Pianist Lara Downes commands my respect because she is not only a brilliant musician, but she is also a wonderful programmer, educationist and creative thinker.

Last night at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Downes launched her new Artist Sessions series, in which the pianist invites musical guests to join her on stage for conversation about their work interspersed by music.

The series launched with a soiree revolving around the release of Downes’ luminous new Exiles Cafe recording on the Steinway & Sons label and involved guest artists Quartet San Francisco.

The program featured a wonderful mixture of folk-inflected music mostly by 20th century composers who had willingly or unwillingly left their homelands to pursue lives abroad. Miniatures by the likes of Piazzolla, Stravinsky, Chopin, Bartok and Prokoviev came and went, evoking a range of different moods from melancholic to spirited.

Tangos abounded. In fact, the concert got me thinking about the tango as being the ultimate expression of the diasporic way of life. So many of these exiled composers wrote them. I wonder why? Perhaps it’s something to do with the tension between the exotic and the everyday embodied by tango…??

I love the intimacy of The Artist Sessions and I’m looking forward to attending future events, such as the one on May 29 with pianist Christopher O’Riley and the one in the fall with vocalist Theo Bleckmann.

I think the coziness warrants more participation from the audience, however. The event is touted as being “interactive,” which I usually take to mean that the artists involve the audience in the proceedings beyond playing to them and acknowledging their applause. This wasn’t the case last night: The interactivity revolved exclusively around the artists on stage talking to each other. It would be fun to see Downes and her collaborators become more creative about the way they engage with the room.

For all the proselytize-ing I do around the vocal arts on my weekly public radio and podcast series about the voice, VoiceBox, there are times when I wish that people wouldn’t sing. Or, rather, I wish they would pay closer attention to the context in which they are lifting their voices in song.

I bring this up the morning after a rather strange event I participated in last night as an oboist in the orchestra that contributed as a guest group to the 25th anniversary concert of a Bay Area-based choral organization called Singers Marin.

I’m all for arts organizations celebrating milestones. 25 years is impressive.

But need such an event be executed on such a pretentious scale? The community singing group rented out Davies Hall, no less — the home of the San Francisco Symphony. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, if you have the cash (I imagine the space is one of the more expensive ones in town), your musical forces are strong enough to fill the cavernous space, and you can get enough customers to do the same. I’m heartened by the fact the the Symphony is making its hallowed enclaves available to amateur musicians these days and it’s exciting for members of the community who love to make music to get the chance to perform on the Davies stage. However, Singers Marin’s choral corps didn’t have the necessary power and presence and relatively few of the seats were filled. The absence of these things might have been mitigated by the singers demonstrating some excitement about performing in such out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. But for the most part, they didn’t look like they were having much fun up there at all. The prevailing mood was stiff and stuffed.

I also feel the need to ask whether the event needed to go on for two and a half hours, especially if almost every piece on the program (with the exception of my orchestra’s not very fantastic but enthusiastic contributions of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Samuel Barber’s School for Scandal Overture) is composed by the same composer? Gwyneth Walker seems like a nice lady and she’s obviously a competent choral arranger. But she’s hardly Beethoven or Schubert.

I don’t enjoy being mean-spirited. But today, I’m shaking my head in disbelief at the whole thing.

Lots going on. A few thoughts about a few things:

1. The Exploratorium: San Francisco’s eclectic interactive museum devoted to the meeting point between science and art recently opened its massive new digs on the waterfront with a flourish of parties and special events. I attended a “Friends and Family” Day at The Exploratorium last week and was happy to wander around the cavernous space engaging with all kinds of interesting installations demonstrating how various natural and manmade phenomena work. The museum is a mishmash of old installations brought over from the institution’s former home at the Palace of Fine Arts and new features. I like the unfinished, workshop-like atmosphere of the place. It’s more like a massive unkempt warehouse where creative things take place than a slick contemporary museum with shiny plastic and brushed metal exhibits. What I am not so keen on, however, is the lack of natural light in the building. The beautiful terrace overlooking the Bay comes as a welcome contrast to the murk of the museum as a whole. The ceilings seem very low and so do most of the exhibit illuminations. Perhaps this is taking the concept of a creative workshop-garage a little too far.

2. The Bereaved: There’s been a lot of buzz about the work of the American playwright Thomas Bradshaw in these parts lately. His dramas, which vomit rape, drug-abuse, violent crime and other serious matters over audiences in a disturbingly lighthearted way, haven’t yet gotten much airplay by the Bay. I think that’ll probably change now owing to Crowded Fire theatre company’s slickly produced production of Bradshaw’s The Bereaved. The drama, which tells a story of a middle-class family’s “struggle” to maintain its lifestyle in the wake of the death of its main bread-winner, is really a parody of dramatic form and content. Like an 18th Century French farce or English comedy of manners, The Bereaved follows its own mad logic. Bradshaw’s genius is to make unlikely and quite shocking decisions seem like they make perfect sense within the framework of the play: A caring mother asks her husband to marry her best friend on her death bed; a caring father endorses his 15 year old son’s career as a drug pusher at school, a loving son steals from his father…and so on. There’s also a ton of very explicit sex in the play, which Crowded Fire’s ensemble cast, led by Marissa Wolf, accomplish with unflinching aplomb. Wolf goes on and on about the play’s “honesty” in her program notes. But I don’t see The Bereaved‘s representation of life as as being particularly honest or dishonest. What it is in a nutshell is fast food. I felt stuffed and queasy after the experience, as if I’d eaten five Big Macs in one go. In as much as we live in a “fast food culture,” I suppose the drama is an accurate reflection of life in some sense. But at the end of the day, it’s all just empty calories.

3. Notes from the Middle East: Oakland East Bay Symphony‘s concert involving Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian composers and musicians was beautifully performed at The Paramount Theatre on Saturday night. But I came away from the experience thinking about how challenging it can be for composers to successfully integrate different kinds of musical genres together without succumbing to musical cliches. Nader Abassi’s The Nile Bride is full of turmeric-laced meslimas and whirling dervish string passages which give his piece a vaguely Middle Eastern flavor. I felt like I was listening to the score of an old Hollywood movie set in that part of the world during British colonial times. The world premiere of John Bisharat’s Ya Way Li, is full of interesting musical colors owing to the combination of the full forces of a symphony orchestra and various Middle Eastern vocal, percussion, string and wind solo instruments. But the Middle Eastern and western instruments don’t integrate well in the score. They live separate musical lives as the piece evolves. The most successful work on the program was Avner Dorman’s Astrolatory, which shimmered, and didn’t make any effort to conjure the spirit of the Middle East. The inclusion of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor on the program seemed odd. The crowd-pleasing piece is inspired by Norwegian folk music. Besides the fact that the soloist, Eliran Avni, comes from Israel, I couldn’t really see the rationale for its place on the program. Avni’s performance was solid but not particularly inspirational.

4. The Community Music Center Children’s Chorus Spring Concert: San Francisco’s Community Music Center is a great local arts institution that more people should know about. The Center has an amazing choral program for kids aged between eight and twelve that, unlike ensembles such as The San Francisco Girls’ and Boys’ Choruses, is completely free  to participants and less demanding in terms of rehearsal time. Judging by the sweet, eclectic and tuneful lunchtime concert I attended yesterday at the Center’s main auditorium, the quality of the music-making is high and the kids look like they’re having fun. The point of such an ensemble is not to tour the world, produce chart-topping Christmas albums and turn children into singing machines. It’s to engage them socially, get them breathing and thinking deeply, inspire them to have fun and, of course, teach them about music. Yesterday’s concert had the additional benefit of teaching the children about different cultures and languages — the group sang in Latin, Russian, Spanish, Swiss German and English over the course of 45 minutes. Their coach, Beth Wilmurt, is formidable and brilliant. Some of the participants have been singing with Wilmurt for several years; many sets of multiple siblings have passed through this ensemble.  I only wish that there were more boys in the choir. As is so often the case with children’s art-making, girls dominate, but singing is equally good and fun for both sexes. There were four boys and five times as many girls as far as I could tell. If I were a parent, I would send my kids to participate in Beth’s group.

It’s unusual that a theatrical production which throws so many jumbled staging ideas at the audience should yield moments of truth and emotional impact.

But Mark Wing-Davey’s production of Pericles at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre does just this, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t make head or tail of half of of the staging ideas and that the play itself (which has been jaggedly edited for Berkeley Rep’s two hour version) is not remotely to be counted among Shakespeare’s finest.

The production is a melee of different cultural idioms. Vaguely middle-eastern ideas (burqas, terrorist attacks,  Islamic devotional singing style…) rub shoulders with absurdist imagery such as rows of green and red cabbages representing human heads. A big crane dumps a bunch of seemingly unrelated visual objects on stage including a boat motor and a massive chandelier. None of this stuff made much sense to me, though several costumes with cabbage head appendages  reminded me of the papier mache head that Wing-Davey sported during his acting days as Zaphod Beeblebrox in the old Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC TV series.

The ensemble cast which includes a lot of local actors (a wonderful and welcome rarity for Berkeley Rep!) does a beautiful job of keeping the action flowing along. The most remarkable moments occur when you see past the confusing miss-en-scene and simply concentrate on what the characters are going through. I found that I was quite moved by the scenes in which Pericles is reunited with his daughter and his wife.

Campo Santo is one of those uncommon theatre companies that exists in the professional space, producing often high quality work, while at the same time remaining intimately connected with and entrenched in its community.

In so doing, Campo Santo lifts the much maligned term “community theatre” out of the swamp of disdain and makes it sound worthy of its name. All theatre should aspire to be community theatre, ultimately.

Campo Santo’s latest world premiere — The River — by Culture Clash’s Richard Montoya and directed by company stalwart Sean San Jose is, albeit a bit of a crazed dramaturgical whirlwind, a superb example of community theatre as it should be perceived.

The one issue I have with the experiencing the show is less to do with the play itself — which is pretty great. It has to do with the fact that that the theatre company is so deeply focused in on its own community-mindedness that it can be prone to a level of self-congratulatory navel-gazing and in-joke-making that’s rather alienating to anyone who isn’t intimately connected with the company’s personnel and politics.

Revolving around the mysterious and macabre death of Mexican worker Luis who was lost without a trace in the desert near the California-Mexico border, the play makes for compelling viewing. It whips along with a mixture of lyrical and spunky dialogue that makes us think about the serious issues about immigration and race without seeming remotely didactic. Watching The River is akin to taking a wild and drunken white water raft ride thanks to the superb ensemble cast which brings Montoya’s roster of gonzo California characters vividly to life.

They’re mostly cartoon types, reminiscent of the sorts of unsavory characters that populate Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but they seem full and unusual. I particularly love the conflagration between Nora el Samahy’s forthright park ranger and gay Mission hipsters Lance and Javier (played by Christopher Ward White and Lakin Valdez respectively). The characters paint a picture of the Bay Area and California that is at outlandish as it is recognizable.

What wrecked the opening night show for me was the 15 minutes devoted at the end, immediately after the applause, to members of the company going into a weird hyped-up self-appreciation fest. I realize that open nights can sometimes veer into this terrain (that’s partly the reason why I tend to avoid them) and there’s also the consideration that the play was written as a memorial to the late company member Luis Saguar. There were many members of the Campo Santo “family” in the room that night. But not everyone in the audience needed to be part of the company’s ad hoc and longwinded “group hug.” That’s what green rooms and opening night parties are for.  We were all trapped there though. By the time I left, I felt like I had been slimed. I had to rush home to wash the river water off.

Public displays of self-adulatory behavior, along with poor quality production values, create the deadly combination that gives community theatre a bad name. Few people could accuse Campo Santo of the second of these crimes. But the first is becoming an issue.

There’s a way for a company to connect with its audience as a whole without alienating the people who love its work but who aren’t necessarily interested in being part of the love-in.

Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola is one of the most strangely compelling pieces of theatre I’ve witnessed of late. The show, if you can call it that, is barely a piece of theatre in the traditional sense. Nothing much happened. Half of it was improvised. It lasted 24 hours. And I didn’t go to a venue to witness it; I watched the show as a web stream, online, on and off throughout the marathon performance.

The piece, which is more commonly performed in a six-hour version, was produced as part of the SPILL Festival of Performance, in The Pit at The Barbican in London.

I tuned in at the start, at around 4pm Pacific Time (midnight in the UK where the live audience was settling in for the night), and then intermittently until the same time the next day. I was there for the last 30 minutes.

Describing the show makes it sound incredibly monotonous. For the entire time, pairs of actors in clown-face improvise, in straightforward and often dead-pan manner, responses to hundreds of scripted questions. The questions range from the absurd (“Would you like to be murdered?” ) to the matter-of-fact (“Where are lamas from?”) to  to the thought-provoking (“What are babies for?”)

Sitting through the whole thing would have been an endurance test, but a gratifying one, I think. Quizoola is a lot like life in compressed form. It is indeed an endurance test peppered with strange questions whose answers are pretty much unknown, pointless or completely arbitrary. The fact that the actor doing the questioning never discusses the answers given by the responding actor underscores this reality. Quizoola is set up like a quiz show of sorts but there are no right or wrong answers and certainly no prizes for getting it right. The reward comes from simply getting through it.

I didn’t watch the whole 24 hours on the Internet. But dipping in and out has given me plenty to think about. The questions were often funny and sometimes touching. The actors seemed very human behind their face-paint, giving answers in as natural and unaffected a way as possible. The rhythm of the thing was really compelling, too. Sometimes the actors became very gestapo-like, shouting and repeating questions in a frightening manner. The occasional bursts into silliness had the opposite effect, momentarily breaking the tension and tedium of the proceedings.

I had to tear myself away from my laptop every time I needed to run an errand or go to a meeting. I think I could have sat there and watched almost non-stop were it not for the fact that I had things to do outside.

PS I tweeted a few times as the webcast unfolded and was gratified to find a message from Forced Entertainment this morning thanking me for watching. That was a nice and unexpected touch.

Of the many singing experiences I’ve had to date, the one I participated in last night at Stanford’s Memorial Church was among the most visceral, and is likely to be an experience I remember with fondness for a long, long time.

I was part of the ensemble involved in Stanford music scholar Jesse Rodin’s Digital Josquin Project. The Project revolved around a series of workshops and final concert in which we performed late works by the 15th – 16th century Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez behind a specially commissioned music lectern modeled after a 15th century original housed in Bargello in Florence. Meanwhile, a big screen projected high-tech digital representations of data culled from the music to help people visualize the patterns in Josquin’s work. The professional singing group Cut Circle joined us for the rehearsals and concert. I outlined the project a few days ago in this blog post.

What made the experience so visceral for me was singing in such close physical proximity to my fellow vocalists. My skin was touching the people standing directly around me and I could feel my neighbor’s breath on my face. And because we were all reading from the same score that was a couple of feet in front of us, we looked up and out throughout the concert instead of down at folders full of sheet music, as is usually the case in choral music events. This led to a sound that was organic, freeing and full. In truth, I’ve never felt so much “on the inside” of a piece of music as I felt last night as a result of this configuration. The music was coursing through us all and out into the room with tremendous power. It was super moving. I could have stood there singing Josquin all night.

The picture above, taken during one of our rehearsals last week, shows us singing on risers in front of the stand upon which a giant musical score was balanced. This was an experiment to see whether this more standard configuration felt more comfortable. People could see a little more easily on the risers, but the carpeted metal stands were a total joy-killer. We sounded uninspiring on them and they squeaked. The whole thing lacked intimacy. We ended up ditching the risers, thank God. I’m glad we tried them out though because it was interesting to see how making a few simple tweaks to a musical ensemble’s environment can impact their sensation and sound.

The Josquin Project left me thinking that choruses should experiment with singing in close-clustered formations on a regular basis. And anything that can be done to get people’s eyes away from individual copies of a score is a good thing. If learning music off by heart or creating mega-scores for a group to share aren’t possibilities, then maybe there’s a case to be made for sheet music to tele-prompters or some other centralized source. Looking up makes a great deal of difference.

I’m looking forward to collaborating on this type of work again with Jesse, if he’ll have me. Next time around, we’ll sing from illuminated manuscripts rather than specially-prepared contemporary editions of Josquin’s work. That will doubtless add a whole new layer of experimentation at the crossroads of “old meets new.”

The frontier of the digital music-making space is an interesting place.

At an event last night in The Mission, I got to muck about with a bunch of unusual digital musical instruments.

One of my favorites was The Jambox (pictured left with my friend Nat demonstrating) which is a console covered in postage stamp-sized rubber squares which you can push in different sequences to create bass lines, melodies and rhythm parts. It’s best played by two people as it’s hard to keep all the different lines going with one pair of hands.

Another fun gadget was a computerized harp — I think it was called Liquid Harp but it might also have been tagged Air Harp or Aero Harp or some such. You wave your hand in front of a screen showing vertical strings and sensors pick up you moti0n and make the strings “vibrate” and produce sound. It’s incredibly soothing and sweet.

The amount of technical expertise you need to play these things seems minimal. The low barrier to entry aspect is one of the advantages of these gadgets. But I wonder if spending longer amounts of time and concentration with digital instruments like the harp and Jambox might yield results that go beyond the instantaneous pleasure one gets from waving one’s hand or pressing a button to make a satisfying sound? Maybe there’s a way to really work at these things and take the sound to a more complex level…?

The long-sketchy Tenderloin / mid-market area of San Francisco is under an intense period of renewal right now. Twitter’s decision to set up shop in the area along with the development efforts of the region’s biggest theatre company, ACT, has been helping to kickstart life in the neighborhood. Smaller businesses are popping up like trendy bakeries, candy shops and coffee stores. And more long standing arts organizations, such as The Exit Theatre and The Cutting Ball Theatre have helped to keep the neighborhood thrumming in a positive way.

But there’s still a long way to go before the beleaguered section of downtown San Francisco starts to truly take off. The efforts so far and the push for what lies ahead owe much to the energy and determination of Elvin Padilla, who for the last four years has been heading up the Tenderloin Economic Development Project (TEDP). Much of Elvin’s work has revolved around arts and culture initiatives — specifically, the development of an art and education center known as the 950 Center for the Performing Arts.

The main question right now is how the many vacant buildings in the neighborhood  — specifically, the properties on the 950 block of Market Street less the Crazy Horse strip club and The Warfield music venue —  will be developed. “We are reassembling our development team in anticipation of the properties being acquired – hopefully – by a friendly developer that will give us a chance to perform,” wrote Elvin in an email update about TEDP.

I emailed Elvin to ask him a few questions. My first was to ask him to define “friendly developer.” He responded:

PS Elvin is going to be providing an overview of what’s happening in the neighborhood on Wednesday April 17 at 11am at 301 Eddy Street.

One of the more surreal evenings that I’ve spent in my many years in San Francisco was spent on Saturday night at a lavish corporate party at San Francisco City Hall.

The party was thrown by a tech company called Computers and Structures Inc (CSI) which I’d never heard of before. CSI is a structural and earthquake engineering software firm based in Berkeley, California. It’s headed up by a very flamboyant, fun-lovin,’ lady-admirin’ structural engineer by the name of Ashraf Habibullah. 

Now normally I don’t go to these kinds of events. For one thing, I don’t get invited. And for another, I’m usually out seeing performances. For a third, corporate events are not really my kind of scene. But when a choreographer friend of mine who has directed the entertainment portion of previous parties thrown by CSI (apparently the City Hall shindig is an annual occurrence) invited me, I accepted mostly for two reasons. One, I wanted to see how a corporation parties during an economic recession; and two, I was curious about Habibullah, the host for the evening.

The Pakistani-American entrepreneur has a passion for the arts. He’s a co-founder of the Diablo Ballet company and started an organization called the Engineers’ Alliance for the Arts which encourages school kids to explore the links between art, technology and structural engineering. In other words, Habibullah is no ordinary engineering firm CEO.

The work of Diablo Ballet is a far cry  from the Las Vegas theme of Habibullah’s party though.

The setup was tacky and fun and probably pretty pricey. There were carefully-made, large-scale mock-ups of Vegas architectural landmarks and the company had hired what seemed to be top-of-the-line pop star impersonators.

At one point in the evening, a cavalcade that included a lookalike Elvis, Cher, Celine Dion, Madonna and Michael Jackson performed short snippets of hit pop songs on the grand staircase flanked by feather-and-sequin-clad chorus girls. The lookalikes were mostly pretty convincing, unlike the few performers who had been drafted in and covered in face paint to imitate (badly) that staple of the contemporary Vegas entertainment scene, the Blue Man Group.

Our host looked like he was having a great time throughout. He insisted that every guest had their picture taken with him as they walked in and loved giving people hugs. I admired his outfit: Habibullah was wearing a custom-made suit which glimmered with tiny winking lights. His shoes flashed with the same LEDs.

Despite the attention to detail, one thing that was curiously absent from the Vegasification of City Hall was the gambling. I wonder why this form of entertainment, which is closer to the heart of Sin City culture even than Celine Dion, was kept out of the proceedings? I guess corporations that spend perhaps a quarter of a million dollars on a party don’t want to be reminded of the easy come easy go nature of cash-flow.

I personally found the metaphor of the slot machine-less Vegas to be a bit creepy in this context. San Francisco is a city whose wealth has been built on the gambling antics of prospectors and entrepreneurs. That a Bay Area corporation should arrange a Vegas-themed party in the seat of local government without recognizing this irony in an upfront way seems like willful ignorance.

P.S. It’s interesting to consider how much money might have been dropped on this black-tie party for about 800 guests. City Hall is surprisingly inexpensive to rent for a space of its size and history. From the website that displays the fees, it looks like that aspect of the evening might have come in at around $12,500. But the cost of the amazing amounts of delicious food (which ranged from made-in-the-moment sushi to Indian fare) and drink, the transformative decor and the entertainment must not have been slight.

I’ve been really busy with a fascinating project happening at Stanford under the auspices of Renaissance music scholar Jesse Rodin. It’s a marvelously organic amalgam of old-meets-new.

Jesse, an expert on the great Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450 – 1521), is bringing together a few Stanford singers — undergrad and grad students, plus yours truly — to perform a bunch of late works by the composer at a concert in Memorial Church on the Stanford campus this coming Saturday. Jesse’s Boston-based professional vocal ensemble, Cut Circle, is also in town. The four Cut Circle vocalists will also be performing on Saturday. The repertoire includes Inviolata, Preter rerum seriem, and the Missa sine nomine. 

Now what’s different about this project, which we’re workshopping in a series of intense five-hour long workshops which continue throughout this week, is the merging of old performance practices with new ways of visualizing musical data.

On the one hand, Jesse commissioned some local wood-workers to create a replica of a 15th century music lectern. We’re huddling around the lectern to sing the music from one massive manuscript, as would have been the case for the monks who sang this repertoire back in the days before Xerox machines and iPads.

On the other hand, the concert is going to be accompanied by computerized analyses of the music we’re singing in real-time. Ge Wang, a computer-music professor at Stanford has created a program which visualizes different aspects of Josquin’s music such as the structure of cadences and the frequency of various notes and voice types. The idea is to help people see patterns in the music. The data is going to be shown to the audience in the performance through colorful projections on a big screen or screens.

I’ve only seen a demo of the technology so far. The piece I saw looked very pretty, like a series of undulating rainbow mandalas.

What’s more palpable about the Digital Josquin Project, as it’s called, is how standing in a tight huddle around one massive piece of music changes the dynamic of the singing within our group. We are so close that we can touch each other and practically feel each other breathing. We barely need a conductor because we’re getting so used to thinking and breathing and singing as one organism. And in fact Jesse is mostly turning the massive pages of the scores at this point and barely conducting at all.  Our combined sense of tuning, blend, dynamics and line flow seem much stronger when we’re standing so close, which is also blowing my mind. I feel like every pore of my skin is wide open with this music. It’s bizarrely both invigorating and exhausting.

But singing in this way has its challenges. One of the main ones, we’ve discovered, is figuring out how best to stand around the lectern given the fact that there’s barely any room and that everyone is a different shape. Some people say they can’t see properly. Others complain that they’re standing too close to the music and are getting headaches. Not being able to hear oneself sing is another common response I’ve been hearing from my colleagues.

We’ve been experimenting as we go and I think we’re getting used to the format and figuring out the optimal arrangement of bodies. As long as people shower before coming to the concert and refrain from eating Big Macs or stinky cheese and wearing heavy perfume, I think we’ll be OK.

I can’t wait to see how our efforts to emulate the performance practices of Josquin’s day will tie in with the computer renderings when they’re up in the church. We’ll have to wait until the dress rehearsal on Friday to see how that pans out.

P.S. MAY 9, 2013: THIS JUST IN: THE RELEASE OF VIDEO FOOTAGE AND AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE PROJECT:

Julie Marie Myatt’s play The Happy Ones which is now running in a production directed by Jonathan Moscone at the Magic Theatre, treads long-trampled theatre ground in its examination of the meaning and emptiness of the so-called “American Dream.”

What makes this rather far-fetched drama interesting is that it views the US from a more global viewpoint than the many navel-gazing dramas that tend to populate the American Dream playwriting genre.

Like the genre’s ur-text, Death of a Salesman, The Happy Ones also follows the fortunes of a salesman. But it ends on a slightly more hopeful note. Walter Wells is a an upstanding, middle-class appliance store owner, a loving husband and father and a good Christian. His life in 19670s Southern California seems perfect to him. He is perfectly contented. When Walter’s wife and children are killed in a car accident, his world falls apart. And when the Vietnamese immigrant, Bao Ngo, who caused the death of his nearest and dearest shows up in his store asking to do penance for his crime, things starts to take a sightly surreal turn in Walter’s life.

Set just after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the play draws an explicit parallel between an American man’s personal tragedy as a result of an unfortunate accident and that of an entire nation — the thousands of Vietnamese people who lost their families, homes and patrimony as a result of carefully strategized American violence.

It’s hard to buy the relationship between Walter and Bao even at the hands of Moscone’s slick direction and the capable ensemble cast helmed by Liam Craig as Walter and Jomar Tagatac as Bao. And we don’t come away really knowing much more about the American Dream and its failure than we get from classic works in the genre like Miller’s.

Still, I came away from the two-hour play caring about the characters, which is more than I can say about most contemporary plays.