lies like truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When most people think of China’s Ming Dynasty, priceless vases come to mind. There are certainly plenty of gorgeous ceramics on display at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum right now. But it wasn’t the display cases full of beautifully preserved, very old china that caught my eye when I visited the museum’s Power & Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty exhibition last week. I was most knocked out by a couple of hanging scrolls.

What I loved most about these two works of art is the relationship between the image and the story behind each one. The first image, “Boating on a Snowy Night,” was created by court artist Zhong Qinli (active 1465 -1505) using ink on silk and comes to San Francisco from the Palace Museum in Beijing. Upon first glance to an eye untutored in Chinese art and fable like my own, the image depicted on the silk, though delicately crafted and full of lovely textures, doesn’t give much away. We simply see a boat making its way up a river. But the picture suddenly communicates a rich and wonderful inner life when viewed again after reading the back story in the exhibition catalogue.

Zhong took a 4th century story as his source for the scroll. The scroll depicts the thinker Wang Huizhi (died 386) traveling up river to visit his mentor, the renowned scholar-artist Dai Kui (died 395).

As the story goes, Wang, suddenly struck by a desire to venture into the inclement winter weather to see Dai, boated along the river to his mentor’s house. But just before reaching his destination, Wang decided to return home. Why? Because the impulse that had sparked the visit had passed.

What a strange and wonderful story not to mention subject for a painting. When viewed with the narrative in mind, Wang’s journey takes on a new meaning. The air looks chilly, the traveler frigid, and the boat tiny in comparison to the rocks and trees and water around it. Nature seems to engulf Wang’s winningly random act. “Wang’s subsequent saying,’going impromptu and returning at heart’s content’ is regarded as a romantic metaphor of high virtue,” the catalogue tells us. “His boating on a snowy night has remained a popular subject in art for over a thousand years.”

The second scroll that resonated particularly strongly with me depicts “A Monk Enjoying a Moon Painting.” The ink on silk scroll was created by the Ming period artist Wu Wei (1459 -1508) and also comes to the exhibition from the Palace Museum in Beijing.

What I love best about this painting is the monk’s carefree, almost lunatic expression. He seems so happy in his world. And there’s something so surreal about him bumbling about in the hills looking at a picture of the moon on paper rather than up at the real thing in the sky. Rene Magritte would have loved this picture I think.

The catalogue includes a vivid description of the artist which I’d like to include by way of conclusion as the image in the scroll kind of conveys something of the spirit of the man who created it:

“The image certainly reflects [Wu’s] itinerant lifestyle. Traveling from one town to another in pursuit of freedom, wine, and entertainment, Wu chose to base himself in Nanjing most of the time. He was honored by two emperors with prestigious titles, including “Number One Painter,” and was twice appointed to paint for the imperial court. Nevertheless, the position could not keep him in Beijing nor subdue his dissolute temperament, which he indulged by drinking with geishas. When drunk, his vigorous brushstrokes and bold splashes were far removed from the highly controlled techniques of many of his associates. Just as Wu himself dep arted from the main current, so did his art, which according to his contemporaries, expressed “insolence” or a “fighting spirit like the soldiers.” ”

Over the past couple of days in Los Angeles, I was reminded once again of just how completely different the business of telling stories on stage is to attempting the same on screen.

LA Opera gave two first-time opera directors — Woody Allen and David Cronenberg — the chance to apply their seasoned filmmaking skills to a pair of opera productions, both of which opened over the weekend at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. Allen mostly got away unscathed with his staging of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, but Cronenberg’s adaptation of his 1986 horror flick, The Fly, made me wonder if the director had ever been to see a stage production in his life before.

Allen’s staging of the most well-known of the three one-act operas that make up Puccini’s Il Tritticoin some ways resembles a typical Allen movie. The noisy Italian family at the heart of Puccini’s farce could be one of Allen’s Jewish clans. The characters might have stepped out of Radio Days or Manhattan. In familiar territory, Allen seems to understand the people in Puccini’s story and creates boisterous, visually and physically dense scenes in which there is so much action that one feels like one is watching a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Despite the humor of the production, there are a couple of aspects of Allen’s opera debut that bother me. The first is to do with the fact that the director plays safe — he basically plunks a scenario from one of his vintage films on stage. The second is to do with his weird approach to curtain calls. This sounds insignificant, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth as I left the opera house. Seemingly — and somewhat pointlessly — attempting to subvert traditions, Allen had each member of his sizable cast bow individually not once, not twice, but three times. By the time the performers were taking their third set of bows, the audience had gotten fed up with clapping and was starting to wonder what was going on. Meanwhile, the great man himself never bothered showing up on stage. I felt sorry for the singers having to go through this bizarre routine. Instead of leaving the stage on a wave of applause (as was the case for the first two acts of Il Trittico directed by William Friedkin) they left under a cloud of disgruntlement and confusion. Not a great way to end an otherwise pretty great night out at the opera. What was Allen trying to prove?

Cronenberg showed a similar lack of understanding of theatrical mores with his production of The Fly. I have to admit that I feel a bit sorry for the movie director, whose work on screen I have long admired. Cronenberg is rather out of his element on stage. He fails to find elegant solutions to problems like how to get people and furniture on and off in between scenes. The piece lacks strong visual and dramatic metaphors. The storytelling system is so literal, from scientist Seth Brundle’s latex fright suits to journalist Veronica Quaife’s refusal to smoke because she’s pregnant to the copious amounts of bad simulated sex, that it’s hard to take the piece seriously at any level. Audience members kept giggling during the opening matinee at parts that weren’t — as far as I could tell — meant to be funny. The literal approach works fine on screen, but it doesn’t fly on stage. Cronenberg at least has the benefit of working with terrific actors — Canadian baritone Daniel Okulitch is particularly striking and conflicted as world-changing scientist/mad genius Brundle. The Fly‘s problems are not all Cronenberg’s fault: Howard Shore’s music is terribly weak — I don’t think I’ve heard a more monotonous and forgettable operatic score in years. And David Henry Hwang’s repetitive libretto, with its constant doomsday refrain of “all hail the new flesh!” is more embarrassing than revealing of some important message about the nature of scientific discovery.

Ultimately, the prize for best director over the weekend shouldn’t go to either novice. It must go to Friedkin, a veteran filmmaker (The Exorcist, The French Connection) whose opera career extends back a decade to a Florentine production of Wozzeck. I was particularly won over by Friedkin’s take on the second part of Il Trittico, Suor Angelica. Having never experienced the opera live on stage, I had no idea that Puccini’s convent-based tear-jerker about a bunch of nuns could be so overwhelmingly moving. Thanks to soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s stomach-convulsing turn in the title role and Friedkin’s sensitive use of light, bold approach to iconography and meditative, almost sculptural blocking framework, this kitschy one-act stole my heart on a balmy Los Angeles Saturday night.

Yesterday evening at the San Francisco Fringe, I saw two theatre productions on a boy-meets-girl theme. But despite the similarity of the shows’ subject matter, I’ve rarely had two more extreme experiences in a single evening’s theatre-going to date.

The first show, Moon Fable, was a sweet and ardently sincere homage to young love produced by a company called SideCar Theatre. The second, Peg-Ass-Us, created by the New York company Pack of Others, was a graphic, no-holes-barred panegyric to heterosexual anal sex.

Moon Fable tells the story of a harried young office worker whose girlfriend disappears to Paris, leaving him in a dead-end job. In the youth’s dreams, however, the moon and her consort of nutty sidekicks help him understand the importance of love. The production evolves in a surreal, dream-like fashion and includes some lovely visual moments such as when the young man’s briefcase stuffed with papers opens in a dream to reveal a model of a tiny paper figure standing on top of a ladder trying to reach the moon. At the same time, the man himself is standing on top of a real-life ladder doing the same. If the show had been more expertly acted, its overall effect may well have been more tantalizing. But even though the production plodded along, it had its heart in the right place.

Peg-Ass-Us, on the other hand, told a completely different kind of romantic tale. The show, fittingly performed at San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, was part burlesque, part personal memoir and part how-to guide. The how-to was related to a sexual practice known as “pegging” which basically involves a man, a woman, a strap-on dildo and oodles of lubricant. I’ll leave the rest to your imaginations. John Leo and Sophie Nimmannit make a winning couple. He’s all reserved and highly strung; she’s brash and aggressively sexual. There are some game little songs in the piece, including a clever ode to the mythical beast after which the show takes its name. But the central conceit about two people discovering the joys of anal sex gets a little boring after a while. By the time Nimmannit and Leo whip off their clothes, get out their sex toys and set about providing us with a live demonstration of pegging (from which we are thankfully actually spared at the 11th hour) we’ve pretty much had enough. Talk about flogging a dead unicorn.

In any event, it was amazing to see quite how different two interpretations of basically the same experience — falling in love — can be. And if it weren’t for the Fringe, coming across this kind of theatre-going mix would be unlikely. 

I stopped taking Woody Allen seriously as a film director around 1995. After Mighty Aphrodite, Allen’s films seemed to taper off, becoming mawkish parodies of themselves.

So it was against my better judgment that I found myself sitting in my local movie theater the other evening watching the director’s latest film, Vicky Christina Barcelona. I decided to see VCB on the basis of several personal recommendations and a handful of positive reviews. I’m really glad I went.

Romantic relationships have been a central theme in Allen’s work throughout the decades, but while previous films like Annie Hall and Hannah and her Sisters painted love affairs in broad strokes, Allen flecks his canvas in VCB with subtle, shifting notes.

Not only does he mine the nature of human passions in an unflinching yet human way, but he also achieves this with humor and grace. I found myself as intoxicated by the Spanish landscapes as I was by all the performances.

Riding high on the success of VCB, the question now is, how will Allen’s operatic career kick-off? This weekend I’m heading to Los Angeles to experience, among other things, Allen’s first ever stab as a director of opera. He’s staging Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” from Il Trittico for LA Opera. The opening night is this Saturday. Watch this space for the verdict next week. Let’s hope that the director manages to tell a love story as well on stage as he’s managed to this time around on screen.

The San Francisco Fringe festival starts today. Every year, when it comes to Fringe time here in this city, I spend hours trying to figure out what shows to see. I never had this problem in Edinburgh: The Scotsman would simply give me a list of shows to review which pretty much kept me busy from 9am till 2am every day for a month. If I managed to find an hour to go and see a production which wasn’t on my roster, I was lucky.

The San Francisco Fringe isn’t nearly as big as its Edinburgh equivalent, but here, I’m my own boss: I can see whatever I want. This is both a blessing and a curse. How to choose from the myriad offerings? What selection criteria to adopt?

One approach, which I would probably favor if I had all the time in the world to potter around from show to show for the entire two-week span of the festival, would be to leave things to chance. I could draw show titles out of a hat or shut my eyes, turn to a random page in the festival brochure and pick productions according to where my index finger lands on the page. Another method, though a boring one, would be to wait until the last few days of the festival and only go and see those shows that have been earning raves from audiences and critics.

But what if you’re faced with having to go at the start of the festival and only have the chance to see a few productions on one or two days? It’s impossible to come up with a set of fool-proof criteria for figuring out which productions to choose from the slew of offerings. But, for what it’s worth, here are a few notions that pass through my head when I’m trying to work out what to see:

1. The Fringe is packed with solo shows. It’s harder to bring a show with a cast to a fringe festival, so I’m interested in seeing ensemble productions.
2. There are many interesting site-specific productions in this year’s festival. I like seeing productions that take place in non-traditional venues, as this seems very much in keeping with the ad hoc spirit of the Fringe.
3. I admire companies that trek over here from faraway places to participate in the festival. It’s fun to check out theatre from other cities in the US and abroad.
4. If a local company whose work I admire or hear is great but haven’t gotten around to experiencing yet has a show on, I’ll try to get there.
5. In terms of content, I’m generally less attracted to self-revelatory auto-biographical solo shows about a writer-performer’s struggle to recognize his homosexuality with his religious faith than I am to, say, a kamikaze take on a classic or a physical-theatre piece about dog racing that blends original storytelling with clog dancing. It is the fringe after all, and I’m on a hunt for the deranged and different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The rest was just bollocks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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