Sweet Sweet Lovin': "Girlfriend" at Berkeley Rep

Over the weekend I went to see the new musical Girlfriend at Berkeley Rep. (Full disclosure: one of my friends from college was operating one of the spotlights--I made sure to applaud extra hard after the songs that featured her expert tracking of the actors with the spotlight!)

Like American Idiot earlier in the season, Girlfriend is a "jukebox" musical--it is based on the pop-rock music of Matthew Sweet, particularly his album Girlfriend, from 1991. I had never heard of Sweet before I saw this show (the early '90s are kind of a cultural blind spot for me), but it's good music--timeless, poppy, earnest and melodic.

In Berkeley Rep's Girlfriend, the music is played by a 4-person all-female band (styled and costumed to look like butch lesbians) and sung by two young actors, Ryder Bach and Jason Hite, as they enact the story of two gay Midwestern teenagers struggling to express their attraction to each other. Neither the characters nor the plot is going to win many points for originality; it's the old story of young love having to overcome societal obstacles. And it's a wish-fulfillment fantasy too: one of the boys is a geeky, epicene outcast and the other is a smart, guitar-playing, All-American jock. And perhaps the show (which runs about 2:05, with intermission) takes a little too long to tell its sweet but slender story.

At the same time, though, the audience really does fall in love with these characters--and, as a writer, that is not an easy effect to acheive. It is much easier to shock or offend an audience, than it is to make people care for your characters as though they are real human beings--and say "awww" aloud as the story wraps up. While the Girlfriend boys are archetypes, there is an attempt to give them backstories and witty dialogue that fleshes out their characters--they are several degrees more rounded than the young men of American Idiot. The Green Day musical certainly got my heart pumping to a punk-rock rhythm, but it didn't stir my emotions; Girlfriend left me with a sweet little smile.

Though Berkeley Rep is doing its best to encourage the link, American Idiot might actually be the wrong musical to compare Girlfriend to. The more I think about it, the more Girlfriend reminds me of a contemporary version of Kneehigh's/ACT's Brief Encounter (my review): a story of a love that society wants to repress, a wish-fulfillment fantasy where a mousy protagonist finds himself/herself desired by a smart, handsome, successful guy. And all accompanied by the most upbeat pop music of the era. In both cases, too, the show is not only about the love between its two lead characters. It's about our love for these kinds of stories and songs, and the enduring hold they have on our imaginations; about the fact that we all can remember what song we were listening to in high school when that special someone glanced our way...

"Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi": A Thriller of a Play

So, one of the reasons I was so eager to share with you that I am on the Cutting Ball Literary Committee is because it affects the way I discuss Cutting Ball productions on this blog. Now that I am somewhat affiliated with this institution, I can't write objectively about it, and it's fair for you to know that.

And that's important because on Saturday night I went to see the latest Cutting Ball production, the world premiere of ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, by Marcus Gardley. Here's my attempt to discuss some elements of the production while honoring my new association with this theater company.

I came to love Cutting Ball through their productions of three plays with minimalist plots and production values: Thom Pain, Krapp's Last Tape, and The Bald Soprano. Jesus Moonwalks is kind of a departure from that; it features 12 actors and a more elaborate physical production. Cutting Ball has built a stage out of stained wooden boards, with constellations of colored buttons on the back wall--it looks wonderfully Southern and folk-arty. Miss Ssippi (the river herself, played by Nicole C. Julien) wears a beautiful blue gown with an 1860s silhouette. She and the three members of the female Chorus sing many spirituals in beautiful four-part harmony. (Anyone else think that they should have a sing-off with the three middle-aged African-American guys who are always out in front of A.C.T. singing "Down By the Riverside"?) And the incorporation of these powerful old songs into the script makes Jesus Moonwalks a communal, cathartic experience.

Furthermore, while the language of Jesus Moonwalks is highly lyrical and metaphorical, the play also has a plot in the traditional sense (something that Thom Pain, Krapp's Last Tape, and Bald Soprano lack). Actually, make that a plot and several subplots. The main story is that of the slave Damascus (Aldo Billingslea), who is traveling through the Civil-War-torn South trying to find his daughter, Po'em. Though Damascus is lynched by Confederate soldiers, Miss Ssippi resurrects him and transforms him into a woman: Demeter. The play thus refers to the myth of Persephone (and it made me wonder: why are there so many plays that treat the Orpheus and Eurydice theme, and comparitively few about Demeter and Persephone?).

I actually met Billingslea seven years ago when he was one of the actor-instructors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Summer Seminar for high school students. We kids thought he was the coolest guy ever--I still remember a chant that he taught us! He does a great job in the role of Damascus/Demeter, playing a woman with intelligence and without any condescension.

Eventually Demeter winds up in Louisiana on the Verse family plantation, home to several colorful characters. The plantation mistress, Cadence Verse (Jeanette Harrison) is like some kind of twisted Tennessee Williams figure--a delusional, dipsomaniacal Southern belle with some nasty secrets. Then there are two young girls underfoot: Blanche (Sarah Mitchell), a white tomboy; and Free (Erika A. McCrary), who doesn't know she's black.

Jesus Moonwalks is an ambitious play and could potentially use one more revision to work out some of the kinks. In the first part of the play, Jesus is mostly a comic figure (lots of humor arises because only one of the other characters can see and hear him, and the moment when he moonwalks is pretty amusing) but the denouement requires you to take Jesus seriously and believe that this is the almighty son of God. I thought that the shift in tone could be smoothed out. Also, the time frame of the play is a little confusing, though the elaborate program notes try their best to explain it: evidently it starts in 1863 at the Siege of Vicksburg then jumps forward two years to the very end of the Civil War, but that doesn't quite register in the script.

Still, I recommend ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi for its lyricism, its spirituals, its ability to put the Mississippi River on the stage of a small S.F. theater, its unique take on American history and heritage. It's just been extended at Cutting Ball till April 25. And I would love for the play to have a future life--some theater in the South ought to pick it up!

"Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West": A 37th View?

This is a post in which I potentially shoot myself in the foot. So, if your name is Naomi Iizuka, and the year is 2014 or so, and you discovered my blog because I sent a grad-school application to the playwriting program at UCSD, which you lead, and you googled my name... I'd prefer it if you didn't read this!

Also, if you don't want to read spoilers for Iizuka's new play Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, or her older play 36 Views, you might also want to look away.

The Variety and San Jose Mercury-News reviews of Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, now in its world premiere at Berkeley Rep, hinted at this, but I'm just going to come out and say it: it plays like a rehashed version of Naomi Iizuka's earlier hit, 36 Views.

It's not just that the plays explore similar themes: Japanese identity, exoticism, sexuality, authenticity versus artifice in art. It's that they use the same plot twist to illuminate these themes. 36 Views takes place among contemporary art collectors who discover a rare medieval Japanese pillow book (noblewoman's intimate diary) that turns out to be a modern forgery. Part of Concerning Strange Devices takes place in Meiji-era (late 1800s) Japan, but it also features a modern storyline set in the art world--about a man who buys forged Meiji-era photographs!

Not only that, the plays have a similar rhythm. Each of the 36 scenes of 36 Views ends with a sharp noise, made by the Japanese musical instrument that consists of two sticks being struck together. Each scene of Concerning Strange Devices ends with a blinding flash of light, like a camera flash, as all of the light bulbs onstage are illuminated for a split second. One is a sound cue and one is a light cue, but they both have the same effect, of ending each scene with a BANG!, an exclamation mark.

Now, I guess it's good that Iizuka has found her voice, her style, the themes that she most enjoys exploring. But anyone who has seen both 36 Views and Concerning Strange Devices must ask, where is the line between "exploring the same themes in multiple works" and "repeating oneself"?

After the show, I was discussing this with my theatergoing companion, who brought up Wendy Wasserstein as an example of a playwright who consistently explored the same themes, but did not "repeat herself" the way that Iizuka did here. All of Wasserstein's plays are set in the same milieu and explore the upper-middle-class female experience in the late 20th century; but each one of them looks at it from a slightly different angle and together they give a well-rounded perspective. It's a very cohesive body of work, but none of the plays are copies of one another. (Perhaps it also helps that Wasserstein's plays are less "plotty" than Iizuka's--so she couldn't reuse the same plot twists.) Whereas Strange Devices literally feels like a copy of 36 Views, because of the plot similarities. Very interesting in light of Iizuka's fascination with forgery and authenticity and all of that stuff!

Also, it's been 6 years since I saw 36 Views (at Portland Center Stage, in 2004) so my memory of it is hazy, but I recall it being a more engaging play than Strange Devices. Strange Devices features a lot of direct-address monologues in which Iizuka self-consciously outlines the themes that she is exploring and the messages that she wants to convey; I would have found the play much more interesting if more of it was achieved through active dialogue. After all, it's partly a mystery about two young con artists who outwit a guy by selling him forged photos--so shouldn't it be more exciting, less oblique and ruminative, than it is?

The Meiji-era plotline also suffers from monologue overload. At the end of the play, Iizuka's character Mrs. Hewlett informs the audience that she left her husband and went to live with a sexy tattooed Japanese rickshaw driver. But it bugs me that we just have to take this on faith: I mean, I'd find it much more interesting to see a scene of Mrs. Hewlett and the rickshaw driver negotiating their relationship (and all of the barriers of language and race and class that lie between them) than to hear her tell us "I shacked up with him and the sex was amazing." And if Iizuka wants to write a monologue-heavy play, why doesn't the rickshaw driver get a speech of his own? As it is, he doesn't have a word to say in the script; doesn't this further objectify and exoticize him, rather than giving him a voice?

It feels like after last year's In the Next Room, Berkeley Rep is making a specialty of plays about bustle-clad American women from the 1880s whose sexual frustration comes to a head when they are confronted with a new technology (vibrators, cameras). And, though both plays are presumably written with the best of intentions, they both feature racially problematic treatments of some of their nonwhite characters--the Japanese rickshaw driver in Iizuka's play and the black wet-nurse in Ruhl's.

Top photo: Bruce McKenzie and Teresa Avia Lim in the modern-day story. Bottom photo: Kate Eastwood Norris, Bruce McKenzie and Johnny Wu in the Meiji-era story. Both photos by Kevin Berne, Berkeley Rep.

"No man is feliz till he's six feet under": Oedipus El Rey

Blind, a modern-day adaptation of Oedipus Rex by Craig Wright, just opened in New York to bad reviews. But, perversely, I almost wish that I could see it for myself... because I recently saw another new adaptation of the Oedipus legend--Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro--and it was really amazing. So I'd be curious to see this other play to learn why Wright gets it wrong (ha!) and Alfaro gets it right.

It sounds like Wright's play, like Sophocles' original, focuses on the ninety minutes it takes King Oedipus to discover that he has killed his father and married his mother--a single scene, played out in real-time. But Alfaro's play dramatizes the backstory: he shows the young Jocasta giving birth to Oedipus, and how exactly Oedipus killed Laius and fell in love with Jocasta. It is vivid, it is fluid, and it covers a broad emotional palette. In ninety minutes, there's a tender love scene accompanied by a haunting a capella rendition of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," a rousing party celebrating Oedipus and Jocasta's wedding, a dream sequence where Oedipus converses with prophetic owls, and a truly shocking and gruesome ending. There were only six actors--Oedipus, Jocasta, and a four-man chorus who take on other roles as needed--and minimal scenery, enabling the play to cover so much ground so swiftly.

Sophocles' play is a detective story with a cathartic punch at the end, but the detective-story parts of the plot are glossed over in Alfaro's version. It's much more of a human drama, all the way through. He streamlines the original myth: Oedipus learns the truth shortly after marrying Jocasta, rather than after they have four children together. Also, in his version, Oedipus's foster-father is Tirésias, the blind prophet, not some random king of a neighboring city--which is such an amazing way to reinforce the theme of blindness that runs through the play, and makes Oedipus' decision to gouge his eyes out that much more resonant.

The Los Angeles Chicano setting of Alfaro's adaptation also lends it interest--I particularly liked the Chorus's translation of Sophocles into a contemporary Hispanic idiom, especially the final moral: "No man is feliz 'til he's six feet under." But I came out of Oedipus El Rey thinking less about how it was a "Hispanic play," and more about how it rewrote a familiar myth in a compelling and moving way, with a great storytelling instinct.

Oh, one more thing: I loved how Alfaro made the Greek concept of "hubris" intelligible to contemporary audiences by writing Oedipus as a very young, very cocky man. So not only the will of the gods, but Oedipus' youthful arrogance is to blame for what happens--he's sure that Laius deserved to die and that Jocasta will go to bed with him. And Joshua Torrez, who according to his playbill bio is only just out of college, did a great job in the role.

Oedipus El Rey has been a critical and commercial hit for the Magic Theatre and has been extended to March 14.