February 20, 2008

Athol Fugard, The Blood Knot at ACT Theatre (Feb 8–March 9).

Two South African brothers share a shed during apartheid. One is light skinned enough to pass as white; whereas, the other cannot. What unfolds is an investigation into the very notions of race & the power dynamics, guilt & jealousies that go with it. It's sad that this play is not only still poignant, but very relevent.

January 19, 2008

Poet's Theater at CCA last night:

CA Conrad's "The Obituary Show" was worth the $10 to get in. The creepiest peanut butter sandwich ever. "A bucket of fuck" as a positive.

Buuck's intro simultaneously raising and lowering the bar, as a way of saying welcome to the performance people.

Kevin Killian's Michael Stipe T-shirt strip act.

Erika Staiti (as in mighty Staiti, the program tells us) in plumes.

Clive working the walk-on extra action in the corner.

Buuck advising to "cover the nip" from the wings to a piece that promised nippage. Thank you David Brazil.

Mary Diaz as a lushed out Yoda. Was that really a beertini? I thought those were figments of Mr. Westbrook's imagination.

Hannah Weiner, as directed by Suzanne Stein, shows a use for semifore that the Boy Scouts never covered.

And that sandwich. . . with the hand. . . the creepy creepy very wrong and creepy hand. . .

I hope they slap it up on youtube or ubu soon.

December 24, 2007

1. Let Sha drive a car around Mills yesterday. It was her first time behind the wheel ever. I think she may be hooked on the sense of power operating a ton of machinery gives you. At least, she's seriously comtemplating driving school when she gets back to Minnie.

2. Bought an antique Smith-Corona manual typewriter from a guy in Fremont for $20. It's in excellent shape and even has a good ribbon. It's exactly like one I owned the second time I moved to New York.

3. Adam Bock's Shaker Chair is on at the Shotgun Player's theater near Ashby BART. It's refreshing to see such poignantly political material in the Bernard Shaw tradition. Good acting, minimal set, and Bock's dialogue.

4. Took Sha to the Laney College flea market. She was horrified and fascinated in equal amounts at all the crap up for sale. I walked away with a wash board. Couldn't find a set of thimbles though, so I'll most likely be scrounging in Chinatown--Chinatown has everything-- today to get some.

5. The graffiti at 46th Avenue and Foothill is something.

September 8, 2007

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. A.C.T. Theater. Runs through Sept 30th.

This production is more bare bones: A single set for all scenes, 10 actors who remain on stage at all times, when they are not in the scene they double as the orchestra (even when dead), and by virtue of having only 7-9 instruments at any one time, the Sondheim score has been cut to its minimalist essentials. And yet it works. All the intensity of the original production is there and, in fact, the ties between characters become heightened. Gone is the magic barber's chair; in its stead is expressionistic (if somewhat obvious) lighting and sound symbolism.

"But there's no one comes in even to inhale!
Right you are, sir,
would you like a drop of ale?
Mind you I can hardly blame them!
These are probably the worst pies in London.
I know why nobody cares to take them!
I should know! I make them!
But good? No...
The worst pies in London..."

April 1, 2007

Philip Kan Gotanda, After the War at ACT Theater

After the War explores what it means to be an American who is forced to operate outside the center of American society. The historical backdrop of post internement camp Japantown brings together a mix of folks on the margins: a No-No Boy jazz musician, a wealthy Japanese entrpreneur/crook, an unemployed Black man from the Deep South, a Russian prostitute, a poor Oklahoma woman and her slow younger brother. . . the effect of which shows that even in the end, the power that is practicised within these communities can be trumped at any time by the central powers that be.

While steeped in a specific historical situation of a very specific San Francisco neighborhood, the questions Gotanda poses are relevant and on point to contemporary American society, as questions of power, patriotism, race, and inner city planning are all still very current in today's conversations.

January 20, 2007

W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle @ ACT Theater.

Maugham, I think, is one of those writers that I tried to tackle too early in my reading life and just got turned off. I never quite got into Of Human Bondage the way I did, say, by anything F Scott or various other Moderns ever wrote. This production of The Circle--once again a fantastic cast, beautiful set, all the things the ACT is recognized for--makes me want to pick a few Maugham tombs off the library shelf and give him another pass.

It's nice how the timeline of events that occured prior to the on stage action remians somewhat vague: at what point did Elizabeth decide to invite Arnold's estranged mother to visit, before or after she decided to run off with a lover just as Lady Kitty had done?

It's also nice how the play steamrollers to the conclusion that seems evident from the first act, only to throw the audience of the path several times through adjustments in tone (act 2 ends as the totally violent downer opposite of the laugh out loud first scene), making you doubt the inevitable in the final act.

At ACT until February 3rd.

November 12, 2006

Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes at ACT Theatre.

For some reason, all week before today's performance I had it in my head that Mina Loy wrote this, and thought I was in for something much different than this tight Southern drama that revolves around family, greed and capitalism at its worst.

The cast was strong, with powerful performances by Jack Willis as Ben Hubbard and Jacqueline Antaramian as Regina Hubbard.

This is the second play in a row at ACT that deals with revolutionaries: the last play was Stoppard's Travesties chronicling Joyce, Tzara and Lenin in Zurich. In Foxes, when Alexandra commits to working against the corruption caused by bottom-line cut-throats like her family in the end, she is in effect joining if not the revolution then at least the labor movement. Given Hellman's leftist leanings, this isn't so surprising; what is is how the theater-goers immediately around me chose not to grasp this aspect of the play (the final moral moment that the play has been building up to) to read it as another play about how Deep South families are dysfunctional, a la Tennessee Williams.

September 24, 2006

Adam Bock, The Typographers Dream (Encore Theatre Company w/ Shotgun Players @Ashby Theater)

&

Tom Stoppard, Travesties (American Conservatory Theater)

I've recently been rereading Johnn Berger's Ways of Seeing which has quite possibly framed all of my media & arts related experiences in the past couple of weeks. For example, Adam Bock's Typographer's Dream features professionals whose jobs it is to create written and visual historical records: a typographer, a geographer, and a court reporter. Each job seems innocuous, until you factor in how each of these by necessity frames the information of the products they produce, privileging (forcing) one reading over others possible: Why is Poland always pink? Once you factor in all the subjective decisions that these professionals make and couple that with a Benjaminian understanding of reproduction, suspicion begins to fall on everything claiming to be a record of something else. Enter Stoppard's Henry Carr, a mid-level diplomat in Zurich during the Great World War. Wheelchair bound and elderly, Carr begins to spin a yarn that puts him near the center of Zurich's incredible avant-garde and revolutionary activity, placing Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin all just one degree of separation from each other. The problem is that Carr's failing memory and his propensity for self-aggrandizement aren't to be relied upon. Could he have really stopped Lenin from catching the train to Russia after the revolution if only he hadn't fallen in love with a reference librarian? What ensues is a multi-perspective discussion of art and revolution and the value and purpose of both. Is Tzara another product of lickspittle imperialism? Joyce another bourgeois in pauper's mismatched clothing? Lenin doesn't get Mayakovsky? Really? Really really?

January 21, 2006

Neo-Benshi, Small Press Traffic at California College of the Arts (January 20).

SPT again revives the Japanese benshi tradition in which a narrator describes, explains and adds to the story line of the silent film for the audience. The neo-benshi pulled out their poetic kit bags and barred no holds to turn selected film sequences on their heads and into an amazingly entertaining evening of live performance.

The highlights:

Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy and Colter Jocobsen turning the John Wayne vehicle The High and The Mighty (1954) into a commentary about the US annexation of Hawaii, not-so-closeted homosexuality, and crass American materialistic stupidity, all while being extremely laugh-out-loud funny.

Ronald Palmer's doppelgangered, oepidalish twist on the violence of American Psycho (2000).

The way that Summi Kaipa seemed to keep all the overt and covert tensions (sexual, familial, class) of the Baliwood film Bobby (1973) while transfering the action to the greater suburban South Bay area.

Tanya Brolaski and Dan Fisher's reworking of the Bette Davis flick Another Man's Poison (1952). Their use of homophones to create followable non-sequituurs, the timing of their dialogue matching so closely with the film so as to seemlessly coopt it, the flippant sexual and drug related references pouring out of Bette Davis' mouth all worked to make their performance a serious exercise in poetry fun.