See my play "Horny" at SF Theater Pub on Monday, May 20

My latest short play, "Horny," will have a one-night-only performance in San Francisco on Monday, as part of The Pub From Another World.

It's a play about sex and unicorns. Obviously. What happens when you're a young woman who really, really wants to have sex with your boyfriend... but, if you lose your virginity, you can never touch your pet unicorn again?

The Pub From Another World is an evening of eight sci-fi, fantasy, and horror short plays, produced by Sunil Patel. In addition to my unicorn play, there's plays about psychos, superheroes, time travelers, and mad scientists. Plus a play by four-year-old Audrey Kessinger that went viral on BoingBoing.

It should be a really fun evening and I suggest getting there early, as it's bound to get crowded. The performance is at 8 PM at the Cafe Royale, 800 Post St. (at Leavenworth).

"Horny" is directed by Meg O'Connor and will feature actors Sam Bertken and Olivia Youngers. Making out. Lots of making out.

Image: "Young Woman with Unicorn" by Raphael.

A Day in the Life of My Ideal Self @ SF Theater Pub Blog

Another bit of (charming?) neurosis from me in my latest San Francisco Theater Pub column. I discuss the gap between my idealized vision of myself and the messy reality. Sometimes the gap seems so large as to be unbridgeable -- sometimes it seems like it'd be so easy to bridge, yet I still can't do it.

If anything, the pressure of writing a twice-monthly column is making me very aware of the flaws and habits that are holding me back -- "maladaptive perfectionism" chief among them. See, for instance, my old post "Playwriting, Failure, and the Fear of Failure." Perfectionists are so afraid of failure that they often feel stuck or paralyzed -- and I know that feeling well.

I tell myself things like "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," encouraging myself to cross just one item off my to-do list and thereby feel more accomplished.

And then I get stuck in one of my perfectionistic-paralyzed moods and wait an entire week even to write a brief marissabidilla post linking to my latest Theater Pub column...

The Goddess from the Machine in Berkeley Rep's "Pericles"

Readers of this blog probably know what the term "deus ex machina" means and where it comes from. But just in case you don't... it literally means "the god from the machine," and it refers to the practice, in ancient Greek and Roman theater, of lowering an actor dressed up like a god onto the stage using a giant crane, and having the god or goddess character resolve the plot just when everything seemed hopeless. Nowadays, of course, we use the term in a looser sense, for any contrivance that comes in at the end of a story to wrap up the plot in an arbitrary way. (I also have a long-standing fascination with the term because my first play was titled Deus ex Machina.)

We've all seen plays and stories that employ a deus ex machina in the second, looser sense -- but I never expected that I would ever see a real "god from the machine" being hoisted onstage via a crane.

And then I saw Pericles at Berkeley Rep last Sunday. As Pericles is not one of Shakespeare's strongest or most psychologically intriguing works, Mark Wing-Davey's production gains its interest from its lively staging, performed by an ensemble of eight actors. There are masks, there are puppets, there's a platform on springs that doubles as a bed (for a sex scene) and the deck of a ship (for a storm scene)... and there's a giant crane that swings round at various moments to pluck something offstage or lower something on.

The script of Pericles incorporates a shameless deus ex machina: the goddess Diana appears to Pericles in a dream and tells him where he can find his long-lost wife. And, as I said, the crane got quite a workout during the production: most memorably, in the scene where Marina is suddenly kidnapped by smugglers, the actress got trapped in a big net and then hoisted into mid-air.

So I really should've seen it coming, that this production would employ the crane one final time, for the deus ex machina scene at the end of the play. Nonetheless, I was amazed and delighted when Diana swung into view, dangling from the end of the crane and giving her wisdom to Pericles.

My boyfriend, even though he is a classics scholar, professed to be disappointed by the effect. He said it looked very inelegant, to have the goddess dangling from the crane like a sack of potatoes.

"But that's the way it would've looked in ancient Greece," I said. "Though they wouldn't have said 'sack of potatoes' because potatoes are a New World food..."

Perhaps audiences these days are accustomed to more elaborate, smoother flying effects, using the latest technology. But I was thrilled to see a bit of ancient theater history repurposed for a 21st-century production.

Pericles plays at Berkeley Rep through May 26.

Photo: Jessica Kitchens as Thaisa, David Barlow as Pericles, Anita Carey as Gower. (There are no pictures available online of Diana on the crane, so I selected this photo instead -- because Ms. Kitchens also plays Diana, and isn't her Thaisa costume gorgeous?) Photo courtesy of mellopix.com.

Epic Plays, Small Theater: "Coast of Utopia" at Shotgun Players

While reading this profile of Blanka Zizka, artistic director of Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, I was most struck by the section that described Zizka's production of the Tom Stoppard play The Invention of Love.

Though the play had a successful run in London, no theater in New York took it up. "People kept thinking that Invention of Love was dry as toast," says New York actor Martin Rayner, who portrayed the elder [A. E.] Houseman. "Nobody wanted to touch it in New York. Blanka took it and made it this vibrant thing."

It would become the highest-grossing show in Wilma history, and it prompted Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater -- who had passed on the play because he thought it too difficult and complicated -- to drive to Philly to see it. Not long after the lights went down, Bishop remembers, "Suddenly the play, which had made no sense to me in London, made total sense to me now. I don't honestly know how. The design was much simpler. The theater was smaller. It wasn't that the actors were better than the British actors. They were clearer. They had an emotional life."

The reason this passage struck me is because Bishop's experience seeing The Invention of Love at the Wilma mirrors what I've been telling people about the experience of seeing Stoppard's plays Voyage and Shipwreck (the first two parts of his Coast of Utopia trilogy) at Shotgun Players. The Wilma Theater has 300 seats; Ashby Stage, where Shotgun performs, has 150. I feel like 125 to 300 seats is really the ideal size for a theater: large enough to make you feel like part of an important communal experience, but small enough to still feel intimate.

And maybe that intimacy is especially important when staging one of Stoppard's challenging and cerebral plays. At least, I connected far more with Shotgun's production of Voyage, last year, than I did when I saw the play in its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theatre in 2006.

In New York, I think there were something like 60 people in the cast, including famous faces like Ethan Hawke and Jennifer Ehle. The production was lavish, sparing no expense; it opened with an elaborate effect of ocean waves swirling and spiraling around Brian F. O'Byrne (who played the trilogy's protagonist, Alexander Herzen). But, aside from Billy Crudup's brilliant performance as Vissarion Belinsky -- he spoke some of Stoppard's most complex monologues as if he was actually coming up with the words on the spot -- I wasn't really able to connect with the play. The bigness, the lavishness, the constant emphasis on "we are doing something epic and highbrow," overpowered the story. My friend Lexi, who went with me to the show, thought that the opening special effect was the best part of the whole thing. But special effects should not be the reason that you go see a Stoppard play.

The Coast of Utopia features much discussion of intellectual topics, which can make it seem dense and confusing. But it also bears a Chekhovian influence -- there is poignant human drama amidst all of the storms and streams of talk. That element of it, though, got swallowed up by the massive Lincoln Center production. But in Shotgun Players' 150-seat house, the epic grandeur and the human intimacy of the play are balanced. Shotgun may have only 20 cast members instead of 60 (and face it, 20 actors is still a freakin' huge cast). Their set is bare-bones, their costumes are serviceable but perhaps not 100% historically accurate. But the play is clearer. It has an emotional life.

I wanted to love Voyage when I saw it in New York, because I love Stoppard and I love big intelligent plays... and, I guess, I respected that production, but I didn't love it. (Billy Crudup excepted.) It didn't even bother me that I had to miss seeing the other two parts of the trilogy in New York when I left to go study abroad.

Nowadays, I have immense respect for Shotgun for daring to tackle this epic trilogy in their mid-size East Bay venue. Moreover, I am connecting with what they're putting onstage -- getting caught up in the characters' emotional predicaments as well as their intellectual jousting.You can bet that I'm already looking forward to Salvage, the conclusion of the trilogy, which they'll produce next season. In the meantime, Voyage and Shipwreck are playing at Shotgun Players through the end of this weekend (May 5).

Image: Joseph Salazar as Mikhail Bakunin, Patrick Kelly Jones as Alexander Herzen. Photo by Pak Han.

Orphée Wrap-Up @ SF Theater Pub Blog

In my latest column for Theater Pub, I discuss my internal debate over whether to cut the line "Someone had to throw a bomb" from Orphée after the Boston Marathon explosions took place on the day of the staged reading. Which leads into a larger discussion of artistic and moral courage (with a slight digression about how awesome my boyfriend is).

And though the show is over now, I also wanted to link to the other posts on the Theater Pub blog about Orphée:

• an interview with director Katja Rivera, the "reigning Orpheus interpreter of the Bay Area"
• program notes about Orphée from Ashley Cowan, managing to work her trademark '90s pop culture references into her discussion of this French play from the 1920s!

Bon Anniversaire, Cody Rishell

Today's post is dedicated to my friend Cody Rishell, because it's his birthday and because I haven't properly thanked him, on this blog, for all of the ways his art and his friendship have enhanced my life over the past three years.

The first real memory I have of Cody is working the Olympians Festival audition sign-in table with him in 2010. He was talking a mile a minute about The House of Mirth (he had just watched the heartbreaking Gillian Anderson film version) and "California Gurls" (the song had just been released and Cody already had it stuck in his head). Not many people can talk with equal authority and enthusiasm about Edith Wharton novels and Katy Perry songs -- so Cody immediately piqued my interest as someone I'd like to know better.

Since then, we have bonded over our mutual love for Alphonse Mucha, La Traviata, The Great Gatsby, indie theater, and much more. Last year, I served as copy-editor and Cody did the layout for the Bay One-Acts play anthology -- we had a ridiculously quick turn-around time to put the book together (one week) but we ended up having a surprising amount of fun doing it. When I discovered that I could use Google Docs to compile a list of typos as I found them, and Cody could see the list update automatically as I typed, he wrote that his "head was exploding with unicorn glitter sex." Yes, it is that much fun to work on copy-editing a book with Cody.

Cody coordinates all of the art for the Olympians Festival each year, meaning that he recruited the artists who did the beautiful posters for my plays Pleiades (Emily C. Martin) and Aphrodite (Kelly Lawrence).

This year, Cody did black-and-white portraits of me, Stuart Bousel, and Meg O'Connor to serve as the promo artwork for our "Behind the Curtain" mini-festival at the end of March. I love the portrait he did of me (based on my headshot photo), especially the eyebrows!

"I was trying to channel '1960s French secret agent go-go car racer girl,'" said Cody when I complimented him on the way he drew my eyebrows.

Because Cody says fabulous things like that. And then the only thing I could do in response was send him this YouTube video of Anna Karina singing "Roller Girl." (I cannot find a version of this online that I can embed in my blog. But click the link, it's worth it.)

Cody also had an art show last year called "Everyone Worth Knowing is a Mythological Creature in Disguise," which is a pretty great philosophy, n'est-ce pas?

I particularly like his drawings of the sexy minotaur girl who goes around carrying a parasol, which she wields like a weapon in defense of the less fortunate.

Cody also does all of the artwork for San Francisco Theater Pub, and I have to confess that one of the most exciting things about producing a show at Theater Pub was the prospect of seeing what Cody would draw for the program. His illustration for Orphée this month was even better than I could've hoped: it was double-sided, with Orphée on one side of the paper and Eurydice on the other. So if you hold it up to the light, the image of Eurydice shines through the paper like a ghost. I can't find a picture of this online (and that wouldn't be the right format for it, anyway) but trust me, it was amazing.

So happy birthday, Cody, you mythological creature in disguise, and thank you for all of your beautiful artwork. Here's to many more years and much more beauty.

The Bicoastal Playwright-Producer-Translator

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that my play Pleiades was selected by the Atlantic Stage Co. in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for their New Voices Play Festival. At this very moment, 1:30 PM on the East Coast), the staged reading of Pleiades is beginning in South Carolina...

...and I can't be there, because I am at the Cafe Royale in San Francisco in my capacity as the producer of San Francisco Theater Pub's April show, my new translation of Orphée. (OK, fine, I wrote this blog post in advance and have timed it to go up on Sunday morning.)

Tech rehearsal for Orphée on one coast, a staged reading of Pleiades on the other. Weekends like this don't come along very often.

And it should be no surprise that this beautiful song has been stuck in my head all week: "South Carolina" by Tennis: