Tag Archives: theater

JANAM : Jana Natya Manch

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I went to see a performance on Sproul Plaza by a aprt of Jana Natya Manch, a street theater company from Delhi, and later went to see a documentary about their work. From talking to Liz, I had thought that agit-prop really died in the early Soviet Union, but it’s alive and well in India. After years of watching the Mime Troupe’s ossified preaching-to-the-choir form of direct political appeal, JANAM’s methods and approach are refreshing and immediate. I don’t really know if the CPI(M) is the best option really, as I have a distrust of most political parties. One woman in the troupe talked a bit about this during the documentary — she was more interested in social change than political parties, but then realized that political parties should be about social change.

The flip-side is that their style would not work in the US. I have a lot of half-formed theories about this — the entrenchment of our two-party system, the fact that the economically downtrodden in the US have been duped into thinking that they are not as downtrodden as they are, and our curious predilection to be left alone all the time. People simply do not stop what they are doing or where they are going to see a piece of street theater.

Anyway, it was food for thought and food for blogging.

Concert Announcement : A Flowering Tree

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Sometime if I have time I’ll write about our first rehearsal with Adams and Sellars. I have also written a small note on some of the religious poetry used in the libretto.

A Flowering Tree


by John Adams
libretto by John Adams and Peter Sellars

John Adams, conductor
Peter Sellars, director
Jessica Rivera, soprano
Russell Thomas, tenor
Eric Owens, bass
SFS Chorus, chorus

America’s foremost living composer, John Adams, imagines rich and beautiful worlds. This SFS co-commission, inspired by The Magic Flute, is an escape into dream and myth and comes on the heels of Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. Peter Sellars returns to direct this semi-staged production. The premiere of any new Adams work is an event not to be missed.

Thursday 3/1 — Saturday 3/3, 7:30 PM

Acting Like a Thief

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I finally watched this documentary that was sent to me a few weeks ago called Acting Like a Thief. It is about the a street theatre organization in India from the Chhara community, a group that was labeled by the British as a “criminal tribe.” The disctrimination continues to this day. This is what taking community action via theater is about.

Also related, the Human Rights Watch report on discrimination against the Dalit community in India.

All Wear Bowlers

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I saw All Wear Bowlersa at the Berkeley Rep on opening night. It was one of the most entertatining pieces of comedy I’ve seen in a while. The productions I saw earlier this semester (Lorin, Blood in the Brain, and Passing Strange) were good too, but I Bowlers really hit the spot for me in my stressful end of semester dance.

The play is of a piece with Beckett — two hapless fellows somehow get trapped on stage. What’s different is that these two actors, Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford, are incredibly skilled physical comedians. Dressed in vaudevillian baggy pants, vests, and coats, the pair clown their way around, messing with the audience (note : do not get seats in the main level, house left corner), and most of all trying to escape. There are wonderful conceits in the play — a silent film rolls and they duck behind the screen and into the film (the mind boggles at the sense of timing), interruptions from the soundtrack, and so on. The piece reminds me a bit of one of my all-time favorite films growing up : Bill Irwin in The Regard of Flight. It has some of the same sensibilities, although Irwin was trying to say more about theater in an overt way, whereas in Bowlers you feel like you’re watching a kind of aquarium show.

I don’t have too many intelligent things to say, except that it’s damn entertaining and its going on tour I think, so if it comes by your neck of the woods, definitely see it.

Hamlet : Blood In The Brain

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I got a chance to see the new Naomi Iizuka play, Hamlet: Blood in the Brain at Intersection for the Arts (15th and Valencia). The production is a collaboration between Iizuka, Intersection, Campo Santo, and CalShakes, and took about 5 years of workshops and fora to come to its current form. The nice thing about going to Campo Santo productions is that they are really about process and it shows. This play is a recasting of the Hamlet story in a 1980’s Oakland devastated by the internecine conflicts between rival drug-dealers. In this story “H” (all characters are initials) stands in the shadow of his father, who was a “legend” and who dealt drugs all across Oakland. Rather than coming back from University, he comes back from the penitentiary and has to cope with the demands of his “uncle” C, who has taken over the business, has married H’s mother G, and who has Big Plans to expand his operation. The gangsta mythos and drama of the street struggle is an appropriate fit for the largeness of Shakespeare’s story, but Iizuka doesn’t really romanticize it. We are very much inside H’s mind the entire time, from his first line “the pounding… of a BASS” to the end, in which the poisoned chalice is done away with and instead we have a real Mexican standoff.

The play is another must-see. Like Love is a Dream House in Lorin, the play deals with local issues and problems, but the focus here is on the dissection of H’s turmoil. He is well and truly stuck here, as opposed to the kind of angsty playboy you see in some productions. To a degree he brings it on himself, but when you see C plans to have L kill H at a club in Oakland you understand the degree to which he is ensnared by business and blood and family and pride and honor. The feeling in intensified by the Chorus, which appears in all the club scenes, taunts H about his own inadequacies. We see it also when H meets L’s sister O near Lake Merritt and tells her that he wants to take her far away but in a later scene when she gets in his car he is paralyzed and cannot leave. Those who want a scene-by-scene adaptation should stay away. It’s more the Iizuka has taken Hamlet, knocked out everything but some posts, sifted through the detritus to find some nuggets, and then found a story in which those can be strategically placed. It’s in those changes that the indictment of the culture itself comes. There’s no reason for O to drown herself here — far better to have her killed in a driveby orchestrated by L himself, who is supposed to take out H.

As with every Campo Santo productions, the performances are huge and powerful. Sean San Jose as H, Donald E. Lacy Jr. as C, and Tommy Shepherd as L were particularly good, I thought, but Margo Hall as G, Ryan Peters as O, and Ricky Marshall as H’s father were also excellent. The play’s been extended and tickets can be reserved in advance at Intersection.

Love is a Dream House in Lorin

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Last night I saw the Shotgun Players new production, Love is a Dream House in Lorin, by Marcus Gardley. It is an amazing piece of community-generated theater. The production is important to see, especially if you don’t usually go to theater, because it can turn your whole view of the possibilities of theater as a tool for dialogue within the community. Lorin was the name of a town that was annexed by Berkeley in the early 1900’s. It goes from Dwight to Alcatraz, Sacramento to Telegraph. The neighborhood was one of the only places people of color were allowed to own property — as such this area of South Berkeley developed a complex multiracial composition and was one of the first neighborhoods to voluntarily desegregate its schools. As a student, I am far too ignorant of the environment surrounding where I study — Berkeley is a temporary stopping place for me on my road through life, but this neighborhood, in and around which I have lived my entire time, has a complex history that is not at all apparent from its modern-day incarnation as the ‘hood.

The play is centered around a house in the Lorin district and its history. The play’s characters, residents of the Lorin District, are all named after streets in the neighborhood. The story starts with the house being bought by Russell and Adeline Wheeler, a biracial couple ready to start a family in the early ’80s. As we follow their story the history is revealed, from the original Ohlone inhabitants of the area through the building of the first Victorian homes, the internment of the Japanese-Americans who lived there, the black families who made their homes their and on through to Vietnam. The narrative is not linear — although the play is grounded in Adeline’s experience, it is not merely a story being told to her. Each stage of the story is paced differently — the heterogeneity keeps the play breathing and unpredictable. Aaron Davidman has created a physical language for the piece using recurrent physical patterns and motifs that helped the stories maintain their individual consistency while drawing parallels between the different residents of the house (as when a couple in love dances in the living room). The overall effect is hauntingly beautiful but not sentimental. Always looming over the production is the current situation of the neighborhood — drive-by shootings, gang problems, and drug abuse. The play reminds us that everyone who lives here has a story to tell.

I could go on rambling about the play and spoil details of the production but I won’t. If you are in the area, you have to see this play — it is probably the most important piece of theater I’ve seen in years.

9 parts of desire, part 2

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Upon rereading, my review of 9 Parts of Desire may have been a little too positive. There are definitely problems with the play, especially in its relationship to its intended audience. I was initially impressed by what the play managed to do correctly and the versatility of the actress, but then the lacunae became more apparent.

Firstly, class is only tangentially dealt with in the play. Yes some of the 9 women are poor, but in Raffo’s scramble to give them strength and agency, she didn’t really address the relationship between them — which women enable the oppression of the others? What are the political forces that are relevant to them? It’s set up as a Baathist/Saddam versus American/Bush conflict, but that is a gross oversimplification, as the news points out. We’re given 9 snapshots of women but only the finest of threads stitching together their relationships to each other.

This is further complicated by the choice of these 9 snapshots. As I tried to argue with an acquaintance last night, someone will take issue with any finite number of images you take as “representative” of the spectrum of Iraqi women. Her complaint was that the choices were stereotypical — drunken expatriate, politically opportunistic artist, helpless 2nd generation immgrant. I think the more accurate criticism is that there weren’t very many complicated images, contradictions that couldn’t be fully explained by the text. To a degree, the women were textbook-logical. Even an irrationall impulse could be explained. It comes off a little pat, and thus non-representative.

Finally, there is the issue of catharsis. This play is playing in wealthy leftist Berkeley, and there is a real danger (and I’m sure it happened to many people) they they will go to see this play and feel like they have experienced the pain of these women and can now be cleansed of their guilt from complicity/ignorance/etc. I heard some paper called it an uplifting theatrical event, a feel-good play. It should have been more disturbing or challenging to avoid that. But you can’t control an audience’s reception that finely.

Was it worth seeing? I still think so. It’s standard practice to dislike all theater on some grounds, but my general feelings are positive, albeit shot through with some concerns. It’s too bad it closes today so nobody else gets to see it. But onward and upward, as they say.

9 parts of desire

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I managed to catch this play at the Berkeley Rep last night. It’s a one-woman show by Heather Raffo, this time performed by Mozhan marn;ograve;. The play tells 9 Iraqi women’s stories, from an Iraqi-American obsessively watching the news for images of her extended family to a woman selling scavenged goods on the street, from an artist who painted Saddam’s portrait and is now asked to make a mosaic of Bush’s face on the floor of a hotel to the lone survivor of a bomb shelter that was mistakenly bombed by the Americans, vaporizing the bodies of those within.

The play’s most powerful device, used again and again without seeming old, is the simple statement of an atrocity. It is a kind of alienation that Brechtian manipulation can never accomplish. Hooda, an older expat living in London, is a pacifist who is for the war because Saddam ruined her country and “this war it was personal.” She tells us of her time in prison before fleeing Iraq. “They get to you by torturing those around you,” she tells us, and describes how a man was forced to listen to a tape of his wife being raped while their 3-month-old baby was placed in a bag with hungry cats. Layal, the artist, describes how her friend was taken by Uday, stripped naked, covered in honey, and fed to his dogs. This is what their lives are like, and in that matter-of-fact tone we are made to understand that we cannot possibly know what it is like to experience that.

The only moments that didn’t really work for me were at the end, where I felt like the sound levels were such that I couldn’t make out the text, and the moment where Layal smashes her supplies. In the latter, the transition is so abrupt that I couldn’t really make out why she snapped then. In the former, I was mostly disappointed because that is the moment in which everything is tied together before the denouement. All of the lines from the play come back through the tongue of Mulaya, the mourner. Nanna, the street seller, complains: “I have too much existence. Our history is finish.” Amal the Bedouin loves “with her heart, not with her eyes.” It’s a goldmine for drawing the piece together as a collective outcry against this existence, this injustice, and this horror that face these women, and it felt rushed and hard to decipher.

But no performance is perfect, and the positives in 9 Parts of Desire far outweigh the negatives. Marnò’s face is chameleonlike — she has a real gift for transformation, much like Sarah Jones. A program note that I read afterwards noted that the way in which a woman wears her abaya, her robe, tells us much about her class and her politics. It’s a simple signifier that allows the actress to physicalize her relationship to her politics, differentiate characters, and build a visual vocabulary, constrained by a single garment.

Unfortunately, the show closes this weekend (to make way for Culture Clash’s Zorro In Hell, which I am really excited about). But if it comes your way, definitely watch it. It changed my friend’s view of solo performance, and it may change yours.

The Gem Of The Ocean

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Liz and I went to see August Wilson’s The Gem Of The Ocean at ACT last night, directed by Reuben Santiago-Hudson (of Lackawanna Blues fame). As with all productions I’ve seen at ACT, it was a mixed bag, most of which I attribute to a one-note performance turned out by Michele Shaw, the actress playing Aunt Ester. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Gem Of The Ocean is set in Pittsburgh in 1904, and is the penultimate (in writing order) and first (chronologically) in Wilson’s epic project to write a play about the lives of black Americans for every decade in the 20th century. As with many of Wilson’s plays, the stories of individuals are played out against the background of social and political events. In the case of Gem it is worsening work conditions at a mill that employs many of the black citizens that causes a walkout. A man was accused of stealing a bucket of nails and drowned himself rather than admit to the crime he did not do. At the top of the play a young man from Alabama, Citizen Barlow, tries to get help from Aunt Ester, an old matriarch who is said to “clean people’s souls.” She takes him on a spiritual journey to the City of Bones so he can confront his guilt and fill the hole in his soul.

I don’t want to give away the whole plot, but the other characters are what really make the play sparkle. Ester lives with Black Mary, a strong woman who seems to be Ester’s mentee, and Eli, a former Underground Railroad worker. Solly Two Kings, another escaped slave, is a frequent visitor to the house, and constantly reminds Barlow that there is still a war to be fought for rights and citizenship in the US. The villain of the piece, Caesar, is Black Mary’s brother, a self-made entrepreneur who is charged by the city with keeping the law. His zeal for the job puts him at odds with his own community as he makes ourageous statements like “some niggers were better off under slavery.”

What works about a play like Fences (Wilson’s 1950’s play) is that the social context of the play is integral to all of the characters — they are all inextricably caught up in the movements of their time. Here, by contrast, Ester is almost divorced from reality, and Shaw’s performance brings out the spiritual wanderings and tones down the groundedness. Indeed, it is in those moments where Ester is not having a deep metaphysical connection that Shaw runs roughshod over the lines — her Ester is two people, a priestess and a pushy old woman.

The rest of the cast is significantly better. In particular, Steven Anthony Jones as Solly Two Kings dominated the stage and there was a fire behind his performance that was hard to match. Roslyn Ruff brought that quiet intensity to her performance that was so lacking in Shaw. The actor playing Barlow, Owiso Odera, was the great surprise of the evening — especially when he committed to the unreality of the City of Bones sequence.

There’s more I want to write about the politics in the play, but I’ll wait until I read it. In particular, Caesar is a kind of stand-in for Alan Keyes or Clarence Thomas, a tool of the law rather than a shaper. The juxtaposition (and conflict) between him and the truly radical and revolutionary Solly Two Kings was uneven — a little man with a gun versus a big man who had one notch on his walking stick for each of the over 60 slaves he helped to free. Wilson is telling us that in 1904 it was clearer than it is now how much work is left to be done — slavery wasn’t so long ago and the wounds were fresh. When Caesar comes with a warrant for Ester, she tells him that she has a piece of paper too, her bill of sale. Just because the law’s written on paper, she reminds him, “don’t make it right.”