lies like truth

A work of art that evokes a sense of place can be a powerful thing. It brings up all kinds of memories and yearnings. Dickens was good at it and JMW Turner, but its’ not an easy goal to achieve.

One of the biggest pitfalls facing The Cutting Ball Theater Company with its world premiere production of Tenderloin, a play about the neighborhood that surrounds the company’s theatre on Taylor Street in downtown San Francisco, is creating a lasting impression of The Tenderloin without falling into cliche.

The first ten minutes of the show, which is full of beautifully detailed performances from the ensemble cast, are worrying in this regard. We see a bunch of bedraggled characters shuffling about in a state of mental or financial depravity or both and then we move to a bar where we’re told by various residents about how rich and vibrant the area is and how it doesn’t deserve its bad name.

For those of you that don’t know, The Tenderloin is one of San Francisco most drug-trafficked and destitute inner city areas. The tourist guides tell readers to avoid it. But it’s also transforming. There are quite a few small arts companies in the vicinity as well as trendy restaurants, bars and galleries. It’s really quite an interesting, architecturally lovely and fairly safe 29 block stretch of the city and most people who attend The Cutting Ball’s productions feel positively enough about it to render the non-stop positive messaging in playwright/director Annie Elias’ production completely redundant.

That being said, the rest of the show, which is the result of many interviews of Tenderloin residents, has seem startling moments. My favorite story was that of a 60-something ex-soldier — a confirmed bachelor who lives on his own in the neighborhood — who through a dint of fate, ends up becoming the primary care giver to a newborn baby. (The infant’s mother, a friend, asked the man to take care of her child when she was about to go to prison.) Not only is the story utterly compelling, but Michael Uy Kelly’s “gentle giant” approach to the character warms the heart.

Also compelling are the scenes enacted by the promising young actress Rebecca Frank and Cutting Ball veteran David Sinaiko (pictured.) The pair plays an elderly couple who run a hotel in The Tenderloin. Frank, who’s barely out of her teenage years, plays the old man, while Sinaiko, a greying dude known best for gruffly masculine roles like Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame, essays the role of the wife. Both pull the unusual casting off so seamlessly and believably that I stopped thinking I was essentially watching a drag act.

On the downside, the play could have been an hour shorter. At two hours, the length of Tenderloin only serves to dilute the strong sense of place that comes across during the first half of the show.

No arts organization can or should live forever, no matter how revered and well-funded it might be.

Stil, the possible demise of an amateur wind ensemble (which used to give public performances but is now a reading oriented pickup group) that’s been around in the Bay Area since the 1970s and with which I’ve been loosely associated over the last few years has made me pause with some regret and think about the various reasons why this is happening and if anything might be done to prevent it from ceasing to exist.

The main problem is one of attendance decline:

“Participation in the group has markedly declined,” the group’s administrator wrote in an email yesterday. “In the last 13 months, we’ve met 16 times in 56 weeks, about 29%. This year, from January through April, we’ve met 6 times in 16 weeks, about 38%. Last year, from March through December 2011, we had 5 dectets, 4 quintets and 2 quartets. This year we’ve had 3 quintets, 1 quartet, and 2 trios.”

The ensemble tried to accommodate members’ commitments by changing the meeting time from a Wednesday to a Thursday evening. But that plan didn’t stick.

And now the Oakland church that has provided free space for the group to rehearse in every week for many years wants it to pay $100 a month to use the facilities.

The financial burden isn’t really the issue — if people really wanted to play, the group would find a way to self-finance or raise money some other way. I’m sure the church wouldn’t beyond negotiating a preferred rate. Or musicians could host get-togethers in their homes or find another venue.

It’s a sad sign of the times though, that a group with as low a commitment threshold as this one should collapse through lack of interest or the mere reality of modern, over-scheduled life. I, for one, haven’t played with it for a while for two main reasons: I am indeed over-scheduled and schlepping to the dark depths of Oakland to play music for 90 minutes on a Wednesday evening just isn’t a priority for me right now.

I’m not exactly Heinz Holliger on the oboe, but I have to admit that the other issue that keeps me away from the group is the overall lack of musicianship skills. Many of the core musicians are extremely old and don’t have as good a sense of hearing and seeing as they used to have, though I can only dream of playing as well as they do at the age of 85! I don’t feel all that satisfied by hacking my way poorly through an evening of music. If the musical standards were higher, I’d probably feel more inspired to attend. Ironically, it’s probably the low-commitment aspect that’s ultimately keeping me (and perhaps others like me) away.

That being said, some people have been playing with that group since its inception, and losing it will be very hard on them. Beyond the loss of a great and rare pickup playing opportunity for wind instrumentalists in the Bay Area, the demise of the group presents another challenge: What to do with the amazing collection of wind ensemble music which it has amassed over the years. The repertoire in the organization’s collection ranges from the Baroque to the brand new. It’s an enviable stash that any university or conservatory archive would salivate at the thought of acquiring.

So here’s what I think should happen: The music should be offered as a gift to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music or Mills College or some other venerable music institution. Music students will drool over the stuff. In exchange, the receiving organization should provide a room once a week for free to the donating wind ensemble to play in as well as access to the music. Not only will the group benefit from the ongoing free space, but it will also hopefully receive an injection of new musical blood in the form of talented music students. THat should go a long way towards renewing the energy and raising the level of musicianship.

I often hear people in this country complaining about how pointless the standing ovation has become in a performance setting. Here in the States, an artist need only walk on stage, belch, and walk off again to witness an audience jump to its feet in rapturous applause.

But audiences aren’t the only party involved in a public performance that’s to blame for overdoing things that might be better left underdone. I’m thinking specifically about the tradition of the end-of-show encore in a musical performance: Few shows merit one, and yet the habit is ubiquitous.

Last night, I had a conversation with a music journalist friend of mine, Matt, about how annoying and often unnecessary encores can often be.

Generosity is as lovely trait in any artist. But a musical performer shouldn’t always, or indeed ever, feel compelled to provide a “musical chaser.” The encore is as ingrained in the concert-going experience as waiting in line for the ladies loo. But I don’t think audiences really want them in most cases. This is true regardless of the quality of the performance.

Best case scenario: The concert has been meticulously planned like a delicious meal and is fantastic. When a chef gets it right, we’re often sated when we get to coffee and mints. The same goes for the concert experience. It’s the “One more wafer thin mint,” as the saying from the famous Monty Python skit, that sends us over the edge.

Worst case scenario: If the performer is not really delivering, we’re more than ready to get out once the main set is over. Having to sit through an extra track turns an OK concert into something more memorable for its mediocrity.

At the end of the day, it’s always better to “leave ’em wanting more.” An encore should always be a pleasant and unlikely surprise, only to be pulled out on rare occasions in the heat and inspiration of the moment in response to the specific vibe in the room. It should never be expected and endured.

Interactivity is so much the rage these days both in journalism and in the arts that it’s starting to make things like the business of going to see a traditional play or ballet look really old-fashioned.

It’s a sign of the times that two out of the three just-announced Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge awards are going to organizations that source content from members of the public. (The third is a university-based project, and therefore also distinct from the regular media setup.)

And events in which audience members are actively involved (like the one I’m planning around Drinking Songs on May 16 under the auspices of VoiceBox in downtown San Francisco) are springing up all over the place.

Take the Feast of Words: Literary Potluck event which I attended at SOMArts Cultural Center a couple of nights ago for instance. These monthly events, in which esteemed local literary figures and chefs partner to present a meal and a reading around a particular theme, are now a regular part of the SOMArts Calendar and are selling out.

The theme of Tuesday’s event was “Leap of Faith,” and it involved a reading from writer Beth Lisick and a meal created by chef John Ingle.

I personally have never much enjoyed attending author readings — just because someone can write well, it doesn’t mean they can read well in public, and not all literary works lend themselves to being read aloud.

So what was great about the Literary Potluck was that the highlighted author reading was only a small part of the overall proceedings.

The rest of the evening was taken up with eating Chef Ingle’s yummy meal (consisting of kale, shrimp and various other healthful ingredients), sampling potluck treats which audience members contributed to the event in exchange for a reduced entry fee, meeting fellow attendees at the big family style dining tables that had been set up in SOMArts main gallery space and participating in writing exercises. Some audience members even got to share their work with the group.

Though the soiree was low-key and felt at moments a bit like playtime at kindergarten, it was a lovely blend of activity, creativity and socializing.

This was all very different in feel from last night’s performance of an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men at Theatreworks in Mountain View. A traditional theatre experience requiring audiences to sit quietly in the dark and applaud at the end, Robert Kelley’s production would be deemed utterly unfashionable by today’s crowd-sourced approach to cultural product.

Yet by my estimation, the experience was equally worthwhile. What I valued most was what the staging of Steinbeck’s famous 1937 novel about people eking out an existence on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in rural California revealed about the story.

Although the use of Latino accents for Lenny and George didn’t quite work in terms of creating a parallel between 1930s rural workers and today’s workforce (more of the other farmhands would have needed to be Latino to make the conceit make sense) Kelley’s production enabled the status and power games between the characters to seem all the more pronounced and moving. That the ensemble cast managed to draw us deeply into Steinbeck’s narrative was what I valued most about it.

In a sense, experiences like this production of Of Mice and Men are interactive, at least to a degree: While audience members don’t get to jump up on stage, they are transported to a different world which forces them to negotiate between the one being portrayed before their eyes and their own. That’s a kind of interactivity.

To conclude: I’m not going to write off the more traditional arts experiences just because they don’t involve theatergoers swinging from the chandeliers. But I’m interested in ways in which interactivity can be explored.

Perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of cultural life in San Francisco at the present time is how Pop-Up Magazine manages to sell out Davies Symphony Hall, one of the city’s biggest venues with nearly 3000 seats, in just 30 minutes.

Not even Yo Yo Ma is capable of attracting so many paying customers so fast to Davies, and it’s kind of amazing and awe-inspiring that any live performance event not involving a slew of major celebrities could be so popular.

For those of you who aren’t aware of the phenomenon that is Pop-Up Magazine, here’s an article about it.

Basically, though, Pop-Up is a live journalism event in which various writers, artists and other creative types get up on stage for a few minutes and tell idiosyncratic stories. Some of the pieces, which are curated by magazine journalist Douglas McGray, are accompanied by video, slides and/or audio. Occasionally the speakers use props or have guests with them to help tell their stories.

The next edition of Pop-Up Magazine is happening in a couple of weeks time, and as I mentioned above, Doug and his team sold out Davies Symphony Hall in 30 minutes flat. Trying to gain admittance to the event was a bit like trying to get tickets to a Radiohead concert. Very challenging, in other words.

In any case, I’m trying to figure out what it is about Pop-Up that is causing such a buying frenzy. Most issues include respected national media journalists with credits in outlets like The New Yorker, Harpers and This American Life to their names. But on the whole, they’re by no means celebrities. And the programming is often kept under wraps until close to the night of the performance, so most ticket-holders don’t generally know whom it is they’re paying to see until the eleventh hour .

I gather that Twitter plays an important role in marketing the events. But it’s not like the organization has a bazillion followers. Today, the total stands at 3,870. My best (but probably still inadequate) guess is that the lickety split sales owe as much to a grand demonstration of herd mentality as they do to the presentation of a compelling storytelling experience.

In an effort to find out a bit more about the Pop-Up phenomenon, I canvased a few people I know who attend the organization’s events. Here are three responses. In truth, their responses to my three questions don’t really shed much light on the mystery. Perhaps I am asking the wrong questions…

PERSON A
1. How did you initially hear about Pop-Up Magazine?
Through friends. I think it was when one of them posted that she was going to the first one and provided a link.
2. How do you find out about Pop-Up Magazine events?
I found out about the third issue, the first one I could attend as I was out of the country for the others, through a friend who was to be one of the speakers. This last issue, I heard about it again through my friends on Facebook.
3. What appeals to you about Pop-Up Magazine?
I like storytelling. It attracts some of the writers that I read, so the chance to hear them tell a story orally is special.

PERSON B
1. How did you initially hear about Pop-Up Magazine?
I don’t remember. Probably the internet.
2. How do you find out about Pop-Up Magazine events?
People usually alert me to it. Last time it was a friend who was in it. This time it was my girlfriend.
3. What appeals to you about Pop-Up Magazine?
I like the idea of it. Honestly, I’m not that impressed. It’s fun and everything but the hype doesn’t match the actual event.

PERSON C
1. How did you initially hear about Pop-Up Magazine?
From a friend
2. How do you find out about Pop-Up Magazine events?
I signed up for their twitter feed.
3. What appeals to you about Pop-Up Magazine?
Its a cool mix between journalism and art, a really engaging form of storytelling. And I like that I don’t really know what to expect in advance. And that the chance is big that some of the talks/performances are interesting to me. I hate it if I am trapped somewhere for hours with one thing and it turns out I don’t like it – so the nice thing about PopUp magazine is that there are so many different things, and if I don’t like one it’s over in 3 minutes or so ;-)\

Caught Annie Baker’s subtle play about modern manhood, The Aliens, in a beautifully crafted production at SF Playhouse over the weekend.

Forgive the concision of this blog post, but I’m dog-tired and want to get at least some brief thoughts down about the experience before hitting the sack. So I’ll use bullet points to explain what I liked about it.

1. The play takes place in the garbage can-stinky, cramped and tightly-enclosed back yard of a cafe in Vermont. Bill English’s incredibly detailed and realistic set design is full of symbolic portent — it’s like an ugly, inescapable concrete-laced womb which is the perfect environment for a play about a bunch of male characters who are still attached to their mothers by the umbilical cord. In essence, these characters are aliens living in an alien world. And they are completely alienated from their surroundings.

2. The power dynamics between the characters, who are played with great precision and passion by the three-strong male cast, are completely arresting. I spent a lot of time worrying about the negative ideas and habits that the young and impressionable teenager, Evan (a wide-eyed, deeply uncomfortable yet utterly adorable Brian Miskell) would pick up from the his new thirty-something waster acquaintances, KJ (a suitably out-of-it Haynes Thigpen) and Jasper (a spiky yet sensitive Peter O’Connor.) Director Lila Neugebauer keeps the tension oscillating between the characters. We think something disreputable or simply bad is going to happen to Evan. But then unexpected things happen and a tiny light shines at the end through the essential bleakness of the proceedings.

3. I got a fascinating insight into the young(ish) male psyche from watching this play. It’s the bipolar opposite in some ways to the kind of maleness that David Mamet puts across in his play. Mamet’s characters are all swagger on the outside but soft on the inside. Baker’s are the reverse. Both versions ring true, but Baker’s seems more radical somehow.

One of the best things about being a John S Knight Fellow at Stanford is that when a line of thinking tugs at you and you’re struggling to reel it in, all you have to do is put the word out to the other 19 journalists in the group and before you know it, you’ve convened a group of smart people to hash out the idea with, most often in the sun over a glass of wine.

This was the case recently for me. I’ve been fascinated by the slippery link between art and journalism for many years (theres a reason why this blog is called ‘lies like truth’) and in light of the brouhaha surrounding This American Life’s retraction of its Mike Daisey program following the revelation that the monologist fabricated details in his acclaimed solo show about the conditions facing workers in Apple Computer factories in China, I decided to convene a discussion among members of my fellowship program.

It was a small group of five (three of us pictured above) that met up in front of Stanford’s Student Union last week for a chat about this topic. What began as a discussion about the Daisey affair (we all seemed to agree that Daisey crossed a line in not being clear about his storytelling approach, regardless of whether he was telling his story in the context of a theatre production or a journalism-focused radio show) quickly devolved into a hot debate about the basics of what it means to be a journalist and practice journalism.

It was a great discussion because there was a lot of lively disagreement. Some people in our cohort felt that the media still has the power to be a trusted source of information for the public and should maintain scrupulous fact-checking and other ethical standards. Others thought that this notion was hopelessly idealistic and at best aspirational.

The main takeaway that I got from the conversation was a confirmation of a reality that I was already growing to understand — that “the truth” and “the facts” are blurry concepts even in the most rigorous of media settings. Thanks to the tech boom and the economic downturn among other factors, we are entering an era where this is becoming increasingly the case as the media landscape fragments and commentators and reporters become increasingly “artful” in their attempt to rise above all the noise and get attention for their stories.

The conclusion? Every individual journalist and media organization, large and small, should have a long hard think about the basic rules or tenets that define their work, even going as far as to codify a set of rules for how they aim to operate in the world. The rules will be different for different people, but it’s setting standards in the first place that matters.

If the music I heard at the Fifth Annual Switchboard Music Festival can be used as a gauge of the state of contemporary composition today, I would have to say that contemporary music is a lot like my hairdryer.

I don’t have a very good hairdryer; I adopted it from a friend and I rarely use it. It doesn’t bother me that it only has two modes: low and slow, and high and hot.

But that the Switchboard Festival, a one day event in San Francisco showcasing the talents of new composers and the hip, young ensembles and soloists that perform this repertoire, should also basically have only “two settings” — sparse and soft, and compressed and loud — is of far greater concern to me.

Admittedly I was only able to hear a hear 13 of the 30 plus works presented during the day owing to having to rush off to Stanford for a singing rehearsal. Maybe the rest of the day yielded a wider variety of sonic expressivity.

Despite the limited scope of the compositional moods on display, certain parts of the performance left a mark on me.

I was very impressed with the quality of the musicianship. It’t not easy playing music that is this repetitive and black and white in its mode of communication.

I especially loved The Living Earth Show (a duo comprising electric guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson.) The musicians clearly seemed to be enjoying thrashing about making the dirty-aggressive sounds in Repetitive Stress, an homage to heavy metal music by Jonathan Russell. The piece received its world premiere at the Festival and I was happy to be there to witness it.

The talented clarinetist Jeff Anderle’s lyrical take on Nico Muhly’s 2007 piece It Goes Without Saying, accompanied by a whimsical video montage crawling with humanoid and other creatures by Una Lorenzen, was also a highlight of the first two hours of the program. Anderle seemed to crawl inside the hazy contours of Muhly’s musical landscape. I found myself transported into a dreamlike state with the bubbling clarinet and fleeting images on screen.

But despite the musicians’ artistry, I came away from my time at the festival wishing for more emotional nuance. The music on the roster was all so samey. Next year, maybe they could invest in a hairdryer with at least three settings.

Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia 2002 trilogy of plays and Abel Gance’s 1927 biopic Napoleon have a great deal in common: They both portray famous revolutionary European figures and explore the sociological, political and personal factors that influenced their actions, are meditations on humans’ ability to create and adapt to change, and are both rather long. The Coast of Utopia consists of three, three-hour=long dramas; Napoleon is five and a half hours long.

I caught the first part of The Coast of Utopia, “Voyage,” in an expert production by Patrick Dooley for The Shotgun Players on Friday in Berkeley. On Saturday, I spent most of the afternoon and evening in the company of some 3,000 people at The Paramount Theatre in Oakland for Kevin Brownlow’s staggering restoration of Gance’s masterpiece with musical accompaniment provided by the Oakland East Bay Symphony performing, exquisitely and with impressive stamina, a score created and conducted by Carl Davis. The film, presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, represents the most complete restoration of Napoleon ever witnessed in modern times.

Seeing both of these artistic efforts in such proximity inevitably caused me to think about the distance separating these artistic portrayals of revolutionary activity in previous centuries and what revolution amounts to in our own times. Both Stoppard and Gance create intensely human stories out of historical figureheads. The likes of Napoleon, Marat, Robespierre, Danton, Bakunin, Stankevich, Chaadaev and Belinsky leap out of the history books with their sabers flashing and their appetites growling.

The works I saw this weekend both embody the spirit of the revolution in another way: Their mere existence speaks to the passion, commitment and sheer hubris that it takes to even create art on this scale.

For a small company like Shotgun Players to pull off a feat like “Voyage” is an act of defiance in itself. The piece employs 21 actors, who all moved about Nina Ball’s simple set composed of malleable partitions with graceful fluidity. This is no mean feat considering the modest proportions of The Ashby Stage where the run is taking place. I felt like I was watching a world-class soccer team or a pack of Navy seals execute a critical mission. The story-telling is all strategy, just like a crack military operation.

As for Napoleon, the idea that such film could have existed in the early days of cinema beggars belief. The whole thing is shot on such an intimidatingly large and lush scale that I am still reeling from the experience. That the filmmaker cast himself in the cameo role of Saint-Just, the French Revolution’s most cold-blooded leader, is decidedly un-just. Gance’s achievement is nothing short of Napoleonic.

It’s hard to imagine that our contemporary world of Tahrir Squares and Occupy Movements will provoke such memorable portrayals in art a hundred years from now. But who knows.

“We’re toughing it out,” the young woman in the gold lamé dress said to my friend and I during intermission yesterday evening at the opening night of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker at The Curran Theatre in San Francisco. “We’re waiting for the double homicide.”

The first half of director Christopher Morahan’s subtle production of Pinter’s classic starring Jonathan Pryce as a craggy opportunistic down-and-outer with a shady past, seemed to leave Bay Area audiences feeling non-plussed. I noticed lots of shrugging shoulders and furrowed brows. Some people didn’t return for the second half.

So what’s going on here?

The Bay Area’s theatre-going audience is quite sophisticated. And there’s a lot of incisive, thoughtful and visually arresting work being done on our stages.

But Pinter doesn’t get a ton of airplay out here. Perhaps yesterday evening’s reactions are the natural response of an opening night audience drawn by a big-name actor. Weaned on action-packed entertainment product that speaks to them directly, maybe they struggle with Pinter’s slow-boiling, subtext-centric dramaturgy? The slovenly-drab appearance of the single, garret-room set and the old-fashioned, post-war costumes may be apt to wear people out as much as parsing Pryce’s hard-to-pin-down, semi-Welsh, semi-Brummie accent.

There’s also the problem of seeing a production more than two years after it was conceived. The show was created at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 2009, and it’s quite possible that the acting and mise-en-scene are starting to wear a little thin at the elbows. This is often an issue for touring productions that have runs out here on the west coast. By the time they reach us, the actors are getting tired and aspects of the staging that were once sharp have sometimes become a bit baggy.

I didn’t see the show in the UK so it’s hard for me to say. Michael Billington’s review in The Guardian from when the production first came out provides some clues to its quality.

I dunno. I felt quite involved in the moody-taut world unfolding before my eyes on stage. But it’s probably true that Pinter’s world is difficult for many audience members to digest. Still, kudos to the Shorenstein Hays Nederlander company, that bastion of crowd-pleasing musicals, for giving us something chewy to experience on the commercial theatre stage.

It was a cold and rainy night in San Francisco and Pierre-Laurent Aimard managed to make it pour and freeze indoors.

The French pianist’s recital at The Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances was so icy and insular that winter reigned in the gallery and stalls.

It was, of course, a technically accomplished performance, and full of subtlety and nuance. Enormous spaces of emptiness opened up in between the notes of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag’s Jatekok (Games,) a work composed of shard-like fragments that reminded me less of children’s playful pursuits than a very lonely walk across a frost-scarred field on a chilly February morning.

Ensuing works by Kurtag (Splinters,) Schumann (excerpts from Bunte Blatter,) Liszt (Unstern! Sinistre, disastro and Les jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este) and Debussy (Preludes, Book II) continued in much the same introspective mood.

Dressed like a James Bond villain in a black, Chinese-collared pajama suit, Aimard stroked the keys of the Steinway grand with introverted reverence. He didn’t utter a word during the performance and barely looked at the audience. But he did manage to smile semi-warmly when he took his bow at the end.  There was no encore.