Archives for 2008

I am always saddened when powerful words like “love,” “terror” or “tragedy” lose their strength and even eventually their meaning owing to overuse, bowdlerization and/or general carelessness.

I’ve been feeling this disappointment particularly strongly of late with respect to what was until recently one of my favorite words: “maverick.”

Maverick was once a wonderful word. It sticks on the tongue and in the heart. It reminds me of wild, empty plains; of life lived on the edge. The way in which the McCain-Palin junket has seized the word and made it synonymous with stolid Republican values inspires nothing in me but boredom and disgust.

So it was a great relief to turn on the radio yesterday and catch the middle of the latest edition of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s great news commentary show, As It Happens. During the show, the host interviewed an 82-year-old woman by the name of Terrellita Maverick. Ms. Maverick lives in San Antonio, Texas. She comes from a long line of Mavericks. She’s what you might call a “genuine Maverick.”

When asked for her thoughts about McCain-Palin’s attempt to turn her family name into part of the brand image of Republican campaign, Ms. M was naturally indignant. She said that the Republicans had no business using the word “maverick”, regardless of whether it’s with a capital or small “m.” She then went on to relay her family’s history in the real-estate and cattle business. The original meaning of the word “maverick” apparently dates back to the mid-1800s, when one Samuel A. Maverick (1803-70), a Texas cattle owner and one of the interviewee’s ancestors, was negligent in branding his calves and became known for his individualist behavior.

The seven-minute interview was wonderful, despite the fact that Ms. Maverick, perhaps suffering from slight deafness, called Palin “precocious” and “a good speaker.” (Alas I don’t think the pensioner was being ironic.) I really needed to let off some election season steam. Hooray for Canada.

Like many things in life, people often judge an arts experience by the entrance that a performer makes on stage. Whether it’s the members of the male a cappella vocal ensemble Chanticleer all traipsing on stage in perfect tuxedo-sporting synchronicity with black folders neatly tucked under their right arms, or Katherine Hunter loping on with a scowl as the malignant, hunchbacked Bolingbroke in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III I witnessed in 2003 at London’s Globe, performers tell us much about what to expect within the first few seconds of their act.

So it was interesting, on Friday night, to experience the country singer Iris Dement’s entrance at http://www.yoshis.com/ in San Francisco. Shuffling on stage with her head bowed, her guitar hung haphazardly around her neck like a baby chimp, spilling liquid from a cup in one hand and carrying a plastic bottle of water in the other, Dement looked like she was carrying huge bags of groceries to her front door rather than getting ready to play before a packed house at one of the west coast’s premiere jazz clubs.

Dement sighed, put down her load, and plonked herself down at the piano. “So much for a smooth start,” said the singer-songwriter in her husky, southern drawl.

Dement’s entrance might have left some audience members non-plussed, and her appearance — stocky, bespectacled and dressed like a school marm in an old-fashioned, knee-length, patterned sun-dress, chunky-heeled sandals, woolly cardigan and string of beads — didn’t exactly exude country music heroine cool. But as soon as Dement started paying, I certainly forgot about her entrance. Or, rather, the quirkiness of those opening moments coupled with her slightly frumpy appearance, only served to endear her to me.
I was struck by the contrast between the sweet, pleading penetration of her singing voice, the husky, I-just-got-out-of-bed-stoned timbre of her speaking voice and the Tom Waitsy rocking of her piano style. As far as I recall, all of the songs in Dement’s spiraling, close-to-two-hour unbroken set were strophic. And every time the chorus came around in her melodies on such themes as enduring love, spiritual wonder and soaking in nature, the songs seemed to get more and more under my skin.

Dement’s songs have a candidness to them that’s at once inspiring and refreshing. She tells it like it is without being cynical. One of my favorite songs from the concert was “Let The Mystery Be”. The open, sparse chords sounded as truthful and free-ranging as the philosophy of the lyrics, which explore our attempts to understand “the great unknown.” With its jaunty stride bass and cracked melody, “Mama’s Opry”, a memoir about Dement’s relationship with her mother, is as much an exasperated appraisal of — as it is a tribute to — the tough, 91-year-old woman.

Dement’s performance also presented an interesting combination of extreme self-absorption and brazen worldliness. At one point, she commented about how much she loved playing the piano at Yoshi’s (“This piano sounds so good to me; if I’m not careful, I’ll forget you’re there.”) At another, she played a few bars of a song then changed her mind, saying that she suddenly didn’t feel like performing that number anymore. On the other hand, her commentary included pained thoughts about the state of the nation (“I’m not too happy with the way things are going in this country right now”) and her decision to join a new church, inspired by a Kansas City pastor she heard on the radio who stated “christianity and capitalism don’t go together.”

A friend who attended the concert with me was unhappy that Dement spent so much time behind the piano. He prefers her guitar-playing, of which she did very little during the set. But I didn’t mind the keyboard-centric bent of the evening. I found myself completely absorbed in the singer’s sound. My first impression of seeing Dement perform live will probably stay with me forever. But the thing that will stay with me the longest, I think, is the memory of her wonderfully humorous, bitter-sweet ballad about an aging couple entitled “This Love’s Gonna Last.” I will never forget the lyrics of the refrain for their pungent imagery. I’ll leave you with these words:

Some days together we’re like baseballs breaking glass
Still, I think this love’s going to last.

Chris Jeffries’ stimulating, funny and clever musical Vera Wilde juxtaposes two seemingly very different characters from the same era. The quirky, homespun-melodied work, produced by the Berkeley-based company Shotgun Players and featuring a five-piece folk band comprising of upright bass, guitar, banjo, fiddle and drumkit, extrapolates on the lives of Oscar Wilde and Vera Zasulich.

Za who? I hear you ask. The the story of the great Anglo-Irish playwright is well known throughout the world. But Zasulich, despite being dubbed the “mother of terrorism” for taking Russian feudal law into her own hands in the late 1800s, working closely with Lenin during their exile in Switzerland, and playing a fundamental role in bringing about the Russian Revolution, barely registers as a footnote to most people today.

Zasulich and Wilde probably never met, though Wilde was enough inspired by news reports of the Russian radical’s stand against the Czarist authorities (she shot a sadistic prison commander for flogging a defenseless, physically-depleted student 50 times for the crime of not removing his hat) to write his first (extremely unsuccessful) play Vera, or The Nihilists (1880) about Zasulich.

Employing a mercurial time structure which moves forwards in time through Zasulich’s story and backwards through Wilde’s, Jeffries shows us, by the end of the play, just how the reputations of the two figures stand today. Our final impression of Zasulich is of a crippled, old woman, barred from an important Community meeting and already practically forgotten by the people who had heralded her as a hero in her youth. Wilde, meanwhile, is in his prime by the end of the production. As portrayed by the flamboyant Sean Owens (a talented Bay Area actor and playwright who seems to view Wilde as a sort of alter ago) the character exudes confidence at the end of the play. A vision in green velvet, Owens’ Wilde stands proudly at the start of his career. He embodies the idea of promise.

The start of the play paints the opposite picture of the two protagonists: Zasulich is at the height of her powers: As brought to life by a willowy, determined Alexandra Creighton, the character is fearless, radical and committed to shaking up the system. An overnight sensation, Zasulich becomes a figurehead of dissent. Wilde, on the other hand, is at his lowest ebb when we first meet him. Broken by his years in Reading Gaol for “gross indecency” and unable to return to England, he dies a pauper in Paris. His shimmering resume as a dramatist is even tarnished by the fact that his most successful plays are performed without his name on the billboard.

At one point in the middle of the play, the two characters’ lives physically intersect. Jeffries imagines them meeting in London. Wilde is in rehearsal for — ironically — his play A Woman of No Importance, when Zasulich seeks him out ostensibly to interview him for the revolutionary newspaper which she edits in Switzerland. She hopes to inspire the man who wrote a play about her to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon, but instead leaves disappointed without even telling the playwright her name.

Though the opening scenes could use more punch, and the singing could overall be better in tune and more clearly enunciated, director Maya Gurantz delivers a clean, well-balanced staging of the work and coaxes energetic, performances from all five members of the ensemble.

Set against Lisa Clark’s claustrophobic backdrop of grey, narrow, precariously inward-leaning Victorian facades, Gurantz, Jeffries and their collaborators evoke a history of heroic outcasts from Galileo to Joan of Arc to pose a provocative question about the nature of revolution: Does change happen at the heart of public life or on the fringes?

There’s a passage from Amy Tan’s novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter which won’t leave me alone.

It’s the section describing a book of Chinese brush paintings called “The Four Manifestations Of Beauty.” According to an interview with the novelist in Fate! Luck! Chance! , Ken Smith’s new book about the making of the opera version of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan filched this idea from her friend Bill Wu, an Asian art expert. Wu had developed his ideas about aesthetics through studying the calligraphy of the famous Chinese artist C. C. Wang. I’d like to quote the passage as I think it’s one of the most resonant descriptions of beauty I’ve ever come across:

‘With any form of beauty, there are four levels of ability. This is true of painting, calligraphy, literature, music, dance. The first level is Competent. ‘We were looking at a page that showed two identical renderings of a bamboo grove, a typical painting, well done, realistic, interesting in the detail of double lines, conveying a sense of strength and longevity. ‘Competence’, [Kai Jing] went on, ‘is the ability to draw the same thing over and over in the same strokes, with the same force, the same rhythm, the same trueness. This kind of beauty, however, is ordinary.

‘The second level’ Kai Jing continued, ‘is Magnificent. ‘We looked together at another painting, of several stalks of bamboo. ‘This one goes beyond skill’ he said. ‘Its beauty is unique. And yet it is simpler, with less emphasis on the stalk and more on the leaves. It conveys both strength and solitude. The lesser painter would be able to capture one quality but not the other’.

He turned the page. This painting was of a single stalk of bamboo. ‘The third level is Divine,’ he said. ‘The leaves are now shadows blown by an invisible wind, and the stalk is there mostly by suggestion of what is missing. And yet the shadows are more alive than the original leaves that obscured the light. A person seeing this would be wordless to describe how this is done. Try as he might, the same painter could never again capture the feeling of this painting, only a shadow of a shadow.’

‘How could beauty be more than divine?’ [LuLing] murmured, knowing that [she] would soon learn the answer. ‘The fourth level,’ Kai Jing said, ‘is greater than this, and it is in each mortal nature to find it. We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is what innocent children have. It is what old masters regain once they have lost their minds and become children again.’

He turned the page. On the next was an oval. ‘This painting is called Inside the Middle of a Bamboo Stalk. The oval is what you see if you are looking up or looking down. It is the simplicity of being within, no reason or explanation for being there. It is the natural wonder that anything exists in relation to another, an inky oval to a white paper. A person to a bamboo stalk, the viewer to a painting.’

Kai Jing was quiet for a long time. ‘This fourth level is called Effortless,’ he said at last.

There’s an art to knowing how to tackle a museum. The massive civic institutions that grace most major cities around the world, from The Prado to The Met, are overwhelming and exhausting to many visitors.

If you happen to live in a city with a big museum, you can buy a membership and enjoy seeing the institution bit by bit. You can pop in and out in a lunch-break. You never have to wear out your soles by attempting to “do” the whole museum in one visit.

But if you’re a tourist and feel like you have to get around the museum in one day, you’re likely to experience burn out. In an effort to create a manageable experience, you might choose to ignore the permanent collection and simply take in the traveling show. This is a shame as it’s the permanent collection that defines an institution, not the celebrity exhibit that flirts with several organizations on its way around the world.

With the above in mind, it’s gratifying, on occasion, to spend time in a small museum. I was reminded of this only yesterday when I visited Santa Cruz’s tiny Surfing Museum. In only 30 minutes, I’d pretty much covered the whole place and walked out into the sunshine feeling like I’d learned many new and wonderful things about the local surf culture. Set in an old lighthouse on a cliff overlooking one of the laid-back California coastline’s legendary surfing areas, “Steamer Lane”, the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum traces around 100 years of Santa Cruz surfing history and provides some background on the genesis of the sport from 15th century Hawaii to the California shoreline.

The museum is housed in a tiny single room, about the size of a generous stall in a public bathroom. Not an inch of space is wasted. Photographs of famous local surfers adorn the walls. Massive, old fashioned wooden boards (some weighing 100 lbs or more) tower over us like totem poles. There’s a video featuring interviews with members of the surfing community and an elaborate faux-beach display created to show off an innovative wetsuit designed by Jack O’Neill (the founder of the O’Neill surf gear company.) The museum even houses a gift shop.

Other surf museums such as the International Surfing Museum at Huntington Beach, might have more extensive collections. But there’s something rather wonderful about walking out of a museum without feeling frazzled. In this way, the museum perfectly embodies the zenful surfing spirit.

Enjoyed a fabulous private backstage tour at San Francisco Opera House on Saturday evening courtesy of my vocal instructor and SF Opera chorus member, Kathy McKee. Prior to our attending a performance of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, Kathy took my friend Alice and I into the bowels of the venue, where we wandered around a maze of corridors, and popped in and out of rooms where a motley assortment of singers, musicians, janitors, administrative staff and others were going about their business.

It was particularly fascinating going into the chorus members’ lounge. Singers in various states of costume gobbled take-out food, read books, or sat in huddles chatting. The room even had a blackjack table in the corner, though no one was engaging in a game at that point.

The room in which the singers lined up to get their faces done and wigs put on by the opera’s face and hair staff also provided a wonderful snapshot of the performers’ pre-show lives. The place was packed. Having already applied their own makeup bases to their faces, singers waited patiently in a row of chairs for a space in front of a mirror to open up. Once seated, the makeup artists went to work on the singers.

I enjoyed being in front of the proscenium almost as much as the experience of being behind it. Verdi isn’t my favorite composer. The stuffy mise-en-scene with its Medieval Italian costumes also left me rather cold. But Dmitri Hvorostovsky (pictured) made for such a believable, empathetic title character, that I was completely taken in by the production. And I really enjoyed the crowd scenes, packed as they were with thundering hordes of chorus members and supernumaries.

For me, the most powerful aspect of the opera lies in its probing of the word “democracy.” The opera begins by epitomizing the idea of “people power” with the Genovese masses deciding to elect a “commoner”, Boccanegra, to be their doge. The chorus in SF Opera’s raises the roof onstage. And Verdi never lets us forget the presence of the people: Even when we’re not looking at them, we hear their voices ringing out from off-stage.

But the opera does nothing if not satirize and question the democratic process. Political conniving and backstabbing constantly threaten to undermine Genoa’s fragile structure and by the end of the work, a huge shift has taken place. Boccanegra dies on stage and the next doge is declared not by the people but by the dying man himself as he breathes his dying breath.

By the end of the sublime choral concert I experienced on Thursday in Berkeley by Chanticleer, I was convinced of two things: One — that the all-male a cappella vocal ensemble deserves every bit of praise it gets from the classical music press, and two — that the ensemble needs an image overhaul.

Let’s start with point one, with which most people would agree. The opening concert of the group’s 31st anniversary tour brought together songs from many different parts of the American choral tradition, from the simple, spun-gold lines of the traditional Appalachian shape-note song, “Guide Me, O Though Great Jehovah” to the mesmerizing, primal soundscape of Mohican composer Brent Michael Davies’ “Night Chant.” At various different points in the two-hour-long program, the music took us up, brought us down, made us laugh, made us cry, cradled us in waves of softness and jolted our systems to the core. When I came to my senses after the experience was over, I was struck by the diversity of the group’s repertoire and the spine-tingling beauty of its sound.

Now to point two: The only thing remiss with the performance was the presentation. I know that Chanticleer gets a lot of marketing mileage out of the preppy-pristine squeakiness exuded by its singers on stage. For some weird reason, many people, especially in this country, get off on the choirboy thing. But no one in the ensemble looks comfortable in a stiff tuxedo. The stiffness of the singers’ garb is worsened further by the little speeches that they give between songs. I don’t have a problem with the introductions per se — most of the content in Thursday’s concert was interesting and the pontificating never went on for more than a minute or two. But the delivery seemed so canned and rehearsed. I can’t understand how singers who sing so organically together, who seem to move, vocalize and breathe in such perfect harmony, can be so robotic on stage when they’re not singing.

Interestingly, when I was out in the lobby after the concert talking to a couple of the ensemble members, I got a completely different impression of them. Something of the naturalness that comes across in their singing was also present in their warm way of meeting and chatting with audience members after their gig. All the formality vanished in the post-show environment. Which made the pompous dress and speechifying seem all the more absurd.

While it’s true that for some concert series, the group eschews the tuxedos for, say, black pants and shirts, or, at Christmas, preppy sweaters and slacks. But regardless, the vibe is still decidedly old-fashioned. Grandmothers and elderly gay men might like the stuffy aesthetic, but I imagine it leaves almost everyone else cold.

It seems sad to me that a group whose members are so young (most of the singers are in their mid-20s) should attract such an aging audience. There were quite a few zimmer frames in the house on Thursday and my friend and I were probably the youngest people there by about 20 years. The church in which Chanticleer performed was right next door to the Berkeley campus, but I don’t recall seeing anyone who looked like a student.

Something needs to be done to rectify the issue and the solution might just be to do something about the group’s presentation. Chanticleer deserves and needs to find a broader, younger audience. We should regard these guys as rock stars. Doing away with the penguin suits and the rehearsed speeches might be a good start.

Like dairy products, theatre critics come with sell-by dates. At some point after you’ve been in the game for a while and have covered shows on similar subjects by the same companies over and over again, you wake up one day and realize that you’ve said just about all you have to say about these plays and players. You find yourself repeating yourself. The word choices, sentence constructions and themes that once seemed so fresh now seem stale by dint of endless repetition. You’ve gotten to know people in the business, making the job of being honest about their work more of a challenge. You continue to walk the straight and narrow anyway because your first priority is to tell it how it is. But you don’t revel in your unflinching honesty as much as you once did because the director whose show you just trashed has long been a keen reader of your blog.

It takes a brave critic to admit all this to themselves and an even braver one to take action. For those lucky few with staff jobs, the possibility of moving on to another beat makes the prospect of hanging up their reviewers’ notebooks and pen-lights more palatable. Those staffers with a strong attachment to the theatre can always kid themselves that they’re taking a sabbatical rather than moving on for good.

But for freelancers (and most theatre critics these days aren’t on the payroll) the idea of giving up writing about a performing arts community they’ve come to know and love, the career-building power of a regular platform, and a steady paycheck seems particularly daunting.

Getting a similar gig at another media outlet probably isn’t the solution for people who are enough in tune with themselves to face the reality of their predicament. For you’ll still be writing about the same shows and producers, albeit for a different editor and maybe a different core audience. Moving elsewhere is a possibility, but getting in on the tiny number of available jobs usually takes living in that place for months first if not years. Theatre is an intensely local genre, so unless you’re one of those very few reviewers who manages to snag a job in another market in spite of having no prior knowledge of that city’s specific arts environment, you’re kind of stuffed.

There are few things worse for the health of a theatre community (and I’m including audiences in my definition of the word) than stale, jaded journalism. Knowing this is one thing. Doing something about it, however, is quite another.

The quest for so-called “authenticity” in the early music movement is one of those crusty topics that never goes away. Research into Medieval music practices serves an academic purpose, sure, in as much as finding out how music may have been performed in the distant past enriches our experience of it. But to what extent are all the academic tracts useful when it comes to the practical business of performing? My mixed feelings about this topic crystalized last week when I attended the Anonymous 4 “Chant Camp” which I initially blogged about yesterday.

Susan Hellauer, co-founder of the famous American early music ensemble (pictured) argued passionately in favor of bringing early music to life in a way that makes sense to the performers, even if that means turning one’s back on scholarly thought. Anonymous 4 focuses on capturing the flow of words, phrases and musical lines in the repertoire it sings. It doesn’t prescribe to the more academic “solemnes” method of reconstructing early music which produces a cooler and less emotional effect.

Knowledge about ancient performance practices is mostly based on conjecture: We can’t know for certain how things were done back then. Who’s to say where authenticity lies when a source for a piece of chant might be Roman, but the text, Franco-Flemish? “You have to do the best you can. You read what the scholars say and then do something that means something to you,” Hellauer said. “You can theorize yourself into silence and never sing a note.”

One of the many fascinating things I learned last week while attending an afternoon-long “Chant Camp” in Silicon Valley led by two members of the great New York-based early music collective, Anonymous 4, was that it is in fact possible to learn a piece of music quickly and easily without having to refer to a score.

When I had previously tried to pick up some of Hildegard von Bingen’s chants while preparing for a production of Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard von Bingen alongside fellow singers in San Francisco Renaissance Voices, I found the score indispensable. We tried a couple of times to learn chants by repeating phrases back to our director, but we didn’t get very far. Now I realize that this might have been because I was scared.

To most classically-trained western musicians, the idea of learning music by ear is completely foreign. We use our eyes first to read the notes on the page, learn the music, and, eventually, if we’re skilled, get to the point where we can play or sing the notes off by heart.

But this way of getting to grips with a composition isn’t the only way to do it, as workshop leaders Martha Genensky and Susan Hellauer (two members of Anonymous 4) proved to us. They encourage workshop participants to learn music by listening, which is how most chant would have been learned in Medieval Times as the monks and nuns generally couldn’t read musical notation.

Over the course of a mere half hour or so at the workshop, we surprisingly managed to absorb several winding lines of chant by memory. Some of us were tempted to look at the music we had been given, but I did what I was told and put my manuscript paper down. Instead I concentrated on listening to Hellauer and Genensky singing short phrases of the chants to the group and repeating them back. It helped that a lot of the words were simple and well known (mostly standard liturgical lines like “Benedicamus Domino”). I found that after about two repetitions, I was able to get the flow of the phrase pretty well. After five, I more or less had the line down. The tricky part was remembering how to string all the little blocks together — remembering which little phrase to tack on to the previous one to create the whole piece.

It was strangely liberating to learn music in this way. I might try to apply what I learned in the Chant Camp to other kinds of music. In terms of getting the all-important flow of the line in plainchant though, this ears-only method is indispensable because it makes all the singers in the group tune into each others’ energy right from the first note of the first hearing. It’s a pretty powerful method.

Last night, around 35 Bay Area theatre community members gathered at Last Planet Theatre in San Francisco for the latest in an ongoing program of “theatre salons” hosted by a group of six local performing arts people, myself among them.

The theme was “what is fringe?” and we spent the evening eating, drinking, and hotly discussing issues surrounding notions of fringe theatre. Wide-ranging ideas came up during the conversation, but we essentially kept returning to one issue: Whether fringe is a type of theatre (ie something that can be defined by its content and other associated factors) or the name given to a particular arts experience, usually a festival.

To some, the fringe specifically denotes a festival of uncurated theatrical work such as The Edinburgh Fringe. Any use of the term beyond that is meaningless. Others, meanwhile, think that there is such a thing as “fringe theatre” and more or less define the concept along the same lines as one would “alternative”, “experimental” “outre” and other similar terms.

For me personally, the most interesting talking point of the evening stemmed from the beginnings of a discussion we had about the distance that local artists feel between the fringe and the mainstream. In the Bay Area — and I suspect it’s the case all over the U.S. — there exists a wide gulf between the small, alternative world of theatre-making and the relatively-moneyed, mass market world. The gulf exists not just in terms of the size of the budgets, but also in terms of the content as well as the artists and the types of venues involved.

We didn’t get a chance to explore issues of the relationship between fringe and mainstream theatre as much as I’d have liked to last night. But the ideas have been pinging around my brain ever since. It was particularly interesting in light of yesterday evening’s event to come across Nicholas Hytner’s (pictured) article in from yesterday’s edition of the UK Times this morning. I’m pretty tired of British newspapers publishing articles with self-important headlines like “British theatre is the envy of the world.” But a paragraph in Hytner’s article about the fringe caught my attention:

“Maybe the biggest change in the British theatre since the foundation of the National in 1963 has been, if not the assimilation of the fringe into the mainstream, then at least the blurring of the line between the two,” Hytner writes. “It’s a mark of the health of our theatre that artists and audiences now travel happily between the two, and that the discoveries of the new wave are hungrily coopted on behalf of the wider audience. The fraternal dialogue between fringe and mainstream means an artist like Emma Rice can base her company, Kneehigh Theatre, in Cornwall, work at both Battersea Arts Centre and the NT, and collaborate cheerfully with an enterprising commercial producer to draw the crowds to the West End. And if you go to Edinburgh now, you can’t really tell whether the Fringe or the official Festival represents the establishment.”

It’s been a while since I lived in the UK and worked in its theatre community, but if what Hytner says is really true, then the British theatre is indeed enviable for this very reason. Artists working in the theatre on this side of the pond just don’t get to move as freely between the fringe and the mainstream. Why? Just as the literary mid-list has dwindled to close to nothing in the book publishing world, so mid-sized theatres are a rarity in this country today. As a result, artists find it hard to transition from making work on a small scale to a larger scale. Plus, there’s the need for artists to sustain themselves with better paying jobs in the industry that make the economics of performing on the fringe untenable. (You can put on a sold-out, critically-acclaimed show at the fringe, but if you can only charge $9 a ticket perform just six times in a 50-seat house, you’re not going to make enough to keep a roof over your head.)

In the rare case that an artist does manage somehow to score that breakout hit enabling them to leap from the off-off-Broadway scene to Broadway (or at least the fringe scene to more mainstream venues), then it’s usually a one-way journey. People over here “graduate” from the fringe. They don’t hop freely between the margins and the mainstream several times in any given year.

On the way through the tiny hamlet of Olema, California on Friday, my eye caught a sign at the edge of the village which looked just like the kind of sign you’d find at any city limit in America, except instead of “Olema, California (Pop 55, Elev 60)”, it read, “Obama, California (Pop 55, Elev 60).” My friend and I drove onwards towards the coast, thinking, “what a terrific trompe-d’oeil.”

We weren’t the only people to notice the sign. The next day, the local paper, The Marin Independent Journal, ran an article about the sign.

“Olema resident Kelly Emery’s sign of the times is stirring up a bit of small-town political excitement,” wrote reporter Jim Staats. “The 48-year-old Emery – a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama for president – installed a road sign outside her Olema Cottages bed and breakfast on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard this week that mimics other town limit signs, except that it renames the area “Obama.””

According to the article, the sign served, at least in the mind of its creator, as much an artistic purpose as a political one. “”It’s really just an artistic expression,” Emery is quoted as saying in the article. “There’s something about his name that plays tricks on you. I love our Olema sign and it would make me think graphically of Obama and I just thought it’d be fun to make a sign that would hopefully make people do a double-take.”

This morning, as my friend and I headed back from the coast following a weekend of camping, we were dismayed to see that the Obama sign had disappeared. We wondered whether an angry Republican had taken it down, or whether a selfish tourist or Obama wonk had stolen it.

We talked about its merits as an art project versus a political statement and decided that its cheekily precise mimicking of a typical U.S. city sign made it function on both artistic and political terms — political, because it trumpeted the name of the presidential candidate to passersby; artistic, because it did it in such an unusual, eye-catching and humorous way that it both made fun of election season over-the-top political campaigning methods while contrastingly claiming Obama as an inherent part of the tiny tourist town.

I called the B&B when I got home to find out what became of the sign. The reality was more prosaic than we’d thought: “I had to take it down because it was in the county right of way,” Emery told me in a resigned voice. Emery has no plans to reinstall the sign on her property because she says no one will see it there, though she might erect it elsewhere in the town of Olema if her fellow citizens allow it. I asked Emery what made her put the sign up in the first place. She responded: “My intention was just to make people smile.”

I wonder if anyone in a place like Kansas City will attempt the same on behalf of Senator John McCain? McCainsas City (Pop 146,866 Elev 740), anyone?