Gem

Ahh, you don't really want to hear what I thought of Gem of the Ocean, do you?

I mean, if a theatre writer doesn't write about the show until like two weeks after it opens, she usually thinks, What's the point? The Chronicle already made the bold statement that the play was"striving to fulfill its place in American theater history, at the expense of its dramatic integrity." Well, like the Chron, I can forgive it that.

So, two weeks later what stays with me is Wilson's intense poetry, his sharp dialogue where every word works doubletime (I'm especially thinking of the aching scenes between Citizen and Black Mary). Really, those are my reasons for seeing the play.

Getting It Wrong

As much as I'm all for new work and for the Bay Area being a player on the national new play scene, I have to point out Ben Brantley's negative review of Grodin's The Right Kind of People, which had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre, directed by Chris Smith, who helmed the NY production as well.

Really, the big issue I have is that Brantley states the play was "a popular success at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco." Uh, excuse me? I wonder where Mr. Brantley is getting his facts. I don't suppose he bothered to look up the Chronicle's review? Because that was far from glowing. If the SF production was at all popular, it was because the play had the best actors in the area--then the script promptly wasted their talent. I don't know one person who thought the production was successful or that the script didn't need work. So, there's Mr. Brantley telling the nation that San Francisco thought this was a good play as if we were dumb enough not to know a good play if it bit us in the ass.

What I do appreciate about the Magic's production and Smith's philosophy of developing new work is that it's not about the end product. If more artistic directors truly believed this, then the new work resurgance in the Bay Area would be stronger. The only quibble I have with the Magic premiering People is that a lot of local playwrights could have written better--but then, they wouldn't have already had an "in" to the NY scene.

SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

A little login to my StatCounter reveals that many people have recently visited by way of Googling "Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle nominations 2005."

Fear not, intrepid drama geeks! Those nominations should post to the Theatre Bay Area site within the next week or so.

Olympic-itis

I'm addicted to the Olympics, which is where I've been the past couple of weeks. No, I don't mean I was in Torino; I was making quite a big dent in my year-old sofa, and somehow this will-sucking sofa prevented me from even posting my whereabouts.

One week of Olympics is fine. By the second week, you're an addict. You sit in front of the TV almost every night till midnight waiting for some major climax that never comes, yet you can't tear yourself away. Also by the second week, a bit of self-loathing creeps in. Hour after hour of ripped bodies pushed to the limit of human endurance, and I've spent two weeks on my ass eating Godiva chocolates. My favorite parts are when the announcers say, "At 27, she would be the oldest woman to ever win a gold medal in figure skating." God, and I was feeling good about the early 30s.

Yesterday, after watching Sasha Cohen yet again fail to put two programs together, I announced the end of my figure skating affair. It won't last. I can't shake ever shake it for long. Even so, who would have ever thought that the most exciting figure skating event would be ice dancing? Yes, they were always divas, but the falls, the fights! You gotta love the Italians, who one minute before their program wouldn't even look at each other and glared at each other before their program started. (This is where we started playing MST3K with the TV: "'You better not fall this time,' she says. 'Or I get my mafia uncle to whack your kneecaps.' And, 'I get a dead horse's head and shove it up your ass.'") And then after the program, cry and hug.

I still did manage to get to some theatre. ACT was good enough to schedule press night of Gem of the Ocean on the only night figure skating wasn't on, and I did see two or three other shows, which I will post about shortly.

Dinner Theatre: Sort Of

My friend The Playgoer has been in town this weekend, and after spending a week or so perusing the listings at Theatre Bay Area and soliciting my recommendations, he settled on The Mystery Plays at SF Playhouse on Friday night, and the very first preview of the world premiere, Nero (Another Golden Rome) at Magic Theatre on Saturday.

I also hope he can manage to catch Master Builder at Aurora this evening.

Friday night we met The Playgoer at his Union Square hotel's top floor lounge and restaurant, which offered stunning views of the city and stunning prices to match. Ironically, for so many reasons, I had been stricken that day with losing my voice, so I was considering an Irish coffee or something similarly hot and coating. All coffee drinks were $12. So, I checked out the wine by the glass list, which averaged $12 for a $7 bottle. Well, if I was going to pay $12 for anything, it would be a top shelf drink, so I settled on a margarita on the rocks, which hurt my throat more than my wallet. We also shared and cheese plate and a smoked salmon pizza.

The Playgoer offers a SF Dispatch of the play, and from our conversation that evening, which was rather obviously one-sided, I gathered that spaces like SF Playhouse, Actors Theatre of SF and such were rather rare creatures back in New York. In any case, I had recommended SF Playhouse one, because of the playwright and two, because of the caliber of actors the company has attracted after only several seasons in business. Rod Gnapp and T. Edward Webster were very good, as was Christina Anselmo, in this noir-like play with a very sparse set. In the audience that night was Mark Jackson of Death of Meyerhold fame and Nick Sholley, who appeared in Trev's Tenders in the Fog, both of whom I was happy to introduce The Playgoer to.

Saturday night we braved the Chinese New Year Parade and settled at Hana Zen off Union Square before heading up to the Magic. The Playgoer had actually been in town last year, and liked Hana Zen enough to return. Of course, the sushi and yakitori restaurant is one of my regular restaurants, a bit pricey for dinner but always good.

Magic Theatre artistic director Chris Smith was a bit surprised to see me at a preview, especially the first preview, so I assured him that I was there totally unofficially, which means I won't comment on the play except to say it's a new play so you should go see it because we like to support new plays. Interestingly, Nero playwright Steve Sater and musician Duncan Sheik are also collaborating on a musical in New York--but Nero is "a play with music."

So, I suppose what's next is a Staged Readings dispatch from New York, which could happen if I could ever manage to get out there. If I did, I'd catch the new Richard Foreman (what, as opposed to the old Richard Foreman? jeez), the new Wallace Shawn, Spamalot....

But maybe The Playgoer will have to stick around until the blizzard clears up in New York and SFO stops cancelling flights.

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?

Dinner Theatre: Beckett's and Aurora Theatre

Ibsen's Master Builder at Aurora and Beckett's pub aren't an obvious dinner theatre pairing, but I've been going through Irish pub withdrawels (however nonauthentic the pubs be) since Foleys closed a few weeks ago for retrofitting, which caught me entirely by surprise. Once you have your heart set on some Boddingtons at the end of the work week and before a show, everything else pales. So, Beckett's it was, even though it wasn't quite the end of the work week--but hey, Thursday is close enough.

I had a theory that Foleys and Beckett's were owned by the same people, a theory only based on the menus, which were quite similar. But really, its no huge coincidence that two Irish pubs should both have bangers and mash and fish and chips. My theory is now shot, due to the fact that a couple of months before it closed, Foleys expanded their menu (even if they did take the hamburger off, curses!), while last week's trip to Beckett's revealed a truncated menu. They didn't even have pies! (Did they have them before? I can't remember. But I remember the menu being more than one page.)

I settled on Harps, some battered prawns and a salad, while Trevor had Guinness and fish and chips. All around the seafood was a bit greasy, which may be a plus, after all, it's an Irish pub.

Too bad we weren't seeing Waiting for Godot at Aurora. It would have been too perfect, maybe even cliche. Paul Walsh's new adaptation of Ibsen's Master Builder was modern, fresh and very much geared to our acquired attention span of 45 minutes for act one, and something like an hour fifteen for act two.

Aurora, as well all know, is an actors' haven. And James Carpenter in the title role is a stunning sight. This is, quite frankly, some of the most kick-ass acting I've seen to date. And that was only opening night! What will he look like toward the end of the run, with even that much more time to polish the near-impossible emotional transitions demanded by the part? It's too bad that Julian Lopez-Morillas had but one scene, but it was opposite James, and these two legendary Bay Area actors bandied lines back and forth like, well, to be cliche, tennis players. Julian's Knut breaks down, and James' Halvard pulls away from such emotion, unable to deal with it. Anne Darragh turned in such precise work as Aline that she merely needed to grunt and raise an eyebrow to get the audience to laugh, and Richard Rossi as the Doctor balanced--or at least guided us through the layers of emotional terrain husband and wife built up over the years--not a house or home, but a dreary bog weighing everything down.

Of course, what's best about seeing Carpenter's master acting class is the intimacy of Aurora's space, where you are so close you feel as though you were right in the living room. The thrust, though, requires constant movement by the actors, who often sit with their back to you. This bugged me more with this play, because I didn't want to miss a moment of Carpenter's lines. I do wonder if over time Aurora's space will become too restricting to the directors and actors who work there, as the space demands that plays be blocked a certain way to accomodate such a severe thrust. The most radically different staging I've seen there was Ron Campbell's solo show, which was as about as proscenium as you're ever going to get in that space, but it was still restricting. Ah, I guess that's one for the Aurora folks to answer with future productions. But in the meantime, enjoy the phenomenal acting.

What Ails Arts Journalism? The Same Ol' Complaints

Well, the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Muiscal Theater took place a few weeks ago down in LA, and already national critics are writing about the sorry state of arts coverage.

Here are some shocking, just shocking points: there's less space in newspapers for arts coverage; more people attend live arts events than professional sports; critics have retired or taken buyouts, etc etc etc ad naseum.

Gosh, this is all news to me. It's not like I haven't heard this when I attended the O'Neill Critics Institute a few years ago, and it's not like we haven't heard this from other critics who write down these stats in their columns like it was breaking news.

Don't get me wrong: Of course I'm for arts coverage. But there's something wrong when journalists have been printing the same ol' stats and regurgitating the same old complaints for at least two years.

I'm an arts writer. (Well, I'd really label myself an arts editor, but for purposes of this blog, I'll say I'm a writer.) And I agree with these writers in theory. But I'm fatigued with hearing this story. It's as if these critics/writers think if they keep throwing the live arts v. sports stats at their editors and at their readers, that their column inches will magically reappear.

Look, I don't know what the answer is. Now, there is less coverage for arts in the newspapers. But newspapers are, let's just face it, dying. Some critics bemoan that more arts stories are going online. As if that were a bad thing. Two years ago we saw stats that most readers between the ages of 18 and about 35 are getting the majority of their news online. And we also know that regional theatres want younger audiences. But regional theatres throw all their energy into newspapers: ads, reviews, Little Men. No wonder their audiences are older. Maybe I'm simplifying, but the disconnect seems obvious.

See, I'd rather spend less time beating my head against the wall about arts coverage in newspapers and spend more time figuring where the arts coverage should be: blogs, podcasts, websites, etc. Newspaper writers who wave around 2-3-year-old stats in their paper columns only reinforce the fact that they're behind the technology times. Face it, they're on a sinking ship. Who cares how many inches they have for theatre if in five years' time (or less), the paper is out of business? Who's reading? What's the real benefit for theatre companies?

I overheard someone say that she never reads blogs because she has enough unedited thoughts of her own. Here are my unedited thoughts, meant to provoke. If I edited them, my various allegiances would have removed all the sentences' teeth. I doubt they're that sharp anyway. But I'm really thinking we need to start looking at this problem from another angle.