SF Bay Area Critics Circle

Well, the SF Bay Area Critics Circle finalists have been announced. It's the list everyone loves to hate, but unfortunately it's the only real theatre awards in town (for now, I hope). An acquaintance of mine complained that all the finalists were from the large theatres, so I intended here to blast them for that, but upon a second look of the list, that's not really true. SF Playhouse, a newer, smaller company, received several nominations, as did Cinnabar, Broadway by the Bay (a non-Equity house), Ross Valley Players and Hoochi-Doo.
But there are some major oversights, the most obvious being Shotgun Players. Dog Act, written by Liz Duffy Adams, recently won the Glickman for best new play, yet didn't even get a nomination for orginal script by the Circle. Now, consider that the Glickman committee is made up of all the major critics in the area (the Chronicle, Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and so on), while none of these critics belong to the Circle (mostly because they don't want to be associated with it). Nope, Liz Duffy Adams isn't a finalist for original script. But I noticed that one of the orginal script finalists is an adaptation.
I fear complaining about the Circle can take away from the people and companies who do walk away with awards, so don't give me any grief for that, because I believe that the finalists deserve praise. And the truth is that everyone complains about the Circle yet everyone still lists their nominations and awards on all their marketing and publicity materials, and I hardly blame them. But the truth is that the Circle has always been in danger of losing credibility completely, especially since they recently stopped holding the gala. Most of the good people on the Circle have been jumping ship. I hope the ones that are left are seriously looking at the reputation of the Circle and are seriously committed to fixing it. One of the ways they could fix it is by having the critics start attending shows outside their "comfort area," shows that they aren't writing about for their papers. Most people think that the critics aren't going to shows they aren't getting paid to write reviews about. Read: "most people think."
And, no, I don't have a better system in mind, and I know every awards group is flawed, but I'm still going to point it out, so get over it.

Regarding Epiphanies

Indri reminds me that Brian Keith Russell has had some more serious roles--I love when people keep me honest. OK, I was being a bit lazy. I'll start venturing out to the East Bay more.

A Beautiful Mess

OK, so it was Valentine’s evening and I was at the opening of Campo Santo. I would have said that only someone like me would be at the theater that night, except that the house was full--and it wasn’t just the press.
Stairway to Heaven by Jessica Hagedorn is a beautiful mess. Ostensibly about a homeless Gulf War vet, the junkie/exotic dancer he has some sort of relationship (he says he’s incapable of love--a nice Valentine’s theme for the cynical) with and the woman (Nena) who takes him in and makes him take diction on her stories that may or may not be true. By the end of the play, Nena sort of falls for the owner of the strip club, but her sister shows up and ends up banging the guy on Nena’s kitchen floor. Along the way we think that Nena’s sister has left her husband and that Nena killed a guy in Amsterdam a few decades ago. We’re supposed to realize that we really don’t know people, that identity is slippery and it’s even more slippery if you’re a Tenderloin denizen.
Now I really hate post-show talkbacks where audience members wonder aloud, Who’s story is this? and, I need some payoff for my confusion, and, blah blah blah dramatic arc. (This show did not have a talkback, I’m just digressing.) So I had to catch myself on the way home when I did think that I needed some sort of payoff for the confusion of this play. The idea that identity is slippery isn’t quite enough, and the play shifted so harshly from plot point to plot point that it reminded me of when I used to grind the gears on my now-defunct 1986 Volvo.
But you see, talkbacks kill a play. Campo Santo does what they call a “open process” where people can come to workshops of the play in progress. And though they may develop a play for three years, on opening night you still have something raw, flawed, but beautiful and kicking. What you have is a play and an aesthetic you wouldn’t find on any other stage in S.F.

Epiphanies

I have a friend in town from New York who’s trying to fit in four San Francisco plays in as many days. Last night we hit Word for Word, which was performing “The Necklace” and “Jury of Her Peers” in an evening they entitled Epiphanies.
If you’ve never seen a Word for Word performance, go to this one. In its stagings of literature, the company often employs whimsical images or some theatrical element that enhances our engagement with the text. You get the entire range in Epiphanies.
Of course, Delia MacDougall carries the evening, but the entire ensemble is just incredible. Brian Keith Russell is an amazing character actor, always fun to watch. Though one of these days I’d like to see someone write a seriously complex role for him. Andrew Hurteau is perfectly sympathetic as the husband in “The Necklace.”
“The Necklace” is played lightheartedly, so it’s “Jury” that really catches you. The story unravels slowly, deliberately. A farmer’s wife is accused of murdering her husband, and the sheriff along with his wife, the farmer’s friend and his wife and an attorney search the house for clues. The farmer’s wife (MacDougall) never appears in the text yet she appears onstage, almost a ghost of gray hair and pale makeup. There’s a beautifully sad payoff to this choice at the end of the story, so I won’t give anything away. But the women do find the clues in the smallest domestic tasks, clues the men wouldn’t be able to see.
Saturday night, Sweetest Swing in Baseball.

"Smug Married" Fights Back

Bust magazine is for women “who have something to get off their chests,” but I have something to get off my chest about Bust. (It was Bitch’s turn last time.) Namely, Diane Mapes “Single Minded,” in which she rants about how singles are dissed in this society. In fact, she rants with such fervor that you have to wonder if she’s just a bitter single person. I’ll say right off that she has some great points, especially in regards to the discrimination singles face in the workplace (family leave) and by the government (Social Security). That should change.
However, she does nothing to improve how singles are perceived when she says things like, “Yes, I’m talking about you, smug marrieds.” Yes, I’m married. But I’m not smug, and certainly I’m not the only unsmug married out there. First of all, married people were single once, and marriage does not cause amnesia, as she suggests. If married people seem to gravitate away from their single friends, it might be because they are smug or otherwise inconsiderate, but it could also be because their single friends think they no longer have any street cred, and trust me, marrieds can sense that. And maybe marrieds seek other marrieds because their single friends don’t want to hear about marriage problems any more than they want to hear about how something must be wrong with them if they aren’t married.
Through interviews with single advocates, Mapes article includes some really lame examples. A 2-for-1 coupon to a restaurant is suddenly seen as some evidence of single discrimination. I’m sorry, are the only “couples” in restaurants married or in serious relationships? Doesn’t she go to restaurants with friends? Another example was a rabbi’s reading at a wedding about how marriage joins two people whose lives were previously worthless. Perverse, yes. But is the wedding about the couple getting married or about the guests? Maybe that particular couple felt their lives were less meaningful until they met each other; who wants to judge that?
Again, Mapes has some great points about legitimate discrimination, and I wholly support changing policies and laws. But I also want to point out that in many of the same cases, married couples without children face the same sort of discrimination. Yes, a single working person gets less benefits than a working person who has a partner and kids to support. But the childless “marrieds” also gets less benefits. And consider the societal discrimination a childless married couple faces. As soon as I got married, people started asking my mother when I was going to have kids. Generally, most of society can’t figure out why a couple would get married if they didn’t want to have kids. So, Ms. Mapes, this isn’t about single versus married; it’s not black and white.

In the Pink

Today a piece on Impact's production of Othello in the Pink Pages. Not bad. And SFist's Cheshire Dave with a photo credit. Last week the Pink had a piece on the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Dare I saw that the Pink Pages aren't bad these days? At least when it comes to theatre coverage.

Regarding Ms. Weiner

Wendy Weiner--who I haven't seen in years since she performed her Give Me Shelter at Exit Theatre--inhabits a couple of bylines in mags sitting in my apartment. The first, in American Theatre, is a profile on Intersection for the Arts + Campo Santo's Deborah Cullinan, (I love Deb and Campo Santo, but I wonder if AT is overexposing them) which includes a whimsical sidenote that Deb decided to stay in San Francisco after a $5 bill landed on her head while walking in the Mission. Considering the things that have landed on my head in this city, I probably should have left long ago.
The other byline is in Bitch, where she tackles the "Last Taboo of Reality TV," namely that reality TV doesn't include what happens when women get their periods on such shows as Survivor and Colonial House. OK, we've all wondered. And by now most of us have figured it out. Weiner ends her article with a quote by a Colonialist, who points out that many of the directors are women, so if women won't bring up the issue, who will? OK, politics aside, this article is based on the fallacy that reality TV is reality. Are you telling me that the educated and hip women of Bitch (and Ms. Weiner) think reality TV is real? Survivor and The Bachelor and The Bachelorette is just smut, and those shows would be the last ones I would want to break new postfeminist ground by showing not only women vomiting on the beach but women trying to figure out how to dispose of their tampons in an environmentally friendly way.

More on Paris

Curious that Oklahoma got the front page review in today's Datebook, while the world premiere of Fetes de la Nuit didn't, but I suppose that's geographical preference.
Had I disagreed with Robert Hurwitt, perhaps this would have been a little more lively. But in all, he was spot on, down to the last paragraph. Only in the Bay Area would smoking surpass nudity as a taboo. And even though the actors were smoking fake cigarettes, and the smoke was noticably pulled upstage by the ventilation system, still audience members started coughing. I was in the sixth row, and I couldn't smell anything. A well-known Bay Area actor allegedly said that as soon as cigarettes appear onstage, people start coughing. It's psychosomatic.
At the end of Fetes, I was speaking with another well-known "person of Bay Area theater" who said, well, that this wasn't quite a play.
True, and I've been mulling this over. I'm thinking back to Striking 12 at TheatreWorks, the GrooveLily concert. I'm thinking of the breakdancing in Fetes. I'm thinking of Bright River's beatboxing. These are all attempts, though probably not pointed attempts, to shake up people's notion, not of theater, but what they may see in the theater. That theater isn't all stuffy. But these elements, most of which require a more palpable participation on the audience's part--actors talk about feeling the audience with them, but this is different. And I'm not sure audiences go there. Maybe it's because they've been trained to sit down, shut up, don't eat, don't drink, don't talk, don't leave, and for gosh sakes turn your phone off else we draw and quarter you. Then to expect them to vocally participate.... Or, in the scene with the flatulence artist in Fetes, expect the whole audience to stand up for the finale, for no particular reason, when most of them are like, But I don't want to stand up. Well, the comment that this "is not a play" isn't really useful to me because I'm much more interested in what it is, or what it can be. What it isn't isn't interesting; it closes the conversation down. I'm more interested in why these more "pop" elements aren't connecting with the audience so much. I'll be mulling that over...maybe I can say more after seeing U2 in April.

Paris in Berkeley

Usually theatre companies make sure they don’t overlap press nights. But last night saw the opening of Hilda at American Conservatory Theater, Oklahoma at Best of Broadway and the world premiere of Fetes de la Nuit (Parties of the Night) at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. ACT added some press nights, and Oklahoma…well…. What’s a theatre writer/editor to do? I headed out to Berkeley.
Berkeley Rep’s site describes Fetes as “a racy collage that expresses the beauty and complexity of love. It mingles drama, dance and music--including Edith Piaf, great arias from opera, hip hop and French pop music--into a sensual and exuberant celebration of life.”
Playwright/collagist Charles Mee, the scholar of amor whose Big Love--featuring lovely women throwing themselves on the floor over and over again--pounded the Berkeley Rep stage in 2001, finally visits the city that embodies the complexities of passion. The collage--we can’t really call it a play--is a parade of French stereotypes and outrageous French accents (an echo of Monty Python’s Holy Grail would be appropriate here). Some work well, some not so much. Some of my favorites include a woman playing a piano with dental floss, a session in a nude drawing class (the scene that generated the full nudity warnings) where the male and female models start checking each other out, an episode of wine-making (with feet) and a studied look at smoking.
If this seems like a list without any meaningful connection, well, that’s pretty much what the evening was. Mee provides a couple of throughlines: a lesbian couple starts the evening broken up and ends it (perhaps) back together, while another heterosexual couple meet and eventually discuss moving in together. There are lectures on the concept of love, and I suppose what we’re supposed to come away with is encompassed in a line about finding a great love, and then dying. A great love that could change the world, heal the world. Mee tries to add multiculturalism and issues of racism and class, but they fall flat and seem out of place. It might have worked if the piece was an intermissionless 90 minutes instead of a roughly two-hour evening with intermission.
However, Fetes is a visual feast, with fabulous and absurd costumes, mostly for the fashion show sequence. Shorts with bananas attached, skirts with the backs missing, a belly dancer with hot-pink feathers. (And you don’t want to miss James Carpenter’s strutting.)
Mee leaves ample room for a director’s interpretation, and Les Waters delivers oddly juxtaposed images--usually using background actors that witness (or don’t even care what’s going on)--that are at once funny and rather poetic. But in the end, though you had a good time, you’re left with a sense of: And?
More on this after the reviews come out.