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?

What is it about all these arts organizations now stampeding onto the information super highway with such enthusiasm? Have all the marketing directors suddenly woken up to the fact that there are audiences to be found out there on the Web? Or have they just been taking their time about reaching out to be people through online channels?

San Francisco Ballet is the latest in a long line of arts companies to announce the launch of the holy triumvirate of blog, Facebook page and YouTube channel. The only thing that’s missing from this offering is a presence on MySpace. The blog so far contains three entries. They make for pretty fun reading. It’s interesting to see what the dancers are getting up to in their spare time — one writes about performing in Kazakhstan and another chronicles her hurricane relief efforts in New Orleans. And the holiday snapshots make the dancers seem approachable and friendly. A third entry, written by corp de ballet member Lily Rogers (pictured), recounts the dancer’s trajectory from taking her first steps as a dancer to what it’s like working for SF Ballet on a day-to-day basis.

What’s not clear to me from the blog, nor indeed from the company’s YouTube and FaceBook pages, is what purpose such online conduits really serve for the ballet company beyond vaguely “reaching out” to people — specifically “young” people. The “About” section of the blog doesn’t give much away:

“There’s much more to San Francisco Ballet beyond the beautiful displays of artistry that the Company presents onstage. Here’s a chance for Ballet followers to learn a little more about what goes into those world-class performances. Dancers, ballet masters, choreographers, and other key players in Ballet productions will contribute their perspectives, and members of the community are encouraged to lend their voices to the dialog as well.”

This all sounds rather wishy-washy and over-general, as if someone at SF Ballet woke up one morning and thought, “I know what, we should start a blog! After all, everyone else is doing it!”

But without a more strongly articulated mission, it can be difficult for a busy organization to maintain its blogging momentum. The reality is that blogs created by major arts organizations which aren’t kept up regularly with eye-catching, fascinating content reflect badly on those organizations. It’ll be interesting to see how the blog works out for SF Ballet. Here’s hoping there’s a constant stream of invested dancers, choreographers and other company personnel to keep the beast fed.

The Climate Theater in San Francisco seems to have created a niche for itself as the place to go to experience popular TV and Web-based entertainment on stage.

Just under a year ago, I blogged about YouTubed, the Climate’s whacky and wonderful series of live skits based on people’s favorite You Tube videos.

I’d heard about the Climate’s intermittent stagings of the old ABC television seriesThe Dating Game soirees a while ago and thought they’d probably be more embarrassing than make for interesting theatre. But having experienced the live stage version at the Climate last weekend, I’ve changed my mind: The Dating Game is my new guilty theatrical pleasure.

The formula and set-up for the Climate’s version of the Game is very similar to how it works on TV, albeit in a no-frills, lo-fi version. A tatty curtain separates two halves of the Climate’s tiny stage. On one side of the curtain sit three eligible bachelors; on the other, a keen bachelorette. The bachelorette asks a series of questions of the bachelors and eventually picks one of them with whom to go on a date. The whole thing is masterminded by an effervescent MC.

The Climate’s version of the Game is so much more compelling than the TV version because it amplifies the ridiculous and the dramatic.

For one thing, the contestants put on really strong personas. The night I saw the show, one bachelor (Bachelor Number 3) acted completely bored throughout the entire production. He sat on stage with his shot of whiskey (another thing you could never do on TV) and stared blankly upwards as if the answers to the questions were somehow inscribed on the lighting grid. But having an incredible natural flair for comedy, he managed to come up with the most brilliant off-the-cuff answers to the bachelorette’s questions — unlike the TV show, the contestants require genuine improvisation skills. For example, when asked “If you were to make a perfume for me, what would be the main ingredient?” Bachelor Number 3 responded “Bachelor Number 1” without skipping a beat. The audience fell in love with all the contestants that night, but unsurprisingly, Bachelor Number 3 was the winner.

For another, audience participation is so energetic that it borders on frenzy. People yell at the stage and laugh and become completely involved in what’s going on. It’s rare to see such complete investment in an audience for a TV show without the aid of production assistants telling people to clap and laugh on cue. And theatre audiences aren’t generally known for making noise beyond forgetting to turn off their cellphones, coughing and unwrapping candies.

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun. The pleasure came from the sheer bombast of it all.Theatre and mass culture can exist in wonderful symbiosis, especially when the theatre takes pop products, exaggerates them, spins them around and turns them on their heads.

By the end of this week, San Francisco culture vultures will have their own special mode of transportation to help them get around the city.

Starting on September 20, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency‘s CultureBus will transport people to and from many of the city’s main cultural institutions. For a flat fare of $7 for adults and $5 for seniors, youths and people with disabilities, the entirely new bus route (route 74X) gives customers unlimited access to CultureBus for the day.

The bus runs between downtown San Francisco to Golden Gate Park, stopping near various cultural institutions along the way, including the Asian Art Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Neighborhood and the California Academy of Sciences, which reopens in Golden Gate Park on September 27.

The Culture Bus represents the first collaboration between the City and County of San Francisco, the SFMTA, the San Francisco Convention Visitors Bureau, the Yerba Buena Alliance and various cultural institutions.

I think the bus service is a terrific idea. Not only does it make ecological sense, but it also helps people save money that might otherwise be spent on expensive taxi cabs. Plus, being on a bus with fellow arts lovers is bound to inspire interesting arts-related conversations along the journey.

The only thing that disappoints me slightly about the service is its currently very limited hours. Excluding certain holidays, CultureBus will run approximately every 20 minutes, from 8:40 a.m. to 5:50 p.m. daily. This is fine for museum-goers, but what about people who want to take the bus to the opera, ballet or theater in the evening?

Of course, it’s early days yet and the service is no doubt in embryonic stage. “At this time, CultureBus is designed to take locals and visitors to the various museums throughout the city,” CultureBus’ public relations manager, Kevin Kopjak, informed me when I quizzed him about the limited hours yesterday via email. “At the end of the first year, the results will be evaluated and plans to expand the program will be investigated. This would include looking into adding other cultural institutions, CultureBus stops and extended hours to the program.” Hopefully CultureBus will take off and become the way to travel to all kinds of arts events in the not too distant future.

As I strolled through downtown San Francisco yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but wonder if all the tower blocks, traffic, stores, roads and other signs of “civilized” life would exist if we didn’t have clocks — if we didn’t have a system for regulating this slippery notion known as time. If human beings had only nature’s cycles upon which to count to figure out what to do when, would the economy as we know it not exist? Maybe so, because without clocks, the concepts of past and future would cease to be meaningful in the same way. Maybe people would live more in the present, and the present is less concerned with shoring up future wealth, getting people to meetings on time, and otherwise endlessly driving towards some fictitious notion of progress.

The elusive nature of “now”, the slipperiness of memory, and human beings’ unsettling hopes and fears about what lies ahead form the backbone of Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project’s mesmerizing new production, After All, Part 1. I caught the show yesterday afternoon during its way-too-short run at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and spent the rest of the day wandering around the city feeling like I was walking through a completely unfamiliar world.

Shuch’s 80-minute piece marries whimsical songs and earth-bound choreography with short plays by Octavio Solis, Michelle Carter and Philip Kan Gotanda. Shuch performs theatrical alchemy by seamlessly fusing the seemingly very different texts — about such things as the world as viewed through the eyes of a goldfish (their memories are not as short as people popularly think), a man’s experience on a beach, and a charismatic preacher’s delivery of something he calls “the last psalm” — into a dreamlike, engrossing, bleakly humorous whole.

The brilliance of Shuch’s work is that it manages to convey several complex ideas about the world we live in without once being didactic. The aesthetics of her productions are simple yet always visually stunning. In this one, hoards of dancing “extras” memorably plod across the stage dragging each other by the ankles in assorted white outfits, and appear in several scenes bopping maniacally like they’re at a 1950s high school hop. Thus Shuch creates a humorous version of heaven that is equally,and less funnily, reminiscent of a lunatic asylum.

Shuch also has a brilliant way of working with artists whose talents lie in more than one area. In this production, the versatile choreographer Joe Goode demonstrates his skills as an actor in the role of the deadpan ‘Man at the Sea’ character. Matthias Bossi’s preacher plays a mean percussion. Beth Wilmurt’s goldfish is as adept at delivering Carter’s goldfish text as she captures, through a perfect symbiosis of observation and fantasy, the watery creature’s way of moving and singing. Dwayne Calizo’s sinister Santa Claus brings tears to our eyes with his soulful renditions of originally-composed songs and standards by the likes of Simon & Garfunkel. Similarly, the corps of four dancers turn out to be adept with language: at one point, the dancers perform an aggressive, almost tribal-feeling dance while percussively chanting the mantra “fuck, no!” over and over again in different rhythms and groupings.

Shuch deserves wider exposure. Having experienced many of her shows over the past few years, I’ve come to see her as one of the most thoughtful, playful and complete performance-oriented artists working in this country today. After All, Part 1 makes me want to develop a different relationship with time. But I’ll still be counting the weeks until Shuch unveils the sequel to this production, After All, Part 2.

Caught a trio of shows at the San Francisco Fringe Festival the other night. All of them very different, all of them with their hearts in the right place, and all of them, despite being only an hour or less in length, leaving me feeling like they could have been 15 minutes shorter.

The first was a moving and often compelling musical by Carrie Baum entitled Exit Sign: A Rock Opera. The production deals with Baum’s relationship with her father and how she copes with his untimely death. From a musicianship perspective, Exit Sign is wonderful: Great, punchy rock numbers played by a tight four-piece band led by Baum on lead guitar who all seem very much engaged with the action on stage without being gratuitously involved; soulful singing from the two main cast members — Jamie Ben-Azay as the Baum character and Steffanos X as her father; and simple yet eloquent philosophical messages about the confusing nature of life, love and death. Despite Baum’s interesting mix of fast-paced punk songs and lyrical ballads, the pacing of the production feels a little monotonous and ponderous owing to the slow delivery of lines and general elegiac atmosphere of the work. Also, Baum fails to fully integrate the queer undercurrent into the main story line. Plus, the overall conceit about a father and daughter being prompted by a voice from the television set during a re-run of the movie It’s A Wonderful Life to go on journey together to find the meaning of life seems a bit daft and inconsequential. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout most of the show.

Next up was iScan, a play by local dramatist Peggy Powell and directed by Dan Wilson. Wilson’s musical Sweetie Tanya really impressed me when I saw it at San Francisco’s Dark Room theatre earlier this year. iScan is a very different kind of project. The play looks at what the world would be like if we could all predict our futures. When an impressionable graduating high school student, Edward, has his blood “scanned” by a sinister “gene analysis” company called iScan, he finds out more about his future than he’d like. Anger and fear about his parents’ alcoholism and violence lead Edward down a regrettable path as a result of iScan’s diagnosis. The play poses some fascinating, Minority Report-like questions and a couple of the performances (from Brianne Kostielney as Sarah, a young iScan employee who falls for Edward, and Christine Rodgers’ as Edward’s soused mother) are well-balanced. But the writing isn’t incredibly sophisticated and some of the acting is a little heavy-handed. Wilson’s direction could use more rhythmic variety and flow too.

The final show of the evening, On Second Thought, was a solo show by a Canadian performer by the name of Paul Hutcheson (pictured left — he’s much more handsome than this in real life.) Hutcheson is a lovely performer with an expressive face and lithe physicality. He’s a terrific storyteller too. But the David Sedarisesque vignettes about dealing with his brother and teaching school kids seem a bit stale, like the performer’s been doing them for too long (he’s performed this show to acclaim at a bunch of different fringe festivals from Orlando to Winnipeg) and the gay themes star to feel repetitive after a while too (especially if, like me, you’re subjected to dozens of solo shows about gayness every year.)

All in all, though, it wasn’t a bad night at the fringe. I really enjoyed the conversations and snacks I had in the Exit Theatre Cafe in between the shows too. Lots of people, delicious cheese, fruit and wine. I wish more theatres had cafes as good as the Exit’s.

When I see my name on a press release, it’s usually at the tail-end of a quote that a theatre company has pulled from one of my reviews about its work. I’ll come across lines like “‘Very Good!’ — Chloe Veltman, SF Weekly” and sigh, knowing full well that the phrase pulled from my review is missing the word “not” at the front of it.

Yesterday, however, my name appeared on the publicity materials advertising a company’s new show in an entirely different context: For the first time in my life — at least to my knowledge — a piece of my writing has inspired the creation of a theatrical production.

Here’s what the press release for Sleepwalkers Theatre‘s upcoming production about the elections, March to November, says:

“Inspired by SF Weekly theatre critic Chloe Veltman’s January 9th article “Election Stage Left,” which challenged Bay Area playwrights and theatre companies to create more “political” works, Sleepwalkers answers the call to arms with a classic hero story that assess the relevance of overtly political theatre. With the upcoming election as a backdrop, March to November, by Sleepwalkers co-founder Tore Ingersoll-Thorp, is an examination of one artist’s search to find political responsibility in her work.”

I’m not sure whether to feel flattered or alarmed by this news. I’m happy that people are doing something with my work other than using it to line the cat box. Then again, the article (and its author) may end up being the butt of some elaborate theatrical joke. Which I guess wouldn’t be so bad.

Whatever the intention and the outcome, I’m looking forward to seeing and maybe reviewing the show. As as I said in the concluding line of my essay, if a local theatre company manages to put on a smart and beautiful play about election season that makes me question my generally lazy liberal beliefs, then “I’ll be happier than a Republican congressman handing out buttons at a high-school abstinence drive.”

Playwright Itamar Moses’ new drama, Yellowjackets is unusual: It’s a piece of issues-based educational theatre with a cast of young actors that breaks out of the high school drama or ethics class mould and finds a home on the professional stage.

The issues that the play deals with — racial and class tensions within an American high school, specifically the playwright’s alma mater, Berkeley High — would seem like perfect fodder for a high school drama or ethics class. One can imagine students working with their teachers in the classroom to create in-school productions of the play and use it as a launching pad for the discussion of key issues facing the high school community today.

But within the context of a world premiere commission by Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the play effectively pulls the issues out of the insular, school environment and attempts to make them resonate with the general public.

The quality of Moses’ writing, with its cleverly interweaving themes, plots and characters, the punch and pace of director Tony Taccone’s blocking and the liveliness of the performances manage to a degree turn what might otherwise be an educational exercise into something capable of reaching beyond the confines of the high school drama workshop.

Intellectually, I can see why the play could be powerful within the Berkeley community: It’s a local story; it deals with important issues facing Berkeley residents; it grapples with the problems at stake from all angles and asks more questions than offers tidy answers; it addresses young people directly — because the narrative is about their lives — and indirectly asks them to take ownership of the issues. After all, moving forwards with trying to find practical solutions to racial and social tensions both within American schools and the country at large, is the work of the next generation. Planting the seeds of thought now is key.

And yet, for all that, I personally didn’t connect with the production when I saw it last night. From a purely theatrical perspective, the “de-ghettoization” of what is essentially a piece of educational theatre through taking it out of the classroom and putting it onto a major public stage doesn’t really work for me. Rather than dealing in metaphors and letting us make subtle connections between what’s happening before our eyes and the realities of the world at large, the drama bludgeons us over the head with its political content. Also, if you’re not from Berkeley, have never attended an American high school and feel a bit baffled by this country’s relentless obsession with race, the theme and story-line seem entirely remote. Most of the time during the show, I felt like I was watching a group of aliens describe life on their distant planet. Whereas I wanted to feel as connected to the characters and their concerns as I do when I see, for example, great productions of plays by the likes of August Wilson or Athol Fugard.

Still, commissioning and staging Moses’ drama is a bold move on Berkeley Rep’s part. If nothing else, it’s an intriguing experiment and a laudable piece of community service.