Ondine at Cutting Ball Theater

Last Saturday I went to Cutting Ball Theater to see Ondine, a new play by Katharine Sherman, directed by Rob Melrose. Ondine is a mermaid who falls in love with Hildebrand, a young mortal, an alchemist who is searching for the "universal solvent" (though he also wonders what container could hold a substance that can dissolve anything – he occasionally ponders whether there is a hidden meaning and unity there). Like its titular mermaid, the play is appealing but also oddly disjointed.

For one thing, the setting is not some Maeterlinck-like Vague & Timeless Land of Misty Enchantments; it is insistently and clearly contemporary, in behavior, appearance, and language. So . . . an alchemist? I'm more likely to accept the mermaid, frankly. The facts of modern physics are far more marvelous than the fantastic dreams of the alchemists (who were generally considered frauds by Chaucer's time). But here we don't even reach Newton, much less Einstein – Aristotle is cited as the ultimate scientific authority. Hildebrand proclaims himself a knight as well as an alchemist. I couldn't help wondering how he's paying the rent. I suppose I should just accept the two worlds – mermaid and alchemist in one aspect, and (honestly, not very interesting) young contemporary couple in another – but the juxtaposition seemed more about convenience than anything else. Hildebrand not only appears to have no job other than his alchemist gig, he appears to have no friends, no family, and no history; Ondine has three older water-women who show up to remind her, rather gently, that there is a price for leaving the sea, but she too is in many ways a blank – Hildebrand literally teaches her language. Their life together is a Pinterest dream, revolving around cups of tea and home-made scones. (I was a bit baffled when Ondine talked about "learning to make scone dough rise" – yeast doughs rise, and they can be tricky, as yeast is a living organism, but scones are a quick bread and rise while baking – how do you "learn to make scone dough rise"?)

We're not really shown how they meet – Hildebrand pours some water out and she appears and it seems to be mutual love at first sight. This may be just my problem, but I don't find happy young love an interesting subject for the stage – it's sort of the point of their shared joy that there is nothing dramatic there: no conflict, no clash, just cups of tea and lovely homemade pies and scones. (This is not the only time the playwright avoids potentially interesting and dramatic scenes.) There are brief scenes, often variations on these themes (I've learned about tea! look at how much in love we are! I don't want to return to the sea yet, because of tea and scones and love!); the language is waterlike: fluid, flowing, often sparkling, occasionally murky. I do have to object to the frequent use of fuck / fucking, which is part of the insistently contemporary tone I referred to earlier: fuck and its variants started showing up more frequently as the play went on, and I winced each time, not because I was shocked and offended, but exactly because I wasn't: in the course of a few decades, that once powerful word has descended through overuse into a merely annoying verbal tic; an atomic bomb has turned into a damp squib. This is why we can't have not-nice things. It really used to mean something when you said fuck you to someone. Now: not so much.

And Sherman doesn't really do anything with the word, which is odd, considering that fucking is presumably what really draws these two characters together, even though their life together, as shown to us, is quite decorously tea-and-sconesy; the only reference to sex is on their first night, when Hildebrand gives her his bed and sleeps on the floor "because of chivalry" (though apparently he gets over that at some elided point). Other words are played with, but there's no playing with fucking. (As far as I recall, it is never used to refer to, you know, copulation; it's only used as an expletive or adjective.) The word just sits there, a standard marker of anger that's too conventional to attract much attention; it's a little dried-up pellet of dead language. If this were a play that aimed at realism, its use could be defended as an accurate representation of how many of our contemporaries speak, but when your protagonists are an alchemist and a mermaid, the way we live now is maybe not the effect you're really aiming for.

I found the actual experience of watching the play entertaining. The set (scenic design by Michael Locher) is a sort of wave-like crest running down the middle of the performance space (the audience sits on either side), and the characters climb and roll and sink over and around and even into it. There's a lot of movement. The cast is quite accomplished and charming (Jessica Waldman as Ondine, Kenny Toll as Hildebrand, and – I just now found out that the three water women have names! – Molly Benson as Rain, Marilet Martinez as Mist, and Danielle O'Hare as Ice). The set and staging are captivating. The language, except for its tired use of fuck, is playful and interesting. But the material seemed stretched a bit thin even for 80 intermissionless minutes, often because of Sherman's tendency to skip potentially meaty dramatic moments in favor of a chant-like repetition from the trio of water-women or sometimes puzzling remarks about baked goods. It may sound as if I'm asking for a more conventional play here, but I think that's not really it. I'm asking for a more dramatic play.

We do get one big dramatic scene, when Hildebrand decides that although he loves Ondine he needs to leave her because his important and urgent alchemical research dictates that he seek out a hermit and then live in solitude for a while. Ondine, apparently not understanding that his departure is temporary, curses him (much use of fuck in that speech). I'm not really giving anything away here, since the program tells us ahead of time about the actual though rare syndrome called Ondine's Curse, and in addition all along we're given brief scenes of Ondine gently slapping or shaking her knight to keep him awake, but if you're going to the play you might want to read the next few paragraphs selectively.

If you suffer from Ondine's Curse, you lose the ability to breathe automatically. This means that if you sleep, you will stop breathing and therefore die. Since being deprived of sleep will also kill you, it's a condition that condemns you to a painful death one way or the other. So Ondine is sentencing Hildebrand to death for leaving her. But it turns out that he does return, and he really did love her all along, which makes her feel really kind of bad for punishing him with a gruesome, painful, and premature death. (There's no explanation for her inability to undo a curse she laid on someone; presumably, as in Tennyson's Tithonus, "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.") When he realizes his beloved has laid this cruel, irrevocable curse on him, how does Hildebrand react? He doesn't. No anger, no sense of betrayal, no ironic laughter, no questioning. . . . no drama.

There's no clash of opinions or realities or desires here, not even a sense of the savage consequences of fooling with water sprites. I had the feeling that the material would work better as a lyric poem or ballad, forms in which a relentless focus on only one perspective or one voice can seem suggestive, ironic, and powerful, rather than narcissistic and emotionally self-serving. But the strength of drama as an art form is the forum it offers for a multiplicity of voices and different points of view, and we're just not getting that here. In a poem our imagination can supply the doomed youth's unmentioned reaction, but when we see the actor physically in front of us, the art form (and reasonable expectations) dictate that we're going to see some reaction from him.

I felt that underneath its shining carapace, the essence of the play was banal: it's about a young woman who is all about love and baking. There's a young man who lets her down, because he has an interest other than her – he's putting his career first. She curses him, in the way of young women let down by young men, and in a bit of wish fulfillment, he dies a horrible death (horrible, however gracefully and gently staged), even though (in another bit of wish fulfillment) it turns out he loved her all along. For me, this was one of those plays whose pleasures – an ingenious set and staging, a fine cast, a mostly interesting flow of words (but please, everyone, stop with the fucking) – gradually recede as the experience passes, leaving doubts about the themes and structure of the work. But there was enough there so that I would be interested in seeing another play by Sherman.

If you'd like to check it out yourself, the show is running at the Exit on Taylor through 6 March; you can get tickets here.

ubiquity of Ubu-osity

Last Sunday I saw Cutting Ball's production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, directed by Yury Urnov, in a new translation by Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose. When the play premiered in Paris in 1896 there were riots in the audience, and the play immediately became a touchstone of modernism and a milestone in theatrical history. Oddly, though that kind of thing is right up my alley I had never seen or even read the play before. I'm always fascinated by these lacunae among aficionados; life is crammed with incident, most of it irrelevant to what we're really interested in, and time grows scarce, and you can't get to everything, and admitting that is admitting your mortality. Anyway I walked into the theater with only the vaguest idea of what I was going to see, and though apparently some adjustments have been made from the original version I can't speak to what exactly they are, though I can say that this production is brilliantly entertaining, with the sort of simple, even subversive directness that can only be produced by the highest sophistication.

The story itself is a variant of Macbeth; Father Ubu and his ambitious wife Mother Ubu join forces to take over the kingdom of Poland (the play of course predates Hitler, but for us it's as impossible not to hear an echo of the Third Reich in this plot as it is not to remember the Shoah during The Merchant of Venice). Along the way there are also refracted references to Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Richard III, and a bit of Romeo & Juliet, and maybe more, but though such things provide structure and ironic connections to theatrical history you could enjoy the play even without having heard the name "Shakespeare" ever before in your life; it's a slapstick tragedy that looks very much like the daily newsfeed. Few things fade faster than yesterday's shocking art; at this distance, though one can only admire the willingness of the Parisian audiences to be ridiculously outraged, what was absurd and obscene provocation to them looks like realism to us. The play has value beyond its historical interest and its once-shocking content.

The constantly repeated obscenities, for instance (generally versions of "shit"; I think there wasn't a single "fuck" uttered in the two-hour run time, which makes sense because devouring and therefore defecation are what you might call the all-consuming motive of the Ubus) sound depressingly like everyday conversations to us (I hear this sort of thing on the commuter trains and the sidewalks of the Financial District all the time); you have to want very badly to be shocked to find shit shit shit shocking, rather than a sad example of how we sound to each other these days – such accuracy forms its own scabrous satire on how we live now.

The setting for this production is a modern-style kitchen, all gleaming stainless steel and shiny utensils, which is a really brilliant concept, since it makes the setting both stylishly up-to-the-minute and primal: there is a basic hunger portrayed in these characters, who ignore or attack officially admired institutions of church and state and live in a world of abrupt, self-centered and self-serving actions breaking through the feeble veneer of civilized life. Ubu's opponents are sometimes portrayed using tomatoes or baby carrots, which is funny in the way of Chaplin's dance with the dinner rolls in The Gold Rush but also terrifying: Ubu looms over these little objects, slicing and smashing and devouring them. There's a honey bear that is put to threatening use, at one point last Sunday reducing two of the actors as well as the audience to helpless laughter. Spatulas become swords, the company forms itself into a horse, everything metamorphoses into something else. Clever use is made of music, lots of klezmer but also bits of Mozart and, in one memorable mimed battle, Barber's Adagio for Strings.

Ubu's opponent, the Czar of Russia, first appears shirtless and fishing; he is often shirtless and sporting, in the manner of Vladimir Putin, just one of the unobtrusive ways this production links the world of Ubu to the world around us. There is also the son of the King he killed, who (the son) is portrayed as a posturing, queeny youth, which was genuinely funny but also somewhat shocking to modern sensibilities, since we like to pretend that such caricatures have no basis in reality (I guess the shock of having to laugh at stereotypes is the current equivalent of an earlier age's shock at obscenity, just as people who these days casually say fuck would never use a racist epithet). Ubu is concerned almost entirely with how to get more money out of his world without having to spend any, even on the army he needs to defend what he has already grabbed. They might as well call him Mr 1%; his unprincipled and selfish greed is the guiding light for current American capitalism.

David Sinaiko, a Cutting Ball stalwart, brings his manic edge to Father Ubu, and Ponder Goddard is the hilariously scheming Mother Ubu. William Boynton, Nathaniel Justiniano, Andrew Quick, and Marilet Martinez bring the other parts to life. There is some audience involvement, of a painless and even enjoyable sort; when Mother Ubu towards the end tries to persuade her angry, stunned husband that she is an apparition, come to tell him that she has in fact never wronged him, some members of the audience get to read the "apparition's" lines to him (I was one of them – it's fun being an actor! but I was a little surprised that the other readers were so halting and stiff). Some of the audience members, depending on their proximity to the action, are given plastic ponchos to wear when the egg-tossing and tomato-smashing starts.

The last scene is done mostly on video, with stage directions read out loud as we see the Ubus wander out into the seedy surrounding neighborhood. It's an interesting way of transitioning us out of the theatrical world into the real but oddly similar world. It makes us conscious of theatrical artifice, and of how much it is a major element in the world around us, and our perceptions of that world.  As I left the theater I heard sirens and the rumor flying around the streets was that there had been a shooting in front of the Westfield Mall, just a block or two away from the Cutting Ball. This meant that the Powell Street BART station was closed, but of course the lazy, useless, overpaid BART employees didn't actually tell anyone that, and it wasn't until I got down on the dangerously crowded platform that I realized something was wrong. There were no announcements as to what was going on, and the electronic signs just flashed the usual boilerplate messages. I soon realized that I needed to get out of there and walk to another station. I stopped along the way to buy some chocolates, since I was quite hungry by then. And though I did spare a thought to the man who had been shot and his still-unapprehended would-be killer, I mostly cursed the inconvenience caused me by the greedy, incompetent BART employees who couldn't be bothered to get off their fat asses to tell people not to enter the station. Ubu's world is our world.

The show has been extended through 9 March. Go see it if you can. More information and tickets may be had here.

Krispy Kritters at Cutting Ball Theater

A few Sundays ago I went to the Cutting Ball Theater to see their world premiere production of Andrew Saito's Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night, directed by Rob Melrose. The cheerful and efficient young woman who handles the tickets asked me how I was doing. "I'm OK," I lied. "Just OK?" she said. "Maybe our show will make you feel better." I smiled weakly, because that is what I do in situations like that, but damned if she wasn't right: two hours later I walked out feeling much, much better. Because a terrific evening of theater can do that to you.

But I'm not sure how to describe this play, or what I can say that would entice people to go, though I think they should. I often wonder why we decide to attend one event and not another – what piques our interest? People usually fall back on plot, but I often find that the least interesting element of a show – it's certainly the most transitory; once you let the horse of plot out of the theatrical barn, you can't coax it back inside. Some works grow richer if you watch them knowing how they develop and end, but works planned with such subtlety usually have other elements (character, psychological or social insight, language) that are even stronger than plot.

On the other hand, wondering what happens next is a basic human impulse. It's the energy that keeps a story moving forward. But I have to admit that one reason I've never seen a play by Neil Labute (on stage; I did see the film version of The Company of Men, which struck me as a bit off, like something written by someone who had read anthropological articles about "the alpha male" and corporate life but had never actually experienced either) is that they're generally sold in terms of their plots, which tend towards such overheated and calculated "controversy" that they seem to me the dramatic equivalent of clickbait. They just don't sound interesting to me, though I can see that they might to some others.

So I'm not sure what to say here that would be the right thing to say. Enthusiastic adjectives are too commonplace to catch attention, and though a lot happens in this play . . . well, the descriptions of Krispy Kritters that I saw beforehand made me think it might be trying too hard, or be a bit too cutesy or quirky. It's not; it's like being trapped inside several interesting minds at once. Here are some elements of the show, and I hope there's something that snags your attention:

There's a young man, Drumhead, who works in a mortuary, and has his own furry little version of a glass menagerie: a collection of stuffed mice and other vermin that he keeps in matchboxes (except for the hamster Jesus, hanging on a cross in his room); he's fascinated by the prostitute Scarlett. Scarlett's madame is her grandmother, a dear, semi-doddering old woman who enthusiastically recommends masturbation to women, and who occasionally loses her hearing, and when that happens, Scarlett or Nurse Candy will have to suck out the animal obstructing her ear, and the animal, caught in a paper bag, usually carries some sort of object as well, like a shoe (are these spirit animals carrying totems and portents? you can go as real or as metaphysical as you like with them); the animals get dumped out into the growing, growling, threatening menagerie in the backyard and basement. The grandmother sometimes requires a key body part from Scarlett; Nurse Candy traipses over and sweetly insinuates that Scarlett needs to do right by Gran Ma Ma until Scarlett gives in and the doctors take out her kidney or lung or whatever.

There's a rival prostitute as well, a young Japanese woman called Snowflake, and there are constant power struggles among these women. Drumhead is both fascinated and repelled by their sexuality. His father Pap Pap, a legless old man in a wheelchair, fights naval battles in a basin he holds on his lap. He dreams of getting his legs back. There are mysterious deaths among Scarlett's clients; Drumhead sees them at the morgue and plays detective, ineffectually, while he moons over Scarlett and Snowflake moons over him. It's all grounded in lots of bodily fluids, and lots of animal life, and lots of sex and death. There's flagellation and youthful yearning and aged regrets. Grotesque comedy gives way to grotesque tragedy, and vice versa. It all makes perfect sense while you experience it.

Credit for that goes not only to playwright Saito, who kept it all together while also taking it all apart, but also to director Melrose, and the versatile, deeply talented cast: Felicia Benefield as Scarlett, Wiley Naman Strasser as Drumhead, Marjorie Cump-Shears as Gran Ma Ma, Mimu Tsujimura as Snowflake, David Sinaiko as Pap Pap, Maura Halloran as Judge Gristle and Nurse Candy, and Drew Wolff and Caleb Cabrera in a variety of smaller roles.

It's the best kind of theater: you can't describe it, you can only really experience it. And if you go see it again, I think you'd have a different experience each time – you'll pick up on different themes and connections. The run was originally scheduled to end 16 June, but has been extended to the 23rd. Click here for tickets. Andrew Saito is just beginning a three-year assignment as Resident Playwright at Cutting Ball. I'm looking forward to what the next three years bring.

it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

When I first moved to Boston I lived in a crappy dim apartment on what was then the crappy dim side of Beacon Hill, the side that sloped down towards a big gray medical center and a bigger, grayer jail and the three or four old houses that were left of the West End, which had been urban-renewaled out of existence decades earlier. It all seemed far away from the picturesque expensive front of Beacon Hill, which looked out on the lovely green (or lovely snow-covered, depending on the season) grass of Boston Common. I lived in that apartment because it was cheap and I was poor, but my street was legitimately part of Beacon Hill, and that's always been an address that mattered to people who lived in Boston, and this was when people were starting to move back into downtown areas and other people were realizing there was lots of money to be made from people moving back into downtown areas, so there was lots of upheaval as one building after another magically transformed from dilapidated old eyesore into charmingly old-fashioned and potentially lucrative condominiums.

There was a run-down little convenience store on the corner across the street from my apartment. I avoided the place. It sold mostly dusty, dented canned goods that were available in better condition and for less money just a couple of blocks away in the big clean Park and Shop, or whatever that grocery store was called, and the Park and Shop also had fresh fruits and vegetables and other things you'd want in a grocery store. But mostly I avoided the dim little shop because the owners, a lumpen, sour middle-aged couple, were unpleasant people, ranging in behavior from passively indifferent to actively rude whenever a customer happened to wander in.

The inevitable happened and someone bought the property that held the shop and jacked up the rents to drive the tenants out to make way for more profitable newcomers. One of the local free weekly papers (the kind born from the idealistic rebellious spirit of the 1960s that still hung on in the money-grubbing 1980s thanks to income from the sex ads in the back pages) decided that this sort of eviction by rent was exactly what was wrong with Boston, which it may or may not have been, and that they would fight back with a big article featuring the dingy little shop as an example of the rich local texture that was being stamped and smoothed out by the moneymen. The sour middle-aged couple was magically transformed into "valuable members of the community" and my heart sank when I read that because I knew what would happen: the shop proprietors would now insist on demonstrating their value to "the community" by hanging out in the doorway of their shop grimly shouting greetings at anyone walking by, which was going to include me every time I entered or left my apartment building.

I braced myself and muttered "hello" back at them for a while, because I was a well-behaved middle-class boy, but of course that didn't last too long because the thing about the inevitable happening is that though it might be slowed by high-minded and well-meaning protests, it does eventually, inevitably, happen. There were bigger social and economic forces at work here, and though I can understand fighting against them (personally, I don't shop at WalMart), I had neither the money nor the inclination to buy the nasty couple's overpriced shoddy merchandise. I'd have forgotten the whole thing within months if I hadn't been so irritated by the fakery of the media-invented and media-imposed claim of "community." The real-estate people: they were a community. They knew each other, banded together, shared the same views and the same approach to the world. The rest of us: we were just random people who coincidentally occupied the same blocks for a few years, because we all worked but we still didn't have enough money to live in a nicer part of town, and it was sentimental, and politically delusional, to see us as anything else.

This is a roundabout way of presenting the skeptical frame of mind in which I approached Tenderloin, the last play of Cutting Ball Theater's mainstage season. The play was written and directed by Annie Elias, based directly on extensive interviews with Tenderloin residents; seven actors (Tristan Cunningham, Siobhan Doherty, Rebecca Frank, Michael Kelly, Leigh Shaw, David Sinaiko, and David Westley Shipman) performed a wide variety of roles.

It was enjoyable, though surprisingly sentimental, by which I mean it kept insisting it was dealing in harsh reality while actually insulating us, keeping us several layers away, from anything truly harsh or alien to bourgeois theatergoers. Everyone featured is connected in some way with the pathology of the Tenderloin; we see clergy and social workers and lawyers, and impoverished, marginal people, but we don't see, for example, office workers who happen to live there because the rents are comparatively low given the convenient downtown location. We hear from a man who sneers at "the suburbs" and prefers the Tenderloin because it's - well, you know the whole nostalgie de la boue thing: reality is more real with poverty and drug abuse in it. Drug abuse is frequently mentioned, but we don't hear from actual drug addicts, let alone any drug dealers. One of the first stories we hear is from a woman who was in an abusive relationship with a man who hated the Tenderloin and insisted they go live in the Sunset District. The implication is clear that his choice of neighborhood is a moral failing, and she is saved when she moves back to the Tenderloin on her own. As with most of the stories we hear, she is presented as an innocent victim. I found myself wanting to hear from the man, who struck me as a more interesting, complicated, and threatening character: why did he hate the Tenderloin so much? how did he see this woman he claimed to love? how did he justify to himself his behavior to her?

Same thing with the drug users and dealers we never hear from: I can see the general path, but particularly when you're talking about notoriously destructive drugs like heroin, I'm genuinely curious why people think it's a good idea to give it a try. What stories do they tell themselves in justification? It's possible we won't get anything better than survival-of-the-fittest cliches, maybe copied third-hand from some "gritty" TV procedural, but that has its interest, particularly if someone else on stage is smart enough and media-savvy enough to call them on it. But the documentary-style method of this play doesn't really allow for a lot of cross-commentary. There is some, in particular some byplay between a burnt-out janitor fed up with the Tenderloin and a former beat cop who supports the legalization of drugs. But then there are scenes such as the Filipina social worker who has very methodical lectures filled with the sort of advice about the importance of faith and family and working hard and setting priorities that is both common-sensical and delusional, and I have no idea how her students take her advice: does it provide some helpful structure and inspiration? or is it just goodthink horseshit that has no relation to the world they actually have to live in?

The performers were not only uniformly strong; they were uniformly dazzling. Each played several roles, and just when I'd think someone was perfectly cast as a worldly-wise lawyer or stolid security guard she or he would change on a dime into a bubbly little child or a transsexual bartender. But in classic Brechtian style (and this is Cutting Ball Theater, so they must know this) the very brilliance of the performances kept me constantly aware that what we were seeing was a performance; we might hear about the drug-addled homeless covered in their own shit, but we weren't smelling it the way we could simply by walking through the nearby BART station; we're seeing sensitive, committed, very talented performers displaying their skills for our entertainment. Even the music was stylish; we got some Edith Piaf, but no one was under our window, or in the apartment next door, blasting hiphop while we were trying to sleep. (I'm not complaining about that, just noting it; I've been to way too many plays where the elderly/middle-aged and mostly white audience gets blasted with hiphop as a signifier of gritty urban realism, whereas everyone knows it's really just corporate music for suburban white teenage boys.)

There were framing scenes that did feature the sort of street crazy that people associate with the Tenderloin, but perhaps it was inevitable that we didn't hear from these people during the play (except for the actual ones who can be heard through the walls of the theater on the street outside, of course): it's inherent in this sort of interview-based documentary theater that it's going to favor the articulate and the reflective, and, to some extent, those with an emotionally complete story arc: even avant-garde audiences don't like to be left dangling. So we didn't hear from anyone strung out on drugs, or anyone engaged in criminal activities. We heard from ruefully wise older inhabitants who had suffered into life wisdom. They may have done some foolish things in their youth, but those days were past. We might hear passing references to being in jail or the army, but then we would get long and genuinely cute and charming stories about raising children in the neighborhood. It's all colorful and harmless. I was reminded several times of Damon Runyon, which I'm pretty sure was not the desired effect.

When the street crazies reappeared on stage at the end, did I see them differently from the way I had in the beginning? Not really. Was my opinion of the Tenderloin changed? Again, not really. Despite the sincerity and skill of the performers, there was nothing here I didn't already know, and nothing would be changed by our attending this show. When I got on the train afterward two bedraggled people, of the type associated with the Tenderloin, got in the same car with me. And I kept thinking they would get out, but they stayed on until I reached my town, and then they got out, because now more than ever "the Tenderloin" is everywhere. Did I look at them with more compassion after seeing the play? Once again, not really. I was already sort of helplessly compassionate towards people like them. But I will be honest and insist on pointing out that I would be far less compassionate if they, for instance, were screaming or spitting at me, or had a sickening smell, or were blasting crap music loudly from a radio. What is community? Where do we draw the line on what connects us to the rest of our grubby species? Cutting Ball is in the Tenderloin, but are any of the inhabitants portrayed here going to show up for their upcoming Strindberg cycle? Does the theater's location have any real meaning? Isn't it really just another example of the pervasive influence of real-estate prices?

ghost town

Saturday before last I headed out to Cutting Ball Theater for Tontlawald (The Ghost Forest). I got off at the Powell Street BART stop and walked through the Westfield Mall for a while. Normally I would avoid any mall, even an allegedly upscale one like the Westfield, on a Saturday night, but it's right there, and I had some time to kill before the theater opened. This might have been a miscalculation on my part, since the crackheads who gather in the vicinity of the Exit Stage Left generally ignore the random passers-by and leave them plenty of sidewalk space, whereas the shop-heads in the mall reminded me once again that I am apparently the only remaining person who will move out of the way for other people so that we don't collide (and I’m not even talking about those idiots who stroll straight on, their eyes glued to their stupid little electronic toys).

I had been wondering recently if I had been taking Cutting Ball a bit for granted – I’ve been going to their shows for almost their entire decade-plus of existence, and you get used to a certain level of things. But I was talking to NA, a theater habitué who hadn’t been to Cutting Ball much but who had gone to Pelleas and Melisande, and she was raving about how much the company had done in such a small space and how inventively and satisfyingly everything had been staged, and I thought, yes – her remark had brought me into a sudden state of awareness of something I already knew but had – not exactly forgotten, but had not kept fresh in my consciousness.

It all comes back to mindfulness, and awareness of the moment – walking so that you don’t collide with others, appreciating what you see: noticing. I know everyone talks about living in the moment blah blah blah but it’s actually a tricky thing, since the moment so often is one you wish would pass, which is an inevitable response but maybe not the best one possible. What do you notice? What do you dwell on (or in)? What do you remember? The days might drag but the years fly.

Live performance is to me a paradigm of the “awareness issue” and of how we try to live in the world – after the trouble and time and expense, among often uncomprehending and downright rude and stupid audiences, you still have the artists, giving of their essence to you. I’m speaking generally of the audience here; the full house for Tontlawald the night I went was completely silent and attentive, except for one idiot woman who kept giggling ostentatiously towards the end, apparently to show everyone that she “got it,” whatever "it" was. There's always someone who feels the need to giggle like that.

We were encouraged to read the original story beforehand. It took up only a half-page in the program, but I decided not to, since it’s fairly rare for me to see something where I don’t already know everything that’s going to happen. The play happens in a fragmentary and refracted way (though it was always clear to me what was going on). Oddly one effect of this fragmentation is that while you watch it in the moment you also feel as if you’re remembering the performance – individual moments spring out with dreamlike vividness the way they would when you thought about the performance later. These striking moments are achieved with the simplest effects, as when the protagonist, a girl named Lona, seems to walk on air – the actress is on one stool and then steps onto a second one while an actor moves the first stool in front of the second one, so that she continues to move smoothly from one to the other. (This was the moment that inexplicably produced giggles from that one person.)

Lona has a father, and a cruel stepmother, from whom she finds refuge in the forbidden Tontlawald – the ghost forest, an eerie realm, a place of the unearthly, of the imagination. It’s a place of make-believe and of awareness. It’s body, it’s breath, it’s theater. The back of the performing space is a wavy lattice of gleaming white ribbon (a portion of which is used to simple and stunning effect at the end, draped around Lona to effect her transformation into a bird). A similar white pattern is painted on the black floor. We also are enmeshed in the Tontlawald.

The play was co-directed by Paige Rogers and Annie Paladino. Laura Arrington did the movement, and Eugenie Chan wrote the text. I had not much liked Chan’s earlier work for Cutting Ball, but I loved her spare, evocative, and poetic script for this one. There is much beautiful and natural singing, with music that is familiar, or just sounds familiar – a snatch of the Magic Flute, old jazz songs. (It’s funny how even a passing lyrical “daddy-o” becomes resonant in the setting of this fairy-tale family.) There is occasional use of amplification, very deliberately done to distort or change the voices – it’s mindful amplification, which is very different from what we get in a lot of theater these days (yes, I’m thinking of the Berkeley Rep/Kneehigh Wild Bride – Tontlawald is what the Wild Bride should have been). One reason I prefer unamplified voices is that to me performing is very much about the body and what it can do unaided – I mean, I recognize that driving cars fast around a racetrack takes a lot of skill, but I don’t find it at all interesting to watch, the way I would humans or even horses racing around a track. Bodies even became musical instruments, as when the men stripped off their shirts and provided music by drumming on their chests and thighs. Like the rest of the performance, it was both very primitive and very sophisticated.

The whole ensemble is top-notch: Rebecca Frank, Sam Gibbs, Cindy Im, Marilet Martinez, Wiley Naman Strasser, Meg O’Connor, Liz Wand – and I particularly liked the dead-eyed nuance Madeline H.D. Brown brought to the stepmother.

Coincidentally, a few days before going to the performance I had been reading about the theories of the postwar Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski – basically, he thought that since theater could not compete with the spectacle and realism of the movies, it should move in the opposite direction: towards directness, simplicity, the use of the actor’s bodies (he expressed this as “poor” theater – theater stripped down to its essentials). I say that this was a coincidence since it turned out that Tontlawald was inspired by Grotowski’s theories. There are moments that reminded me of other avant-garde theater works – I thought of Beckett’s Not I, and the Stein/Thomson 4 Saints in 3 Acts, and suchlike – but Tontlawald feels like a coherent and moving whole, not at all like a compendium of art-house tricks. I was reminded not only of the long range of avant-garde theater, but of what exciting, exhilarating fun it can be. “That was certainly an experience,” I heard one audience member say at the end of the hour. It sure was.

Tontlawald runs through 11 March, though I hope it gets extended. It's a stunning performance. Get tickets here.

still music

Maurice Maeterlinck was one of those huge figures who went from omnipresence to obscurity in what seems like the blink of an eye. He’s best remembered for writing the play that ended up as the libretto of Debussy’s great opera, Pelleas et Melisande (though silent movie fans may also know Maurice Tourneur’s lovely 1918 film based on another play, The Blue Bird). Cutting Ball Theater has been presenting a rare opportunity to see Maeterlinck’s original play of Pelleas and Melisande. I went to one of the previews, several Sunday afternoons ago, during a suffocating hot spell, which is strange to remember now that it's so cold.

The story is pretty much as in the opera, though of course it’s not shaped by Debussy’s music. There is ambient music in this production, provided by Cliff Caruthers, which works very well towards helping to create the play’s dislocated atmosphere. Things are not quite what they seem, but not always in the way we think, and if that sounds a bit puzzling and obscurely meaningful, then you’re getting the picture. Rob Melrose, who also did the new translation of the play, sets the work on a long, stripped-down platform that runs down the middle of the theater, with seats banked on either side (not the usual configuration at this theater).

There are dark metal sheets hanging down splashed with pale green paint that conjures up leaves, or maybe moss in a cave, or streaked castle walls, though the medievalism is kept to a minimum, as are the props generally – the actors mime holding objects, and Melisande’s famously long hair is evoked and imagined rather than displayed; for the scene in which Pelleas hangs on to Melisande’s suddenly unloosened hair, the actors lie on the platform, which we now visualize as a vertical wall rather than a horizontal floor, and he reaches up towards where the hair would be, hanging on to what we imagine is there.

The costumes are mostly contemporary, but evocative of other times and places. Melisande’s costumes usually bare her arms, so she looks different from and fragile next to the other characters. Pelleas wears a dark ski vest with a row of trees subtly silhouetted across the bottom, over a dark green T-shirt (I actually sat there wondering where they’d gotten that shirt, which I really liked; it looked like something you could get from Eddie Bauer, but it also worked as a costume evoking the outdoors where he and Melisande meet).


There are lots of elements that seem obviously “symbolic” – the sun, the night, the sea, the caves, journeying, her hair, the ring she loses – but much is left suggestively unexplained, and the play’s power comes from the shifting meanings and general instability of the symbols, which always seem about to collapse into dream-land or other subconscious realms.

Obviously there’s a danger here of being overly precious and vague, which Melrose and the actors successfully avoid. As I’ve indicated, the more obviously fairy-tale or antique elements, though not eliminated, are handled so that the story doesn’t become merely picturesque or old-time storybookish. Caitlyn Louchard does an outstanding job suggesting the indrawn, haunted Melisande, without lapsing into annoying feyness; you feel Melisande is being as direct as she can be, or can allow herself to be.

But it was the performances of the brothers Golaud (Derek Fischer) and Pelleas (Jonathan Schell) that gave me a pleasant surprise because – I can’t think of any other way to put this – given the temptations of the material, they were surprisingly masculine. They could easily have been vaguely gauzy fairy-tale princes; these seemed like actual guys you might actually meet, struggling with love and jealousy and loss. Yet there was enough strangeness in them – a suggestion of willful blindness or hurtful sensitivity – to provide the instability as well as the strength the script calls for. (Among the rest of the cast I also particularly liked Paul Gerrior as Arkel, the ruler of exhausted wisdom.)

Maeterlinck supposedly lost favor when the theater turned towards “realism,” but this production made me ponder the slippery nature not just of "realism" but of reality. The performance is about an hour and forty minutes, with no intermission to break the mood, and the somber heat, heavy and suffocating and unusual for the time of year, began to seem like one of the play’s elements of definite but not quite definable significance. Heading home on the train afterwards, I was trapped in front of a man practically shouting into his cell phone, telling his friend over and over that Tricia had discovered photos that Tasha had taken of herself wearing one of Tricia’s nightgowns, posed on Tricia’s bed – which I assumed she shared with this man, but maybe not; it really wasn’t clear how the three were related – was Tasha an ex-lover? a daughter? a sister? Whatever was going on there, it was clear this man felt that what might in other circumstances be a minor incident (borrowing another woman's outfit, sitting on her bed) was in this case freighted with deep emotion and constituted a shocking betrayal. I was still under the spell of the performance, and this incident, right down to the strange similarity in the names of the two women, seemed like a forgotten episode from what I had just seen, and like a validation of Maeterlinck’s method.

The show runs through November 27, so you have a few more chances to catch it. Get tickets here.

buzz buzz

Maybe it’s the changing weather patterns that have increased my animal awareness of what the sky is doing, but a couple of Sundays ago I did cast a reluctant farewell glance at the soft and clear blue afternoon sky as I ducked into the Exit on Taylor for Josef and Karel Capek’s The Insect Play, the last of Cutting Ball Theater’s Hidden Classics readings for this season. Years ago I read Karel Capek’s fabulous novel War with the Newts. He also wrote several plays, some in collaboration with his brother Josef, including one that Janacek used as the basis for his great opera The Makropulos Case and one (R.U.R.) that gave us the word “robot.” So you can see the Capeks tend towards the Aesopian, the fantastic, the science-fictiony-satirical.

It was worth giving up a Sunday afternoon for The Insect Play, which is funny and beautiful and frightening. It starts with a drunken vagrant, who has clearly seen better days and a higher station, staggering in a wood where he runs into a Professor of Entomology (one little quibble here about the translation: at one point it has the Professor say “laying” when he should say “lying”; our contemporary standards for professors are no doubt lower than in early-twentieth century Prague, but it still jarred on my ear). The Vagrant then nods off and finds himself part of the insect world.

There are three segments exploring that world, sort of like the Divine Comedy in reverse, though even the paradise we start with isn’t exactly blessed. We are among the gilded fluttering butterflies, all of them scheming lovers or desperate poets. This is a very funny segment, full of elegant high-society bitchery and romantic maneuvering. The earnest poet butterfly is desperately in love, but mostly for the sake of producing poetry out of his manufactured anguish, much to the irritation of the female butterfly who is trying to entice him before she gets too old. (Her helpful friends keep up a stream of kindly comments on her age.) He goes from producing sort-of-Swinburne verse to a bold new style that is sort-of-Futurist. He’s thrilled, even if the other butterflies aren’t.

We go lower from this light world in the second segment, which is down among the middle- and working-class beetles, crickets, and flies, along with a chrysalis who keeps announcing vibrantly that she is “about to be born!” There are marital squabbles, lots of bickering about homes and possessions (especially the precious ball of dung the beetles have spent their lives accumulating), a world of constant struggle often ending in arbitrary death. The Vagrant observes these worlds and comments on them but is mostly outside of them, as he is of the human world.

The second realm, darker than the first but still funny, gives way to the inferno of the ants, a mechanized, corporate and militaristic world, which is horrifyingly funny in a dark way that kills the laughter in your throat as you watch the ants mindlessly marching to arbitrary orders inspired by slogans about the nation and God’s will that are still all too familiar.

During the second or third act, as I saw the play steadily getting darker and more horrifying, I started to think that the Capeks were going to have trouble ending it: ending with the ants would be utterly nihilistic, and also would leave the Vagrant’s story unfinished (kind of like the Christopher Sly prologue in The Taming of the Shrew). Anytime you cover as wide a territory as this play covers, there’s the urge to sum up something about life, its astonishing beauty and its often pointless suffering, which means, realistically, you’re often just rearranging banalities – sentiments that are banal because we all feel them to be so obviously true and significant. Sure enough, the epilogue runs on way too long; there were several points where I thought “now is obviously the perfect ending” only to get a new series of “ah, birth!/oh, death!” conversations, which are diluted through repetition (though perhaps the endless repetition of these basic moments of life is really the point after all). I would have regretted the loss of the Samuel-Beckettish snails, but trimming would have helped the epilogue, in my opinion.

But that’s a minor quibble. I was thrilled to discover a wonderful play I had never heard of, which is kind of the point of the Hidden Classics series. I can’t believe this play isn’t staged more often – it must be an incredibly fun play to design. As I watched it I kept thinking that it would make a terrific opera, something along the lines of The Cunning Little Vixen, with the different worlds offering the composer the opportunity to display so many different colors and moods.

The large cast was really good. B. Warden Lawlor was the Vagrant but the other actors, who generally played several parts, weren’t identified by role in the playbill, so here’s the mass ensemble: Molly Benson, Derek Fischer, Myron Freedman, Dimas Guardado, Paul Jennings, Damian Lanahan-Kalish, Sam Leichter, Annamaria Macleod, Sarah Moser, Chris Quintos, Paul Stout, Trish Tillman, Nathan Tucker, and Addie Ulrey. Bennet Fisher directed, obviously successfully.

Will Eno plays at the Cutting Ball

My earlier plans to see the Will Eno trilogy at The Cutting Ball had been derailed by sickness, so I finally got there last night. I had seen their earlier production of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and enjoyed it, though looking back at what I wrote about it I was apparently less convinced at the time. I think it was the comparison to Beckett that I found a bit off, though oddly I was reminded of Beckett last night, particularly during Lady Grey (in ever lower light) the first of the evening’s three short plays. I was also reminded of Thom Pain, and thought maybe the pieces were a bit too similar in mode, mood, and method, but apparently that was the author’s intention (see here for Marissabidilla’s reaction to an earlier performance and for her report of the talk-back with Eno in which he mentions this). In any case the other two plays (Intermission and Mr Theatre Comes Home Different) were different enough so that I could see he had more than one way of playing.

These plays are all about theater (or performance) in various ways, so the whole evening takes on a meta-theatrical cast that makes it difficult to tell sometimes if something is just happening or scripted to happen: when actor David Sinaiko introduced himself right before the show to audience members on the left, and then started introducing them to each other, was that part of the performance or not? It was pretty funny – “Hey, Chris! Look, here’s another Chris!” I was on the right so he did not speak to me. I did not feel excluded by this.

The first play starts with an empty chair in a bright pool of light, situated off-center, to the right (from the audience’s perspective). Lady Grey is the only character. She enters in darkness and when the lights go up she is off to the left; the chair remains empty until towards the end of the piece. Her monologue, like Thom Pain’s, jumps back and forth in time, returning to a traumatic childhood incident, to periods of severe but strange illness, to nature, and always to the awareness of being observed, to the nature of observation, and to the slippery nature of the words we use to define the things we try to say. Her story involves a school show-and-tell from her childhood, during which she stripped naked.

I’m assuming this is how she felt – naked, exposed, sort of baffled and humiliated. Perhaps I’m being too literal here but I can’t imagine a girl stripping for show-and-tell and not being stopped by the teacher well before she exposes her genitals (about which the boys ask her questions), even in the 1970s. It’s always interested me how people need to retain certain elements of reality in order to sustain a fantasy, and this particular incident (for me; others might feel differently) crossed over into the territory of the unreal, so I had to read it as emotional.

There is a hint that the girl had been sexually abused, but I find child sexual abuse as a plot device sort of hacky (overused and oversimplified), so I was glad it was only a hint. Danielle O’Hare was Lady Grey. It was an interesting performance; I often felt she was reciting (rather than embodying the character and saying things because that’s what Lady Grey would say) but that may have been a deliberate choice, heightening one’s awareness Brecht-style of the performance as a performance, which would fit with the play’s own refracted perspectives on performance.

Then there was a fairly useless intermission. The intermission was followed by Intermission, in which two couples during the intermission of a play called The Mayor, about a mayor dying in a hospital, end up in conversation. Danielle O’Hare returned as Jill, the younger woman, with her partner Jack (Galen Murphy-Hoffman). David Sinaiko and Gwyneth Richards play Mr and Mrs Smith, the older couple. It was a quartet of fine performances.

Sinaiko has been with the Cutting Ball from the early days (as have I, on the other side of the non-existent proscenium) and for a long time I felt his performances relied too much on sheer manic energy. But around the time they did Endgame (which was, honestly, one of the few times I have ever left a theater thinking, “that was perfect”) he started giving much more modulated, subtler performances. So it’s not meant as a criticism of him when I say I thought there was too much of Mr Smith.

Mr Smith is a somewhat cranky and condescending man, who lectures the younger couple on the moments that make up life and so forth. “How many intermissions will you sit through” was a line that struck home with me. His lengthy story about having his dog put to sleep did not. Friends and family members of mine have had this experience recently, and I know it’s very painful, and I am very sympathetic, but I am sympathizing with a friend’s pain rather than connecting with the particular situation, if you see what I mean. This might be clearer if I discussed my general feeling about dogs, but I think I’ll avoid that digression and just return to the play by saying I wanted more of the other characters, particularly the young couple.

I was very amused that Jack took his cell phone out several times, because of course that had just happened in our actual intermission – it had only been about thirty minutes since the cell phone reminder, people are sitting there with friends and partners, and yet they immediately pull out their phones to check messages. Is everyone waiting for a kidney or something?

But maybe I was just having a weird connection with the cell phone thing, the way I did with the dog thing. I couldn’t quite tell if we were meant to find Jack callow, and it was perhaps Murphy-Hoffman’s charm that made him otherwise – the amount of time given to Mr Smith lecturing him makes me think maybe we were meant to find Jack unsympathetic, but honestly I would have been rolling my eyes long before he did. I would have liked more about Jack, and also would have liked more from Jill, who clearly had powerful emotional reactions to the theater that she couldn’t or wouldn’t quite articulate.

There are poignant indications that the older couple has settled into the sort of semi-bickery comfortable familiarity in which they stop thinking about what the other one feels. The lines we hear from the play are hilarious parodies of an earnest drama about “issues.” I wanted more of all that and less of Mr Smith’s patronizing speeches about life and its representation, speeches which are true and beautiful (and therefore worth saying) but, frankly, not all that original or striking (and therefore not worth saying at such length).

Mr Theatre Comes Home Different, the final piece, was a scene for Mr Theater (David Sinaiko) who, in the space of about ten minutes, both conjures up and parodies the magic of theater – the creation of a whole outdoor setting just by speaking a few words about a forest, the attempted recreation of the outdoors by having stagehands toss fake snow from the rafters, the real creation of a Lear-like storm just by speech, the concentrated emotional intensity spun out of nothing but speech and belief. We go from farce to tragedy to love story to death scene in no time. It was a dazzling tour de force for Eno and Sinaiko.

The show runs for a couple more weeks and I’d recommend catching it if you can (check the Cutting Ball website for information). I do have to say that if the three plays were done without an intermission (which I would prefer) the performance would be slightly over an hour. It’s not that I felt I didn’t get my money’s worth (and besides, with their season membership I could go several times and get a reserved seat, so it’s a bargain). It’s that I get off work at 5:00 and the show doesn’t start until a bit after 8:00, so I had to kill slightly over three hours for a show that lasted only a third of that time. I find the Union Square area, a visitor-packed shopping district, fairly unpleasant to walk around in. And my one sure-fire refuge there is going; I realized last night that it’s not only the Borders in the Westfield Mall that’s closing, it’s the big store right off Union Square as well. It was, at least, a fairly congenial place to waste time before the theater opens. Oh, I bought some heavily discounted books (some plays by Aristophanes in a translation I didn’t have and Berryman’s Dream Songs, because I really need more books to read) but increasingly I wonder whether it’s really a good idea for me to squander that much time. Maybe if they’re not going to start earlier I will switch to Saturday shows; even getting to the theater insanely early will waste less time than wandering unproductively. I would do that for Cutting Ball shows, but I’m just less inclined these days to fit my schedule and preferences around theaters that don’t have their track record. This is all part of the meta-theatrical theme perhaps.

every woman adores a Fascist

Last Friday I went to the first performance of Eugenie Chan’s Diadem & Bone to Pick, just starting its run at Cutting Ball Theater. Bone to Pick had appeared a couple of years ago on a program with short plays by Gertrude Stein and Suzan-Lori Parks. I did not much like it (the reasons for my reaction are here, about halfway down). I decided to go to the revival because I was curious about the new accompanying play, Diadem, and how Bone to Pick would work in a new context. And I had bought a season pass, so basically I’d already paid for it. And I’m always open to the possibility that I’ll change my mind about something. I’ll put you out of your suspense right now: I didn’t change my mind. If you want to read something nice, you'll need to skip all the way down to the last paragraph.

When I first saw Bone to Pick, I felt that the author undercut the portrayal of Ria by making Theo such a crude fascist bully – it raises all sorts of questions about Ria herself that are never convincingly explored, if they’re even explored at all: What does it say about her that she’s attracted to someone like that? (Yes, he’s supposed to be hot, but everyone knows that personality affects our perception of physical appearance.) If she’s going to make comments all along about what a meathead he is, then isn’t she more complicit than he is in the trouble he causes? After all, he’s just following his nature, but she, as we are told repeatedly – the play could use some pruning – knows better. It seemed to me more effort was put into dumping all the blame on him and excusing her than on exploring the issues raised by the plot.

But then the plot and the psychology are both rather sketchy, and I wonder if the avant-garde, non-linear structure functioned as squid ink, helping to hide their basic incoherence. Even small details don’t add up: I can accept, if you’d like, a waitress who quotes King Lear (“vile jelly”), but it seems improbable that such a woman would also mispronounce “au jus” in a way that draws a laugh (a fairly cheap laugh, I think) from some of the audience. In fact, for all the fanciness of the linguistic structure, I couldn’t help noticing that what the audience seemed to respond to were jokes about cock (as in cocking a gun and, you know, cock) or the number 69 – the same sort of thing that would be laughed at by junior-high-schoolers who think they’re being sophisticated. And there’s a point where Theo hits Ria and threatens her with a gun – and moments later it just seems forgotten, and it doesn’t seem to affect her view of him. I've got to say, that must be one incredibly hot guy. Most women I know would harbor at least some slight resentment at having a gun pulled on them.

Theo is apparently some sort of soldier, or at least vigilante, but he’s not even brave, except when it comes to pushing around anything weaker than he is – he’s not even allowed the virtues of his faults, if you see what I mean. Couldn’t the playwright have been generous enough not to make him a coward, on top of his endless other bad qualities? Bernard Shaw was smart enough to give his capitalists valid arguments and plenty of good lines (he was also theatrically savvy enough to do so; it's always way too clear where the caricature that is Theo is going).

Theo is xenophobic and obsessed with guns and meat. There seems to be some attempt here at an allegory of contemporary American society, in which Theo and his “masculine” values are destructive and stupid and bad, while Ria, needless to say, is only guilty for loving him, almost against her will, in the good old Harlequin-romance way. If a nineteenth-century author talks about, and assigns values to, “masculine” and “feminine” traits (an obvious example is Das Ewig-Weibliche from the end of Faust), then I’ll make the cultural adjustment and see his or her point, but I’m not buying such a reductive and simplistic view of gender from a 21st-century author. If you think arrogance, stupidity, and violence are “male” values, do I really need to do more than gesture wearily towards the loathsome figure of Sarah Palin? And she is by no means an exception.

Imagine if the genders were reversed here: if a young male playwright wrote a solo work for actor, in which he, good-humored, stoic, appealing, hard-working, tells us about his girlfriend, who is stupid, shrill, vain, and shrewish, and he assists her in doing something really destructive but it’s not his fault at all because, you know, she has big tits and he really wants to bone her, and all along the way every reference to women is in some contemptuous, generic, cartoony way – do you really think anyone would buy that?

Diadem proved a good companion piece, since I felt Bone to Pick the first time around suffered by comparison with the Stein and Parks plays. Diadem also tells the story of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur, though in a more straightforward classical setting (or decoratively semi-classical, since there is plenty of evidence of modern times and contemporary sensibilities) and with more straightforward language – though even so, there are too many slips and self-indulgences; one example of a slip: Theseus is described as having “biceps rippling in the breeze,” which sounds like something out of SJ Perelman, because biceps can ripple, but not in a breeze (or even a strong wind, or a gale) the way something like water, or hair, or a flag can ripple in the breeze.

There’s a lot of more or less direct recitation of myth. About ten minutes in we were already hearing how the stupid men had killed and eaten Poseidon’s cattle, and I inwardly rolled my eyes, because it was clear we were going to get the same puerile “boys are icky” simplification of a rich and complicated subject (the subject in question being either mythology or gender relations). You know, I love the ocean (who doesn’t?), but I can’t claim to be a devout adherent of the god Poseidon, and I might spare some sympathy for half-starved sailors, anonymous and exhausted, who seized a chance for a rare decent meal, a respite in their rough and perilous lives. Sure, from the ancient Greek point of view, it was blasphemous, but Diadem isn’t exactly a faithful recreation of the classical experience. So why not bring in a perspective that isn’t about an extremely privileged woman (Ariadne is a princess, and a descendant of the gods) imposing her I’m-so-special priestess/goddess fantasies on the lower orders?

There are other examples, but it’s really not worth going on about them. I do not understand Cutting Ball’s commitment to this material. Though these plays make avant-garde gestures (the incantatory and collage-like nature of the language, the use of classical myth, the non-linear presentation), and Chan is not without talent, these plays strike me as hollow; the attempted richness and complexity of language are not matched by corresponding richness and complexity of thought and perception. It’s like seeing a spiky whorled shell on the beach but when you pick it up to examine it, it’s empty inside except for echoes. And unfortunately what it’s echoing is a view of women’s roles that is so smug, self-serving, and reductive that it’s barely worth the energy you’d spend arguing against it. If you’ve seen such stupid slogans as “girls rule, boys drool” that are sometimes marketed to the sillier junior-high girls, then you’ve basically seen these plays.

I will say, though: what I’ll call my lived experience in the theater was not that bad. No one was checking her cellphone during the second half, like the woman next to me at their last show; no one was kicking my seat or rear, like several women at several of their shows; the sets, sound, and lighting were all stylish and striking, in the Cutting Ball way. And Paige Rogers gave a virtuoso performance. My usual experience is that actors, no matter how skillful, can bring me through a piece once, and then the writing has to be there. But Paige held my interest even through my second viewing of Bone to Pick, which, I have to say, was a pretty awesome achievement, under the circumstances.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December

It’s sugarplum month, but we don’t need to let that stop us. There will be Christmas-tinged items on this list, but that’s hardly avoidable, even if I wanted to. I will proceed along my usual arbitrary and personal lines (no Nutcrackers, but the Hard Nut would be listed if it was being staged this year in these parts, which it isn’t being). There will be Messiahs! I know it’s one of the ultimate holiday chestnuts, but this is the season for chestnuts, and even though I should be tired of it I’m not. In fact I’m listening to it right now. Because I probably won’t make any of the live performances, due to conflicts beyond my control.

Thursday, December 2, the Pacific Film Archive, Paramount Theatre, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unite to present Carl Theodor Dreyer’s astounding 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, an oratorio inspired by the film. Information here. Go and marvel!

John Adams and El Nino return to the San Francisco Symphony December 2-4. Later in the month there’s a little more Adams and a lot more Messiah.

Philharmonia Baroque presents Messiah on December 3, 4, 5, and 7, in various locales as is their wont. And American Bach Soloists presents Messiah on December 16, 17, and 18. If the calendar or location don’t decide for you, you can compare casts and other relevant information: here for Philharmonia Baroque, here for American Bach Soloists, and here for the San Francisco Symphony.

Magnificat mixes it up by presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit, which uses old French carols as its basis, along with other seasonal music. December 17-19 in various locales; details here.

Berkeley Rep revives Mary Zimmerman’s fun production of The Arabian Nights, December 11-30.

Cutting Ball Theater extends its production of The Tempest to December 19 (my thoughts here, but in case you don't want to click through, it's a recommendation). And if you want more of the Elizabethans, Cutting Ball’s Hidden Classics Reading Series (which is free), has Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, on December 5. (Opera fans may know the play as the source for Richard Strauss’s Die Schweigsame Frau, though the opera is possibly done even less often than the play. I have actually seen the play staged, but never the opera.) By the way, can anyone explain to me why there is no good (that means affordable and scholarly yet meant for the public) complete edition of Jonson’s plays and masques? He must be fuming over how his rival Shakespeare has outstripped him.

I would be at Epicoene on the 5th if I didn’t already have a ticket for Elza van den Heever’s solo recital, presented by San Francisco Performances, part of their always worthwhile Young Masters series.

And Cal Performances has a full slate, including Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on December 4, and Nicholas Hodges on the 12th, with the Hammerklavier and Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X.

I have done nothing but in care of thee

Last night I went to the first performance of Cutting Ball Theater’s new production of The Tempest, directed by Rob Melrose. It is a three-actor chamber version, but it is in a sense a very traditional production, in that Shakespeare’s plays have always been altered and adjusted to fit the mood and means of the time. I think this basic malleability of theater is the reason (in addition of course to great poetry and deep characterization) that Shakespeare became enshrined as the English writer par excellence, rather than say Spenser, whom Shakespeare's contemporaries would probably have nominated for the post; great though it is, The Faerie Queene is always going to be an elaborate, many-stranded allegorical Renaissance epic, written in semi-archaic though gorgeous language in a strict stanza.

I shouldn’t give the impression that Cutting Ball’s production is an outrageous variation; by and large, if you wanted, it’s possible to see it as a fairly straightforward telling of the story, with the virtuoso twist of using only three actors. The central idea here is a triangle between Father, Daughter, and the Young Lover who takes her away from him, and in the opening and closing scenes Prospero is presented as a therapist and Miranda his patient, subject to both hypnotherapy and classic lie-on-the-couch talk therapy. The whole idea works surprisingly well, with surprisingly little alteration necessary to the play, particularly in the long back-story scene between Prospero and Miranda at the beginning, after the opening tempest, when he tells her who she is and how they came to the island; and it creates fascinating resonances among the characters and situations.

The idea of the father struggling to give up his control sheds an interesting light on some scenes; for example, when he denounces Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda, we can see that she is instead a willing participant, and the scene becomes about a father’s fear of (which includes his repressed fantasies about) his daughter’s growing sexual awareness, and how those feelings will lead her away from him. The advantage to using three actors is that as they become other characters, you see their basic situation in a new light: for instance, Ferdinand and Miranda are both losing their fathers, and when the father is played by the same actor, that brings the point home; when the father becomes Stephano, the drunken leader of Trinculo/Miranda and Caliban/Ferdinand, you get another lurid funhouse twist on the triangle.

David Sinaiko plays Prospero, Alonso, and Stephano; Caitlyn Louchard plays Miranda, Ariel, Gonzalo, Trinculo, and Sebastian; and Donell Hill plays Caliban, Ferdinand, and Antonio. Though occasionally, as I always do when I see Shakespeare performed, I wanted something a little more or a little different (perhaps a little more majesty from Prospero, a little more unworldliness from Ariel) I’m going to give all three a big compliment, which is that they speak the lines as if these were things the characters would actually say in this way, and as if they knew what they meant – many’s the Shakespeare performance I’ve heard where the actors have memorized the lines, and they come out sounding only like lines they’ve memorized. The performers distinguish clearly among the characters, using different voices as well as adjustments to their costumes (though perhaps they should rethink the short green tunic dress for Ariel, since it comes off as a bit Peter-Pan-like at times, and I think the use of an Italian accent for Alonso is a mistake; it sounds too much like a vaudeville funny voice and it raises the question why no one else from the same town has an accent).

Donell Hill is black, which lends an interesting resonance to his Ferdinand/Caliban function as The Other (as well as to moments like the one when he as Sebastian denounces Alonso for giving his daughter to an African and thereby losing her in that distant land). When Prospero says "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" he points to his own heart rather than to Caliban, to whom the line officially refers; it's an interesting twist and a nice example of the fluid identities among the characters, and it completes the father's process of giving his daughter away. I'm glad they avoided the recent fad of presenting Caliban as a representative of native victims of European imperialism. I’m not saying there’s no element of that, but as a through-line interpretation it just doesn’t work for me: for one thing, Caliban is clearly servile by nature, as evidenced by his ready submission to Stephano as his new master when he’s fed up with Prospero. He also (in the standard interpretation) tried to rape Miranda when she was a little girl, which I think we can all agree makes him basically unsympathetic, and he is lazy and can’t be trusted with liquor – for me the notion of Caliban as aborigine just gets too close to minstrel-show racist stereotypes to be considered true to Shakespeare or the character or the themes of the play. It seems obvious to me that Caliban is basically an earth spirit (in contrast to Ariel), so like the earth he is often dull, heavy, and dirty, though also capable of moments of astonishing beauty (the most famous example being his speech in Act 3, scene 2, "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises . . ." and ending "when I waked, I cried to dream again"). Shakespeare did that thing that makes him Shakespeare: he overwrote the part so that the richness of the character bursts through any thematic framework; and as with Shylock, the character has grown richer and more unanswerable with our current experience of history.

As usual with Cutting Ball, the set, the videos, and the ambient sounds are stylish and appealing. The raised stage looks like the bottom of a swimming pool, and there is a desk (holding the chess set and a model of a ship) and a couch such as you might find in a therapist’s office. The backdrop is a large engraving in the style of Dore of the sun setting over the ocean; surrounding that is a thick border of shiny silver foil. (Michael Locher is the set designer, Bessie Delucchi did the costumes, Heather Basarab the lighting, and Cliff Caruthers the sound.)

Personally, I’d much rather see an inventive take like this than a more straightforward production; nothing against such productions, but at this point in my theater-going (and my life with Shakespeare) I’m just not going to see a production of one of his plays where I think they’ve nailed everything. So I might as well spare myself the time and money and wait for shows that cast a different light on what I think I already know.

The movement of the play as an inner psychological struggle to allow one’s child (and her spirit, her Ariel) her freedom makes the effect of this production surprisingly elegiac; though The Tempest is often presented as Shakespeare’s farewell, this is the first time I really felt it that way.

The production runs through November 28 at the Cutting Ball's home stage, the Exit Stage Left.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October

Cal Performances gets things off to a terrific start with several west coast premieres from the Mark Morris Dance Group: Socrate, Looky, and Behemoth, September 30 to October 3. Jeremy Denk appears Sunday October 24, with a wonderful program: the Ligeti Etudes, Books 1 and 2, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And from the 26th to the 30th, Benjamin Bagby is performing Beowulf (with surtitles) in what the series brochure calls Anglo-Saxon – do they not call it Old English anymore? Ah, tempus fugit. . . They have a bunch of other interesting stuff as well, but that’s what I have tickets for so far.

San Francisco Performances presents the Takacs Quartet on October 9, playing Haydn, Bartok, and Beethoven. Again: they have other interesting stuff this month, but that’s what I have a ticket for so far.

Cutting Ball Theater starts its season with a Hidden Classics Reading Series presentation of Andromache, by Euripides, on Sunday October 3 at 1:00 p.m. (The Hidden Classics series has free admission.)

Between the Lines, directed by Nicole Paiement, presents Riding the Elevator into the Sky on October 9, featuring Chiaroscuro Azzurro by Laura Schwendinger with Wei He on violin and David Conte’s Sexton Songs, with Marnie Breckenridge, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 415-503-6275 for tickets.

Magnificat presents a rare opportunity to hear John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, 8-10 October, in a different location each night, so check out details on their website.

In further baroque developments, Philharmonia Baroque presents a variety of works by Bach, including the Wedding Cantata, the harpsichord concertos in D minor and D major, and the Orchestral Suite No. 1; October 15-19 in various locations, so check out details on their website.

The Beethoven 7 is perhaps my favorite of his symphonies, so I’m glad to see the San Francisco Symphony has it scheduled October 7-9, with some interesting accompanying pieces by Revueltas, Villa-Lobos, and Varese.

The Shotgun Players offer Mary Stuart, writer-director Mark Jackson's version of Schiller's play.

At the end of the month (starting October 22), Berkeley Rep starts its run of the three-part, twelve-playwright west coast premiere of The Great Game: Afghanistan.

And at the very end of the month, October 30 and 31, Urban Opera presents The Witch of Endor, a pasticcio version of Saul's visit to the witch of Endor (familiar from Handel's Saul, if not from The First Book of Samuel) based on music mostly by Purcell. The title role is sung by Shawnette Sulker, who was so good in Carter's A Mirror on Which to Dwell.

Re Krapp

Cutting Ball Theater is closing out its season with a revival of last year’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape, again starring Paul Gerrior as Krapp, with David Sinaiko on tape as the Voice of Krapp (a once up-to-the-moment technology that now looks, in further illustration of the play’s themes, so antiquated). Once again Rob Melrose directs (incidentally, Cutting Ball hasn’t formally announced next season’s schedule yet, but Rob gave me a quick preview, and they have some great stuff coming up; go to their website and join their mailing list).

I was at the first performance of the run, last Friday; the show plays until July 3. Go see it if you’re at all inclined to. One reason I went again is because this is my least favorite Beckett play, and I’ve never really connected to it, but I was piqued enough to give it another try. I still don’t quite connect with it, but I saw some aspects I hadn’t really seen before, and it’s difficult to imagine I could see a better production.

I re-read what I posted about it last year, and was amused to discover that reading myself a year later replicated in milder form the action of the play, in which we watch Krapp listen to himself thirty years before, his search for the remembered troubled by forgotten moments, jettisoned sentiments, and even words he’d forgotten the meaning of. (One thing I noticed more this time is the contrast in tone between the grander, more eloquent speech of the younger Krapp and that of the older Krapp, who combines a simplified and perhaps purified emotional life with the querulousness of an old man.) An aging man, trapped in his own head, dwelling on his passing life with confusion and longing . . . look, I already live that (I even repeat out loud random words with pleasing sounds, the way Krapp does). I go to the theater to escape from my head, not to hear more echoes.

And yet it’s also a bit too far away from my mundane existence – I can’t help feeling that in this play, Beckett verges on the sentimental. The fragments of life presented – a philosophical epiphany on a stormy waterfront, an old woman singing, an erotic reverie – are all too "poetic", and their texture too unvaried. Even the references to defecation (I assume that’s what all the banana-eating business is about, as well as what I’ve always felt is the way too obvious pun in Krapp’s name) take on a certain poignancy, and the antique charm of a ruin; and the reference to time wasted in public houses has a certain nostalgie de la boue glamour about it. It’s all too much the sort of thing you’d like to remember if you were an old man looking back on your life. Even his regrets are picturesque. Where’s the time lost and wasted in boring office work, the unpleasant commutes, dead-end relationships, and irritating romances? Where’s doing the laundry and the dishes and falling asleep when you’re trying to read because you’re just too tired and the daily little disappointments of life? Where's the stuff you'd rather not remember, but you can't help it because life is made up of so much of it?

There’s a truth about life to the play, but to me its effects feel a bit too calculated to be quite true to life. This is a short work (under an hour), but I think to avoid sentimentality this type of thing either needs to be even shorter or much more varied and contradictory in tone. I already know that the days may pass slowly but the years fly quickly.

So I think that’s why I don’t really connect with the play. It’s close enough to where I live so that I can’t help seeing that too much has been left out. (Maybe it's just too close to home? As I re-read this before hitting post, I'm less certain of my confident assertions about the play.) Would I go see it again? Sure. It’s Beckett, and when you love an artist you trust that even his possible failures are really your failures of perception, and someday you will be enriched by finally understanding their meaning. There’s a lovely moment when Krapp is listening to his tape and he slowly leans forward, head lowered, and embraces the machine that has preserved his younger voice in all its confidence and self-delusion. I hadn't really noticed that last time.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: June

San Francisco Opera closes out its season with La Fanciulla del West, Die Walkure, and Faust. Voigt and Licitra are in Fanciulla, with Luisotti conducting; Racette and Relyea are in Faust (I’m not familiar either with the Faust, Stefano Secco, or the conductors, Maurizio Benini and Giuseppe Finzi); and Stemme and Delavan are in Walkure, with Runnicles conducting. Walkure is of course the second part of Zambello’s American Ring, and though I had some reservations about the Rheingold, I’m curious to see how the “American” qualities are worked out. It will help me decide what to do about the Ring next year. In fact I’m still trying to figure out what to do about the rest of the Opera’s respectable but not particularly interesting season (not particularly interesting with the major exception of The Makropulos Case, with Mattila). But I ended up getting tickets to all three of these operas. I’m even mixing it up by sitting in the balcony for Faust. Make it new, children! as Wagner told us.

San Francisco Performances officially ended its season in May, but Yuja Wang’s recital was postponed for health reasons, so now that she is, I hope, fully recovered, she will be playing her previously announced program (Schubert/Liszt, Schumann, Scriabin, and Prokofiev) on the evening of Sunday, June 20.

Wang also appears with the San Francisco Symphony that same week, in a program including Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands (the other set of hands will belong to Michael Tilson Thomas, who is also conducting the program), the Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brazileiras No. 9, Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and two pieces by Stravinsky: the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra and The Rite of Spring. Sounds meaty!

June 10-13 the Symphony has the overture to the Flying Dutchman, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist James Ehnes, and Berg’s Lulu Suite with Erin Wall as the soprano soloist. The website notes on the concert bizarrely state that “Beethoven’s Violin Concerto proves there’s never too much of a good thing” and I have absolutely no idea what they mean by that in this context. Dada lives.

June 23-26 Tilson Thomas conducts an all-Berlioz evening, with the Roman Carnival Overture, Les Nuits d’Ete (with soloist Sasha Cooke), and Harold in Italy (featuring violist Jonathan Vinocour). This takes the place of the originally scheduled season closer, Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette.

The Berkeley Early Music Festival & Exhibition takes place June 6 to 13. Click here for the program listing; the Tenebrae Responsoria by Carlo Gesualdo performed by AVE and the Motets by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani performed by Magnificat look particularly tempting.

Cutting Ball Theater is reviving its production of Krapp’s Last Tape from last season. They also have two plays scheduled in their Hidden Classics Reading Series: Strindberg’s Storm, in a new translation by Paul Walsh, on June 13, and Goldoni’s The Antiquarian’s Family, in a new translation by Beatrice Basso on June 20.

So there you have the season coming to a close. Feel free to drop me a line if I’ve forgotten something.

. . . and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi

One of the things I like about Cutting Ball Theater is that, without making a big deal about it, they have a history of including plays about the African-American experience. They’ve done several by the wonderful Suzan-Lori Parks, and now we have Marcus Gardley’s . . .and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi. The tiny stage of the Cutting Ball expands to epic size with this rich, rewarding tale of the final days of the Civil War. It opens and closes with gospel music and the great river (Miss Ssippi, played by Nicole C. Julien, and her chorus of attendants, Rebecca Frank, Halili Knox, and Erica Richardson) speaking to us just as a river should: flowing, poetic, sometimes clotted and muddy, sometimes clear and limpid, sometimes imperious and indifferent, sometimes sheltering and cleansing. Yes, Julien and Co. have figured out how to play a river. Nature takes an active part in the proceedings; there’s also a tree, played by David Westley Skillman, who later is the hilariously deadpan, benevolent Jesus (though he gives Him compelling depth when he needs to).

Nature and the human world (because even though the play is filled with the sort of compelling language and poetic vision that is basic to the Cutting Ball mission, in between the gospel choruses and the river’s monologue there is a plot driving the evening, a melodramatic Faulknerian engine of loves, jealousies, masters, and slaves) combine in the key figure of Damascus, a slave who takes advantage of the chaos of war to run away; he is caught, castrated, and lynched. The Great Tree allows him to return to earth for two days to search for his missing daughter, only he must return as a woman, Demeter. As the name tells you, the story of Demeter and Persephone is referenced (and as the name Damascus tells you, there are Biblical references too). Aldo Billingslea is outstanding in the double role. He manages to lighten his voice and gestures delicately enough to convince us he is the woman Demeter, without mincing or exaggerating her into a caricature. He keeps his power both as Damascus and as Demeter.

Adding to the mix of the play are references to African-American folklore and theater, often in the lanky, canny person of Brer Bit (Martin F. Grizzell, Jr). The whole cast is strong (here are those I haven’t mentioned so far: Erika A. McCrary in the key role of Free Girl, David Sinaiko as Jean Verse, Sarah Mitchell as his wife Blanche Verse, Jeanette Harrison as their daughter Cadence Marie Verse, and Zac Shuman as Yankee Pot Roast) and they all have their moments. This is a play that would hold up over repeated viewings.

I'm giving this an enthusiastic recommendation, but here are the things I didn’t like: the use of a quilt as a map/metaphor, the whole thing about Demeter needing to find his daughter so that he can pass on his song or release the song inside her or something, and naming the daughter Poem (not sure if I’m spelling that as it should be, since they pronounce it more like “Po’ Em,” as in Poor Emily, but I’m just guessing there). Plays can work with such clunkingly obvious names as Poem, Free, Verse, etc (I’m thinking of Streetcar Named Desire, with its Belle Reve, Elysian Fields, and indeed the streetcar Desire, not to mention Everyman and the works of Jonson and the Restoration dramatists, though they of course use such names for comic effect), but I just find them . . . clunkingly obvious. As for the quilt and passing on the song, I have no philosophical objections; I just find those things trite and “inspirational” in kind of a hacky way. (V, who taught me how to quilt, once said as we were looking through piles of quilting books, all heavy with metaphor, that she wanted to write a book about quilts called They’re Really Just Bedcovers.) These threadbare moments aren’t really necessary: Demeter’s search makes both emotional and metaphorical sense without framing it in such obvious terms.

The other minor thing I disliked: Jesus really does, at one point, moonwalk the Mississippi. There are many moments of comedy and music and strangeness in the play that arise naturally; this felt shoehorned in. Many of the themes in the play – about gender, race, pop music and entertainment, even searching for a lost child – appear in grotesque form in Michael Jackson’s career. But the music from Thriller doesn't hold up next to the gospel songs that are woven through the rest of the play, and Jackson is a figure of such weirdness that his appearance, even as a reference, is more of a distraction than an illumination. But then I’ve never found Jackson of any interest as an entertainer, except as a cultural phenomenon/cautionary tale. Exploring his life would make a fascinating play, but a different one. I had the feeling that “Jesus moonwalking the Mississippi” was one of those haunting images around which the play began to crystallize; even though the work outgrew the image, it remained, a vestige. The musician who really hovered over the work for me was Richard Wagner; this play ends, as does the Ring, with a fire, a flood, and the ambiguous redemption of a new beginning.

It’s a terrific evening: go see it if you can. And for the first time in my last several visits to Cutting Ball Theater, I was not poked, prodded, kicked, or rudely discussed by either the women beside me or the guys behind me. It adds to the pleasures of the evening, not being abused like that.

Mothers of the Year, Classic-Style

For several years Cutting Ball Theater has had an enticing and free series of play readings, usually focusing on the obscure and rare, called The Hidden Classics. I finally managed to get to one of these, the Medea double-bill (Euripides followed by Seneca). I love these compare-and-contrast things. The cast was the same for both plays: Medea was Paige Rogers, Jason was Garth Petal, the Nurse was Lynne Soffer, Creon was Bennett Fisher, James Kierstead was the Tutor and the Messenger, Patrick Kelley and George Matan-Hester played the non-speaking sons, Mary Anne Cook, Mayra Gaeta, and Lindsay Cookson were the Chorus, and Paul Gerrior was Aegeus, who only appears in the Greek version. Amy Clare Tasker directed the Euripides and Rob Melrose directed the Seneca (Rob and Paige are the artistic directors of Cutting Ball).

It was a fascinating, absorbing, and frankly exhausting afternoon, even with a half-hour intermission with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres between the plays. (Those seats are kind of difficult to sit in for so long. Also: the woman behind me literally kicked me in the ass several times. Again I ask, what is wrong with you people? If your foot poked the person in front of you, wouldn’t you be extra careful next time you needed for some inexplicable reason to cross your legs, especially since he was so nice about it the first time? And that little pat on the shoulder doesn’t count. In fact it adds to the irritation. Sheesh.)

The reading was to be followed by a discussion of the two versions and a vote on which we preferred. I skipped the discussion and hence the vote; something about the woman in the back row going “woooo!” every time Medea scored a point persuaded me that I’d be better off heading into the sunset. I understand from Marissabidilla’s discussion of this afternoon that Euripides won. (Click here for her discussion of the Medeas, as well as of Phedre at ACT, which I’m going to get to further on in this entry, and here for her discussion of Seneca as the Roman Tarantino.) Though I agree with her comparison of the two, which can be summarized as Euripides is a playwright and Seneca a poet, I would have voted for Seneca mostly because of the novelty of obscurity, though I suspect if I’d sat through the discussion perversity would also have led me to favor the savage Roman. I was feeling pretty bloodthirsty myself. What with the ass-kicking, and the "Woooo!"ing.

My other reason for favoring Seneca was that the Latin Medea had more of the requisite ferocity. I loved Paige as Lady Macbeth so I know she can handle Medea, but the performance of the Euripides version was too anguished, too sympathetic, too much the way a normal woman would be. But Medea is not a normal woman, something quite a few audience members didn’t seem to grasp. We need to fear her, and to recognize that her actions, however solidly motivated, are fearful. Other characters refer to her ferocity and cunning, and even in her mock meekness you have to sense that glint in the eye and steel in the voice that tells you that she is terrible, implacable, furious. Otherwise why would everyone who knows her be so wary of a powerless woman? Her rejection doesn’t leave her heart-broken, it leaves her enraged to the point of murdering her own children.

Medea hesitates to kill them, because she is not an inhuman monster, but killing her children is her plan all along, she never seriously falters in her plan, and she does it out of hatred. She’s not like Norma, whose more generous and natural impulses cause her to change her mind about killing her children and eventually lead her to accept love (and death) rather than revenge. And she’s not like Margaret Garner, the so-called American Medea, because Garner acted out of love, to protect her children from a life of slavery. Medea acts out of cruelty and hatred. Yet the feeling seemed to be that she was perfectly justified, and if anyone was to blame, it was Jason.

Can we all maybe agree that murdering your own two children is perhaps a bit of an over-reaction to getting dumped? Yes, it was not a nice thing for Jason to do. Medea is justly angry and hurt. But isn’t it enough she kills his new bride, and her father, and burns their house to the ground? Euripides highlights everything that might make you take, if not a sympathetic view of Medea, at least an understanding one; but he was doing that in the face of a society that considered her simply evil and inhuman. We seem to have a society that considers her actions perfectly justified and even praise-worthy, at least judging from the “You Go, Girl!” vibe in the audience. (As noted by The Onion, women are now empowered by everything women do.) It is this same bizarre refusal to consider women morally responsible for their actions – which is a refusal to take women seriously as members of society – that undercut Bone to Pick, the Eugenie Chan monodrama Cutting Ball presented last year. It is ironic that everything Euripides designed to make his audience question itself led a contemporary audience not to question itself.

I was reminded of an interview with Fay Weldon that I read years ago, about her brilliant novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil: she said how odd she found it that people just accepted everything the protagonist did (as she destroys the husband who did her wrong, his mistress, and herself) instead of debating, as she thought they would, the point at which she went too far. (If this doesn’t make sense, it will if you read the novel, as you should, but at all costs avoid the crappy movie version with Meryl Streep and Roseanne, which omits about half of the book, the more interesting half.)

Perhaps this overly sympathetic portrayal was part of an attempt to differentiate the two Medeas, since their stories are essentially the same, though Seneca has many more long and elaborate speeches. The portrayal there, though still sympathetic to a degree, was of a more implacable woman. I found the Euripides performance fundamentally misconceived, but as noted quite a lot of the audience seemed to think murdering the children was just a particularly sassy comeback. (I did wonder if those audience members would have felt quite so comfortable about it if Medea had murdered two daughters instead of sons.)

Given this attitude, Jason, already a flawed and unheroic hero, had a losing battle for the audience’s favor, though Garth gave it his considerable best try. But when Jason points out to Medea that he’s given their children the great advantage of living in Greece, there was a lot of laughter, as if this were evidence of Jason’s smugness. But though there is some smugness there, it’s a valid point, as if an American were to make the same remark: yes, the country may be a mess, and tending downwards (do we finally have national health care yet?), but it’s a wealthier and more secure place to live than quite a few other places, and what’s silly and smug is pretending that doesn’t matter. When Medea justifies her earlier murders (of her younger brother, among others) by saying she did it out of love for Jason, I don't think we're supposed to accept that as an excuse. I think we're meant to take that as evidence that her emotions are selfish and uncontrolled. In other words, that the blame is hers for taking such actions, not primarily his for benefiting from them. If the audience is only taking one character's arguments seriously, it's missing the debate among irreconcilable and clashing points of view that is the essence of Greek tragedy.

I’d say the audience had a very naïve view of Medea, but the naivete may well be mine in taking the drama and the characters seriously. (But then, I’ve always felt that sophistication is really just another barrier between you and a genuine experience of theater; when you’re too busy sorting out which reaction will signify you as sophisticated, you can’t really have an honest reaction. Sophistication only exists in relation to other people.) It's not that these people weren't totally into Medea: one man told me he was pretty much a Medeahead, and was planning to watch the Lars von Trier version as sort of an after-party. Perhaps by now these stories have been so Freuded, Frazered, Junged, and Campbelled, so painted, performed, filmed, and sung, that we have reached a stage of Alexandrian decadence with them, where they have lost their primal strength and become exercises in style. What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?

Several days after the Medeas I went to the Geary Theater to see Phedre, “translated and adapted” from Racine’s play by Timberlake Wertenbaker. The single set featured metal columns whose hollow interiors were filled with writhing pipes, nicely suggestive of the twisted emotions right below the surface of the characters. The costumes were eighteenth-century in style, though the men’s sturdy brown garb was far too drab, especially for Hippolytus: he’s repeatedly described as proud, haughty, arrogant; to me, Jonathan Goad was more of a nice guy, suggestive of a semi-hunky suburban dad starting to go to seed, and far too contemporary. I had a similar problem with several of the actors, who were OK and appealing enough but just completely out of sync with Racine's style and story. One major exception was the Theseus of Tom McCamus, who commanded the stage appropriately; the show picked up when he showed up.

Seana McKenna as Phedre was fine, but after a while – the show was about two hours, with no intermission – I felt she needed a few more variations on the theme of how miserable her forbidden love for her stepson Hippolytus made her feel. This isn’t really McKenna’s fault, I think. The play has several strikes against it with a contemporary American audience: the subject matter, to start with. Far from shivering with the horrifying thrill of incest, we’re likely to think, meh . . . he’s not blood. It’s just a stepson, for Heaven’s sake! Haven’t we seen this dozens of times on Springer or even Oprah? What does forbidden love mean in our society, or more specifically, in our representations of society? We have a theater in which Albee can write a play about a man in love with a goat, and, though I found that play a huge disappointment, it is a serious play, and far from being shut down by the Vice Squad, it had a comfortable run entertaining the tourists on Broadway before heading out to a life of regional revivals. So I at least felt a little impatient with this woman mooning over her shocking love, and Racine didn’t do her (or us) any favors by moving any less-than-noble emotions to the wily servant Oenone (Roberta Maxwell), who in this version is the one who comes up with the scheme to slander Hippolytus, Potiphar’s-Wife-style.

The translation uses unrhymed lines shorter than Racine’s alexandrines, but the basic problem is that for all English-speaking audiences the paradigm for poetic theater, consciously or not, is of course Shakespeare, with his richness, his extravagance, his range, his sublimity and his vulgarity. Racine is just going to seem flatter and tinier to us, because his power comes from the untranslatable contrast between the precision and control of language and form and the wild emotions expressed therein. An English-language equivalent might be something like the poetry of Housman, whose power comes from the sense that only his very tight, regular, and formal structures can keep his deep emotions from slopping out into incoherent throbbing. (That, incidentally, is why I almost always dislike musical settings of Housman; the music for me adds a disruptive and unnecessary third element that upsets the balance.)

You can hear at least one surviving recording, just a couple of minutes long, of Bernhardt as Phedre, which of course was one of her great triumphs. Even through the surface noise you can hear a combination of fever and formality. But she was coming from a theater that valued grand gestures and symphonic vocalism and that was still stylized in some of the ways in which Racine’s theater was stylized. We are very far from that.

I don’t regret seeing the play, because how many chances am I going to get? (Though I do have some regrets about the cost.) But I also can’t say I was thrilled by it, or discovered something I hadn’t already known or felt. The whole thing was disappointingly middle-of-the-road. The story, so basic yet so remote from anything we find tragic or shocking, and the formal, elevated style the play requires, called out for something extreme to wake us to whatever power they might still have over us: darken the stage, light the actors with spotlights or flashlights, strip the actors down and make their language standard contemporary prose. Or have the actors use highly stylized gestures, speak in rhyme and formal cadence, make the stage an explosion of expressive color. Put Hippolytus in a golden loincloth and Phedre in buskins and a towering crown. Go ahead and have a man play Phedre, in homage to the Greek tragic theater and to the camp attitude that many take to these works. Sure, there will be some inappropriate laughter, but there is now anyway (and camp versions of Greek tragedy can be both very funny and strangely powerful). To put it another way: go Noh, go Kabuki, or go home.

(The photographs are all from the Graeco-Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My other picture of the Maenad at top is here, and you can click through at that entry to see Lisa's photo of the entire statue. The second and third pictures are different shots of the same statue, which is of Artemis if I'm remembering correctly. The fourth picture is a fragment of Hera, again if I'm remembering correctly.)