R.I.P. Joan Schirle and Clint Rebik

 

Update 2/16: Though North Coast media has so far failed to recognize Joan's achievements, the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook has a long article here, following the American Theatre magazine tribute here.

Joan Schirle died on February 1. I miss her already. Though I hadn't been in touch in recent years, knowing she was in the world made it a better place.

There are others who can better chronicle her considerable achievements, here on the North Coast and elsewhere in the world, and I hope they will do so. 

 But I can venture this much: As a creator of theatre, a teacher and communicator, there is no one I know of who has been more important for a longer time to the arts and their character in this community. I hope that this is recognized.

 I can only speak of what I know and feel. Joan was associated with Dell’Arte for nearly half a century. She was its Founding Artistic Director. As a creator and performer, she could excel at the robust, exaggerated commedia style, though even in the shows of that style that I saw, she added a more nuanced dimension. A prime example in more recent years was her performance as Mary Jane in Dell Arte’s bravura show, Mary Jane: The Musical. She commanded that stage as a star.

 But she was also adept at more subtle and delicate work, based on movement and music, gesture and image and poetry. Her work explored untold or little told stories of quiet heroism and love in dire or difficult circumstances, often instances of injustice.  For example, Elisabeth's Book.

 In my experience, Joan was just as authentic as a person. In a context where relationships are so often mostly transactional, she was genuine. I am grateful to her personally for two specific acts. She included me as performer and presenter in Dell Arte’s staged reading of the Sinclair Lewis play, It Can’t Happen Here, marking the 75th anniversary of that play’s opening in 18 theatres across America, produced by the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project. Joan was a principal organizer of simultaneous readings in 20 other cities. Apart from allowing me to participate in this meaningful event, she honored me with my only opportunity to be on the other side of the stage in my years on the North Coast. 

 Then when I was unceremoniously fired without cause as theatre columnist, she was the first member of the theatre community to support me in public, by posting on the local theatre Facebook page, eliciting other such statements.

 

I imagine there are many who have similar and better stories to tell about Joan’s kindness and courage, her openness and responsiveness, her humanity. 

 It seems to me that Joan had a very full life. She performed and taught and traveled all over the world. She was honored with awards in California and in Europe. She had a family, a daughter, a granddaughter. I hope that she felt that way about her life.

 Joan was born a couple of years before me, in 1944. She said to me once, we’ve got ten good years left, don’t we? Of course, being this age, I don’t remember how long ago she said this. But I’d like to think that however many they were, that on balance, they were good years.

 Last year the North Coast lost another of its theatre founders and important figures for decades. Clint Rebik was co-creator and artistic director of the Redwood Curtain theatre.

 I knew Clint since that theatre began more than 20 years ago. Besides being a talented actor and director, and in recent years a valued administrator at HSU, Clint was a model of integrity and kindness, generosity, good humor and judicious good sense. I wrote about his theatre and their productions for a decade, though I was also there for their first night. When my column was axed, Clint reached out and assured me I would have a free seat there anyway. 

We did not know each other well, but for awhile we occasionally had coffee when I stopped by his HSU Admissions office. He was widely admired in this community. Clint was only 55. He left behind two sons he loved, a partner and many friends.

Los Pajaros and More on This North Coast Weekend

Update: It's the final weekend (Feb. 12-14) for Los Pajaros.  With Mother Teresa as Harpo, Dick Nixon as Groucho, it's the Marx Brothers meet Firesign Theatre, with a Latino edge.  The cast of 11 seems even bigger at times, so it's fascinating to recall that before this HSU production, the only performances were by the three members of Culture Clash. 

HSU Theatre is opening its major production for this school year on Thursday (Feb. 5) and it's something different for the North Coast.  It's Los Pajaros, a contemporary musical satire adapted by the Chicano American performance troupe Culture Clash from the play The Birds by Aristophanes, directed by Del Arte's Michael Fields, and featuring a Tim Randles band playing salsa, blues, gospel and rock & roll.

What's different is the Latino voice and perspective, in the Culture Clash script and as carried out by a largely bilingual HSU student cast.  The production recognizes the growing Latino population in Humboldt County and within the HSU student body, while adopting and adapting a comedic approach that's as old as theatre in western civilization.  That's pretty exciting.

So even if local media is waiting a week to review this play, it's worth saying that it opens this weekend and runs for only one more: Thursdays through Saturdays, February 5-7 and 12-14 at 7:30 p.m. with a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday February 14 in the Van Duzer Theatre.

  There's a lot more information at HSU Stage & Screen.  I usually have my complete say there, as production publicist.  But once in awhile I need to add a little emphasis when it may not be getting through otherwise.  (If you read the Journal you won't even get that link to information.  In what looks very much like deliberate pettiness, they've excised every mention of a web page link to this weekend's HSU theatre and music productions.)

Not that this is going to be a regular thing here anymore, but here's a couple of other events this weekend:

Arcata Playhouse hosts The Uncomfortables Tour, a spoken word event featuring Billy Tuggle (aka Karma Threesixty, from Chicago) and Wil Gibson from Maine, plus special guests. It's happening Thursday (Feb. 5) at 7 p.m.  There's a free workshop earlier that afternoon at 4 p.m. 707-822-1575.

First years at the Dell'Arte School present their annual Commedia dell'Arte Show  Thursday, Friday and Saturday Feb. 5-7 at 8 p.m. in the Carlo.

All's Wells

Lynne & Bob 2011. Photo by Bob Doran

No North Coast retrospective could be complete without Lynne and Bob Wells.  (That by the way is how the label reads on this site-- "Lynne and Bob Wells." It links to their individual performances as well.)

I've referred to them as the North Coast Lunts (and so had to explain who the Lunts were.)  Dell'Arte honored them in 2011, and I interviewed them on that occasion.

They told me then that they met when they were both cast in a Ferndale Rep production of a Neil Simon play.  In some ways their romance was itself out of a story: the rich girl and the poor boy.  But those circumstances have their unique aspects, and became part of a unique relationship.

It's one of those things that everybody knows but nobody talks about, so I felt a little trepidation in asking them about it.  But I did, and they talked about it easily. There wasn't space in the original column, but that column is structured pretty much as the conversation was, for they kept coming back to the show they were to do when they accepted their award, even when we talked about this.

"He's a poor boy," Lynne said.  "I was very fortunate--I'm a trust fund baby."
"She's a sugar mama," Bob said.
"I'm your sugar mama," Lynne laughed.  "Maybe we should do a bit about that."
"I've never done anything for money," Bob said.  "It has to be something I love.  I worked five years in the Post Office.  But I liked it."
"I never did anything for the money either but I always felt guilty about it," Lynne said, "because it's always come to me.  Always part of me saying, how do I deserve this.  But it's been a great blessing.  It allows me to give, and that's been great."

The family fortune had its roots in, of all times, the 1930s.  "My father started the first car and truck rental business in the United States," Lynne said.  "He started with a taxi, but never got calls for the taxi, just somebody who wanted to rent the car.  He was a man who always said my goal every day is to make a buck and do something for somebody else.  If I do that every day, I feel good."

"We were raised with a very strong work ethic," she said. "But as adults we also came into quite a lot of money when the business was sold.  But it's dwindling."

Once together, Lynne and Bob made an unusual move for actors in plays: a year of study at Dell'Arte.  I also don't know of many Dell'Arte grads who returned to the conventional theatre.  Lynne admitted it took awhile before what she learned there "got incorporated."  Bob remembered being told that it might take five years for what he'd learned to sink in.  "It took me ten."  

"Thinking back on the Dell'Arte experience for me," Lynne said, "we were the oldest ones at the time.  It was a huge accomplishment.  Donald Forrest was our acrobatics teacher, and he was so kind to me--and rough on everybody else.  At the end of an entire year my big accomplishment was that I was able to do a forward roll."  She did it in one show at Ferndale--"and never again."

"Donald Forrest is one of the most excellent actors I've ever met in my life," Lynne added.  "He taught me so much."

They both agreed on their favorite directors: Michael Fields and Rene Grinnell.  Bob added some names from Pacific Arts Center Theatre days: Gordon Townsend, Jeff Peacock.  (They also volunteered their least favorite director, but I'll keep that to myself.)

"I like a director who will come in strong, with a vision and with good direction in the beginning," Lynne said, "but in the last couple of weeks they adore you, they let you go. A director who is picking on you until the last minute, I don't want.  They have to know that they chose somebody for a reason, and at some point they've got to let you go."

in Glorious!

We were talking in the Plaza Grill in the afternoon, and the combination of ambient noise on the recording and my poor notes didn't record what performance Lynne said was "Bob's Hamlet."  But I did hear Bob say that Lynne's Hamlet was Glorious!, the comedy about Florence Foster Jenkins that opened Redwood Curtain's new theatre on Snug Alley.  "Lynne Wells unleashed" was how I described her tour de force performance.

Bob was with her in that production, funny and poignant.  Their most famous performance together apparently was as George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Doing it was an intense experience they definitely did not want to revisit.  "We didn't realize it was a comedy," Bob said. "There were just four of us, rehearsing that play for six weeks.  We were so into it, it seemed intrusive to have people there to see it."

In my time as columnist, I saw them work together in Painting Churches at North Coast Rep, Glorious! and The Language Archive at Redwood Curtain, and in a couple of Christmas shows at the Arcata Playhouse.  In addition to their skills that create credibility and delight, they do have a kind of mystique that is a delight in itself.

I had the additional pleasure of being onstage with Lynne.  In fact, we played husband and wife for a couple of hours, at the anniversary reading of It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis at Dell'Arte. I got to feel a little of that energy exchange that's an essential pleasure of acting on stage, when it's good.

Among my happy memories of Bob was his singing and dancing performance in North Coast Rep's My Fair Lady.  As I wrote then: "From his opening number (“With A Little Bit of Luck”) his performance as Eliza’s father was astonishing. It did better than stop the show—it energized it forward."

But the first thing I noted about Bob Wells was his speaking voice.  I commented on it first in The Ladies of the Camellias. "Nobody could make the two syllables of 'password' funnier than Wells does."  But then I wrote a column with his vocal work as its theme, and instead of the interview column, that's what I will reproduce below.

I do it to honor both Lynne and Bob, for their approach to the art and craft of acting and performance, their respect for the text and for the audience.

Bob Wells' Vocal Magic  February 2010

According to renowned early 20th century Italian actor Tomasso Salvini, the three most potent elements of acting are: “Voice! Voice! Voice!”

 You might expect that sentiment from an old-school actor like Salvini, or even actor and director John Gielgud, who suggested that while attention is often lavished on other aspects of performance, how the words are spoken “can have more effect than anything else.”

 But open almost any book on stage directing or acting, and they proclaim the importance of voice. The purported Stanislavski “Method” may have enshrined mumbling on American stages, but director Robert Lewis quotes Stanislavski writing at length about vocal acting: “Letters, syllables, words—these are the musical notes of speech, out of which to fashion measures, arias, whole symphonies.”

Harold Clurman (another Method-influenced director) writes about it—even Jerzy Grotowski devotes some 30 pages to vocal technique in Towards a Poor Theatre.

 A revelatory object lesson in vocal acting is available this weekend at the Arcata Playhouse, where Bob Wells performs in a short play by Arthur Kopit, directed by Dan Stone.

 First of all, every word Wells says can be heard, and every word can be understood. With these foundations in place, Wells goes on to act with his voice—his intonations, pronunciations, the words he stresses hard, the syllables he lets linger and float away.

 Beginning with his surprising “entrance,” Wells captivates, even when he does almost nothing except create this character with sound. He’s masterful: both poetic and clear. We know who this man is, and we attend to what he has to say.

 The play, called Sing to Me Through Open Windows, is more problematic. Arthur Kopit is a contemporary American playwright with a long career that began with revolutionary absurdist romps like Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, but more recently has included musicals, including Nine, which reached the silver screen this year with Kopit as an executive producer.

 Whether Kopit has copped out or America has caught up to his absurdism is an open question, but this early play is at best an exercise in poetic symbolism that for me remained fairly elusive in this production. There’s the old magician (Wells), the boy who visits him (played by newcomer Zachery Davis with appropriate vulnerability) and a clown whose relationship to the others is difficult to assess (played with appropriate physicality by Craig Klapman.)

 This is the kind of challenging work that Dan Stone often chooses. Figuring out what was happening was more difficult because Bob Wells was the only one who was clearly audible all the time. Even so, a kind of ambiguity is inherent in this play.

The stage imagery, including the music (all created by Dan Stone), worked well. The lighting was especially clarifying, but other choices (like the puppets) less so. The themes of life’s transitions and mythic cycles are there when you think about it, but the impact of aging was absolutely clear as an experience.

That’s the work of Wells, playing a magician who is in the process of himself vanishing. “Fear is like regret,” he concludes, “only with fear, there’s not much time left.”

 Remarkable words to come from a 22 year-old playwright (as Kopit was when he wrote this), but very powerful when spoken by a veteran actor in conscious control of a superior vocal instrument. I particularly urge young actors to experience—and listen to--this performance.

Bah Humboldt! Christmas 2006

This is my draft of a column from December 2006: an account of three productions I saw on one Sunday.  It's notable for the Sanctuary Stage commedia del'arte performance at Mazzotti's (what I didn't say was that, the morning I attended, I was the only person there) as well as the Dell'Arte holiday show, and the Redwood Curtain fundraiser.  Plus the Christmas party afterwards, at which I snapped the photos published here, one for the first time. When I realized the Journal wasn't going to pay me for taking pictures for them, I stopped.

 Last Sunday began with Jupiter, Mars and Mercury clustered in the pre-dawn sky -- the first time since 1925, the last until 2053. Not that I saw that particular performance -- getting to brunch for a noon "curtain time" was early enough for me. I was beginning my Christmas show marathon.

 "It's a raincoat and sunglasses day," remarked the woman behind the counter at Arcata Liquor, where I bought my Sunday newspapers (with my book review in the Chronicle) before crossing the Plaza to Mazzotti's Restaurant. There, with your choice of broccoli and pancetta quiche with fresh fruit, or eggs Benedict with prosciuto puff pastry and champagne, you got A Christmas Commedia, served piping hot by Sanctuary Stage.

 The show is itself a mercurial combination of classic commedia dell'arte -- right down to the characters from its Italian origins -- and Charles Dickens' fable, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge as the commedia's Pantalone (also a rich miser who abuses his servants, as Scrooge does Bob Cratchit) is just the starting point of the interplay. Factor in the contemporary references (like the very recognizable face on the Ghost of Christmas Past) and there's another source of unexpected energy, and laughs.

"Bah, Humboldt!" Pantalone shouts, and we're off. The cast is outstanding, led by Tinamarie Ivey in a tour de force as Pantalone. Though all the performers (including Carrie Hudson, Melissa Lawson, Dan and Zachary Stone) have physical comedy skills, and fine comic timing and presence, the intensity shoots up to the roof as soon as Heath Houghton bounds on stage. He's always one of those actors you have to watch, but he adds both an individual and a cohesive energy to this ensemble -- and he does a jump on his knees from the stage to the floor that will drop your quiche-filled jaw.

What most impressed me about this show (scenario by Dan Stone, elaborated by cast improvisation in rehearsals) is the combination of physical humor, verbal wit and a mostly efficient and forward-moving story with the major narrative virtues: You could follow it, and it kept you involved, even when you basically know what's supposed to happen next.

 There's the traditional slapstick, chases and double-takes, but also wordplay, topical asides and in-jokes (anybody who recognizes the "I'm alive" intonation from James Whales' Frankenstein gets an extra laugh) that fly by almost as fast as in a Marx Brothers movie.

Though Dickens' story retains its prominence and power on its own, this is a well-performed, well-crafted entertainment, and an intelligent companion to the Sunday papers on the table. With cleavage and toilet humor, of course.

You've got one more chance to see A Christmas Commedia -- this coming Sunday (Dec.17) at Mazzotti's. Brunch starts at 11, and the show at noon.

 There was a lot of Christmas-related theatre happening on Sunday. I saw three shows and still didn't have time to get to the matinee of Cinderella (packing them in at Ferndale Rep) or the back-by-popular-demand Humboldt Light Opera show, King Island Christmas, both beginning at 2 p.m.

 The next event I could attend was the Redwood Curtain benefit at the Bayside Grange in mid-afternoon. Co-founders Peggy Metzger and Clint Rebik seemed overcome by the impressive turnout when they took the stage to introduce a reading of David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries, performed by Edward Olson.

"You can brag to your friends you were here for our entire 2006 season," Rebik quipped. Redwood Curtain's year in the dark, and its prospective future, were on everyone's minds. But after referring to the still-ongoing search for new digs, Metzger flat-out promised: "We are going to produce a season in 2007, come hell or high water."

The Sedaris piece is an account of an actor new to New York who takes a job as a Christmas elf at Macy's department store, where an army of elves run a huge, season-long assembly line of kids and their parents past multiple Santas. Olson, having donned the gay apparel called for in the story, effectively rendered the humor and human observations of this pleasant, contemporary tale.

Then while most of the audience moved to the munchies supplied by Curley's Bar & Grill, others went up on stage to be photographed with a leering Santa (Bob Wells) and a sweet Mrs. Claus (Lynne Wells).

 Next I finally caught up with the Dell'Arte Company's holiday show, Entrances and Exits, at the Adorni Center in Eureka, where it had to compete with the entertainment value of the ballet of little birds seeming to glide along the waterline in the darkness, feeding in the shallows of the bay.

The core idea of this show is vaudeville farce, with the inherent impudence of opening, closing and skittering doors punctuating the sketches, along with music and requisite, child-pleasing clowning.

All the members of the ensemble (Tara Cariaso, Carlos Alexis Cruz, Gulshirin Dubash, Kajsa Ingemansson, Morgan Jarl, Andrew Phoenix, Helga Rosenfeldt-Olsen and Freddy Villano) are young, skilled and very appealing. The show itself seemed uneven -- tight and incisive at times, slack and virtually incomprehensible at others. The clarity of situation and form of vaudeville theatre was lacking, and while that may have been part of the experimental intention, easily grasping the premise and form allows the audience to recognize surprise and relax into the laughter.

 But there are plenty of delights anyway. I'd love to see this group do Second City-style improv, especially after a few months in front of audiences. This weekend you can see this very watchable ensemble do the Carlo Theatre version of this show, Thursday through Sunday, Dec. 14-17.

 Finally, very late last Sunday, the hemisphere premiere of the annual Geminid meteor shower began. I didn't see that either. I was writing this column.

Dell'Arte Memories

When we were living in Pittsburgh, Margaret came back from a national theatre conference somewhere with a load of brochures and other handouts.  One day I spread them out on my bed and began reading the ones that looked most interesting.  I read about this theatre called Dell'Arte in some place with the lovely name of Blue Lake.  I liked what I read about theatre and community, theatre of place, nurturing and generating new work on the spot.

Margaret and I were both playwrights at the time.  It was more or less how we met.  When in the course of time she interviewed for some teaching jobs in California,  I was rooting for Humboldt: because of the climate, the redwoods and the sea, and the proximity to Indian tribes.  Nearby Dell'Arte was also part of the draw.

It turned out that Dell'Arte was not going to be a creative home for me, and I got a different role to play, as a theatre columnist, which I performed as best I could for the past 9 years. Dell'Arte was a big part of those years.

We started seeing Dell'Arte shows as soon as we got here in the fall of 1996.  I began writing about their shows in 2005.  I laughed, I was dazzled, I was frustrated, I appreciated, I was puzzled, I learned. But after all that time and all those shows, I'm still not sure what I think or feel about devised work or commedia.  Which means I've constantly been challenged and engaged, in the process of learning about these ways of doing theatre, and learning about my own responses.

I've certainly come to know more about and appreciate commedia and its role.
I've learned enough about "devised" or group-created theatre to know I can't understand it from the outside, though I expect the process is different for each project and with each group.

I love the idea (and when I've experienced it, the process) of a seat-of-the-pants group creation that's funny--a cabaret, a burlesque, a series of skits.  One of my dreams was a kind of theatrical That Was the Week That Was every month. But for a sustained, single theatre piece, i.e. a play,  I certainly haven't lost my preference for a playwright.

Of course the playwright's process may well include others. Some, maybe many playwrights work with the director, cast and other creative agents on the production, often reimagining and rewriting parts of the play.  I knew of one wonderful play that began with creative contributions from a class (Becoming Memories by Arthur Giron, which I've seen in three different productions, including one directed by Margaret Thomas Kelso.) And I've seen close up the contributions that actors as well as others can make to a play in process, at the O'Neill Center.

 But I can't help believing that the inchoate quality of some such productions, the missed opportunities for both depth and finish, for a vision is often a result of compromise or just too many cooks.  However, I've felt this not only with devised work, but with some plays that go through the workshop and development process, and come out homogenized or confused, or both.

It may not even be fair to compare devised work with the work of a playwright.  But I get the feeling that the first is fashionable now, crowding out the other.

But on with the shows...

Out there right now is the latest of Dell'Arte's annual Christmas holidays shows.  The performers and co-creators are generally from the Dell'Arte School, directed by Michael Fields, Joan Schirle or Ronlin Foreman.  Over the years I've seen them in at least four venues: the Carlo, the Van Duzer, the Adorni Center and McKinleyville High School.

For Dell'Arte, it keeps them visible in the communities, and gives the school's students some experience before audiences and especially in touring--that process of packing out, setting up, playing the show, breaking it down, packing it back in the truck, and heading for the next venue.  For audiences it is free holiday season entertainment,  near where they live.

I recall The Hunting of the Snark as the most visually impressive, with sets by Jody Sekas and costumes by Lydia Foreman.  This interpretation of the Lewis Carroll poem happened the same year (2007) as Ferndale Rep did a children's show based on the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland.

I remember images and impressions from other shows (one with a lot of doors and people running in and out, for instance.)

  But my favorite is the 2009 show, A Commedia Christmas Carol. That was the Dickens Christmas year, as NCRT did A Christmas Carol and Ferndale Rep did Oliver!

  This show gave us the framework of the familiar Dickens story but with contemporary twists (though none of them were Oliver.)  Scrooge's nephew and his wife, paragons of middle class virtue in Dickens, are spoiled Yuppies.  Most daring and most effective was Tiny Tim, not as a crippled waif, but as afflicted with the contemporary American scourges of obesity and asthma.

So it was contemporary, full of verbal as well as physical humor, and it was commedia, for Scrooge is a version of the ancient character type, the Miser.  And while it was not entirely faithful to the spirit of Dickens' tale, it gained by both resemblances and contrasts, and it pleased both children and adults on different levels.  This is perhaps different from saying it was a family show--I suppose some others were better at being that.

Throughout the year there might be another Dell'Arte Company show locally, they might tour, or simply be involved in other projects.  The School produces shows as projects from courses in clown work, melodrama, tragedy and so on.  In the spring are the culminating shows, the Finals and the Thesis Projects.

I've previewed and reviewed a number of these shows over this years.  For the purposes of this retrospective, I'm most interested in what simply comes to mind, without refreshing my memory by looking back at what I wrote about these shows, though doing so does tend to organize the fragments and images I spontaneously recall.

I remember the excitement, the ambition of Between Two Winters, a project in tragedy that had enough legs to travel.  I remember vividly the lovely story of Annie Edison Taylor, the first woman to deliberately tumble over Niagara Falls in a barrel, as one of the 2012 Thesis shows.

Many shows seemed like lesser variations on themes of Beckett, Kafka, etc. or constructed from a checklist of physical theatre skills, or elaborate illustrations of a complex and heartfelt idea that only the participants and their friends understand.  In other words, student work.

Occasionally however something original and whole emerged, and this happened just last spring with 'Night Mother, a Comedy.  The characters were believable, not caricatures, and the situation was fresh.  They reacted to each other, they changed or revealed other aspects of themselves.  But at the same time, there were familiar comic bits and tropes and basic situations. The performers were excellent.  It was a real play and a very funny one.

Not everything on stage has to be "a play" in that sense.  Using physical movement, visual design, sound and music, and words, a piece can be created with beautiful parts, images and impressions, that relate to each other and the whole, and to an  effect that is both cumulative and unified.  Care must be taken not to disturb it with anything that pushes the audience out of the experience; this is usually a narrative problem.

 But it is something else that Dell'Arte does--most recently with Elisabeth's Book, played last spring and summer.  This piece made very strong and lasting impressions.

Then there are the big, sprawling summer shows.  Unique on the North Coast, the Dell'Arte Company is a theatrical presence elsewhere in California and especially in Europe where it is artistically respected.  But the parent Company always returns for the outdoor show that begins the annual Mad River Festival.  There its relationship with a broad local audience is renewed.

My own favorite as the most successful evenings of theatre among these shows I've seen remains Blue Lake: The Opera.  But the most significant must be the Mary Jane shows.  There had been a long silence about Humboldt County's most important cash crop, which the first show broke in a big way.  Dell'Arte took a real chance doing it, and I believe they knew it.  But by the second, darker version, the engagement was firmly made, and the topic opened up more generally.  Now there's to be a movie combining the theatrical elements with documentary.  It's the apotheosis of theatre of place.

Dell'Arte is also remarkable for the other theatrical groups it has spawned, and though they've spread out across the country and the world, many have visited (some more than once) with productions.

Dell'Arte is also unique for its continuity, and the continuous contributions of its principals, most notably Michael Fields and Joan Schirle.  I wrote about the extraordinary year that Michael had in 2013 (once I had the title "Plenty of Fields," the column was inevitable), at HSU and beyond as well as at Dell'Arte.  But that's just one year among many.  His presence, inspiration and his work have been of inestimable value to North Coast stage for many years.

The same can be said of Joan Schirle, whose contributions to Dell'Arte and North Coast theatre have been profound.

She brought Mary Jane to life and infused those shows with continuous energy.  Her performance was also the occasion of my favorite Stage Matters lines: Surely Schirle should eschew sleuthing and choose chanteusing.  I know, easy for me to say.

 I am particularly grateful to Joan for including me in the anniversary readings of  It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis that celebrated the great unknown triumph of the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s.  She helped organize a national series of readings, and gave me a part at Dell'Arte.  So now I've looked out from that Carlo stage as well as looked into it.

Big Fat Liar and Mad River Fest 2006

I started this blog in January 2007, so the reviews, previews and so on I wrote in 2006 and 2007 aren't here.  Some of them now aren't accessible anywhere.  So for the record, here is what I wrote about the 2006 Mad River Festival, beginning with an unusual piece previewing the opening production in the backyard, Big Fat Liar. 

 This year’s [2006] Mad River Festival begins Friday in Blue Lake with the Dell’ Arte Company production of Big Fat Liar. It’s the second of their three collaborations with a Danish theatre based on Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a play about a man who lives by lying and by making up stories with himself as the indomitable hero.

 Using an NSA mole and the GPS interface in my Blackberry, I located its director, Michael Fields, lounging at Sacred Grounds. I read the five-act verse play, which Ibsen never meant to be performed, while my driver weaved through the Arcata traffic. I like to be prepared for my ambush interviews.

 I found Fields at a table by the door, sipping absinthe and munching on a Danish. I think her name was Freja.

 “Are you really going to ask me a question wearing your shades?” he inquired.

 “I’m legally blind,” I retorted.

 “That explains some of your reviews.”

 “With these glasses I can see everything. Into the infrared. Into the future.”

 “Really? What do you see about me?”

 “I see a letter to the editor complaining that I have not described your beauty in enough detail. Or Freja’s.”

 “My assistant writes a good letter,” he smiled, “when not playing a flying pig.”

 “I can understand Dell’Arte being interested in Peer Gynt, the most physical and fantastical of Ibsen’s plays,” I said, baiting the trap. “But why three different versions? Why don’t you just, you know, do the play?”

 Fields talked about researching past productions, seeing films and videos of the Berliner Ensemble, the Royal Swedish ballet, and the production Ingmar Bergman brought to New York, among others.

He read a version set in New Orleans translated into Cajun. “I met the head of the Norwegian national theatre who has directed it 17 times. He’s doing two productions now—one with a deaf theatre company in Oslo, and he’s going to do part of it in Egypt in front of the Sphinx. He says the play is like a prism—you break it apart and put it back together. You can’t do the full thing—it’s six hours at least.”

 “We decided to explore it from three different angles,” Fields continued. “We did our first adaptation, Myth-o-mania, as our Christmas holiday show, and in September we’ll do our final version, The Lie, in the Carlo, and take it to Minneapolis, New York and Denmark. It’s a kind of comedia noir cabaret piece with three of our actors, and three actors from the Danish company. They’re called Jomfru Ane Teatret, which means ‘the Virgin Mary Company.’”

 “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick with the absinthe.”

“Big Fat Liar, the one we’re doing for the Mad River Festival, is the spectacular outdoor version. We’ve got a burning ship, monkeys and levitating trees. We’re using every actor at Dell ‘Arte. Our live band, with the entire Arcata Gospel Choir singing brand new songs, and a hard rock version of ‘Mr. Sandman.’ We’ve got our teen ensemble. We’ve got children on stage, including a nine month old baby.”

 “And Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,” I suggested.

 “That’s a lie!” he said. “They will not be in the show. They’ll just be in the audience. Watching their lovechild Shiloh play a troll.”

 “Trolls? They live on the Internet, don’t they?”

 “ Some of them. The story of Peer Gynt is based on Norwegian mythology and fairy tales. But there are Peer Gynts in every culture. We try to make it relevant—we talk about the Arkleys, Dave Meserve, the Blue Lake laundry thief. But it’s still Peer Gynt’s story---a guy who is full of possibilities, but who wastes every opportunity because he has no capacity to reflect and learn. He has these amazing adventures, but all he does is repeat his mistakes in different ways. He lives in fantasies, the way we’re taught by commercials to live in their fantasies of a perfect life. We basically follow Ibsen’s story to the end of Act 4, when Peer sails home, still hoping that he can say someday that he did something with his life.”

 We talked about which parts of the play are supposed to be real and which might be Peer’s dreams, but I suddenly sensed I was needed elsewhere and it was time to shed this secret identity. “Michael, I’d love to chat about this all day,” I said, “but I’ve got to answer these text messages from Tom Hanks, who just told James Lipton on “The Actor’s Studio” that what he really wants to do is write a column, and he wants some pointers. And I have to find a phone booth, or at least a police box.”

 “Right,” he said with a sigh. “And I have to go back to Blue Lake and see if the pig can really fly.”

 “Which is where Dear Readers must go,” I added, “to learn how much of this was a lie.”

 Big Fat Liar plays at Dell’Arte’s Rooney Amphitheatre from June 23 through July 1. Try http://www.peergynt.org for more info on the Peer Gynt project.

  In a later column, a brief comment on the production and more about that year’s Mad River Fest: 

 As for Big Fat Liar, with his boyish charm and energy, Jaese Lecuyer was a perfect Peer Gynt to anchor this outdoor romp. All the elements of production and all the performers (including the band) made quality contributions to a successful and crowd-pleasing show. Maybe because I’m partial to the Marx Brothers and their vaudeville-derived routines, my favorite bit was Ronlin Foreman as the crazy asylum director. Not everything worked, but a lot of the excitement comes from Dell’Arte pushing the boundaries, so it’s still a good time. I’m looking forward to the third Peer Gynt production getting deeper into Ibsen’s creation.

 After the rousing extravaganza of Big Fat Liar, this summer’s Mad River Festival resumes with a new one-person show by Sara Felder, called “OUT OF SIGHT: A Blind Comedy about God Israel and My Mom,” beginning Thursday in the Carlo Theatre and ending Sunday.

 With her virtuoso juggling and use of comedy, movement, shadow puppets and audience interaction to explore her themes, Felder has dazzled North Coast audiences before. (Formerly from San Francisco, she’s relocated to Philadelphia.) Describing the content of this show, Felder says: “What’s important to me is that I’ve been performing in and out of the Jewish community for almost 20 years, and I’ve been scared to talk about Israel on stage. So the play is really a piece about trying to find my voice in the conflict, and the complexity and poignancy and heartbreak of many American Jews as they struggle with conflicting emotions. But specifically it’s a piece about this mother and daughter trying to maintain their relationship in the face of these differing views.”

 Next weekend (July 14-16) is the second Dell’Arte players show,“Artesmisia,” an original work directed and principally written by Guilio Cesare Perrone (whose version of “The Illiad” was presented last winter), with Barbara Geary in the lead role.

 An imperious and statuesque Woman in Green in “Big Fat Liar” (the stilts helped), Geary is also “Artemesia’s”co-creator. The show features choreography by Yong Zoo Lee (who also worked on “The lliad”) and original music by HSU student YounJoo Sin. It’s based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few recognized women painters in the post-Renaissance, Baroque period. Her father (Orazio Gentileschi) was a well-known Roman artist who encouraged his daughter’s talent. But he brought charges against the friend he hired to teach her about perspective, Agostino Tassi, for raping her when she was fourteen.

 Though Tassi was jailed during the proceedings, it was Artemisia who was on trial. Then 19, she was tortured while being questioned by Tassi. Though he was convicted, his friends in high places got him released, and he subsequently disappeared. But he remained a presence in Artemisia’s art. She painted portraits of Judith, who in the Apocrypha to the Bible, beheads her seducer, the Assyrian commander Holofernes.

 “She kept returning to that theme over and over again,” Geary observed. “Some say so she could paint Tassi’s face on Holofernes, getting his head cut off.”

 Sensational enough for a Harlequin romance novel (and there is one), and a 1998 French film (very romantic and historically inaccurate), Artemesia’s story will get a different treatment at Dell’Arte. “I play Artemesia,” Geary said. “As she revisits scenes of her rape, she becomes Agostino Tassi in her imagination. Her model, named Julia, becomes Judith in her mind. In our terms, she works through what happened to her. It all helps her realize that she can move on—that she has other things to paint.”

 Geary describes the production as “visually lush, emotionally intense and ultimately redemptive.” There is even an aspect that might relate to Sara Felder’s piece, in that Geary was initially fascinated with Artesmesia choosing to paint strong Hebraic women instead of the more passive Catholic saints, which were more traditional subjects of the time, especially for women.

 The Dell’Arte portion of the Mad River Festival concludes on July 16 with the annual Annie and Mary Day parade and pageant in the afternoon, and a cabaret show in the evening. Tyler Olsen, Dell Arte’s assistant producing artistic director and part time flying pig (in “Big Fat Liar”) is directing this year’s pageant. “For the last few years we’ve had a theme, and this year it’s ‘A Parade of Nightmares,’”Olsen said. “We’ve gone out into the community to get ideas. We asked people to tell us their nightmares, which could be personal or social, like war and pollution.”

 The North Coast community also participated through the Mobile Mask Project, which set up at various Farmers Markets and other venues where people could help make masks that will be worn for these events.

 This year the cabaret has been moved from the afternoon to the evening to accommodate an “edgier, adults only” performance of songs and short theatrical pieces by Dell’Arte actors and staff, and outside performers. It may get “a little raucous and a little lewd,” Olsen said. “but it’s a lot of fun.”

The Parade featuring salsa band, stilts and giant heads, begins at 4pm in Blue Lake’s Perigot Park and ends at Dell’Arte for the Pageant. The Cabaret (organized by Kate Gleason) starts at 8 pm in the Carlo Theatre. The Mad River Fest concludes with the week-long Humboldt Folklife Festival, July 17-22. Check http://www.dellarte.com for performers and times.

From Inge to the Illiad on the North Coast Stage

This is a version of a column from January 2006 about two upcoming shows.  I'm including it along with Dell'Arte posts because half of it is about The Illiad, with a little about their process, but that Ferndale Rep was doing Inge is also pretty interesting, from the perspective of 2014.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar, with plays and a screenplay made into hit movies starring Marilyn Monroe, Burt Lancaster, William Holden and Natalie Wood, William Inge was a major presence in the 1950s. But he suddenly became dated and invisible in the decade before his suicide in 1973, and his plays were seldom performed.

 Then early in this decade a few small productions of Inge’s Bus Stop in Manhattan and at the Williamstown (MA) Playhouse seemed to spark new interest, including a 2005 fiftieth anniversary production by the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley.

 “Plays seem to go through cycles,” said Gene Cole, who directs Bus Stop at Ferndale Repertory Company starting tonight. “Maybe it’s Inge’s turn. He’s always been one of my favorites.”

 Cole thinks Bus Stop may have been neglected because “it’s not flashy. But it’s a real gem. There are eight characters, snowbound overnight in a small café in a tiny hick town. By the end of the play, every one of them has grown significantly in some way.”

 Cole, a ten-year veteran, acting and directing at Ferndale as well as NCRT, directs a cast of Humboldt County favorites plus a few newcomers, at least to local audiences. Nathan Pierce plays Bo Decker, the cowboy who falls for Cheri, the nightclub singer played by Theresa Ireland. Other characters are played by Gloria Montgomery, Christen Whiesehunt, Jerry Nusbaum, Josh Kelly and Albert Martinez.  “It’s the best cast I’ve ever worked with,” Cole said. “They’re all well-matched to their roles.”

 Bus Stop is known mostly for the 1956 movie with Marilyn Monroe. How does the play compare? The Marilyn role in the movie “is probably increased a little,” Cole said, and the older character, Dr. Lyman, is significantly diminished (Inge himself played Lyman in a later production.) “Other than that,” Cole said, “it’s pretty much true to what happens in the play.”

 Inge said its subject was love, both innocent and tainted. Cole believes that the interactions of these characters—how they treat each other, what some are willing to sacrifice and why--- will connect with audiences. “That’s what I like about theatre,” he said. “It isn’t just what you see, and it’s gone. It’s what you take away. What you talk about and think about afterwards. Bus Stop lends itself to that very well.”

 Giulio Cesare Perrone was a designer in Milan when he fell in love with an American opera singer, Ann Victoria Banks, married her, and followed her back to the U.S.

 Since his three-year stint with Dell’Arte earlier this decade, he’s been working in the Bay Area as a designer and director, for both theatre and opera. He’s returned to the North Coast to collaborate with 2nd year MFA students at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre on his script of what some believe is the greatest war epic of all, Homer’s The Illiad.

 It plays this weekend, beginning tonight, at the Carlo Theatre in Blue Lake. While Americans may be familiar with The Illiad mostly from bad swords-and-sandals movies (old and new) about Troy, its Helen and its horse, in Italy Perrone grew up with Greek mythology on the page and on stage. “This is a project I’ve wanted to do all through my life,” he said, “and especially at this moment, with the wars going on in the world, this was an opportunity to do an adaptation of Homer’s text.”

 The conflicts of invaders and the people invaded are issues he said the play emphasizes, obviously relevant to Iraq now but to other conflicts as well. “In The Illiad there are so many agendas,” Perrone said. Besides the Greeks and Trojans, the various heroes and the pantheon of gods all have their separate goals and strategies. The role of the gods, and how mortals relate to them, may suggest the role of religions in war.

 Perrone wrote his adaptation specifically for nine actors, because that’s how many MFAs there are. “Because at Dell’Arte we consider actors as also creators, my adaptation also uses the lives of the people who work and study here at Blue Lake, who come from all over the world.”

 Within the linear story, dance and other movement uses contrasting motion and physical relations to “focus on the relationship of humans and gods,” according to choreographer Yong Zoo Lee. While the production explores time and space to define relationships, linking the mythological world with contemporary physics, Perrone stressed that the work is not abstract, but grounded in the reality of war.

 “It’s an ensemble piece,” assistant director James Peck summarized, “to create something of a truly unique nature, and to expand the limits of how physical theatre can be expressed. We’re pretty excited about the results.”

Theatre Ain't For the Faint-Hearted: Dell'Arte Christmas Show 2005

One of my first North Coast theatre pieces, more than a year before I began this blog. It reminds me of my intentions for my column--to include reporting as well as preview and reviewing. But regular reporting takes time and the resources of a staff writer. Anyway,for the record, Dell'Arte's 2005 Christmas Holiday show, and a statement about theatre and the people who create it .

USC football fans got a little worried a few weeks ago when star tailback LenDale White went down with an injury in practice. They still had the superlative running back Reggie Bush (this year’s Heisman) but no backups. Fortunately for USC it was a minor mishap and White returned to help them trounce UCLA on the way to their upcoming national championship game in the Rose Bowl.

 Injuries, even in practice or (as has happened in the NBA and NFL) in pre-game warm-ups, are an expected hazard in sports. But in the artistic realm of theatre? As two local productions discovered recently—within a week and just yards apart—freak injuries can instantly shake up a stage game plan, or cancel the show. No negligence- ---just the breaks of the game.

 The cast of Dell’ Arte’s Myth-o-maniac was starting this year’s first free holiday road show at HSU’s van Duzer Theatre on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The audience was seated, eagerly anticipating the customary physical comedy of this popular annual performance.

The show began with the two female cast members, Audrey Finkelstein and Kali Quinn, singing their opening song as they approached the stage from the lobby. Christopher Beaulieu, the third and only male player, was onstage, preparing to go out and meet the two women. “I stepped down from the stage, I started to skip up the aisle,” he recalls, “and my ankle went out from underneath me and I hit the deck.”

 So Act I was moved from the theatre (where the show was cancelled) to the hospital emergency room. Beaulieu left there after midnight with a diagnosis of a bad sprain, and a wheelchair.

 After a short night at home in Ferndale, he was back at HSU at 8 a.m. to help re-block the show for a scheduled 10 a.m. performance. Beaulieu had to replace his walking, running, skipping and jumping with wheeling---and considerable crawling.

 The following Thursday, at HSU’s Gist Hall Theatre, a show created by Jyl Hewston’s physical theatre class called Immortal Steel was scheduled to open at 8 p.m. It was 8:20 when Hewston (also the director) apologized to the audience for the delay, and the show started. The delay was due to an accident.

 The show featured 16 actors and some 15 fights---with staffs, cudgels and mostly with swords. So was an actor’s arm accidentally lopped off by someone who didn’t know the blade was loaded? Not exactly. A half-hour before curtain, an actor tripped on some stairs.

 He had a minor sprain to one hand, but it meant that one key fight had to be cut entirely because he couldn’t hold a staff, and otherwise he became a left-handed swordsman, which required other adjustments. “I had to pull the other actors out of make-up,” Hewston said, “ and prepare them for the changes.” University theatre is supposed to be partly a learning experience, and it was for that cast. But the show did go on, for all 6 performances.

 Meanwhile, Myth-o-maniac had more than a half dozen shows scheduled while Beaulieu ankle was healing, and they were all over the place: Fortuna, Crescent City, Willow Creek and Eureka. By the time I caught the show at McKinleyville High School last week, Beaulieu was adept enough to be doing some wheelchair wheelies and other stunts. “Every show is different anyway,” he said, “but I try to add something each time, as I get comfortable with it. So now the wheelchair’s become part of the show. ”

 Beaulieu hopes to be on his feet again when they return to the Carlo Theatre at Dell’Arte this week, December 15 through 18. “But if I’m not, we’ll work the wheelchair in even more,” he said. “I don’t think it’s taken away from the piece.” In fact, it’s added something. “I’ve noticed kids in wheelchairs in the audience, and I think it’s great if they make a connection with something they’ve never seen before.”

 The Greek word for theatre means action. Drama is (among other things) the physicalization of fiction, the transformation of the storyteller’s gestures and the imagination of the listener into stuff and movement, in order to enact the story’s pith and moment. From the page to the stage---both enacting it and creating it new every time-- is the job of making theatre, and it’s sweaty.

 Though certain kinds of theatre make special demands on the actors’ bodies, all theatre is physical theatre. For those who do it, theatre is about as effete as football. All kinds of people get involved in creating its apparently effortless magic, but one thing is sure: theatre ain’t for the faint of heart.

This North Coast Weekend: Dell'Arte Holiday Show

A friend in Boston who traveled often to L.A. on movie business once described to me his example of the quintessential California attitude: "When somebody told me 'have a good weekend' on Tuesday."

In that spirit, and in view of the upcoming Thanksgiving travel-holiday-travel complex, here's the major stage news (to my limited knowledge) about the upcoming weekend...and beyond: the annual children and family-friendly, mostly free Dell'Arte Christmas show.  Or winter holidays show, if you prefer.

This year it is Pippi Longstocking, a childrens book heroine from Sweden who does not suffer from overexposure in the US, having escaped the velvet hand of Disney.  (But not Shirley Temple Storybook, one source for last year's Dell'Arte holiday show, Babes in Toyland.)

Pippi, the star of only three books originally, hasn't been totally neglected--there are live action and animated films and TV series in various countries, including a US feature in 1988 starring Tami Erin, a child star who in recent years has become known for, well, a sex tape, and an alleged DUI and hit-and-run. But we're going astray from the main point here.

Pippi herself is a notable child heroine because she's a girl who is very strong, physically strong.  A proto-superhero maybe.  But that may also be beside the point.  Her father is a pirate (which is part of this show.)

The point is Dell'Arte is opening its 34th annual Holiday Show Tour this week with its adaptation of Pipi Longstocking, beginning on Friday (Nov. 28) in the Carlo. Directed by Michael Fields, original music by Tim Gray, featuing Alyssa Hughlett, Moses Norton, Hannah Gaff (all seen this summer in the acrobatic "Taken Away"), Cooper Lee Smith, Kaitlen Osburn, Christophere Kehoe, Drew Pannebecker and Sarah McKinney.  With sets by Lynnie Horrigan, lights by Michael Foster and costumes by Lydia Foreman.

As usual the show tours up and down the North Coast, and most shows are free.  The full schedule of public shows follows--for school shows closed to the public and other information check the Dell'Arte web site www.dellarte.com.

Friday and Saturday (Nov 28, 29) at 7:30 : Carlo Theatre

Wednesday Dec. 3 at 7:30 : McKinleyville High        

Friday Dec. 5 at 7:00: Trinidad Elementary
        
Saturday Dec. 6 at 7: Lorna Byrne Middle School, Cave Junction

Sunday Dec. 7 at 5 p.m.: Orick Community Hall

Tues. Dec. 9 at 7:30: Winema Theater, Scotia

Wed. Dec. 10 at 6:30: Mateel Community Center (not free)

 Saturday Dec. 13 at 7:30: Eureka Theatre

Sunday Dec. 14 at 7:30: Van Duzer Theatre HSU

Tues. Dec 16 TBA: Hoopa Elementary

Thurs, Fri. and Sat. Dec. 16-20 at 7:30: closing (paid) shows back at the Carlo.

TICKETS: Carlo Theatre shows reservations at 707 668-5663 ext. 5.  For Arcata, Eureka, McKinleyville and Trinidad: free tickets at Pierson Building Center, Wildberries Marketplace, Coast Central Credit Union or at Dell'Arte.  Tickets also available at each venue before each performance.

The audience is asked to contribute non-perishable food items, which the cast collects and donates to local food banks in collaboration with local non-profit, Food for People.

Free performances are made possible by support from: Pierson Building Center, local schools, Wildberries Marketplace, Coast Central Credit Union, Renner Petroleum, Green Diamond Resource Company, California Redwood Company, Stephany Joy of RE/MAX Realty, Suddenlink, Sierra Pacific Corporation, Ironside Metal Works, and Coastal Business Systems.

Freak and Greeks

In my retrospective plan, I'd hoped my best reviews would be about the plays I remember best, but that's not necessarily the case.  (I should say this retrospective actually began with reproducing my review of Salmon Is Everything from 2006, which was an example of a review I still like about a play I still remember as one of the best I got to write about--although it was some time later.)

At the moment I'm thinking more about the plays than the reviews, and this one--Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy, from April 2008 has remained in my memory as a singularly exciting and weird theatrical experience.  There was a quality of surreal danger about it.  At that point it was a strange amalgamation of monologue, music, dark comedy and bizarre family drama.

Almost a year later, a revised version of the show with a different director returned to the Arcata Playhouse. I was disappointed by the changes--it was lighter, drained of danger and life.   (I wrote about it elsewhere on this blog, here. The illustration here is from that production.  I couldn't access my April 2008 review on the NCJ Journal site--that year has mysteriously disappeared.)  But its return allowed me to reap some benefits of reflection.  So what follows is all about this first version, but combining my review at the time with this later description.

The bit that I mention specifically--the puppet's story about his father's job testing the wringers on wring washing machines by literally being wrung through them--has stayed with me ever since.  I mentioned it just a few months ago to David Ferney, who wrote and performed that particular piece.

 Freaks Are Really Greeks? A Promising Work in Progress at the Arcata Playhouse (April 2008)

 Theatre can be most alive when it is rough and unfinished. Some of the most exciting performances I’ve witnessed have been staged readings, script-in-hand or living room cold readings. But what I saw and heard last week at the Arcata Playhouse is more than the raw and even intuitive attempt to explore dramatic material—it’s the living process of creating a play through collaboration, which can include the audience.

 The piece under construction is Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy, produced by Dell’Arte, together with Arcata’s Four on the Floor Productions and a troupe from Canada that specializes in mask work and puppetry, the Calgary Animated Objects Society, or CAOS.

 As is often the case here, all these roads lead back to the Dell’Arte company and school, which many of the participants have in common. Script and song lyrics are by Toby Mulford, music by Tim Gray; the director is Stephen Buescher, and head designer is Xstine Cook, the founder of CAOS.

 Only an insider could accurately describe the nature of the ongoing collaboration, but, as most group efforts do, it results in iterations—successive versions that reflect new creative insights, responses to observations of performances by insiders and audiences, as well as technical improvements. So each performance at this stage is likely to be different.

As might be expected with these particular companies, this production is developing puppetry, costumes, props, sound and lighting effects right along with the script, so there is plenty to see and hear (including singing and instrumental performances.) Beginning last Saturday and continuing this Thursday, Friday and Saturday (April 10-12), audiences are formally brought into the process with question-and-answer sessions after the show.

 “Crawdaddy” is about a troupe of sideshow “freaks,” that is also a family, with San Francisco Mime Troupe veteran James Griffiths as Crawdaddy ( he’s got crab claws for hands, and he becomes the patriarch of the clan); Jacqueline Dandeneau in an immense fat suit as his Fat Lady wife; Zuzka Sabata and Esther Haddad as their Siamese Twin-daughters; Tyler Olsen as the son-in-law Val, and David Ferney speaking through a sinister puppet as the Barker. Jerry Lee Wallace is the Outside Talker (who was literally outside talking up the performance before it started, promising “David Spade live,” which is certainly my idea of a freak show.)

 I caught a dress rehearsal and the opening night performance, and there were changes even in the day between. At least one wasn’t planned. Jackie Dandenau, who had been so expressive and animated in rehearsal, had become so physically disoriented by the fat suit that she almost didn’t go on for opening night, and her performance was more subdued, especially at first.

Violet and Daisy Hilton, Siamese twins in the 1932 film Freaks

The knowledge I brought with me to that rehearsal concerning “freaks”—people with real, exaggerated and fake deformities who made their living as exhibits or performers—was pretty limited. There were still some freak shows attached to traveling carnivals when I was a child, though I never entered one, and in the 70s I did see the 1932 Todd Browning film (“Freaks”) with actual freak show performers as the actors. In that movie, the “freaks” were the honorable ones, while a couple of “normal” people in the circus were the villains.

 Things are not so simple in “Crawdaddy.” For one thing, there are no “normal” people in it—their presence is felt only as showers of coins and greenbacks. Crawdaddy describes his show in lofty terms, as “extraordinary people doing extraordinary things” and promising “magic and mystery.” But also “the transcendent and the twisted.” Early on, Veronica has dreams of creating an excellent troupe, but that creation turns out to involve murders and perhaps other violent acts (the degree to which these are specified appears to be an ongoing experiment), as well as the grotesque exhibits of stillborns, who can still be “useful.”

In the performances I saw of that show, Crawdaddy (played by James Griffiths of the San Francisco Mime Troupe) was a dominant and sometimes threatening personality, despite being barely ambulatory due to his grotesque crab tail and feet. His marriage with Veronica, the Fat Lady was interdependent with their attempts to take and then keep control of their freak show, which often involved murdering other freaks, including Crawdaddy’s father.
 
But there was surprising tenderness in their relationship, and in Veronica’s struggle to have children (stillborns that she justified keeping in jars as part of the show), and then in their family feeling when Veronica gave birth to Siamese twins, Lily (Esther Haddad) and Heather (Zuzka Sabata.) The two girls, writhing in each other’s permanent embrace, were lively and real, and of course part of the freak show, playing odd and haunting melodies on saxophone and violin.

 Through dialogue and Crawdaddy’s monologues, and particularly the stories told by the vaguely sinister puppet, GW Willikers (the voice of David Ferney), more of the family drama was revealed, always returning to the particular culture of freaks in freak shows, as well as the permeable definitions yet ironclad realities of freakishness and normality. So when one of the girls fell in love with the dim but otherwise “normal” janitor, Val (Tyler Olsen), the mood alternated quickly between acceptance and menace.

 The mood was captured by a story the puppet told with pride and nostalgia about his father’s job testing out the wringers of washing machines by getting wrung through them, and popping back to normal size afterwards. The assembly line as freak show suggested another riff on economic dependence at the edge of existence.

 The essence of a freak show—of the need to satisfy the entertainment desires of normal folk with freakishness and freakish behavior—was a unifying theme, and just how this affected the family was often demonstrated in how many coins and bills showered the stage from the darkness around it. When survival was again threatened, Crawdaddy devised a one-time-only showstopper, the chainsaw separation of his daughters, which ended predictably in their deaths.

In his last soliloquy, Crawdaddy refused to be judged, judging instead his audience and the darkness within human nature which he shared and reflected. Together with the music and bizarre comedy, this was an edgy evening, and with themes shared with Shakespeare and especially Greek drama, it certainly was in the neighborhood of the tragedy in its title.

 The most unexpected element of this show, and the one that most impressed me at the rehearsal, was the central story of a family. The play begins with Crawdaddy telling about a hard lesson his father taught him as a child. Then the relationship between Crawdaddy and Veronica develops, and leads (after several stillborns) to the twins, who appear to be literally joined at the hip. I was taken with Veronica’s innocence and her powerful maternal feelings, and especially the performances of Sabata and Haddad as the twins, literally quivering with life and energy, two girls becoming young women.

 The courtship of one of the twins by Val, the somewhat dimwitted young man who sweeps up after the show, provides humor, vitality and then a sexual tension running between innocence and perversity. Perhaps it was additional makeup and Dandenau’s necessary restraint, or maybe just because I was sitting farther from the stage, but on opening night even these scenes seemed darker, less “human,” whatever that may mean in this context. And the play certainly gets very dark later.

Without giving more of the story away, this darkness brings to a climax another central theme: the identity and morality of the characters and their world, in relation to the audience. How does the audience define them, even to themselves? In starkly reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet # 121, Crawdaddy echoes the God of the Old Testament, as well as St. Paul, the poet Wyatt and of course the poet Popeye, in asserting, “I am who I am.” Yet he justifies his evil in the eyes of observers: “All men are bad and in their badness reign.”

But is that reality, or denial and evil itself? In the end I was struck by how much these “freaks” resemble the freakish gods of the Greeks, especially in their grotesque family relationships. I’ve just started reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, and I was intrigued by her suggestion that the Greek myths of gods who murder, rape and torture each other, present a family model that was more perverse and tragic than any in nearby civilizations, and this may have been a product of the preceding “dark age”-- four centuries of chaos and privation.

 This in turn focuses something I noted about “Crawdaddy.” Though the Dell’Arte press release said it takes place in the 1930s, I detected no indication of time or circumstance or any outside world in the production itself. I wonder if that is an avenue yet to be explored. In any case, this piece has extraordinary potential, and it may do extraordinary things.