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Archives for June 2009

When A Powerful Visual Image Becomes A Theatrical Cliche

Even the most intelligent and bold stage auteurs can fall into the trap of cliche. Having caught the talented Bay Area writer-director Mark Jackson’s expressionistic adaptation of Goethe’s Faust at Shotgun Players at the weekend, I’ve come to the conclusion that the image of a young woman with red paint smeared below the waistline on the front of her dress may be in dire need of retirement.

Often used to suggest insanity and/or loss of innocence, a bloodstain on the nether-regions of an actress’ clothes seems to crop up time and time again in plays and some films. One memorable example is Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 movie version of Hamlet opposite Mel Gibson. The image is extremely powerful and visceral. But it’s been so over-used by directors that it’s overstepped the line between engaging theatre-savvy audiences and boring them.

In Jackson’s Faust Part 1, actress Blythe Foster as Gretchen finds herself in this unfortunate predicament before she — surprise, surprise — slits her throat with a knife.

There’s part of me that wonders whether Jackson is trying to exploit the cliches of expressionism in this scene for artistic effect. Not only does Gretchen wear the bloodied dress, but she’s also got botched makeup smeared haphazardly all over her face. She wears her lipstick on her cheek and her eyes look like bruises thanks to the puffs of blue-green makeup all over them.

Jackson exploits the archetype of feminine madness and disintegration so strongly that it’s possible that he might be asking us to look beyond these cliches and see some deeper significance in them. But if that’s the case, the meaning of this visual image in an otherwise thoughtful production was lost on me.

A Midsummer Night’s Lockdown

Dozens of journalists, including myself, gathered at San Quentin State Prison on Monday morning hoping to experience a highly anticipated performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by inmates which was scheduled to take place at 10am in the maximum security facility.

We had all gone through a a rigorous security clearance process and were about to enter the prison gates to see the show when a prison spokesperson explained that the performance had been canceled. Representing the Warden’s Office, Samuel Robinson told the assembled crowd that the facility had gone into lockdown mode. A lockdown prevents visitors from entering and prisoners are rounded up and confined to their cells. According to a piece in today’s Examiner, the lockdown was caused by a piece of missing equipment, which the spokesperson was not at liberty to discuss. Apparently the offending article was located at ten minutes to ten, but by then it was far too late to revoke the lockdown mode.

San Quentin’s Director of the Arts in Corrections Program, Steve Emrick, said that this year represents the first time that cast members in a prison production are allowed to use props. In the past, the actors have had to conjure objects using their imaginations — and the imaginations of their audiences. I wonder if the missing article that caused the security breach was a donkey’s head?

The performance will be rescheduled at a later date. In the meantime, check out this great article about last year’s San Quentin production of Much Ado About Nothing by PlayShakespeare.com‘s Denise Battista.

Why Opera In The Ballpark Is A Brilliant Idea

San Francisco Opera mounted its annual simulcast of an opera production on Friday evening at AT&T ballpark. This year’s event, which broadcast the company’s production of Tosca starring Adrianne Pieczonka, Carlo Ventre and Lado Ataneli not only to patrons at the War Memorial opera house, but also to tens of thousands of people sitting under the stars at the San Francisco Giants’ home across town, hit a home run as squarely as last year’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor, starring Nathalie Dessay.

Here’s a link to my description of the 2008 experience.

This year, I wish to add that I can’t think of a better way to introduce large numbers of people to opera than this. Here’s why:

1. The event is free. Anyone can attend.

2. The event is slickly and warmly managed with a legion of opera helpers clad in special “Opera at the Ballpark” baseball shirts on hand to answer questions and guide people to where they want to go.

3. You can bring a picnic or buy concessions at the park and eat and drink all the way through the performance.

4. If you have to get up to use to bathroom or need to leave for any other reason, you don’t risk disturbing anyone else to any great degree.

5. You can wear what you like (though warm clothes are pretty necessary as it gets quite cold by the time intermission comes along.)

5. There’s plenty of room for kids to run around.

6. The opera supplies free printed plot synopses and information about the cast and main production personnel. Also, the plot details are screened just before the start of the first and second half of the opera.

6. Video presentations before the opera begins and during intermission provide interesting information about many different facets of the opera, eg interviews with the head of the wig and costume shops, as well as an overview of productions past and present.

7. The opera partners with local classical music radio station, KDFC, to provide live commentary as the event unfolds. This year’s commentators weren’t completely on top of their game. But hopefully the use of a teleprompter will help to make things flow better next year.

8. Finally, the experience of sitting in the park as night falls watching a great opera performed by some of the world’s most engaging opera artists with around twenty thousand other people is absolutely unrivaled. It’s much more fun, in my opinion, than sitting in the opera house itself.

I can’t wait for September 19 when SF opera presents a live screening of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the home of the Giants.

Staging Crowd Scenes So They Don’t Look Lame

A trip to see California Shakespeare Theater‘s production of Romeo and Julietdirected by Jonathan Moscone a couple of evenings ago prompted a conversation between myself and a friend about the challenges involved in scenes requiring theatre companies to create the illusion of crowds convincingly.

It’s very hard to give theatre-goers a real feeling of a packed and throbbing space when there are only a handful of actors on stage. Different directors approach the problem in a multitude of ways some more successful than others.

The Cal Shakes cast put a lot of energy into staging the masqued ball scene in Romeo and Juliet. A quirky, loose-limbed choreographed dance routine to Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive” was a lot of fun. The constantly flailing bodies created a jungle-like effect which made it believably tricky for Alex Morf’s Romeo to physically make contact with Sarah Nealis’ Juliet for the first time having spotted his heart’s desire across the room. But despite the energy of the scene, the stage still felt underpopulated and both my friend and I found it hard to suspend our sense of disbelief and feel like we were really experiencing Verona’s Party of the Century.

So what techniques have directors used successfully to make crowd scenes feel dense? Big budgets, of course, allow a lot of extra people to appear on stage. Crowd scenes in operas mounted by major companies usually feel busy because of the sheer numbers of supernumaries thrust in front of the footlights.

But what if you only have the money and/or artistic desire to create a crowd scene with three actors? My friend has a solution: He says he once saw a play in which a director created the feeling of a sweaty dance club by cramming the members of his small cast in a tight, see-through box in the middle of the stage. The close quarters apparently created a visceral feeling of compression, of bodies tightly entwined in space. He was won over by the illusion at any rate.

I’ve seen a similar effect achieved through the judicious use of lighting — the partygoers stood close together in one part of the stage, which was strongly lit by patterned, club-style lights, and the rest of the stage was dark.

Any more ideas for staging crowd scenes? What works and what doesn’t? Drop me a line.

A Child Prodigy At The Peabody Essex Museum

I spent last Saturday morning exploring parts of Salem, Massachusetts’ wonderful Peabody Essex Museum. The museum stands out in the twee, witch-and-warlock-ified town of Salem for the cool, modern sophistication of its architecture, its gobsmacking collection of artifacts brought back from the Far East during the great age of seafaring by mariners and offbeat special exhibits. It also happens to be America’s oldest continuously operating museum and boasts the only complete Qing Dynasty house located outside China.

The museum was full of surprises for me that day. In between mistaking an extremely finely-wrought sample of 19th century Chinese embroidery for a display of ink calligraphy, and thinking I was looking at early 20th century photographs of surfers instead of images captured over the last couple of years by photographer Joni Sternbach utilizing 19th century tintype photographic techniques, I met a toddler with a prodigious fascination for Oriental ceramics.

My friend and I were pottering around one of the Far Eastern galleries when a small boy who was in his father’s arms looked at us and asked us for our ages. We told him how old we were. He told us his age. We exchanged names, though I sadly can’t remember his. He then went on to talk extremely lucidly about his favorite bits of the Peabody collection and said a few words in Japanese.

His father, a pleasant, middle-manager-looking white guy in regulation kahki pants and polo shirt, told us that his son visits the museum several times a week. He can’t get enough of it apparently. When a museum warden showed up, a huge smile spread across the boy’s face. “It’s Duck Man!” he declared delightedly. The warden grinned at the boy and made loud Daffy Duck quacking noises. The boy laughed and clapped his hands.

Perhaps one day, he’ll be running this museum.

Lazy British Theatre For Gullible American Audiences

I’ve lost count of the number of sub-par touring productions I’ve seen of classic plays by British theatre companies in the US over which American audiences go ga-ga irrespective of their quality.

With the possible exception of Tim Supple’s Indian A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cheek By Jowl’s Twelfth Night, I can’t think of any British production I’ve seen in recent years on US stages that have actually been worth the price of admission.

Yet the adulation with which shows like Peter Hall’s Theatre Royal, Bath production of As You Like It and — the prompt for writing this blog post — Phyllida Lloyd’s take on Schiller’s Mary Stuart for the Donmar Warehouse (which I saw in New York last week) have been received stateside give me pause for thought. Are people simply won over by the accents? Do theatregoers see names like Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter on the marquee and autmatically think to themselves “there are famous British actresses in this production therefore it MUST be superb”? Why do new world audiences lose all sense of critical judgment when it comes to experiencing productions from the old world?

A few weeks before I went to New York, I asked as many people in the know as I could for theatre recommendations. The one show that came up in almost every exchange was Mary Stuart. Which is why I decided to go and see the show. Admittedly, a couple of people who had not yet experienced the production for themselves recommended it to me, most likely on the basis of McTeer’s well-received turn on Broadway as Nora in A Doll’s House a few years ago.

But far from representing the best of British theatre, Lloyd’s lifeless production is packed with the worst of its cliches. Though Walter, as a terse Elizabeth I gave a slightly nuanced performance, McTeer, as Mary, Queen of Scots, hit one melodramatic note throughout. Peter Oswald’s adaptation killed all the poetry in Schiller’s original. The whole thing felt stagey, pompous and tired.

I understand that by the time UK productions reach the US, they have often been running for a couple of years or more. This could explain the lack of freshness. But what I can’t get my head around is the thunderous applause and critical hurrahs that the production is receiving on Broadway. “It’s hard not to be at least a little in love with — and more than a little in awe of — the very leading ladies in Phyllida Lloyd’s crackling revival (first seen at the Donmar Warehouse in London) of this 1800 tragedy of double-dealing politics,” wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times.

When, oh when, is the US going to get over its automatic deference to British theatre?

Bacon: What’s the Beef?

Just read ArtsJournal colleague Jon Perreault’s extensive and erudite blog entry about the Francis Bacon retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The opening paragraph sums up Jon’s thoughts about the artist:

When it comes to Francis Bacon (1909-1992), less is more. The current “Centenary Retrospective” at the Metropolitan, on view through Aug. 16, is ample proof. One picture at a time can be quite effective, but seeing any Bacon that once might have taken your fancy (perhaps out of some deep-seated perversity) along with others of the same or far too similar ilk destroys any credence he might once have had as a major artist.

Perhaps I’m a sick soul. But since having experienced by first Bacon retrospective in London as a teenager (albeit I was slightly older than 13, when Jon wrote that he saw a reproduction of Bacon’s famous Painting, 1946, at the Museum of Modern Art) I can’t seem to get enough of this artist’s work. Contrary to what Jon thinks, I believe that “when it comes to Francis Bacon (1909-1992), more is more.”

My thoughts about Bacon were confirmed by a visit to see the exhibition at the Met last week. The cumulative effect of experiencing all those canvases together was overwhelming in a good way, like a great performance of the Verdi Requiem. It was also strangely life-affirming.

As I moved through the galleries from the artist’s screaming early works through his pining reflections following the death of the love of his life George Dyer and finally to more introspective and almost detached pictures of sundry boyfriends and acquaintances in his final years, I felt like I was watching the evolution of a soul at close quarters. I liked the fact that the exhibition didn’t simply dwell on the iconic paintings of the 1950s and 60s — the ones depicting sinister popes and nightmarish monsters — and instead only lingered for a while before moving on to show different stages of the artist’s career and preoccupations. The progression allowed me to transcend the cliches that one thinks of when conjuring the work of Bacon (the fanged, moist-lipped mouths, the shapeless-fleshy abattoir forms) and thus appreciate the quality of Bacon’s draftsmanship, his fragility and his malign sense of humor. I’d spend the night wandering those galleries if I could.

Krapp, 39: A New Take On An “Old Muckball”

When actor and performer Michael Laurence asked the Samuel Beckett Estate for the rights to include a passage from Krapp’s Last Tape, in his own dramatic riff based on the Irish bard’s 1958 bittersweet meditation on memory, he was, unsurprisingly turned down. The Beckett Estate basically doesn’t allow anyone to do anything with Beckett’s work except observe it to the letter. So a New York theatre-maker’s desire to take the basic premise of Krapp — a drama about a man who meticulously documents his life on tape and then goes back many years later to play back the recordings and use them as a jumping off point for further analysis, documentation and no small amount of despair — and turn it into a meditation on his own life, was never likely to get the go ahead from Beckett’s famously uptight lawyers.

Not that the non-cooperation of Beckett’s Estate matters at all. For Krapp, 39, Laurence’s 21st century homage to Beckett and attempt to purge a personal obsession with Krapp’s Last Tape, doesn’t need the words of the original author to resonate. Beckett’s play ends with a disavowal: “I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now” and Laurence’s play makes us feel the flickering flames of our lives to a degree that we too don’t need to hear Beckett’s words.

Krapp, 39, is a rambling, hyper-self-indulgent work that spirals between many different time periods as the shabbily-dressed, 39-year-old narrator (Laurence, playing himself or at any rate a version of himself) looks back at his meticulously documented past and wonders about his future. But solipsism is a clever tool in Laurence’s work, which he exploits in such an over-the-top way that the self is as much present center-stage as it disappears from view completely.

In Beckett’s play, the 69-year-old protagonist looks back at his 39-year-old self, who in turn comments, on tape, about an even earlier version of himself. If Beckett’s play feels like a set of mirror reflections, Laurence’s feels even denser. There are so many time periods and layers of personal history and egotistical mood swings in the piece that one comes close to losing oneself as a viewer as well as the “self” that’s talking to us on stage. Fragments of past are like shards of glass that get under the skin and cause pain.

In some ways, Laurence’s play differs from Beckett’s in the sense of being like a splinter you can’t remove. While Beckett’s protagonist looks back at his life during its twilight moments and comes to a degree of self-recognition about his past, Laurence’s character, more tragically, is at the turning point of his life. Beckett marks 39 as the age when one is at “the crest of a wave”, and in Laurence’s play we see a character fully aware of the meaning of what it is to be 39 and yet powerless to negotiate the turning sea.

But for all that, Krapp 39, is as funny and and oddly life-affirming as the play upon which it is based. Laurence is a generous, cheeky presence on stage at the tiny Soho Playhouse in lower Manhattan where I happily caught his performance last week. Sitting there among the debris of his life — old and dusty knick-knacks of a bygone age like books, toys and photographs nudging the shiny newness of video screens, camcorders and laptops — with his dusty, ill-fitting suit, deranged hair and bananas, he looks like he’s a happy hermit crab.

It’s no wonder that Krapp, 39 has been enjoying such a long run in New York. I hope audiences in other parts of the country get to experience Laurence’s homage to Beckett too.

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