The Morning After . . .

Review: The Sense of What Should Be @ The Playwrights' Center

November 9, 2009

The idea that comic books might provide more useful information than religion for navigating the modern world is a promising one. After all, during the...
The idea that comic books might provide more useful information than religion for navigating the modern world is a promising one. After all, during the Bush administration we were fighting the “axis of evil” and attempting to rid the world of “bad guys” like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And adapting comic-book stories for other mediums has worked well in movies (Batman/Spiderman/Superman franchises, Sin City, X-Men, Watchmen, et cetera) and on television (Smallville, Heroes).

In the Workhaus Collective’s The Sense of What Should Be at the Playwrights’ Center, playwright/director Dominic Orlando is attempting to do something similar on the theatrical stage—by creating a play based loosely on a comic-book plot. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more difficult to achieve a comic-style suspension of disbelief in a live setting, and the play itself feels trapped somewhere between a teen revenge fantasy and a parable about the evils of young people with just enough information to be dangerous.

Dylan Frederick plays Adam, a 16-year-old super-nerd who is frustrated by his lack of power in the conventional world and turns to comic books for inspiration (since all the great superheroes are nerds at heart). “Knowledge is power” is Adam’s mantra, so he spends his free time gathering as much knowledge as he can. Adam isn’t after book knowledge, though. He’s interested in the sort of information he can use to blackmail the prettiest girl in school into dating him and do battle with the evil forces of suburban conformity. To accomplish this, he convinces a disgraced minister (John Middleton) to share some of the secrets he has heard in confession—information Adam swiftly employs as his secret weapon.

All of which is great, as far as it goes—but this is one of those plays that doesn’t go far enough in some directions, and goes way too far down too many other, less desirable roads. In fact, the first act of The Sense of What Should Be contains an intriguing set-up and introduces the provocative possibility that comic-book justice may be more satisfying and effective than real-world justice. It doesn’t happen, though. There’s also quite a bit of banter about religion’s relevance or lack thereof in the contemporary world, leading one to believe that the play is going to explore the potential usefulness of comics as a guide for understanding a world that has essentially devolved into a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. But no, that doesn’t happen either.

What does happen is a thinly motivated scheme to take over the local hydro-electric dam and hold the city ransom for $10 million in diamonds as “revenge” against the mayor and his stupid-jock son, who dates Marie, the girl Adam fancies. It’s straight comic-book fare, and is supposed to be funny, but when the protagonists don superhero costumes at the dam, things begin to fall apart both literally and figuratively. Which is a shame, because somewhere in this boy-genius-meets-minister-with-an-axe-to-grind tale is an interesting, entertaining play about, well . . . something.

Dylan Frederick plays a great nerd throughout, and he gets some fine support from Joanna Harmon as Marie, the high-school girl he pines for, and Daniel Jimenez as Derek, her boyfriend. But it’s not enough to save the play from itself. In the program notes, writer/director Dominic Orlando writes, "The Sense of What Should Be is about what happens when comic books and pop culture are valued as much as—maybe more than—the Bhagavad Gita and The Bible, for example.” And maybe it is, but it’s not much fun to watch Goliath beat up on David, which essentially what happens when the dominant socio-cultural paradigm comes out on top against a kid with a dream. It’s not like Andy wants to fly; he just wants the pretty girl to notice him.

The Sense of What Should Be continues at the Playwrights' Center through Nov. 21.

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My Monster @ Bryant-Lake Bowl

November 4, 2009

Tuesday night is arguably the deadest entertainment evening of the week, but you have to hand it to Bryant-Lake Bowl for bucking the tide and...
Last night I stopped in to check out a staged reading of My Monster, a play written and performed by Bill Corbett and Joseph Scrimshaw. It was raining, and I could have stayed home to watch the pilot of that new TV series, V, about a supposedly friendly alien invasion, but instead I was persuaded to drag my lazy butt off the couch and head over to BLB. And I’m glad I did, because I laughed more in an hour there than I have in the past year watching so-called “comedy” on television—from 30 Rock and The Office to Leno, Letterman, Conan, and SNL. Colbert is a step up, but I got home in plenty of time to see both him and John Stewart—and frankly, neither was as funny last night as Corbett and Scrimshaw.

Staged readings are an acquired taste, but they can sometimes be more fun than a full-blown production simply because the rules are looser and the expectations lower. My Monster is perfect for this sort of presentation because it’s practically written as a staged reading. In fact, Corbett and Scrimshaw are tuning the script up before performing it in January at San Francisco’s SketchFest, a three-week orgy of comedy that everyone who’s anyone in American comedy has participated in at one time or another.

In My Monster, Corbett plays a pompous version of himself as a successful screenwriter delivering a lecture (or rather, sharing the “lightning energy” of his brilliant mind) on how to create a compelling Hollywood screenplay, starting with the creation of a compelling character. Scrimshaw plays the “character,” who, after his personality has been fleshed out—screenwriter by day, paid assassin by night, drinker of Martini and Rossi Asti Spumante (for product placement purposes), excellent puncher, lover of women, vampire fighter extraordinaire—starts questioning Corbett, the screenwriter “God,” about his character’s motivations and moral code. Having created this “monster,” a character who challenges his screenwriting genius, Corbett must now figure out a way to get rid of him—by either deleting him or rewriting him.

Paraphrasing doesn’t do it much justice, I’ll admit. Suffice it to say that My Monster is hilarious, and I’ll be curious to see how it does in competition with the nation’s best in SF.

In the meantime, BLB has plenty of other interesting stuff going on. Tonight (Wed., Nov. 4) it’s The Works, an interesting forum for writers and poets who want to share aspects of the writing craft in short, informal presentations. Hosted by our own Lightsey Darst, tonight’s program features Emily Warn and Peter O’Leary on “Poetry and Religion: In Praise of Naming and Listmaking,” and Jim Rogers on “The Writer in the Graveyard.” I’ve been to a couple of these events, and even though the subject matter might sound a little obtuse, the presentations themselves can be surprisingly thought-provoking, precisely because they are about aspects of writing that may have never crossed your mind.

Tomorrow night, there’s another installment of the Reel Jazz Film series, featuring a documentary by filmmaker Katja Duregger about gay/HIV-positive pianist Fred Hersch—called Let Yourself Go: The Lives of Fred Hersch. And this weekend, don’t miss Hardcover Theater’s new play, She: Immortal Witch Queen of the Lost World, a company-created piece that combines various books in the “lost world” genre, including Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

I could go on, but, as I said before, there’s something interesting happening at BLB almost every night (here's the schedule). If you haven’t been lately, maybe it’s time to get off the couch and let the DVR do its work. Tonight I’m going to watch that episode of V, but my guess is that it’s not going to be quite as entertaining as last night’s trip to BLB.

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Review: Faith Healer @ The Guthrie

October 25, 2009

As most of you must know by now, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer marks quite a few firsts. It’s the first time Guthrie artistic director Joe...
As most of you must know by now, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer marks quite a few firsts. It’s the first time Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling has cast himself in a title role, the first time he has both directed and acted in a Guthrie play, and the first time he has dusted off his acting chops in more than twenty years.

The obvious question everyone wants answered is whether Dowling is any good? And the answer is yes, he does a fine job in his role as Francis Hardy, a faith healer who spent his life traveling from village to village in Scotland and Wales, occasionally performing minor miracles for sufferers of various ailments and disabilities. However, in pairing himself with Sally Wingert and Raye Birk, two of the Guthrie’s most dynamic actors, Dowling has set the bar for himself extraordinarily high. And by the time Sally Wingert is half-way through her monologue, it honestly doesn’t matter how effective Dowling’s turn onstage was. (The play is told in four long monologues—the opening one by Francis Hardy (Dowling), the second by Gracie, Hardy’s wife (Wingert), the third by Teddy, Frank’s manager (Birk), and the closing one by Frank again.) The way this play works, Dowling tees it up, Wingert cocks the bat, and Birk hits it out of the park.

Such monologue plays are difficult to pull off because very little of the action happens onstage; most everything happens in the audience’s imagination. The actor is just a storyteller, and the strength of the thing rests on the power of the tale, the music of the language, and the skill of the teller. Each character recounts the same key episodes in their twenty-year association together, but each has a slightly different interpretation of events. As Frank Hardy, Dowling has the hardest job, since he must set the stage for the stories to come.

The tale they all tell involves Frank’s strange “gift” as a healer, the circumstances surrounding Gracie’s stillborn baby, and a chain of events that eventually leads to Frank’s murder and Gracie’s suicide. As skilled as they are, the monologues by Dowling and Wingert are so melancholy and depressing that they can be a bit tedious, but the payoff comes when Raye Birk takes the stage as Teddy, who recounts several humorous episodes of his days as a manager, including one about a whippet (yes, a dog) that could play the bagpipes. Teddy is a flamboyant character who wears a red velvet housecoat and bowtie and loves exclaiming the word “fantastic!” Having already heard two different versions of the events Teddy is discussing, including two different assessments of his own role in those events, Teddy’s revisions are hilarious—and as he gets to the sadder parts of his tale, the humor makes them that much more poignant.

The beauty of this play resides primarily in the evocative lyricism of the language and the ability of each actor to paint the same basic chain of events with a completely different brush. The play is performed in the McGuire Proscenium, but it is such an intimate play that the Dowling Studio would probably have been a more effective space. It is also an “actor’s” play, in that on any given night Frank Hardy never knows if he will be able to “perform” a miracle, which is the same situation all artists face, whether they are an actor facing a new audience each night, a painter facing a blank piece of canvas—or, it must be said, an artistic director planning a season of plays. Kudos to Dowling for accepting the challenge, and for proving that more than mere faith is behind his success at the helm of the Guthrie. There’s a little skill involved too.

Faith Healer continues at the Guthrie Theater through Dec. 6.

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Review: Ruined @ Mixed Blood Theatre

October 18, 2009

You know things are going badly when working at a whorehouse represents a step up in your living situation. But it beats being gang-raped by...]]> You know things are going badly when working at a whorehouse represents a step up in your living situation. But it beats being gang-raped by soldiers for five months, or having your uterus split open with a bayonet, which is the fate suffered by Salima and Sophie (respectively), two young Congalese women caught in the crossfire of a civil war that is tearing their country apart.

But at least they’re alive, and at the beginning of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined—which won this year’s Pulitzer, Obie, and Drama Desk Awards for Best Play, and is receiving an impressive, finely acted staging at Mixed Blood Theatre—the women are sold to a brothel by Sophie’s uncle, an itinerant salesman who knows exactly how bad things are: bad enough that he has to sell his niece to a madame for protection.

The proprietor of the brothel is Mama (played by Regina Williams), a strong, saucy force of a woman who is all business on the surface, but has compassion for the women who work for her, especially Sophie (Celeste Jones). Sophie is “ruined” for sex, but she is smart and can sing, and eventually finds her niche as the business’s bookkeeper and late-night singer. Each night, when the soldiers and miners make their way to Mama’s for respite from days spent digging and shooting, Sophie soothes the savage soldiers by singing romantic love songs. The periodic rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire doesn’t stop her, or anyone else, because in this particular jungle the sound of an AK-47 is as common as the chirping of crickets.

A great deal of barbarity is alluded to in this play, but most of it occurs offstage, in the world beyond Mama’s Place. Her little shack in the jungle is the last outpost of civilization in this war-torn hellhole of a country. It’s the only place where at least a few rules still apply (Mama insists that soldiers check their bullets at the door), and some forms of pleasure—beer, sex, music, conversation—are still available. That, and she’s got the only pool table around. Mama survives by not taking sides (“Who will win? Who the hell cares?” she says), by treating soldiers on each side equally, and by making sure that her girls give her guests what they want. Superior customer service is the price the girls pay for protection and survival.

Regina Williams is marvelous as Mama. She sways and struts through her establishment, letting everyone know she’s in charge, and she’s quick to bark at anyone who dares defy her rules. But the real accomplishment of this production is that it so effectively reproduces the microcosm of insanity that exists under Mama’s roof and stretches out into the terrifying jungle beyond. The eleven-person cast is relatively large, but it has the feel of an ensemble that has worked together for years, which is a credit to Aditi Kapil's direction as well as the raw talent onstage, including Bruce Young, Ericka Ratcliffe, Paul Meshajian, Irungu Mutu, and Gavin Lawrence. The set, too, is superb.

As plays go, Ruined is fairly conventional (it’s essentially a one-room drama told in three acts), but the subject matter is timely and Mama’s complex survival strategy has enough layers and dimensions to make her place a serviceable metaphor for any country where civilization has broken down and good people are caught in the crossfire (Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, Darfur—take your pick). Allusions are made to the politics of diamond and copper, two of Congo’s richest natural resources, but understanding the politics isn’t necessary, because no one—not even the fighters—understands it completely. It’s more important to recognize that the fighting is not about nothing—it’s about the usual things: money and power—and that the social breakdown caused by the war has led to an environment of almost unthinkable barbarity. Inside Mama’s Place, the dynamic is reversed—here it’s about poverty and powerlessness, and good people doing what’s necessary to survive in a country where pretty much everything is ruined. The morality of it is disgusting, but it makes for some effective drama. Mixed Blood’s production is the first in the country after its prize-winning run in New York, and it's the meatiest, most engrossing play to hit a local stage in a while.

Ruined continues at Mixed Blood Theatre through Nov. 22.

101 Dalmations @ The Orpheum Theatre

October 15, 2009

It’s not an opinion that I’m very vocal about. Like love of our flag or love of our Lord, puppy love is something that’s...

Dogs are okay.

It’s not an opinion that I’m very vocal about. Like love of our flag or love of our Lord, puppy love is something that’s simply unquestioned in this country. Recently, on the Jay Leno Show, Chris Rock delineated our newest piety when he joked about the modest level of outrage directed at Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old girl. Rock’s remarks provoked an electronic whiteout of moralizing invective—not for his joke comparing Roman Polanski to O.J. Simpson, but for his joke refusing to compare Polanski to Michael Vick. “Michael Vick must be wondering, ‘What the hell did I do?’" Rock said.

The next morning, about 200 trillion online dog lovers locked down the ALL-CAPS key on their keyboards to remind America’s formerly favorite comedian.

There were other, deeper divides exposed by the reaction to Rock’s comments, but the hysterical nature of the doggie bloggers made something clear that’s been obvious to anybody who’s been a bystander at a dog run or a dog park or, God help us, a doggy date: America is zealously devoted to her canines, and each year this devotion intensifies.

I get it: there are all kinds of reasons man’s best friend deserves the affection—chief among them an unreasoned loyalty on behalf of the dog—but more than one cultural pundit has speculated that, at least on our end, the intensity of the relationship has been stimulated by Hollywood. And even if, as Ralph Ellison suggested in Shadow and Act, Hollywood is only a mirror held up to society, no production company has depicted puppy love quite as successfully as Disney. The biggest doggie franchise of all times is unquestionably Disney’s version of 101 Dalmatians. First released as an animated feature in 1961, it was re-released in 1969, 1979, 1985, and 1991. Another version, starring live-action humans and dogs, was released in 1996 and a sequel to that one was released in 2000. All told, the 101 Dalmatians movies (there was a television cartoon too) have grossed more than $600 million, and that’s not counting DVD sales.

Now, making its worldwide debut at the Orpheum Theatre, brought to you by Purina Dog Chow (not Disney) there is a 101 Dalmatians: The Musical. For the last three weeks, 15 Dalmatians have been sitting in a warmed-up tent in the Orpheum parking lot, and last night these dogs finally had their day.

The strangest bit of fallout from the movie, was that immediately after its debut, there was a run on Dalmatians at America’s pet stores. “And Dalmatians don’t have the best disposition,” according to one of the musical’s producers, Randall Buck. “When it was discovered they didn’t make great pets, thousands of dogs were returned and destroyed.” The musical wanted to include live Dalmatians in order to set themselves apart from other anthropomorphic Broadway productions, like Cats or The Lion King—but in order to avoid another Dalmatian holocaust, they decided against using Dalmatian puppies. They are using rescued animals, and before each show they are passing out literature parsing the challenge Dalmatians pose as pets. They are well aware that there would be ALL-CAPS HELL TO PAY if these types of politically correct steps weren’t taken.

If you are an entertainment lawyer, at this point you might be asking, HOW DID THESE NON-DISNEY GUYS GET THE RIGHTS? Actually, the musical is based on the 1956 young-adult novel written by Dodie Smith. Superficially, there are major deviations from the movie—Pongo’s owner is married in the book and the musical, as is Pongo—but the most important artistic conceit is maintained: the parallel between dogs and humans. Throughout, the dogs, Pongo and Missus Pongo, portrayed by James Ludwig and Catia Ojeda, refer to their owners, Mr. and Mrs. Dearly, portrayed by Mike Masters and Kristen Beth Williams, as their “pets.”

In fact, the producers have gone through great pains to ram this over-thought point home: every actor portraying a human has been compelled to act on stilts. This makes for some wobbly dance routines, and ridiculously baggy costumes, but due to the stilts, the humans are distinguishable from the other much shorter humans (other than Mr. and Missus Pongo, mostly child actors) wearing white pajamas with black spots. (When I asked a producer how he found actors willing to perform under these conditions, he said, without irony regarding a production where the actual Dalmatians travel on their own luxury coach: “actors will do anything.”) I’m sure the stilts will be more manageable after a few performances, but despite the, well, stilted performances, one (I’m sure very foreseeable on the part of the producers) dramatic bonus is a ten-foot-tall Cruella Deville. And Broadway star Rachel York manages to have an incredible amount of fun playing one of the culture’s most iconic cartoon villains ever over-the-top-and-on-stilts.

The songs, written by former Styx lead singer Dennis DeYoung (he wrote both “Sailing” and “Lady,” the other guy wrote “Mr. Roboto”) are also very high concept. Speaking to DeYoung before the show, he explained that he divided the tone of the songs between human and dog. The humans, like Cruella and The Dearly’s, sing big, Broadway numbers, like Cruella’s devilish “Hot Like Me,” with nods to jazz, music hall and vaudeville, while the dogs sing more contemporary pop and rock songs, like “Gotta Take Care of Your Human.” The dramatic flow of the scenes is a little uneven, and for a guy famous for his ballads, most of the ballads were a snooze. But still, a couple songs managed to stand out: the reggae/rock opera-ish “Be a Little Big Braver” was catchy, if not full-on infectious, and “Hail to the Chefs” was evocative (maybe a little too evocative) of “Cabaret.”

But here’s the thing: the stilts and the songs are compelling enough, and that’s all they have to be. Because as long as you love Pongo and Missus Pongo—and you really have to, unless you want to be thrown in the river like some kind of apostate non-dog-loving witch—you will care about what happens to them, and you will keep watching. Respectfully, Ludwig and Ojeda don’t screw this up—they sing well, and they have a very appealing, sitcom husband-and-wife thing going on. But the winning premise—dogs: they’re just like us!—is one of the most well-established moral truisms of the age, so well established that the kids in the audience have been conditioned to love it before sitting down for the first scene. It’s veritably Pavlovian. The producers have to know this—with live animals and actors on stilts there are going to be inevitable kinks—but the premise is too good for the production not to be able to overcome a few kinks.

There is one pretty major kink that really does need to be worked out, however. There aren’t enough dogs in 101 Dalmatians. Remember those 15 Dalmatians in the parking lot? They only have two scenes in the entire thing. Granted, they get a huge reaction from the kids when they finally do appear, and an even bigger one during the grand finale, but even to this dog-liker, there could be more dogs in the show.

Don’t freak out; I mean it. Seriously. Easy, there. Back away from the ALL-CAPS.

101 Dalmations continues at the Orpheum Theatre through Oct. 18.

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