lies like truth

Edward Albee's At Home At the Zoo consists of two one-act plays. The first, "Homelife", was written in 2004 when Albee was 76 years old. The second, "Zoo Story", was composed when the author was just 30. Though the two plays complement each other in some ways, I'm not sure they should be produced together. More to the point, I'm not sure if "Homelife" should be produced at all.

San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater does as fine a job with staging both plays as is conceivable. (In fact, the two Albee plays I've experienced at ACT have been among the best work that I've seen the company produce in recent years. 2005's The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? was terrific.) Director Rebecca Bayla Taichman creates boldly contrasting moods between the two halves of the show. While almost everything about "Homelife" is careful, measured and internalized -- like Robert Brill's blandly stylish off-white living room set -- "Zoo Story", staged against a toxic green backdrop, bristles with animal energy, heart-on-sleeve passion and danger.

But while "Zoo Story" had me completely engrossed, "Home Life" almost made me go to sleep. I don't think that the problem lies with Taichman's production or the quality of Rene Augesen and Anthony Fusco's acting. The play feels completely staid and stale and I'm not sure if there's enough in it of interest to resonate in any particularly revealing way with the action in "Zoo Story."

Albee wrote "Homelife" to "do justice" to the character of Peter. The only character who appears in both plays, Peter is a dead-from-the-neck-down, middle-aged man who sits on a park bench minding his own business until his life is suddenly thrown off-kilter by a talkative and strange young man by the name of Jerry (compellingly played in ACT's production by a shifty yet lovable Manoel Felciano). Jerry does most of the talking in "Zoo Story" and Peter remains a shadowy, passive character. Albee attempts to readdress the balance between the two characters by helping us to understand Peter's behavior in "Zoo Story" through showing us the character at home with his wife Ann in "Homelife, which takes place in real-time about an hour before he heads to the park for his fateful meeting with Jerry.

While meeting Peter before he meets Jerry helps us to understand and empathize with the character to a degree, "Homelife", to my mind, has two enormous flaws. For one thing, unlike the apocalyptic "Zoo Story", "Homelife" could never work as a standalone play. It's just too plodding and cliche-ridden. For another, one of the wonderful things about "Zoo Story" is its strangeness. I like the mystery that enshrouds both Peter and Jerry. Why do we need to have Peter's life explained away?

At Home at the Zoo plays at ACT until July 5.

Until a few days ago, I was one of those people who turned their nose up at the social networking site, Facebook. With three blogs and a website to maintain myself, I was very much against the idea of being tied to my computer even more by upping my "online presence". And why would anyone in their right mind want periodic updates on my life along the lines of "Chloe is staring at a blank page on her laptop. Only 2,000 words to write before teatime" or "Chloe had soup for lunch"?

I broke down last week however, when I heard that a large number of participants of the Chanticleer Summer School -- an amazing (and frankly life changing) choral workshop run by the San Francisco a cappella men's chorus Chanticleer which I attended last week at Sonoma State University -- had their own Facebook page. Suddenly I saw a good reason to succumb to the lure of the beast. Upon the prodding of two of Chanticleer's singers (Eric Alatorre and Brian Hinman, I will hold you both accountable forever!) I signed up for an account on Friday afternoon and prepared to be unimpressed.

The site is of course a big time-waster. But in terms of being able to stay connected with singers from all over the country, I think Facebook might become invaluable.

For one thing, I've been enjoying reliving the workshop experience by checking out photos people took during the week and hearing about their various singing endeavors upon return from Sonoma. Here's an example by fellow workshopper and music teacher Paulo Faustini who lives on the East Coast: "Vocalized the sopranos to a high F at 8:30 AM and then worked with the small group singing Hassler's Dixit Maria, and is now taking a break before a masterclass at 1 PM, and then more lessons later in the afternoon and an evening rehearsal. Wine may be needed at the end of the day!"

For another, Facebook might actually end up being a great business communications tool for me as I develop my vocal music radio show, VoiceBox, and various other journalistic and musical endeavors. For instance, the day after I returned from the workshop, I wrote a blog post about Chanticleer music director Joe Jennings' farewell concert. I was able to paste the link to the post on my Facebook page, which made it much more accessible to the people who were either at the concert and/or care most about it, but don't necessarily follow my blog on ArtsJournal. Readers, in turn, were easily able to comment on the blog post. A few wrote to say they'd signed up for the RSS feed to receive my blog regularly through ArtsJournal.

And when VoiceBox starts up again in the fall, I'll be able to alert a hopefully captive audience of singing buffs about the series and engage them as listeners.

The simple moral of the story: Sometimes it's good to get suckered into something. I've been slow on the uptake. But Facebook (or F$*!book as I've affectionately come to call the site) really does seem to hold promise as a cultural resource.

Marty Ronish, the co-creator of the excellent classical music radio blog, Scanning the Dial, asked me to contribute some thoughts about what it's like to be a rookie radio host. I recently launched my first radio series, VoiceBox, through NPR-affiliate KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco.

Reading over my responses to the questions Marty asked makes me feel like a Muppet. Did I really equate hosting a classical music radio show with good sex? The mind boggles.

In any case, click on this link to read my thoughts.

And on a completely unrelated subject, check out San Francisco Chronicle Theatre Critic Robert Hurwitt's very informative piece about the history of the San Francisco Mime Troupe which turns 50 this year.

In his excellent article about Merce Cunningham's decision to disband his dance company following his death ("Why Dances Disappear") Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout does a brilliant job of explaining how dances are taught by choreographers to dancers and how this impacts the longevity of the pieces he or she creates. My favorite part of the article is where the writer compares the transmission of a piece of dance from choreographer to company to the transmission of a piece of classical music from its composer to an orchestra:

Dance notation is so complex and inexact that no choreographer has ever used it to create a new piece from scratch. In fact, most choreographers and dancers don't even know how to read dance notation, much less write it. Instead of sitting at a desk and writing down the steps of a new dance, a choreographer makes them up on the spot in a studio and personally teaches them to his dancers, who then perform them from memory on stage.

No other art form works this way. Imagine that instead of writing down his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven had taught it to the members of the Vienna Philharmonic by playing it on the piano over and over again until each musician knew his own part by heart. Now suppose that the Philharmonic liked the Fifth Symphony so much that it continued to perform the piece for the next two centuries, with each succeeding generation of players learning the score by rote from its predecessors. Ask yourself this: What would Beethoven's Fifth sound like today? Would it still sound the same way it did in 1808, or would it have undergone dramatic changes in the process of being transmitted by ear from musician to musician? Or might it have been forgotten altogether?

The only aspect of Teachout's story which strikes me as odd is the author's surprise at the idea that a choreographer might want to keep his company going on past his death (Cunningham is 90 years old.) "Why break up so solidly established an ensemble?" writes Teachout.

To my mind, the dissolving of performing arts companies as a result of the death or indisposition of its artistic creators is a natural thing. Companies ARE their directors in most cases. Without the charismatic visionaries at their core, they often lack the energy to continue. There's just no point.

I believe that more companies should follow Cunningham's lead. And I speak somewhat from experience: When I was in my early 20s, I worked right out of college for the London-based theatre company Cheek By Jowl. It was an eye-opening debut into the world of professional theatre. When I arrived, the company was in pretty bad shape. The relationship between the artistic directors and the executive director had turned sour, morale was low, and the artistic directors were being increasingly solicited by admiring producers to work outside Cheek By Jowl.

Instead of continuing with the charade of running their own company, they decided to close it down for a while. Eventually, Cheek By Jowl came back with the original artistic personnel (though without the original managing director) in place and went on with a renewed sense of vigor and purpose and continues to make inspired work to this day.

At the time when all the upheaval was going on, I was confused and sad. I was only 22 after all and I ignominiously lost my job after a year. But now that I look back at the artistic directors' decision, it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes you have to raze the mountainside to make it grow anew.

The people that know Joe Jennings well say that he isn't given to voluminous outward displays of emotion. The few times I've spent in the company of the great American chorus conductor, interviewing him for articles about Chanticleer, the world-famous all men's a cappella ensemble he's been directing since the mid-1980s, or on more general vocal music subjects, he's remained piquantly understated to the point of terseness.

Jennings is, in fact, one of the most soft-spoken and taciturn interview subjects I've ever come across. But while his iterations are compact, they're often profound, so you have to get in close and tune in your ears to listen.

This was definitely the case during most of the past five days which I spent singing with Chanticleer and around 60 other choral music enthusiasts at the annual adult singing workshop which the ensemble holds in conjunction with Sonoma State University up in wine country.

During our daily afternoon rehearsals, Jennings, who is officially retiring this summer, cut an almost spectral presence. The choral director would shuffle into the room very quietly and painfully slowly behind the walker he now regularly uses to get around owing to an illness that is slowly but surely taking a toll on his mobility. Taking his place before the assembled choir, he would mutter a couple of words under his breath. The people sitting nearest him seemed to catch his drift and this would set off a ripple effect of communication until we all figured out what piece he wanted us to work on, at what measure he planned to start and what exactly it was that he wanted us to do with the music once we had it ready before our eyes. On occasion, though, the Chinese whisper mechanism didn't work and he'd end up repeating himself several times, each with more volume and better articulation. Then, after a couple of hours of concentrated effort, he would say something like "mmm-hmm" or "that's all" and shuffle on out of the room on his walker without further comment.

The hushed, self-effacing demeanor belies the sonic miracles that Jennings creates on stage. Chanticleer itself of course gets as close to nirvana as a choral ensemble can get. But what he managed to pull out of the workshop choir at yesterday's concert was profoundly moving -- not just because of the music which we performed, but also because of the powerful emotions that welled up and surfaced in this amazing and outwardly reserved conductor.

We had caught a glimpse of Jennings' secret superhero nature at rehearsal the day before, when he led the Moses Hogan spiritual, "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" with such ferocity that he seemed demonically possessed. He threw his arms up in the air, he gyrated, his conducting roared. At one point, Jennings leapt carnivorously at the piano and played the entire score from memory thumping the keys on his feet like Jerry Lee Lewis going at "Great Balls of Fire."

I'm sure the members of Chanticleer, who were all present throughout the workshop, have experienced this side of Jennings on occasion before. But it was electrifying for someone like me, who'd only ever encountered him sitting before a tape recorder in an interview room or sitting statuesquely in the front row of a concert hall while watching Chanticleer perform, to see the music course through the conductor in this way.

When it came to yesterday's afternoon concert, the explosive outburst of the previous day's rehearsal mellowed into something quite different. During our set, Jennings face started changing. The poker expression he so often wears, with eyes blinking impassively from behind glasses, softened. His lips, which are usually pursed in an expression of vague disapproval, opened slightly. Jennings looked -- surely not, but, yes, actually, yes -- like he was on the verge of crying.

By the time we reached the last song in the set, Franz Biebl's "Ave Maria", the conductor's eyes were full of tears. They trickled down his cheeks as he moved his body to shape our singing. And all around the stage, the chorus responded to his gestures, in turn giving voice to Biebl's angelic music and the spontaneous surge of his emotions.

This was Joe Jennings' final official appearance on a podium with Chanticleer. And no one in that concert hall yesterday afternoon will forget it in a hurry.

I'm off to the Chanticleer Summer Choral Workshop in Sonoma for the rest of the week. I'll be too busy singing to blog, most likely. So please find me here again next Monday.