The Morning After . . .

Review: The Seafarer @ The Jungle Theater

November 14, 2009

The literature on the subject seems fairly clear: negotiating with the devil is a bad idea. The devil holds all the good cards—infinite time, supernatural...
The literature on the subject seems fairly clear: negotiating with the devil is a bad idea. The devil holds all the good cards—infinite time, supernatural powers, all sorts of sinful temptations—and human will is notoriously weak, so the devil usually gets what he’s after.

And yet, people continue to make deals with the devil all the time, typically when they are at the lowest, most desperate point in their lives. That’s when the devil shows up and offers his stock deal: I’ll get you out of this mess in exchange for your immortal soul. Once out of trouble, the people in deal-with-the-devil stories always conveniently forget they ever struck such a bargain—until the devil comes to collect, at which point they start negotiating again. And so it goes, until the sad human’s soul is bubbling in the hot fry vats of hell.

Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer offers an entertaining twist on the devil-has-come-to-collect narrative. The action takes place on Christmas Eve in the flat of an Irishman, Richard (played by Allen Hamilton), whose brother Sharky (Stephen Yoakam) has come to visit for the holidays. A friend stops by to play some poker and brings with him a well-dressed gentleman, Mr. Lockhart (Phil Kilbourne), who turns out to be the devil, and he’s come to collect on a debt. Turns out Sharky, in exchange for a favor twenty-five years earlier, agreed to let the devil play a hand of poker for Sharky’s soul at some point down the road—and that time has come.

Why the devil needs to play such games with people I don’t know. But I do know that if I were playing a winner-take-all hand of poker with the devil for my immortal soul, I would not let the devil deal. Those details aside, what saves The Seafarer from becoming just another devil-gets-his-due story is that it would be an engaging play full of entertaining banter even if the devil hadn’t come to the party. These guys are all hard-core Irishmen, blokes who are far more dedicated to liquor and laughter than they are to their wives. The proof: How many men do you know who play poker with their buddies on Christmas Eve? And the drunker they get, the more eloquent they become, especially Allen Hamilton as the bellicose romantic Richard, who is blind, half-crippled, and frequently hilarious, especially when he’s feeling “all Christmas-y” or leading the charge to chase away the “winos” and “hobos” who are constantly fouling his doorstep.

This is a Jungle Theater production, so the set is marvelous—or as marvelous as a dumpy apartment piled high with assorted junk can be—and the acting is first-rate. It’s not easy to make casual conversation between characters who have known each other forever seem natural, but every moment of this play feels as if you’re peeking in on the lives of Richard and Sharky and friends—lives that are unspectacular in every respect, save for the volume and duration of their drinking bouts. Also, the play is not without a gentle whiff of the Christmas spirit, so while it’s not exactly a holiday play, it is a play worth seeing during the holidays. It’s not the Nutcracker or A Christmas Carol, certainly, and for that alone we can all be thankful.

The Seafarer continues at The Jungle Theater through Dec. 20.

]]>

Review: The Sense of What Should Be @ The Playwrights' Center

November 9, 2009

The idea that comic books might provide more useful information than religion for navigating the modern world is a promising one. After all, during the...
The idea that comic books might provide more useful information than religion for navigating the modern world is a promising one. After all, during the Bush administration we were fighting the “axis of evil” and attempting to rid the world of “bad guys” like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And adapting comic-book stories for other mediums has worked well in movies (Batman/Spiderman/Superman franchises, Sin City, X-Men, Watchmen, et cetera) and on television (Smallville, Heroes).

In the Workhaus Collective’s The Sense of What Should Be at the Playwrights’ Center, playwright/director Dominic Orlando is attempting to do something similar on the theatrical stage—by creating a play based loosely on a comic-book plot. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more difficult to achieve a comic-style suspension of disbelief in a live setting, and the play itself feels trapped somewhere between a teen revenge fantasy and a parable about the evils of young people with just enough information to be dangerous.

Dylan Frederick plays Adam, a 16-year-old super-nerd who is frustrated by his lack of power in the conventional world and turns to comic books for inspiration (since all the great superheroes are nerds at heart). “Knowledge is power” is Adam’s mantra, so he spends his free time gathering as much knowledge as he can. Adam isn’t after book knowledge, though. He’s interested in the sort of information he can use to blackmail the prettiest girl in school into dating him and do battle with the evil forces of suburban conformity. To accomplish this, he convinces a disgraced minister (John Middleton) to share some of the secrets he has heard in confession—information Adam swiftly employs as his secret weapon.

All of which is great, as far as it goes—but this is one of those plays that doesn’t go far enough in some directions, and goes way too far down too many other, less desirable roads. In fact, the first act of The Sense of What Should Be contains an intriguing set-up and introduces the provocative possibility that comic-book justice may be more satisfying and effective than real-world justice. It doesn’t happen, though. There’s also quite a bit of banter about religion’s relevance or lack thereof in the contemporary world, leading one to believe that the play is going to explore the potential usefulness of comics as a guide for understanding a world that has essentially devolved into a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. But no, that doesn’t happen either.

What does happen is a thinly motivated scheme to take over the local hydro-electric dam and hold the city ransom for $10 million in diamonds as “revenge” against the mayor and his stupid-jock son, who dates Marie, the girl Adam fancies. It’s straight comic-book fare, and is supposed to be funny, but when the protagonists don superhero costumes at the dam, things begin to fall apart both literally and figuratively. Which is a shame, because somewhere in this boy-genius-meets-minister-with-an-axe-to-grind tale is an interesting, entertaining play about, well . . . something.

Dylan Frederick plays a great nerd throughout, and he gets some fine support from Joanna Harmon as Marie, the high-school girl he pines for, and Daniel Jimenez as Derek, her boyfriend. But it’s not enough to save the play from itself. In the program notes, writer/director Dominic Orlando writes, "The Sense of What Should Be is about what happens when comic books and pop culture are valued as much as—maybe more than—the Bhagavad Gita and The Bible, for example.” And maybe it is, but it’s not much fun to watch Goliath beat up on David, which essentially what happens when the dominant socio-cultural paradigm comes out on top against a kid with a dream. It’s not like Andy wants to fly; he just wants the pretty girl to notice him.

The Sense of What Should Be continues at the Playwrights' Center through Nov. 21.

]]>

My Monster @ Bryant-Lake Bowl

November 4, 2009

Tuesday night is arguably the deadest entertainment evening of the week, but you have to hand it to Bryant-Lake Bowl for bucking the tide and...
Last night I stopped in to check out a staged reading of My Monster, a play written and performed by Bill Corbett and Joseph Scrimshaw. It was raining, and I could have stayed home to watch the pilot of that new TV series, V, about a supposedly friendly alien invasion, but instead I was persuaded to drag my lazy butt off the couch and head over to BLB. And I’m glad I did, because I laughed more in an hour there than I have in the past year watching so-called “comedy” on television—from 30 Rock and The Office to Leno, Letterman, Conan, and SNL. Colbert is a step up, but I got home in plenty of time to see both him and John Stewart—and frankly, neither was as funny last night as Corbett and Scrimshaw.

Staged readings are an acquired taste, but they can sometimes be more fun than a full-blown production simply because the rules are looser and the expectations lower. My Monster is perfect for this sort of presentation because it’s practically written as a staged reading. In fact, Corbett and Scrimshaw are tuning the script up before performing it in January at San Francisco’s SketchFest, a three-week orgy of comedy that everyone who’s anyone in American comedy has participated in at one time or another.

In My Monster, Corbett plays a pompous version of himself as a successful screenwriter delivering a lecture (or rather, sharing the “lightning energy” of his brilliant mind) on how to create a compelling Hollywood screenplay, starting with the creation of a compelling character. Scrimshaw plays the “character,” who, after his personality has been fleshed out—screenwriter by day, paid assassin by night, drinker of Martini and Rossi Asti Spumante (for product placement purposes), excellent puncher, lover of women, vampire fighter extraordinaire—starts questioning Corbett, the screenwriter “God,” about his character’s motivations and moral code. Having created this “monster,” a character who challenges his screenwriting genius, Corbett must now figure out a way to get rid of him—by either deleting him or rewriting him.

Paraphrasing doesn’t do it much justice, I’ll admit. Suffice it to say that My Monster is hilarious, and I’ll be curious to see how it does in competition with the nation’s best in SF.

In the meantime, BLB has plenty of other interesting stuff going on. Tonight (Wed., Nov. 4) it’s The Works, an interesting forum for writers and poets who want to share aspects of the writing craft in short, informal presentations. Hosted by our own Lightsey Darst, tonight’s program features Emily Warn and Peter O’Leary on “Poetry and Religion: In Praise of Naming and Listmaking,” and Jim Rogers on “The Writer in the Graveyard.” I’ve been to a couple of these events, and even though the subject matter might sound a little obtuse, the presentations themselves can be surprisingly thought-provoking, precisely because they are about aspects of writing that may have never crossed your mind.

Tomorrow night, there’s another installment of the Reel Jazz Film series, featuring a documentary by filmmaker Katja Duregger about gay/HIV-positive pianist Fred Hersch—called Let Yourself Go: The Lives of Fred Hersch. And this weekend, don’t miss Hardcover Theater’s new play, She: Immortal Witch Queen of the Lost World, a company-created piece that combines various books in the “lost world” genre, including Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

I could go on, but, as I said before, there’s something interesting happening at BLB almost every night (here's the schedule). If you haven’t been lately, maybe it’s time to get off the couch and let the DVR do its work. Tonight I’m going to watch that episode of V, but my guess is that it’s not going to be quite as entertaining as last night’s trip to BLB.

]]>

Review: Faith Healer @ The Guthrie

October 25, 2009

As most of you must know by now, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer marks quite a few firsts. It’s the first time Guthrie artistic director Joe...
As most of you must know by now, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer marks quite a few firsts. It’s the first time Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling has cast himself in a title role, the first time he has both directed and acted in a Guthrie play, and the first time he has dusted off his acting chops in more than twenty years.

The obvious question everyone wants answered is whether Dowling is any good? And the answer is yes, he does a fine job in his role as Francis Hardy, a faith healer who spent his life traveling from village to village in Scotland and Wales, occasionally performing minor miracles for sufferers of various ailments and disabilities. However, in pairing himself with Sally Wingert and Raye Birk, two of the Guthrie’s most dynamic actors, Dowling has set the bar for himself extraordinarily high. And by the time Sally Wingert is half-way through her monologue, it honestly doesn’t matter how effective Dowling’s turn onstage was. (The play is told in four long monologues—the opening one by Francis Hardy (Dowling), the second by Gracie, Hardy’s wife (Wingert), the third by Teddy, Frank’s manager (Birk), and the closing one by Frank again.) The way this play works, Dowling tees it up, Wingert cocks the bat, and Birk hits it out of the park.

Such monologue plays are difficult to pull off because very little of the action happens onstage; most everything happens in the audience’s imagination. The actor is just a storyteller, and the strength of the thing rests on the power of the tale, the music of the language, and the skill of the teller. Each character recounts the same key episodes in their twenty-year association together, but each has a slightly different interpretation of events. As Frank Hardy, Dowling has the hardest job, since he must set the stage for the stories to come.

The tale they all tell involves Frank’s strange “gift” as a healer, the circumstances surrounding Gracie’s stillborn baby, and a chain of events that eventually leads to Frank’s murder and Gracie’s suicide. As skilled as they are, the monologues by Dowling and Wingert are so melancholy and depressing that they can be a bit tedious, but the payoff comes when Raye Birk takes the stage as Teddy, who recounts several humorous episodes of his days as a manager, including one about a whippet (yes, a dog) that could play the bagpipes. Teddy is a flamboyant character who wears a red velvet housecoat and bowtie and loves exclaiming the word “fantastic!” Having already heard two different versions of the events Teddy is discussing, including two different assessments of his own role in those events, Teddy’s revisions are hilarious—and as he gets to the sadder parts of his tale, the humor makes them that much more poignant.

The beauty of this play resides primarily in the evocative lyricism of the language and the ability of each actor to paint the same basic chain of events with a completely different brush. The play is performed in the McGuire Proscenium, but it is such an intimate play that the Dowling Studio would probably have been a more effective space. It is also an “actor’s” play, in that on any given night Frank Hardy never knows if he will be able to “perform” a miracle, which is the same situation all artists face, whether they are an actor facing a new audience each night, a painter facing a blank piece of canvas—or, it must be said, an artistic director planning a season of plays. Kudos to Dowling for accepting the challenge, and for proving that more than mere faith is behind his success at the helm of the Guthrie. There’s a little skill involved too.

Faith Healer continues at the Guthrie Theater through Dec. 6.

]]>

Review: Ruined @ Mixed Blood Theatre

October 18, 2009

You know things are going badly when working at a whorehouse represents a step up in your living situation. But it beats being gang-raped by...]]> You know things are going badly when working at a whorehouse represents a step up in your living situation. But it beats being gang-raped by soldiers for five months, or having your uterus split open with a bayonet, which is the fate suffered by Salima and Sophie (respectively), two young Congalese women caught in the crossfire of a civil war that is tearing their country apart.

But at least they’re alive, and at the beginning of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined—which won this year’s Pulitzer, Obie, and Drama Desk Awards for Best Play, and is receiving an impressive, finely acted staging at Mixed Blood Theatre—the women are sold to a brothel by Sophie’s uncle, an itinerant salesman who knows exactly how bad things are: bad enough that he has to sell his niece to a madame for protection.

The proprietor of the brothel is Mama (played by Regina Williams), a strong, saucy force of a woman who is all business on the surface, but has compassion for the women who work for her, especially Sophie (Celeste Jones). Sophie is “ruined” for sex, but she is smart and can sing, and eventually finds her niche as the business’s bookkeeper and late-night singer. Each night, when the soldiers and miners make their way to Mama’s for respite from days spent digging and shooting, Sophie soothes the savage soldiers by singing romantic love songs. The periodic rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire doesn’t stop her, or anyone else, because in this particular jungle the sound of an AK-47 is as common as the chirping of crickets.

A great deal of barbarity is alluded to in this play, but most of it occurs offstage, in the world beyond Mama’s Place. Her little shack in the jungle is the last outpost of civilization in this war-torn hellhole of a country. It’s the only place where at least a few rules still apply (Mama insists that soldiers check their bullets at the door), and some forms of pleasure—beer, sex, music, conversation—are still available. That, and she’s got the only pool table around. Mama survives by not taking sides (“Who will win? Who the hell cares?” she says), by treating soldiers on each side equally, and by making sure that her girls give her guests what they want. Superior customer service is the price the girls pay for protection and survival.

Regina Williams is marvelous as Mama. She sways and struts through her establishment, letting everyone know she’s in charge, and she’s quick to bark at anyone who dares defy her rules. But the real accomplishment of this production is that it so effectively reproduces the microcosm of insanity that exists under Mama’s roof and stretches out into the terrifying jungle beyond. The eleven-person cast is relatively large, but it has the feel of an ensemble that has worked together for years, which is a credit to Aditi Kapil's direction as well as the raw talent onstage, including Bruce Young, Ericka Ratcliffe, Paul Meshajian, Irungu Mutu, and Gavin Lawrence. The set, too, is superb.

As plays go, Ruined is fairly conventional (it’s essentially a one-room drama told in three acts), but the subject matter is timely and Mama’s complex survival strategy has enough layers and dimensions to make her place a serviceable metaphor for any country where civilization has broken down and good people are caught in the crossfire (Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, Darfur—take your pick). Allusions are made to the politics of diamond and copper, two of Congo’s richest natural resources, but understanding the politics isn’t necessary, because no one—not even the fighters—understands it completely. It’s more important to recognize that the fighting is not about nothing—it’s about the usual things: money and power—and that the social breakdown caused by the war has led to an environment of almost unthinkable barbarity. Inside Mama’s Place, the dynamic is reversed—here it’s about poverty and powerlessness, and good people doing what’s necessary to survive in a country where pretty much everything is ruined. The morality of it is disgusting, but it makes for some effective drama. Mixed Blood’s production is the first in the country after its prize-winning run in New York, and it's the meatiest, most engrossing play to hit a local stage in a while.

Ruined continues at Mixed Blood Theatre through Nov. 22.