This North Coast Weekend: Continuing

Continuing this weekend are: the musical The Secret Garden at Ferndale Rep, the drama Painting Churches at North Coast Rep, and in its last weekend, the comedy Bad Dates at the Arcata Playhouse.

In case you missed it, here is my review of Bad Dates from last week's Journal.


I had my doubts. I was going to a show called Bad Dates, written while Sex in the City was hot, by a New York playwright who made her living in television: a monologue about romantic misadventures by a woman surrounded by her several hundred pairs of shoes. When I could be at home witnessing the meaningful drama of the NCAA basketball tournaments (M and W.)

But what could have been trendy triviality—and judging from some reviews online, has been played that way—became something different in the Redwood Curtain production at the Arcata Playhouse, because actor Tinamarie Ivey created a dimensional character you come to care about, and director Dan Stone found and told a compelling story.

That’s not to say that Theresa Rebeck’s script is lacking. In fact, part of this triumph is finding and using the potential that’s in it.

From the first moment—even in the preview I saw—Tinamarie Ivey instilled complete confidence and belief, partly because she was totally committed to inhabiting this character. Her honesty supported the character’s vulnerability, her ease on the stage nurtured credibility, and her physical and vocal skills suggested the shades of this character, from irony, anxiety and denial to pride and bravery.

The character she plays is Haley, who came to New York City from Texas. Divorced, she’s old enough to have a 13 year old daughter, and has become successful as the manager of a dubious but trendy restaurant, but she’s starting to look for romance again.

Ivey doesn’t do an obvious Texas accent (although she can mimic one to hilarious effect with just one word: “law.”) But she does have the undertones, and especially the occasional deep, throaty resonance (she kept reminding me vocally of Mary Kay Place of The Big Chill and Big Love fame, although Place is from Oklahoma.) This propels the raucous humor.

Though we see only Haley, and never leave her apartment, there’s a story threaded through her accounts of dates she remembers, has just been on, or is just about to begin. It eventually involves a visit to a police station (which is all just like we see on TV cop shows, she assures us—kind of an in-joke since Rebeck was a writer and co-producer for NYPD Blue and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.) In fact, if this story had been a TV show, the twist at the end would have been predictable, but as a play it works quite well on several levels.

I don’t want to give away too much, but there is a startling moment towards the end of such raw emotion that our presence as an audience feels intrusive, and the convention we’ve accepted—that this woman is simultaneously in her living room and addressing us as an audience—suddenly seems on the verge of shattering. The whole play could have fallen apart here, but it doesn’t, and this directorial gamble pays off because Ivey is in complete control of the stage.

At a certain point, Haley apologizes for male-bashing. Frankly, that’s the tone I had more or less expected but didn’t really hear, so the apology came as a surprise. I expect that men have similar dating stories anyway, including being absurdly influenced by friends and an old movie.

Even though Dan Stone (as scenic, lighting and sound designer as well as director) made very good use of the limited possibilities at the Playhouse, this is an intimate theatrical experience that such an intimate space affords. I doubt that it could work so well without that intimacy.

Studio Theatre

Just the words give me a rush--Studio Theatre. When I was in college it was where the action really was. We had big main stage productions (even a rotating stage) but the shows conceived and directed by students were in the Studio--that's where I did most of my acting, all my directing, and where the plays I wrote were mounted. Plus it was where I saw my first Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Genet, etc. Some of those productions still stay with me. When I think of Krapp's Last Tape, I get an image from the production I saw there, not from the one I saw in New York.

Studio Theatre isn't just a college phenomenon--I remember going to a big showy and not very interesting production of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford, Ontario but I stuck around for a play in their studio theatre that night, mounted by the actors on their own, and it was thrilling.

But the studio theatre is where university student work is usually done, often in the spring, as for-credit projects. I remember going to several such productions at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, especially when it was a play I wanted to see but hadn't seen yet. That's where I saw Joe Orton's farce, What the Butler Saw, and it was one of the most enjoyable shows I can remember seeing anywhere.

Anyway, it's been a few years since I've been back to the HSU Studio Theatre but I did see two student shows in the past week that reminded me of how bracing and fun this kind of theatre can be.

On March 27, Megan Hughes directed two short plays by David Ives (in a program she titled "The Ives of March,") both with the same cast: Kelly Whittaker, Ethan Heintz and Clayton Cook. The first one, "Time Flies," is a terrific very short play, about the very short lives of a couple of Mayflies, with a guest appearance by nature documentarian David Attenborough. It's funny, poignant, imaginative and beautifully constructed, and the cast hit all the right notes. The second play, not sure of the title, is about 3 workers on a highrise beam who aren't what they seem. This didn't have quite the same sure rhythm, but it was still an effective presentation. I'm glad I saw them both. Thanks to Megan Hughes and her actors, my afternoon was considerably brightened.

Yesterday evening I saw the first performance of another project, the first act of Patrick Marber's Closer, directed by Steven Robert King, featuring Jamie Banister, Johanna Hembry, Omari Howard and Jessi Walters. This is an edgy contemporary play, witty and provocative. The actors were all very good, very sharp. They also all had a lot of presence, and that's something you can't necessarily teach. Through instruction, experience and directing, performances can improve and styles can develop. But if you start with presence, you are way ahead.

I was particularly impressed with Jamie Banister (who I haven't seen act before) and Omari Howard (who I recall seeing just once.) Jessi Walters did well with her character, which was a difficult one. (Omari's character was also difficult in that he went through a big unexplained change, and was basically mercurial anyway.) I've seen Johanna Hembry a number of times, and this seemed to me like one of her best performances, particularly in relation to the other actors. They all worked together well, which was necessary in this piece, particularly in selling the quirky dialogue. That's also a compliment to the director, who staged the play well, given the limitations of these very basic studio theatre productions. It's crisply paced, a bit rough or unsure in places, but I've certainly seen more formal productions that have deeper flaws and less energy. I enjoyed it.

Closer continues in the HSU Studio Theatre (entrance is to the left of the Van Duzer doors) on Friday and Saturday (May 3 & 4) at 7:30 and on Sunday at 2. Admission is free. It's one hour--just the first act--so on the way home, you can try to imagine what happens to these people in the second act. Be forewarned that sex is the subject and though the behavior on stage isn't very graphic, the talk is.

Both of these productions reminded me of what studio theatre can do, especially when participants are engaged by the material, and have chosen to do it. That feeling of risk and commitment is part of what makes the studio theatre still whisper possibilities.

Johanna Hembry also designed this poster--she designed most of the HSU theatre posters over the past few years. Johanna impresses me in a number of ways, including how well she has used her time at HSU, as a theatre and art student. Now she has all these posters, which for the last year or two at least are professional level work. And she's been in all kinds of plays. She's been an enthusiastic participant in the publicity photo shoots for those plays--apart from being photogenic, she understands what these photos are about. When the photographer, director and I ran out of ideas for the shoot of the staged reading earlier this year (The Fire-Bringer), she staged what became the central image for the production. She's made the most of her opportunities, and that's heartening.

This North Coast Weekend

Ferndale Repertory Theatre opens The Secret Garden tonight (Thursday, April 2.) This 1991 musical is probably the best known of the many adaptations and extensions of the 1911 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who also wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy. With book by playwright Marsha Norman (‘night, Mother), and staged around the time of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, this musical originally dealt with complex themes often inhabiting children’s stories, and even Burnett’s novel was said to be influenced by Theosophical ideas.

But basically there’s Lucy Simon’s music, the beguiling if repeated story of a displaced orphan (which in this case somewhat mirrors Burnett’s own life) confronting sinister and colorful figures, and the perennially enchanting image of the secret garden (or wardrobe, looking-glass, Pepperland…)

The Ferndale Rep production appears very promising, with young Brianna Schatz as the heroine, Brad Curtis as the aptly named Alexander Craven, and a cast of supporting players that mixes skilled local veterans with fresh faces and voices. The production team is also impressive: The Rep’s Executive Director Ginger Gene directs, with musical direction by Dianne Zuleger and choreography by Linda Maxwell.

In their press release, Brad Curtis suggests the musical’s themes will resonate emotionally in these troubled times, and Ginger Gene affirms that there “are layers of meaning for audience members of all ages. Ultimately, this play is about courage and the willingness to search for the magic in life and the joy that awaits all who open their hearts.”

This weekend and next at the Arcata Playhouse is the outstanding Redwood Curtain production of Bad Dates, which I review in the Journal here.

The Lunts

In the review below, I mention this couple: "I’d call them the North Coast Lunts if I thought anyone knew anymore who the Lunts were." So this isn't Bob and Lynn Wells, but Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, known as the Lunts--the most famous American acting team, who starred in more than two dozen Broadway plays from the 1920s into the 1950s. They did Shakespeare, Chekhov and Shaw, and contemporary playwrights. They're especially famous for how well they worked together and how quickly they picked up each other's lines, especially in Noel Coward. Coward wrote Design for Living for them, and for himself as their co-star. The Lunt Fontaine Theatre on Broadway is named for them. But I have to admit that I first heard of them when Holden Caulfield goes to a matinee of one of their shows in Catcher in the Rye.

Why Howe: Painting Churches 2009

Bob Wells, Jolene Hayes, Lynn Wells at NCRT

Tina Howe nearly nabbed the Pulitzer for Painting Churches in 1984, and by 1986, when I saw the Virginia Stage Company production in Norfolk, this play was on its way to becoming a regional theatre staple. (I saw Broadway veteran Avril Gentles, regional theatre stalwart Wyman Pendleton and young Jordan Baker, familiar now from TV, especially a recurring role in The New Adventures of Old Christine.)

Unlike one of Howe’s earlier plays, which had a cast of 44 (“The seventies—those were the days,” Laurie Anderson used to say in the eighties), Painting Churches has a cast of three and a single set, and so has tempted many unwary theatres with the idea that it’s simple to do.

The story is easy to outline—a young painter (Margaret Church, called “Mags”) returns from Manhattan to Boston to help her aging parents pack up their house for a permanent move to the country, and also to paint their portrait. Her parents are blue-blood aristocrats peculiar to Boston: well-born, highly educated, even famous (Mag’s father, Gardner Church, was a prominent poet who did win Pulitzers) but with depleted financial fortunes. Tina Howe’s father, broadcaster and writer Quincy Howe, came from such a Boston breed, and Gardner is said to be based on him, though it seems there’s some echoes of poet Robert Lowell as well.

Though homey comedy is emphasized in the beginning of the play, the drama that accrues involves both the consequences of uneven aging, and the unresolved relationship of parents and daughter.

The current North Coast Repertory Theatre production features Bob Wells as Gardner and Lynne Wells as his wife, Fanny. It’s a treat to see them act together (I’d call them the North Coast Lunts if I thought anyone knew anymore who the Lunts were.) Bob slithers and squints, balancing the comedy with the character’s residual gravity. Lynne is a fine comic partner but can cause shivers with a look--and she keeps the most consistent Boston accent. Jolene Hayes is energetic and emotive as Mags, and has her own solid comic as well as dramatic turns, including some physical moments.

Director Renee Grinnell propels them all around a simple but evocative set by Katie Pratt, filling the stage with motion and emotion. There are harrowing images, like the scattered manuscript pages and the disordered end of an honored life summed up by books being piled according to color.

But for me, these praiseworthy elements—plus this much-praised play—did not come together, when I saw it opening night. It could be that the tone this play needs is harder to achieve than it might seem. Or maybe this play’s time has passed, and it is too overwrought and overwritten to be more than sentimentalized melodrama.

There’s some fine writing, there are moments to admire, and aspects of the characters that may well spark responses and recognitions in the audience. It’s certainly worth going just to see Bob and Lynne Wells perform. But the play and the production did not work for me as a whole.

I frankly don't know how to disentangle my responses. Even before going, I wondered how a North Coast audience would warm up to such an East Coast and specifically Boston class as the Churches. (The folks in Norfolk seemed to, as I recall, but then southern gentility had some things in common.) This North Coast Rep production seemed to go for universality (though they tried the accents), and casting a well-known North Coast couple automatically relocated it a bit. But in doing so, it lost some subtlety that may be necessary.

On the other hand, how much is in the script, and how much was deeded by the original cast and production team? Tina Howe has written often about art and artist (as well as about aging), but I found the notions of art (of painting and of poetry) in this play pretty simplistic. Or are the relevant lines meant ironically? Hard to tell.

The problems and terrors of aging are real (though this play is not explicitly or even necessarily about Alzheimer’s Disease, despite some statements to the contrary.) But in general, its approach to aging seems a bit antique. It may be that Painting Churches is a younger woman’s play about old age. More than a quarter century later, Tina Howe is in her seventies, with perhaps a different perspective in her new play, Chasing Manet, which has just opened at Primary Stages in New York. It’s about two women who escape from their old age home.

Great Bad Dates

I had my doubts. I was going to a show called Bad Dates, written while Sex in the City was hot, by a New York playwright who made her living in television: a monologue about romantic misadventures by a woman surrounded by her several hundred pairs of shoes. When I could be at home witnessing the meaningful drama of the NCAA basketball tournaments (men's and women's. )

 But what could have been trendy triviality—and judging from some reviews online, has been played that way—became something different in the Redwood Curtain production at the Arcata Playhouse, because actor Tinamarie Ivey created a dimensional character you come to care about, and director Dan Stone found and told a compelling story.

 That’s not to say that Theresa Rebeck’s script is lacking. In fact, part of this triumph is finding and using the potential that’s in it. From the first moment—even in the preview I saw—Tinamarie Ivey instilled complete confidence and belief, partly because she was totally committed to inhabiting this character. Her honesty supported the character’s vulnerability, her ease on the stage nurtured credibility, and her physical and vocal skills suggested the shades of this character, from irony, anxiety and denial to pride and bravery.

 The character she plays is Haley, who came to New York City from Texas. Divorced, she’s old enough to have a 13 year old daughter, and has become successful as the manager of a dubious but trendy restaurant, but she’s starting to look for romance again.

 Ivey doesn’t do an obvious Texas accent (although she can mimic one to hilarious effect with just one word: “law.”) But she does have the undertones, and especially the occasional deep, throaty resonance (she kept reminding me vocally of Mary Kay Place of The Big Chill and Big Love fame, although Place is from Oklahoma.) This propels the raucous humor.

 Though we see only Haley, and never leave her apartment, there’s a story threaded through her accounts of dates she remembers, has just been on, or is just about to begin. It eventually involves a visit to a police station (which is all just like we see on TV cop shows, she assures us—kind of an in-joke since Rebeck was a writer and co-producer for NYPD Blue and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.)

 In fact, if this story had been a TV show, the twist at the end would have been predictable, but as a play it works quite well on several levels. I don’t want to give away too much, but there is a startling moment towards the end of such raw emotion that our presence as an audience feels intrusive, and the convention we’ve accepted—that this woman is simultaneously in her living room and addressing us as an audience—suddenly seems on the verge of shattering.

 The whole play could have fallen apart here, but it doesn’t, and this directorial gamble pays off because Ivey is in complete control of the stage. At a certain point, Haley apologizes for male-bashing. Frankly, that’s the tone I had more or less expected but didn’t really hear, so the apology came as a surprise. I expect that men have similar dating stories anyway, including being absurdly influenced by friends and an old movie.

 Even though Dan Stone (as scenic, lighting and sound designer as well as director) made very good use of the limited possibilities at the Playhouse, this is an intimate theatrical experience that such an intimate space affords. I doubt that it could work so well without that intimacy. This exceptional show plays two more weekends.

Natasha Richardson on Stage

Natasha Richardson, who died as the result of a skiing accident at the age of 45, is known to most of us from films, but she was also an accomplished stage actor--following in the family tradition of 3 generations and counting. That's her with mother Vanessa Redgrave and sister Joely Richardson, and again with her mother (below left) in a scene from the film Evening. Some filmgoers may not realize who she is because she took on a variety of roles, and the same is true in her stage work. She won high praise in Broadway revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire (middle bottom photo, playing Blanche DuBois) and Cabaret (for which he won a Tony), as well as Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Among other notable roles were Ibsen's The Lady and the Sea (top right photo) and Patrick Marber's Closer (bottom right)-- coincidentally an HSU student group is performing a Studio Theatre production of this play's first act in early April. A New York Times article briefly describes her family legacy in film, but there is much, much more of it. These photos are all from the New York Times as well. Click collage to enlarge.

This North Coast Weekend

A big weekend for theatre, beginning with North Coast Rep opening Tina Howe's Painting Churches on Thursday, March 19 at 8. (That's Bob Wells, Jolene Hayes and Lynn Wells in the photo above.) Dell' Arte students present four 15 minute melodramas in an evening entitled Dust in the Wind, Thursday through Saturday at 8 in the Carlo. The comedy Lafferty's Wake plays at Redbud Theatre in Willow Creek Friday and Saturday at 8. (530-629-1907.) Hearts and Minds is described as short SoHum-centric comedies, at the Mateel on Friday and Saturday at 8, and Sunday at 2. (923-7880.) And on the first weekend of spring, it's time for high school productions: You Can't Take It With You is at McKinleyville High on Thursday through Saturday at 7. (839-6470.) Once Upon A Mattress is at Arcata High Thursday through Saturday at 7:30. (845-2002.)

Elsewhere

According to new scholarship, this is an authentic portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime, unlike the more familiar images. Not quite the rock star as portrayed in Doctor Who last year, but a lot closer...When an Oregon high school banned a production of Steve Martin's play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, and its students decided to put on an unofficial production anyway, the playwright--a wild and crazy guy--put up some of the money to do it. The ban seems motivated by a combination of squeamishness (for its "adult content") and reductive, misinformed political correctness ( "people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.") Martin says it's about "the similarity of the creative process involved in great leaps of imagination in art and science."North Coast Rep did a production of it some years ago here, which I saw and enjoyed.

R.I.P. Deborah Clasquin

Deborah Clasquin, pianist and teacher much beloved on the North Coast, passed away on Tuesday, it was announced today. In his email to colleagues, Dean Kenneth Ayoob called her "a force of nature," and Deborah certainly was that. She was a force for good on the North Coast and for the students and fellow HSU faculty she championed. I'll always remember sitting behind her on the Fulkerson Hall stage as she played "Rhapsody in Blue." My last encounter with her ended in a long hug. We will miss her.

Our Town, Our Time

Besides David Cromer (top left) in the current hit Chicago-to-New York production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the part of the Stage Manager as been played by Paul Newman (bottom left), Hal Holbrook (bottom right)--and Thonrton Wilder himself (top right.) At center is the striking poster image from a Dallas production. More on Our Town and our times in the post below. Click collage to enlarge.

Our Town, Our Country

Frank Rich has led two lives at the New York Times. He's currently a current affairs columnist, and before that he was the chief drama critic. (He's had even more jobs outside that paper--he was a movie critic for Time Magazine, and before that for New Times magazine, where he was also an editor: my editor, in fact.) The two roads that diverged in a country wood also met there, and his two lives also occasionally touch in an overt way.

This Sunday was one of those times, when he wrote about Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and our country. He cites two new productions, in Chicago and New York (there was another up in Ashland last season that unfortunately I didn't get to see), and observes: "You can see why there’s a spike in the “Our Town” market. Once again its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away “layers and layers of nonsense” so Americans can remember who we are — and how lost we got in the boom before our bust."

Given the role that theatre plays in this culture, it may take an ex-drama critic to make the connection between new productions of a classic play and how that play resonates and illuminates the moment in a new way. But given the openness that many people in theatre audiences take to the plays they see, I believe this connection is made pretty often by audiences, if not journalists.

I am also delighted that Wilder's play is being revived. Thonrton Wilder has been too easily dismissed for too long. I'd like to see a new production of The Skin of Our Teeth (his other Pulitzer Prize winner) as well. Wilder wrote plays from the 1920s to 1960. He wrote fiction into the 1970s. That's a lot of American history. It's time to see him again, anew.

Here's are reviews of the Chicago production and the New York production of Our Town.

This North Coast Weekend: Jagun Fly

It's the final weekend for Jagun Fly at HSU. I saw what will probably wind up being the worst night of the run, which was last Friday. Michelle Cartier, who not only designed the visuals (projections, video) and sound but was to run it during the show, had a sudden family emergency and wasn' there. Though the play was possible without the visual effects, the production was built with them as part of it, so the timing was thrown off. Plus someone had to learn the sound cues, because there were important sound effects. Then director John Heckel came down with this flu that's felling people left and right--he did what he could until he was too sick to stand on Friday afternoon.

But the show went on, and despite a lighting cue error which erased an important speech, and some other missed lines elsewhere, there were also very effective moments for each of the cast members, particularly Natasha Harrell (pictured above), who nobody had seen let go like that before. Judging from the talk-back afterwards, the audience was impressed overall. Now Michelle is back and the show is only going to get better. I'm hoping to see it again this weekend.


I also spent some time with the playwright, John ADEkoje, who was on campus for a week from Boston. I'd read this play so I knew he can write, as I keep saying, some serious music. But I was equally impressed with his temperament (pretty even, with humor and both in-the-moment perceptions and an analytical distance) and attitude. These are qualities I've seen before, and together with his writing talent, it's a combination that augers well for success. He impressed those who knew him as a student with how he's grown, and the potential for growth is another good sign. He's also a filmmaker, so the stage may not become his main emphasis, but he has a lot of potential as a playwright well beyond his alma mater.

Choice Voice: Sing To Me Through Open Windows

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.

 This Sanctuary Stage production plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 at the Arcata Playhouse.

 Speaking of voices, the Arcata Playhouse recently hosted a live original radio comedy, broadcast on KHSU. Both Ferndale Rep and Redwood Curtain have done these, and the full house at the Playhouse also attests to their popularity. What’s weird about watching a radio show is that it isn’t weird at all. The talent—too numerous to name—was great, the script (a detective story parody involving KHSU) was mostly funny, pocked with puns and other psychic detritus (you know, crazy people from Detroit.)

 Afterwards some participants recalled the great audio artists called Firesign Theatre, of “Temporarily Humboldt County” and “Nick Danger, Third Eye” fame. Get their CDs—still funny, and not insane.

 Coming Up: Still speaking of voices, completing its run this weekend at the HSU Studio Theatre is The Homecoming by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, known for his unique dialogue, and among the ensemble is another notable North Coast actor who excels at vocal acting, Jabari Morgan. Remaining performances are Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 and Sunday at 2. Info at HSUStage.blogspot.com.

 On Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8, the Dell’Arte Company Cabaret features your favorite Dell’Artesans plus special guests and a sneak preview of their epic work-in-progress: Blue Lake: The Opera. Then on Monday, Dell’Arte hosts visiting Le Cabaret Noir’s “Sin on Heels,” advertised as “a tawdry blend of burlesque and gender-bending performances.” For more on both cabarets, check dellarte.com.

 On Saturday March 13, Ferndale Rep holds its annual fundraiser, “RepFest: Comedy Tonight” at the Ferndale Community Center. Auction items and other information posted on ferndale-rep.org.

Jagun Fly

Jagun Fly, a new play by HSU graduate John ADEkoje begins tonight in the Gist Hall Theatre at 7:30, and plays Friday and Saturday, and again next weekend. Because I do publicity for HSU, all I could say about it in my Journal column this week is this: [it is] the winner of the tri-annual New Plays Season national competition at HSU, Jagun Fly by John Oluwole ADEkoje, an HSU playwriting graduate who is establishing a promising career in Boston. It's that Humboldt rarity: A play about Africa and America written by an African American, with an African American cast. (Standard disclaimer: I have professional and personal relationships to HSU theatre, so I will not review it here.)

But this is my own damn blog unaffiliated with anybody, so I'll add this. I haven't seen the play yet (I will Friday) nor a complete rehearsal, and I do know the production is dealing with a last minute emergency that's taken a key effects person away. But I have read the play and ADEkoje has got serious music in his dialogue. He's doing very well in Boston, connected to young black playwrights up and down the East Coast, and it's entirely possible that he will turn out to be an important playwright. In fact I think it's likely. So anybody who cares about the theatre and wants to have future bragging rights about seeing this early work, ought to get to Gist.

I also must say I am very disappointed in how the local press has covered this play, or failed to, for--if nothing else-- the newsworthiness I outlined in my column mention: this is a new play--selected as the best submitted for the New Plays Season--by an African American playwright, with an African American cast. Given what month it is, and given the events of this year so far nationally, it strikes me as utterly tone deaf not to have given this event prominent coverage. And nobody did.

Don't make the same mistake of thinking this is just another opening of another show. There's more information and photos at HSU Stage, which is a site I created and maintain for HSU Theatre, Film & Dance.

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.

Puppets in Hell: Independent Eye's Rash Acts

The Independent Eye’s Mythic Kitchen troupe, based in Sebastopol, returned to the North Coast last weekend for two shows at the Arcata Playhouse. With this version of their Rash Acts, they were trying something new, more or less. They’ve used puppets before—co-founder Elizabeth Fuller, who brought her show Dream House to the Playhouse a couple of summers ago, said that people still remember their puppet version of Macbeth from 1979.

 But after 35 years of eclectic experimentation, Fuller and partner Conrad Bishop decided to focus on integrating puppets in their new work from now on. As a step in that direction, they combined actors and various kinds and sizes of puppets to revisit five stories they’ve done in the past as non-puppet theatre.

 Puppetry is an ancient and cross-cultural element in theatre, and was present at the creation of commedia dell’arte. The world-weary puppet introducing Rash Acts mentions the memory of familiar American puppets gone by, like Howdy Doody and Kermit the Frog. His bitter patter clues us in to the expectations we may be dealing with as the evening progresses. Because the un-cute and non-madcap message of the evening might be that it’s not easy being mortal. Hey, kids—what time is it? It’s Howdy Apocalypse time!

 The current economic tailspin plus the usual angst-producing suspects (war, Big Macs, strip malls, cancer) are front and center in the first piece, “Alice in Wonder.” It’s a riff on Lewis Carroll, with a sci-fi feel (Borg voices, Forbidden Planet sound effects)--- although the White Rabbit is an airport security scanner out of the Marx Brothers (or reality), the caterpillar has given up smoking, and the Queen is male (because being Queen is a man’s job.)

 Alice is a childhood doll rediscovered by her grown-up owner as she packs up to leave her foreclosed house, and is tossing out “crap I’ve had for years, like hope and expectations… This is not one of those mythic underworld journeys. This is just going to hell.”

 Alice is eventually consigned to the Goodwill. The woman’s one remaining hope is to plant some seeds (farming and growing stuff as the only good thing left seems common to several of the stories) but she can’t, she’s moving. Not a cheery story, but with a homemade feeling of a child playing dolls in her room.

 “Reach Out and Touch” concerns a recent widower bedeviled by telemarketers at mealtime, “Freeway” is a Firesign Theatre/Doctor Who fantasy of a couple that gets on the freeway and forty years later finally finds the Big Rest Stop. This one had some interesting, dance-like interactions between the two puppets and the human couple animating them.

 “Big Mama’s Baby” is an unsubtle but cleverly detailed allegory of white civilization as a spoiled child wrecking the planet, until the volcanic Big Mama Earth snuffs him. He wasn’t all bad, though—he left behind the Ode to Joy.

 “The Shadow Queen,” which features some very nice shadow theatre work, provided at least the choice of something hopeful: art as a kind of resurrection, offered as an alternative ending. But relentless mortality and screwed up people trashing the planet were common themes, as startling lines zinged by among those that sounded more conventionally cynical.

 The puppets and costumes are striking. Personally, I have trouble relating to puppets when the puppeteer is visible. I guess most people focus on the puppet anyway, but I keep looking at the person—I gravitate towards facial expression and where the voice is coming from. It’s like a movie with subtitles: I wind up reading more than watching.

 But when I could focus on the puppets, I still found that, except for a couple of moments, they tended to mute emotional connection rather than strengthen it. Maybe a certain alienation effect is intended, or inevitable. Even when they aren’t obviously grotesque, there’s always been a certain creepy quality about puppets. In any case, given the content, it was a disquieting evening. Ruefully funny, too, though not exactly Kermit and Howdy time.

 Coming Up: Next weekend is a busy one at the Arcata Playhouse, with physical comedy in The Cody Rivers Show on Thursday (Feb. 26), Cal Pritner from New York doing Mark Twain on Friday, and a cabaret fundraiser for Coastal Grove Charter School students on Saturday…Sanctuary Stage does The Vagina Monologues on Thursday and Friday at 7:30pm at Aunty Mo’s Lounge in Eureka, benefiting local organizations. It includes two monologues never performed in Humboldt before.

 Opening on Thursday and playing two weekends in the Gist Hall Theatre is the winner of the tri-annual New Plays Season national competition at HSU, Jagun Fly by John Oluwole ADEkoje, an HSU playwriting graduate who is establishing a promising career in Boston. It’s that Humboldt rarity: a play about Africa and America written by an African American, with an African American cast.

This North Coast Weekend

Rash Acts at the Arcata Playhouse: 6 actors, 42 puppets, five "live theatrical animations" (i.e. plays maybe)written and directed by Sebastopol theatre artists Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller, this Friday and Saturday (Feb. 20, 21) at 8 pm.

A limited run at North Coast Rep of Cubby's Dream, written by, directed by and starring: Dave Silverbrand! And his Not Bad Under the Circumstances Players! Sounds like fun and it's a benefit for Silverbrand's Cleats for Kids that sends baseball equipment to poor children in the Dominican Republic. It's on Friday and Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 2pm.

As It Happened at Dell'Arte by its MFA students is three plays--loosely describable as adaptations of works in another medium-- by three groups, starting tonight (Feb. 19) and running through Sunday at 8pm.

Jeff DeMark and The UKEsperience Band are back at the Muddy Cup in Arcata on Saturday (Feb 21) beginning at 8:30 with a short Ukes set, then Jeff does some new material and reprises some stories, too. Then the Ukes are back for "their eclectic 'island boogie' songs in addition to sterling versions of Beatles tunes." There's really nobody like Jeff anywhere, every show is a new experience, even for his devoted fans who never miss him. This is the second collaboration with the Ukes; the first was a perfect blend. All this and music, too!

Meet the Meat

I'm a little behind in posting here, so here's an expanded version of my Journal review of two plays currently at North Coast Rep.

There’s a very funny, very short science fiction story by Terry Bisson that I first heard as a radio dialogue, in which two alien spacefarers are passing near Earth. One describes the intelligent species below while the other can’t believe what he’s hearing. “They’re meat?” he keeps repeating. “They have brains made out of meat? Thinking meat? You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat?” They decide for the good of the other beings in the universe they’ll just forget about Earth.

Being meat puppets complicates our lives with conflicts of intentions and conflicting desires. Carnality, in obvious and complex ways, unite the two plays currently on stage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka: Beware the Man Eating Chicken by Henry Meyerson and The Goat or Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee. Both plays are funny, one is also very dramatic, and neither is for the squeamish. Fans of theatre, even vegetarians, should make a hearty meal of this superlative evening.

Beware the Man Eating Chicken (I should warn you and my editor that the title is a pun not requiring a hyphen: it’s about a man who eats a lot of chicken, and other meat) takes place in a chaotic low-rent living room, where the brassy Betty Smith (played by Kathleen Marshall) browbeats her sister Carole (Shelley Stewart) into assisting her get rich quick scheme of feeding her unseen son William (snarls and bellows by Sam Cord) to attain a weight sufficient to win the Las Vegas contest for fattest man on the planet.

Enter Captain Leonard (Anthony De Page) who tries to disrupt the process, and siblings Albert and Dorothy (Josh Kelly and Melanie A. Quillen) who own a chicken business and want to exploit a connection with William, currently devouring 20 chickens a day. Complications ensue: think The Honeymooners meets Little Shop of Horrors.

Michael Thomas directs the eventful proceedings at a breakneck pace, which overcomes such incongruities as why a chicken company would really want to make the fattest man alive their logo. Such chinks in verisimilitude are beside the point—the whole headlong romp is at best a thinly veiled allegory of predatory capitalism anyway. The characters are stereotypes but these actors play them with unflagging energy and conviction, and ring every ounce of legitimate theatricality out of them. The script is efficient yet quirky, as befits that almost lost form, the one act. The experience is satisfying, but the aftertaste of memory is apt to be about the comic performances.

This is the California premiere of Meyerson’s play, which which was first seen in 2000 and had its most prominent production at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival. It’s followed by a play that won the 2002 Tony Award on Broadway and had successful productions in San Francisco and Washington, by a playwright who has been internationally famous since the early 1960s, Edward Albee.

Yet the somewhat edgy absurdity and laugh out loud humor of "Beware" efficiently sets up Albee’s The Goat (which is a pun of another kind), since the release of laughter is important to its effect, and to Albee’s characteristic interplay of charm and provocation. (They are also linked by each featuring a son named William. They call him Billy in The Goat, which must be another joke.)

But this play is different in almost every other way, beginning with the setting: an upper middle class dining room. Martin is a highly successful architect who is forced by the betrayal of his best friend Ross, to tell his wife Stevie and their gay son Billy, that he is having a love affair with a goat.

The kind of absurd and perverse humor inspired by Gene Wilder falling for a sheep in Woody Allen’s movie, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex is an important element throughout this play, but it is hardly the only mood. There’s family and personal tragedy and revelation, touches of awe and horror, and a mix of levels from midlife crisis to ultimate human issues in the patented Albee banter. Such are the problems that meatheads are heir to.

That this production effectively expresses such rapidly shifting and sometimes simultaneously opposite moods is due to director Michael Thomas’ brilliant blocking and pacing, and to what he created with this exemplary cast that works so well together. James Read gives Martin both perplexity and clarity, helplessness and internal force.

Shelley Stewart discards the dowdy sister in “Beware” to become the attractive, intelligent and passionate Stevie necessary to be convincing. Lincoln Mitchell (after a semi-deus ex machina walk-on in “Beware”) plays the creepiness and the hard concern of the self-appointed friend. Sam Cord also excels as the gay teenage son who adds even more layers to the sexual tensions and carnal conundrums, and to the sense of loneliness for the transgressor, however (and whenever) defined.

This is vintage Albee, uncompromising, with wit and complexity of character, dramatic weight and fearlessness seldom seen these days, when how we’re supposed to feel about a character and think about a subject is typically prefabricated. This production serves and illuminates this play, which is the highest praise I can give it, other than to suggest that this is North Coast theatre at its best.

Whose Stereotyped Now? The Wild Guys

In The Wild Guys, currently at Ferndale Repertory Theatre, we’re asked to believe that: Andy (played by Mike Halton), an older executive and experienced men’s group leader, takes three men he barely knows on a retreat without telling them anything about what they’re doing.

 He invites Stewart (Joe Hiney), a produce manager in one of his grocery stores who he disdains, and entrusts him with guiding them through the woods to a cabin that only Stewart knows about, on what Stewart thinks is a fishing and drinking trip during which he can lobby for promotion.

 Then these grown men entrust all their food to Robin (Carl Hanson), who declaims, fantasizes and whines in incessant New Agelish, and has been to many men’s groups but somehow decides that this time he won’t bring the food so they can forage and hunt like wild men, even though if he’d ever tried this before, he would likely have starved already.

 Though we’ve seen these men talk on cell phones before they left, none of them brings one along into the woods, including Randall (Hal Bahr), an otherwise wired lawyer, who is only there because Andy is a client and it’s an excuse not to compete in a triathlon with his younger girlfriend.

 But for the fast-paced first act we go along for the ride, as they get lost in the woods. Though playwrights Andrew Wreggitt and Rebecca Shaw are Canadian, there are Humboldt references added, and some comic video that also provides character background. There’s funny dialogue and action, and director Marilyn Foote keeps things moving across Gary Franklin’s handsome set, comprised of platforms that stand in for landscape.

 The actors, while not entirely sure-footed on opening night, spoke clearly, interacted well, and performed their physical action with comic effect. They all bring something to their characters, especially Joe Hiney, who suggests the hayseed side of G.W. Bush. There’s a predicable sitcom feeling, but enough laughs to keep it lively.

 Then (after one of Ferndale’s long intermissions, nearly 25 minutes) it pretty much falls apart in the bloated and unconvincing second act. There are fewer laughs, and except for a few home truths (Robin complains that when he professes his feminist sympathies, women think he’s a wimp), the stabs at seriousness are half-hearted at best.

 When it was a staged cartoon, the lack of characterization beyond recognizable types and what the actors brought to them didn’t much matter. But the attempt to introduce meaningful interactions seemed tacked-on and artificial. Revelations were clumsy, unearned and largely unrelated to what came before. By then, that the premise never made much sense became clearer and more important.

 I think most of this play’s problems can be traced to its willful misunderstanding of what’s called the men’s movement, which the play identifies with workshops begun by the poet Robert Bly. The play parodies a cliché—the popular image of deluded men going into the woods to drum and act like children. By taking that easy course, the play has nowhere real to go.

 But it doesn’t stop there: in effect, it attacks not just the excesses of this men’s movement but its essence. So here’s a contrary pitch. There’s no one alive who has done more for American poetry than Robert Bly. Together with others, including James Hillman (the most important American psychological thinker since William James), his men’s workshops used myth and real poetry (collected in a great anthology titled Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart) to explore issues such as men’s relationships with their fathers, each other, women, family, the world, meaning, death and their own numbed and unarticulated feelings.

 In the face of lazy misunderstanding or worse, it took courage. For Bly, the “wild man” was about regaining spontaneity, partly through music and contact with nature. Rediscovering “the warrior” wasn’t about killing dinner, but focused perseverance. (It’s all there in Bill Moyer’s video, A Gathering of Men.)

 Excesses aside, demeaning the whole intent leaves us with little more than today’s standard image of masculinity defined by relentless commercials: slightly dim guys whose only real focus is lust for their favorite beer.

 To be fair, this play was a prize winner in some form (there’s apparently a one hour version). It’s a community theatre favorite and the basis for a Canadian feature film on the festival circuit, although the movie reportedly drops the men’s group theme and makes it a back-to-nature trip.

 The Wild Guys runs two more weekends.

 Coming Up: Improviso! is extreme Commedia, classic physical comedy with masks, performed by Dell’Arte School first year students at the Carlo February 5 through 7 at 8 p.m… Sanctuary Stage is producing the annual The Vagina Monologues, and is hosting a fundraiser to support the production on February 13 at Aunty Mo’s Lounge in Eureka from 6 to 9 p.m. Proceeds from the production will go to local organizations that work to stop violence against women and girls: North Coast Rape Crisis Center, the Emma Center, Women’s Shelter in Southern Humboldt and the Wiyot Tribe's "Vachurr Wimouthwilh." 786-9151.

Note originally posted 12/12/09:

Friday and Saturday are the final performances for The Wild Guys, a comedy at Ferndale Rep. I reviewed it last week, and in the current issue of the Journal are three letters with a contrary view--they all liked it a lot.

My response overall was mixed, though I took issue with the play and its point of view on "men's self-help encounters of the type made famous by drum-beating poet Robert Bly and the new-age, touchy-feely movement that supported it" (to quote the Ferndale Rep web page.) (There is just so much wrong with that sentence I don't know where to start.)

 People have asked me about these letters, and I'm completely comfortable with them. They express valid points of view (even if perhaps as part of an organized effort) and different experiences of the play. I am also completely comfortable with what I wrote, and the need to offer a contrary view on the attitudes represented in the play. But if you want to see for yourself what the fuss is about, you've got just two more chances. Pictured above are: Carl Hanson, Mike Halton, Joe Hiney and Hal Bahr.

One more interesting item about The Wild Guys: This production features actors from southern Humboldt, where the rehearsals were held. On opening night, Ferndale Rep exec director Ginger Gene asked the audience where they were from, and pretty much everybody was from southern Humboldt, supporting their actors on the night when proceeds go to those involved in the production. Ginger did ask if there was anyone there from another state. No one was. "I'm in an altered state," one voice added.