fun stuff I may or may not get to: October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Otro, the Same

Thick House Theater has revived El Otro by Octavio Solis, and for me this sentimental melodrama is their first real misfire since I've started attending their productions. “Sentimental melodrama” may conjure up a Victorian well-made play like Way Down East, but though it is an accurate description, it's not how you experience this drama, which has very fancy ways of telling its very conventional story.

Romy is a 13-year-old girl being picked up from her father Guadalupe (called Lupe) by Ben, her mother Nina’s new husband. Lupe, a drug dealer and general low-life, insists on bringing them to a ranch to give Romy a farewell present. The story is told mostly from Romy’s point of view, which is unfortunate since she’s the least interesting character on stage (and Maria Candelaria looks about ten years older than the rest of her stage family). She takes some peyote before the Dad exchange, which presumably is why she often breaks into less than entirely plausible stagey-poetic stream-of-consciousness monologues that contrast sharply with her normal demotic style of speaking.

Ben (Johnny Moreno, good here and so good in Thick House’s Blade to the Heat, a much more interesting examination of ethnicity and masculinity) is an Army private, a second-generation immigrant Mexican from Chicago who doesn’t speak Spanish. For some reason everyone keeps calling him by a different army title (I think Lieutenant) and he has to keep correcting them. There are some recurring themes and images that develop (for example, dogs, associated with Lupe and his past, and horses, associated with Nina and Ben) but this isn’t one of them.

Another much-repeated bit that goes nowhere is Lupe’s repeated insinuation that Ben wants to molest Romy, which Ben then indignantly denies. There’s no reason to believe this is anything other than Lupe being ugly, so all the repetition does is make you wonder why Ben is putting up with Lupe.

Lupe is presented as sort of a trickster figure, which strikes me as an extremely sentimental approach to someone who is basically a bully and a thug. There are various other attempts to add mythic resonance with various magical-realist elements, but they mostly appear for theatrical effect or to paper over implausibilities. I suppose it’s a tribute to Sean San Jose’s performance as Lupe that it is even slightly plausible that Ben would accompany him, given Lupe’s relentless crude insults and threats. Ben’s motive for going is presumably to protect his Nina’s child, and sure, he’s meant to be slightly passive and safe, but it’s difficult to believe he wouldn’t fight back, and pretty early on too.

All Ben really had to do to win Nina (the appealing Presciliana Esparolini) is deal with some very spicy salsa; after he proves his Mexicanness by eating peppers so hot they make him sweat, she tells him she has a daughter, and the news not only doesn’t scare him off, he determines to be a father to her child. But Romy, in the unoriginal way of children of divorce, resents the interloper, though you’d think she’d be grateful that at least one adult shows some interest in her. Yet she rejects him until his arduous ordeals finally convince her he is worthy of her love.

I find it very strange, and very limiting to the play, that it consistently takes such a superficially adolescent point of view. Ben seems like a stand-up guy, but we're supposed to sympathize with Romy's hostility (if you lose patience with her attitude, then the evening really drags in an irritating way – trust me on this). The emotional focus of the play is Ben winning Romy, not her mother. Romy repeatedly rejects him because he’s “a nerd,” a longing for a cool dad that is difficult to take seriously, especially given Romy’s life with the violent and unstable Lupe.

But this is one of those explorations of ethnicity that insists that the only real experience for its people is as an underclass. You hear about black or Latino school kids saying that studying is for whites and so forth, which strikes me as a tragic example of internalized racism. Yet it's this adolescent point of view that this play embraces in its insistence that Ben must always give way to Lupe, so that he may be purged of his attempts to lead a regular middle-class life and instead be initiated into true Mexicanness.

Because apparently a non-Spanish speaker from Chicago doesn’t count as a real Mexican. Ben must suffer the underclass indignities of the illegal immigrant – a dangerous river crossing, harassment by border patrol, physical violence, and various other trials. You can dress up the humiliation of Ben as a vision quest or a search for an authentic self and toss in all sorts of colorful magical realist bric-a-brac, but not respecting Ben’s experience on its own terms is really no more than a way of insisting that Certain People just don’t belong in Certain Places.

It turns out that the whole thing is based on a passionate love triangle from the past that ended in violence. Nina and Anastasio (who melds with Ben and is played by the same actor) are having an affair. His parents disapprove so they go to Lupe and demand that if he’s a man – if he’s a Mexican – he end things. Not unexpectedly, these taunts lead him to kill Anastasio, and I’m not sure what else the parents expected, though it’s also not entirely clear that they realize their son is dead. They seem to think he's just been otherwise occupied for fourteen years. It’s also not clear why Nina sticks with Lupe for over a decade after he’s killed her true love, or why she’s never told Romy that Anastasio is her biological father (as if it matters; apparently no one here has heard the expression “Your father is the man who raises you” – what an odd faith in bloodlines). Yes, it’s the same old clichéd story – hot-blooded Latins vowing vengeance! killing for honor! Living by a primitive code in a sunbaked land!

There's a lot of yelling and gunfire and blood. You don't even get the payoff of seeing Romy start to move from her adolescent point of view to an adult point of view. It's all just teenage wish fulfillment.

Oh, those Latins! So much passion! So much screaming! So much spicy food!

fear death by water

The doors don’t open for Ecstasy: A Waterfable until right before 8:00, because when you walk in the whole cast is on-stage chanting – OK, the story is already flowing midstream when we enter. This premiere by Denmo Ibrahim is presented by Golden Thread, a Middle East-centered theater group that is new to me (the ticket was part of my subscription to Thick House Theater). It is based on a Sufi parable called When the Waters Were Changed, as is mentioned in every article about the play, though during the play itself you never get to hear the whole parable, which as far as I can figure out seems to be about a day when the waters changed (and changed those who drank them), and one man resisted and was unchanged, until he stopped resisting and joined the others.

This being a Middle Eastern-centered show, there is ululating and keening, and a twinkly and foul-mouthed old wise woman. There are also chants and ceremonies and stories that are repeated in part over and over, there are ablutions and dreams; there is a sense of time that encompasses the present day and the timelessly mythological. Characters turn into other characters and then back into themselves, only played by different actors. Water runs through the whole action in the form of drips or lakes or jugs of water; the set contains boats and sinks and buckets and a toilet. There is a man subject to visions who writes a strange script on the wall, and a young couple coming to terms with changing from two individuals to a couple. There is almost always someone on stage asleep and dreaming, and what we see may or may not be his or her dream.

If this sounds confusing – well, that depends on your point of view. The script and staging are very suggestive, and you will probably seize on the through-line that most reaches you and interpret the action by your own lights – as a story about an individual resisting the group, or surrendering to the group, or as a story about when everyone changes religion (yeah, it's the Middle East) and you don’t, or as a metaphor for becoming sexually active, or as something else entirely.

If you need someone to tell you what the moral is, or if you need a linear narrative, this play will probably bug you. I’m not criticizing people who want those things; it’s just that linear plots aren’t that important to me. And initially, I too was resistant to the show – as I said, there is ululating, in that way that signals “mideastern” just as flamenco guitars signal “Spain,” and an old woman who is alternately wise and potty-mouthed, which can be sort of a cutesy cliché. And there is a character called Birthsong, and if I had taken that in before the play started, I might have run screaming into the night.

But by the end of the evening (and this is a short play – about 75 minutes, no intermission) I was loving it. In fact I felt sort of giddy – it was the sheer theatricality of the whole thing. Much as I love traditional plot- and character-driven theater, lots of those plays would work just as well if they were filmed. Something like this can only be experienced as theater – if you were reading the script, what is fast and fluid would be slow and confusing, and if it were filmed, with dissolves and cuts and other special effects, I think it might look gimmicky instead of as inevitable as it does here. This is theater as lyric poem, and it just doesn’t translate into other media.

So big praise to Ibrahim, and to director Evren Odcikin, and to the very talented ensemble: Cec Levinson, Garth Petal, Nora el Samahy, Roman Kosins, Bobak Bakhtiari, Deborah Eliezer, Bora “Max” Koknar, Alika Spencer, and Heidi Wolff. The show is still running and you have a few more chances to catch it this coming weekend; check here for more info and tickets.

Fayette-Nam at the AATC

As part of my subscription to Thick House Theater, I received a ticket to Fayette-Nam, the Asian American Theater Company’s world premiere of Aurorae Khoo’s play; I was a little wary going in, but I found it a rich and enjoyable evening.

I was a little wary because I loathe ethnic uplift and groupthink and I hate theater that’s all about cardboard figures representing different groups shouting slogans at each other, and those are the kinds of the things I expect from any theater group that's ethnic-specific, and the summary – an African-American soldier goes AWOL before being shipped out to Iraq and hides out with an Asian-American woman and her daughter, with whom he is in a love triangle; the mother runs a donut shop and dreams of Paris and the daughter is a pyromaniac – just sounded a little too self-consciously quirky for my taste.

The synopsis oversimplifies the subtle and complex interplay among the characters. Khoo expertly conveys a sense of Fayetteville, a waystation for soldiers that sustains a tense and fragile community of service industries (mostly cheap restaurants and strip joints). The family unit is also tense and fragile and surprisingly enduring.

Laura-Lai Lee, the mother (played by Lisa Kang), and her children, Debbie Lee and Connor Lee (Kathleen Mendoza and Kenneth Tan Ronquillo, respectively), all dream of getting away but also know that, given reality, they aren’t really going anywhere. Debbie has been booted from Columbia University because of an arson incident (the details of which are slowly revealed, and which increase the complexity of what could have been a one-dimensional character; Debbie isn’t as bold and different as she likes to pretend). Connor is a teenage boy who is trying to break away from his mother and sister; he wants to join the football team but ends up as equipment manager, not being athletic or popular enough for the squad.

Laura-Lai envisions herself in what is very much a tourist’s fantasy of Paris – the Eiffel Tower, baguettes, the Champs-Elysees, l’amour! – but is stuck in her donut and eggroll shop, the Hole and Roll. It’s easy to see why the young black soldier, Jerome Dupree (played by Jon Gentry), already far from his home in Oakland, missing his grandmother and longing to escape the strippers and his boasting buddies for an authentic connection, is drawn to this woman as well as her daughter.

Race and gender stereotypes do surface, but in an almost casual way that comes from character and situation, not ideological need (though I was a little dubious that Laura-Lai would really describe her former husband as like a pound cake, yellow on the outside and white on the inside – this woman fantasizes about Paris, and the man she’s been seeing, a retired officer known as the Major, whom she fears losing, is white, so being Chinese just hasn’t seemed that important to her). I think the script could use a little tightening; we go to Paris or hear people described in food terms maybe once too often, but the play doesn't lapse into the predictable and I was never bored. Credit should go to the playwright, and also to the director, Duy Nguyen (the AATC’s Co-Artistic Director), as well as the talented cast.

You have a few more chances to catch the show, which is scheduled to close July 11. Click here for more information or tickets, and here to see the YouTube video.

daily and random inspirations

After one of my recent postings on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, artist Andrea Way e-mailed me and told me she had spent last year doing a painting a day, and during the month of September she had listened to LHL while painting. You can check out the fabulous results here. This project reminded me of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play-a-day-for-a-year, some of which I saw at The Cutting Ball (by the way, you still have a couple of weeks to see their latest production, Ionesco’s Victims of Duty, which I highly recommend and hope to write about, oh, soonish; and The America Play by Parks is next up at Thick House Theater). I find the whole “one artistic product per day for a year” idea fascinating. I’ve thought about doing it with haiku, but that always seems too easy to me – I mean, five-seven-five, it’s not that difficult, people – but I’ve occasionally exchanged haiku with co-workers as if we were Heian aristocrats and not cubicle monkeys, and apparently it’s more difficult than I think, judging from the unnatural elisions and other blunders I would see. Maybe I will do that.

Many years ago I was associated with a high-school science textbook that ended up never being published, and one of the suggested (not by me) student activities was to “illustrate the concept of osmosis by performing an interpretive dance.” I found this absolutely hilarious, partly because the target audience probably knew as much about interpretive dance as about osmosis and partly because I could imagine the high-school students who would do this, what it would look like, and how stunned their captive audience would be. Well, damned if an idea that seems silly can't really work: check out Jolene’s lovely choreographed version of her Ph.D. thesis over at Saturday Matinee. See, it's frequently said that life is like high school, but sometimes instead art, science, and athletics can all come together, instead of sitting at separate tables in the cafeteria.

the real deal

I’ve noticed for quite some time now that “passion” is a buzzword these days the way “ambition” was back in the late 1980s: both are deeply ambiguous qualities that are nonetheless presented as simple and unambiguously positive. “Passion,” in fact, has become such a cliché that I merely note its presence, since it has no real meaning anymore; I know most people mean “the thing that makes me interesting” but what they are actually describing is usually “the thing that makes me especially loud-mouthed and ignorant.” Last year I was living in fear that during job interviews someone would ask me the latest inane and fashionable question, “What are you passionate about?” Would I then be true to myself – to my passion – and blurt out the truth: “Avoiding conversations like this?”

“Authenticity” is now a rising buzzwords (or an emerging one, to use another buzzword); I’m hearing and reading it more and more these days. Again, since it is an ambiguous word used without ambiguity, I’m not sure what it means – what true purity and actual Reality are meant. Thoughts of authenticity and even of passion were floating cloud-like through my mind over the past few days, as I began the giddy autumn round of theater-going.

Nothing (except possibly a free ticket in premium orchestra, and even then only with a stun-gun) could induce me to go to Opening Night for either the Symphony or the Opera. I like to think I’m an open and democratic guy, but in my heart of hearts I have the snobbish conviction that the people who go to these things, like Catholics who only go to mass on Easter or Christmas, only believe in social obligation rather than in music. But I can catch the gala spirit, which is one of the reasons I very much enjoyed Angela Gheorghiu’s recital at Berkeley on Saturday. For someone who has only previously appeared in this area once before, she certainly received the ovation of a much-loved star, and she certainly knew how to milk it, which was charming in its way.

It’s a really lovely voice, though at times not quite powerful enough to rise above the orchestra (I was in the front row, but my balcony friend had the same opinion). The Puccini arias – Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta from Rondine, Un bel di, O mio babbino caro as an encore – came off best, I thought; her Pace, pace mio Dio, one of my all-time favorite arias from one of my all-time favorite operas, lacked the umber shades I wanted, but then I have heard Leontyne Price sing the aria live (in recital, several times).

The odd, somewhat incoherent program varied the celebrated opera arias with orchestral interludes from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, which sounded splendid and precisely flowing; what a pleasure to hear them sounding so good, and to hear the overtures to Figaro and Cenerentola and the intermezzos from Manon Lescaut and Cavalleria Rusticana without the chatter of those who are only waiting for the big arias (so good job by the Berkeley audience on this one!).

The orchestral interludes also allowed Gheorghiu time to change from her white gown to her black one and then to a red one – that’s three gowns for a total of eleven vocal pieces (counting the three encores); that’s 3.6 songs per gown, which seems like a high ratio, even for a diva, and despite my enjoyment I couldn’t help feeling we weren’t quite getting full value for our gala-priced tickets, with only slightly more than an hour of music (including the orchestral pieces). The ruched black gown was so tight that, in my humanitarian way, I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, and therefore sing, in it. She did succeed, and it turned out to be an interesting sight, like watching the buffer baritones sing shirtless: you got to see what muscular movements produced what sounds (and I didn’t realize those vibrated on the high notes – I love sitting in the first row!).

The “popular songs” – “popular” meaning “not operatic arias”; you’re not going to hear Curtis’s Non ti scorda r di me or Delibes’s Les Filles de Cadiz blaring from an iPod on public transit, unless you're next to a conservatory student, or hear them sampled by rappers keeping it real – were less interesting to me, though Gheorghiu sang them with as much conviction as the meatier arias. And I’m just not sure that a Romanian soprano is wise to risk I Could Have Danced All Night to an American audience. That’s one of the few songs I actually like from My Fair Lady (the other is On the Street Where You Live, thanks for asking). My dislike for that particular musical predates my becoming aware of what seems to be a critical consensus that it is “really” a Viennese operetta, proving once again that Viennese operetta is a genre to which I have an instinctive aversion. You’d think Romania being close to Vienna, at least physically, would help out, but I couldn’t help recalling Audra McDonald’s performance of that same song in that same hall last June; she had an easy mastery of the style and sold it (and even conducted a sing-along) in a way that Gheorghiu didn’t quite manage.

Somehow, despite the lovely evening, and my enjoyment, and the audience’s vociferous happiness, I can’t quite listen to Gheorghiu without a certain ironic distance. The grand diva mannerisms, like her somewhat studied on-stage flirtatiousness, seem slightly too calculated. That makes them oddly endearing in a way – she wants so much to have the audience adore her like an old-fashioned grand diva – but also makes her seem to be more in the service of La Gheorghiu than of la Musica, makes her seem not quite to have a deep musical intelligence – I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw doing this type of mixed-bag program. Have I heard too many stories about Gheorghiu’s backstage antics? That arm upraised in triumph at the concluding high note – both arms for a really big finish! – with each repetition it seemed less like the spontaneous exultation of the triumphant athlete that a successful singer is, and more like a gesture calculated to convey the Diva manner. I’d entertain the thought that the old-fashioned Diva cannot be regarded without irony these days, but I don’t think that’s true: Callas reigned in the 1960s, and that’s not a decade that, as it is popularly conceived, seems congenial to her form of the Divaesque. I’ve heard great divas, and I’ve heard great singers, and they move you to a place beyond ironic distance.

Friday night I was at Thick Description Theater’s second show this season, Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul. I didn’t find it as completely successful as their production earlier this year of Blade to the Heat (next up is The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, which I’m really eager to see), though it’s quite entertaining and sustained my interest for its (almost) 90 minute running time. Domingo overcame a slightly halting start, and his charm and energy and presence can carry you past the holes in the concept. But afterwards, waiting for the bus and then the BART train, my doubts loomed larger and I felt that the piece could have used some further work. (Though I should point out that a lot of the audience felt differently – the woman behind me, giggling constantly and chewing gum, was not the only one singing along – is this what it’s like to sit through Mamma Mia!? Anyway, she seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.)

It’s an autobiographical one-man piece about growing up black and, it turns out, gay in Philadelphia in the late 70s. The running theme that ties it all together is soul music. That felt a bit contrived to me. For one thing, that wasn’t the music Colman himself favored as a boy. He keeps asserting that the soul music of the late 70s is his music, the music that created him, but if there’s a moment when he really takes it to heart, we’re not told. The closest he comes is going with his sister to an Earth, Wind, and Fire concert, and realizing how much it unites the black audience.

As he flips through the family’s old vinyl LPs in a crate on an old record player (the show’s madeleine dipped in tea, and one of the few props on the mostly bare stage, along with some family photographs on the back wall), which he discovered abandoned in the basement after his parents moved out of their now crack-destroyed neighborhood, he comes across the Carpenters album that belonged to him – it gets a laugh, being the square white music among all the soulful black acts, and it’s also an early indication that he’s, you know, “different,” but I wonder why an old Carpenters album should be any sillier to us than an old Earth, Wind, and Fire album. And why should his practicing Beethoven on the violin – Beethoven, of all the soul-searching and soul-creating heaven-stormers – be used as evidence of his effeminate, nerdy nature? It’s the standard pop culture link between classical music and the effete, decadent, and esoteric (just as discussed by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise). Why should Beethoven be any more alien to his soul than to any contemporary American’s?

I was reminded of a novel I read quite a few years ago, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, about a well-off middle-class black widow who has to discover her “real identity” by abandoning her comfortable life and discovering her “cultural identity” in the happy and musical poverty of the Caribbean islands. But nothing in that life is what she has actually lived, and she actively resists it in the beginning – so in what sense is that way of life her “authentic being,” in a way that the comfortable middle-class existence she really lived is not? Why should she allow the sentimentally summoned “ancestors” to control her self-identity? (Try to imagine a novel about an Irish widow who discovers that she no longer needs the nice house she and her husband worked for, because what she really truly needs are the sod huts of her suffering ancestors, with their requisite rich poetry (at least according to the stereotypes) and empty stomachs.)

It’s a way of defining one’s allegiance to and identity with a group with which one might have little in common, but to which outsiders insist you belong: you embrace and celebrate the limitations. Domingo mentions that his mother encouraged his classical studies and love of art, and used to put Leontyne Price on the record player on Sunday evenings, until his stepfather said he wanted to hear music that “sounded black” (an interesting sidelight into the various types of racism Ms Price had to face during her great career, though that’s not the point that’s being made here). I had the feeling that what we were seeing here was simply the exhaustion of Otherness – that, worn down by the constant consciousness of his race in a racist society and his sexual orientation in a homophobic society, Domingo decided, based on the importance of soul music to his family, that declaring it important to him was his way of belonging not only to them but to the larger black community. I guess it’s a standard need to define oneself by a group or groups, whether or not the groups really want you, but why shouldn’t he include the Carpenters and Beethoven in the music that defines him? Why limit himself to his family’s or his society’s limitations? Why not include his mother's definition of "music that sounds black" as well as his stepfather's?

Domingo convincingly and swiftly embodies the different members of his family, though some portraits are less successful than others. His sister – a proudly loud-mouthed chainsmoker who makes a point of blasting her music to annoy people – is given a moment at the end, after we also hear that she battled drug addiction for years, when she says she feels like the B side – the flip side of the hit, the side that never gets played – and that maybe that’s why she’s so loud. Well, sure; there’s a certain poignancy there, but also a fairly obvious motive, and as someone who has ridden many buses and trains with people who make a point of being inconsiderate to prove that they exist and are important, it’s the adolescent obviousness of the motive that makes such behavior so incredibly annoying. It would be sentimental of me to pretend otherwise. I can’t muster too much sympathy with that sort of self-indulgence.

But the portrayal of the mother and stepfather are particularly interesting and moving, and the emotional high point of the show – the moment when the use of soul music didn’t seem like just an arbitrary gimmick to tie loose scenes together – is when both parents are slowly dying, each conscious that both are slowly dying, when the mother encourages her husband to sing Gladys Knight’s You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me the way he used to. It’s a deeply personal moment, painful and beautiful. There are other moments, however, when the personal moments are, to be somewhat harsh, less interesting. That’s a hazard in telling your own story. I’m sure it was profoundly significant and moving to Domingo when he came out to his family and they accepted him, but from a theatrical point of view it’s a story we’ve seen too many times before, and it feels a bit dated – though of course he’s talking about a couple of decades ago, and that’s already another era.

And there is a certain celebration of datedness here. At the end, we find out about a younger brother, who hasn’t been mentioned before, and he explains that when the parents moved they left the LPs in the basement, hoping some other family might enjoy them, because they had bought all the old music on CD at Virgin Records years before. This is meant to be sort of a comic moment, and the solution to the mystery of how his parents could abandon their past, but as soon as Domingo mentioned the abandoned LPs at the very beginning of the show I had already thought, well, they probably replaced the old albums with CDs. Times change and so does technology.

There’s a certain amount of dwelling on telling ephemera of the time (certain types of colored aluminum drinkware, certain ways of doing one’s hair or entertaining oneself) that can seem like easy nostalgia, a shared identity of age that really only seems shared. Except for a brief dismissal by the stepfather, there’s no mention of rap music, which has been around for decades now (and is also used by many as a signifier of black identity, and as such, like rock and soul, is quite popular with the corporations trying to sell us stuff). Despite his repeated assertions that the music made him, this piece isn’t really about that specific music – it’s about what was playing on the radio when he was young, when people he loved were still around to enjoy it.

Then the evening before that (we’re back to Thursday now) I went down to Davies for the San Francisco Symphony. The orchestra had recovered splendidly from the exhaustion of Opening the Season the night before. I did see a few women whose hilariously grotesque costumes made me think the Season Opener might be a two-day affair. It was a great beginning for the real start, the musical start, of the Symphony's exciting season, even though Tilson Thomas insisted on picking up the microphone before opening with Ligeti’s Lontano. He proceeded to talk mostly about Stockhausen. OK, he wasn’t quite as disjointed as I’m making him sound – his point was that Ligeti was trying to create with an orchestra the sounds and textures that Stockhausen created electronically – but did this gorgeous swelling beast really need to be defanged with the little lecture, putting it all in perspective? Let the gorgeous sounds speak for themselves. Ligeti and Berlioz, much as I love the recordings of their music, really strike me as two composers whose works have a different quality, more vivid and detailed and ravishingly alive, when heard in person. I'm glad San Francisco Symphony is including more Ligeti in its programming; the Requiem is coming up later in the season.

The gaminesque Labeque sisters, Katia and Marielle, then played the Poulenc Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra. I haven’t heard les Labeques all that often, but I’ve always liked them, mostly because I remember reading a review in the Boston Globe (probably by Richard Dyer) that mentioned they were one of the few soloists he had ever seen return to the hall after their part of the program just to listen to the rest of the music. The Poulenc is a delightful mélange, and it reminded me of the story that John Adams wrote his Chamber Symphony while studying a Schoenberg score and hearing a Looney Tunes cartoon that his son was watching in another room – not because of those specific influences, but just because of that free-ranging grasp of different styles, from knotty to nutty. Throw in the Prokofiev 5 after the intermission, and that’s a nice evening. I was glad that in the Prokofiev Tilson Thomas avoided his tendency of late to smash things out. I thought it was really nicely balanced.

At home on Saturday, killing time before the theater – which is basically all I ever do – I dug into the CD pile and pulled out a recent release of Porgy and Bess – a recent release, but an old performance (brought to me like Alcestis from the grave), featuring Leontyne Price and William Warfield in the leads. It was the touring version which gave Price her first big break, though after that I don’t think she sang Bess much, no doubt to avoid being racially typecast. The opera underwent some adaptations and adjustments during and after its first run, and there were several versions floating around until the Houston Grand Opera revival in 1976 sort of set the text. This version differs slightly from the now familiar one not only occasionally in text but also in feel – the drums have more of the African sound so familiar to us nowadays from our world-music CDs, and there’s a jazzier feel all around, and not just because Cab Calloway plays Sportin’ Life. Porgy and Bess was the first opera I ever saw, so I have a special fondness for it, and though many consider it the Great American Opera I know that others dismiss it, partly based on its mixed-culture origins. Whatever its impurity, to me it creates its own cultural field, and is deeply moving, and a beautiful thing.

act like a man

I was interested in a couple of plays that Thick House Theater was doing this season, but I ended up subscribing to the whole series, mostly because their managing director, Hilary Cohen, was so incredibly prompt and detailed (note to arts groups everywhere – efficiency is appreciated!) in answering my e-mail asking where exactly the theater is located and how a non-driver would get there. It turns out to be quite easy – you just get out at the 16th Street BART station and take the 22 Fillmore to the corner of 18th and Connecticut, and then you walk down a hill. Frankly I was expecting a black-painted basement in a dicey neighborhood, but it’s a pleasant, fairly recently gentrified area of Portrero Hill, and the small theater is comfortable and even elegant in an understated way. I enjoyed walking around the area before the rain showers drove me into the theater lobby.

There were two bonus plays added to the four-play season (six plays for $40 – that’s a bargain!). I subscribed just in time to miss the first one (five plays for $40 – still a bargain!), but I did get to David Greenspan’s Dead Mother, or, Shirley Not All in Vain at the Traveling Jewish Theater, which is actually trickier to find than Thick House, until I realized it’s just a ten-minute walk down from the 16th Street Station. I’m not quite sure why anyone would suggest the bus rather than walking; the sidewalks didn’t seem any more filled with annoyances than the 22 Fillmore, and you have to wait around until the bus shows up. I was glad to have the preliminary expedition, since Cutting Ball’s production of Endgame was also at the Traveling Jewish Theater before they make the Exit Theater their new home.

Dead Mother is the story of Harold and his family; Harold’s brother Daniel persuades him to impersonate their dead mother Shirley so that s/he can reassure Maxine, Daniel’s fiancée, that she approves the marriage. Harold’s wife Sylvia, Maxine’s Uncle Saul, and the widower Melvin are also involved; this is more Theater of the Absurd than Charley’s Aunt, though that reference may be part of the whirlwind of literary and dramatic references flying by in an ultimately distracting way: every minute your mind is annotating each scene and speech – there goes Twelfth Night, there’s Godot, Aristophanes, Dante, Don Juan in Hell from Man and Superman, Gertrude Stein, back to Dante, back to dozens that I noticed at the time but have now forgotten. . . .

I felt the constant annotation ended up emotionally distancing me from the action, which frankly is a little thin to start with; the assumption of Shirley’s persona frees Harold to speak the sort of forbidden truths that date quickly; shock has a very short shelf-life. Most of these terrible truths have to do with Harold’s troubled marriage and his attraction to other men, and to the racial prejudices of his middle-class Jewish father. After realizing what the painful family secrets amounted to, I suspected that this was not a new play; sure enough, it’s from 1991. It’s to Greenspan’s credit that the play avoids the cheap logic of therapy-think, where the family would be healed merely because someone dared to speak The Truth, or whatever cliché passes for it, but despite the excellent acting all around (particularly from Liam Vincent as Harold/Shirley) it was a somewhat unsatisfying evening.

A fluid presentation of truth is the strong point of Blade to the Heat, which is set in “the world of boxing” in 1959, shortly before boxing started to recede as a major sport and therefore metaphor in American life. Before that, boxing shows up in all kinds of surprising places, like silent comedies; there’s an extended sequence in City Lights, and it’s the focus of the entire plot in Buster Keaton’s Battling Butler, another of his brilliant, emotionally tortured comedies about a slight and effete man who goes up against a massive, physically confident and somewhat brutish opponent; the film ends with a surprisingly fierce and realistic boxing match. Ironically, the wiry and gracefully athletic Keaton is closer to our masculine physical ideal than his large but doughy opponents. Before I go back to Blade to the Heat, I’ll also recommend WC Heinz’s superb novel The Professional, which is like the novel Hemingway would have written if he’d been able to overcome his horrible boys’ school snobbishness enough to write a good novel.

Blade to the Heat gets described as “the gay boxing play” but it really is more about masculinity in general, a subject it examines with greater depth than just the usual panicked jokes (much like Fight Club, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both involve one-on-one fights). Anyone listening to the posturing tough talk that passes for our political discourse, or the swaggering attempts to justify our criminally insane and disastrous adventures in Iraq, must have noted our society’s need for such a discussion. It’s a psychological cliché to talk about “compensation”, but sometimes things become clichés because there’s a basic truth there: it’s difficult not to see America as the classic bully who swaggers and punches carefully selected weaker victims to cover his own weakness and fear. The iconic image of masculine panic from the last few years is of course our War-Criminal-in-Chief, who carefully avoided even his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, wearing a flight suit on the deck of a destroyer to declare our mission in Iraq accomplished. A (female) journalist at the Wall Street Journal, in one of the most truly embarrassing articles I have ever read, went on and on about how Our Leader “looked, well, hot” and how her tired middle-aged husband lying in his Barcalounger just couldn’t compete. My skin was crawling, but I read on in horrified fascination. It reminded me of a movie I saw years ago, called I think Paris Is Burning, about drag queens in Harlem. I only really remember one segment of the film, because it was so unbearably poignant: part of their traditional drag shows involved the guys dressing up and parading in the suits and ties that were standard business wear back then; here were men so alienated from any sense of normative masculinity that for them the standard male uniform was as exotic as their girly sequins and feather boas. And that’s why when I think of George W Bush, who loves to play dress up (I'm a cowboy! I'm a fighter pilot!), in the back of my mind I see black drag queens. The crisis in confidence is the same. (I should probably make it clear that I don’t have any sympathy with those who “blame” the feminist movement for the confused state of masculinity – obviously if you change the roles for one gender you affect the other, but it’s ridiculous to think that women should be held down because the manly men are threatened by them. Both genders have more than enough need to control and regulate others and more than enough delusion and self-destruction to go around. It probably all comes down to economics as much as anything else.)

Back to Blade to the Heat, which seems to be loosely based on the fight in which Emile Griffith accidentally killed an opponent who allegedly was taunting him for being homosexual, but so thoroughly is the incident thought through that it wasn’t until the end of the play that the connection occurred to me (unlike my experience with Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, about a gay baseball player and filled with incidents obviously based on baseball’s recent past, such as John Rocker’s racist outburst; I kept thinking, No, that’s not quite how people really did react to that action. . . .). It’s a beautifully constructed play, conveying with complete naturalness a wide range of complicated emotional interactions and personified masculinities that come across not as markers across a theoretical range but as actual human beings, with a fluidity of identity that Virginia Woolf would have recognized and appreciated (a fluidity captured so much more effectively in this play than in Berkeley Rep’s ridiculous recent adaption of To the Lighthouse). Every time you think you have a character pegged, sexually, ethnically, or emotionally, he or she shifts a bit and shows you a different side, and it’s all handled in an amazingly rich and economical 90 minutes.

I know it’s obligatory to praise boxing dramas as “a knockout punch!” and suchlike, and I’d like to resist, but this really was a pretty outstanding evening of theater: sets, music, costumes, acting, and script all came together in a way that’s supposed to be standard but really isn’t. The boxing matches were not only convincing and exciting, which is pretty tough to do in a very small theater where you’re only about three feet away from the action, but they flowed seamlessly into the rest of the action instead of being obviously choreographed and practiced much more than the rest of the show, so here’s a big salute to Johnny Moreno as Pedro Quinn (the “gay boxer”) and L. Peter Callender as his rival, Mantequilla Decima, both of whom managed to maintain character even while throwing realistic punches.

I trekked out to Traveling Jewish Theater one more time that week for Cutting Ball’s Endgame, and director Rob Melrose really outdid himself with this one. I’ve been going to Cutting Ball for years now, and this was one of their best productions and a welcome return to form after the somewhat disappointing Taming of the Shrew last summer. And lots of credit should also go to Avery Monsen and David Sinaiko as Clov and Hamm, reunited after their summer foray as respectively Grumio and Petruchio. I didn’t much like Sinaiko’s Petruchio or his Doctor in Wozzeck; I felt he relied too much on a manic energy that seemed more like shtick than anything the characters would actually do, and he seemed to be giving the identical performance with each character. But as Hamm he gave the best performance I’ve seen from him in many years of attending Cutting Ball shows – a modulated, subtle portrait, with his be-ringed fingers and insinuating air of authority, of the dandy at the end of days. Avery Monsen is a really exciting actor: I thought he stole Shrew with his high-energy commedia; here, it was his quiet and inward air of exhaustion and suppressed exasperation that made him compelling. At one point, Hamm starts off on an anecdote, and Monsen just silently closed his eyes for half a second at the beginning of the recital, and you knew immediately how many, many times he’s heard this same story, told this same way, and how patiently and inexplicably he puts up with Hamm.

I meant to write about Blade to the Heat and Endgame weeks ago, but events intervened and I couldn’t until now; the productions are over and their moments of insight and beauty gone; I can’t go back and re-view (or review) them the way I would a movie; they take place purely and poignantly in my memory now, along with a lot of my life; for me going to the theater is like the ancient Japanese samurai going to view the fleeting cherry blossoms, an aesthetic lesson in appreciating the essential quality of life.