Here and Everywhere

Here on the North Coast, Sanctuary Stage has announced an ambitious upcoming season, which includes a 24 hour ten-minute play competition, Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind and their second Samuel Beckett Tribute. Right now, they're auditioning " Actors, Musicians, Dancers, Jugglers(Circus Artists)" on this coming Saturday, June 23 at 11 AM. Auditions will be held at the Eureka Theater 612 "F" Street. Additional information at http://www.sanctuarystage.com/ or call 786-9151.

The American Conservatory Theater (ACT) is coming to the end of celebrating its 40th year in San Francisco. It actually started in Pittsburgh in a theatre I know well (although I was away at college at the time.) ACT has also announced its upcoming season, which includes a different Sam Shepard play (Curse of the Starving Class, which I saw early in its life at the Public Theatre in New York), David Mamet's Speed the Plow, Gogol's The Government Inspector (directed by Carey Perloff, who is also doing John Ford's 'Tis A Pity She's a Whore), and Athol Fugard's Blood Knot.

The UK is buzzing about Ian McKellen's King Lear, in rep with Chekhov's The Seagull, also starring McKellen. They started in Stratford and will transfer to London in the fall. It occurs that there isn't a strong contemporary movie version of Lear out there (though Patrick Stewart told the story without Shakespeare's words in his transplanted TV movie, King of Texas). McKellen successfully took his Richard III to the big screen. From the reviews it sounds as if this is a lavish production, so...maybe?

Finally, Elizabeth Fuller (who responds to my post on Dream Houses in the comments) sent along a link to the New York Times review of Behind the Lid, a production by the performance artist Lee Nagrin, who died on June 7 at age 78. She was (Ben Brantley writes)" a staple of downtown Bohemia for more than half a century, belonged to a tribe now all but extinct in Manhattan, for whom theater was truly a religion, a means of pursuing the ineffable." His review ends:

The visual effects — from that simulated atomic blast to the apparition of a giant talking totem pole — are riveting throughout, psyche- roiling combinations of a childlike primitivism and an uberartisan’s sophistication. Similarly, the entire enterprise can seem silly, frightening, pretentious, sincere and magnificent, all at the same time.

Rather like the great experiment that was avant-garde theater in New York for the second half of the 20th century. “Behind the Lid” is an evocation not only of Ms. Nagrin but also of an entire theatrical subculture that now has only a flickering existence.

In a prologue, Ms. Nagrin’s voice speaks of the artist as a “pearl diver” descending into “the depths of the past” and transforming what she finds there into something beyond time. With Mr. Twist’s loving assistance, she is plumbing those depths again.