killing me softly with his song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haiku 2012/274

looking to night skies
but all I see are streetlights
blotting out the stars

Haiku 2012/273

autumn already -
why should I keep pulling weeds?
let them win winter

the elephant in the room

Last night I was in Berkeley for the first night of the three-night run, hosted by Cal Performances, of the Theatre de la Ville-Paris's production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota. Cal Performances Director Matias Tarnopolsky started the evening with a short talk from the stage in which he pointed out that this was the second time the Theatre de la Ville has appeared in Berkeley; the first time was in 1906, when the group in an earlier incarnation presented Sarah Bernhardt in her legendary performance of Phedre, an event from which Cal Performances dates its existence, as well it might.

Rhinoceros, Ionesco's landmark 1959 work of the Theater of the Absurd, is another legendary moment in twentieth-century theater, one of those post-war works whose combination of menace and philosophizing absurdity got to the heart of the mid-century political situation more piercingly than any earnest "realistic" drama ever could. It is well-known that Ionesco wrote the work in response to the rise of fascism in his native Romania, and the play is often seen as an allegory of resistance to conformist totalitarian systems, which makes it sound high-minded and uplifting. It may be the historical moment to drop that particular framing (that is, limiting) of the play; the thought-provoking and lively production I saw last night made me realize that the play is stranger and richer than its reputation.

There's no need to see the play in political terms at all; as a study of individualism and conformity, it resonates in many ways not tied to specific political systems or philosophies. Anyone who's ever worked in a corporation has witnessed many rhino-metamorphoses, and indeed anyone puzzled by the strange cult fervor motivating the crowds who waited patiently for days and nights to update their iPhones to the latest release has observed the urge to be part of the pack ("it's the wave of the future!" announce the people turning into rhinos). But there's more to the play than feeling superior to the herd, and more to it even than noting the many ways people convince themselves that the herd is the only place to be. (If it were really that simple and straightforward, the play probably wouldn't be worth reviving.) The really subtle, brilliant, challenging thing that Ionesco did is that he doesn't tip the scales: once you set aside what you've been told about what the play is supposed to mean politically, you have to notice that the humans come across as a fairly shabby lot, and the rhinos don't look all that bad.

Demarcy-Mota has the play open with a passage from Ionesco's novel The Solitary. An average-looking, undistinguished middle-aged man comes out alone and talks about walking as a child through crowded streets and seeing the people as phantoms; he finds it comforting, yet he is not quite one of them - it's the classic note of urban alienation. The stage is mostly very dark (as it will be throughout), with piercing, focused white side lights on the speaker. Our average-looking undistinguished middle-aged man turns out to be Berenger (Serge Maggiani), who is indeed undistinguished, but not quite average - in fact, he's pretty much a loser. He has a drinking problem and squanders money on booze; he is unkempt and unpunctual; he longs for his coworker Daisy (Celine Carrere) but assumes he doesn't have a chance against another, more accomplished, coworker, Dudard (Philippe Demarle); he puts up little resistance to the hectoring constant lectures of his boisterous friend Jean (Hugues Quester). He can't bring himself to defend himself, but he will quarrel with Jean over whether the first rhino that charged down the street had one horn or two.

He's not a very inspiring representative of the human spirit. He's pretty much a marginal man, but it's his very inadequacies (he can't even make it to work on time) that allow him to remain human; to be blunt, he doesn't have it in him to turn into a rhinoceros. In the three acts of the play we see him first in a social setting (at a crowded cafe, where he meets the bullying Jean for a drink), then a work setting (at the publishing house that employs him, where his coworkers flirt, fight, and laugh at each other, debating the very existence of the rhino, before one appears and smashes the stairs of the office building), and finally in a romantic setting, as he and Daisy join together as apparently the last remaining humans, before she too defects. Berenger grows to hate his pale weak body, so insignificant next to the strength and purpose and joyful unity of the rhino herd, but he persists - partly out of self-loathing - in being human. At the very end, indecisive and confused, he is isolated on a height, and the stairs down have just given way with a bang, and he pauses, one foot raised out over the abyss that has just opened in front of him, feeling that he will remain human, out of perversity if nothing else.

From the beginning the humans have been close to animals (some even have animal names: Papillon, Boeuf). They bicker and talk at cross-purposes and prove by logical means the most illogical propositions; they can't even agree on what they've just seen when the first rhino runs down the street, and are quick to use the disruption of the African or possibly Asian rhino to criticize foreigners. They are spiteful to friends as well as strangers. The death by trampling of a woman's cat brings some of them together in a moment of sympathy, but I have the feeling they'd be less sympathetic if it had been the woman who had been trampled. They're all indeed individuals, but it's not really working for them; they're mostly destructive, self-serving, and short-sighted. It's a bleak world. The stage is mostly black, and the sets are strange, dark, heavy, and mechanical-looking, with boxy rooms and large walls and pillars that come crashing down. The clothes are mostly black and white. There's the occasional splash of a bright red tie or an orange phone. The eerie offstage music sounds like a distant memory, even when you first hear it. This is a very physical production, with bicycling in circles and running and shouting and the office workers slipping downward as the floors beneath them buckle under the blows of the unseen rhino in the lobby below.

The rhinos, by contrast, appear relatively stable and unified, and were looking better and better as the evening went on. At the end we see rows of their ghostly gray-green heads in the darkness, bobbing up and down. They are called destructive, but once you observe the behavior of the humans in the office you can hardly blame their former co-worker turned rhinoceros for trying to smash the place. If you unlink the rhinos from associations with specific political systems, it opens up interesting interpretive ambiguities in the play: you could even see them as a sublime force of nature. I was definitely feeling the appeal of turning into a rhino. That may not be what anyone intended, but unintended and unforeseen readings are one of the things that make a play endure.

The play is almost two hours and given without an intermission; many people blench when they hear that, but I think that's purely a psychological reaction, since many movies are longer and also don't have intermissions. But people feel freer to get up during movies (several did last night, as well, and one idiot a few rows in front of me even pulled out his iPhone at the end to record the appearance of the rhino heads - like calling to like, perhaps - though on the whole the audience, quite large for a week night production that didn't start until 8:00, was enthusiastic and attentive). An intermission would have really cut the mood and tension of the performance. It's presented in French with English surtitles; the dialogue is sometimes so quick that you miss a few things as your eyes dart up and down, but the language is simple enough so that if you have some even rudimentary French you can make out at least part of what the actors are saying.

There is one more performance, tomorrow (Saturday 29 September) at 2:00. More information is here.

Haiku 2012/272

if I had not glanced
then I would have missed the wind
bending the tall grass

Haiku 2012/271

waking when one wakes
doing what one needs or wants
sweetest of all days

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October 2012

OK, yes: Einstein on the Beach. But wait, there's more! In fact that's not even all that Cal Performances is presenting this month, though it does seem as if it might be enough: but there's also the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra in Swan Lake, 10 - 14 October; Sweet Thunder, a re-orchestration by Delfeayo Marsalis of the Ellington/Strayhorn Shakespeare tribute Such Sweet Thunder, 16 October; and Ensemble Basiani, a men's chorus from Georgia (not the state in the American south, the other one), 20 October.

There's quite a pile-up on Thursday 4 October:

The Berkeley Symphony opens its season in Zellerbach Hall with Joana Carneiro conducting Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question and the Beethoven 7, along with the world premiere of Paul Dresher's Concerto for Quadrachord and Orchestra. (The Quadrachord is an instrument invented by Dresher.) The concert starts at 7:00, but unfortunately this appears to be a one-off for the season opener, as the rest of the season, which looks quite enticing, reverts to the standard-issue worker-unfriendly 8:00 start time. We office drones like to go to concerts too. . . .

The next 4 October event is Nonsemble 6 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music celebrating the centennial of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in a performance staged by Brian Staufenbiel, resident director of the awesome and endlessly inventive Ensemble Parallele. The program also includes Dan Becker's S.T.I.C. ("Sensitivity to Initial Conditions") and Hanns Eisler's 14 Ways of Describing Rain, shown with Joris Iven's silent film Regen (Rain), which depicts 1920s Amsterdam before, during, and after a rainstorm (the score was dedicated by Eisler to his teacher Schoenberg on his 70th birthday); and honestly, you guys, you really need to check with me before scheduling something like this, because it's killing me that I have a conflict. That reminds me of attending an excellent Purcell-based performance by a group whose maiden voyage was also an inventive Purcell staging, and during the reception afterwards I remarked to some woman that I was surprised I hadn't been notified of the group earlier since the audience for artsy daring stagings of Purcell is basically me, and she looked at me with indignation and said, "Well, there are all of these people," gesturing towards the gathered dozens, and I thought, um, wow, OK . . . actually, I thought a few other things (the word "clueless" prominently and effortlessly floating along in that particular stream of consciousness). . . . It was far from the first time that I realized my brand of humor is perhaps more specialized than I like to think, the jocular equivalent of grass-fed free-range artisanal bread, but I also think that this woman had something to do with the (obviously ineffective) publicity, so she might have felt rebuked, which was completely unintentional on my part; I honestly don't remember who she was, and I have no idea if she's still in the field at all, so . . . please I'm already sunk in too far to back out - no offense (no further offense) is intended to any person, place, or thing. . . .

Let's go back to 4 October, since no doubt you're wondering what (and even at this stage I'm still weighing the pros and cons) could keep me from Pierrot Lunaire: it's the start of "Schumann: Under the Influence," a four-concert exploration of Schumann's music and influence organized by pianist Jonathan Biss, presented by San Francisco Performances. The first concert features Carey Bell on clarinet, Scott St. John on viola, and tenor Mark Padmore as well as Biss, in a program featuring Marchnerzahlungen and Fantasy by Schumann, Homage a Schumann by Kurtag, and An die ferne Geliebte by Beethoven. The second concert in the series is Saturday, 6 October; Padmore and Biss perform Schumann's Gesange der Fruhe and Dichterliebe, Berg's Sieben Fruhe Lieder, and Schubert's Heine Songs. The other two concerts are next March; you can get more information about the series here. SFP has other offerings this month as well, including the first two concerts (7 and 21 October) in another four-part series, this one featuring Andras Schiff playing Bach (co-presented with the SF Symphony and held at Davies); The Bad Plus (12 October) playing their arrangement of and tribute to The Rite of Spring, the centennial of whose celebrated Paris premiere is coming up next May; the Bay Area premiere (13 - 14 October) of the Russell Maliphant Company, presenting After Light, an exploration of the style and influence of Nijinsky and the Ballet Russes; and the Takacs Quartet playing Haydn, Britten, and Dvorak (14 October).

The other thing I'm missing because the Schumann series is the 6 October BluePrint concert at the Conservatory of Music; BluePrint, led by the awesome Nicole Paiement of Ensemble Parallele,  is the new music ensemble at the Conservatory. This year's focus is Latin America and this concert features music by Carlos Sanchez Gutierrez, Osvaldo Golijov, Clarice Assad, and Roberto Sierra.

Philharmonia Baroque presents Purcell's Dioclesian, 3, 5 - 7 October, in their usual locations, which you can remind yourself of here.

Speaking of the baroque, the California Bach Society performs the Mass in B Minor, 12 - 14 October, in a different location each day. As always, click the link for details!

Terry Riley performs with Tracy Silverman at BAM/PFA in the L@TE series, organized by Sarah Cahill; 12 October.

San Francisco Opera has a busy and promising month, with three operas in rotation: Moby Dick, I Capuleti e I Montecchi, and Lohengrin. More info here.

The San Francisco Symphony also has, you know, bunches of stuff, but nothing really jumps out at me except Yuja Wang at the end of the month, and given the lengthy list of other stuff happening this month . . . well, check it out for yourself here and make up your own mind.

The SF Playhouse presents Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in their new venue at 450 Post Street, 9 October - 24 November. Their flyer claims that Jackson's presidency "doubled the size" of the USA - uh, I'm sure Jackson was devoted to Manifest Destiny, but I think they're thinking of Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, which really did double (at least) the size of this country. But there is more than enough that actually happened in Jackson's term in office to fill out a musical.

Speaking of musicals, and American Presidents, I think I mentioned this last month, but Shotgun Players has Sondheim's Assassins, 26 September - 28 October.

ACT presents Sophocles' Elektra, translated and adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, with original music by David Lang, featuring Rene Augensen in the title role and Olympia Dukakis as the Chorus Leader, directed by Carey Perloff; 25 October - 18 November, and I really want to see this despite ACT's worker-unfriendly start times (I think they're the only major local theater that doesn't have at least one 7:00 start time during the work week) and user-unfriendly on-line ticketing ("best seat" available? sorry, I will only use systems that show me all available seats). Oh, they're also expensive. But I still really want to see this.

Berkeley Rep also goes Greek with An Iliad, adapted by Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare from the Robert Fagles translation. I have the impression this is a one-man show, in the style of Benjamin Bagby doing Beowulf, but I might be wrong about that. 12 October - 18 November.

Cutting Ball Theater marks the centennial of Strindberg's death (lots of stuff happened a hundred years ago. . . ) with a presentation (drumroll, please!) for the first time in any language or locale (crescendo and cymbal crash!) of all five of his Chamber Plays presented in repertory (with a few marathon, all-in-one-day sessions thrown in there). 12 October to 18 November, and check out the schedule and other details here.

And if the world (or even just the contemplation of this list) is too much with you, head over to the Asian Art Museum starting 5 October for Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy, which runs until 13 January 2013, which is sooner than you think.

Haiku 2012/270

before I knew it
clever birds had discovered
the sweet purple figs

Haiku 2012/269

unless there are trees
indifferently shading
paths you travel down. . . .

Haiku 2012/268

cats climb on couches
pigeons perching on a pole
stars slip through sly skies