Dinner Theatre: Lori's Diner and Cutting Ball at the Exit

Do you sense the hamburger theme?

The lower-price Exit tickets just scream for lower-price food. And because the Exit sits on the edge of the Tenderloin and Union Square, we took advantage of the many tourist-trap/fake diners, Lori's on Powell between Ellis and O'Farrell in particular. Our justification was the pinball machines.

Lori's makes a perfectly respectable burger. Basically, a good burger is any burger that you don't have complaints about. It's got the lettuce, onion and tomatoes on the side, along with an orange slice and a pickle. It came medium like I ordered it. See? No high maintenance stuff. Fries of perfect thickness. Trev went for a cherry Coke--he offered me a sip, and I took one, not realizing that the straw was entrenched in the syrupy goo at the bottom. After I uncrossed my eyes, I was ready to eat. He also had a salad and chili, which he had no opinion about, or none that he verbalized. See? Good diner food. I also got a chocolate milkshake, with whipped cream and a cherry, all very perfectly satisfying.

Then I got my ass kicked on nostalgia arcade games like Galaxian (the poor man's Galaga) and Centipede.

The Cutting Ball is always one to give us edgy plays and thoughtful productions. Martin Crimp's translation of The Maids makes its West Coast premiere, thanks to CB, one which apparently incorporates the ending Genet intended. The play is an extremely difficult piece for American actors, especially privileged ones, to perform, and an extremely difficult piece for American audiences, especially privileged ones, to view. An outsider from a very young age, Genet revelled in being a freak, even consciously choosing the life of a thief, and wrote from the point of view of the oppressed. And he was French. All the more reason for his lines to sail right over everyone's heads and land firmly on the back wall.

Director Adriana Baer stages this play wonderfully, with the audience on both sides of the playing space, something I haven't seen done in Exit Stage Left before. Like the conflict of maid versus mistress, and especially the maid playing mistress, the audience is forced to face itself--a sort of accusation and implication at the same time.

Uneven acting paired with the feeling that some of the actors don't quite understand the nuances of the play, much less that they're able to inhabit an oppressed character, drag the production down a bit. And again, much of the nuance is quite foreign to American audiences anyway that you need exceptional actors with vast emotional range to tease those nuances out, to coax the irony. But thank god Cutting Ball never shies from the tough plays, never talks down to its audience, never gives us weak vanilla when we want strong chocolate. They challenge themselves, and they challenge us. It's not diner food, so who cares if it's not perfect?