"Giant Bones": A Magical Night at the Theater

On Friday night I went to see Giant Bones, the world premiere play based on a book of short stories by Peter S. Beagle, as adapted and directed by Stuart Bousel. (Disclosure: Stuart is a mover and shaker in the SF theater community and an acquaintance of mine, so I'm writing about this show because I want to support my friends, not because I fancy myself an objective theater critic.) Rumor has it that Beagle was convinced that no one could successfully adapt his stories into a coherent work of theater, then read Stuart's script and was absolutely floored! He lives in Oakland now, and lent his support and guidance to the production.

Stuart's brilliant idea was to use the old device of a play-within-a-play to tell multiple stories in one evening. When we watch Giant Bones, we are ostensibly watching a performance by the "Jiril's Players," a traveling theater troupe in some medieval-ish fantasy kingdom. In Act I, the Players perform three different fairy-tale-like stories, and we also get to eavesdrop on some of their backstage goings-on. In Act II, the Players enact their own story, telling how they lost their royal patronage and were forced out on the road.

My parents were in town this weekend, so they were my theatergoing companions at Giant Bones, and they both really enjoyed it--even my mom, who normally hates anything fantasy or sci-fi. But, as I said, the stories in Act I are mostly in the vein of fairy tales, the kinds of stories that we all enjoyed as children: wizards, wicked tyrants, talking fish, tribes of giants. And the story in Act II, being a tale of political intrigue and courtiers' maneuverings, doesn't involve any magical elements at all. Instead, it becomes a moving parable about the power of theater and how it can be used and abused. I know, there are a lot of plays about plays out there, and sometimes it can seem like an overdone topic. But not when it is really well done--written, staged and performed by people who truly do know and love the power of theater--the way that Giant Bones is.

The Jiril is played by the commanding Jay Smith, and his Players are a troupe of nine talented actors who easily take on multiple parts. I especially liked Jessica Rudholm's expressive use of gesture in her role as a wicked queen, and Rik Lopes' self-assurance in the role of Dardis, the manager and star actor of the theater troupe. Kai Morrison amuses as he plays an assortment of villains, and also composed the song that opens Act II.

Giant Bones continues at the Exit Theater through June 19. As an added perk, everyone who attends the performance will receive (in a few months) a special limited-edition copy of Beagle's book Giant Bones. Amazing! I've never attended any other theater production that offered such a special tie-in souvenir--and believe me, this play has made me curious to read the rest of Beagle's stories!

Here is a promo video where Stuart and some of the cast discuss their work on this production. Congrats to them!

The Secret of Theatrical Success

"The secret of theatrical success is this: you must set a decoy at the door so that part of your audience can amuse themselves there while the rest are inside. Shakespeare, Molière, and the profound Chaplin know this well."

--Jean Cocteau, preface to Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel

Keeping it Cagey

Huzzah, the busy season at my job is now over, so I'm looking forward to having my life back... but I will not necessarily return to blogging at my old compulsive pace. I have a lot of plans these days--plays I want to write! and translate! and adapt! and help my friends produce!--so I think I might be better served by concentrating on these projects, and not feel like I need to constantly generate ideas for new blog posts. Of course, I hope very much that these other projects of mine will come to fruition, and if they pan out, I'll certainly let you know what's going on with them! But until they become something more than just a glimmer in my eye, I feel it's better to be a little cagey about what I'm plotting...

Also, my old rule for writing about theater on my blog was that I had to be careful when writing about contemporary/living playwrights, but dead/classic writers were fair game. (And yes, I know that several times I violated my rule about not criticizing contemporary writers... but I always thought hard before I did it.) However, now that I am on a committee that curates a reading series of "hidden classic" plays, I've got to be circumspect when writing about older plays and playwrights, too! Now, when I read a play that I think has been unfairly overlooked, and I want to call attention to it, I shouldn't do it by writing a blog post... first I should bring it to the attention of my fellow committee members and try to persuade them to include it in our reading series! And I don't want you to be able to guess what Hidden Classics we will produce merely by an astute perusal of my blog. In a couple of months, we should be ready to announce the 2010-2011 lineup of Hidden Classics, but for now, mum's the word...

The Short-Play Crash Course

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that one of my priorities, these days, is to amass a good portfolio of short plays, because that's the way to get noticed as a young writer in this town. Trouble is, I've never been particularly good at writing one-acts. Indeed, I am not even sure what makes a good one-act--what do other people look for in short plays? What do I look for in them? Most of the time, when I read or see plays, I'm reading or seeing full-lengths... I just don't have enough familiarity and comfort with the short form!

So I am trying to give myself a crash course in writing short plays. And a big part of this is going to involve frequent attendance at "ShortLived," "the nation's largest audience-judged playwriting competition," which is going on right now, sponsored by PianoFight Productions. Every two weeks, a new slate of one-act plays is produced, and the audience votes for their favorites. The top vote-getters survive until the next round; the rest are eliminated.

What better way to learn about the one-act form: to see a variety of plays, learn what works and what doesn't, and most importantly, see what the audience responds to?

I have some playwright friends whose plays will be produced in ShortLived, and I want to see their works and cheer them on, but that's not my primary reason for attending. And I'll probably run into some people I know in the audience, but I haven't actually made any plans to go to these shows with friends. I'm not there to be convivial, or to be entertained--though of course I will be grateful if I end up having an awesomely fun time. Primarily, I will be there to learn, and observe, and improve my own craft.

I know I sound a bit grim and calculating, when I put it like that. But I have always heard it said--and believed it, too--that the best way to learn is by doing, and by exposing yourself to as many differet facets of an experience as possible.

A long time ago I read a sci-fi novel called The Diamond Age, and I don't remember it very well, but one element of it has stuck with me. The book is set 200 years in the future, where the most popular form of entertainment is virtual-reality interactive movies, called "ractives," and one of the characters in the novel wants to become a professional "ractor." (Some of the roles in these virtual-reality environments are taken by paying customers, average Joes, and the others are taken by professional performers.) She trains herself in the art of "racting": every night, after working a boring day job, she spends some money and takes a role in a ractive. But she doesn't spring for the high-quality, thematically sophisticated ractives, which are more expensive; she goes for the cheap, trashy ones that are geared toward the lowest common denominator. Because the important thing, for her, is to rack up hours of experience, and become completely comfortable with her chosen profession--she'll go out there, get her hands dirty, and do what she has always dreamed of doing.

For whatever reason, this moral stuck with me. Perhaps it contributed to my (somewhat neurotic) belief that I ought to be seeing as much theater as I possibly can, every night if I could hack it, because even if it's bad or cheap theater, I will learn from it. At any rate, it's something I've been thinking about a lot, in recent weeks, as I read cheap plays from the used bookstore and make plans for doing theater in a bar. This is the time of my life to get out there and hone my skills. I can't wait for ShortLived tomorrow night.

If I may be allowed to brag...

...a couple of months ago, I was invited to join the Literary Committee of the Cutting Ball Theater, and I am eagerly looking forward to attending my first committee meeting!

The Cutting Ball is one of my favorite theaters in town; you might have read my blog posts where I raved about their productions of Thom Pain, Krapp's Last Tape, and The Bald Soprano. So I really consider it an honor to be asked to get involved with this organization doing what I love best (apart from playwriting): reading plays and deciding if they would be suitable for staged readings or productions!

Oh, and the week after I agreed to join the Literary Committee? Cutting Ball was profiled in American Theater magazine. Pretty sweet, no?

The other thing that amazes me is the way I got invited to join the committee. I had attended the first-ever San Francisco Theater Pub--Euripides' Cyclops, newly translated by my friend Ben Fisher--and, while socializing after the show, I kept bumping into a young woman. About the third time this happened, we decided we should just introduce ourselves. She said she was Meg O'Connor, Literary Manager of Cutting Ball, whereupon I immediately started gushing about how much I love the work at that theater.

Then she asked me, "And are you involved with theater at all?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm a playwright--I'm a friend of Ben's."

No sooner had I said this than Meg said, "Oh, then perhaps you'd like to join the Cutting Ball Literary Committee!"

Would I ever! Still, I can't get over the easiness, the friendliness of the encounter. At the time this happened, I was reading Outrageous Fortune, which, as you may know, amid all its doom-and-gloom, singles out the Bay Area as a region where the theater is actually thriving; it says that the community here is exceptionally supportive and hospitable. This event--a chance encounter at a pub night leading to my joining the literary committee at one of my favorite theaters--is San Francisco theater at its finest. And this sort of thing would never happen in New York. There, I imagine, the competition to be on the literary committee of a theater as good as Cutting Ball would be cutthroat--requiring some kind of elaborate application process, dozens of hungry young playwrights all jockeying for one slot. Here, there were no hoops to jump through.

As I said, I haven't yet been to my first literary committee meeting, but I believe our main responsibility is to find overlooked plays from thousands of years of theater history, to present in the Hidden Classics Reading Series. (This winter, I attended both Medea vs. Medea and Women Beware Women when Cutting Ball presented them as Hidden Classics.) So not only am I looking forward to the opportunity to share some of my favorite classic plays with the wider public, I also know that the other committee members will expose me to plays I've never even heard of, and I hope that this will make my own writing stronger as well...

"The Caucasian Chalk Circle" at ACT: Would Brecht Have Loved It?

A week ago I went to see the John Doyle-directed production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at ACT. (By the way, this is how you know the American theater has come down with a crippling case of "premier-itis": the posters for this show advertised it as a "world premiere!" Yes, it's a new translation/adaptation... but it's still Brecht!) The play, in true epic theater style, requires a huge cast of characters--many of them playing very short parts--but, due to the budget constraints of the modern theater, this staging used just 9 actors.

I am not sure how well this worked, and how much it related to some of the problems I had with the production. On the one hand, I never wished for there to be more bodies onstage filling out the scenes, and I thought the actors who played multiple roles did a good job of distinguishing their different characters from one another. Brecht was all about storytelling and breaking the fourth wall and drawing attention to theatrical artifice, so, while modern productions of many older plays trim down the cast size and require extensive doubling, this works especially well for Brecht's plays.

On the other hand, I thought the play was sometimes confusing--though the central characters' predicaments were always clear, the play takes place in the middle of a war somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains, and I was confused throughout about who was supposed to be fighting whom. (One could perhaps read this as a deliberate choice, a comment about the futility of all wars. But mostly it bugged me that I was sure Brecht had written a play that made sense, but nobody in the production seemed concerned with making everything clear to the audience!) And I wonder, maybe I would have been less confused if there'd been less doubling--particularly in the first few scenes, as I struggled to get my bearings on the story?

Also, though I said that the actors did a good job of distinguishing their characters from one another, they sometimes needed to do this by means of accents, wacky physicality, etc. For instance, when René Augesen played the governor's wife, she spoke with a déclassé New Jersey accent; and in her scene as a noblewoman fleeing the city, she used a languid Southern accent. My theatergoing companions found this very distracting--"hammy," they said, and also reinforcing unfortunate stereotypes about New Jerseyans, Southerners, etc. I argued that this was a necessary consequence of having only 9 actors--if ACT had been able to afford a bigger cast, such external tricks to differentiate the characters would have been less needed. (Which raises the question: in theaters' ongoing quest to save money by producing small-cast shows that require extensive doubling, are they shooting themselves in the foot? Are they turning off audiences, when people see hammy acting from actors who have to play multiple roles?)

Then I remembered that Brecht hated "realistic" acting! His whole idea was to make clear to the audience that the actors are not "becoming" a character, they are "demonstrating" that character. All the terms I had learned in college came flooding back: "alienation effect," "gestus." Weren't the Caucasian Chalk Circle actors doing that, to some extent? Mightn't Brecht have loved Augesen's use of a New Jersey accent as shorthand for "this character is trashy and nouveau-riche"? (Or, because I'm not an expert on Brechtian acting techniques, would he have preferred that Augesen had found some other way to convey the governor's wife's essential qualities of being callous, self-centered, frivolous? A way that didn't rely on stereotypes about regional accents?)

And my theatergoing companions and me: had we simply seen some bad, hammy acting? Or had we seen a perfect example of epic-theater acting, exactly the kind of thing that Brecht would have wanted--and the fact that we didn't like it just proves that we are too hopelessly bourgeois to ever appreciate the Epic Theater?

"Mirrors in Every Corner": Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

San Francisco folks: You have one week left to see Mirrors in Every Corner at Intersection for the Arts, and I strongly recommend that you do. Let me put it this way: it is the best play I have ever seen by someone of my generation (people born in the mid-1980s)--the play that made me realize that my generation is going to make some awesome theater in the coming years, and we've only just started to have our voices heard.

Mirrors in Every Corner was written by 25-year-old Chinaka Hodge, a poet and playwright from Oakland. It tells the story of what happens when a white girl (strawberry blonde, green-eyed) is mysteriously born into an African-American family that's already got problems of its own. So it's deeply, deeply about racial identity and cultural identity. The cleverness of the idea didn't even hit me till after the show, when I remembered learning in college about an archetype in American literature called the "tragic mulatta." A mixed-race woman who can "pass" for white, she meets a sad end, because she is caught between the black and white social spheres with no place for her in either one. Hodge's brilliance is to update this to a modern context by making it a magical-realist fable (white child born into black family) rather than a literal-minded exploration of the trope (mixed-race girl is mixed-up). In the old "tragic mulatta" works, usually the heroine falls in love with a white man, but cannot be with him because she is black. In Hodge's play, the heroine gets crushes on the black boys at school, but her brother tells her that this is dangerous and she should try to date white boys instead, because society still has a problem seeing black men together with white women! A brilliant twist. And obviously my hat goes off to anybody who can write about race in such a bold and perceptive way while still so young--especially because it still scares me to think about writing about race.

But Mirrors in Every Corner is also an exploration of social history--my generation's social history, from Iran-Contra to the Iraq War. And it is just wonderful to see this onstage, and realize that my peers and I are adults now, and we've lived through some interesting stuff, and we have stories to tell, and we're going to be telling them, more and more, in this new decade of ours! This is smart, fresh, truly inspiring theater. (And I haven't even gone into Chinaka Hodge's use of language and structure and the other more "crafty" elements of playwriting, but trust me, it's all at a very high level.) Get your tickets now!

photo of the cast by Pak Han

Humiliation no more

Have you ever heard of a game called "Humiliation"? Evidently, the author David Lodge invented it in his novel Changing Places. It's a party game to be played at gatherings of the snobbish and overeducated: everyone goes around the room naming the title of the book they are most embarrassed that they have never read. The person with the most humiliating admission is declared the winner.

Thinking that I might one day find myself a participant in a game of Humiliation, I got my answer ready: I would say that, to my great chagrin, I had neither seen nor read Chekhov's Three Sisters.

But now I'll have to think of a new answer, because I finally corrected this embarrassing gap in my knowledge, and I'm so glad I did. I don't know what took me this long. I mean, it would be one thing if I didn't like Chekhov. (Yes, there are people who have that opinion... even if I find it inexplicable.) But I love his three other plays! I wrote a research paper on him and Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater when I was in high school! And yet I had never read Three Sisters. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to preserve it, knowing that Chekhov wrote so few plays, and that once I read Three Sisters I would never again experience the thrill of reading a major Chekhov play for the first time.

So, this probably isn't news to any of you, but Three Sisters is a gorgeous play, and the passage where Tuzenbach and Vershinin debate what life will be like in 200 years might be my favorite thing Chekhov ever wrote. The play so perfectly balances joy and despair... where The Seagull is all about unrequited love, the sadness of Three Sisters is offset by our knowledge that no matter what happens to them, the sisters will always love and support each other. It's the kind of play where the characters declare that they're happy, and it breaks your heart.

And yet, it's funny, too. I made a friend of mine read the Tuzenbach/Vershinin dialogue I mentioned above, and her first reaction was "It's funny," and I could have kissed her for that, because so many people don't see the humor in Chekhov, and she did, right off the bat. Then she said "But you realize that people these days don't care about this kind of thing. They all want to see, like, The Matrix."

Maybe. But I remain hopeful that, as Tuzenbach says, "Life won't change. It will still be hard and happy and mysterious. Three hundred years from now, people will still go around complaining 'Oh, life is so hard,' and they will still be afraid to die, the same as they are now." And if that holds true, then there will always be a place for Chekhov.

Seneca = The Roman Tarantino

After Medea vs. Medea a few weeks ago, I was chatting with one of the actors. Like me, he definitely preferred Euripides' version to Seneca's.

I said, "I got the feeling that Seneca was less concerned with moving the action forward, and more with writing speeches that made allusions to all of these other myths, so that he could show off how smart he was."

"Yeah, he was basically the Quentin Tarantino of Ancient Rome," said my friend. "Sorry, I don't like Tarantino."

"Oh, I don't know, I really enjoyed Inglourious Basterds," I said. My friend hadn't seen it, but maybe he should check it out. It seems that what he objects to is Tarantino's random riffs about pop-culture oddities, but Tarantino naturally had to tone that down for Basterds, because it takes place in the '40s. (And I thought that the riff on King Kong was brilliant!)

But anyway, my friend's comparison of Seneca and Tarantino was especially apt because not only are they both known for elaborate, rhetorical, allusion-filled dialogue... they are also really fond of outrageous bloody violence. In Euripides' play (as is typical of Greek tragedy) Medea kills her children offstage, but in Seneca's, she does it right in front of the audience. Seneca, not the Greek playwrights, was the inspiration for Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. And after Cutting Ball's staged reading of the Jacobean revenge tragedy Women Beware Women, in the finale of which nearly every character dies in a bizarrely violent way, the post-show discussion compared it to...Quentin Tarantino! It's like there's a direct through-line from the ancient Roman dramatist to the Italian-American auteur.

I always used to have trouble remembering why I should care about Seneca or what his stylistic hallmarks were, but now that I know to think of him as "the Roman Tarantino," I won't forget!