lies like truth

I often think that the most satisfying concert experiences follow a narrative arc. And I particularly love it when programmers manage to move an audience from one set of feelings and experiences to something entirely different while maintaining the thematic thread throughout.

Such was the case last night at Davies Symphony Hall. The San Francisco Symphony orchestra and chorus gave us a program of three works with a perfect overall shape.

The music moved seamlessly from a state of despair laced with a glimmer of light (Ligeti’s spectral, microtonal work for unaccompanied voices Lux Aeterna) through one of longing and definite possibility (Schoenberg’s short, dramatic ode A Survivor From Warsaw composed for orchestra, narrator and male chorus) and finally to a condition of unbridled optimism, with the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

The opening movement of the Beethoven was sluggish and I could have done without Shuler Hensley’s heavily tremolo-laced baritone narratorial voice in the Schoenberg. But thanks in large part to the sensitive dramaturgy of the programming, I left the concert hall feeling like the evening’s music had transported me through time and space from a sense of desolation to one of grace.

It’s hard to fault The Scottsboro Boys. The 2010 John Kander and Fred Ebb musical, which is currently running at San Francisco’s Geary stage in an arresting co-production between the American Conservatory Theater and The Old Globe, gets full marks for every detail from casting to music to lighting.

And yet something bothers me about the show, which I experienced yesterday on opening night.

I’ve been trying to pin down what it is that I found so irksome about it, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I think it has something to do with the fact that The Scottsboro Boys feels very much in line the growing clatch of theatrical works about race relations in this country that hide  formulaic political correctness behind a veneer of clever postmodern staging ideas and metaphors.

Suzan Lori-Parks pioneered the formula, with plays like Topdog/Underdog and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. When Topdog came out in 2001, its approach to deconstructing and politicizing historical minstrel shows seems very fresh. But a decade on, the idea feels stale.

Still, this feeling doesn’t detract from the power of the storytelling in The Scottsboro Boys. It’s just a nagging thing. But it won’t go away….

I’ve known about the Djerassi Resident Artists Program for quite a while.

Carl Djerassi, the scientist-turned-playwright who founded the residencies on his spectacular ranch in the Los Altos Hills about an hour south of San Francisco, showed me around the place briefly 11 years ago when I was writing a profile about him for American Theatre Magazine.

This past weekend, though, I got my first in-depth tour of the ranch and its artworks, of which there are many scattered around the grounds in both expected and unexpected places.

The tour was led by Margot Knight, the Executive Director Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Margot proved to be a jolly and knowledgeable guide.

Over the course of nearly four hours, we hiked all around the property, stopping to take in the views and the many pieces of art left by former residency participants.

The program encourages artists of all kinds, not just installation artists and sculptors, to use the surroundings as a setting for work.

During the typical month-long stay, a choreographer might choose to create a dance  in a nineteenth century barn lit by dappled light, a ceramicist might fill an old stump or copse of trees with clay-baked forms, and a writer might sit on a bench overlooking the colossal panorama that tumbles down to the Pacific Ocean and work on a volume of poetry or a novel.

As such, on our hike, we often stumbled upon the flotsam and jetsam remains of works created recently or decades ago. (The program has been around for 33 years and has provided residencies to over 2000 artists, so there are a great many artifacts to be seen around the property at this point.)

I love this aspect of the residency program. The works that nestle amid the trees, stake out rocky outcrops or make their home in sheltered clearings, are slowly deteriorating. Nature is taking over. Some are collapsing, others are covered in moss and lichen, others yet have developed cracks in their formerly smooth surfaces.

Nest, the piece photographed above, was created in 1997 by Cynthia Harper. Back then, I gather it was an imposing wooden structure, with pieces of wood carefully balanced on top of each other to form a giant symmetrical form. Now, little remains of the artist’s original plan. The birds have come and stolen the pieces of wood to make their own nests. There’s a kind of poetry to this steady disintegration.

Artists can come back to fix their work if they want to. But according to Knight, few do. It would be wonderful to come back to visit the works periodically and see how they are slowly becoming one with their surroundings.

The San Francisco Opera‘s company premiere production of John Adams’ Nixon in China left me feeling a bit nonplussed on the whole apart from one thing:  Hye Jung Lee’s performance as the wife of Mao Tse Tung, Chiang Ch’ing.

The tiny Korean soprano and 2010 Merola Opera Program alumnus attacked the role like a normally self-satisfied chihuahua cast away from its owner’s lap.

The power and flexibility of the singer’s voice, coupled with a subtle yet steely stage presence kept me completely entranced. I could not take my eyes nor ears off the performer.

It’s sometimes the case that I go to the theatre to see a new drama and walk away struggling to figure out where exactly the play lay amid the myriad ideas, words, sounds and images that were thrown at me from the stage.

Such is the case with Salomania, a play by the Bay Area-based director and playwright Mark Jackson, at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley.

The production is certainly built on dramaturgically-enticing source material. It takes as its inspiration the real life case of Maud Allan, an American dancer who emigrated to England at the turn of the last century, and caused a sensation with her racy interpretation of the title character in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. During the First World War, at a time when the recently deceased Wilde was widely discredited for his “degenerate” ways and plays, high ranking, stuffy Brits feared Allan’s adverse impact on upstanding British morale and attempted to discredit the celebrity. The danceuse-provocateuse responded by bringing the slander against her to court. But her adversaries, led by newspaper owner Noel Pemberton-Billing, fired back by attempting to draw a link between the “sadistic” content of Salome and Allan’s dark past in San Francisco, where her brother was tried and hanged for committing an atrocious crime against two young women.

The story is brought to life on stage by a wonderful group of actors. Madeline H D Brown plays a curvacious, piquant Allan and Mark Anderons Phillips is wonderfully phlegmatic as Allan’s nemesis, Pemberton-Billing; Kevin Clarke, Alex Moggridge, Anthony Nemirovsky, Marilee Talkington and Liam Vincent round out the capable cast.

Yet Salomania doesn’t really hang together as a coherent piece of theatre. The themes and ideas, though interesting — such as the right of a state to control gender roles and sexual politics — slosh about and are not deeply explored or fully developed. Some of Jackson’s thinking is heavy-handed, like the nod to the tyrannies of McCarthyism and the business of “naming names.” And a couple of the staging concepts cause a similar thunk to the head, like Brown’s constant slow perambulations around the stage during scenes in which she has no lines but for some reason insists on having a physical presence.

That being said, there are a couple of utterly compelling scenes in the mix in the second half of the two and a half hour production. My favorite takes place in a bar. It involves a cynical young soldier played by Moggridge and a pretty widow (Talkington). The two meet over drinks. The intensity of the solder’s feelings come across with sexually-charged language, and the woman responds with understated longing that is part knowing and part innocence. The combination of emotion and restraint in the beautifully-written 15-minute scene says more about the impact of war on everyday people than the entire play does. I longed to hear more about these two characters and watch their lives unfold. But the play moved in different directions and fell silent on the matter.

It’s difficult to know what Jackson, who directed a fairly good production of Wilde’s Salome at Aurora a few years ago, is driving at with Salomania in its present incarnation. With some judicious cutting and rethinking, a true play may yet emerge.

Arts journalists should make a point of attending arts events with people under the age of 20.

I’m saying this having attended a production of The Magic Flute this week at San Francisco Opera in the company of Tyson and Sam, both aged 13, pictured with me to the left. (Their mother, Pam, who was also with us for the field trip, took the picture.) It’s been ages since I had so much fun at the War Memorial Opera House.

The San Francisco Opera’s excellent new production is in many ways a fantastic choice for opera newbies. But that’s not to say it’s at all “dumbed down” or “family friendly.”

David Gockley’s playful English-language translation deftly captures the colloquial spirit and rapacious energy of Emanuel Schikaneder’s original libretto. The language is sexy, funny and unstuffy while being intelligent and lyrical. This balance is eloquently echoed in the “doodle-like” quality of Japanese sculpture artist Jun Kaneko’s production design, with its animated, colorful daubs and dribbles of color and eccentric, geometric forms.

Plus, the performances are mostly fantastic. I adore the contrast between Nathan Gunn’s sweetly salacious Papageno and Alek Shrader’s upright Tamino. I only wish that Kristinn Sigmundsson, who’s usually imbued with one of the most impressively earth-shaking basso profundos, had better control of his low register on the night I attended. The notes at the bottom sounded spread and feathery. They didn’t match the glorious richness and command of the rest of his voice.

Tyson and Sam made me experience opera-going in a whole new way. They asked intelligent questions about the characters, pointed out things I hadn’t noticed before in the orchestra pit — Tyson, a former trombonist, disapproved of the type of instrument that one or more of the players was playing — and forced me to think more clearly about an opera which I have seen enough times to cease to contemplate in any deep way.

Pam reported that her sons had not stopped talking about the event on the way home to Palo Alto (a forty minute drive) and that new opera fans had been born that night. I certainly hope so.

Primed by The Magic Flute, I think these 13-year-olds are now ready for this season’s productions of Nixon in China and Attila. And I’d like to encourage the San Francisco Opera to do what it can to inspire more teens to attend.

OK, so I’m taking back the comment I made yesterday about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s Shakespeare productions as being sub par.

After witnessing director Laird Williamson’s gob smacking version of Romeo and Juliet, I am feeling very much in the wrong for having said that people might come away from OSF not liking Shakespeare very much.

For while it’s true I’ve seen a couple of unappetizing productions of plays by the Bard during this visit and have conversely very much liked two of the non-Shakespeare shows, seeing R & J has made up for all the negativity I felt about OSF Shakespeare this week.

Set in 19th century California and capturing the wars between two opposing Mexican factions, Williamson’s production highlights the rifts that separate two groups of people who are in essence the same.

Nothing — not even the usual codified costuming — separates the Montague and Capulet families in this production except their pure hatred of one another. The similarities in the way the characters carry themselves, dress and converse render the feud between their families all the more absurd and the ensuing story of the star-crossed lovers more tragic.

But what’s chiefly astounding about this production is the brilliance of the performances. The casting team at OSF are doing a miraculous job of getting the right people for the right parts this year. And the pairing of Alejandra Escalante as Juliet and Daniel Jose Molina as Romeo is perfect. The actors are very young — I’m guessing they only recently stepped out of MFA programs — and possess a command of the language and their characters that is all-consuming. And the passion between them is tender, physical, rambunctious and all consuming.

In the balcony scene (probably the best staging of this famous set piece I’ve ever seen) Romeo and Juliet are separated by a a vast distance of space. To reach his lady love, Romeo must leap and bound all over Michael Ganio’s impenetrable-looking high-walled set. Even at a distance, we can feel their excitement at each others’ presence. The chemistry is complete and it remains so to the very end.

Less intoxicating, but still quite fun, was the final production of this year’s trip to Ashland — Jessica Thebus’ take on As You Like It.

Thebus’ conception of the play is whimsical and largely positive, with actors dressed up as sheep and goats bounding about the stage, and a quartet of actresses representing the four seasons dressed in architectural white gowns topped with ceremonial headdresses appearing from windows above the outdoor theatre every now and again to sing songs and wave paper butterflies around.

While the chemistry between Wayne T Carr’s Orlando and Erica Sullivan’s Rosalind isn’t quite as complete as that of the couple in Williamson’s production of Romeo and Juliet, I appreciated some of the performances. Kathryn Meisle, as a spunky, crimson coat-clad Jacques provided a particularly wonderful take on her role.

Though it isn’t politically correct of me to say this, I can’t help but question the decision to cast the deaf actor of Howie Seago in the role of Duke Senior. I had a similar issue with the casting of this actor in Henry V.

Seago gives a nuanced physical performance. But the sign language that passes between several of the characters in his scenes coupled with the necessary verbal translation of the signing by a couple of the actors is pretty distracting and hard to justify in terms of the director’s reading of the play.

I applaud OSF’s adventurous, out-of-the-box approach to casting. But I wonder, in similar situations as they arise in the future, whether there might be a way to make the presence of deaf actors on stage more germane and organic to the rest of the physical and verbal action?

Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to Bill Rauch and Amy Richard for hosting me this year. I look forward to many more visits to Ashland and responses to the work in the future.

 

Someone might be forgiven for coming to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and coming to the conclusion that they don’t like Shakespeare very much.

My Oregon Shakespeare Festival experience this year is so far proving to be unusual: OK, I’m only three plays in, but never have I been to a theatre festival that produces such polarized responses in me.

Though audiences and other critics seem to love it, The White Snake incited a Medusa-like stare in this reviewer. And yesterday’s pair of productions — Chekhov’s The Seagull (simply entitled Seagull) adapted and directed by Libby Appel, and a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V created by Joseph Haj — respectively caused me unmitigated excitement and dull disappointment.

First, Seagull: There were numerous moments in this luminous production of Chekhov’s play of dashed professional and personal hopes where I was giggling and crying at once. Superbly cast, with every actor, whether playing a major or minor role, able to find something moving and fresh to show us in their characterization, the play mined the depths of human passivity and misguided intention.

The opening play-within-a-play scene sets the tone for the rest of the work: When Nina (a fresh-faced Nell Geisslinger) first enters, she trips and falls flat on her face. Such is the pitiful comedy of life and so it plays itself out over the course of this production’s intimate conversation with its audience.  The youthful passion between Konstantin (an effete and wiry Tasso Feldman) and Nina is evident immediately in the way the pair spring around Christopher Acebo’s bare-bones set. A small, elevated wedge-shaped concourse at the back of the stage, like the cleft in a seagull’s wing or the chink between two stage curtains about to open or close, provides a crucial bit of definition to an otherwise barren, lake-blue stage. Racing up and down this chink, the young lovers give us a sense of their potential. Yet the rough-looking proscenium for Konstantin’s play, a frame fashioned from several bits of bleached wood whose branches look like they’re carrying a recently shot animal prostrate on its back and ready to be turned on a spit, makes us dimly aware of a more brutal reality that awaits the temporarily ecstatic lovers.

And then, when Nina performs the play, we get a sense of her natural talent as an actress faced with experimental material, and Konstantin’s similar skill as a dramatist of beautiful and unusual works. Rather than hamming up the performance within a performance, as is the usual choice for actors playing Nina, Geisslinger performs the scene with a conviction that makes sense of Konstantin’s raw stage poetry. By the end of the play, when Nina talks openly about her limitations as an actress, memories of the opening scene serve to permeate the fallen present with even greater bathos.

I could go on and on about this most transcendent of Seagulls. But you get the gist and I want to say a few words about Henry V before heading out for a hike. The show closes very soon — on June 22 — and I urge anyone within striking distance of Ashland to go see it.

So now on to Henry V. I have to preface my thoughts about this production by remembering a conversation I had yesterday morning with my friend Beth who’s accompanying me this weekend, about how productions of Shakespeare history plays always seem to involve intermittent clatterings of war-like drums and actors in black army fatigues and besmirched faces standing with their legs apart looking tough and staring into middle distance.

And then we showed up to the theatre last night and what do we get from the very first moment? intermittent clatterings of war-like drums and actors in black army fatigues and besmirched faces standing with their legs apart looking tough and staring into middle distance. From that moment on, the production heaped cliche onto cliche. I was utterly bored. The actors barked the text out in a way that made it almost incomprehensible.

The casting of deaf actor Howie Seago as Exeter is an interesting choice. But the signing on stage is distracting and I spent way too much time wondering how all the extraneous movement fits in with the director’s interpretation of the play. The gulf in fashion sense between the English and French is similarly strange. In their architectural, patterned shirts and jerkins, the French courtiers all look like they’ve stepped off a John Galliano catwalk (which is ironic considering that Galliano is a British designer.) The “well dressed French” gambit is of course another cliche. And putting the elderly, bearded King of France in a loose sequined dress so that he resembles a disheveled Miss Havisham is simply confounding.

What a mess.

My second annual trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival kicked off last night after a seven-hour drive from San Francisco with The White Snake, a world premiere re-telling of an ancient Chinese folk tale by Mary Zimmerman.

I have previously admired Zimmerman’s vivid stage adaptations of old yarns — the Berkeley Repertory Theater has brought shows like Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights and Argonautika to the Bay Area with great success.

But The White Snake comes across as didactic and visually cliched. It’s a bit of a snooze.

Of course, like all of Zimmerman’s shows, the production is very pretty. The Chinese tale about a snake spirit who visits the human world in human form, falls in love with a mortal and then has to overcome great odds including doing battle with a fire-and-brimstone monk who discovers her true identity and tries to separate her from her mortal husband is told through a veil of floating silks, brightly-colored robes and delicate paper parasols.

The Asiatic kitsch feels careworn as a visual concept, though. From the iconic director Ariane Mnouchkine to the Bay Area’s own Mark Jackson, this aesthetic has been pulled out many times before. The ensemble cast does a fine job, however, of breathing delicacy and strength into mise-en-scene.

The director attempts to fill out the very linear allegoric form of the storytelling with an ongoing joke about narrative conceit. Zimmerman makes explicit the different versions of the myth and how a storyteller has to choose which narrative thread to follow by stating the two options as being like a snake’s forked tongue or a fork in the road. After a while, though it is intriguing to hear about the different paths that a story can take depending on which version of it a listener or teller subscribes to, this device gets tedious and expected.

Finally, the play’s allegorical message about equal rights — why shouldn’t a white snake marry a human being? — is simplistic and overly didactic. Ultimately, the production doesn’t offer much to the marital debate beyond a stump speech for laissez faire.

All around me I’m seeing signs of a society that’s becoming more artistically participatory.

Yes, we’re still by and large a culture that pays to enjoy the experience of passively watching “real” artists at work.

But the growth of DIY culture and the gradual buy-in of major arts institutions into the idea that people today want more than a passive experience is slowly beginning to take hold.

There are, of course, corners of our culture that have always thrived on participation. Take the world of social dance for example.

Over the past week, I’ve had two social dance experiences: The first involved two-stepping at The Saddlerack, a cowboy bar in Fremont (in the East Bay, about an hour from San Francisco by car.) The second centered on swing dancing at Le Colonial, a restaurant and bar which harks back to French Vietnam.

I’ve never swung before and my only experience of two-stepping was at a friend’s house party for 10 minutes. My inexperience hardly mattered though. Thanks to my partners (who were hardly dance champions but could still carve out a line on the floor without wiping out) and the lively music provided by the two live bands — Diablo Road at the Saddlerack and Le Jazz Hot at Le Colonial — I was able to hold my own as a complete novice without embarrassing myself entirely.

And that’s just the point: While there were certainly some very impressive movers on the dance floor in both nightspots whom I occasionally paused to watch in awe, I felt that there was plenty of room for people of all standards. Rather than feeling like a spectator or a participant who’s being judged, it was possible for me to be part of a group of people simply moving in their own way and having fun.

I want more of our culture to be like that.

I think it’s going to take me quite a while to unpack the events of the past few days. I’ll make a start now, at any rate.

It all began on Friday evening with the “graduation” ceremony and dinner for the Knight Fellowship program at Stanford which I have been luckier than lucky to be part of this past academic year. Ten months have zipped by faster than any ten months I’ve ever experienced to date. The brainpower and ideas I’ve been around have left me feeling both full of new energy and also like I’ve got an incredibly big mountain to climb. I’m up for it though.

And then over the past two days at FOO Camp, I’ve sort of felt like I’ve experienced the entire fellowship year on high speed. Like watching a movie in fast forward mode. It’s been intense.

Let me back up: FOO Camp (which stands for “Friends of O’Reilly” Camp) was launched ten years ago by Tim O’Reilly, a publisher, conference organizer, entrepreneur and futurist. For one weekend every summer since then, O’Reilly has invited around 200 people whom he finds interesting for whatever reason to come and hang out at his company’s headquarters in Sebastopol, a small town about an hour or so north of San Francisco. A few weeks ago, I received an invitation.

FOO is a sort of a conference, but in a very free-form, west coasty style mode. It was set up as a way for O’Reilly Media to see what kinds of issues are trending right now and to bring innovators together to brainstorm solutions to various problems.

After people show up (mostly on Friday night, though I turned up on Saturday owing to Knight Fellowship graduation obligations) they pitch tents in the orchards behind the O’Reilly office, sign up on the spot to give talks about anything and everything that springs to mind — there were sessions this time on cloud robotics, what books people are reading, how to fix college education and hacking scooters to name just a few — drink, eat, talk, make strange objects out of motors, LED lights, rubber bands and crayons and generally participate in whatever ways they see fit to do so.

O’Reilly himself wandered around in board shorts, a cap and short-sleeved shirt leading a couple of his own sessions, popping in and out of other people’s and chatting with his guests.

The attendees were a very varied bunch. There were founders of successful startups, a smattering of government and corporate people (mostly from the tech sector), artists of various kinds, programmers, O’Reilly Media employees, academics working in trendy areas like robotics, media science and bioinformatics, and “Makers” (I can’t quite get used to this term; it stems from O’Reilly’s Make Magazine wing and it denotes the community of people who are into making things. As opposed to buying things. It just seems a bit post-apocalyptic to me.) The only quality that people seemed to share was a spirit of entrepreneurism.

What did I do? I attended a bunch of talks, met a great many fabulous people, ate and drank delicious things, felt way in over my head during talks about subjects like “cloud robotics” and led a late-night drinking songs session which eventually devolved into a drunken, quasi-sung, drinking games session. I slept for too few hours in the orchard in my new REI tent, test rode a newfangled type of electric scooter which will soon be providing a Zip Car-style rental service in San Francisco and had an image of my head turned into a miniature plastic bust via a 3D printer. All in all, I learned many revelatory things, got to share some of my experiences and way of seeing with others and had quite a bit of fun.

Here are a few random thoughts and questions I picked up from conversations and sessions over the weekend:

1. To combat the anti-competitive attitudes of the big telecommunications providers, small comms companies are finding niche markets such as areas that don’t get service from the major players or only get spotty service. These mom and pop ISPs are creating opportunities and breaking telco monopolies.

2. Our ability to record data makes it less important for our brains to remember things than it used to be. The issue now is to remember where to find the information we’ve recorded.

3. How can we record our experiences at the same time as being fully present in them?

4. To what extent is it possible to control our memories? With companies like Facebook and Twitter ‘deciding’ how far back to allow users to access their posts, and users sometimes posting information about other users that the other users don’t want to see and be reminded of, individuals can’t always delve as far back into their pasts as they’d like to or choose to discard unwanted memories.

5. Today’s business models seem to be less and less about money changing hands between two parties. The Internet is full of “invisible economies” where value is created often by middlemen springing up to make those economies work. For example, Kickstarter.com creates value by connecting people who want to launch projects with their supporters. PRX creates value by linking independent radio producers with program directors at radio stations who might want to buy their work. There are in addition, more businesses springing up around helping people navigate these marketplaces. For example, there are now “Kickstarter consultants” who are helping people launch projects successfully on Kickstarter as the failure rate is quite high.

6. The internet economy thrives on community. Making money is ultimately not about selling ads to your community but figuring out the value of what you can do with your community.

7. It’s possible to earn a thriving living as an individual brand on the Internet. One person I met who came to prominence making lighthearted four-minute videos on YouTube (which have gained a particularly large following among teenage girls) makes money by selling ads, merchandise and books, running a record label, hosting a conference for online video professionals, aspiring video makers and fans, receiving grants from Google to create special video content and — this is the best part — selling 2D glasses for people who get headaches from watching 3D movies using the traditional 3D glasses but still want to go to see these movies with their friends/family members/lovers. Seriously. He sells the 2D glasses for $8 a pop.

I’m sure more thoughts will percolate over the next few weeks. This experience is going to stay with me for a long time.