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.

"Troublemaker" at Berkeley Rep: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Theater

I was prepared to dislike Troublemaker, or The Freakin' Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright, the Dan LeFranc play making its world premiere at Berkeley Rep. There was that trying-too-hard-to-be-cool title. There was the ad copy, which made the play sound cutesy and juvenile: "Bradley and his bestest friend tangle with rich kid Jake Miller and his middle-school goons. And their nemesis has help from a bunch of zombies and grown-ups!" There was the usher informing me, to my dismay, that the play had three acts and was more than two and a half hours long. There was the annoying, video-game-like preshow music – and if I, a 25-year-old, found this irritating, I could only imagine how much it bothered the mostly retiree-aged audience who surrounded me at Berkeley Rep.

But then the show started, and, surprise surprise... I liked it. The fast pace, the stylized slang, the need to pay close attention to figure out what was going on – and whether it was really happening, or just happening in the protagonist's overactive imagination – swept me up and obliterated my qualms.

The nearest comparison to Troublemaker is probably Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, in that both of them layer a flashy video-game/comic-book aesthetic on top of a story about a boy struggling with everyday problems in mundane surroundings. Well, Bradley would probably call me an "a-hole" for implying that his problems are commonplace. He's 12 years old and, in his own mind, he's a superhero with a tragic origin story, a sidekick, a nemesis, and special powers. But in reality, he's a working-class kid with a taste for mischief and a single mom who might be dating the father of a boy he hates. Well, that's how it feels to be that age: your view of the world doesn't match external reality, and you think that no one else's problems could compare to yours. (At 12, I imagined I was the crown princess of a magical kingdom. Maybe that's what girls do.)

The play is incredibly stylized, but it's far less cutesy than the ad copy implies – one of the things LeFranc explores is whether Bradley might not be just a fun-loving "troublemaker," but a seriously messed-up and troubled kid. The play is also really Genre Savvy. I think where I fell in love with it is the scene where Bradley asks his best friend Mikey to be his "sidekick," and Mikey takes umbrage at this because he's black, which is just what a genre-savvy character and playwright should do.

Act One toggles back and forth between realism and stylization; Act Two goes completely nuts; and Act Three brings it back down to earth to for a more naturalistic, emotional resolution. That second act, though, man... it might be the craziest thing I've seen at a Big Theater in a long time. There's a soup kitchen populated by homeless pirate zombies, the rich kid lounges on a divan as "Goldfinger" plays, our heroes do an unconvincing drag act (leading up to a gay kiss that actually drew gasps from the audience – in liberal Berkeley!), Bradley's smart and mouthy friend Loretta turns into a pint-sized femme fatale... I watched it in disbelief and giddy delight that Berkeley Rep was producing this in such lavish style.

Troublemaker is not a perfect play. There are some parts that I don't think work at all, including the last scene, and some moments whose value is debatable. (I think I was the only person in the theater who laughed at the "poutine" joke, which probably means that it should be cut, even if I enjoyed feeling that this joke was there just for people like me.) But often, imperfect plays are the most entertaining, and they certainly offer more fodder for discussion than a play that is smoothly written but takes no risks. Go see Troublemaker, because it's exciting, and because I want to discuss it with you. Maybe not all of its punches land, but it kicks some serious A.

Troublemaker plays at Berkeley Rep through February 3.

Image: Jake (Robbie Tann) and Bradley (Gabriel King) square off. Photo by Kevin Berne.

White Magic: "The White Snake" at Berkeley Rep

Mary Zimmerman has to have one of the most passionately devoted fanbases in the American theater. At least, in the circles I move in, we've been anticipating her newest play The White Snake for over a year, ever since the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced it for their 2012 season. There were hastily planned road trips to Ashland to see The White Snake ASAP; there was much rejoicing when Berkeley Rep announced The White Snake as their 2012 holiday show; there was me deciding to become a Berkeley Rep subscriber for fear that the show would sell out otherwise; there were my non-"theater geek" friends getting just as excited about the show as I was. Finally, after all these months of anticipating, I saw the show at the end of Thanksgiving weekend. It was worth the wait!

The White Snake is a 100-minute adaptation of a Chinese folktale about a learned snake who takes human form, marries a mortal, becomes a loyal wife and respected citizen, but arouses the suspicions of a fanatical Buddhist monk. This story is very popular in China and, although it is not so well-known in the West, it echoes other folktales about animal-women who marry mortal men, like John Keats' "Lamia" or the Japanese folktale of the Crane Wife.

Zimmerman's adaptation features a multi-ethnic cast (most of whom did the show in Ashland), Chinese-inspired music, beautifully crafted costumes and props, and her trademark innovation in staging and imagery. For instance, at the beginning of the show, the snake characters are represented by some completely adorable puppets -- snake-phobics have nothing to fear from this show -- as well as by having the ensemble, carrying painted umbrellas, form one big "snake."

In its final moments, the play does that thing that every Zimmerman show seems to do: it reaches for transcendence, for a moment of painful beauty, and achieves it. As all good folklore-based theater must, it also resonates in ways that go beyond mere narrative. The protagonist's struggle whether to tell her husband that she is really a snake in disguise echoes the fear that we all have when starting a new relationship: will my partner accept me once he knows who I really am, deep down? Or will I frighten him away?

The White Snake is a kickass heroine: a scholar, magician and herbalist who goes on a quest to save her husband's life and engages in an epic battle with the monk -- and does it all while pregnant. She also has a sidekick, her stubborn, outspoken, and fiercely devoted friend the Green Snake, who takes human form as servant "Greenie." Indeed, The White Snake might be an excellent show for getting girls interested in theater. They'll initially be attracted to the romance and magic of the folktale, and along the way they'll hear a story of strong female characters told by a beloved female writer-director. Take your daughters/nieces/pre-teen friends! (When I saw the show on Sunday the 25th, the audience was mostly full of Berkeley retirees. I wish there'd been more young people and children there!)

Unlike the other Zimmerman works that I'm familiar with, The Arabian Nights (which I saw in Berkeley in 2009) and Metamorphoses (which I've read), The White Snake tells just one story, rather than a collection of them. Yes, it's a story with several twists and turns -- like a snake! -- but there were a few moments where the pace seemed to slacken or my interest flagged, which is something that I never felt in The Arabian Nights. For this reason, and also because my first encounter with the theatrical magic of Mary Zimmerman will forever have a place in my heart, I probably would rank The Arabian Nights slightly higher than the new show. Nonetheless, The White Snake is a beautiful piece of theater that will surely expand the Zimmerman fanbase even more.

The White Snake plays at Berkeley Rep until December 30. Top photo by Alessandra Mello. Bottom photo by Jenny Graham. Featuring Amy Kim Waschke as White Snake and Tanya Thai McBride as Green Snake.

Pagan Christmas, or Magic is Everywhere

My parents came to visit me over the holiday weekend. It was the first time I hosted them for Christmas, rather than going to my childhood home -- which led to some "Wow! I'm an adult!" moments.

Religion-wise, the three of us range from "Catholic-raised agnostic who wants to be more spiritual" (me) to "Attends Catholic church but is cagey whether she actually believes it" (Mom) to "Liberal, believing Catholic who also enjoys Eastern spiritual traditions" (Dad). So we didn't mind having what my mother called a "pagan Christmas." On Christmas Eve, we went to see The Arabian Nights at Berkeley Rep -- i.e., we journeyed to the People's Republic of Berkeley to see a play rife with ribaldry, based on folklore from the Muslim world. How un-American of us!

The Arabian Nights was just as good this time as it was nearly two years ago, and I was so happy to be able to share it with my parents. (That's one of the negatives of theater: as such an ephemeral art form, it is rare to be able to share your favorite theater pieces with everyone you love.) Even the prologue -- the transformation of the theater from a bare stage to a rich panoply of Oriental carpets and hanging lamps -- moved me to tears. And I cried again at the ending, a parable about the importance of telling stories and sharing one's wisdom. The moral of this tale is that stories "come from God." (And how moving, how ineffably moving, that this is the first time the word "God" is used in the play. In the other scenes, the characters consistently say "Allah" to mean "God" -- and Westerners are apt to forget that the two words are synonyms, because "Allah" sounds so exotic. Then, in the last scene, they say "God," and it socks you in the gut.)

So, maybe I'm not a pagan after all. Because theater -- intensely felt, humanistic theater -- is my religion. Mary Zimmerman's The Arabian Nights is a religious experience and the perfect show on which to end my busiest-ever year of theatergoing.

Last week I participated in the holiday Theater Pub show, a collection of monologues and scenes about "How I Learned the Truth about Santa Claus." And that got me thinking about how Santa Claus himself is a form of theater -- a costume we put on, a lie we tell, a charade we keep up, a character we portray, because it makes the world a more interesting and entertaining and happy place. We talk about "the magic of theater," but we also talk about "the magic of Christmas," and in both cases we are referring to a similar kind of emotion. The red velvet curtain of the theater bespeaks the same promise of wonder and delight as the red velvet suit of Santa Claus.

When I was a high school freshman (ten years ago!) I was in a community theater show called Holiday Magic Breakfast Theatre. We were a bunch of teenagers dressing up and singing Christmas carols and Disney songs for an audience of children ten-and-under, serving them breakfast, and concluding with a visit from Santa. At the time, I thought that the title (indeed, the whole show) was pretty cheesy. I wore a tacky calico Christmas dress and pranced around the room belting out "Winter Wonderland" while little kiddies and their parents ate soggy pancakes. But now that I'm older, I can appreciate it more, what we did -- it may not have been Great Theater, but it got such a warm response every time. And "Holiday Magic Breakfast Theater" -- are there four lovelier words in the English language?

Santa Claus is magic.
Theater is magic, and magic is theater, as Shakespeare teaches us in The Tempest. (And, theater is therapy is magic, as Cutting Ball's The Tempest taught me earlier this year.)
Theater is storytelling.
Stories come from God.
God is love.
Love is magic.
God is omnipresent.
Theater is Santa Claus is magic is love is God is omnipresent.

Happy holidays.

Get your "Arabian Nights" tix now!

Interrupting my break-from-blogging for a quick announcement.

Tickets to the special presentation of Mary Zimmerman's The Arabian Nights just went on sale at Berkeley Rep. I saw this show two years ago and it's one of the most gorgeous pieces of theater I have ever seen. It truly feels good for the soul. I can't wait to see it again (I will be sharing it with my parents when they visit me over Christmas).

These tickets are going to go FAST, so I urge all Bay Area theater lovers to seize the chance to see this beautiful show! You know I am not usually such a shill... but for The Arabian Nights, I will happily make an exception. Don't miss out!

Sweet Sweet Lovin': "Girlfriend" at Berkeley Rep

Over the weekend I went to see the new musical Girlfriend at Berkeley Rep. (Full disclosure: one of my friends from college was operating one of the spotlights--I made sure to applaud extra hard after the songs that featured her expert tracking of the actors with the spotlight!)

Like American Idiot earlier in the season, Girlfriend is a "jukebox" musical--it is based on the pop-rock music of Matthew Sweet, particularly his album Girlfriend, from 1991. I had never heard of Sweet before I saw this show (the early '90s are kind of a cultural blind spot for me), but it's good music--timeless, poppy, earnest and melodic.

In Berkeley Rep's Girlfriend, the music is played by a 4-person all-female band (styled and costumed to look like butch lesbians) and sung by two young actors, Ryder Bach and Jason Hite, as they enact the story of two gay Midwestern teenagers struggling to express their attraction to each other. Neither the characters nor the plot is going to win many points for originality; it's the old story of young love having to overcome societal obstacles. And it's a wish-fulfillment fantasy too: one of the boys is a geeky, epicene outcast and the other is a smart, guitar-playing, All-American jock. And perhaps the show (which runs about 2:05, with intermission) takes a little too long to tell its sweet but slender story.

At the same time, though, the audience really does fall in love with these characters--and, as a writer, that is not an easy effect to acheive. It is much easier to shock or offend an audience, than it is to make people care for your characters as though they are real human beings--and say "awww" aloud as the story wraps up. While the Girlfriend boys are archetypes, there is an attempt to give them backstories and witty dialogue that fleshes out their characters--they are several degrees more rounded than the young men of American Idiot. The Green Day musical certainly got my heart pumping to a punk-rock rhythm, but it didn't stir my emotions; Girlfriend left me with a sweet little smile.

Though Berkeley Rep is doing its best to encourage the link, American Idiot might actually be the wrong musical to compare Girlfriend to. The more I think about it, the more Girlfriend reminds me of a contemporary version of Kneehigh's/ACT's Brief Encounter (my review): a story of a love that society wants to repress, a wish-fulfillment fantasy where a mousy protagonist finds himself/herself desired by a smart, handsome, successful guy. And all accompanied by the most upbeat pop music of the era. In both cases, too, the show is not only about the love between its two lead characters. It's about our love for these kinds of stories and songs, and the enduring hold they have on our imaginations; about the fact that we all can remember what song we were listening to in high school when that special someone glanced our way...

"Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West": A 37th View?

This is a post in which I potentially shoot myself in the foot. So, if your name is Naomi Iizuka, and the year is 2014 or so, and you discovered my blog because I sent a grad-school application to the playwriting program at UCSD, which you lead, and you googled my name... I'd prefer it if you didn't read this!

Also, if you don't want to read spoilers for Iizuka's new play Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, or her older play 36 Views, you might also want to look away.

The Variety and San Jose Mercury-News reviews of Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, now in its world premiere at Berkeley Rep, hinted at this, but I'm just going to come out and say it: it plays like a rehashed version of Naomi Iizuka's earlier hit, 36 Views.

It's not just that the plays explore similar themes: Japanese identity, exoticism, sexuality, authenticity versus artifice in art. It's that they use the same plot twist to illuminate these themes. 36 Views takes place among contemporary art collectors who discover a rare medieval Japanese pillow book (noblewoman's intimate diary) that turns out to be a modern forgery. Part of Concerning Strange Devices takes place in Meiji-era (late 1800s) Japan, but it also features a modern storyline set in the art world--about a man who buys forged Meiji-era photographs!

Not only that, the plays have a similar rhythm. Each of the 36 scenes of 36 Views ends with a sharp noise, made by the Japanese musical instrument that consists of two sticks being struck together. Each scene of Concerning Strange Devices ends with a blinding flash of light, like a camera flash, as all of the light bulbs onstage are illuminated for a split second. One is a sound cue and one is a light cue, but they both have the same effect, of ending each scene with a BANG!, an exclamation mark.

Now, I guess it's good that Iizuka has found her voice, her style, the themes that she most enjoys exploring. But anyone who has seen both 36 Views and Concerning Strange Devices must ask, where is the line between "exploring the same themes in multiple works" and "repeating oneself"?

After the show, I was discussing this with my theatergoing companion, who brought up Wendy Wasserstein as an example of a playwright who consistently explored the same themes, but did not "repeat herself" the way that Iizuka did here. All of Wasserstein's plays are set in the same milieu and explore the upper-middle-class female experience in the late 20th century; but each one of them looks at it from a slightly different angle and together they give a well-rounded perspective. It's a very cohesive body of work, but none of the plays are copies of one another. (Perhaps it also helps that Wasserstein's plays are less "plotty" than Iizuka's--so she couldn't reuse the same plot twists.) Whereas Strange Devices literally feels like a copy of 36 Views, because of the plot similarities. Very interesting in light of Iizuka's fascination with forgery and authenticity and all of that stuff!

Also, it's been 6 years since I saw 36 Views (at Portland Center Stage, in 2004) so my memory of it is hazy, but I recall it being a more engaging play than Strange Devices. Strange Devices features a lot of direct-address monologues in which Iizuka self-consciously outlines the themes that she is exploring and the messages that she wants to convey; I would have found the play much more interesting if more of it was achieved through active dialogue. After all, it's partly a mystery about two young con artists who outwit a guy by selling him forged photos--so shouldn't it be more exciting, less oblique and ruminative, than it is?

The Meiji-era plotline also suffers from monologue overload. At the end of the play, Iizuka's character Mrs. Hewlett informs the audience that she left her husband and went to live with a sexy tattooed Japanese rickshaw driver. But it bugs me that we just have to take this on faith: I mean, I'd find it much more interesting to see a scene of Mrs. Hewlett and the rickshaw driver negotiating their relationship (and all of the barriers of language and race and class that lie between them) than to hear her tell us "I shacked up with him and the sex was amazing." And if Iizuka wants to write a monologue-heavy play, why doesn't the rickshaw driver get a speech of his own? As it is, he doesn't have a word to say in the script; doesn't this further objectify and exoticize him, rather than giving him a voice?

It feels like after last year's In the Next Room, Berkeley Rep is making a specialty of plays about bustle-clad American women from the 1880s whose sexual frustration comes to a head when they are confronted with a new technology (vibrators, cameras). And, though both plays are presumably written with the best of intentions, they both feature racially problematic treatments of some of their nonwhite characters--the Japanese rickshaw driver in Iizuka's play and the black wet-nurse in Ruhl's.

Top photo: Bruce McKenzie and Teresa Avia Lim in the modern-day story. Bottom photo: Kate Eastwood Norris, Bruce McKenzie and Johnny Wu in the Meiji-era story. Both photos by Kevin Berne, Berkeley Rep.

"Tiny Kushner": Angels, Therapists, Politics & Hitler

Five short plays make up the Tiny Kushner program at Berkeley Rep, and I think I had read all of them, at various times, before seeing them last weekend. Two of the plays, "Flip Flop Fly" and "A Shrink in Paradise," were commissioned by the New York Times Magazine for their annual "The Lives They Lived" issue. They came out when I was in high school and I remember going nuts for them--or, more precisely, for what they represented. I thought it was awesome that these short plays stood alongside the nonfiction essays that filled the rest of the magazine! And they were Kushnerian plays too--crazy and imaginative and language-drunk.

But you know, these plays weren't written to be performed, and they suffer somewhat when put onstage. "Flip Flop Fly" dramatizes a meeting--on the moon, after death--between eccentric American singer Lucia Pamela and deposed queen Geraldine of Albania. These women both led fascinating lives, but too much of the play consists of having them shout their biographies at each other. That's fine in a magazine, but not in the theater. The point of the play is that Lucia symbolizes American gumption and optimism and Geraldine symbolizes tragic European decadence, which is clever enough, but not dramatic--if these characters are both symbols and both dead, how much real conflict can there be? Berkeley Rep's staging of this piece concluded with an amusing song-and-dance routine, Lucia moving like a loose-limbed hoofer and Geraldine as though goose-stepping.

"A Shrink in Paradise" is another after-death play, imagining Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, Richard Nixon's shrink, being counseled by Metatron the Recording Angel (who evidently moonlights as an analyst). It runs into the same problem as "Flip Flop Fly": these characters are not sufficiently dynamic and dramatic. Also, it feels like Kushner is repeating himself. There was already a play, earlier in the evening, that took place in a therapist's office, with the same actors playing therapist and patient. It's yet another Kushner play that involves angels and takes place in a metaphysical realm. The big dramatic payoff is a comparison of Nixon to Hitler, but the big payoff of Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day is a comparison of Reagan and Hitler, so at some point, you want to say "Lay off the Hitler comparisons, Tony!"

Thankfully, in the final play of the evening, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy"--the play where Laura Bush reads to the dead Iraqi children--Kushner resists the temptation to compare G.W. Bush to Hitler. All the same, it's another play with an angel in it, and another play that presents a basically static situation, intended to rouse our liberal guilt and protest the Iraq War... it's agitprop, not theater.

The other two plays of the evening aren't available online but you can find them in the collection of minor Kushner works called Death & Taxes. "Terminating," about a gay man who thinks he's in love with his lesbian analyst (and doesn't that sound like a bad Woody Allen joke?) has the characters say a lot of quotable Kushnerian things, but the language gets so dense that I don't know what the point of the play is.

So in the end, the only play that really came off well was "East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis"--in which Kushner writes à la Anna Deavere Smith, a series of short monologues spoken by diverse characters, all meant to be played by the same actor. Based on a true story, this play is about a bunch of NYC city employees who get in touch with a crazy right-winger to learn how to cheat the tax code and claim that paying income tax is illegal. While it deals with political themes, it's not a hit-you-over-the-head-and-make-you-feel-guilty play like "Only We Who Guard the Mystery." The monologues are engaging and fast-paced, and actor Jim Lichtscheidl transitions effortlessly between all of the characters he plays. And again, Kushner's prescience can stun an audience: this play was written in 2000 or earlier, but the address of the right-wing group's website is Teaparty.com. The city employees' scheme got discovered and duly punished, but it is disheartening to realize that this anti-tax ideology has only spread...

The bare-bones staging further prevented these plays from coming alive: despite Berkeley Rep's ample resources, scenery was minimal and the actors wore the same costumes throughout. (I was rather impressed with the dark-red satin pantsuit worn by Kate Eifrig: she plays Queen Geraldine, Esther the NYC psychoanalyst, Metatron, and Laura Bush, and somehow her costume works for all of those characters.) All stage directions are read aloud, rather than interpreted; sometimes these are useful, as in "East Coast Ode," but sometimes very obtrusive. In "Only We Who Guard the Mystery," when the Iraqi children open their mouths to talk, Kushner writes that the only sound we hear is "the bird-music from Messiaen's opera St. François d'Assise." Hearing this stage direction read aloud, the audience feels stupid for not knowing their Messiaen, whereas if the sound-op had simply played the music, we wouldn't feel stupid and we'd hear what Kushner had really desired. For, while Kushner intends to make us feel liberal-guilty, I don't think he intends to make us feel stupid.

Photo: Valeri Mudek as Lucia Pamela and Kate Eifrig as Queen Geraldine.

"American Idiot": The Kids of War and Peace

It was announced today that American Idiot, the Green Day rock musical, is going to Broadway! All right, there's been speculation to that effect for weeks, and this press release is still quite vague. Nevertheless, I have been meaning to write about seeing this show at Berkeley Rep, so tonight's a good time to do it.


I actually saw American Idiot twice--first, with my friend Anushka, about four weeks ago (see her excellent comments on the show). We sat in the second row, which blasted our eardrums and allowed us to really admire the performers' drive and energy, but was almost too close, because there is so much going on at every moment of the show. After seeing it with Anushka, I realized that my friend Chanelle (a punk rock fan) had to see this musical too, and I wouldn't mind going again if I could sit further away, and Berkeley Rep has that wonderful half-price-tickets-for-young-people deal... so I ended up returning last week.

Seen from the balcony, American Idiot is still plenty loud, and you gain a better appreciation for the actors' blocking and the gigantic set (which includes a car hanging from the ceiling). At times, I didn't know where to look: there are about 30 video screens, and projections, and flashing LEDs, and traditional lighting effects, and a high-powered young cast who haven't had all their idiosyncrasies ironed out of them. In the true punk rock spirit, each person executes their dance steps in a slightly different way, even if they're all using the same movement vocabulary. This is not traditional Broadway, where every dancer kicks their leg at the same precise angle--instead, these performers dance according to their personalities and their instincts, meaning that everyone onstage is doing something unique.

It amazes me both that American Idiot is such a whiz-bang technological marvel (the first time I saw it, the hydraulic lift malfunctioned, requiring a 5-minute pause to fix it), and also that the cast, these flesh-and-blood human beings, have the stamina to go out and perform it every night!

The Green Day songs are catchy and some of them directly tap into the universal well of post-adolescent angst. When the cast performs the ballads "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends," it's a great communal moment as we acknowledge that we all feel the loneliness, alienation and pain described by the lyrics and set to these soaring choruses. But there are also plenty of punk-rock barnburners, such as "American Idiot" and "St. Jimmy."

The main character of American Idiot is Johnny, aka Jesus of Suburbia, played by John Gallagher, Jr. What energy that guy has! I saw him in Spring Awakening as the nerdy, twitchy, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin Moritz--and in American Idiot he was twitchy, too, but in a different way. He perfectly incarnated the snot-nosed, eye-rolling post-adolescent. Johnny is the only character with any spoken dialogue--just a few lines between some of the songs, to clarify the plot. This narration can be over-the-top, e.g. "I've got an axe to grind, and it's splittin' my head open!" But that also makes it a modern-day kind of street poetry--the bastard child of Clifford Odets.

Not that the plot of American Idiot is hard to understand: just the tale of a suburban kid who goes to the city with nothing but a backpack and a guitar, falls in love, gets hooked on drugs, ruins his life, gets clean, and returns to the 'burbs, a little wiser. There's only one thing that confused me, and it's more a problem of character than of plot. When Johnny first arrives in the city, he spots a beautiful girl (Whatsername, played by Rebecca Naomi Jones) leaning out of an upstairs window. Dressed in white, pure and angelic, she reminded me of Maria on the West Side Story fire escape. So I assumed "OK, this is going to be the old story of the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who must prove himself worthy of the love of the cool, upper-class city girl." But the next thing you know, Whatsername is dancing around in her underwear and enthusiastically shooting up drugs with Johnny. She's not Maria from West Side Story, she's Mimi from Rent--a sweet girl deep down, but also a wild child! And I feel that this should have been clearer when Whatsername first appeared.

Subplots deal with Johnny's friends' attempts to leave suburbia. Michael Esper plays the incredibly thankless role of Will, who can't go to the city with Johnny because his girlfriend is pregnant. He spends the entire show moping on a couch at stage right, unable to participate in much of the singing or dancing. My friend Anushka suggested that the show could be improved by adding "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" for Will to sing--the song fits his situation and, by singing one of Green Day's biggest hits, Esper could have a better moment in the spotlight.

Heather, Will's pregnant girlfriend, is played by Mary Faber, although the first time I saw American Idiot, it was with an understudy in the role. The understudy sang sweetly and earnestly, but Faber has more of a rock-n-roll edge to her voice, so I preferred her.

Johnny's other friend, Tunny, joins the Army and goes to Iraq. He is wounded, but finds love with a hospital nurse. The actors in these roles, Matt Caplan and Christina Sajous, have great chemistry--and they'd better, because they are performing a complex aerial ballet eight times a week! Their flying sequence, set to the song "Extraordinary Girl," is one of the show's highlights.

Anushka and I were both a little bothered, though, by the way that the gender roles in American Idiot are so reductive. They're reductive in the same way that the gender roles in Spring Awakening were--but Spring Awakening is based on a 100-year-old play, so it would be unreasonable to expect its female characters to conform to modern ideals. American Idiot, as a 21st-century musical, doesn't have that excuse. I don't mean to say that it's offensive or misogynistic... just that it doesn't allow the female characters the same complexity or subjectivity or range of experience as the men. They're all a little objectified. They're all angels. Maybe that's par for the course with punk rock?

The devil of the play, meanwhile, is St. Jimmy, the drug dealer--played by Tony Vincent, an amazing, androgynous presence. Upon reflection, it struck me as a little funny that so much money and talent has gone into a show whose moral could be described as "Hey Kids, Drugs Will Fuck You Up," as though it were a bad after-school special. But that's a little uncharitable: I don't believe American Idiot is a particularly deep show, but it is certainly a fast-paced and entertaining one, not a chore to sit through twice, and Green Day has a knack for writing songs that capture a mood.

They say that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the stupidity (idiocy?) of the American public. But I also think that no one has ever gone broke overestimating American adolescents' craving for works of art that tap into the angst of their generation. I predict that American Idiot becomes a big hit on Broadway.

Top photo: John Gallagher Jr. and Tony Vincent. Bottom photo: Gallagher.

Wee Thomas's Army

This week I went out to Berkeley Rep to see their production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Even though I love Martin McDonagh, I wasn't originally planning to see this show, until a friend invited me on the spur of the moment. I'd already seen Lieutenant of Inishmore when it was on Broadway, and in general I'd rather spend my money to see a play I've never seen before, than to see a second production of a play I'm already familiar with. Especially when it's a play that doesn't vary a lot in the interpretation, as McDonagh's works tend not to--I mean, any Shakespeare play allows for multiple good stagings that do not resemble one another in the least, but I would think that all good productions of Lieutenant of Inishmore would basically resemble one another.

One reason it was good to see Lieutenant of Inishmore again is because I wasn't an ideal audience member when I saw it the first time. That was in the summer of 2006, on a day when I had flown to New York on a red-eye from Portland that morning, met a whole lot of new people (my fellow winners of the Young Playwright's contest, plus the contest's organizers), run around the city all day... So as I sat up in the balcony of the Lyceum Theater that night, watching the play, I alternated between thinking "This is fecking amazing!" and "I can barely keep my eyes open!" Yes, even though Lieutenant has a lot of stuff to rivet your attention--a tight plot and structure, McDonagh's great dialogue, plenty of gunfire and gore--I missed parts of it due to my own tiredness. And I appreciated getting to experience it as a complete work of art at the Berkeley Rep on Tuesday.

As I said, I think all good productions of this play are going to substantially resemble one another--but that's not to fault it as a work of art. In fact, it made me realize again the control that McDonagh has over his material, and his skill at creating memorable images as well as memorable dialogue--when the lights come up to reveal a shirtless James hanging upside-down by his ankles, for instance, or the visual contrast of the girl with short hair and the boy with long hair.

One major difference I noticed between the two productions was in the character of Davey, the aforementioned boy with long hair. Davey is none too bright and none too brave, and a lot of the laughs in the play come at his expense. On Broadway, he was portrayed by the tall and gangly Domhnall Gleeson, who "reads" as several years older than Adam Farabee, who played the role in Berkeley. Gleeson's Davey came across as being maybe 20 years old--close to Padraic's age, and certainly older than his 16-year-old sister, Mairead. He also wore an intentionally silly costume that included a Motörhead T-shirt and a ridiculous headband. The effect of all of this was to make Davey a real moron--a character whom it was easy to laugh at, but hard to identify with. Farabee, though, comes across as being about 15 years old--thus, Mairead's put-upon kid brother rather than her stupid older brother. And while his red wig was decidedly silly, he had no headband and wore a plain white T-shirt, the better to show the eventual bloodstains. Therefore, while Davey was still pretty dumb (I mean, you're never going to get around the fact that he loves the smell of shoe polish), his stupidity was more forgivable, because you saw that he was just a terrified 15-year-old kid underneath, rather than a too-dumb-to-live 20-year-old. I just can't decide what's the better approach to his character, now: to give him this more rounded and human dimension, or to make him into a mocking caricature like many of the other inhabitants of McDonagh-land?

Photo: James Carpenter as Donny and Adam Farabee as Davey. (credit: broadwayworld.com)

The Operating Theater: "In the Next Room, or, The Vibrator Play"

Last week I attended the first-ever public performance of Sarah Ruhl's latest, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) at Berkeley Rep. I'd been hearing about this one for a while (and I'm glad she amended the title) so it was nice to be in the San Francisco Bay Area when it premiered! This is also probably the best area of the country to premiere such a play, considering San Francisco's reputation (the famous sex-toy shop Good Vibrations even gave away freebies at the 30-Below after-party). It is based on the historical oddity that vibrators were one of the first electronic devices ever invented, used by medical doctors to induce "paroxysm" in their female patients and cure them of "hysteria."

In the Next Room might be the first Sarah Ruhl play that contains nothing in it to violate the laws of physics, biology, chronology, etc. It's still got a wide streak of lyricism, and it's based on a quirky (but true!) premise, but everything that happens in it falls within the realms of human plausibility. Indeed, I suspect that Ruhl made a conscious choice to use Victorian-style dramaturgy in this Victorian-set play. In the Next Room is staged to take place on only one, richly detailed set, representing the parlor of the Givings' home and the adjacent room that Dr. Givings has appropriated for his medical examination room/"operating theater." And the characters never break the fourth wall, either. It is impressive to see Ruhl the rule-breaker, queen of the impossible stage direction, create an entertaining and original play using a more conventional style of playwriting.

The play's two heroines also seem based on Victorian iconography: chatty, bubbly blonde Catherine Givings (you get the sense that Catherine was a "popular girl" in school) and haunted, sensitive brunette Sabrina Daldry. What's interesting, though, is I feel that most modern playwrights would be attracted to Sabrina's darkness and pain, and make her the principal character. Instead, Ruhl focuses on Catherine, showing us that this woman, who at first seems comparatively shallow and untroubled, has her own insecurities and her own discomfort with the constraints of Victorian society; she just hides it better than the "hysterical" Sabrina does.

I did have some structural quibbles about In the Next Room. The second act is longer than the first and yet I still didn't feel like the story of the secondary couple (the Daldrys) was satisfactorily resolved. Also, for much of the play, I felt that the subplot wherein Catherine hires Elizabeth, an African-American woman, as a wet-nurse for her baby daughter was unnecessary. The play is already juggling several large subjects (gender, sexuality, mental and physical health) so that it seems overly ambitious to tackle race relations as well. Also, though the play obviously strives for political correctness, it still felt stereotypical, or condescending, that Elizabeth is the only woman in the play who has achieved orgasm during sex. (You know, the old cliché that black people are less inhibited, more sexual than whites.) Still, Elizabeth eventually delivers one of the most affecting monologues I have heard in a long time... so does that make it worth it? I don't know.

What is most revolutionary about In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is how innocent it is. The characters' attitudes toward the vibrator are governed by this Victorian-era syllogism:

a) Sexual pleasure is sordid
b) Thus, respectable upper-middle-class white women do not experience sexual pleasure
c) Thus, the "paroxysms" that the vibrator induces in these women have nothing to do with sex, or sexual pleasure
d) Thus, the vibrator is perfectly healthy and wholesome

So the amazing thing is seeing how these women, who are so inhibited in every other aspect of their lives, are completely uninhibited when it comes to the vibrator, because they don't know any better. In this play, emotions and relationships can be messy and lead to guilt, but orgasms are always guilt-free. And even in the 21st century, that is a bold and refreshing sentiment.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is at Berkeley Rep through March 15. I strongly recommend it, despite my quibbles--I haven't even mentioned how funny it is!

Top photo: Maria Dizzia as Sabrina, Hannah Cabell as Catherine.
Bottom photo: Melle Powers as Elizabeth, Hannah Cabell as Catherine, Joaquin Torres as Leo Irving.
All images © Berkeley Repertory Theatre. All rights reserved.

Baghdad by the Bay: "The Arabian Nights" at Berkeley Rep

There's at least one big pitfall in adapting The Arabian Nights into a stage production: Scheherezade's stories must cast the same spell over the audience as they do over King Shahryar; we must feel that they are captivating enough to pique the interest and eventually melt the heart of the most implacable man in Arabia. Anything less than that amounts to failure, and will only result in a spate of snarky reviews that say things like "Shahryar had to listen to these stories for 1001 nights, but I couldn't even stand them for two hours."

And thus, consider it the highest and hardest-won compliment when I say that I could have gone on watching Mary Zimmerman's The Arabian Nights forever.

This was my first time experiencing Zimmerman's work, and while I loved her aesthetic, more elements of it were familiar to me than I expected. It's the kind of storytelling-theater that I recognize from years of acting classes, full of movement work, playful use of props, actors switching fluidly between narration and impersonation. Even some improv, in a scene where two actors (who vary from performance to performance) are called upon to invent comic monologues listing what is in the "Wonderful Bag." In short, a great, teeming theatrical panoply. Even the prologue dazzled: the ensemble unrolled heaps of Oriental rugs, and elaborate lanterns dropped down from the flies, transforming the bare stage into an Arabian souk before you could believe your eyes. Beautifully designed and costumed, but otherwise low-tech theater, the kind where (as Tony Kushner says of Angels in America) the magic occurs because the strings are visible.

Zimmerman has selected lesser-known Arabian Nights stories for this play (no Aladdin, Sinbad, or Ali Baba), with an eye toward covering a wide range of moods. Act I ends with the most shamelessly extended fart joke since Blazing Saddles, while Act II ends with a moving parable about the importance of telling stories and passing knowledge along. In general, the first act is more comedic and the second is more dramatic--a time-honored, and therefore timeless, structure.

Everything feels of a piece, though, because life itself is vivid and varied, and because there's a great ensemble of actors working their hearts out to put it over. There was an understudy at the performance I saw, but I couldn't even discern which actor it was, since the whole group was so seamless. They're an attractive and truly multicultural ensemble who dance, sing, clown, play drums. And while Sofia Jean Gomez, who plays Scheherezade, may look like a conventional blonde ingenue, her attractively husky and authoritative voice makes her perfect for the role of the storyteller.

In an interview printed in the program, Zimmerman notes:

Before beginning rehearsals for the first Arabian Nights [presented by Lookingglass Theatre in 1992]...I was full of a great many theoretical and overtly political ideas for its staging that would call attention to its contemporary relevance... [But] the stories spoke more than loudly enough for themselves: their humanity, wisdom, humor, vulgarity, and poetry were manifest... Almost none of that original impulse toward overt commentary remains.

Indeed, and thankfully so. Politics and didacticism would be antithetical to the storytelling magic that The Arabian Nights must create. Though one episode of the play has a slight "Muslims! They're Just Like Us!" feeling to it (a wise girl named Sympathy the Learned offers advice on living a virtuous life and reminds us that Muslims consider Jesus a prophet), the rest of the work makes no trumpeting claims to contemporary relevance--it doesn't need to. There are a few jokes that rely on pop-culture allusions (and which jolted me out of the play, honestly) but the rest of the humor would work well in any culture and at any time period. And the occasional refrain of "Baghdad, city of peace and poets" is poignant without being heavy-handed.

Late in Act II there is a scene where all the ensemble members talk over one another, dividing into small groups and enacting multiple stories simultaneously. And I could have stayed in the theater until Mary Zimmerman had fully staged each of those stories in front of me, one by one. Or I could even have stayed listening to that overlapping dialogue, stories flowing into stories all night--a testament to the endless power of human imagination, and the desire to know what happens next, that great art provokes.

Note to any readers in Kansas City or Chicago: This was a sell-out hit at Berkeley Rep and I almost didn't get to see it. Book your tickets ASAP for when it comes to Kansas City Rep or Lookingglass Theater!

Top image: Evan Zes with the Ensemble. Bottom image: Sofia Jean Gomez and Alana Arenas (the actress I met on the train). Photos by Kevin Berne, © Berkeley Rep.

"Yellowjackets" isn't black and white

Oh jeez, I promised you more about Yellowjackets, didn't I, and now over a week has gone by? All right, better late than never. After all, the show is at Berkeley Rep for another full month--till October 12.

I went to see Yellowjackets with Anushka, a friend of mine from high school, who turned out to be the ideal theatergoing companion. Because Yellowjackets takes place at a high school, it made us reminisce about our own teenage years and how the characters reminded us of people we used to know. Plus, back in the day, Anushka directed me in a production of Spinning Into Butter, which, like Yellowjackets, is a play about an ostensibly liberal and p.c. school confronting tough issues of race and class.

Spinning Into Butter is simple and straightforward, however, compared with the interwoven voices and subplots of Yellowjackets. The play feels like it could explode at any moment--because Berkeley High School in 1994, the play's setting, is also on the verge of explosion. It takes place in the '90s because that's when Itamar Moses, the playwright, was himself a student at Berkeley High, but the themes still feel very potent and contemporary. These kids could be today's kids, except that they are wearing awful flannel shirts and pale jeans. Though who has time to think about fashion when you're going to high school in the middle of one of the most liberal cities in the country, and yet you feel like you're going to get beaten up any day? Or when you resent the school for its "tracking" system, in which students are separated according to ability? Or when you've got to head up the student newspaper or prepare a skit for Cinco de Mayo or be sure you get into the best college?

I should mention that Itamar was one of the first playwrights I ever met, three summers ago when he was workshopping Celebrity Row at PCS. He's a cool guy, he's been rather dazzlingly successful at a young age, and his writing style--big, smart, energetic plays that grapple with tough questions without losing their sense of humor--is one that appeals to me. So I was looking forward to Yellowjackets, and the script definitely feels "Itamar-esque." Refreshingly, it's a play about teenagers that isn't about "teen angst"--or, if it does feature some troubled kids, also delves into the larger social forces that cause their troubles. The play propels itself via smart and fast-paced dialogue (Anushka and I wondered if we were ever so articulate as teenagers) though there is one dazzling moment of physical action in Act Two that gets repeated to end the show.

Yellowjackets examines the issues from all sides and refuses to name a villain--indeed, if it chose a villain, mightn't that be interpreted as racist in some way? We learn that many of the conflicts in the play arose because of poor communication and the like, so no one is really to blame, and yet everyone (i.e. "the system") is to blame. But the eventual "the kids are alright, if only they reached out and listened to one another" message felt a little naive, like the play was pulling its punches and underestimating how powerful racial hatred can be.

The cast of Yellowjackets is mostly young, because the script requires every actor to play a high-school student as well as an older authority figure or two. Because I've seen so much student theater, I had no trouble accepting young actors as older characters, but I wonder if that might be more jarring for other audience members. Some of the actors play their older characters as caricatures with funny accents or physicalities, but my favorite performers were equally believable as teenagers and as adults. For instance, Jahmela Biggs is convincing as both high-school basketball star Tamika and as sensitive-to-racism teacher Ms. Robbins. Brian Rivera is the only cast member who doesn't convince as a high school student (he just looks too old) but I liked him in the role of Mr. Behzad, a teacher filled with Chicano pride.

The multilayered plot of Yellowjackets kept me absorbed throughout, except during Act Two, when someone in the audience had a loud coughing fit and I briefly took my eyes from the stage. As I looked around the theater, I was startled, freaked out even, to realize that virtually every face in the audience was white. I suppose I should be used to this by now--I go to enough mainstream theater to know I rarely see ethnic minorities there--but man, it's sobering. And it jibes with the point of Yellowjackets: that even in a place as self-congratulatorily liberal as Berkeley, there are still hidden systems that keep different ethnic groups separate.

Links: The LA Times and the SF Chronicle have both published profiles of Itamar in the last week.... Berkeley Rep has started a blog on their website to take you behind the scenes of Yellowjackets.

All images copyright Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Top, Jahmela Biggs and Ben Freeman; bottom, Craig Piaget and Brian Rivera.