The Government Inspector at NCRT

NCRT production

I review the North Coast Rep production of Gogol's The Government Inspector (also known as The Inspector General) in the North Coast Journal this week.  I'm reproducing that review below--unchanged from the print version, except for these photos--because I want to add something about the process, that may (or may not) reveal something about the process applicable to other plays.

As I've written here more than once, my approach to reviewing is the Stoppard system of expressing my response to the performance I see.  I add to this my belief that information about the play and other productions are of interest to readers, both those who have seen or will see this production, and those who won't.  Also because that information is of interest to me, and part of my experience of the play.

There are some reviews that are relatively easy to write: I responded to this in this way, and to that in that way, etc.  Most often it's not that easy, and sometimes it's really difficult.  This was one of those times.

I went to opening night: Thursday, June 2.  In many respects the production went very well.  The performers accomplished the physical and verbal humor with efficiency and style.  I laughed (even when no one else did--at some of Hatcher's more obscure jokes, apparently.)  So much slapstick can get wearying, and it seemed some of the audience felt that way as well as me. But there was a lot to like.  So why didn't I like it more than I did?  There just seemed something empty about it.  It seemed like some postmodern pastiche, yet this was a greatly praised play.

And so I spent the entire weekend trying to figure that out.  I couldn't put my finger on a reason, except maybe a mood I brought with me to the theatre that the show couldn't entirely shake.

I was pretty much in despair about this, as in the middle of the night I was barely keeping my eyes open as I scanned reviews of other productions of this play, especially of this particular adaptation, on the Internet.  That's where I got my clue.  I noticed that several reviews singled out two characters for praise: the Postmaster (a choice role, and a standout in the NCRT production, too) and the Mayor.  Rather, I absorbed this without particularly noticing it.

But then, moments after I'd left the computer it came to me.  The character they didn't name was the supposed government inspector.  That seemed odd, because the NCRT production really featured this character.  Then I realized why I felt that sense of emptiness.  The play I saw was the story of the faux inspector--how this rogue used this opportunity.  But the Gogol satire wasn't about him, it was about how the town leaders behaved.  It was the Mayor's story, and apparently other productions had emphasized this, probably through casting, staging, costuming, etc.  And with that small difference, it becomes a different play. 

That may or may not be a correct perception of this production---but at least now I understood how I had experienced it, and why it left me feeling the way I felt.  Apart from any other moods.  This idea allowed me to write the review.  The whole review was made possible by this idea.  But it is stated in one sentence, at the end of the review.  I didn't need to say anything more about it.  

The process of experiencing the play goes on after the performance, and in this case, after the review deadline.  Another bit of my research was about how to characterize the comedy.  The playbill and actors' statements called it a farce, and it certainly had some of the characteristics of farces.  But strictly speaking, it probably isn't a farce.  The style is farcical, but there can be differences between farce and satire.  Anyway, this led me to read Eric Bentley, who in his The Life of the Drama has separate chapters for Farce and Comedy, and points out various differences.  It's a bit abstruse, and a little too Freudian for me to follow completely.  Plus he gets pretty elliptical.  At one point he lists playwrights who write comedy rather than farce, and Gogol is on that list.  But he doesn't say specifically why he is on that list.

It was Monday by the time I thought of one possible reason.  The various town leaders--not just the Mayor but his wife and daughter, a teacher, head of the hospital, merchants, etc.--sometimes speak mournfully about the position they're in.  It's all part of the general high hilarity on stage, but people who feel they are stuck in provincial Russia and long for the city and nobility--those are characters in Chekhov, too.  So it is this Chekovian humanity in these otherwise absurdly small-minded and corrupt characters that might be why this is comedy rather than mechanical farce.  Fortunately, that possibility is implied in the review's final sentence--an elaboration of the comic complexity.

So with too much introduction, here's the review....



Meyerhold production 1926

 The Government Inspector, Nikolai Gogol’s mid-19th century surreal satire, has been called the greatest play in the Russian language by no less than mid-20th century prose stylist Vladimir Nabokov. Over the decades it’s been translated and adapted many times in many countries, but it seems particularly popular right now. A version that’s just opening in London is the second new adaptation in the UK in just the past few years. In 2008 American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher adapted it for the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and Milwaukee Rep. Perhaps reflecting current attitudes towards government, the style of all these recent versions tilts decidedly towards farce.



premiere of Hatcher adaptation, Guthrie Theatre, MN 

Even before the current North Coast Repertory Theatre staging of the Hatcher version, there have been other productions here this year, sort of. Just last month, Northcoast Preparatory Academy used the Gogol play as the framework for their pastiche, Russian Promenade, at the Bayside Grange. Dan Sullivan’s play Inspecting Carol borrows from the framing story of The Government Inspector, as presented last December at the Arcata Playhouse by the Rialto Theater Company in a production that included no fewer than six participants in this North Coast Rep show, including four cast members.


current London production of a different adaptation

The play’s premise is simple: the Postmaster of a Russian village, who reads everyone’s mail in advance (which is why the mail is often late—he falls behind in his reading) tells the Mayor that a government inspector from the capital is secretly visiting towns in this region. But the news is months old, so the stranger from the city who has been staying at the inn is quickly identified as the government inspector.

Of course he isn’t—he’s a minor bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur and a gambling problem. But the Mayor and other officials ply him with bribes, while the Mayor’s wife simultaneously offers him her daughter and herself.


Groucho sings 'Lydia' in "At the Circus"

Mistaken identity is only the beginning. There is ample opportunity for slapstick, pratfalls and other shtick, and in this production, no such opportunity goes begging. The resulting mayhem is like a collision of classical Greek and Roman satire, French bedroom farce, absurdist commedia and American vaudeville. Meanwhile, Hatcher supplies verbal wit, both gross and subtle, with echoes of Jonathan Swift and anticipations of Stephen Colbert. But even though it’s no Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers as reining spirits are made explicit in the faux inspector’s improvised love song to the Mayor’s daughter—with nearly identical lyrics and the same melody as Groucho’s second-most-famous tune, “Lydia, The Tatooed Lady.”

The cast performs with unflagging energy and style: David Hamilton is the pretend inspector, Scott Malcolm the Mayor, Rae Robison the Mayor’s wife; Anders Carlson and JM Wilkerson are the Russian Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. Also essential and entertaining in other roles are Daniel Amaral, Rebecca Caswell, Dave Fuller, Brittany Gonzales, Lexus Landry, Scott Malcolm, Scott Osborn, David Schlosser, David Simms, Jennifer Trustem, Brian Walker, James Wright and Andrea Zvaleko. Samuel Clemens Cord struck a notable balance as the comic Postmaster—a sunny, believable person, yet a few stops past eccentricity.

As North Coast Rep actors, director Adina Lawson and assistant director Evan Needham are both acquainted with what’s possible on this particular stage, so the orchestration of the action is flawless. Calder Johnson provides a handsome open set as well as lighting, Lauren Wieland and Rae Robison the costumes, Brittany Gonzales and Michael Thomas the sound. Together they present a funny and theatrical evening. I did feel that the production emphasized the phony inspector’s story: how a rogue improvises advantages from the mistaken identity. But it’s the Mayor’s story that’s the soul of the play, and through it the complexities of small town pretension, corruption and selfish ambition are satirically exposed and elaborated.

This North Coast Weekend

This is one of the few plays I wonder if I misjudged.  I wonder if the dissonance could be made to work, or I missed how it did work.  But it did not do well at Redwood Curtain, and it apparently has not been produced elsewhere since.


Redwood Curtain in Eureka is the first theatre anywhere to present a full production of The Lawn, a new play by Cody Henderson, a young playwright from Los Angeles. It’s getting an all-star treatment, with direction by Dell Arte’s Michael Fields and a cast of RC and Dell’Arte veterans.

 I notice that the program doesn’t bill it as a “World Premiere,” as the press release did. That’s wise. It seems very much a work in progress. So theatre-goers should be forewarned to approach it in a spirit of participation as it continues to change.

Though it’s a skilled production with good acting and splashy theatricality, at first preview this play wasn’t ready for prime time, not even here in the hinterlands. It seems intent on satirizing early suburban lawn obsession and its relationship to bad attitudes about non-human life and non-white humans, which I suppose is worth doing once again. But there is also much that’s at best mystifying.

 The central character (almost always holding center stage) is Donald Peterson (played by Donald Forrest), the sententious and increasingly creepy uber-dad, a military vet who is making his grandiloquent stand on his perfect American lawn.

Clint Rebik plays his neighbor Reggie, another man of his generation who may have started at the same place, but is changing. Grace (Lynnie Horrigan) is Donald’s decorous wife who longs for the Paris of yesterday. Philomena (Christina Jioras) is married to Reggie but is clearly Donald’s absurd soul mate.

 Donald’s majorette daughter Betty (Molly Armstrong) is pursued by Reggie’s son Bruce (Barney Baggett), newly blooded into manhood by an elephant kill on safari. Daniel Mariscal plays George, the foreigner who lives on the other side of the Petersons.

 Despite lively and fully engaged performances, there were jarring problems of coherence. While the characters of wife Grace and neighbor Reggie are written and played as real people, Donald, daughter Betty, neighbor Philomena and (to a somewhat lesser extent) teenage Bruce are caricatures. They didn’t mesh. Even on their own, the caricatures were too weak and muddied for myth, and the naturalism too sketchy for drama (though Lynnie Horrigan with an especially impressive Clint Rebik had some convincing romantic comedy moments.)

 That’s symptomatic of the whole: a mash-up of styles, a cacophony of approximated themes, incoherent even in time and place, which tries to be both historical and caricatured, with enough anachronisms to discredit the history and not enough fresh meaning to make the caricatures soar.

 The parade of phallic jokes (some involving elephant tusks) led to a ribald set piece of sexual innuendo with hot dogs and cheese. Funny in itself perhaps (or in a Dell’Arte summer show) it fuels the suggestion that this is all supposed to be postmodern parody. But too much of the play gives other signals. There are affecting glimmers and promising possibilities, and it’s impossible to predict what courageous pruning, re-conceiving and rewriting may produce. But at first preview the action seemed predictable or contrived, the ideas and issues awkwardly presented.

 Maybe some or all of this will change during its four-week run, or has changed by the time you see it. Or maybe you’ll experience it very differently. Scenic design is by Daniel Spencer, lighting by Michael Burkhart, costumes by Amy Echeverria and sound by Tim Gray. The Lawn plays weekends at Redwood Curtain through March 5.

 By the time you read this, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival regionals at HSU will be almost over. There are productions on Wednesday, Feb. 16 (The Time Machine or Love Among the Eloi from Ohlone College of CA) and Thursday (UP from the University of Idaho), both at 7:30 pm in the Van Duzer.

 Dell’Arte presents excerpts from four of its past productions as the keynote event on Friday at 1:30 pm in the Van Duzer. Anyone can buy a day pass for $20 at the Van Duzer box office to attend a production and anything else that day—workshops, play readings, tech expo, etc.

 Among the more than a thousand students and faculty expected from the nine-state region are student critics, who will write reviews of these productions. As a VIP Guest critic at the festival (a title apparently designed to compensate for the lack of other payment), I will be talking to them about the actual practice of reviewing and writing about theatre for periodical publication.

 Among my topics will no doubt be the critical dance required in a small community with an even smaller theatre community, balancing integrity and support, accumulated standards and community standards, while producing columns that entertain and inform readers without needlessly hurting the feelings of people you’re going to run into everywhere you go. This particular column may not be a great example.

Critical Mess

The Jan/Feb issue of The Dramatist magazine (Journal of the Dramatists Guild) focuses on critics, with an essay by Robert Brustein, an article sampling how playwrights cope with reviews, and featuring a roundtable discussion among New York critics (from the New York Times, Village Voice, Newsday) chaired by playwright Edward Albee.

So this discussion was New Yorkcentric, and also mostly about reviewing new plays (since playwrights form the Dramatist Guild membership.) But it's interesting anyway. The roundtable and other articles noted that theatre criticism is dying out, partly as a consequence of theatre continuing to drop back in the pack of entertainment media, and partly because newspapers and magazines are dying, or just getting crazy. They also noted that theatre reviews are often temporary jobs assigned willy nilly to up and coming journalists, who would actually rather be reviewing restaurants. Everyone--including these top critics--wish reviewers were better versed in theatre, and that there were more who were playwrights.

So how do I stack up, I wonder. My experience in theatre is not extensive, but I do have some, and I've seen a lot of plays in a lot of different places over the years. And I am enough of a playwright to actually qualify as a member of the Dramatist Guild (didn't keep up with the dues, though.) I do believe in theatre. And I have no interest in reviewing restaurants.

But though the panel provided a dour assessment of criticism, they were even more worried about playwriting. Michael Feingold of the Village Voice--who also was a dramaturg at the O'Neill Center in its glorious past--was particularly negative about the commercial and development pressures visited on playwrights, way before critics get involved, with compromised and homogenized results. "I have to say to my regret, that I think the playwrights who have learned how to tailor their sensibility to all the compromises are the ones that get produced," he said.

Well, the theatre can endure moronic critics, or just critics who get it wrong now and then. But it can't survive too many pre-ruined plays.

As for playwright Edward Albee, he is most vocal on the topic of critics who don't understand the theatre well enough. But he begins the discussion by quoting an editor of the New York Times in an exchange about reviewing with him and Arthur Miller. "He said the most extraordinary sentence to me. He said, 'We are much more interested in serving our readers than we are the theatre.'"

Edward Albee is a great playwright and a provocative gadfly. I met him once briefly and he was extraordinarily pleasant and generous. While the editor expressed himself a bit crassly (or Albee wrote the dialogue that way), what he says suggests a simple truth that shouldn't be surprising. Albee should no more be shocked that critics write primarily for readers than to hear that playwrights write primarily for audiences.

We all write for multiple audiences. One of my first newspaper editors (when I was a rock critic--but never a restaurant critic) told me that I should write for three audiences: my readers, my editor and myself. But he was being a little disingenuous: we are all aware of, and have some responsibility to, the people we are writing about, and the institution involved (broadly speaking; "the theatre" or "theatre community" for example.) That responsibility begins with accuracy, and includes fairness. In criticism, it also includes honesty.

A play review is taken by those who participate in the production as a critique. Their own critiques of their work--and each other's--is often far harsher than any review I've written, as I've noted. But this one is public. They also evaluate reviews for its effect on publicity and personal glory and career. There isn't a lot a reviewer can do about all of that except be honest in recording responses to the production on the date it was experienced, and to be as clear and fair as possible.

But I would be surprised to learn that most of the readers of theatre reviews have gone to see, or will go to see, the production reviewed. I'm pretty sure that a large part of the readership of a review or theatre column is comprised of readers who aren't going to see the show, no matter what the review says. For them, the review is a piece they read in the newspaper that they hope is informative and entertaining.

But even for those who will see the show--or who are deciding if they will--the review has its own integrity: it is a piece of writing in print in a newspaper, just like the other stories in that issue. The primary job of a writer for a newspaper is to try to provide the best reading experience for readers of that newspaper. Just as the playwright--or anyone involved in a show--is trying to put on the best play they can for the audience that shows up to see it.

There are ways to do that badly, of course--attempted pandering, gratuitous violence, etc. But that's beneath contempt for any kind of article or review. It's something of a balancing act, which I take seriously. But to some extent we're all in show business.

Critical Thinking

The new American Theatre magazine has several articles on theatre critics and criticism. "Should You Take A Critic To Lunch?" interviews critics in several cities that aren't New York (including Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle) and "Notes on Heart and Mind" is an essay on the current state of theatre criticism and critical training. The image that emerges is of a dwindling number of newspapers and magazines with full-time critics or just about any theatre reviewing, resulting in badly paid part-time critics with dubious qualifications and little opportunity for education as critics (there are few academic programs, courses of study or even workshops specifically for critics.)

Badly paid part-time critic sounds familiar--oh yeah, that's me. Another elements of the state of coverage rings a bell, such as the observation that New York newspapers have recently hired younger first-string critics, which "Heart and Mind" author Randy Gener says "presumably, could attract young readers. (A related irony: Nobody ever argued that hiring a female theatre critic could equally attract female theatregoers and readers.)"

Actually, I would broaden or reorient that observation. The problem I see isn't younger critics--it's the bias in coverage towards youth-oriented entertainment. Theatres attract, include and depend on older audience members as part of the mix. While a production of Hamlet could attract an audience varying widely in age more readily than a hip hop concert might, advertisers are more interested in the hip hop concert precisely because it attracts the young demographic they desire. Their theory being that young people are more susceptible to advertising and trend-oriented marketing. So the coverage follows that demographic's interests. This is a trend I see here in North Coast newspapers, even though theatre, dance and classical music are actually amazingly strong for such a small "market." But then, it's an older population. The newspapers are actually orienting themselves to fewer readers in their arts and entertainment coverage.

The magazine also includes an edited version of a symposium with three of the giants in theatre criticism of this era: Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein and Stanley Kaufmann. It's an entertaining if not terribly substantive article, but it does contain Bentley's advice to young people: don't be a critic, be a playwright! There are certainly more academic opportunities for that, although I tend to think that the educational value of very specific "training" in any form of writing (including criticism) is overvalued. None of the above named trinity, for example, got a degree in theatre criticism. The institutes and workshops for critics the magazine lists, however, are probably very useful.

They do discuss some of the perennial issues of theatre criticism and reviewing, such as the conflicts between the "consumer guide" aspect and more integral criticism, and also the effect of criticism on the people putting on the plays, as well as the proper relationship of critics to those who create theatre. (This discussion and the other articles I mention all strongly favor a closer relationship and continuing dialogue, which I also endorse. I also believe that critics should have experience participating at some level in whatever they're critiquing.)

There are the problems of the critic as writer as well as thinker, and other issues that may be of little interest to non-critics. However, Brustein did talk about what kept him from going crazy, writing about show after show:

So the task I set for myself was to put theatre into a context and try to see how this or that play fit into our particular time, our particular society, our particular culture, our particular political life, and how it reflected on that. I don’t think anyone can write a word without somehow creating that kind of reflection. You just have to find it. Then I began to get happier about my criticism.

Oh, to have the paid time and newsprint to do more of that!

Quoth

Speaking of famous British director Peter Brook--as I will be in the course of reviewing of the North Coast Rep production of Marat/Sade in the Journal and later here--he makes a number of interesting comments and suggestions about various participants in the theatre process, including critics, in his book, The Empty Space. Here's one:

"The critic is part of the whole and whether he writes his notices fast or slow, short or long, is not really important. Has he an image of how a theatre could be in his community and is he revising this image around each experience he receives? How many critics see their job this way?"

Who I Am Writing For

Who are my reviews for? It's a tricky question with even trickier answers, and I reevaluate them almost every time I write. How you can complain about a play that the audience likes? That's another part of the same question.

Reviewers are invited for opening nights, which are often filled with friends and family of the people who put on the show. At NCRT the theatre community gathers--it's also usually the night when the actors and others who've worked on the show are the beneficiaries of the concession money--and it's a celebration. In the case of The Nerd, they would also be saying goodbye to Dmitry and Tammy Tokarsky (he played the central role, she designed costumes) who are leaving the area, and welcoming Queena Isadora DeLany (she played Tansy, the love interest) who is new to the area and its community theatre.

But as an audience, it is different from the ones that will follow. I saw this play with the next night audience, a benefit for public schools; the night after that was for mediation services, two very worthy causes I support. Both of these instances--the theatre community gathering, and people in the community gathering to support something that benefits the community--exemplify another aspect of what community theatre is all about. I recognize and honor this. In fact, I love it. But my job isn't to write about that, at least not every time out.

Just as I keep the audiences in mind, I keep in mind that people who put on these plays do so at some sacrifice and work hard (they also have fun) and that they have egos and feelings. I believe in supporting the theatres as institutions as well as being fair to them and to specific productions.

 But in the end I am not writing primarily for the theatres, the participants in a production, and not even for the audiences, as such. My primary responsibility is to write for the readers of the North Coast Journal. Some of them will have seen the play, others have yet to see it, and some will never see it. My job is to give them something interesting to read, and I do that out of my own observations, experiences, predilections and point of view.

I recognize that people who go to plays aren't necessarily interested in where the play fits into local theatre history or comedies of the 20th century--they're out for a reasonably good time on a night out. But some of those people, as well as others who may or may not see the play, are interested in reading more about the play, the playwright, etc. They may be interested in a different point of view on what they saw. Fortunately here, they have the opportunity to get several points of view in print and on line. To me, that's all part of the experience of theatre in a community that values its theatre.

Some, perhaps many people within the theatre community basically understand this, and some even feel that their work is more honored by honest and serious consideration than by constant praise. At least some have told me as much privately.

And although people may use reviews to decide whether or not to attend a show, I very seldom suggest that they not see something. I hope that they are smart and confident enough to seek various points of view, and especially to go to the theatre and decide for themselves.

Elizabeth Fuller's Dream Houses

Dream Houses

Update: Elizabeth Fuller responds in the Comments at the end of this post.

In a recent interview, playwright Tom Stoppard reinterated a view on reviewing that he's held since his first interviews in the early 70s: that the job of reviewers is to express the effect the play had on them the night they saw it. (As a young writer, Stoppard was a theatre reviewer, a contemporary of Kenneth Tynan. This is an old English tradition. H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw first met after a play by Henry James they were each reviewing for different newspapers.)

It's a point of view I take seriously, and basically agree with, although with various amendments. (Okay, you can count up the "view"s now.) For example, the night I saw Dream House at the Arcata Playhouse, I had a kind of allergy attack, which distracted me, and colored my experience of the play. But it would be irresponsible to let it color it too much in writing about the play. And although I was interested in meeting Elizabeth Fuller and hearing the experience of other playgoers at the reception afterwards, I had to go straight home. What if I'd stayed? That would not have changed my experience of the performance, but might well have suggested different ways to approach it in writing.

Stoppard was also talking about the typical newspaper reviewing situation, in which you're writing a review right after the show for the next day's paper. I usually have a few days before my weekly deadline, and with a play like this one, time is useful in letting impressions settle and some idea of the pattern of the play emerge. But I find that even several days is not enough to do more than make tentative conclusions. So one does fall back on immediate impressions--but ones that have lasted a few days, and become the most prominent.

Yet the journalist in me wants to be more "accurate" than that. The review is above all a piece of writing in a newspaper, meant to be read for all the reasons other stories are read--because it's informative and entertaining in itself. But communicating to an audience that is at least partly composed of people who can see the play themselves is not the same thing as talking about your own impressions as if yours were the accurate ones, or even representative. All of this is partly why I insist I'm writing a theatre column, and not theatre reviews.

Now it's been nearly a week since I saw Dream House, and another way to organize my impressions has emerged. That is, I absorbed this "through-line" of the play but other impressions were more dominant: this through-line is the self as a collection of voices talking to the central "me," and their ultimate effect is to produce and impose shame.

Carl Jung and doubtless other psychologists and philosophers believed that each of us is many people. Probably James Hillman would say that's why early civilizations had so many gods. The voices in our heads also include important outside influences: everything from parents and partners to "society."

The conceit of the play is that it's come time for the "me" to create a home. Which we always want to be our "perfect" home: the dream house. But what is perfect? Not the self. But how we arrange our imperfections becomes our creativity, and our self. Accepting, honoring and celebrating that becomes the conclusion.

From the beginning, the play is also structured as literally a dream. The house is the self, perhaps with some reference to the "earth household" of the world, and also to the play itself--because that's what the stage is, in performance: a dream house.

The voices are represented as sisters, a very theatrical device that allows Elizabeth Fuller to create characters with separate voices and physicalities. The "me"--the one the other voices are talking to-- in the beginning is "Bozo," a nickname but also the "me" characterized as a clown. As stage business, I frankly found this annoying, but conceptually it sort of works. The clown's comedy is about awkwardness, though the pratfalls can be thrillingly graceful and daring. The central character is very awkward, anxious and uncertain. That, as well as other elements of her personality, invites shaming.

The idea of shame is brought home near the end, very powerfully, when she strips naked and presents a rapid-fire series of angry and contemptuous comments about her body, as if coming from all the other voices in her head. It's the least gratuitious nude scene I've ever seen. It was intriguing to me that throughout the play she used wigs and clothing to never allow herself to appear conventionally attractive. Then she was naked, with sagging belly (and being of roughly her age, this really made me wince.) But immediately afterwards, she put on a shift which left only her attractive legs naked, and took off the wig that revealed blond hair and, in sum, a quite attractive woman. At the time I found this another dislocation, and a puzzling one. But it does seem to follow the arc of the play. With self-acceptance, beauty.

That what screws us up in life is being "shamed," or made ashamed of who we are and what we do, is not exactly a new idea. Intellectually, I suppose I felt a bit cheated about that. But this is a play, not an idea. It's a performance, and that's its emotional power.

I suspect most of the audience responded primarily to the "sisters"--the portrayals of the Developer, the Plumber, the Dreamer, the Inspector, the Gambler, the Slut. Those were very skillfully done, and they are the meat and potatoes of the show. When I wrote my comments for my column, I was still bothered by what I felt were lost opportunities to make the various levels of "house" more vivid, and I was still feeling negative responses to some other structural elements and stage business. But without seeing it again, I can only be very tentative about that. Who knows, it could have been allergies.

I hope we will see Elizabeth Fuller back here again. Chances are we will. With her husband and theatrical partner Conrad Bishop, she operates out of Sebastopol as The Independent Eye. Her credits are amazing-- some 3,000 performances, 32 seasons of 73 shows, including 52 new plays. Together they've written some 60 produced plays. From Milwaukee to Chicago to Philadelphia to CA, with prestiguous visits to the Meccas of Louisville and New York, such commitment to theatre is awe-inspiring.