@ Z Space: In a Memory Palace

Last night at Z Space I saw the first performance of In a Memory Palace, a resonant & mesmerizing new work. Done in the style of Noh Theater, it is the story of a middle-aged woman who visits her father in a senior residence only to encounter a strange & strangely familiar old woman, who reminds her of a childhood neighbor, a refugee from Hitler's Austria, a woman she was sure had died long before. Though this work has a very specific storyline, it is evocative of other journeys, both chosen & forced, both physical & mental; the evocation is not only on the stage, but in the lobby, which contains an installation exploring different aspects of exile & emigration. Moving away from some "native land" or from your family traditions is such a basic American story that it would be difficult to find, I think, someone who didn't connect with this material on some level, perhaps even a profound one.

(I give away some plot twists below, so take that into consideration when deciding whether to read on, though most of them are fairly easily guessed if you've seen any Noh plays.)

This work floats suspended in a liminal space: between Japanese & Western theatrical techniques & traditions; between the flute & percussion of Noh & the Western sounds of cello & piano evoking fin de siècle Vienna; between present & past; among the actual, the remembered, the supernatural, & the desired. The stage is bare; there are actually two stages, a broad main one, bright white, & then, on its left, a smaller one, the same bright white, that functions as the entry/exit ramp as in Noh Theater (but it also, in being slightly set apart & narrower than the main stage, though otherwise resembling it, reinforces the subtle disjunctions that are part of the mood & metaphors of the piece). At the back of the playing area are several very long overlapping translucent white curtains (sort of like shower curtains); onto these are projected monochrome designs, some of them ambiguous (waves? rocks? massed foliage? as well as stars or stylish Viennese designs). To the right, off from the main stage, sits a chorus of eight, who sometimes chant comments on the action.

As in Noh, the action is very deliberate, very considered. The dialogue is mostly chanted to musical accompaniment & is poetic in its repetitions & phrasings. At times I could not catch every line, which is just a reality of listening to material that is sung with musical accompaniment. I briefly wished that they had used surtitles, but decided that would have been too distracting, at least for a compulsive reader like me. As with comments written in the margin of a book, the printed words would pull you out of your own total experience of the material & impose concentration on only certain aspects of what's going on. The imperfection of our perception is actually a key theme of the work, the blurring of words & memories, the half-caught phrases & the passing glimpses of life. Surtitles would force on the work an almost counter-effective clarity. This is not to discount the power & beauty of the words, but just to suggest that's what most important here is not catching each individual line (most of which are clear enough, as is the storyline) but immersing yourself in the mood, one created by slowness, the intense presence of the characters, the spare but rich setting, the mystery of memory, & of the past, our own & the world's.

For it turns out there are several mysteries around the older woman. The woman who remembered her from childhood (she's wrapped in a shawl, sort of babushka style, printed with an abstract monochrome design but with a very bright red fringe; the performer sits to the side for most of the performance with an intense, riveting, attentive quiet) remembered her as saying she was a concert pianist. This elderly woman claims she was a well-known fashion designer to the Viennese haute monde. She was a Catholic married to a Jew; after the Anschluss, such women were "encouraged" to leave their husbands but she refused & they managed to emigrate but of course abandoning their homes & homeland threw their lives off-course & the glamor & excitement of her fashionable, sophisticated Viennese world vanished with that world.

Perhaps this is why the woman's spirit is haunting the earth, to make her story known, or just to revisit herself the life she should have had. Ghosts are a traditional presence in Noh. The character of the old woman is the only one in this play to be masked in the traditional style. But her costumes are Western: a series of strikingly sumptuous gowns in the style & colors (lots of Klimt-like swirls & gold) of the Vienna Secessionists. She ends the work with a solo dance, summoning both the traditions of Japanese theater & the vanished waltzes of Vienna.

The play is brief (about one hour & fifteen minutes) but intense & concentrated, the sort of thing that will flower out in your mind afterward. It is playing at Z Space through 1 August & then goes to San Antonio, Texas. The play has a dedicated website, which you can find here. I will say that the playbill was not entirely clear about who did what & if there was a cast list I couldn't find it. So here's what I found (much of this comes from J Magazine, which had an article about the show; there were copies available in the theater lobby): the script is by Edith Newton, based on elements from her life; the music by David Crandall & Kevin Salfen, costumes by Margaret Mitchell, masks by Kitazawa Hideta, direction by Jubilith Moore. The show was presented by Theatre Nohgaku with Kunoichi Productions & Theatre of Yugen. Kudos to all of them & to the actors & musicians on a magnificent evening.

at the Phoenix Theater: Long Day's Journey Into Night

For years I didn't think much of Eugene O'Neill. He towers over the history, such as it is, of the American theater, but I found his works ponderous & overly earnest in a way that seemed to guarantee their limits. What was I basing this opinion on? I can't remember seeing any of his plays live besides A Moon for the Misbegotten, which I saw at ART when I lived in Boston (so, decades ago). I saw Ah, Wilderness! on PBS back in the 1970s, when they used to show such things. I did not like it. I saw the films of Anna Christie with Garbo & The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson, but Garbo & Robeson can carry most things on their own, regardless of whatever interest the material has. I had seen, also long ago, the film of Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by Sidney Lumet, with Hepburn & Richardson. I didn't much like any of these, & I thought all that was enough. But O'Neill kept recurring in books about the 1920s & 1930s, I kept wondering about his reputation (did he just do things I didn't care for? there must be something behind the high esteem in which he is held). Sometimes artists nag at us like this, squirreled away in the back of our minds, & that's a signal we need to revisit their work. I don't need to cling to opinions I formed 40 years ago. So when I heard that Long Day's Journey Into Night would be staged at  the Phoenix Theater, I went.

As you can probably guess, I have recanted my heresy. The production, directed by Jeffrey Hoffman, is fluid & forceful; the play has been trimmed but still runs over three hours (with one 15-minute intermission) & it does not lag or drag, & I ended up re-examining my opinions about more things than the plays of Eugene O'Neill.

The mother, Mary Tyrone, embodied here by Angela Dant, was the fulcrum of the story: after a short period of sobriety, she reverted to her morphine addiction, an addiction that works not only physiologically but psychologically to alleviate her depression, her regrets, her loneliness. Dant has a wonderful voice for the role, combining a girl's fluty tones with the querulous ones of an aging woman. So here's my first switch: I have said for years that the problem with dramas about addiction is that they are essentially undramatic, in that the addiction will always win out: that's pretty much the definition of addiction. My mistake was in thinking that the drama would be about the addiction itself, rather than in the way those around the addict (even more than the addict herself) view & react to the addiction.

Her family has fooled itself, more or less, into thinking that maybe this time Mary really has conquered her dependence. The revelation of her addiction (which I thought was one of those things everyone knew, but apparently not; I overheard two women in the audience at intermission trying to figure out what exactly she was on – by intermission it's become clear that it's some sort of medically prescribed painkiller) is made slowly: There are references, when she is absent, about "the last time" & actions that resemble her addicted behavior (what is she doing alone at night in the upstairs room?). The emphasis is on the family's reactions & thoughts & suspicions, & on Mary's reactions. She feels under constant surveillance. Sometimes it seems the main connection this lonely woman has with her family is her resentment at their monitoring. Though she clearly sees herself as a peacemaker, trying to smooth things over with her husband & their two sons, particularly the elder, Jamie, who is already an alcoholic, she will also jab at the others, sometimes with a one-two punch of "understanding" & criticism. (It reminded me of a time years ago when I went with a friend to the house of her parents, who were very quarrelsome with each other; they started arguing about something & though I was listening carefully there was a moment when they switched the positions they had taken, he taking hers & she taking his, without missing a beat & without lessening the tension of the argument; it was like watching two amazing aerial acrobats: a blur of spangles & presto! they have exchanged their swings & are now facing each other on opposite sides high above the ring.)

And she's not wrong (or "wrong") about either the compassionate remarks or the critical ones. None of them are. That's another thing: I had always thought dismissively of this play, & other such family dramas, as plays in which Truths Are Told. And I think I'm not wrong in finding that unrealistic; most truths (or "truths") are told indirectly, inadvertently, not in big confrontations in which X tells Y some home truth, & Nothing Is Ever the Same Again. But what we see here, & what is very true to life, is seeing people weaponize the idea of truth, as revelations to undercut or jab at someone else, or even themselves. (It's not just Mary but also the self-lacerating Jamie who is an example of this tendency.) The very notion of "truth" evaporates; what we are given are more in the nature of different points of view; a twist of the prism shining new colors from old lights. It's all part of the archeology of the family, the resurrection of partly buried incidents or, more to the point, emotions surrounding those incidents, & I was impressed by how skillfully O'Neill paced the revelations.

And that brings me to another objection, which actually experiencing this play led me to set aside: the idea that what we're seeing on stage is the one singular turning point. Nothing Is Ever the Same Again is, by & large, not how most lives happen; even if something appears that way, time moves on & emotions keep shifting. There is change, but incidental & incremental, & linked not only to whatever big revelation has formed the climax of the first act but to the passing of time, the aging of our bodies, the forward current of the culture around us. What is most powerful about this play, though O'Neill has perceptively set it at a time when the family thinks things are changing, is the certainty that nothing has changed, or will change; it is not just this one significant night on which Mary Tyrone will appear like a ghost, clutching her wedding gown, lost in the flowered field of her past; it is night after night after night.

Is escape possible? I used to be convinced, in my blithely & naively American way, that it was: you simply leave. You cut ties. You move on. You put certain people in your past. But it turns out they don't stay there, at least mentally, & that's the mistake I made there: even if you have removed yourself from certain situations or people, they still inhabit your mind. You can make efforts to redirect the steam of your thoughts, but it will keep flowing back to certain people & times. (I have a friend whose memory is going; she has one sister, whom she has not spoken to for years. She claims not to know why her sister doesn't speak to her. We both have our suspicions, but as always in such cases there's a whole iceberg submerged below that tip. But even though the sister is, for all practical purposes, out of her life, & has been for many years, & even though she remembers less & less of her life & the world she lives in, she keeps recurring to the situation, announcing regularly that she doesn't know why her sister refuses to speak to her. . . )

I do get frustrated with plays in which the main character reaches some level of understanding, which leads towards compassion/forgiveness/ &, to use the current inevitable buzzword, "connection". I think that moment is there to give us fake reassurance at the end of whatever traumas the play has been processing, as if we've had a rough voyage & now we're going to be pushed in a comfy chair we can sink obliviously into. My experience is that you work towards understanding & forgiveness & then you cycle back towards anger & just go through the cycle over & over, until time sweeps you away too.  I give O'Neill credit for insisting on the hardness & repetitiveness of what we face in life.

The Phoenix is an intimate theater, which works well for this play, brining us into a fairly cramped cottage in which it's difficult for the quartet not to get in each other's way. The furnishings are few but suitably both genteel & shabby (the Sunday afternoon I was there a table broke & the cast admirably incorporated the incident & stayed in character; at least, I assume it was an accident). I've mentioned Dant as Mary but I don't want to stint the men. Kevin Copps as James Tyrone brings considerable dignity & empathy to a part that could be a caricature of a penny-pinching ham actor. Peter Malmquist as Jamie brings simmering sarcasm & anger to his role from the start, building up to the self-destructive explosions of this burdened son (again, you feel that his drunken attacks will be enacted over & over, a terrible mirror of his father's destruction as an artist by playing the same money-making role over & over until he lost both the ability to play anything else & a public interested in anything else). The exploration of alcohol & the role it plays among the Tyrones is another rich exploration of the behaviors that surround addiction. Miles Milliken as Edmund (the stand-in for O'Neill) brings the sort of sweet decency to his character that gives you a feeling that, damaged though he is, & precarious though his health is, he alone of the quartet might be able, to the extent that it is possible, to step out of this cycle of anguish & destruction, at least to some degree. 

Theater can do a lot of things, of course. One of those things is making us aware of how time has passed with us, & how our perceptions & conceptions have changed, when confronted by the same work in different periods of our lives. When a production makes you rethink the playwright, the play, your dramatic assumptions, & your family / life assumptions, then that production has given you more than most visits to the theater do give you. I had to go for a long walk after the show. And I've been pondering the drama since. The play & the performances have riches I've barely touched on. So, yes, I'm recommending this production, which runs until 10 May. Click here for more information.

Kunoichi Productions: Pacific Overtures

Here's my odd confession about Stephen Sondheim: when I first discovered Sweeney Todd, I was so dazzled by it, so overwhelmed by how close it came to artistic perfection, so struck by its completeness, that it took me quite a while to explore & appreciate the rest of Sondheim. (I am still surprised when I meet people who have some other favorite Sondheim musical, or even some other favorite musical, or who can't sing, however poorly, the entire score). I did make one exception, though: Pacific Overtures, a work I also loved immediately & have wanted to see on stage for years, though I'm also aware of the dangers of such wishes; after wanting for many years to see one of Federico Garcia Lorca's plays on stage, I went to Yerma at Shotgun Players a couple of years ago, & I'm still reeling from their clueless travesty (my entry on it is here).

So I was both excited & filled with my standard anxiety when I was wandering down Haight Street one day last month & saw a poster advertising a production of Pacific Overtures, by Kunoichi Productions. I had never heard of them before, which is why I had to find out about the show from a poster, which is yet another reason it's good to wander. It turns out Kunoichi Productions is a new local group, dedicated to "bold, innovative multidisciplinary theater with Japanese aesthetics, blending the ancient and the modern, using both comedy and philosophy while fusing Eastern and Western theatrical elements"; kunoichi means female ninja; & you can find that information & more at their website here.

I ended up making it to the show's final performance, which was yesterday afternoon, & I am glad I did not skip it, as it turned out to be a very good production, really impressively good, considering the challenges of putting on this complicated work & what I assume are the group's limited resources (as we all know, these are difficult times even for established arts groups, let along scrappy start-ups, so, again, kudos to them for taking on & rising to such a big challenge).

Given Kunoichi's interests, staging Pacific Overtures as their first full production was an astute yet bold choice, as the piece straddles & explores different worlds & power structures, showing how they interact, intersect & clash, & how their inhabitants change or refuse to change during cross-cultural confrontation. Despite all it has to offer, this show isn't done that often, I'm not sure why. I assume the need for an all or mostly Asian cast hinders some, but certainly in this area there's no lack of qualified talent. As I've mentioned, it's a complicated show, but that comes with being a Sondheim show, & his is a name that is now a draw for a sizable group (I can't speak to the rest of the run, of course, but yesterday the house was almost full, & very attentive & enthusiastic).

Pacific Overtures has some of my favorite Sondheim numbers, such as the exquisite There is no other way & one of my all-time favorites, Chrysanthemum Tea, a song which manages to be both witty & tragic, as well as advancing the plot, giving us some history & cultural context, & revealing the personalities of all involved, which makes it, obviously, a triumph of the musical-comedy stage. ("Musical comedy" is a term used only for convenience here, as this show's subject, the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry & his American warships, is not a topic that would suggest, to most people, the makings of a Broadway musical.) The score also contains the song Sondheim once said was his personal favorite, Someone in a Tree, a complicated, multi-voiced narrative about . . . well, many things, but not quite grasping what we supposedly witness is a major part of it.

First I am going to complain about something, but this is my complaint every time I see a musical: the entire show was amplified. Given the relatively small performance space (La Brava Theater, which I had not been to before, despite many years of theater-going; it turned out to be a welcoming space, with the shabby-chic Art-Deco elegance of a former movie palace, which it is), one that an actor's voice should be able to fill, it was a shame that they didn't take advantage of the possibilities for intimacy & subtlety that come with a natural speaking voice. Amplification flattens & distorts tones, removes lower-volume possibilities, & in some ways reduces the audience's attention, as they don't have to listen as carefully. And the little microphones taped to the performers' faces are ugly & distracting. I say all this knowing full well that the use of amplification is going to continue, of course. I just wish it were not so automatic when singing is involved.

Taped-on face mikes aside, this was a very attractive production. The costumes were especially impressive, & astutely done: when the brothel-keeper comes out with her gaggle of crude farm girls, half of whom were comically played by men, to perform Welcome to Kanagawa, the countrified geishas' outfits were notably more garish than anyone else's, done in overly bright shades of pink & green & other electric colors. (This comic scene is balanced later in the drama by one in which three British sailors approach a young girl they think is a geisha, leading to unwanted advances from them that end in the killing of one of the sailors by the girl's father, a scene performed in this production with great delicacy & menace.) The more aristocratic Japanese were in refined dark blues & browns. Commodore Perry, done up like something approaching a Kabuki demon, wore a glistening jacket of stars & stripes, accompanied by two American sailors with grotesque "white people" masks, making them look both swinish & babylike.

There was a lot of movement, clearly based in Japanese theatrical traditions, which the performers seemed quite expert in (in other words, their movements looked natural & expressive, & not like something they had studied just for the occasion), as well as several choreographed dance numbers, all handled with aplomb. Clever use was made of the single set, a multi-level Japanese-style house, & of the auditorium itself, as characters entered or exited through the aisles (causing those of us in the front row to be cautious about extending our legs out!).

It was fascinating to see, finally, something I've been so familiar with through recordings, because of course most recordings don't give you the full show – there are narrative bits, expository bits done with dialogue, that reveals important context for the familiar songs. I have a bad habit of listening to recordings & not necessarily reading all the liner notes, or the plot summaries, so it sometimes takes a while for me to understand exactly what's happening (and in the recording of the original Broadway cast, as part of the work's incorporation of traditional Japanese theatrical techniques, the women's parts are played by men, which further complicates things if you're not reading along; in the recording of the Broadway revival, women play the women's roles, & in this production they did as well, though there's also some cross-gender casting, as mentioned earlier).

Parts of the story, particularly towards the end, were clearer to me than they ever had been before. There were also moments when I wasn't sure if I picked up on something because it was clear, or because at some level I already knew what was going on; for example, during Someone in a Tree, one of the narrators is an old man, one whose mind is possibly starting to slip, who tries to recall what he heard & saw on that long-ago day, when he climbed up a tree & saw into the treaty-house – he's very chatty, & very repetitious, but the important details elude him. The actor in this role skillfully conveyed the character's age, but was it that I was already aware enough of it to pick up on his rather subtle indications? (I have this same situation with Shakespeare productions, especially heavily cut ones: does the story still make sense as they tell it, or do I just know the material so well I'm supplying the lacunae?) (And for the record, the other narrators in Someone in a Tree are the old man's younger self (much younger, as they keep reminding us), a warrior who had been hidden under the floorboards of the treaty house, & the Reciter, our guide through the evening & the history.)

The big comedy number, Say Hello, in which representatives from foreign powers keep showing up, each bearing gifts & menace, & each characterized with musical cleverness by Sondheim (the British representative patters à la Gilbert & Sullivan, the French diplomat is filigreed with a bit of Offenbach), was very cleverly done by the group. As you'd expect with Sondheim, there's a lot of cleverness (the wordplay doesn't stop with the title). And as you'd also expect with Sondheim, if you know his work rather than his reputation (or at least his former reputation), there's a deep reservoir of emotion being drawn on. Some of the characters make only brief appearances (the wife of the low-level samurai at the beginning, for instance) & some have major arcs (the fisherman who, capsized at sea, ended up spending time in Massachusetts, who later returned to warn the Japanese about Perry's ships) that end up in surprising places, but their sorrows, their anger & confusion, provide the human spine to the history, all well conveyed by these players.

The final song, Next, Next, an urgent, on-rushing, speedy look at the changes in Japan after the Meiji Emperor decides to assert his supremacy & lead his country victoriously into the modern world, was astutely updated. There was a flash at one moment that I took to be a reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb. One of the performers at the very end was dressed in an anime-cosplay style, which is certainly a huge part of Japan's current influence but not something that would have been noted, certainly not noted as a major cultural marker for the USA, when the musical premiered in this mid-1970s.

There were no printed programs handed out, & I understand the cost-savings there, but I wish they had at least given us a single sheet. There was a QR code you could scan, but I'm just not going to do that. But Kunoichi Productions's website did give the credits, so here they are, though unfortunately I don't see listings for the set, lighting, & costume designers:

Lawrence-Michael C. Arias as Abe

Faustino Cadiz III as Swing

Keiko Shimosato Carreiro as the Reciter

Edward Im as the Boy

Sarah Jiang as Tamate

Stephen Kanaski as the Warrior

Ryan Marchand as Perry

Eiko Moon-Yamamoto as the Shogun's Mother

Nick Nakashima as Kayama

Vinh G. Nguyen as Manjiro

Mayadevi Ross as the Madame

Julia Wright as Swing

Directed by Nick Ishimaru

Music Direction by Diana Lee 

Choreography by Megan and Shannon Kurashige of Sharp & Fine

Cultural Advising by Ken Kanesaka

Dramaturgy by Ai Ebashi

Good job all, & I look forward to seeing what Kunoichi Productions comes up with next.

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.

New Conservatory Theatre Center: Ruthless!

My final live performance of last year was at the New Conservatory Theatre Center's musical Ruthless! (book & lyrics by Joel Paley, music by Marvin Laird, directed for NCTC by Dyan McBride, with musical direction by Joe Wicht & choreography b Staci Arriaga). It was described as a cult musical, but I will admit to being square enough not to have heard of it, though I was more familiar with the rich loam from which it sprang; there are echoes of The Bad Seed, All About Eve, Gypsy, & references to many golden-age musicals. I probably did miss a few references, as the show is very much a safe place for theater fanatics of a certain vintage, which is not to say it isn't flat-out hilarious for just about anyone with any interest in live theater. Not to give anything away, but the ending reminded me of one of the greatest theatrical creations of all, Hamlet. Only funnier.

The plot starts with a talented 3rd grader, Tina Denmark, who offs her rival for the lead in the school production of an original musical, Pippi Longstocking in the Tropics. I'm not going to recite all the clever lines, which really benefit from the very talented cast assembled by NCTC, but there is a running joke – "You killed over a part in a school play?!?" [response:] It was THE LEAD!!!!" that is worth quoting because it pretty much sums up the driving force of the show & the complications that ensue among what turns out to be three generations of stage-struck would-be stars. (& if you find that exchange funny – as I certainly do – you should seek out this show.)

So here's that talented cast I mentioned: Melissa Momboisse as Tina Denmark, the eight-year-old would-be Pippi; Mary Kalita as Judy Denmark, Tina's mother & just an ordinary housewife (or is she?); Jacqueline De Muro as Lita Encore, savage film critic, hater of musical theater (she has a big star turn titled I Hate Musicals!), & grandmother to Tina; Hayley Lovgren as Miss Thorn, the frustrated auteur behind the Pippi musical & Tina's third-grade teacher; Lucca Troutman in a dual role as Tina's rival for the lead role &, in the second act, as a conniving assistant (named, of course, Eve) to a Broadway star; & J Conrad Frank as the ultra-glam drama coach Sylvia St Croix, who has a few secrets of her own. Frank is particularly funny. I saw him in the lead role of Charles Busch's The Confession of Lily Dare at NCTC last spring (which was, oddly, my first time at that theater, which is a nice little space in Civic Center) & he managed the tricky task (one Busch himself excels at, judging from the couple of movies I've seen) of being able to provoke both wild satirical laughter & genuine depth of feeling. His height is part of the comic effect; he towered above both casts. In Lily Dare I did feel that the surrounding cast was a bit uneven, but everyone in Ruthless! (even the exclamation marks are funny in-jokes!) was up to his level (I should fill out the cast list by mentioned the three "swing" players: Lisa Appleyard, Danielle Mendoza, & Sarah Elizabeth Williams).

Ruthless! turned out to be an excellent way to end a year's performances, & a surprisingly good holiday show, not just because of the little seasonal touches in the set (a small Christmas tree on an end table, things like that), but because it is a celebration of love, at least a certain type of love: the love of theater (on or off stage, all these characters are playing parts & recreating themselves in new roles), the love of the spotlight, the love of giving, giving, giving to the audience (even if they don't always understand or appreciate what they're given). & it's a celebration of family: not just the baroque & sometimes bloody entanglements of the genetically linked, but the created family of those who have the same specialized, not to say rarefied, interests, & who share the same sense of humor. It was in some ways a bleak holiday season; who knew so much joy could come from a musical about advancing in the world by murdering?

Ondine at Cutting Ball Theater

Last Saturday I went to Cutting Ball Theater to see Ondine, a new play by Katharine Sherman, directed by Rob Melrose. Ondine is a mermaid who falls in love with Hildebrand, a young mortal, an alchemist who is searching for the "universal solvent" (though he also wonders what container could hold a substance that can dissolve anything – he occasionally ponders whether there is a hidden meaning and unity there). Like its titular mermaid, the play is appealing but also oddly disjointed.

For one thing, the setting is not some Maeterlinck-like Vague & Timeless Land of Misty Enchantments; it is insistently and clearly contemporary, in behavior, appearance, and language. So . . . an alchemist? I'm more likely to accept the mermaid, frankly. The facts of modern physics are far more marvelous than the fantastic dreams of the alchemists (who were generally considered frauds by Chaucer's time). But here we don't even reach Newton, much less Einstein – Aristotle is cited as the ultimate scientific authority. Hildebrand proclaims himself a knight as well as an alchemist. I couldn't help wondering how he's paying the rent. I suppose I should just accept the two worlds – mermaid and alchemist in one aspect, and (honestly, not very interesting) young contemporary couple in another – but the juxtaposition seemed more about convenience than anything else. Hildebrand not only appears to have no job other than his alchemist gig, he appears to have no friends, no family, and no history; Ondine has three older water-women who show up to remind her, rather gently, that there is a price for leaving the sea, but she too is in many ways a blank – Hildebrand literally teaches her language. Their life together is a Pinterest dream, revolving around cups of tea and home-made scones. (I was a bit baffled when Ondine talked about "learning to make scone dough rise" – yeast doughs rise, and they can be tricky, as yeast is a living organism, but scones are a quick bread and rise while baking – how do you "learn to make scone dough rise"?)

We're not really shown how they meet – Hildebrand pours some water out and she appears and it seems to be mutual love at first sight. This may be just my problem, but I don't find happy young love an interesting subject for the stage – it's sort of the point of their shared joy that there is nothing dramatic there: no conflict, no clash, just cups of tea and lovely homemade pies and scones. (This is not the only time the playwright avoids potentially interesting and dramatic scenes.) There are brief scenes, often variations on these themes (I've learned about tea! look at how much in love we are! I don't want to return to the sea yet, because of tea and scones and love!); the language is waterlike: fluid, flowing, often sparkling, occasionally murky. I do have to object to the frequent use of fuck / fucking, which is part of the insistently contemporary tone I referred to earlier: fuck and its variants started showing up more frequently as the play went on, and I winced each time, not because I was shocked and offended, but exactly because I wasn't: in the course of a few decades, that once powerful word has descended through overuse into a merely annoying verbal tic; an atomic bomb has turned into a damp squib. This is why we can't have not-nice things. It really used to mean something when you said fuck you to someone. Now: not so much.

And Sherman doesn't really do anything with the word, which is odd, considering that fucking is presumably what really draws these two characters together, even though their life together, as shown to us, is quite decorously tea-and-sconesy; the only reference to sex is on their first night, when Hildebrand gives her his bed and sleeps on the floor "because of chivalry" (though apparently he gets over that at some elided point). Other words are played with, but there's no playing with fucking. (As far as I recall, it is never used to refer to, you know, copulation; it's only used as an expletive or adjective.) The word just sits there, a standard marker of anger that's too conventional to attract much attention; it's a little dried-up pellet of dead language. If this were a play that aimed at realism, its use could be defended as an accurate representation of how many of our contemporaries speak, but when your protagonists are an alchemist and a mermaid, the way we live now is maybe not the effect you're really aiming for.

I found the actual experience of watching the play entertaining. The set (scenic design by Michael Locher) is a sort of wave-like crest running down the middle of the performance space (the audience sits on either side), and the characters climb and roll and sink over and around and even into it. There's a lot of movement. The cast is quite accomplished and charming (Jessica Waldman as Ondine, Kenny Toll as Hildebrand, and – I just now found out that the three water women have names! – Molly Benson as Rain, Marilet Martinez as Mist, and Danielle O'Hare as Ice). The set and staging are captivating. The language, except for its tired use of fuck, is playful and interesting. But the material seemed stretched a bit thin even for 80 intermissionless minutes, often because of Sherman's tendency to skip potentially meaty dramatic moments in favor of a chant-like repetition from the trio of water-women or sometimes puzzling remarks about baked goods. It may sound as if I'm asking for a more conventional play here, but I think that's not really it. I'm asking for a more dramatic play.

We do get one big dramatic scene, when Hildebrand decides that although he loves Ondine he needs to leave her because his important and urgent alchemical research dictates that he seek out a hermit and then live in solitude for a while. Ondine, apparently not understanding that his departure is temporary, curses him (much use of fuck in that speech). I'm not really giving anything away here, since the program tells us ahead of time about the actual though rare syndrome called Ondine's Curse, and in addition all along we're given brief scenes of Ondine gently slapping or shaking her knight to keep him awake, but if you're going to the play you might want to read the next few paragraphs selectively.

If you suffer from Ondine's Curse, you lose the ability to breathe automatically. This means that if you sleep, you will stop breathing and therefore die. Since being deprived of sleep will also kill you, it's a condition that condemns you to a painful death one way or the other. So Ondine is sentencing Hildebrand to death for leaving her. But it turns out that he does return, and he really did love her all along, which makes her feel really kind of bad for punishing him with a gruesome, painful, and premature death. (There's no explanation for her inability to undo a curse she laid on someone; presumably, as in Tennyson's Tithonus, "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.") When he realizes his beloved has laid this cruel, irrevocable curse on him, how does Hildebrand react? He doesn't. No anger, no sense of betrayal, no ironic laughter, no questioning. . . . no drama.

There's no clash of opinions or realities or desires here, not even a sense of the savage consequences of fooling with water sprites. I had the feeling that the material would work better as a lyric poem or ballad, forms in which a relentless focus on only one perspective or one voice can seem suggestive, ironic, and powerful, rather than narcissistic and emotionally self-serving. But the strength of drama as an art form is the forum it offers for a multiplicity of voices and different points of view, and we're just not getting that here. In a poem our imagination can supply the doomed youth's unmentioned reaction, but when we see the actor physically in front of us, the art form (and reasonable expectations) dictate that we're going to see some reaction from him.

I felt that underneath its shining carapace, the essence of the play was banal: it's about a young woman who is all about love and baking. There's a young man who lets her down, because he has an interest other than her – he's putting his career first. She curses him, in the way of young women let down by young men, and in a bit of wish fulfillment, he dies a horrible death (horrible, however gracefully and gently staged), even though (in another bit of wish fulfillment) it turns out he loved her all along. For me, this was one of those plays whose pleasures – an ingenious set and staging, a fine cast, a mostly interesting flow of words (but please, everyone, stop with the fucking) – gradually recede as the experience passes, leaving doubts about the themes and structure of the work. But there was enough there so that I would be interested in seeing another play by Sherman.

If you'd like to check it out yourself, the show is running at the Exit on Taylor through 6 March; you can get tickets here.

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.)