress badly or being a bit snotty to some flunkey? And eventually you realize that this isn't some bad-day aberration but instead is a pattern of behavior? I realized my problem with Precious Little is that the main character is a horrible person - only no one calls her on it, or seems to care, or even notice.

That main character is Brodie, a lesbian linguist in her early 40s who is having a child through a sperm bank. She discovers through an amniocentesis that there is a possibility that the child will be retarded (her word). This is only a possibility, not a certainty, but being faced with uncertainty shakes her world. What should be shaking her world is the way she treats other people, starting with her girlfriend, a graduate student named Dre.

Dre is not only an academic subordinate, she seems (based on her language and behavior) to be from a lower social class, and she's much younger than Brodie. Both women are aware that they are violating university rules against professor/student relationships; it's a concern for Dre but Brodie, who seems to feel the rule doesn't apply to her, dismisses her worries. Dre wants Brodie to go to the zoo with her to see a gorilla who had been the subject of language experiments. Brodie, who specializes in the study and preservation of dying languages, disapproves of what she considers linguistic stunts like teaching apes to "talk." She also disapproves of zoos, even though she doesn't seem to care much about animals, or know much about contemporary zoos. Dre really is looking for a public and emotional aspect to their relationship, and even when her need goes from subtext to text (when she says she wants to be used for something besides fucking - her word - and tape transcription), Brodie barely grasps that aspect - she seems to think the request is really just about a trip to the zoo. (This is not the only time this experienced linguist seems to have problems understanding the functions of language, particularly when they involve listening to other people.) They end up going and Brodie, unexpectedly (and rather implausibly), is suddenly fascinated by the gorilla.

When Brodie tells Dre about the complications to her pregnancy, Dre tries to be supportive and understanding but assumes that Brodie will abort the fetus. Apparently this is not what Brodie is currently planning to do, and Dre's failure to intuit this leads Brodie to dump her, brutally and abruptly. Even if Brodie is so self-centered and oblivious that she doesn't anticipate how much pain this will cause Dre, she should have noticed that obvious pain and anger right away. Instead Brodie - callously, cynically, cluelessly - makes it clear she is planning to continue exploiting Dre as a tape transcriber. I think we're meant to find this comical rather than appalling. Does Dre lodge an official complaint about professional misconduct, or even spread (however inadvertently) destructive gossip about Brodie? She does not. She conveniently disappears, off to heal, or sulk, or whatever, in private, but not before repeating (coincidentally) a line Brodie had already used to her genetic counselor, about things hurting less if you use the real words. This is an extremely dubious proposition to start with, and the repetition of the earlier sentiment was one of several spots where I felt the scaffolding of meaning was a little too obvious. Also, for a linguist, Brodie appears to have a remarkably unsophisticated view of the  important social role of euphemism, cliche, and other formulaic language.

The genetic counselor is a young woman named Rhiannon who is so new to her job that Dorothy, an older mentor counselor, still sits in on her sessions. Brodie at one point tells Rhiannon not to condescend to her but the condescension and the impatient snippiness are all coming from Brodie. Rhiannon herself is sincere and well-meaning and trying to learn a complicated and sensitive job. As with Dre, Rhiannon is young enough to be Brodie's daughter, but they elicit no maternal warmth or interest from Brodie, who treats them as she treats everyone, as if they were dimwitted household servants. She does at one point ask Gloria, the nurse conducting the amniocentesis, why she wanted to go into that field, but this rare interest in another person seems more like a distraction before a disturbing procedure than like something genuine, as if nerves were briefly taking Brodie out of herself. Being a parent requires several qualities Brodie is notably lacking, like empathy with others, and a realization that other people are not just projections of oneself. Why does this relentlessly self-interested woman want a child? Why does anyone think she would be anything but a nightmare as a parent? Why does no one in the play raise these questions?

We also see her dealing with Cleva, a language informant, a frail elderly woman who is an immigrant from the region of the Soviet Union where they spoke the dying language Brodie studies. and with Cleva's daughter Evelyn. Again, she is condescending to both, ignoring the mother's physical and mental health problems and dismissing the daughter's concerns. She can barely contain her exasperation when the mother, who obviously had nothing but rudimentary schooling, doesn't understand what she wants. As with other examples of Brodie's relentlessly self-centered behavior, this isn't played, and doesn't come across, as a criticism of Brodie: I had the sinking feeling we were actually  supposed to "identify with" Brodie, and share her exasperation, and even find it a bit endearing and sympathetic. Other people are such a pain! Especially when they're so much less sophisticated than we are!

The way I'm phrasing the action draws out what I see as the underlying reality of Brodie's character and behavior, but during the play itself we are clearly not meant to have these reactions. Certainly no one I heard discussing the play afterward, and nothing I've read about it, would have prepared me for Brodie's awfulness - for the way she uses other people, for her lack of concern for their feelings and problems, for her assumptions of superiority. In fact, as I mentioned above, I didn't walk out of the theater with those thoughts either - more of an unsettled feeling that there was something amiss with the portrayal of Brodie - so I think significantly negative thoughts about her are not built into the play. But I'm feeling the indignation of retrospection, and are theater-makers and theater-goers really so class-bound that they don't see how horrible her behavior is, even when they've stepped away from the immediate experience and thought it over? At a bare minimum, haven't they ever heard the phrase noblesse oblige, and wouldn't that make them question Brodie's behavior? Why does no one in the play confront Brodie's class-based assumptions?

It's all very much like listening to an upper-class woman complaining about the quality of help these days, and being expected to agree. I'm going to quote once again my favorite movie line, which is from Renoir's The Rules of the Game: "Everybody has their reasons. That's the terrible thing about life." Brodie (or perhaps it's Madeleine George, since she's the one who doesn't have the other characters confront or question Brodie to any significant extent) seems to think that the terrible thing about life is other people's failure to see reason; that is, to see that they should do what is convenient for her. A wonderful thing about drama as a form is that even minor characters can have their say, in their own words, free even of a narrator's interpretive gloss: but the vantage point here is unrelievedly Brodie's. (Except on the occasions when we hear the gorilla's interior monologues, which are refreshing.) And the closest anyone comes to calling her out is to say, You just don't understand, which seems more like an inconvenience to deal with than a charge to ponder; Brodie clearly feels they are the ones who don't understand the significance of her work, or of her.

When Brodie tries to persuade Cleva and Evelyn of the importance of Cleva's language (I forget the name of it, but I believe it was invented by the playwright anyway) she goes off on a highly technical little lecture about what makes the language so fascinating to a linguist. I think we're meant to find it quirky and charming that she's so "passionate" about her field (how much bad behavior are you willing to overlook in exchange for quirky interests?), but clearly Brodie is simply unable to communicate with anyone who isn't a graduate student - that is, someone who shares her interests yet is subordinate to her. (And in fact she even says that she had been picturing her future child as a little graduate student.) I'm expected to believe that this woman, who is completely unable to relate to nonspecialists, did field research for years? And she never prepared a short, clear, yet noncondescending explanation of what she was doing? As with her sudden interest in the gorilla or her desire for a child, this was an assertion that I felt came more out of thematic necessity than actual character. Also, you'd think that Brodie, as a linguist, would have been aware that her extravagant use of technical language to poor, marginalized women like Cleva and Evelyn would be seen as an intimidating and even repellent assertion of social and intellectual superiority.

My initial reaction was that Zehra Berkman as Brodie was the weakest member of the three-woman cast, but on further thought I think the faults in the performance lie with the playwright, not the actor. Berkman was appealing and convincing enough so that my experience of Brodie during performance was - well, I wanted to be sympathetic. But thinking it over afterwards, which to some extent means thinking more about what the playwright did and a bit less about what the actor is doing, I had to realize the problem was the play's insular and complacent view of Brodie as a character. Berkman also didn't have the advantage the other actors had of switching among multiple roles, which heightens the razzle-dazzle of a performance on a basic theatrical level. Nancy Carlin plays the gorilla, Dorothy, Cleva, and the Baby; Rami Margron plays Rhiannon, Evelyn, Dre, Gloria, and various zoogoers. Both are superb in their varied roles. The zoogoers are particularly exhilarating, as Margron does whole crowd dialogues in different voices, flowing seamlessly flawlessly and even hilariously from one character to another.

We hear the zoogoers in the last scene, as almost kind of a chant, while Brodie has a long monologue envisioning life with the baby and the gorilla, whose perfect simplicity and elegance of movement she tries to ape (yes, I'm using the word deliberately); I find that as I try to describe the final scene the details and the movement have blurred in my mind, but the impression remains: an almost abstract combination of words and movement and themes that was unexpectedly striking and actually drew gasps the night I was there. There's a powerful poetic meditation struggling to get out of this play, about language and representation and being in the world. Unfortunately it's trapped in a largely "realistic" effort, whose realism does not extend to questioning or criticizing its main character. It's like a banal, hackneyed magazine article we've all seen too many times - Can Brodie Have It All? - that doesn't realize that if you're even in a position to ask if you can have it all (no matter what "it" is), then you're speaking from a position of incredible privilege. Too bad George didn't spend more time on the other characters, all of whom are more interesting than Brodie (the play is less than ninety minutes, but I found myself checking my watch during several Brodie-heavy scenes). She has her moment of elevation at the end, but my retrospective realization of her unquestioned faults, and the play's failure to challenge or even comment on her behavior, make it feel unearned. It's like something you'd read about in the New York Times Style section: the sort of moment expected to give stylish spiritual depth to a life of unacknowledged and assumed privilege, a little epiphany for the entitled.