Archives for 2008

The high ratings of television shows in the UK and US like Last Choir Standing (BBC) and Clash of the Choirs (NBC) together with a slew of articles in recent times about everything from how the French are embracing choral singing to how “choirs are becoming cool” has inspired me think about what it is that turns me on about singing in a chorus. Here’s my initial, off-the-cuff list of reasons, not in any particular order:

The feeling of being part of a team
Creating beautiful music
The physical benefits e.g. improves breathing and posture
Clears my head; helps me connect my head with my body
Keeps me focused on the “now” rather than cogitating over the past or future
Social aspect e.g. meeting new people; going for a drink after rehearsal
Sharing great music with an audience
Pre-concert adrenalin rush
The challenge of learning tricky music
The sensation of hearing really unusual melodies and harmonies
The pleasure of performing in unusual spaces or spaces with lovely acoustics
The theatricality of dressing up for concerts
The idea of lots of different voices and personalities all coming together and creating harmony
Developing musical expertise
The sense of feeling both connected to myself and people around me.

I’m sure there are are more reasons I could come up with if I put my mind to it. If you have anything to add to the list, feel free to get in touch.

Finally, here are a few reasons that music critic Norman Lebrecht states in the piece he wrote in 2005 (see “embracing” link above) about why people love choral singing: “Choral singing is one of the last frontiers of human freedom,” writes Lebrecht. “It is pretty much the only art you can perform without someone taxing, regulating or funding it, and it is certainly the only music that delivers an instant uplift to all participants.”

It’s fascinating to see how an artist’s involvement in a project can mutate over its development process.

While working on an article for the Los Angeles Times about San Francisco Opera’s upcoming world premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, I’ve been curious to discover how Amy Tan’s role vis-a-vis the creation of the new opera has evolved over time.

When composer Stewart Wallace (Harvey Milk) approached Tan, whom he’d been friends with since meeting the novelist at the Yaddo artists’ colony in 1994, about adapting her 2001 novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter into an opera, the novelist at first declined. Then she changed her mind when she realized she wouldn’t have to recreate the novel on stage but could fashion something different based on the source material. (At least, that’s the story that Tan and her cohorts involved in the project give out. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the main reasons the novelist decided to allow her book to be turned into an opera was because a Hollywood film deal fell through.)

Then, when Wallace’s regular librettist became unavailable to work on the project with the composer owing to schedule conflicts (though again, who knows what really went on there) Tan took over the libretto-writing — her first — with Wallace.

Ultimately, however, Tan’s involvement with the opera has gone way beyond writing the libretto. The novelist is playing an active role in the rehearsal process. She’s coaching some of the singers to help them connect with the autobiographical elements of her narrative about three generations of Chinese women. She’s even going as far as to tell one performer — Zheng Cao, who plays Ruth, the main, quasi-Tan character in the story — how to dress and wear her hair. “When Amy’s around, I always have to dress up,” Zheng told me last week when I visited the opera house to conduct interviews and watch rehearsals. She’d just been to the salon and had her hair straightened, also upon Tan’s advice. “When she’s not around, I can wear jeans.”

The Bonesetter’s Daughter has its premiere on September 13. My piece about the opera appears in the LA Times next weekend on September 7.

Over the past few Augusts, I’ve been lamenting the fact that I’m not in Edinburgh, soaking up the Festival. For several years in the early 2000s, I went every year and hurtled around for the month writing reviews and features for a variety of media organizations from The Economist and The Scotsman to the BBC and The San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Today, though, I’m not feeling quite so bad about being on the other side of the world. A friend of mine (and former Edinburgh Festival employee) who lives in the city sent me a hilarious email this afternoon lamenting the money she’s wasted this summer catching bum shows at the Edinburgh International Festival. With her permission, I thought I’d share her experiences with you:

“Oh boy – how much tripe can one girl take?” Her email begins. “The one good thing we saw was the dance company Rosas doing a night to some live performance of Steve Reich’s music. Apart from the dodgy eighties’ number with the synthesizers and maracas, which did eventually do my head in, it was really exciting stuff.”

“The rest was just bollocks.”

“We saw the world premiere of Heiner Goebbels’ new show with the Hilliard Ensemble on Thursday – and I fell asleep only to wake and raise an eyebrow just at the moment when one of the singers intoned “I was asleep, I wish I were dead” (or something similar) and K [my friend’s partner] got the giggles bad. Think we may have disgraced ourselves. We left in the interval. A turgid, over-studied murdering of TS Eliot.”

“We saw a Polish company do a version of [Sarah Kane’s} 4:48 Psychosis – in Polish. Alright, but it would have been better if they’d trusted the words and not tried quite so hard to embody it all quite so dramatically.”

“Then there was a night of Sufi dancing, which was just weird. Mostly because despite being in the international festival dance programme there was almost no dancing and what dancing there was, was pants. Also, left us both feeling entirely icky we felt like some dreadful post-colonial, white supremacist voyeurs peeking at a real religious rite because it was ‘exotic’. Very peculiar programming.”

“Then last night, after all that, we had all our hopes pinned on Matthew Bourne’s new production of Dorian Gray. Oh lordy. It was just so tired and obvious and, well, nasty. So we left in the interval and came home to watch another episode of [the TV series] So You Think You Can Dance (much better dancing and we have become hooked since our Canadian friend Jen introduced it to us a few weeks ago).”

“Am trying to think of the festival as interestingly anthropological to stop me feeling quite so hacked off and imagining everything else we could have done with the ticket money.”

Ah well. Next year, I suspect my friend may rent out her apartment and vanish to the Highlands for the month. She won’t be the first Edinburgh resident to do the same come festival time.

Every now and again, a director, producer or cast member of a theatre production which I am reviewing will accost me as I’m exiting the theatre after seeing the show to ask me what I thought of it. This is a tricky situation. Even if I enjoyed myself immensely, it’s hard to formulate a response instantly. And if I didn’t have a great time, it’s even harder to say it straight out to someone who’s been working so hard to get the show up and running.

I suppose the easiest way to nip the issue in the bud is to use the stock answer: “You can read all about it when my review comes out next week.” But this somehow seems a bit smug. Also, frankly, I never remember to use it when I’m caught on the spot.

The other day, a director not only asked me what I thought of the show as I was making my exit, but also added — when he didn’t quite catch my noncommittal answer to his question — “Oh good, it’ll be great to get a plug this late in the run.” Sheesh.

Most reporters save the hard questions for the end of an interview. The reason for doing so is simple: It’s much easier to get an interview subject to open up to an interviewer on a touchy, difficult or otherwise challenging subject once you’ve gotten to know them a bit and they feel slightly warm towards you, than if you blurt out a question that might potentially cause offense right at the start. If you get off on the wrong foot at the beginning of an interview, you may cause the subject to clam up entirely and be forced to chat about the weather or exchange gardening tips for the remainder of the session.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the new artistic director of a theatre company for a profile story. The conversation went pretty well. The director, whom I shall call Gina, was friendly and helpful and gave me lots of interesting information about herself.

I didn’t think I had anything potentially difficult to ask her, so I felt relaxed throughout. But right at the end of the interview when the topic of Gina’s age came up — a routine journalist’s question, or so I’ve always thought — I suddenly felt like I’d asked the director to admit to an adulterous affair or reveal secrets about her mother’s boudoir.

“Why do reporters always ask women that question?” Gina asked me in a ticked-off voice. “They never ask men.” I told her that this was simply not true: Asking the age of an interview subject is a normal thing. Reporters — at least the good ones — don’t discriminate between the sexes. And yet Gina was not happy. She kept going on about how much she hates to state her age and couldn’t understand why readers would possibly interested in knowing such a detail.

Gina isn’t the first person I’ve heard complain about being asked their age in an interview, though most people are pretty good-natured about it and generally give you the information after being momentarily coy.

But Gina is definitely the first person I’ve come across who gave the following as a reason for not wanting to reveal her date of birth: “I don’t think it would be so easy to get funding if people knew my age,” Gina said. “Funders generally prefer giving money to younger people.” I find this incredibly hard to believe. And if it were true, I doubt very much that Gina has ever run into this problem herself: the woman looks about 15 years younger than she actually is. (Though she didn’t want me to print her age in my story, I found it out from another source.)

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who feels that they’ve been discriminated against as an artist by funders as a result of them knowing their age. Similarly, feel free to share your views and stories about the issues inherent in revealing one’s age to the media as an artist.

I’ve seen a lot of films inspired by Shakespeare’s plays in my time, but I’ve never seen one quite like Never Say Macbeth.

This new feature length comedy written by Joe Tyler Gold, directed by C. J Prouty and produced by Tammy Caplan, has as its teaser: “The curse of Macbeth … It brings fire! Death! Boring first dates!”

The premise for the film is a fun one: A nerdy Midwestern high school science teacher travels to Los Angeles to attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend who’s fled the relationship and her life as a drama teacher with dreams of becoming an actress. When the science teacher improbably finds himself cast as a witch in the same production of the Scottish Play in which his ex is playing Lady M, he mistakenly says the cursed M-word in front of the assembled cast. Disaster ensues.

Although the script is fluffy and full of tired thespian clichés from the crazy, bearded egomaniacal director to the campy gay acting couple, Never Say Macbeth has its heart in the right place. There’s something particularly lively about the scene in which ghosts from the theatre’s distant past all perform shows from a repertory season long ago – at one point, a trio of craggy witches from a1950s production of Macbeth find themselves improbably sharing the stage with characters from equally musty stagings of The Pirates of Penzance and The Importance of Being Earnest.

The film would probably appeal most strongly to a high school audience of students interested in becoming drama majors at college. There’s a cute love story at its center and some cartoonish special effects. The lead actor reminds me of The Office and 40-Year-Old Virgin star, Steve Carell.

But I personally found myself wishing that the movie could have been cleverer and more artfully created. From the grainy, lo-fi quality of the cinematography and the overly hammy performances to the hackneyed premise and cheesy jokes, Never Say Macbeth comes across as a bit amateurish. It’s sort of like a Summerstock theatre production on screen.

I’ve been careful to avoid Golden Gate Park in San Francisco this weekend. A big part of me wanted to hear Radiohead perform at the first ever Outside Lands Festival in the park. But I’ve never been one for crowds and the thought of spending a minimum of $85 on a ticket and standing in the fog for hours with 160,000 people was a bit of a turnoff.

Instead, I spent Sunday wandering around the East Bay, where the comparatively miniscule, vastly more esoteric and largely free Downtown Berkeley MusicFest was taking place all weekend, also in its inaugural year.

It was a delightful, quintessentially Berkeley day, characterized by sunshine, organic mango lassis and a melee of unkempt beards, tie-dyed muumuus and patchouli. Over the space of a few hours, I heard four different acts. Sat on the patio at Jupiter’s brewery listening to the laid-back blues riffs of slide guitarist Pete Madsen (pictured left). The musician was playing with a slide made from a wine bottle by one of his students. Madsen jokes about the slide being a little too upscale for the kind of music he played: It was culled from a bottle of Napa Valley Pinot rather than some homespun moonshine. His music was perfect for a hot day. It span in my head and made me think of parched hills and dusty country roads.

At a hole-in-the-wall venue on University Avenue, the OneWorldWalk Center, I heard the early music quartet, The Galileo Project, performing works for Baroque fiddles, cello and harpsichord by such composers as Corelli and Matthew Locke. The audience was sitting literally inches away from the performers in the cramped performance space, which was really little more than a stairwell with a few seats stuck along the walls. It was thrilling to be so close to the players. I could read the first violinist’s music along with him. I could see the way in which the harpsichordist bunched up her hands to play the complex ornaments in some of the passacaglias and chacones.

Back at Jupiter’s, an acoustic Americana troupe consisting of fiddler, guitarist, mandolin, banjo and vocalist, performed some wild bluegrass music that alternately made me want to slug beer and get up and dance.

The only group I heard that I wasn’t completely won over by was Ya Elah, a world-religion-inspired all-female vocal troupe. The ensemble’s program of “Bulgarian Village Songs and Middle Eastern Melodies” was just way too nutty-crunchy-granola for me. I appreciated the interactive moments, where the singers had the audience join in on the chorus in one song and clap and yelp in another. I also loved harpist Diana Rowan‘s contribution on the Celtic harp. The songs in which the harp accompanied the vocalists were not only better in tune but also more richly textured. What bothered me most about the group’s effort was the endless commentary that went along with the playing. I just wanted to hear the music. But instead they insisted on giving a lecture before each number about the message of each song, which invariably was to do with peace, love and happiness or how we’re all part of the same great, divine, human race and that god is within each of us etc etc. By the time we got to the “Hari Krishna” song at the end of the program I was ready to scream. Still, Ya Elah’s music seems to resonate quite strongly with the Berkeley crowd.

I loved the wide range of acts at the festival as well as the way in which audiences were encouraged to meander from venue to venue. In some ways, the event felt rather like a small fringe theatre festival. I’ll most likely be coming back next year.

The Di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, came into being in the 1960s when art collector and journalist Rene di Rosa purchased and transformed 460 acres of dilapidated vineyard into a working vineyard, a home and space for fueling his passion for Northern Californian art. The Preserve, which I visited for the first time last week, houses approximately 2,200 works of art by more than 900 artists on 217 acres. The collection is extraordinary for its breadth and unorthodoxy.

The highlight for me on this first, all too brief trip, was Paul Kos’ meditative installation Chartres Bleu. One of the major figures in the early Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kos was key to the development of video, performance and installation art in the Bay Area, focusing much of his attention on interactivity and novel uses of sound. Created in 1989 and currently housed in a specially-built “catacomb” underneath Rene Di Rosa’s former home on the Preserve, the work consists of a stack of 27 video monitors that recreate one of the famed stained glass windows from Chartres Cathedral in France.

To get to the work, you enter through a set of heavy wooden doors from a sun-washed concrete patio outside the museum’s main exhibition hall and walk down a dark, cool and narrow corridor fashioned from smooth concrete to look like part of a cloister in an old European church. The corridor opens into a similarly dank and ethereal chapel. The mood of profound calm is further heightened by the sound of steadily dripping water. There are simple seats on which to sit. After the heat and scurry of the Napa sun, Chartres Bleu suggests deep chill and icy stillness. Being in the work is probably a bit like being in a womb. This feeling of profound rest is peculiarly thrown into relief by Kos’ reconstruction of the Chartres window itself. On the far wall when you enter the inner sanctum, the video screens, depicting the crystalline-blue stained glass window of the original in France, gaze steadily at us. The video projections supposedly cycle through the light as it passes through the windows at Chartres throughout the day. It’s hard to look at the screens for too long though. As gorgeous as they are, there’s something unnerving about the pixelated forms. They play tricks on our eyes. I had to keep blinking and looking away.

The work eloquently expresses for me the relationship between the restless, ADD-afflicted pace of modern life and the meditative long-view stance of former generations — the people who spent years building churches and hours sitting thinking and worshipping within them.
br>Oh, and here’s a bit of interesting trivia: The Preserve hosts many weddings, but the only person ever to have gotten married in the Chartres Bleu “chapel” itself is the artist.

The burgeoning relationship between real-world art-making and its virtual-world counterpart is a constant source of fascination to me.

Another interesting development happened this week: A musician made cyber history when a record company offered him a contract based on concerts given in cyberspace.

Nashville bluesman Von Johin performs weekly gigs in Second Life, one of the leading virtual worlds. He plays each Wednesday at 8 p.m. EST at his own Second Life venue “in the Yudasin Sim,” Johin’s Blue Note Club, named after his real-life recording studio on the outskirts of Nashville. Two talent scouts from Reality Entertainment spent several months looking for promising artists to sign throughout Second Life before they settled on Johin. According to a story on Wired News, the record deal is believed to be the first ever given to a Second Life performer.

Reality Entertainment, also home to KC and the Sunshine Band, plans to release Von Johin’s debut album digitally through such outlets as iTunes, Amazon, and Rhapsody. Johin’s show can be watched via Second Life or here.

Johin’s recording contract is just the latest in a long string of interactions between Second Life and the arts and entertainment world. Here are some other examples:

-Second Life recently appeared on the TV shows CSI: NY and The Office. CSI: NY offered viewers an extended, interactive experience, taking them on a journey from the TV screen to the virtual realm.

-Second Life has hosted in-world concerts by such acclaimed real-life performers as Regina Spektor, Suzanne Vega, Duran Duran and Jay-Z.

-The virtual world rock group, Virtual Live Band, brings together the musical talents of real-life performers from the US, Germany and UK for concerts in Second Life.

-Distributed via HBO subsidiary Cinemax, filmmaker Douglas Gayeton’s Molotov Alva and His Search For The Creator is the first documentary shot entirely in a virtual online platform.

-Leading guitar manufacturer Gibson is just one arts-related company with space on Second Life. Guitar buffs go there to try out the latest gear, get music lessons and learn about guitar history.

-Sony/BMG recording artists such as Ben Folds and Michael Penn host events via Second Life.

-Rapper Chamillionaire and grunge band Hinder have conducted meet-and-greet sessions with fans within Second Life.

The lines between the real and virtual world are extremely porous at this point. It’ll be interesting to see how the arts evolve in Second LIfe and other platforms like it.

In other news, I’ll be taking a vacation next week. I’ll be back in the blogosphere towards the end of the month.

A theatre production I caught last week made extensive use of sprechgesang/sprechstimme (German for “spoken song” or “spoken voice”) — a vocal technique that hovers between speaking and singing.

The technique was popular in Expressionist musical compositions of the early 20th century. Arnold Schoenberg’s use of sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire (1912) is one of the most mesmerizing and famous uses of the technique. Alban Berg also used it for his operas Wozzeck and Lulu.

But San Francisco playwright-performer Gary Aylesworth’s The Ballad of Edgar Cayce (A Bluegrass Operetta) represents the first time I’ve ever seen the technique used live in a play.

In some ways, the approach works makes perfect sense for Aylesworth’s subject matter and overall performance style. Concerning the life of the early 20th century clairvoyant and healer Edgar Cayce (1877-1945 – pictured left), the play is full of surreal and whimsical moments. It’s like an Bretonian-Eluardian automatic writing experiment on stage. Also, the play is set during the era when sprechgesang was popular. The sprechstimme in the play creates a vivid metaphor for the state of the clairvoyant’s unorthodox mind.

On the other hand, Aylesworth doesn’t quite get the use of the technique right. Sprechgesang definitely heightens tension in the musical compositions I’ve heard the technique employed. It also creates an other-worldly quality. But Aylesworth overuses the technique. About half of the 90-minute play is delivered in a thumping sprechgesang accompanied by the tick-tock of an old-fashioned, wind-up metronome. By the time you’ve heard this for five minutes, it’s like a jackhammer to the skull. Rather than illuminating Cayce’s mental state for us, the sprechgesang makes us shut down and want to get away from the play’s subject.

Sprechgesang is an interesting technique. It can be very effective on stage. But it should be used sparingly.

Fringe season is upon us. But does anyone really know what “fringe” means anymore? A new article by the Daily Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen chafes at the idea that the meaning of the word has gotten completely lost.

Christiansen waxes lyrical about the “good old days” when the fringe was truly special:

“I first went there as a schoolboy some 40 years ago, when the programme consisted of a narrowly conceived menu of high culture – classical concerts, opera and ballet, serious drama – with a late-night cabaret or bonne bouche, plus a Fringe that consisted of some representatives of the European avant-garde presented by Richard Demarco (a buccaneering showman who outraged Morningside proprieties), and a smattering of students and amateurs mounting humble shows and innocuous skits in a few bleak church halls.Visiting the Festival was akin to a pilgrimage, matching the austere dignity of this beautiful city. There was only one shop of note (Jenner’s), its windows decorated with photographs of celebrated conductors and prima donnas. Finding anything edible was a struggle, the licensing laws were draconian, and sex was what the coal came in. But it was still fabulously thrilling and liberating fun.”

But I wonder if this view of Edinburgh’s long-lost “fringe-iness” is too narrow? Like many other critics of the Edinburgh Fringe these days, Christiansen believes that the festival has lost its meaning largely because of commercial reasons. It’s “a monster devouring its own children,” according to Christiansen.

Yet surely the idea of fringe extends beyond such concerns as the high prices of accommodation during fringe season, overcrowding, escalating ticket costs etc. There are, for instance, important aesthetic issues at stake of which many commentators have lost sight. What makes a show a fringe show beyond the fact that it’s produced on a shoe-string?

Well, for one thing, there’s the venue. Fringe venues tend to be small. They’re often converted into theatres for a fringe production from other uses. For another, there’s content. Fringe productions focus on showcasing new scripts, provide unorthodox readings of classic plays (often truncated to fit into a shorter time frame) or work with otherwise experimental material. In addition, Fringe shows also seem to define themselves by the sizes (small) — and typical ages (young) — of their casts. Design and technical elements are often sparse, though I’ve seen some pretty elaborate Fringe shows in my time, so I’m hesitant to add this to the list of aesthetic issues that come into play when trying to pin down what Fringe theatre means.

I think, overall, what we must not forget in discussions about Fringe (or, for that matter, “off-off” and “off-off-off” Broadway) theatre is the spirit in which this kind of work should be created: one of rebellion. Many of the great original Fringe festivals that grew up in the latter half of the last century (eg Adelaide, Edinburgh) came about in retaliation against mainstream, juried arts festivals. Any fringe event which has lost this spirit of rebellion cannot be counted as a fringe festival in my opinion.

It’s therefore tempting to see a monster like Edinburgh in this light. The fact that it’s become so huge that it might (as Christiansen hopes) cause the Edinburgh’s original arts bastion — the International Festival — to happen at another time of the year indicates that the fringe no longer exists on the margins as it once did, but right at the center. This image is, of course, decidedly anti-fringe.

Similarly, as events like Edinburgh become increasingly beholden to the laws of commerce, there’s a possibility that the spirit of wild experimentation might be compromised as theatre makers may be concerned with focusing on recouping the high costs of being at the festival each year at the expense of creativity. But neither this theory, nor the common sense point I made above about the front-and-center (as opposed to marginal) position of the Edinburgh fringe can be taken at face value. Just because a fringe festival is, as Christiansen puts it, “raucous, filthy, drunken and commercialized,” it doesn’t mean that the renegade spark has disappeared altogether. There’s as much — perhaps even more — danger to being in the eye of the storm as there is to being on the edges.

Sometimes I wonder whether a theater critic’s deep desire to find and champion great new dramas by hot emerging local dramatists leads him or her to overhype plays that don’t deserve tumultuous praise.

This issue has been on my mind quite a bit over the last few days in light of a recent theater experience. On Thursday evening, I went to see Bone To Pick, a world premiere by San Francisco playwright Eugenie Chan. The play is currently being produced as part of a three-play soiree of experimental works by The Cutting Ball at the Exit Theatre, where the company is currently resident.

A modern retelling of the Ariadne myth, the drama pictures the Ancient Greek heroine as a homespun diner waitress left to eke out a lonely eternity in a desolate, war-torn nowhere-land by her callous soldier-lover Theo (aka Theseus.) The play has been superlatively reviewed in a number of local publications. It seems to have stood out as the clear favorite of all three items on the program (the other two being Gertrude Stein’s bizarro 1922 three-hander about the affects of conflicts on families, Accents in Alsace, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1987 family conflict comedy for two actors, Betting on the Dust Commander.) My colleague at SF Weekly, Molly Rhodes, wrote: “Bone grabs you and doesn’t let go” in her review of the production for the paper last week. “Bone is richly rewarding right down to its marrow,” wrote Robert Hurwitt in the San Francisco Chronicle. Robert Avila of the San Francisco Bay Guardian called the play, “a fresh and shrewd refiguring of the Ariadne myth.”

On the strength of these reviews and my interest in seeing powerful world premieres as a member of the judging panel for the the Bay Area’s annual Glickman Award, I went to see the show.

Somehow, I just can’t see what my colleagues are getting so worked up about. I admit to being completely bewitched by Paige Rogers’ tour de force performance as Ria. Rogers inhabits her character so completely that we don’t know whether to feel more sorry for the dilapidated waitress with her self-deprecating attitude and caustic air of resignation or the state of the battered world at large. And Rogers manages to be incredibly funny too. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the image I have of the actress, standing there in her soiled Dairy Queen-esque outfit taking occasional swigs of rusty water from an old coffee pot.

But as for the play itself? Well, I didn’t find it that grabbing to be honest, though there are some lyrical and witty moments. The language is a little too self-conscious and seemed derivative of such writers as Deb Margolin and The Beats. The scenes in which Ria re-imagines leading Theo into the Minotaur’s labyrinth are long-winded and histrionic. I personally failed to get any new insights into the nature of war or America’s increasingly tenuous position on the world stage. I wonder if the excited critical responses have more to do with the strength of Rogers’ acting, the fact that the play compares favorably with the other two productions in the evening’s lineup and Chan’s status as a local up-and-comer, than the pure merit of the script itself?

What can I say except that it’s been a slow year for great new plays in the Bay Area. I think I’ve seen only two in eight months that I would consider worthy of the Glickman Award and both of those were musicals.

Then again, I could always be wrong — I am in a mino(tau)rity after all.