It's a magical world

The only theater I saw in 2022 was Dave Malloy's Octet at Berkeley Rep. (It's good.) Then I saw Great Comet twice in 2023 at Shotgun Players. (Excellent at any size.) And yet now suddenly I have seen three theatrical performances in eight days??I love A Christmas Carol, and it turns out that a friend of mine is actually on the board of this theater company, so a group of us went to see it. It works surprisingly well! Despite "Noh" in the title it's actually a mash-up of different theatrical forms -- Scrooge, the Ghost of Christmas Present (my favorite), and most of the other characters are kabuki, the Ghost of Christmas Past is kyōgen, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is straight noh. It was a good adaptation, as well as a good introduction to classical Japanese theater, and I really liked what they did with Marley at the end. The company is really good (I went to their fundraising dinner earlier this year where they performed short scenes), and I definitely look forward to seeing more shows. 

The Matchbox Magic Flute, adapted by Mary Zimmerman, at Berkeley Rep
I've never seen The Magic Flute (I know, I know, I'm not sure how that's happened either). Unfortunately I suspect I will like this one better--the adaptation turns it back into the musical that it would have been originally, before opera became gargantuan, and also jettisons a good chunk of the sexism and makes Papageno an actual half-bird, along with some other changes. It's "matchbox" because they actually constructed a proscenium within the stage, a la the palace theaters of Europe, and doubled a bunch of the parts as well as made a bunch of cuts. Overall it did feel much closer to performances in Mozart's actual day and immediately after, and was a really great experience. Perhaps inevitably I was reminded of Gilbert and Sullivan, as they translated/adapted all the lyrics into English. (I did still kind of wish they had surtitles, though, lol.) Another brilliant Mary Zimmerman joint with great performances from Berkeley Rep.

A month ago when I was in New York I went to see Hadestown at the New York Theater Workshop. It's an expansion of a folk opera of the same name by Anaïs Mitchell, which I've never heard and which I'm given to understand is different in a lot of ways, particularly in the addition of Hermes to the cast who retell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, including Hades, Persephone, and the Fates. "it's an old story, but we're gonna tell it again," Hermes says at the start, and it's a tribute to the power of this version that I honestly did hope against hope, despite everything, that maybe this time Orpheus would get it right and succeed in bringing Eurydice back to life.

The production is great and the cast is stellar, particularly Patrick Page, who is frankly terrifying but also completely magnetic as Hades. Everyone in the cast is frankly amazing at bringing the gods to life, and though Orpheus and Eurydice are younger and less experienced, they are portrayed in no less accomplished a manner. The semi-immersive staging just makes it easier to get caught up in the story, which is told in a kind of 30s Dust Bowl/New Orleans jazz Americana style which doesn't sound like it should work but totally does, and the show also has no fear about making contemporary political statements, which are most obvious in the song that could be about Trump, "Why We Build the Wall." The performance also leads hard and brilliantly on the particular power of the Greek conception of the gods, which is to say that they are both metaphors and examples of the forces they represent. And though the story is ostensibly that of Orpheus and Eurydice, the complicated, bittersweet marriage of Hades and Persephone is just as important to the plot, and frankly even more engrossing on some levels; we know how the former story ends, but the other is less clear. The costuming is brilliant too; we particularly loved the Fates, who carry their respective tools of the trade--scissors, a ruler, and thread--on their persons in the manner of weaponry and sing in harmonies that recall the Pointer Sisters. I can't wait for the cast album to be released next year.

Favorite plays, what you like about theater, etc. for via_ostiense 

I kind of have a type when it comes to plays--you might be able to figure it out when I say that my favorite playwrights are Tony Kushner, Tom Stoppard, and Mary Zimmerman. Honorable mentions to Brian Friel and Michael Frayn, too. And Shakespeare of course but that's practically a given. I really like plays that go after big ideas, that unite ideas and people, that think and dream big. I also really like wordplay.

Favorite individual plays? Stoppard's Arcadia, Frayn's Copenhagen, Kushner's Angels in America (I make no claims that my tastes are unconventional), Zimmerman's The White Snake (note to self, her Wikipedia page is badly out of date). I also really enjoyed the Beardo musical, and I've liked everything I've seen of Stephen Sondheim's so far--really, my theater education is pretty woeful, particularly for someone who once had her own one act plays performed in her high school.

I think what theater excels at is the fact that it's in the moment--which is obvious, but because it's a time-bound thing (even more than all art) it can bridge the gap between times and places with very little effort. The cricket scene in The Invention of Love is one such example--the finale of Mary Zimmerman's Arabian Nights, in which medieval and contemporary Baghdad are briefly one, is another. I don't actually know a lot about theater, so I can't speak from a place of any especial knowledge, but that's always the magic for me--how we can go anywhere without leaving the same room, transported by some people in costumes. It's a definite kind of magic.

Now I really miss Shotgun Players and Berkeley Rep. I never wrote up the last shows I saw there--Tom Stoppard's Salvage and Dear Elizabeth, respectively, both of which were really good. Salvage in particular was excellent, but then, I do love Stoppard. (P.S. Shotgun is doing an all-female playwrights season in 2015!)

My sister and I went up (out) to Portland this weekend to see Trek in the Park, which is concluding its five-year mission this summer with The Trouble with Tribbles.  We had a really good time! I have missed her. 

Of course we went to Powell's on Friday night, and I was proud of myself for exercising restraint (I still have books from my first trip to Powell's four years ago that I haven't read) and only buying one book. We saw Only God Forgives at the theater across the street, which was…interesting. The colors were beautiful, and the story was interesting too. My sister loved it, and though I was not as enthusiastic, it was still cool. 

On Saturday we went to the coast, specifically Astoria at the point of the state, where we saw the Goonies house, and heard seals in the harbor but did not see them, and then down to Cannon Beach, where One-Eyed Willy's treasure is, somewhere. It got sunny by the time we got there, and we walked on the beach to see the famous rock, which was cool. We also had the Oregon version of salt water taffy, which is just sad, and tried the sea salt chocolate caramel apples. Too much sea salt. We also found a coffee shop with very tasty Aztec Mochas, and had a chestnut cream/banana crepe. If there's one thing I've learned about shore towns the world over, it's that they're all fundamentally the same, and it was fun. We also finally got to Lemongrass, a Thai restaurant in a house, and it was delicious. We drove around the fancy houses in the west hills before winding up at a fancy cocktail bar downtown, because what else was there to do.

Yesterday we got up and went to Slappy Cakes, and it was delicious, as usual. (Think Benihana except you're cooking the food yourself and it's breakfast.) We had to eat at the bar because it was so busy, so we were not able to cook our own pancakes, but it was still delicious. We went to Extracto Coffee both days. Our consensus is that it is probably the best coffee in Portland. 

Then we went to Pencil Test, which is a bra shop Spike had heard about at Reed, and got fitted for bras. Bras that fit! What a miracle! It really is true that Victoria's Secret bras do not actually fit most women well. So now we know what sizes we are in various brands, and can begin the slow process of replacing our VS bras with ones that fit. 

It has become something of a tradition for us to drive out to The Bird Hut to see the birds, so we did that (Spikeo was making friends with a rose cockatoo, unsurprisingly; they were both pink) and then drove way the hell out to Cathedral Park in North Portland. We got there at two for a five o'clock show to get good seats, because as I said, I didn't come all this way to get bad seats. One of Spike's friends showed up at about quarter to three and we sat around and hang out and drank his homebrewed beer before the show started. 

Trek in the Park! It was so great. The cast was good, and we could hear decently well, and the costumes and effects and music were very well done. A very minor thing that I enjoyed a lot was that Admiral Fitzpatrick was played by a woman, and that one of the security officers was female too, although I was sad that the helmsman (who apparently has no lines in The Trouble with Tribbles) was played by a white dude. I thought that Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov were the best among the lead cast members, although Uhura was awesome too; she just has too few lines in general. Spock was also good, though it seems clear that Gerrold was writing specifically for Nimoy's very arch delivery style, which this guy didn't quite achieve. But the scene with the tribbles in the storage compartments was amazing and hilarious (they just kept falling on Kirk's head!), and it had been long enough that I'd forgotten the denouement with the Klingon spy at the end, and it was really great, and I got a very nice T-shirt to commemorate the whole thing afterward. Long live Trek. Go boldly. 

And finally last night after eating Japanese food and going back to Powell's we wound up at Ruby Jewel Scoops, which is very tasty artisan Portland ice cream. This morning we got up very early (especially considering that my flight has been delayed an hour) and went to the airport, and so a good time was had by all. 

Fallaci. Written by Lawrence Wright, directed by Oskar Eustis. Performed by Berkeley Rep.

I'd never heard of Oriana Fallaci before I went to see this play in three acts, which surveys her life and work and her turn to Islamophobic "clash of civilizations" fundamentalist rhetoric beloved by neoconservatives after 9/11 and doesn't come up with any easy answers. I liked the play, but I also had issues with it.

Some of these can be attributed to it being a world premiere--though Fallaci's cancer is a leitmotif throughout, it's totally unclear what kind of cancer she had, which is confusing given that in the play as in life she blames Saddam Hussein burning the oil fields of Kuwait for her developing lung cancer. That was a minor note; more important was the fact that the foil character, a young Iranian-American journalist, feels at times more like a caricature than a real person. Particularly given the arc of her development in the play--ably symbolized by her sartorial transition from short skirt and sleeveless blouse to full-on chador in the final act--I had problems with this. (It doesn't help that the performance of the actress in question was, I thought, a bit wooden in the first act.) It seemed to me too pat, too easy (and I particularly didn't like the very final bit at the end, about Emilia) in a lot of ways that were questionable.

It's hard not to admire Fallaci for her lifelong commitment to fighting tyranny wherever she saw it, regardless of her tendency to embellish her narratives after the fact. The play exploits this tension between her courage and her Islamophobia very productively; she was fascinating, uncompromising, and compelling because of that. At the same time, though, I know that I wouldn't be anywhere near as willing to cut Fallaci or the play any slack if it were about, say, a man like Christopher Hitchens. And I guess my problem with the play is that in the end, in the person of the Iranian-American journalist and her relationship with Fallaci, it seems to come down on the opposite side of the scale.

Troublemaker, or The Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright. Written by Dan LeFranc, directed by Lila Neugebauer, performed by Berkeley Rep.

I have generally enjoyed my season tickets to Berkeley Rep, and I genuinely loved this play. Bottom line: if you like Scott Pilgrim or Calvin & Hobbes, you'll like this play. It's like Scott Pilgrim, but in middle school, in working-class Rhode Island, in the 90s. (Nineteen mighty-four, to be precise.)

The play follows the adventures and misadventures of its eponymous hero Bradley Boatright, who's on his way to being branded a troublemaker (or, as the parlance of the local correctional school has it, a "moubletaker") as he and his best friend Mikey battle the blond, rich and evil Jake Miller, with the help of local intel specialist Loretta Beretta.

One of the best things about the play it the sheer verve of its language; rather than not use swear words, which anyone who survived sixth grade knows is completely unrealistic, LeFranc invented a whole new set of swear words of his own. The characters are wickedly knowledgable about some things (race, for example), and totally oblivious about others in a very realistic way, and it's a tribute to the play that we don't even realize that, Calvin & Hobbes-like, Bradley's reality isn't the same as that of everybody else until the beginning of the third act. Indeed, one of the other best things about the play, aside from the fact that it was hilarious and the characters were awesome, was that having set up a series of grand and awesome versions of alternate reality, LeFranc knew enough to puncture them for maximum effect when it counts.

The play had its world premiere with this production, and there are still some kinks to be worked out. It's too long (the magical realist beach sequence in act 3 should be the first thing to go), and as someone else said in front of me as I walked out, there needed to be more Loretta Beretta because she is amazeballs, and some of act 2 could have been streamlined, I thought. But as well as being dangerously smart, the play has a heart, and I would happily see it again.

An Iliad. Dir. Lisa Peterson.

I went to see this show at Berkeley Rep on Tuesday night - I splurged on season tickets this summer when I was feeling rich, but I totally forgot to go see Chinglish. D'oh.

Overall, I liked the play, and I especially liked the authorial decisions to have the play mostly be retold in modern language, and that it was a one-man show with the Poet himself as the one man (though, how else could it have been done?). The Poet stumbles in compelled to tell his story, though as he admits, "Every time I tell this story, I hope it's for the last time." It's never for the last time, and I liked that this production had clearly been updated to take the ongoing wars around the world since it was written (on the brink of the Iraq war) into account, though of course one deplores the necessity. It's not hard to make the Iliad speak to our time, and I liked that it did. I also liked that they used the Fagles translation as their base, since the Fagles translation is my favorite.

That said, why no one in the production could be bothered to ask anyone how to actually pronounce Greek - not even Homeric Greek, but classical or even modern Greek - was really annoying to me. Granted I"m over-educated, but to hear the Poet mispronounce the fourth word of the entire poem, and keep mispronouncing words and names, really grated. The other thing is that, powerful as this show was, I don't know how much that was new it really added to the Iliad, y'know? Though, I'm not sure that's the standard by which I ought to judge this play. It certainly does bring the Iliad to new audiences, and it does make the Iliad into an anti-war story, which, as I've said before, I'm not convinced that the actual Iliad actually is. (I'm happy to go on about why, if anyone wants; just ask.) And that's probably the Iliad we need right now, inasmuch as we ever need the Iliad. Maybe one day it really will be told for the last time; but not yet.

Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia, Part 1: Voyage. Performed by Shotgun Players, dir. Patrick Dooley.

Tom Stoppard is probably my favorite living playwright, but this is unquestionably not his best play, and the Shotgun Players production--while quite good, and admittedly still in previews--fails to hit the mark 100% of the time.

The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy of plays about the intellectuals and revolutionaries of Russia's 19thC other than Marx and Lenin, the artists who created Russian literature as we know it and the non-communists whose thought and actions would eventually result in the first of Russia's 1917 revolutions: the February Revolution, which was itself overthrown by the more famous October Revolution. That they failed doesn't invalidate them; indeed, the remarkable thing about Russia, as in so many communist revolutions, is that the communists succeeded at all. As with so many Stoppard plays, it's a drama of big ideas uncomfortably inhabiting people whose souls are rarely sized to match, and the play is particularly good at articulating the gender and status divide the Romantic revolution makes apparent among its devotees. All that being said, I think the central problem with this play is that its hero, Alexander Herzen, doesn't appear until the start of the second act, and then (because he's exiled for sedition) only appears in one other scene after that.

( What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, it's Russia! )

All that being said, however, I would definitely recommend this production, and this play, to anyone to whom it sounds interesting.

Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare. Dir. Kenneth Kelleher.

I trekked out, along with a motley crew of awesome people, to the Presidio to see S.F. Shakespeare do Cymbeline, which is one of the romances (i.e. later, Jacobean, tragicomedy) and that almost no one in our group had either seen or read before. Seeing or reading it before would not, I think, have done anything to alleviate the utter ludicrousness that is the plot or make it more sensible. I literally said "This is ridiculous!" out loud when they handed out the programs and I read the plot summary, a sentiment that was aptly echoed by Cymbeline in the play in Act V when he says, dumbfounded, "Does the world go round!?" If I start saying this, rest assured, what I mean is, "What the fucking fuck!?"

I'll let you read the Wiki article to attempt to grasp the plot; what I want to talk about is the production, which was nothing short of amazing. The costuming and set design went the route of a sort of Dickensian steampunk look and feel, which worked very well in context (I support modern AUs in Shakespeare costuming in perpetuity), and the actors and the director all performed things with a sort of giddy OTT attitude--though not, let me hasten to clarify, emotionally one-note--that really made the ridiculous plot shenanigans emotionally credible. They also made the very smart decision to have just about every actor but Emily Jordan, who did an amazing job with Innogen, double parts, which certainly helped sell things like Innogen mistaking her stepbrother's beheaded body for her husband's, since they were both played (brilliantly) by Craig Marker. The music was also amazing, a mixture of very well done settings of the music in the text (music is such an important part of the romances, seriously, they're half-masque in some ways) and playing of samples of contemporary things--I recognized at least one Magnetic Fields song, which is fitting since I tend to blame Stephen Merritt's score for the "Coraline" musical for the toy piano that featured (in a suitable way, yes) in the set design in this production.

It being the Presidio, I'd be remiss in not mentioning the weather, or more precisely the fog, because fog in the Presidio does not mess around, and is doubtless the reason why the grass we were sitting on was the cushiest grass I've seen in the state of California. It was a bit chilly by the end, but by no means intolerable since I'd dressed appropriately. There are lots more performances this month; if you can check it out, you totally should!

Eonnagata. Conceived & performed by Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage, and Russell Maliphant. Costume design by Alexander McQueen.

I had no real idea what to expect from this show, but I knew I had to go. I wasn't disappointed, either.

What I know about the Chevalier d'Eon comes from the anime Le Chevalier d'Eon and the section about the Chevalier in Marjorie Garber's book Vested Interests (though there's also a great section on the Chevalier and Marie Antoinette in Caroline Weber's wonderful Queen of Fashion), and to be quite frank my standards for this show were essentially, how does it compare to the anime? Which is sort of a weird standard to have, but there it is, and I think that in the end both the anime and this show are their own things, but that Eonnagata has a much less rigid approach to gender in general and to the gender of its protagonist in particular.

Eonnagata is a multimedia show that tells the story of the Chevalier's life more or less in order, with the three dancer-choreographers each portraying the Chevalier at different times and in different costumes and genders. The show incorporates ballet, modern dance, fighting, a life-size bunraku-style puppet giving a monologue, classical music, pre-recorded monologues and slide projections, and…well, it's brilliant. The fluidity of d'Eon's gender is perfectly matched by the choreography and the sensitive handling of the story, but I thought of Caroline Weber's description of the rigid gender roles of French society more than once, and in the end I'm not sure whether d'Eon's challenging of those gender roles or the roles themselves had the triumph; the Chevalier died poor in exile in Britain, and the underlying social mores of France weathered the Revolution intact.

Eonnagata takes its portmanteau name from the kabuki techniques by which men portray women, and the show's hybridity at all levels is dazzling. It was brilliantly done--the lighting and the music were amazing too--and not quite like anything else I've ever seen.