Jeffrey R. Smith reviews

FENCES

2012-02-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

FENCES

Reviewed by Jeff Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Altarena Playhouse is currently presenting August Wilson’s FENCES as directed by Gene Kahane.

Set in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in 1957, FENCES is at once a metaphor, a window and a mirror for where we were and where we are in our progress toward a racially just society.

Given the span of 55 years between the setting of the play and when it is being performed, one can take note of both the progress and lack of progress toward the goal of racial equality.

When it comes to race in America, what should seem “so 1957” doesn’t.

Hoop skirts, girls with pony tails on roller skates serving patrons at drive-in root beer stands, fins on the rear the fenders of cars, hoola-hoops and duck tail haircuts all seem dated: “so 1957;” but the problems that plagued and arrested the African-American community in 1957, unfortunately, do not seem as dated.

Director Gene Kahane, who mostly directs high school theatre, making occasional off campus forays into community theater, has been nominated for several San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics’ awards; his artistry is conspicuously apparent in this current opus.

Gene does not believe in Procrustean fits, he directs with a suggestive voice; not a megaphone; his vision of a show is projected onto swirling vapors not cast in stone.

Given that this is an African-American play with an all African-American cast, his touch was judiciously even more restrained: barely palpable; he listened more than he spoke and the vision of the cast became the vision of the director; he served mostly as the eyes and ears of the cast; reporting to the cast what the audience would ultimately see and hear.

Leontyne Mbele-Mbong provides the center of gravity for this show; combining superb acting with a noble heroic grace as Rose: a woman who celebrates life and love as much as she vulnerably lives life and loves.

Dorian Lockett as Bono was, to many in the audience, too real to be acting; the audience had to be reminded that MR Lockett, although he was so convincingly deep into his character, was, after all, faithfully following the August Wilson script.

MR Lockett proved the stage adage: “when acting does not seem like acting, that’s acting.”

Avondina Wills courageously took on the most strenuous role of Lyons: a man of larger than life proportions, a bundle of wrestling contradictions and a big generous erring heart.

Once Jaelyn Cooper stepped onto stage the show needed no Klieg lights; this bright little supernova from Wood Middle School was absolutely dazzling on stage; she was the apotheosis of hope, clarity and unfettered potential as the delightful Raynell.

While Rita Hayworth was discovered at Drug Store in Hollywood, Jaelyn Cooper was discovered, properly chaperoned, at Alameda’s favorite west end bistro, Cooper’s 1400.

February is African American History month; whether you are out for exceptional entertainment and quality theatre, or for a slice of African-Americana alla 1957, this show is not to be missed.

While many community theaters cautiously hunker down to time worn reheats of successful Broadway hits, it is commendable that Fred Chacon and Gene Kahane take the risk and effort to bring Alameda quality theatre with substance.

For an unforgettable play, performance and evening, call the Altarena box office at 510-523-1553 or visit www.altarena.org.

ARCADIA

2012-01-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

ARCADIA
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The diminutive but mighty Live Oak Theater of Berkeley is courageously and superbly performing Tom Stoppard’s major encyclopedic opus: ARCADIA.
This ambitious undertaking distinguishes the Live Oak Company amongst its peers of community theaters; it is one of the few that has the hubris to attempt polishing such a gem; miraculously, they mustered the talent and directorship to tackle this strenuous, brilliant script by whom many consider to be the living incarnation of Oscar Wilde.
Robert Estes has honed and crafted an amazingly fluid performance from his principals who deliver precisely chiseled and comprehensible lines in a properly clipped upper class British accent.
Stoppard is not easy material: his characters, were they to pause on the set and submit to an IQ test, would all record genius scores rivaling Tesla, Feynman and Oppenheimer; their dexterity with language, wit and rhetoric reflects an intelligence that would make most of us feel like Australopithecus.
Christopher Kelly, as the arrogant, expansive and expressive researcher Bernard Nightingale, is to be congratulated for his sterling performance.
Although most community theaters hover somewhere between bankruptcy and penury, the Live Oak Company and Costumer Designer Hilary Seeley seemed to have the resources to accurately and tastefully match costume with rank, period and personality.
This reviewer, an engineer by education and a mathematician by profession, was pleasantly stunned to hear the characters correctly and convincingly articulate the intricacies of Fermat’s Last Theorem, Regressions, Recursions, Logistics Equations, Carnot’s Thermodynamics and the Entropy Death of the Universe.
Sure enough, the Director had prudently called in an expert: a Mathematics Consultant videlicet: Digeratti Morgan Brown.
ARCADIA is intelligent, sophisticated wit that will challenge your ear, your intellect and your audio processor; it will deliver aerobic exercises to your Broca’s region.
Stoppard is the greatest thing to happen to English theatre since Shaw went on to pick daisies in the Elysian Fields; to find Stoppard in the Bay Area, performed this well, is a rare event and certainly not to be missed.
For tickets to an enchanting, erudite celebration of the English Language and Western Civilization, call the box office at 510-649-5999 or surf over to the Live Oak website: www.aeofberkeley.org.

PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT

2011-11-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The SF Playhouse is presently home to PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT by Tennessee Williams.

Award Winning Director Bill English breathes levity, relevancy and a modern spirit into what has been described as a “serious comedy.”

The result is a heart-warming romantic comedy; a toasty little holiday chestnut pulled off the glowing coals for your holiday entertainment and edification.

Williams recognized post-traumatic stress disorder back in the 1950s when much of our unsympathetic nation, frustrated over Truman’s orchestrated Korean stalemate, derided returning veterans as “wimps,” unfairly contrasting them to the victorious heroes of the decisive World War II.

Returning veterans Ralph Bates and George Haverstick, marvelously played by Johnny Moreno and Patrick Alperone, fail to be anesthetized by the burgeoning material promise and the spiritual lassitude of the Eisenhower era.

Each harbors an expectation for something larger than mediocrity and more liberating than conformity.

Each too, is unable to feign normal sexual relations with his respective spouse.

Is this Williams calling into question the existence of pure heterosexuality as he did in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, or is he ascribing the dysfunctionality to the trauma of war and male insensitivity?

Not having the expedient luxury of reaching for the triangular blue pharmaceuticals, the two veterans rightly arrive at the conclusion that sex is a sequel, not a prequel, to tenderness, intimacy and understanding.

Joe Madero, as the obtuse, blustering and menacing MR McGillicuddy, accounts for a disproportion share of the humor in this staging.

While we have distanced ourselves from the culture, mores and archaic beliefs of the 1950s, our emotional evolution has essentially remained at a standstill; the lessons of PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT could easily be just the perfect Holiday Gift for you and your loved one.

A set by the Bay Area’s premier designer is absolutely magical; given that the set sustains two ripping “earthquakes” during the show demonstrates Nina Ball’s understanding of seismic engineering.

To warm your heart this Holiday Season, without using an ounce of fossil fuel, get thee to the SF Playhouse and PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT . . . you just might get an adjustment yourself.

For tickets call 415-677-9596 or surf over to www.sfplayhouse.org.

THE CHALK BOY

2011-11-26T15:41:00.000-08:00

THE CHALK BOY

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Impact Theatre of Berkeley is proof that given determination, sufficient talent and resourcefulness, more can be done with a whole lot less.

Their current minimalist production of THE CHALK BOY faithfully depicts the painfully vicious nature of the social hierarchy in a high school setting.

Adolescents who have absorbed the basics of sparring and jousting within a social context from their parents often fail to gage just how much cattiness is sufficient to wound but not cause paralysis.

While it is one thing to throw a body check to thwart a competitor’s ascent up the social food chain, the check should not cause him or her to walk off the playing field, drop out of school or deny the victor a chance to witness the withdrawal, moping and depression of the vanquished.

The ground rules call for bruising; not breaking the competition.

Four high school girls—Penny Lauder, Lauren Radley, Trisha Sorensen and Breanna Stark—seem to be locked in every conceivable form competition with each other excepting the obvious: the highest GPA.

With tenuous forays into lesbian and heterosexual sex, the occult and even academics, the four girls seem to explore the boundaries and mores of their seemingly safe community.

It is safe until the title character, Chalk Boy, turns up missing.

As Alfred Hitchcock advised, "New put a creek in a murder mystery unless you plan to use it."

Mysteriously, one of Chalk Boy's fingers—one might ask if it was the violating finger—gets mailed home.

Thanks to fast routing by the U.S. Postal service, the DNA was still legible upon receipt—it was obviously not shipped during the holiday season.

Chris Quintos as Trisha makes some remarkable and credible transitions assuming different characters and personas while surfing on an unstable emotional roller coaster ride.

Excellent directing by Ben Randle keeps the various threads of the storyline from tangling in the mind of the audience.

Given the extremely low ceilings—think coal mine—lighting designer Jax Steager miraculously bends Newton’s Law of Optics and ignores the tenets of Ohm’s Law just getting light the subterranean stage.

Both the production standards and the dauntless spirit of Impact Theatre make for excellent theater, a wonderfully rustic place to eat pizza, drink beer and a reassuring glimpse of the next generation of promising thespians strutting and fretting their nascent hours upon the stage.

MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS

2011-11-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Richard Harder and the Off Broadway West Theatre Company have qualitatively ratcheted the San Francisco theater experience several notches closer to Plato’s world of ideals.

MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS is written by Athol Fugard; a South Afrikaner who is probably best known for his plays A LESSON FROM ALOES and THE BLOOD KNOT.

Fugard’s novel TSOTSI, rewritten as a screenplay, won an Academy-Award in 2005.

As any aficionado of theatre will tell you, it is not sufficient to pull a world class script off the shelf and hope that it will stand up on its own two overleafs.

As a theatre critic who has seen MASTER HAROLD in venues from London to Norfolk this production runs ahead of the pack like Sea Biscuit on the final turn.

Set in the white minority government mandated insanity of Apartheid of the 1950s, the play details how government sanctioned segregation wades into the psyches of its constituents.

Just as Jews garner international opprobrium for settling on the West Bank, blacks were precluded from occupying designated sections of Johannesburg and South Africa.

While Martin Luther King Junior had a vision for the planet, the two black servants; Willie and Sam (played superbly by Anthony Rollins-Mullens and LaMont Ridgell) have a vision for South Africa.

Their vision manifests itself in a metaphor: ballroom dancing; partners gliding in harmony across the floor never colliding or clashing with other partners; everyone enjoying the rich music of life.

The vision is shattered by the brutal reality personified by Hally; an Afrikaner whose family essentially owns Sam and Willie as well as the tea room where they work.

Ominously, the story unfolds during a thunderstorm and presaging a fundamental clash between Master Harold and the Boys.

To Fugard’s credit the audience cannot dismiss the anxious apprehension that every ounce of the dialogue is inexorably moving the action closer to the precipice and tragic cataclysm intrinsic to Apartheid.

The fine seamless acting of Rollins-Mullens, LaMont Ridgell and Adam Simpson rolls like the thunder, lubricating the slippery slope on which characters stand.

The camaraderie of the boss’s son and the employees, blacks and whites, is tenuous at best; it is held together more by what is left unsaid than by what is said.

What is left unsaid is the epic social injustice of Apartheid.

Sitting in the audience, one gets the feeling that once the play gets started nothing can stop the action from unfolding—neither black-outs, earthquakes nor sovereign defaults.

This is Star Treks’ the tractor beam.

There is not a better show is the bay area; don’t miss it.

For tickets call 800)838-3006 or www.offbroadwaywest.org.

ONCE IN A LIFE

2011-10-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

ONCE IN A LIFETIME

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Running short on optimism?

Would you like an anti-dote to the pessimism that has nagged us since the house bubble vaporized?

Would you like rich frothy optimism, rubbed like a topical ointment, a palliative, on your funny bone?

Then American Conservatory Theatre is the place you should be.

Don’t rely on The Wall Street Journal, the Fed, the U.S. Treasury, your Divorce Lawyer, your Real Estate broker, your Hedge Fund Manager or the Nightly News to cheer you up.

You need comedy; not tragedy and certainly not expanding doses of reality.

Currently ACT is performing ONCE IN A LIFETIME, a gut wrenching spoof on Hollywood that will have you laughing so hard it will restore the laugh lines you sold off to Botox.

Written by George S Kauffman and Moss Hart, and directed by Mark Rucker, ONCE IN A LIFETIME has the levity of the Marx Brothers, the satirical wit of Twain and the parody punch of Mamet.

Julia Coffey as the fast thinking, even faster talking May Daniels, is the dazzling jewel of this delightful, galloping ensemble piece.

Fifteen actors assume 70 roles to keep this aspidistra flying and the laughter rolling.

An absolutely stunning set design by Daniel Ostling and a video design by Alexander Nichols not only provide the visual backdrop, they dovetail with a multi-media synergy to superbly augment the show: melding a classical 1930 comedy with the theatrical technology of the twenty-first century.

If you love comedy and want to lift yourself into the giddy empyrean, get thee to ACT pronto; call the box office at 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

PHAEDRA

2011-10-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

PHAEDRA

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Shotgun Players—never ones to fear neither pushing the envelope nor foraying outside the creative box—are currently presenting Adam Bock’s PHAEDRA, an adaptation of Euripides’ HIPPOLYTUS.

When a projectile of Eros goes astray, the damage can be equally devastating in urban America as it was in ancient Athens: people get their feelings hurt, people die, people snuff themselves, the apple cart gets capsized and often times divorce lawyers make mega-bucks from the ensuing fray.

A prominent judge, Antonio Mason, with foreboding trepidation, welcomes his prodigal son, Paulie back into the bosom of his suburb home.

While there is no ring and no fatted calf on the bar-bee, there is a covertly slavering step mother.

While Dad and Step Mom work, Paulie (optimally played by Patrick Alparone) is enjoying life outside the slammers and juvenile halls.

Still on probation, Paulie spends halcyon days working on his Grandfather’s Mustang—prepping it for the grand probation breaking getaway to Colorado—and undergoing substance abuse therapy.

Mason’s wife Catherine—a.k.a. Paulie’s stepmother—is not eager to have Paulie back home and, although the audience is unaware, her unwelcoming stance is not as objectively based as it appears to be.

Catherine, although middle aged, her blood has yet to cool; she has a supercharged endocrine system that is still occupying the driver’s seat and calling the shots like Fast Eddy in the HUSTLER: her hippocanthus is so awash in estrogen she can barely stand up straight; if estrus were a trailer, she would have a double wide.

Catherine Castellanos plays Catherine with a cool inner sizzle reminiscent of Anne Bancroft’s MRS Robinson.

Paulie, like any suburban boy raised in a blissful broth of denial and dysfunctionality lubricated with money, is hostile, self-absorbed and self-indulgent: he is that little terrier that has grabbed hold of Daddy’s gabardine pant leg and won’t let go: knowing that tears in the fabric and social embarrassment are his only tools for vengeance.

For Paulie, independence only extents as far as attitude, disrespect, self-destructiveness, smoking cigarettes and not making your bed: the rebellion was never intended to extend clear into the realm of financial emancipation.

After Paulie settles in, his step mother makes her hormonally charged move.

Prodded by misdirected lust and buoyed by Dutch Courage in the form of Chardonnay—possibly a Pinot Grigio—consumed at three in the morning, she ambushes Paulie: professing her errant erotic love and offering herself as carnal booty for Paulie having successfully laid siege to Antonio’s castle.

The story seems to parallel the biblical story of Joseph wherein Joseph is sexually harassed by Potiphar’s wife; since no description of Potiphar’s wife is ever given, we don’t know whether to give Joseph kudos for good moral principles or good taste.

As in the MRS Potiphar caper, Paulie’s step-mother tries to reverse the tables: she tells Mason that Paulie performed a bodice ripper on her; Mason takes the bait, betraying his son one final time.

Stage stalwart Keith Burkland as Mason is over-the-top; he gives us an unsympathetic Mason we can both loath and despise with a clean conscience.

Rarely does real life give us such a rich opportunity for a sense of moral high ground and ethical superiority.

Burkland’s Mason gives us hope, a reason to go on living knowing that the people who live in those mega-homes, behind wrought iron gates and manicured lawns, have lives that are even more wretched than our own.

Burkland’s Mason gives us a sense of complacency and makes us comfortable with mediocrity for only the price of a theatre ticket.

Burkland’s Mason is Richard Cory, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Willy Loman and the cuckolded MR Robinson all in one package.

To stage this dissection of the America Dream, Award winning set-designer Nina Ball has created a masterpiece.

Her set reminds us that PHAEDRA is after all Greek; MS Ball has introduced nuances and elements of Minoan, Mycenaean and Athenian architecture and styling without dragging down the value of the Euro.

Following what can only be a highly praised and successful run of PHAEDRA, the set should be auctioned off—I want it to gussy up my trailer in Manteca—it really is beautiful.

For tickets call the box office at 510-841-6500 or surf over to www.shotgunplayers.org.

TIGERS BE STILL

2011-09-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

TIGERS BE STILL

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Amy Glazer takes this lively psycho-comedy and keeps the Aspidistras Flying and the laughter rolling from curtain to curtain.

TIGERS BE STILL by Kim Rosenstock makes a close brush with BEYOND THERAPY by Christopher Durang.

Redemptively, Rosenstock’s characters are not quite beyond therapy and a determined, hopeful and iron-willed Sherry—played beautifully and most convincingly by Melissa Quine—is willing to intervene, applying gentle back stick pressure, in an effort to pull everyone out of his or her nose dive.

Sherry is the stage’s answer to Amelie, the French Montmarte Miracle Worker created by writers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant, and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in the 2001 film.

While Amelie mends the lives of the wretches of Montmarte, Sherry resuscitates the entire cast and then some at the San Francisco Playhouse.

Sherry’s sister, Grace—an emotional basket case whose only strong suits are her proclivity for undiluted Jack Daniels and her excellent choice of movies to wit: TOPGUN—is a major part of Sherry’s case load.

The pathetic Grace—delightfully played to wretched excess by Rebecca Schweitzer— is a vengeful woman jilted at the threshold of the church and an inevitably dysfunction marriage.

In a spiral of self-absorption; Grace trundles from bed to couch, wading through a slough of self-pity every inch of the way; were it not for the Jack and constant reruns of TOPGUN, one would say her life was pretty much a waste—but then again, how do you argue with good taste?

Zack too is on the ropes, about to go down for the count or get knocked out of the ring of life.

Rising stage star Jeremy Kahn rightly plays Zack: a recent high school grad who finds himself in limbo and arrested development after wrapping his mother around a tree in a car wreck.

Mysteriously, Jeremy’s Zack is more a stoner than an emotionally fried and guilt ridden adolescent: he seems to have patterned his existential angst more from Cheech and Chong than Mike Nichol’s Benjamin Braddock.

Like a meteor landing on the stage, award winning Bill English jumps into the fray, filling in for Remi Sandri as Joseph, the Elementary School Principal who keeps a shot-gun, which he erroneously refers to as a rifle—ah city slickers—locked and loaded to ward off an escaped tiger.

Bill has the ability to translucently laminate his character, a laid back exterior, overlaying a concerned and loving parent to Zack, overlaying a tormented and lonely man who has lost both his wife and the love of his life—that would be two women.

No matter how many loose ends and frayed lives there are, Sherry is there to knit things together and give everyone a swift kick in the butt to get them moving down the highway of life again.

It is Melissa Quine as Sherry who takes a story of human wreckage and makes it into a feel good comedy—it’s a wonderful piece of alchemy worth seeing.

If you like sensitive comedy, hurry, the show closes September 10th, call 415-677-9595 or surf over to www.sfplayhouse.org.

CANDIDA

2011-08-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

CANDIDA

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Jonathon Moscone directs what is likely to be the highlight of the 38th Season of California Shakespeare: CANDIDA.

This is George Bernard Shaw at his ironic best, using wit to scrutinize and dissect the contractual symbiosis and the psychological underpinnings of what is ostensibly a sound marriage; in this case the union of a seemingly morally superior clergyman and a charismatic woman of stunning pulchritude and superior wit and intelligence.

The complacent dynamics of the marriage are brought into focus by a wild romantic young poet who probes and tests the marriage mucilage.

Julie Eccles puts forth a dazzling performance in the title role, showing restrained, but sustained, strength as a woman whose husband begins to weaken under the strain of introspection and whose unabashed admirer threatens to come unraveled due to hopeless love and his own covetousness.

The superior strength of Candida as a woman is what places this play is the realm of the modern.

Anthony Fusco (absolutely no relation to Rolf, Al, Lance or Lars) as the Reverend James Morell, makes an ever so subtle transition: ratcheting from the over-confident husband who smugly senses his entitlement to a woman of Candida’s expansive, larger than life dimensions, to a man near panic, not knowing how he can to be the recipient of Candida’s affection and splendor.

Nick Gabriel is marvelous as the effete and overweening Eugne Marchbanks: the peer poet of leisure who tries to snake Candida from the Reverend Morell.

A vibrant set designed by Annie Smart brings a splash of color to the parched sun burnished Bruns Amphitheatre and its environs.

Conspicuously tasteful and well-conceived costuming by Anna Oliver establishes time, setting and class consciousness.

And for an addition measure of class consciousness and humor there is Mister Burgess, Candida’s father, the shrew and insensitive capitalist played to the comic hilt by the riotous Jarion Monroe.

The show is a delightfully intelligent comedy that holds up a lens or mirror to the delicately balanced dynamic that sustains even a successful marriage.

For a rapturous evening under the stars and Klieg lights, call the Cal Shakes Box Office at 510.548.9666 or go to online ticketing at www.clshakes.org.

INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM

2011-06-27T10:59:00.000-07:00

INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

THE NEW YORKER recently quoted Tony Kushner (“Angels in America” and “Caroline, or Change”) estimating that an audience’s collective I.Q. goes up about twenty-five points while watching a play.

Assuming Kushner’s prediction is accurate, audiences attending Off Broadway West Theatre Company’s current presentation of INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM should swap some highbrow sophistries, savvy notions, lucrative stock tips and illuminating profundities during intermission and while filing out after the final curtain.

Richard Harder, a purist and master stage artist, deftly directs this delightful, sepia toned, rendering of John Orlock’s most successful comedic melodrama.

Characters: Florence and Viola Becker, two sisters rapidly approaching middle age, begin to hear biological alarm clocks clanging like London’s Big Ben; in a desperate bid to bring men, matrimony and maternity into their lives, they respond to mailer cataloguing eligible gentlemen.

Imagine the technology and pickings of Craig’s List al la 1902 Louisville.

Rather than contacting two gentlemen, they link up with two rogues: ludicrous con artists: Winfield Davis and Amos Robbilet.

Once admitted to the sister’s parlor, Davis and Robbilet: a pair of hack charlatans, claiming to hail from the International Institute of Science and Populism, begin to work their conspicuously transparent scam on the spinsters.

Shouldn’t “Populism” alone have set of their smoke alarms?

Using a rich mixture of pomposity, bluster and buffoonery, Davis and Robbilet take advantage of Florence and Viola’s willingness to put false hopes and suspension of disbelief ahead of common sense, good judgment and conservative Presbyterian politics.

Paul Stout is marvelous as the flimflam artist Winfield Davis: every aspect of his countenance, bearing and speech is guaranteed to set off your smoke alarm and BS sensors.

Kim Saunders is stunning as Viola Becker; Kim is able to exude a brand of fragile vulnerability and desperation akin to Tennessee Williams’ Laura in the Glass Menagerie.

Great costuming by Sylvia Kratins and a stunning set design by Bert van Aalsburg really nail down the period, material circumstances and class consciousness of Viola and Florence.

Richard Harder shows an exacting attention to detail rarely evidenced in contemporary theater: this is a piece of art that should not be missed.

For tickets, call the box office at 800-838-3006 or visit www.offbroadwaywest.org.

TITUS ANDRONICUS

2011-06-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

TITUS ANDRONICUS

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Before advancing too far into this review and running the risk of activating an attention deficit disorder, let it be unequivocally stated: if you have not yet seen TITUS ANDRONICUS at California Shakespeare, go immediately.

Get off the hospital gurney; postpone elective liposuction; depart the assignation; stop work on the full torso tattoo: this production of TITUS ANDRONICUS will undoubtedly be ranked as the best piece of Shakespeare performed anywhere this summer.

To say it is a tour de force by James Carpenter and company is a pusillanimous understatement.

Director Joel Sass has chiseled the Elizabethan English of this apocryphal Shakespearean tragedy into a high intensity crystalline vengeance piece that makes the DIE HARD series look like Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

James Carpenter has never failed to dazzle; yet as Titus he has exceeded even himself.

Be warned, this play was kept off Victorian stages because of its graphic gore and violence: dismemberment, decapitations, throat hemorrhages induced by fine edged cutlery, cannibalism, rape, lingual extraction and some swearing are amongst the active ingredients.

All of which might be mild stuff for those who play video games, but it could prove hard core for the other half of the audience.

The play is set in fourth century Rome: when the Goths and the Visigoths were routinely kicking Roman butt: civility, integrity and honor were well out of vogue and everyone was in the survival mode: scrambling to get the last of piece of Romanna pie.

For those who believe the dire auguries of the Wall Street Journal, TITUS invokes some trepidation: will post-imperial America, servicing a $20 trillion debt, with a defunct public sector, second amendment guarantees, a landscape littered with deteriorated infrastructure and bereft of pacifying transfer payments, fare any better than a crumbling Rome?

TITUS ANDRONICUS is scary because it depicts a declining civilization with no system of justice, with no cap on inhumanity and no safety net to stop the free fall into MAD MAX barbarism.

Presaging aside, TITUS ANDRONICUS is riveting entertainment not to be missed.

For tickets call 510-548-9666 or go to boxoffice@calshakes.org.

METAMORPHOSIS

2011-06-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

THE METAMORPHOSIS

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Aurora Theatre of Berkeley, never a troupe to back down from a theatrical challenge, is currently performing Franz Kafka’s METAMORPHOSIS as adapted by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson.

This is risky turf given that everyone who reads Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS entertains a personal relationship with the story not to be violated by a stage rendering.

Dramatically, the mood of the play oscillates between humor and horror: give yourself a little emotional distance, and the play is absurd and funny; cozy up to it and it morphs into metaphor: possibly targeting you.

Gregor (dexterously and gymnastically played by Alex Crowther) awakens to find he has become an insect; his family—which is financially dependent on him—sees the transformation more as a family fiscal crisis and an embarrassment, rather than as a personal catastrophe for Gregor.

While play uses trappings from the LEAVE IT BEAVER era—when father knew best and June (the Beav’s mother) wore heels and pearls at home: even in the kitchen—it retains its existential and absurdist, Kafkaesque feel and flavor.

The galloping set designer Nina Ball—perhaps the most acclaimed artist in the bay area—has broken free of traditional Euclidean fetters and abandoned the orthogonal lines of conventional stage architecture.

While the Aurora stage is a rectangular “Thrust Stage” as Director Mark Jackson describes it, Nina has successfully masked that fact, employing a brand of Picasso Cubism which allows the audience to watch Gregor climb the walls as would a cockroach.

The audience sees Gregor, in his room, as if were looking down from a ceiling fan while simultaneously witnessing the tepid responses of Grete, Mother and Father in the dining room.

While Gregor withers away, neglected and locked in his bedroom, the family icily remains focused on the dislocations, the ancillary problems and the inconveniences of the metamorphosis.

This is intelligent, provocative, daring theater at its best.

Would this play serve at a metaphor for the economic precipice that our country presently teeters on?

Find out: call the box office at 510-843-4042 or go to www.auroratheatre.org.

CARE OF TREES

2011-06-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

CARE OF TREES

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Fortunately for aficionados of quality theater, the Shotgun Players have prudently elected to extend CARE OF TREES through June 26: this is a public service.

Written by E. Hunter Spreen and capably directed by Susannah Martin this marvelous play is a virtual canvas on which many conspicuously great artists within the Shotgun Troupe have dabbed their genius: comingling their creative brushstrokes.

Award winning set designer Nina Ball is consumed by a creative flame: for Nina, it is not enough to create a set reflective of the spirit and suited to the action of the play, Nina goes on to bring entrance ways, the foyer and the outside of the building into thematic harmony with the script: if there is over-kill in scenic art, Nina may have achieved it.

For TREES, Nina seems to have taken a cue frOM Led Zeppelin: she has constructed a spiral stairway, seemingly to heaven or at a minimum to the playhouse rafters.

Much of the mood of the play emanates from the dramatic lighting by Lucas Krech: were TREES a silent movie and illuminated by Lucas, it would still make sense.

The sound and music of Jake Rodriguez make a major contribution to the development of psycho-drama within the play: while the actors express their feelings with words, gestures and movement, Jake expresses their emotions with sound.

Liz Sklar (as Georgia Swift) and Patrick Russell (as Travis Dekalb) perform a stunning and strenuous dance on stage; given the gut retching emotional conflicts they writhe through, one can only hope that they are not employing “method acting” as derived by Stanislavski and Strasberg: an extended run could have them reaching for the Librium or bathing in the Liebfraumilch.

The play seems to borrow ever so slightly from Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES (the greatest production of TRAVESTIES in the bay area was performed by the Shotgun Players): the initial narration, by Georgia and Travis, lurches, halts and rewinds like Henry Carr’s unfurling recollections of Zurich in 1917.

Georgia metamorphosing into a tree is reminiscent of Daphne changing into a Laurel tree as she is pursued by Apollo.

If E. Hunter Spreen has taken anything off the shelf, it is there that the semblance ends: the show is nothing short of a rocket sled: fasten your seatbelt.

For tickets call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org.

REBORNING at the SF PLAYHOUSE

2011-06-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

REBORNING

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Sensitive Male?

Isn’t that an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms?

Or both?

Assuming he made the selection, sensitive male SF Playhouse Artistic Director Bill English has picked what could easily be termed a cushion right off the psychotherapist’s couch.

REBORNING by Zayd Dohrn makes clever use of comedy to render the audience vulnerable to the message of this heart-warming and thought provoking play about the relentless pain of loss and the protracted process of healing.

Director Josh Costello has fashioned some multifaceted characters to live up to the complexities of the script: Daizy, superbly played by Alexander Alioto, being his best example.

Alexander’s Daizy is a lightweight artist inhabiting the far reaches of three dimensional creativity and sculpture: he designs very convincing, life-like phalluses.

Using high tech procedures and exotic polymers, his finished product looks exactly like the real thing only bigger than what most of us can rightfully lay claim to.

His significant other Kelly: the walking-wounded, played by Lauren English, uses Daizy’s technology to create the next step in the procreative process: babies.

These babies are not merely cutesy dolls that are plumbed to wet themselves as their garage door eye lids slam shut; these are life-like dolls which are so convincing that adults put them in strollers to garner oohs and ahs from passing adoring strangers and to gain a seat on the subway.

Enter Emily, played by award winning actress Lorri Holt.

Emily has lost her child and each waking hour is laced with bone-grinding pain and seemingly interminable grieving.

Desperately betting against rationality, Emily puts her faith in a totem, a polymer facsimile of her deceased daughter to palliate her grief.

As Kelly is putting the finishing touches on the surrogate polymer baby, up pops folie à deux as the French would say.

Kelly and Emily get into a tug of war over baby (see I Kings 3:16-28 for a similar case): abandonment issues are pitted again the grief of infant mortality.

One psycho-philosophical fiber seems to wend itself through the play: where does a fetish end and where does the domain of talisman and totem begin?

If you have ever wondered, from a distance, how people get through shattering kinds of losses or if you “suffer a lack of empathy for the paths people take towards healing,” this play could untie these Gordian riddles for you and ratchet up your compassion index.

Zayd Dohrn, Josh Costello and Bill English prove that serious theatre is far from tedious theater: REBORNING is enthralling and riveting.

For tickets call the box office at 415-677-9596 or go to www.sfplayhouse.org but hurry, the run ends soon.

6th Street Playhouse does CABARET

2011-04-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

CABARET

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The 6th Street Playhouse of Santa Rosa has always been full of surprises although nothing in recent memory could possibly prepare the average theatre aficionado for their current opus: CABARET.

The show is based on the script by Joe Materoff and contains many memorable hits by lyricist Fred Ebb and composer John Kander, but such origins are only the launching pad, the chrysalis, the springboard, for this stunning production.

Fasten your seatbelt and press your occipital bone into the headrest, you are about to be accelerated back to the complacently decadent days of Berlin in the 1930s where fatalism, political apathy and resignation were repackaged as joie de vivre.

Director David Lear has skimmed the cream de la cream of theatrical talent from every stage west of the Petaluma River: this show reveals an unflagging attention to detail from Klieg lights to Casting and on to Costuming.

And speaking costumes, unless you are a regular at the O’Farrell Theatre, you are not likely to have seen the fashion line-up that Tracy Hinman Sigrist has in store for you: gentlemen, fasten your chin-straps, your jaw is about to drop.

Scenic designer John Connole has you smelling the bratwurst and tasting the Veuve Clicquot before the house manager reminds you—in a thick Prussian accent—to turn off your cell phone and unwrap your candy.

Connole’s set design seems to optimize every square centimeter of the Sixth Street Stage; he boldly experiments with what photographers call depth of field: his set seems to recede back to the firewall upstage and to cantilever into the audience downstage; unless you’re wearing 3-D glasses, you are never going to see a set design push the limits of Euclidean Geometry like this.

Connole has embellished the set with murals—done in sepia tones that reflect the time and madness of a rising Third Reich; the murals are astonishing: they should be auctioned at Sotheby’s after the show closes.

Mood swings are everything in this show: half the characters are bi-polar, the rest are manic; Lighting Designer Theo Bridant cleverly works his subtle craft to the max: subliminally changing the emotional climate with daring bursts of color suddenly flooding the stage and suffusing the actors with torrents of red and blue.

Just as the insouciance of the cabaret is contrived, a buffer from the truth of the rising Nazi tide, Theo Bridant’s lighting, seemingly heavy handed at times, symbolizes how hard the patrons are working to ignore the omens.

Choreographer Tony Gianchetta should be commended first and foremost for his courage: thanks to Bob Fosse, CABARET is possibly best known for its impeccable choreographic standards: an audience has been preconditioned to expect nothing less and Tony delivers in spades: from the synchronous chorus lines, to the bawdy ménage a trios and on to the superlative solo performances of Marjorie Rose Taylor: this show is buffed and brilliantly polished.

Expectation and past experience inevitably place tremendous pressures on the performers in CABARET: the movie CABARET earned Fosse four nominations for Oscars: it was flawless.

Any actress that has the chutzpah to take on Sally Bowles knows she is up against Liza Minelli, the definitive Sally, who won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her unforgettable role in CABARET.

Marjorie Rose Taylor more than measured up to what is arguably the most challenging role in show business: she was absolutely dazzling.

When Miss Taylor performs the title song—reaffirming her decision to remain with the cabaret and to leave the straight life behind—the audience is rocked: this reviewer had chills, rushes and the hairs on the back of his neck standing like a cockatoo’s feathers.

If this show were an Olympic event Miss Taylor would get a 10 in acting, a 10 in singing and a 10 in dancing.

Rarely is this much talent ensconced in one up-and-coming actress; what is truly noteworthy is that Miss Taylor is clearly prepared to augment her prodigious natural talent with tons of hard work; paradoxically her stage presence and dazzling finished product seem nearly effortless.

The show is nothing short of smashing; it will pry you loose from Bill Fosse and Liza Minelli; henceforth you will remember Tony Gianchetta and Marjorie Rose Taylor.

For tickets, call 707-523-4185.

LEGACY OF LIGHT

2011-04-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

LEGACY OF LIGHT Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle The San Jose Rep, now into its 30th anniversary season, is presently staging LEGACY OF LIGHT written by Karen Zacarias and deftly directed by Kirsten Brandt. Robert Yacko, as Voltaire and Rachel Harker, as Emilie Du Chatelet are the dazzling dynamic dipole about which this delightfully sophisticated and witty play revolves. The script is nearly encyclopedic: crammed with bits of math, physics, science, astronomy and biographical details on history’s most brilliant man: Voltaire—whose I.Q. is estimated to have been 190 (just a few points shy of what Marilyn Vos Savant claims hers to be) and one of the preeminent scientists and mathematicians of the French Enlightenment: Emilie Du Chatelet: the woman who successfully challenged the false hypotheses erroneously laid down by Isaac Newton himself. Karen Zacarias has clearly researched and fact checked her script, the math and physics expressed in the play are consonant with Newtonian physics. As described by Voltaire in a letter to a friend, "Everything about Emilie is noble, her countenance, her tastes, the style of her letters, her discourses, her politeness. … her conversation is agreeable and interesting," Rachel Harker is an excellent match for bigger than life Emilie. In her day, Emilie rightfully earned the accolade or sobriquet: blue stocking; she was light years ahead of her times: she mused on the possibility of dark matter: a glue which held the universe together. Einstein himself would not postulate dark matter until 1917—then too, Einstein later mistakenly recanted the theory. In addition to the sterling performances of Harker and Yacko, there are the magnificent period costumes of Brandin Baron and a set design by William Bloodgood that works equally well in both the 18th and the 21st centuries. This is top quality theatre: it is erudite entertainment that is both charming and edifying: it should not be missed. For tickets call the box office at 408-367-7255 or email info@sjrep.com.

WIRE HEAD

2011-04-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

WIRE HEAD Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle WIRE HEAD, currently at the SF Playhouse, is a not-to-be-missed hyperbolic comedy think piece written by Matthew Benjamin and Logan Brown and superbly directed by Susi Damilano. WIRE HEAD serves as a lens, a mirror, a sounding board and a litmus test to examine the moral and ethical gray zones created when superior intelligence is juxtaposed or collides with mediocre intelligence. As human beings it is hard to conceive of another species, aside from gods, demi-gods, (not to be confused with demagogues) and dolphins that are collectively or individually smarter than we. What thoughts; what truths; what knowledge would such a species apprehend that we could not? We may condescendingly indulge the dolphin, pat him or her on the slippery head, and acknowledge that his or her larger brain represents more cognitive potential than our own brain, but the truth is that we are not threatened by the dolphin. Perhaps we are not threatened because the dolphin seems to be perpetually smiling: we implicitly trust them and, we never have to compete head on against a dolphin at work, at sea, at chess, in a poker game or in a singles bar. Imagine a superior entity that looked at your feeble intelligence the same way that you look at the intelligence of a Chimpanzee, a Labrador Retriever or your Uncle Cusper. There is a Star Trek episode wherein a non-essential crewmember is stuck by cosmic lightning—whatever that is. Rather than fry and die, the crewmember recovers; immediately his intelligence begins to show exponential growth; he devours every book in the Starship Enterprise Carnegie Library. The crewmember goes on to absorb the ship’s data base and is studying the Enterprises’ owner’s manual when Spock learns that the crew member completely understands the collected works of Spinoza, enjoyed the movie INCEPTION and can beat Spock at three dimensional chess. Spock urgently recommends marooning the new super genius on a planet that is so primitive that its inhabitants eat without silverware, have no cable television, cannot distinguish between a Merlot and a Cabernet and have barely scratched the surface of Paleolithic culture. As the usually rational Spock warns Captain Kurk, “Jim, we have got to get him off this ship: in a few days, he will be looking at us as if we were lab rats.” The panicky assumption is that the new genius will NOT be a moral genius and his cognitive powers will be inimical to the Enterprise mission and its crew. Strange that as a species we not only intimidated by, but are mistrustful of and threatened by, other peoples’ superior intelligences. Such is the grist and gist of WIRE HEAD. In WIRE HEAD, a Chinese firm begins marketing cranial implants, nano-hard drives and chips designed to augment human intelligence. Given that there is little demand, or need, for these devices in China, they sell them to Americans who were not raised by an Asian Tiger Mom or Amy Chua and who regularly attended sleep-overs. When Hammy (played by Cole Alexander Smith), an indulged trust fund baby, has an implant installed, he is suddenly infinitely smarter than his mediocre cohorts Adams (played by Craig Marker) and Destry (played by Gabriel Marker). Recalling how an advanced culture—the Europeans—enslaved and decimated a primitive indigenous culture—the American Indians—Adams and Destry declare war on cranial chips, nano-hard drives and the wire heads who have them. If it morally permissible to kill a species designated less intelligent than humans, is it also permissible to kill an artificially created species that has far greater intelligence than humans? After all, as Protagorus said, “Man is the measure of all things.” WIRE HEAD should be seen with a group of friends: it will inspire a philosophical discussion that will continue into the evening long after the last glass of wine and bottle of beer have been consumed. WIRE HEAD is a parable, metaphor and augur for our times. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Superb directing and judicious casting have taken a brilliant script and elevated it to inspirational art. For an evening of hilarious, thought provoking fun and laughter, call the box office at 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

QUILTERS

2011-03-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

QUILTERS Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle The Ross Valley Players are currently presenting QUILTERS: A MUSICAL, multi-multi-layered collaborative piece derived from a book written by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, set to music and lyrics by Barbara Damashek, Directed by Marin’s first lady of Theatre: Linda Dunn, with Musical Direction by Gloria Wood and Choreographed by Linda Dunn. This whole ménage is rests on a foundation book by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Hall: THE QUILTERS: WOMEN AND DOMESTIC ART: AN ORAL HISTORY. While it may take many pieces of fabric to make a quilt, it also requires many talents to stitch together an entertaining tableau that features a detailed, dramatic portrait of pioneer life on the prairie, fashioned from songs, stories and dances. There seem to exist as many origins to quilting as there are quilt designs. The Puritans, who liked the concept of God’s providence—hence Providence, Rhode Island and Providence Town, Massachusetts—were not ones to waste anything. To waste was an affront to their Benefactor; they used the Book of Mark to justify their steadfast position. “Mark 6:41 And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. Mark 6:42 And they did all eat, and were filled. Mark 6:43 And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes. Mark 6:44 And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.” The Puritans paid careful attention to the fact that the left-overs were gathered up: not wasted. The allegory was not lost on Quilters: no scrap or fragment of textile was too small, too faded or too worn to not be incorporated into a quilt. Like the play itself, the quilt was multi-layered both in its form and function: it chronicled the life and history of the quilters and kept them warm inside their sod hovels. This production owes much to the lustrous voices of Dawn Marie Hamilton and Olivia Harrison. Lighting Design by Les Lizama is a conspicuous asset to the show: the back drop seems to change colors like a Mood Ring always reflecting the emotional tenor of the play. Costuming, always a challenge to the community theater, is superbly handled by Michael Berg who gives everyone a prairie homespun look without casting a pale of shapeless dowdiness over the lovely actresses. Perhaps because the play is drafted and crafted nearly bereft of men, it remains centered on what is real, what is essential and what is truly valuable in life: the play is a celebration of the very essence of life. In a world where a sense of material wellbeing is declining like a Mosler Safe dropped from the cargo ramp of a C-130 Hercules, it is nice to be buoyed by a core belief in simple virtues, gifts and pleasures: all of which seem to be manifest in the quilting tradition. You may have lost your 401K, motor yacht and Time-Share in Vegas, but if you have a bag of rags, a needle and thread, you can get busy creating a family treasure. For tickets to a restorative, upbeat and heartwarming evening’s entertainment, call 415-456-9555 or surf on over to www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

SEX AND DEATH

2011-03-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

SEX AND DEATH

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The award winning Off Broadway West Theatre Company is currently staging a menacing pair of Pinter plays that will have you digging for valerian roots and foraging for Saint John’s Wort.

Durand Garcia directs THE DUMB WAITER, a disturbing piece that takes the audience on a sled ride from the existential peak of Beckett, down the slippery slope, to the unbridled and unhinged absurdity of Kafka.

This is a wonderful show for the cerebrotonics who would prefer to laugh at their own existence rather than someone else’s jokes.

Conor Hamill and Shane Fahy superbly play Gus and Ben: two hired guns who have cashed in their moral chips, and severed their ties with life, their sanity and their humanity.

Slipping into madness can be a gradual, unconscious process—a series of petty compromises—with transitions so subtle that they fail to set off the smoke alarm as they inexorably ratchet the despondent into deeper despair.

Gus and Ben should have known they had arrived at the wasteland when they began responding to the demands of a dumb waiter by offering up their stale biscuits and rancid milk; they prove that insanity does not have to be synonymous with loneliness if you can commit yourself to an ironclad folie au deux.

Durand Garcia captures the very essence of Pinter: he brings the audience face to face with Pinter’s swirling abyss of absurdity and gives them a convincing peek at anesthetized people staggering beneath the tedious burden of human consciousness.

THE DUMB WAITER is not light weight theatrical pabulum: if you cried yourself to sleep after BAMBI, you might want to come in after intermission and catch THE LOVER instead.

THE LOVER, as directed by Cecilia Palmtag, depicts a married couple’s creative struggle to keep eroticism alive in marriage.

As Oscar Wilde once observed, “The chains of matrimony are so heavy, it sometimes requires three to lift them.”

Sarah (played by Nicole Helfer) and Richard (played by Chad Stender) invent third parties to keep Hymen and Eros living under the same roof.

In Pinteresque form, John the milkman enters to tantalize the prurient minds of the audience, and to send them scampering down the alleyway to false hypothesis.

Miss Helfer delivers a very steamy performance as Sarah.

A palpable tension is sustained by the characters: each one demanding that the other play an active role in constructing a life worth living and a marriage tolerably worthy of preserving.

This is entertainment, art and life bundled into two well executed shows.

If you take your theater seriously, this is not to be missed: these plays pick up where Edward Albee, David Mamet, Gogol, Ionesco and your Psychotherapist left off.

For tickets visit www.offbroadwaywest.org.

CLYBOURNE PARK

2011-02-21T15:30:00.000-08:00

CLYBOURNE PARK
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

A.C.T. is currently hosting the West Coast Premiere of CLYBOURNE PARK by Bruce Norris.

Directed by Jonathan Moscone, this play unfurls longitudinally through time, stretching from the post Korean War Era i.e. 1959 to the post Housing Bubble Era i.e. 2009.

At its surface, the play seems to be symmetrically constructed: in 1959 whites were trying to protect their property values in a fictional setting known as Clybourne Park, Chicago, by keeping African Americans out; in 2009 African Americans are trying to protect their neighborhood from white gentrification by placing restrictions on what up-grades could be made on the battered, existing homes.

The same clutch of houses is caught in a tug-of-war between whites and blacks and the same tap dances are performed while trying to rationalize what is going down.

While the struggle has been nearly reduced to tedium, a brilliant script by Norris, livens up the debate with banter as picante as Cajun cooking.

The usual antebellum race cards—which trump all the namby-pamby, transparent, defensive, hollow white rhetoric and platitudes—are played, but the exchanges have a crispness to them that is largely attributable to the stunning performance of Omoze Idehenre.

Ethnic jokes targeting whites, seemingly unrepresented in the real world, are launched in a retributive fusillade by Lena (Idehenre's character).

The audience may find themselves self-reflectively cringing in parts but the net effect is a humor rooted in self-awareness rather than denial.

This is a provoking play that entertains as well as it informs.

For a stimulating evening call the box office at 415-749-2228 or surf over to www.act-sf.org.

DOUBT by Ross Valley Players

2011-01-31T18:32:00.000-08:00

DOUBT

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Ross Valley Players are currently performing DOUBT by John Patrick Shanley.

The play is set in 1964 at the Saint Nicholas Church School in the Bronx.

The dialogue pivots centrifugally about a priest—Father Brendan Flynn—who is seemingly too friendly with the students, particularly a male student—Donald Muller—who happens to demonstrate homosexual leanings and a penchant for alter wine.

Father Flynn is new to the school: he has been bouncing around the parish like wallaby on crack; always staying one step ahead of formal inquiries and one step behind hearsay and innuendo.

The hard-boiled biddy: Mother Superior—Sister Aloysius Beauvier—immediately smells a rat: better yet, she senses that Father Flynn is merely a pedophile masquerading as a priest.

Given the play is set in 1964 long before our perceptions of the priesthood were glazed over with newspaper headlines, the audience is obliged to put aside current stereotypes as the play unfurls.

The script is brilliantly crafted and perfectly balanced in its presentation of the evidence.

Trotting out the equivocal case against Father Flynn is designed to do exactly what the title alludes to i.e. to produce a stultifying, stymieing and immobilizing doubt that arrests the decision making process and the mind’s ability to reach a firm conclusion.

The glacial Sister Beauvier—played marvelously by Chris Macomber—cannot afford to capitulate to doubt: Father Flynn must go.

The novice Sister James—superbly performed by Shannon O’Neil Creighton—although privy to all the evidence against Father Flynn, remains deadlocked in her ambivalence.

Sister Beauvier and Sister James perhaps have the same degree of doubt, but Sister Beauvier does not have the luxury of merely ruminating on the case as Sister James does.

The play runs through February 13 and, thanks to a great cast and highly polished production standards, is as intellectually challenging as it is entertaining.

In a world brimming with mass media pabulum, DOUBT is a refreshing alternative.

For tickets call 415-456-9555 extension 3, or visit www.rossvalleyplayers.com/tickets.

2010-11-27T14:01:00.000-08:00

PALOMINO
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Aurora Theatre is currently presenting PALOMINO: a one-man, seven character play about a New York actor turned carriage driver; turned gigolo; turned kiss and tell author.

David Cale is the whimsical writer, capable director, and star of this tour de force.

PALOMINO explores the erotic and lucrative opportunities set before a handsome Irishman, who is sufficiently charged endocrinally, anatomically qualified and morally debased enough, to provide a mercenary verisimilitude of love to the cougars and dowagers of Central Park.

Whether the tender and ribald tales are fact or fantasy is up to the audience to decide: being an election year, the commingling of fiction and non-fiction has become a life style—particularly in California.

Cale is absolutely protean on stage: moving from one character to the next by merely shifting his gait, affecting a lilt, raising or lowering his pitch, and translating his body language.

Such nuances are the creative brush strokes he uses to vividly depict each new character.

Cale conjures up four distinct women and to the credit of his acting talent, he is not another cross dresser.

Even while garbed in the rudimentary vestments of a stable boy-one horse teamster, Cale facilely morphs from one horny society matron to another, and takes on three male roles—including a very compelling Irishman.

This is acting and storytelling at its best: minimal set, minimal props, minimal tech and minimal costuming all place the theatrical burden—the ability to suspend the audience’s sense of disbelief—on the shoulders a very capable actor.

This is stage magic bordering on the alchemical.

Politically and culturally to its credit, an Irishman is the main character and yet there is none of the obligatory, ancillary, or gratuitous British bashing that typifies a show with one or more Irish characters.

In this regard, Cale shows unusual and possibly unprecedented restraint.

Kieran McGrath refuses to be a victim of British Imperialism: instead, he is an autonomous Kerouacean wayfarer of the planet: he is the modern day Gaelic equivalent of Odysseus.

If you have ever imagined yourself as a Lothario for hire, or wondered what it would be like to insinuate your way in to the gilded boudoir of a Park Avenue apartment, this is your ticket.

This show is about taking charm, good looks, and a propensity for moral compromise to the marketplace, on the road, and on to Malibu, Monterey and Malta.

For a delightfully provocative evening call the Aurora box office at 510-843-4822 or surf over to www.auroratheatre.org for tickets.

HEDDA GABLER

2010-11-04T20:08:00.000-07:00

HEDDA GABLER

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The award winning Off Broadway West Theatre Company is currently presenting Henrik Ibsen’s HEDDA GABLER as directed by Richard Harder.

Great casting, starting with Cecilia Palmtag in the title role, jump starts this intricate and complex show which has been universally hailed as the beginning of modern theater.

Palmtag and Harder have artistically conspired to create a Hedda that is as emotionally glacial as a February fjord and as turbid as the winter waters of the North Atlantic.

But it is not merely iciness that defines Hedda, it is her alluring contradictions: the projected sense of being attainable while being unattainable: a disturbing beauty on the outside and a menacing, manipulating vixen on the inside.

While the show dates back to the 1890s, it has lost none of its ability to grab audiences with its dramatic talons and drag them into the pathological vortex created by Hedda.

Hedda is a powerful woman: seemingly much bigger than the life in the small western Norwegian town which she is seemingly exiled; she is certainly no match for its denizens.

But exiled from where and for what?

Has fate sequestered her in provincial Norway to deny her the opportunity to achieve her fullest potential or to appear on the cover of supermarket tabloids?

Has she been denied the chance to live life on a scale commensurate with her beauty, ambition and intelligence?

Could the Hedda Gabler of Ibsen, Palmtag and Harder have expanded herself to match the challenges of the larger modern world?

Given the chance, could Hedda have “been a contender” instead of a neurotic, self-absorbed, narcissistic, destructive, petty, petulant child raging against the dull civility and quiet tenor of Norwegian life?

Hedda exercises absolute control over all the other chess pieces on the board.

Adam Simpson brilliantly portrays Hedda’s husband: the absolutely obtuse George Tesman: he is like a snake handler, never consciously aware of the dangerous malignant force he has married into.

If you see the show with friends, be prepared afterwards for heated debate: undoubtedly Hedda will be put on trial: defended and vilified; cross examined via the lens of speculative psychology, bar stool sociology, feminism and a probing dissection of Hedda’s cerebral cortex.

This is theater as it was meant to be: provocative, intellectually challenging, emotionally charged, philosophically stimulating and psychologically captivating.

For tickets, call the box office at 415-407-3214 or visit www.offbroadwaywest.org.

SECRET ORDER

2010-10-24T19:58:00.001-07:00

SECRET ORDER

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The San Jose Repertory Company is currently presenting SECRET ORDER written by Bob Clyman and directed by Chris Smith.

The play approximates the content and trajectory of a morality play: a compromise, followed by a cover-up, followed by a moral landslide.

William Shumway, an earnest and naïve cellular biologist from Wisconsin, (played marvelously by James Wagner) is discovered by a major east coast pharmaceutical company.

He is recruited by a slathering washed-up scientist: Robert Brock (played to a tee by Robert Krakovski) who has supplanted his own scientific inquiry with ambition, simony and power brokering.

Shumway, is soon joined by a Harvard undergraduate: Alica Curiton (played by Kathryn Tkel).

The first step on the highway to moral or ethical degradation is expectation, the second is ego, the third is compromise, the fourth is deception and the accelerating slide seems to fan out in all directions from there on.

Mike Bruggeman, a high mugwump in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who specialized in Counter Intelligence used the acronym: MICE.

It stood for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego.

SECRET ORDER sticks close to this mnemonic device conjuring up each of ingredient while not necessarily sticking to any particular order.

While many of us have low expectations for the ethics of hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, our bookie, car salesmen, bureaucrats further up the food chain than dog catcher or meter maid, we entertain unrealistically high expectations for scientists.

Perhaps it is because, by definition, scientists are supposed to be seeking a higher order objective truth: examining the landscape through the unconditioned and unbiased lens of scientific inquiry.

When science gets distracted by the possibility of riches beyond Croesus, compromise finds an open window somewhere.

Clyman had originally titled has show THE SECRET ORDER, but strongly suspected that prospective audiences would assume that it was another fruitcake rehash of THE SECRET PROTOCALS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, or more on the Masons, the Mormons, the DaVinci Code, the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, MOSAD, the Knights of Columbus or Dykes on Bikes.

Like Mark Zuckerberg did for Facebook, Clyman opted to drop the THE in the title.

Four characters start down the primrose path with what is a major breakthrough in the war on cancer as fought at the cellular level.

A certain DNA sequence is introduced to cancer cells that cause the cancer cells to communicate with other cancer cells.

Their message: “STOP reproducing!”

Momentarily at least the other cancer cells are fooled by these renegade “R cells” who are working for the biologist.

The ruse lasts long enough for the Doctor Shumway to publish his short lived success in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The eagles begin to circle overhead with venture capital dollars to drop on the pharmaceutical company.

While Doctor Shumway knows that the “R cells” eventually become double agents and go back on the side of ordinary cancer cells, the world of venture pharmaceutical capital does not and Shumway and Brock tacitly agree to keep it that way.

There is no sensible way out of the situation other than by more ethical compromise on the part of one or more of the principles: after all, why give up on a seemingly promising idea until you are overwhelmed by failure.

Think of Laetrile, a placebo distilled from apricot pits; think of Viox and the Merck deception.

Think of cold fusion, super blue green algae, Echinacea, steel cut oats, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Doctor Mesmer’s electro-magnetic Jacuzzi treatments, your massage therapist, acupuncture, unblended highland scotch, pulverized rhino horn, etc, etc.

Ultimately, Saul Roth (played wonderfully by Julian Lopez-Morillas) provides everyone with a quasi ethical parachute that keeps the right people in the battle against cancer.

A great show, rich with dramatic irony and well crafted dialogue: lines you can only wish you could have thought of or remembered for future use at the punchbowl.

For an enjoyable, intelligent evening, call the San Jose Rep box office at 408-367-7255.

THE SUNSET LIMITED

2010-10-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

THE SUNSET LIMITED

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The San Francisco Playhouse is presently home to the west coast premiere of THE SUNSET LIMITED by Cormac McCarthy.

To say this show is brilliant would be an understatement.

Were the “little pink man” to watch this show, he would be launched out of his seat like a Nike missile: over his vacated seat, Libra would be visible.

As dark as Cormac McCarthy represents himself with such works as THE ROAD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, this show is an intelligent existential comedy with a clearly expressed redemptive hope for all of us who are self conscious, self absorbed, self delusional and or just swirling in the vortex of selfishness.

This show intimates that there is a path to self transcendence and a possibility of breaking the chains of tyranny clamped on us by our self indulgent egos.

No person, play, movie or comic book can compellingly answer the question: Do we go on living or grease the rails of the express train?

Like Hamlet,, Emmanuel Kant may have covered similar “to be or not be” issues in his CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON but who reads Kant anyway?

The life-death discussion in this play is riveting; it is both morally elevating—assuming there is such a thing as moral high ground—and cogently understandable even to those of us who graduated in the bottom ten percent from Chico State under the five year plan.

The play is as profound as it is simplistic.

There are two characters, no names: one black (played by Carl Lumbly) and one white (played by Charles Dean).

The white guy, a bohemian, has lost his zest for things bohemian or fears that the world has become too bourgeois.

The white guy is a college professor who, despite his tenure and bar stool at the faculty club, has attempted to intercept the Sunset Limited while it was chugging along at 85 miles per hour; the black guy has pulled him from the gleaming gristly tracks.

Aside from the “chimneys of Dachau” there seems to be little to have soured the professor on life other than his own centrifugal reflections and possibly reading too many term papers that were down-loaded by his marginally literate university students.

As for the black guy, he is an ex-con who has opted out of the criminal class much like Samuel L Jackson’s character in PULP FICTION: he dedicates himself to “just walking the earth.”

Much of the dialogue is Socratic; if English is your first, second or third language, the conspicuous richness of the philosophy expressed will be accessible to you: indeed inescapable.

Both Lumbly and Dean carefully chisel their words without over-articulating or sounding pedantic or sophomoric.

Lumbly captures the relaxed selflessness of the truly transcendent being: he is at home with himself and seems to embrace of all humanity: he has a Buddha nature to him.

Dean too has nailed his character: he absolutely exudes anhedonia and dread; like Agent Smith in THE MATRIX, he seems to stagger under the oppressive burden of being, thoughts and existence: the particularized conditioned consciousness.

The set design, at a minimum, is ascetic: grunge urban primitivism.

For a budget busting $61, Bill English, the award winning director and genius set designer, resourcefully bought all the salvaged materials to construct a monastic lathe and stud cell for the black urban mystic.

Tree huggers be advised: no trees were injured in the building of this set.

Whether the “go on living” argument of the black guy prevails or not, remains a mystery.

The pessimism of the professor is clearly a dangerous contagion.

The endangered species of the planet are probably rooting that mankind will ultimately become too intelligent, like the professor, to go on living.

Strange that the adaptive evolutionary process used to ensure our survival; now it leads us to self destruction: perhaps too much cognitive evolution is a bad thing.

The professor seems to have engaged in a life time of confirmation psychology: he has mired himself in a dismal funk: he has read 8000 books, carefully sidestepping the one best seller that might have proved life affirming.

McCarthy, via the professor, alludes to Gibbons and THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE as supporting evidence for his condemnation of Christianity.

Had the Romans been of the professor’s mind, they would have committed suicide and never have known that the barbarians had arrived at the gates.

For additional support for atheism McCarthy invokes the images of the chimneys of Dachau: could a responsive caring creator have allowed the Holocaust?

The Jewish population lost six million innocents; the Christian population certainly had to have lost faith in the existence of a loving, omnipotent interventionalist.

THE SUNSET LIMITED continues through November 6 th.

See it with friends, it is highly provocative: you will want to discuss it afterwards.

For tickets to what will most likely be the best show you will see or have seen in years, surf on over to www.sfplayhouse.org or call 415-677-9596.

NOVEMBER

2010-09-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

NOVEMBER

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Being an election year, this is a propitious time for the Ross Valley Players to trot out NOVEMBER by David Mamet.

True it is only another vicious, rabid, mud-slinging California gubernatorial election and a power-puff Senatorial race, but there is a palpable whiff of byzantine intrigue, testosterone and estrogen in the air.

Parody and satire usual involve hyperbolic exaggerations of the most risible elements of whatever it is the author is trying to lampoon.

In the world of politics, it is difficult to exaggerate the truth.

The unapologetic sale of pardons, the shake-down for bribes (a.k.a. campaign contributions) the grotesque distortions of spin doctors (a.k.a. speech writers and press secretaries), the groveling influence peddling (a.k.a. lobbyists) and the foul, hard-ball language of the rich, powerful and irreverent, all provide the tempera with which Mamet paints a riotous picture of the Presidential Oval Office.

Mamet writes in a language highly reminiscent of the Nixon tapes and Pacino's SCARFACE.

Director James Dunn judiciously cast Buzz Halsing as the Honorable (sic) President Charles Smith.

The tirades and machinations of Buzz’s President Smith keep the audience in paroxysms of laughter from curtain to curtain.

Like most politicians, President Smith adheres to the prime directive of government officials: “Parlay the public’s trust into personal gain.”

President Smith also wants to build a presidential library to chronicle and immortalize both his mediocrity and rapacity.

Money is the only resource that President Smith seems to lack: his reelection war chest sits at $4000 and his library fund could not afford to turn the first spade of soil.

As most reckless people will assure you, “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” and in the absence of moral fiber or ethics, President Smith tries his best to hi-jack America's Thanksgiving dinner, exploring such surrogates as pork and tuna in lieu of turkey.

His speech writer Clarice Bernstein (played by who is undoubtedly Marin’s funniest female comedian: LeAnne Rumbel) hammers out a marvelous denunciation of the traditional Thanksgiving repast; borrowing heavily from the lexicon of exploitation, imperialism, colonialism, chauvinism and liberal guilt.

Her diatribe could have easily done for Thanksgiving what Hollywood’s epic 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE, with Gérard Depardieu did for Columbus Day amongst fatuous Californians.

Stephen Dietz (as Archer Brown) superbly captures the White House Chief of Staff type: officiously distorting, extending and projecting executive privilege to include crimes and misdemeanors.

A stunning set, designed by Ken Rowland and ushered into reality by Ian Swift, adds even more polish to this near flawless production.

Special kudos should be extended to sound man Bruce Vieira for never missing one of the dozens of incoming phone calls to President Smith.

NOVEMBER is intelligent sophisticated humor, lightning paced, unflagging and honed to a razor’s edge.

You will laugh until your lipo suction scars ache.

For best entertainment value in all of Marin, contact the ticket office at 415-456-9555 or surf on over to www.rossvalleyplayers.com/tickets.

BLACK PEARL SINGS!

2010-09-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

BLACK PEARL SINGS!

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The San Jose Repertory Theatre is currently presenting BLACK PEARL SINGS! as written by Frank Higgins and directed by Rick Lombardo.

The play is one story derived from a plethora of similar stories compiled during a government program established in 1936 to collect and catalogue America’s musical folklore.

The fictitious Susannah Mullally (marvelously played by Jessica Wortham) is based on the historical persona John Lomax: a Texan who traveled the country with 315 pounds of recording equipment stashed in the trunk of his car.

Lomax operated under the assumption that prisoners, due to their isolation, remained largely uninfluenced by radio and the contemporary music of their times.

The music of prisoners would more faithfully date back to the slavery ear or even to the pre-slavery era in West Africa.

In his search for uncorrupted Africa music, Lomax met Huddie Ledbetter in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Huddie had been languishing in prison since he was 21; show casing his talent to the governor, Lomax engineered Huddie’s early release and the two of them immediately sprinted off to New York City.

Given his prodigious talent and Lomax’s management, Huddie quickly ascended to become the 12-string folk and blues legend Lead Belly.

Frank Higgins has borrowed generously from the miraculously serendipitous Lead Belly – Lomax story; retooling it into the Black Pearl – Mullally story.

While Lead Belly’s musical influence stemmed from the Mississippi delta and Shreveport, Louisiana, Pearl’s tradition was Gullah: from the South Carolina barrier islands and the Lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia.

Gullah is arguably the most undisturbed African-American cultural tradition.

Lomax got Lead Belly to perform in prison garb in New York and likewise, Mullally directs Pearl Johnson to do the same.

Art has a way of imitating life.

Pearl reluctantly capitulates to Mullally’s demands as her musical manager even though Pearl trusts that Mullally can help her reunite with her daughter and give her the means to raise her granddaughter.

Pearl does not give in easily: Pearl chaffs under Mullally’s yoke and bucking at nearly every staging suggestion Mullally makes.

Mullally made have garnered Pearl’s freedom from a Texas prison, by Pearl immediately relinquishes a portion of that freedom, by stepping into the reins wielded by well meaning Mullally.

The bristling, halting, resistant of Pearl to the best intentions of Mullally provides the grist for this show.

Having gained her freedom from prison, Pearl assumes an even greater challenge of preserving her identity and autonomy.

BLACK PEARL SINGS! is a heart-warming profile of desperation growing into trust and friendship.

Every performance is likely to earn a standing ovation: it is not to be missed.

Now through September 26th, tickets can be purchased via info@sjrep.com or 408-367-7255.

TROUBLE IN MIND

2010-09-07T18:34:00.000-07:00

TROUBLE IN MIND

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

TROUBLE IN MIND, superbly directed by Robin Stanton, written by Alice Childress and currently performed at the Aurora Theatre Company of Berkeley is a stimulating, provocative potpourri of irony and contradiction.

Structurally, the play is a play within a play: specifically, it is a play about rehearsing a Broadway play; the imbedded play being CHAOS IN BELLEVILLE.

The year is 1957; the season is Autumn; and the day is Monday.

The chaos however is not confined to Belleville: it erupts at a rehearsal when African American cast members take rightful umbrage with the stereotypic characters contained in the BELLEVILLE script.

The play is resplendent with ethnic and cultural diversity, yet it is ironic that a play, crafted to expose African American stereotypes in theatre, relies so heavily on other popular stereotypes.

The chief malefactor in the show is the director character: Al Manners (played masterfully, almost infuriatingly so, by Tim Kniffin).

Al Manners is brash, abusive, petulant, insensitive, tyrannical, remote, uncompromising and unmistakably identified as a WASP (i.e. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant); he is pitted against nearly every character in the show.

Given the subtle clues that MS Childress discretely seeds into the script, it is apparent that the stage assistant: Eddie Fenton (played by Patrick Russell) is gay.

Eddie is wrongly and disproportionally castigated by Al Manners for not having deflected a disturbing phone call from Al’s ex-wife.

Henry, the doorman, is Irish; replete with his Tam O’Shatter hat no less.

Henry deliberately provokes Al by ignoring his request for Danish and substituting jelly-filled donuts instead.

Henry uses the reprimand he receives from Al as a springboard, to reveal that he comes from a fighting Irish family and has strong opinions over British rule in Northern Ireland.

Leaping from Danish to "Home Rule," Henry dredges up the turmoil overtaking Ireland due no doubt to the English or WASP types.

Henry clearly sees his conflict with Al as emblematic, or as an extension, of the nagging Irish-English conflict that stretches back 800 unrelenting tit-for-tat years in Belfast.

Henry’s donut caper comes off symbolically as the equivalent of an IRA pipe bomb attached to Al’s muffler.

The nefarious Al takes no prisoners: in a heated religious discussion cascading from the play, Al points accusingly to Bill O’Wray, who apparently is some relative of Abraham (the one drop rule must apply) and reminds Bill, “it was your people who crucified Christ.”

So, in addition to riding rough-shod over the gays and suppressing the Irish of the six counties, Al is also a raging anti-Semitic: righteously carping to the Jews for their deicide.

After speaking with his ex-wife on the phone, Al shares with the cast and crew that his ex-wife now has a boy friend—apparently a real man—as Al reports himself as totally “emasculated” by the situation.

The revelation seems to reassure the entire cast that Al may be a successful director and the boss on the set but, as they may have covertly suspected, he is fundamentally a failure as a man and as a human being . . . what a relief to confirm that Al has feet of clay.

Bill O’Wray (played by Michael Ray Wisely), who has been exposed by Al as a Jew, is aloof: only reluctantly will he eat with the rest of the company: we are certain that kosher food is not necessarily the issue.

Bill is also a man with options: in addition to being selected for CHAOS IN BELLEVILLE, Bill in snuggly cast in soap operas: Bill is a man holding two passports.

Judy Sears (played by Melissa Quine) is the apotheosis of the Caucasian girl: she is blonde, she hails from Connecticut: the very Citadel of White America; and she is a graduate of Yale: the highest expression of WASP privilege.

Admittedly, this is a play about stereotyping African Americans in theater, but one might wonder if this play would have worked as well had the tyrannical director been a hapless Irishman, a deicidal Jew or an African American.

No one is suggesting that, like the movie AVATAR, the nefarious villain is rendered even more despicable when he is an old white, single, straight, Protestant man.

It seems that such men can be vilified with guaranteed immunity.

It does seem as if the cast of characters is too conveniently cogent, too off the shelf and resting too soundly on culturally embraced stereotypes and prejudices.

TROUBLE IN MIND is a play for our times, it is an Obie winning script, flawlessly produced by the award winning Aurora Theatre and should not be missed.

For tickets through September 26 th, contact the box office at 510-843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org on the web.

Review for HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES

2010-07-22T00:44:00.000-07:00

HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The award winning Off Broadway West Theatre Company is now, through July 31, presenting Alan Ayckbourn’s hilarious bedroom farce: HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES.

Director Richard Harder—never one to back down from a theatrical challenge—has proven himself again in this brisk contraplex confection.

Of all forms of stage comedy, farce is probably the most difficult to stage.

The average British farce has a minimum of seven doors and exit ways.

Traditionally each exit must be used—with precision timing— a minimum of twenty-seven times: during each act.

Ayckbourn has upped the ante on the degree of complexity of this show by superimposing two households: The Foster’s and the Phillips’ onto one set.

James Darbyshire (as Bob Phillips) expertly tackles what is arguably the most demanding role in this ensemble piece: he plays the cuckold that is forever converging on the sordid truth but is forever dodging the facts asymptotically: remaining safely just beyond the pale of reality and reason.

Mister Darbyshire has mastered the art of speaking with an intelligent manner while playing the fool.

Sylvia Kratins (as MRS Fiona Foster) is a deliciously duplicitous vixen, over-charged by her id and endocrine system, tip-toeing around discovery and soaring above suspicion: she plays a woman of conspicuous sophistication and elegance who has not come untethered from her erotic shadow.

It would be appropriate to say that Jeff Garrett was ideally cast as the philandering Frank Foster, but why set off the smoke alarms in his home.

MR Garret’s Frank superbly plays the kind of slithering reptile that no office building, cul-de-sac or trailer park should be without: he keeps husbands attentive and on their toes, and keeps women feeling attractive.

Corinne Proctor shows real finesse in her portrayal of the too trusting Teresa Phillips: a new mother who is totally dissed by her Lothario husband: Frank.

MS Proctor slowly ratchets up her ire, one notch at a time, until she reaches a roiling boil.

No farce would be complete without the perplexed innocents: the ancillary casualties of the capers, assignations and intrigues; thus we have the Featherstones: Mary and William, played with blithe naiveté by Jocelyn Stringer and Adam Simpson.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES is the best entertainment value to be found in San Francisco this summer.

For tickets call 800-838-3006 or visit the Off Broadway West website at www.offbroadwaywest.org.

THE FANTASTICS reviewed

2010-07-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

THE FANTASTICKS

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Given that THE FANTASTICKS has reached its fiftieth year, it is possible that you may have seen the show dozens of times: once with each new spouse, lover or Craig's List acquaintance.

Ignore all that syrupy nostalgia: if you have not seen THE FANTASTICS as performed by the San Francisco Playhouse and directed by Bill English, then you have not witnessed the full potential of the show nor how wild creativity, unfettered imagination and deeply disturbed whimsy can add new dimensions—indeed Riemann Surfaces—to this tasteful musical classic.

If Einstein postulated a fourth dimension, Bill English has trotted string theory onto the stage.

The creators of THE FANTASTICKS: Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt conspicuously borrowed themes from both ROMEO AND JULIET and PYRAMIS AND THISBE.

While probing the depths of her subconscious for an appropriate and contemporary set design, award winning designer Nina Ball may have borrowed or been inspired by the likes of Cormac McCarthy i.e. THE ROAD or George Miller and Byron Kennedy i.e. the MAD MAX franchise or even the Bible wherein Ezekiel warns Israel to repent or see its altars desolate, images broken, and its cities laid in waste, or Ecclesiastes wherein God warns the Chosen people that they should remember the days of their youth, for in their old age "fears shall be in the way" and "then shall the dust return to the earth as it was."

This incarnation of the show does doff its hat to T.S. Elliot's WASTELAND.

As the signature song warns and admonishes us : "try to remember when grass was green and grain was yellow" and perhaps when the Gulf of Mexico did not have an oil slick the size of Madagascar, and a navigable Northwest Passage was just the wistful pipedream of Henry Hudson.

The reality is that this production transcends, soars above, the entire specter of the WASTELAND the Great Recession.

Sepideh Moafi is primarily responsible for that transcendence: her warbling, mellifluous, classically trained voice lifts one's spirit well above the Sturm and Drang of planetary decay and the post-industrial implosion of civilization: Moafi elevates this musical to the grandness of operetta.

Louis Parnell and Joan Mankin are absolutely delightful as Hucklebee and Bellomy; their affectionate dance, Pas de Deux if you will, is ample evidence that human love, kindness and tenderness are not the exclusive purview of the young.

Tarek Khan, as El Gallo, lends another great voice to the show as well as mystery and a grand measure of machismo.

Director Bill English has made an interesting character of The Mute, played demurely by Norman Munoz: he has the impishness of Puck and the stealthy serpentine movements of Caliban.

This show is about optimism imbedded into the morass of realism: like a lotus blossom flourishing in redolent humus; or as the lyricist Tom Jones states: "Without hurt the heart is hollow."

For an enchanting evening ironically set amid the ruins of civilization, do not miss this wonderful piece of art, music and acting.

For tickets surf over to www.sfplayhouse.org or call the box office at 415.677.9596.

SPEECH & DEBATE at the Aurora

2010-06-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

SPEECH & DEBATE

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Now through July 18, the Aurora Theatre of Berkeley is staging SPEECH & DEBATE by Stephan Karam.

As anyone who has graduated from a public school within the last decade can tell you, or as anyone who has attempted to teach in a public school can inform you, freedom of expression within secondary education has greatly expanded, yet it remains a skittish issue.

Within public education, anyone above the rank of teacher basically serves at the pleasure of the community and its mugwumps and muck-a-mucks: it serves no administrator's or educrat's professional interest to rock the boat with probing investigative journalism performed by some earnest but politically insensitive student.

Muckraking and an unmuzzled press in the hands of a naïve high school student—a.k.a. loose cannon—are more likely to invite the wrath of an embarrassed bureaucrat, than a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.

Texting, Sexting, Twittering and Facebook have collectively served to lower contemporary society's threshold for privacy boundaries—frosted glass has given way to transparent shower curtains: the information age has tempted us to engage in a form of personal transparency even to the limits of exhibitionism within cyberspace.

Maro Guevara, Jason Frank and Jayne Deely—as Howie, Solomon and Diwata—as the teenage principals in this riveting play, exploit information in order to pursue their high school agendas.

Information is a form of currency: it buys cooperation, forms coalitions and it ferrets out additional information: like earning compound interest.

Facebook currently faces legal challenges from subscribers who feel that Facebook has compromised their confidentiality; likewise Diwata maintains a personal video blog site and she is shocked to learn that internet browsers, including fellow students, have been visiting her blog: as if they have snuck into her bedroom to read her diary or took a picture of her at a topless beach.

Howie want s to form a Gay-Straight-Alliance: he parlays his confidential information to gain a faculty sponsor for the alliance.

Diwata wants damaging information on her drama teacher—Mr. Healy—who failed to recognize her nascent talents and miscast her as a voice in the chorus, rather than the lead, in a high school production of ONCE UPON A MATRESS.

Solomon wants to do a profile on the city mayor, shining the torch of high school journalism on the hypocrisy of Republican gays who gain both political edge and moral high ground by systemically bashing gays.

Solomon, reflecting the expressed attitudes of Rick Santorum, the former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania who argued that Americans do not have a constitutional right to privacy with respect to sex, demands full disclosure—no pun intended—from the city mayor, while keeping his own sexual identity under wraps and well as that Democratic party members.

The play is excellent grist for thought.

Jayne Deely is an absolute delight as Diwata: the brilliant, machinating high school drama queen who is groping for power, position and influence in that small pond known as high school.

SPEECH & DEBATE provides an excellent vantage point from which to survey where we, as a wireless society, have delivered ourselves and our private lives.

For tickets to this mustn't miss, in-the-now comedy, call the box office at 510-8443-4822 or surf over to www.auroratheatre.org.

PASTURES OF HEAVEN

2010-06-17T18:47:00.001-07:00

PASTURES OF HEAVEN

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The California Shakespeare Company is presently performing THE PASTURES OF HEAVEN a stage adaptation by award winning playwright Octavio Solis, based on a short story cycle by Pulitzer Prize (1939) and Nobel Prize (1962) winner John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck, a native of the Salinas Valley, he spent his early youth in Spreckels Junction: an unincorporated town at the intersection on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

The train passed through the valley sweeping up the abundant produce and delivering it to California canneries and lucrative markets back east.

Living very close to both the land and the people or this rural community provided Steinbeck with the requisite intimacy to compassionately portray their struggle to harvest a dream from what is arguably the most fertile region on the continent.

The personal stories contained in PASTURES OF HEAVEN can be identified, if not separated, into twelve semi-distinct intertwined threads.

The title comes from the exclamation of a Spanish corporal who was lead into the valley in pursuit of a band of runaway Indian Slaves—a.k.a. heathen apostates—who had escaped from forced labor at Mission Carmelo.

The corporal dubbed the niche Las Pasturas del Cielo, linking its enchanting natural beauty with the 23^rd Psalm: "He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters . . . "

If there is a central theme, it is the pain caused when well-intended people try to clumsily help or satisfy the needs of others or the push and the pull of two distinct beings trying to head down the road of life hitched to the same wagon.

This too was not terra incognita to Steinbeck: even before multiple marriages became fashionable, Steinbeck had three of them; certainly he was no stranger to the tug-of-wars that supplant marital bliss after the pheromones and hormones begin to shirk their conjugal duty.

A versatile set design by Annie Smart, transports the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater audience through time and space to a place in California history where the land and its newly arrived denizens were swelling with hope, promise and expectation.

It was a brief moment in California history when it seemed like Lennie Small's dream of "living of the fat of the land" was a distinct possibility.

Eleven ensemble members re-invent themselves, through props, accessories and costuming, as nearly forty characters.

Rod Gnapp, one of the bay area's premier actors, provides much of the comedy in this brisk sequence of vignettes that illuminates the pivotal points in the stories of the simple but ambitious people with complex lives.

This is a great show that skillfully depicts the hypnotic draw and the boundless promise of California in the early years of following it annexation, at the point of gun, from Mexico by the treaty concluded at Guadalupe-Hidalgo, February 2, 1848.

This is acting and California history at its best; it should not be missed.

To step back in time to the nascent days of California statehood, call the box office at 510-548-9666 or via the website at info@calshakes.org.

SYLVIA REVIEWED

2010-05-16T19:12:00.001-07:00

SYLVIA

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Altarena Playhouse of Alameda is currently performing SYLVIA: the story of a dog and the man who loves her . . . too much.

Gene Kahane masterfully directs this delightful, multi-layered comedy by A.R. Gurney that is more about pets owning people than people owning pets.

As Tyler Durden warns us in FIGHT CLUB, "The things you own end up owning you."

Greg (played by Christopher Ciabattoni) is a middle aged urbanite; he is successful in the mundane sense of the word.

Greg is a man of whom Alexander Pushkin would have said, "has substituted habit for happiness."

Given a new found dog, Greg is given the luxury, like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, of searching for the purpose life.

Kate (played by Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), who is married to Greg; is happily imbibing in the self actualization that Doctor Abraham Maslow prescribes for all of us: Kate is on a bold altruistic mission to bring Shakespeare to inner city middle schools.

While Kate is intelligently ascending Maslow's hierarchy, Greg is neurotically rutted in puer aeternus: he is drawn to a stray dog: Sylvia (played by Analisa Svehaug).

Sylvia is alluring to Greg because of her munificent energy, exuberance and even her unrestrained sexuality.

Above all her doggie attractions is Sylvia's greatest gift to Greg: the rarest of life's commodities: is unconditional love.

Even before Kate witnesses Greg puerile obsession with Sylvia, she is against the idea of owning a pet: Kate wants to luxuriate in all the trappings of middle class urban life and the freedoms intrinsic to a well earned empty nest: dinners out, parties, books, sophisticated friends, travel, Shakespeare and cultivated leisure.

As Greg is drawn into the vortex of the canine home wrecker, he is warned omni-directionally of the perils: his dog-park friend: Tom (played by Jamie Olsen), also an out-of-control dog owner, loses his wife in a power struggle over his randy Fido; Phyllis (also Jamie Olsen): a family friend, has an unnatural attraction to her gold fish; and Greg's androgynous family therapist: Leslie (Jamie again), highlights the risks and choices he is making with Sylvia.

Life goes by too quickly and dog ownership is perhaps an opportunity to if not to recapture lost time, then at least to reflect on it.

Prompted by a certain pivotal manipulation by Sylvia, Kate generously gives Greg the opportunity to transcend the symbiosis he needs with Sylvia and to advance into an adjusted middle age.

As Greg matures, Sylvia resumes her life as a dog rather than continue as the screen upon which Greg projects his psychological wish-list.

As Greg's anthropomorphizing winds down, his relationship with Kate matures.

SYLVIA first opened in 1995 at the Manhattan Theatre Club: it served to launch the meteoric career of Sarah Jessica Parker, who originated the title role; try to imagine the PG-13 entertainment industry without Sarah or the cosmetic industry without her product line.

SYLVIA may be the dog owners' vengeance piece for Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS.

As Uncle Cusper used to say, "Beware anyone who has a first, middle and last name for his or her cat."

Leontyne Mbele-Mbong has nailed the role of Kate: if any male in the audience has remnants of the eternal child left in him, Leontyne's Kate will stir up feelings of adolescent rebellion.

This reviewer's inner child repeated the mantra: "Take the dog and run!"

Christopher Ciabattoni portrays a Greg that instantly resonates with anyone yearning to get back to the simple pleasures of life.

Such a conspicuously great set design by Darrell Burson is a rarity in community theater: he and Anne Kendall are to be commended.

Thanks to creative artists like Frederick Chacon and Gene Kahane Alameda has quality theater.

SYLVIA is excellent entertainment that will provoke much laughter and some introspection.

For a great evening in the wonderful City of Alameda, get thee to SYLVIA.

For tickets call 510-523-1553 on surf over to www.altarena.org/tickets.

SLASHER reviewed

2010-05-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

SLASHER

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The award winning San Francisco Playhouse operates under the assumption that theater is about entertainment; given their burgeoning audiences, awards and accolades, the formula is obviously working.

Currently the Playhouse is performing SLASHER, written by Allison Moore, directed by Jon Tracy and starring the First Lady of San Francisco Stage: Susi Damilano.

Frances McKinney (Susi Damilano), a misguided whack-job feminist, demonstrates a willingness to kill in pursuit of an anachronistic agenda that hearkens back to the seminal days of Betty Friedan.

Against the perceived injustices of a misogynistic society and a degrading, exploitive film industry, Frances employs an unconventional arsenal of weaponry: a cordless drill, a staple gun, pruning shears, screwdrivers, the family sedan and a satchel charge resembling a bird's nest of multicolored detonator wires.

Sheena, Frances' daughter (played by Tonya Glanz), is a struggling college student, working endless shifts at a Hooters knock-off earning $2.14 per hour plus tips; then she is cast in BLOOD BATH: a titillating, ultra low budget, high cleavage, slasher flick of the "schlock horror" genre.

The director of BLOOD BATH: roué Marc Hunter (played by Robert Parsons), is more impressed with Sheena's pulchritude and accoutrements than with any of her latent film talents; as his fantasies roil, he hires her away from Buster's Beer House to the tune of $15,000.

When Mommy Dearest: Frances finds out about Sheena's sleazy film career, she emerges from the painkiller fog bank, she had hitherto shrouded herself, in order to mobilize against arch villain Marc Hunter and to rescue Sheena from digital disgrace.

Deprived of her electric wheel chair, Frances is not to be deterred: she slithers about like an amphibian in desperate search of a Vernal Pond.

Susi Damilano has a level of physical comedy that reaches the classic genius of Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin.

As Frances, Susi Damilano is uproariously hilarious as the frenzied fruitcake fixated on a mission from Friedan.

Frances is a psychotic crusader stuck in a warp-drive episode; replete with a glistening, candy apple sebaceous sheen of accumulated hyper sweat and coifed with matted hemp-like, sebum clotted hair: she looks like she could have escaped from a Mental Hospital, a Pilates Class or the Paleolithic Age.

Make-up Artist Daniel Hirsch deserves Obie for this one.

Set Designer Bill English has either worked a miracle within the intimate stage or violated nearly all the Postulates of Euclidean Space; if String Theory is correct and the universe really does have eleven dimensions, then Bill has discovered at least ten of them within Playhouse stage.

SLASHER is real comic genius manifested on the stage: it is truly a genuine piece of performance art, but first and foremost it is entertainment: you will laugh until you re-open your liposuction scars or dampen your incontinence shorts.

SLASHER is not to be missed.

For tickets, now through June 5^th, go to www.sfplayhouse.org or call 415-677-9596.

A REVIEW OF THE FRINGE OF MARIN

2010-04-18T20:09:00.001-07:00

THE FRINGE OF MARIN

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Fringe of Marin, a festival of one-acts plays, started by Doctor Annette Lust precisely twenty-five years ago, has, like a good Bordeaux, qualitatively evolved: it: is now a substantial theater event for Marin County.

This season's offerings include several superbly crafted plays well worth the time and the mere pittance that Dominican University charges for attending.

Roberta Palumbo clearly researched, wrote and expertly directed her very sophisticated offering: LAST ACT: VIRGINIA WOOLF'S FINAL YEAR.

Monique Bricca plays the title role: capturing the complex essence of this neurotic and depressed, self-absorbed writer who, as the German bombs rip up the country side around her, thinks little of Bloomsbury or the heroics of Churchill and the British people.

Instead she debates as to which will last longer, her "trough of despair," the war or her writer's block.

In unpatriotic fashion, Virginia wishes that the Germans would put ashore in order to ease the tension caused by their impending invasion.

Just in time to provide comic relief, a dramatic comedy by Roger Marquis, wonderfully directed by Nancy Long, leaps into the line-up.

MEMORIES is a chance encounter of two sweethearts who had the luxury of experiencing unbridled sex in high school and were fortunate enough to have never taken their hormonally charged love to the next step.

While their subsequent marriages to less suitable lovers never remained intact, their vivid memories of burning adolescent concupiscence lasted forty years.

The fortuitous encounter provides them with an opportunity to pick up where they left off: either bickering or copulating or both: the audience gets to make that call.

SHAVIUS/DIABOLUS: G. BERNARD SHAW IN HELL is indisputably the most philosophical piece in the retinue.

Writer Jack Foley sets the hook just as the Klieg lights come up: what did George Bernard Shaw do the deserve eternity in the stygian regions?

The pithy, ironic dialogue is worthy of Shaw himself: "Illusion is the only way we can bear reality," "beware the man whose god is in the sky," and "life is nothing but knowledge of self" are a few of the eschatological morsels and aphorisms imbedded in this cerebral script.

Both actors: Steven M. Vickers and Vernon Medearis, render meaning and the right amount of profundity to this well measured script.

David Kester, a Marin Man for All Seasons, Ross Valley Renaissance Man, Stand-Up Cynic and former professional baseball player, performs superbly in what seems to be a one man show with a cast of three.

Kester is a riot in CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES: he plays a man who, thanks to a high fiber diet and serious workouts on the elliptical, staved off his midlife crisis until the eleven hour.

He might have put it off indefinitely except that a young lady in a local watering hole irreverently intimated that he was "stuck in neutral."

Writer Mark Lewis puts a "done that, been there" feel into this play about what you should do "when your chronological clock starts ticking a little too loudly."

Kester's character: Guy, rails against all the usual targets: love, marriage, women, misspent youth and the brevity of life.

His rant is much like the restaurant critic who said, "the food was terrible and the portions were so small."

Life would not to be taken serious, except for the fact that it is short.

Annette Lust knows how to stack the deck; in this festival she keeps an ace up her sleeve: Kimberly Peterson an amazing finish to what is arguably one of the best Fringes ever.

Kimberly beautifully sings her original compositions, they serve as a lyrical narrative to her exuberant celebration of life and love in Brooklyn New York.

This young lady is clearly destined for higher venues and recording contracts.

You might have missed Grace Slick at the Fillmore or Jimmy Hendrix at Monterey: don't miss Kimberly Peterson at the Fringe of Marin.

For show times, details and directions, call 415-673-3131.

DEN OF THIEVES reviewed

2010-03-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

DEN OF THIEVES

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The economy got you down?

It could be worse: you could be one of four rank amateurs who tried stealing $750,000 from the mob and is now sitting in the basement of a night club, wrapped up snuggly in duct tape, awaiting execution at sunrise.

Robbing the mob is one thing, insulting the mob's intelligence with an ill conceived safe cracking attempt is even worse.

Such is the fate of four loveable characters in Stephen Guirgis's play: DEN OF THIEVES now being performed at the San Francisco Playhouse.

Susi Damilano directs this hilariously dark comedy about four young adults, who are short on cash, short on prospects but very long on chutzpah and blind optimism.

Paul, played to a tee by Casey Jackson, is a well intended sponsor from 12-step program for recovering kleptomaniacs and compulsive over eaters; he also happens to be a family trained safe cracker.

Maggie, played by Kathryn Tkel, is Paul's pet project: ostensibly Paul wants to keep her sticky fingers from stealing junk food and to keep her from consuming the ill gotten empty calories found in Yodels: the reality is, Paul wants to sleep with Maggie.

Flaco, Maggie's ex-boy friend, played by Chad Deverman, primarily wants Maggie back again and secondarily wants Maggie to help him steal $750 large ones from what he erroneously thinks to be a relatively unprotected mob safe.

Boochie, played by Corinne Proctor, is Flaco's back-up mistress: standing in while Flaco is attempting to patch things up with Maggie.

Boochie too is recruited for the heist and although her assets are highly conspicuous, her talents for grand theft remain arcane.

The script is well constructed to the point of being air-tight: snappy dialogue is precisely balanced with action.

The finish is punctuated with enough epiphanies for nearly the entire cast of characters.

Susi Damilano has done a fantastic job sharply chiseling her characters.

An amazing set, designed by Bill English and constructed by Mateo, seems to violate all the Postulates of Euclidean Geometry: it fits into the finite space of this intimate theater.

The play runs through April 17^th and will no doubt be talked about for a long time after.

For tickets call 415-677-9596 or surf on over to www.sfplayhouse.org.

THE BOYS NEXT DOOR

2010-03-20T17:19:00.001-07:00

THE BOYS NEXT DOOR

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle

The Ross Valley Players are currently presenting THE BOYS NEXT DOOR by Tom Griffin.

Kim Bromley directs this hilarious and heartwarming ensemble piece about four mentally and emotionally challenged men who live in a group home guided by the paternal, patient and understanding hand of a dedicated social worker.

Josh List: a twenty year veteran of Seattle; Brook Robinson: an itinerant actor of San Antonio, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah; Wendell Wilson: making his fourth appearance with the RVP; and David Yen: soon to be seen in the Mountain Play, collectively contribute to the chaos and pathos that is marginally reined in by their supervisor: Jack Palmer, played superbly by Timothy Beagley: a Bay Area actor with sixteen years on the stage.

Jeff Garrett, who marvelously plays MR Klemper i.e. the brutally abusive father of Barry Klemper, is dramatically speaking, a conspicuous high point of the show.

Garrett is the very apotheosis of menacing: even before he utters his first insensitive, bullying and taunting words on stage: he achieves an evil presence that only an exorcist could truly appreciate.

MR Garrett owes his evil countenance to excellent directing by MS Bromley, a glistening, unctuous sheen of psychotically sultry make-up and the perfectly sordid sartorial standards achieved by the resourceful costuming genius: Michael Berg.

Garrett as Klemper is the kind of person you would wisely cross the street to avoid passing on the sidewalk.

Were Garrett's Klemper your relative or in-law, your family would issue him a restraining order precluding him from making even a cameo appearance at a family function.

While on the surface, the play is about mainstreaming the mentally challenged, at another level, it is all about communication.

The characters, in a sense, grossly exaggerate or parody the communication short comings that all people share.

This play illustrates the imperfections and limitations of human speech.

Even amongst the most intelligent and highly articulate, spoken communication is a highly imperfect art: words have associations, denotative and connotative meanings; while they deliver messages, they send people out on tangents and on to erroneous digressions.

Words have a message in what the expressly say, what they implicitly say and even by what they fail to say.

For example: you might have a significant other that likes to remind you about how you behaved when you were in love with him or her.

What she or he leaves out of the conversation is any description of how she or he behaved during that ardent romantic period.

The omission begs the question: was he or she ever actually in love as well?

Playwright Tom Griffin artfully uses mentally handicapped characters to demonstrate the inherent shortfalls, subtleties and complexity of the spoken language.

By not saying one thing, we may be, by default, implying the opposite thing.

The evil MR Klemper is unable to tell his son, Barry Klemper, that he loves him.

Emotionally handicapped himself, MR Klemper gets as close as he can to expressing his own love for Barry by reminding Barry that despite his handicap, his mother loved him dearly.

MR Klemper urgently wants his son to feel loved and that in itself is a true expression of love.

This play will invite introspection; it will ratchet you one notch closer to the people you love; it will invite you to examine your communication skills and to listen closer to what people are saying to you.

Let there be no ambiguity in this communication: THE BOYS NEXT DOOR performed by the Ross Valley Players is well worth your time and the ticket.

For tickets to an entertaining and elevating evening, contact RVP at www.rossvalleyplayers.com or flip open the cell and call 415-456-9555.

THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith

2010-02-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Domenique Lozano's recent translation of Bertolt Brecht's THE CAUSCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE is currently being performed, as directed by John Doyle, at the American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco.

An important ingredient in film making is set: whether it be the location or some contrived backdrop for the action; in theatre location is not optional: set is.

In theatre, the elaborateness of the backdrop or the set design is arbitrary: it is a tug-of-war between the director, the set designer and the imagination of the audience.

As the set designer and director respectfully bow to the imaginative powers of the audience, theater moves away from the film making concept and towards the domain of storytelling.

Director John Doyle is clearly a storyteller: the program identifies no set designer: the minimalist symbols: tokens of when and where the action takes place, are the work of MR Doyle: an artist who trusts in the imagination of his audience to conjure a virtual setting.

THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE is the third or fourth evolution of an idea.

The idea seems to have surfaced first with the WISDOM OF SOLOMON (circa 930 b.c.e.) when King Solomon decreed that a disputed infant be cut in half so that the two women, equally convincing in their claims to be its mother, would have a fair share of the child.

The concept may have resurfaced independently in a 14^th century Chinese play: LI QIANFU by Li Xingdoa, and again in 1925 as THE CIRCLE OF CHALK by Alfred Henschke (a.k.a. Klabund).

Klabund's play was expropriated by Brecht in 1940 and recast as a short story: THE AUGSBURG CHALK CIRCLE.

In 1944, Brecht, mindful of the talents of émigré actress Luise Rainer, brought CHALK CIRCLE to its present incarnation: a form which, in the words of Harold Clurman, is designed to ". . . liberate the spirit without drugging the senses . . . " and impart ". . . wisdom rather than excitement."

As the curtain rises, Grusche, a servant of the Grand Prince, rescues the son of the Prince, when the infant son's preoccupied mother flees the capital city: paying more attention to her luggage than to her child.

Grusche rescues the child, greatly augmenting the survival challenges she already faces.

In the eyes of the law, her rescue is tantamount to a kidnapping.

Typical of Brecht's lavish use of contradiction, paradox, irony and the collision of opposites, Grusche's decision to save the child gives her far greater survival challenges but fortifies her with a sustaining raison d'être.

Omoze Idehenre is extraordinary: she gives us a Grusche that is leather tough on the outside, sinewy strong, and vulnerably human and maternal in the inside.

Rene Augesen, gets a comedic lift by approximating the blonde joke stereotype: she is a riot as Natella: Wife of Governor Georgi Abashvili and ditzy mother of the infant Michael.

Natella would be better named Nutella: she is the archetypal bourgeois materialist who could let her fur collection interfere with providing safety for her infant.

Rod Gnapp, indisputably one the bay area's finest actors, is smartly embedded at the very core of this delightful ensemble piece; Rod has a way of covering the entire turf that runs between martinet and marionette; as a soldier, Rod has a comical delivery that has the audience speculating as to whether his character lacks compassion, a conscience or just native intelligence.

As the East German Government always suspected, Bertolt Brecht is a classicist: a master at depicting the rival complexities of life.

CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE runs through March 14^th.

For tickets call 415.749.2228 or grab the mouse and surf on over to www.act-sf.org.

THE FIRST GRADE Reviewed by Jeff Smith

2010-02-15T15:29:00.001-08:00

THE FIRST GRADE

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Aurora Theatre Company of Berkeley is presently staging the delightfully dark, but redemptive, comedy THE FIRST GRADE by Joel Drake Johnson.

Anyone who has ever known an Elementary School Teacher with twenty plus years in the cookie crumb trenches knows how such a vet is.

Being accustomed to speaking with diminutive persons equipped naturally with audio processing problems and attention deficit disorders, teachers tend to over articulate even the briefest, least abstract sentence.

Secondly, because Elementary School children have yet to become adept at masking their real selves, Elementary Teachers see everyone as if he or she were as simple, linear and as transparent as a first grader.

Does seeing the world through the lens of a First Grade Teacher provide one with a better handle on life or greater insights?

That's the question writer Joel Johnson and direct Tom Ross vividly answer on the Aurora Stage.

Julia Brothers, as the First Grade Teacher, provides the audience with a character that everyone can appreciate for her honesty, intelligence and expectations and yet ironically no one would want her as a spouse or as a parent: she demands too much objectivity from the people around her and, like a First Grade Teacher, is unwilling to tolerate any forms of self indulgence or monkey business.

Warren David Keith, as the defeated retreating husband: Nat, brilliantly portrays a husband that the audience can universally sympathize with; after all, how does a man live with a woman who makes cookies and then hides them so that no one else can eat them; and who brooks no intimation of human weakness?

Nat, unable to get a divorce fast enough, does what most men would do: adapt: he escapes to a quiet corner of the house, buys scotch in two-liter bottles and sneaks in a passionate mistress.

As the expression goes, vengeance is best served cold or on a queen size mattress.

Were it not for his penchant for ice in his scotch, he could side step Frau Elementary Teacher all together.

Rebecca Schweitzer, as the dysfunctional daughter, gives an equally compelling performance.

What's a daughter to do when she has an overbearing First Grade Teacher as a mother?

Shut down, search for sensual pleasure and oral satisfaction in forbidden cookies, sulk, give off tons of attitude like a squid gives off sepia, and curl convolutedly into the emotional fetal position.

The First Grade Teacher has pretty much destroyed all life at ground zero until a more wretched character: Mora, played superbly by Tina Sanchez dives into the family brew.

THE FIRST GRADE is indisputably a great play: it's entertaining, elevating and enlightening.

Why? Because it's a blend of irony and complexity: it's about adroitness, rectitude and a sober approach to life run amuck and onto the rocks: scotch on the rocks to be specific.

If you are getting a whiff of toxicity in your life, or you just want an intelligent laugh, THE FIRST GRADE is your ticket.

To buy your ticket, call the box office at 510.843.4822 or surf on over to www.auroratheatre.org.

BEAUTY OF THE FATHER

2010-02-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

BEAUTY OF THE FATHER

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

As Robert Kincaid says in THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, "Rarely does this kind of certainty come around in life."

Rarely is there much certainty in theater: normally, you can enjoy equal security by betting on a Super Bowl Game or by picking a show.

While you can do nothing to improve your Super Bowl odds, you can do several things to improve your odds of picking a winner on stage.

For example: select a play by a Pulitzer Prizing winning playwright like Nilo Cruz.

Second, choose a play that has won a Pulitzer Prize: such as BEAUTY OF THE FATHER.

Third, decide on a rising theater company that in its brief four years as an acting entity, has won several bay area theater critics' awards: like Off Broadway West.

Fourth, pick a show directed by a director who has won bay area theater critics' awards both as a director and as an actor: someone like Richard Harder.

And finally pick a show with an absolutely stunning actress from Alameda, who will dazzle you, enchant you and sling you back in your seat: someone like Natasha Chacon.

Rarely does this much recognized success and promising new talent all converge within an intimate theater like the Phoenix of San Francisco.

Natasha Chacon is the Aspidistra that keeps BEAUTY OF THE FATHER flying.

As Marina, she is absolutely endearing: exuberant and courageous, while as vulnerable and fragile as a tundra flower.

As an actress, Miss Chacon shows an emotion range that would surpass any reasonable director's expectations.

Much to her credit, Miss Chacon has the ability to credibly breathe contrasting emotions, the tension of opposites, complexity and conflict into her multidimensional character.

Marina grieves for her recently lost mother; is ecstatic to be reunited, after ten years, with her artist father in Spain, and is torn between two continents, two men and two divergent depictions of her father: Emiliano.

Sara Krulwich of the New York Times very accurately describes this play as "A study in emotional fireworks;" the fuse and the pyrotechnics can both be traced to Marina and Miss Chacon.

Great performances by Chris Holland as the compromised Karim and Durand Garcia as the Artist Emiliano, round out this superb cast.

With such a superlative cast, it is difficult to discern where prudent casting ends and great directing by Richard Harder begins.

If you enjoy intelligent theater that is exotic, romantic, emotional and as richly complex as Catalonian sangria, then BEAUTY OF THE FATHER is not to be missed.

Off Broadway West performs at the Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason Street in San Francisco.

Tickets may be obtained via www.offbroadwaywest.org or by calling, when not in heavy traffic, 1-800-838-3006.

PHEDRE

2010-01-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

PHEDRE

Reviewed by Jeff Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The American Conservatory Theater (ACT) is currently performing a bold and highly creative rendering of Racine's PHEDRE.

While the content is the surely the stuff of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the playwright wrote in the epic style of the classical tragedians from a parlor in mid-seventeenth century Paris.

In 2009, Timberlake Wertenbaker translated and adapted the French script to the American stage.

As with all Greek tragedy, once the first domino falls, the audience senses the inevitability of all that follows and yet inwardly resists the unfolding catastrophe, even until the last domino is supine.

Carey Perloff has worked a minor theatrical miracle with a play that qualitatively approximates what was once the premium fare at the Great Dionysian Theater of the Athenian Golden Age.

Phedre, superbly played by Seana McKenna, is the catalytic axel about which this tragedy turns: frailty is her strongest suit.

Phedre is weak and self-indulgent; in her self-absorption she provokes and unleashes the fury of her husband Theseus against his son and her step son: Hippolytus.

Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur i.e. Phedre's half brother, is brash and too confidently takes the perfidious bait dangled by Phedre.

Tom McCamus is stupendous as Theseus: he perfectly portrays the opaque density of a man who has exhausted his heroic nature and now his greatness only serves as his undoing.

A stunning set design by Christina Poddubiuk creates an immediate sense of foreshadowing and impending kibitzing by the meddling gods who languish on Olympus.

The performance incorporates origin music by David Lang.

ACT is a theatre company that is not afraid to take risks.

In performing PHEDRE, it has taken on a truly great play for which the audience carries its expectations into the theater.

Given the grandeur is this production, those expectations are exceeded.

ACT's PHEDRE is not to be missed.

Contact the box office at 415-749-2ACT.

THE MISER AT RVP

2010-01-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

THE MISER

Reviewed by Jeff Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Given that The Economist magazine has retreated from even speculating on when or if the Great American Recovery will take place, we might all gain a personal appreciation for the frugal, parsimonious obsessions of THE MISER, whether it be in the theater or in the home.

Instead of a return to the good ole days, The Economist scans the offing for evidence of a mere stabilization: a limping, gasping economic engine that hits frequently on enough cylinders to keep running without too much jump starting from grotesquely profligate deficit spending.

True to the times, the Ross Valley Players (RVP) are presently performing Moliere's THE MISER as directed by Bruce Vieira.

RVP's THE MISER is simply stunning and not to be missed; it may have been a light weight comedy that Moliere toured the provinces with, but the RVP have primped it from every possible angle: a fabulous set design by David Apple which makes the miser look like a Rothschild; period costumes that precisely reflect each character's station in life and a cast that clearly exalts in the art of theater.

Satirical, farcical and perhaps ominous as well, the play revolves around Harpagon: the tyrannical, tightfisted father of Cléante and Elise.

Harpagon, played superbly by Grey Wolf, is the kind of guy everyone hates yet loves to cozy up to simply because he is holding the purse.

Like most spendthrift, entitled children, Cléante and Elise are eager to dip into family capital: just give them a trust fund and you will never see them again.

Cléante and Elise despise their father for all the usual reasons.

Harpagon is rich and yet won't spend his money; worse yet, he won't give it to his idling, self-indulgent children who long for the barest necessities: simple essentials like frippery, luxury, leisure and torrid romance.

Harpagon—like many celebrities, sports figures, politicians or any man who has clawed his way to a position of wealth and power—would like to parlay his success into the obvious: a crack at youthful pulchritude; in Harpagon's case it's Mariane: the lover of his frivolous son: Cléante.

Meanwhile, Harpagon's daughter: Elise, is in love with beau Valère: a savvy servant to Harpagon.

Valère is superbly played by Chad Yarish.

Much to MR Yarish's credit he is able to credibly produce a conspicuously intelligent Valère.

Strange that for all the censure Moliere drew for performing THE MISER, the play is framed by and rooted in stock aristocratic conceits.

At its core are arrogances as elitist and plutocratic as Calvin's notion of the elect.

Both Mariane and Valère are of noble origin and like Oliver (Dickens), Ernest (Wilde), Luke Skywalker (Lucas) and Tarzan (Edgar Rice Burroughs) their true aristocratic origins beam through the humble circumstances in which they find themselves like a beacon, or a pheromone, to discerning members of their caste.

It is as if Fitzgerald's maxim were true: "The rich really are different."

In the denouement, Mariane and Valère discover they are siblings and that their father is the magnanimous Signior Anselme, who will pay for their weddings.

Due to a shipwreck as in COMEDY OF ERRORS, the family was rend asunder, but in the end, the rich marry the rich and the lower classes are precluded from comingling with or diluting aristocratic DNA.

Strange too that Moliere's miser is arrayed much like we would expect Shakespeare's Shylock to appear: in North African Sephardic attire: a satin dressing jacket with an inseparable kufi in the style of Thelonious.

It should be remembered that France did not come to grips with its middle age penchant for anti-Semitism until after the Dreyfus Affair.

If the contraction of 401(k) has you down or your house is underwater as the mortgage companies like to say, this play is guaranteed to cheer you up and make you rich if only in spirit.

For tickets contact the Ross Valley Players at http://rossvalleyplayers.com. You can guarantee your tickets by purchasing them online, but you can also call Brown Paper Tickets at (800) 838-3006 to purchase tickets by phone for the current show.

Theater review: Speed-the-Mamet - San Jose Mercury News

2010-01-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_14177106

~Jake Vincent

Speed-the-Plow at the Pear: Performance | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

2010-01-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=27271

~Jake Vincent