"Grandeur" at the Magic Theatre: a protean figure in a conventional play

Carl Lumbly is music legend Gil Scott-Heron and Rafael Jordan is journalist Steve Barron in Grandeur at the Magic Theatre. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

The set for Grandeur, the new play by Han Ong at the Magic Theatre, doesn’t look particularly grand at first glance: it’s a hoarder’s apartment in Harlem, with stacks of books and videocassettes and shabby old ‘60s furniture. But when the show begins and its central character, Gil Scott-Heron (Carl Lumbly) takes his seat in an old armchair, his face illuminated by a solitary lamp, there is no doubt that we are in the presence of majesty. In Lumbly’s portrayal, Scott-Heron is a wily old enchanter, a Prospero laying traps for the young and ingenuous. Later on, he plays with a Rubik’s cube as though it were a piece of spell-casting apparatus.

In Grandeur, the young person who must evade Scott-Heron’s traps is one Steve Barron (Rafael Jordan), a freelance journalist on assignment for the New York Review of Books. (It’s a somewhat distracting coincidence that this character’s name is just one consonant away from “Steve Bannon.”) Steve is an earnest and preppy black man whose face is hardly visible behind his mop of hair—it’s like he knows he shouldn’t steal the spotlight from Gil, a much stronger personality with many more stories to tell.

We also meet Scott-Heron’s caretaker, Julie (Safiya Fredericks), who mixes abiding affection for the old man with exasperation at his shortcomings, not least of which is his addiction to crack cocaine. Julie is also on hand to inform Steve of his role in all of this: “You’re death. You know that right? I mean not death-death but […] like a herald.” This heavy-handed metaphor gets under Steve’s skin and causes him to have an unconvincing breakdown near the top of Act 2.

Much more compelling is Scott-Heron’s anti-capitalist political rant, revealing his ambivalence toward the rappers who came after him. They sample his records and call him the “Godfather of Rap,” but their materialistic values are far different from his own. There’s also an implied contrast between the way Scott-Heron plays with language in his jazzman-poet fashion and the way a reporter uses language to pin down facts with precision.

Grandeur is obviously an attempt to wrestle with Scott-Heron’s legacy and his contradictions. It takes place in the last year of the musician’s life, just after he has released his first album in 16 years. (While Steve Barron and his NYRB article are fictitious, The New Yorker published an excellent profile of Scott-Heron, written by Alec Wilkinson, around this time. I’ve read hundreds of New Yorker profiles but this one has stuck with me.) But although Scott-Heron was undoubtedly a dramatic personality—brilliant and flawed, irascible and damaged—Grandeur is not, itself, a very dramatic show. It’s too bad that a play about an innovative and charismatic musician should have such a well-worn structure and setup.

Grandeur, by Han Ong, directed by Loretta Greco, is playing at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco through June 25. More information here.

A Sentimental Journey through France and Austria: "The Baltimore Waltz" at Magic Theatre

Anna (Lauren English) gets a diagnosis from The Third Man (Greg Jackson)
while her brother Carl (Patrick Alparone) looks on. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

Last night, after I saw Magic Theatre’s production of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, I waited for a bus in a driving rainstorm and eavesdropped on two middle-aged women discussing Trump’s airstrike in Syria. “I’m just waiting for World War III to start,” said one. “Yeah, I look up and expect a nuclear bomb to fall on us any day now,” said the other. I’ve been having similar thoughts—how could I not? I’m about to turn 30 and I have serious doubts that I will make it to 40. And in response, I’ve thought a lot about chucking it all and going on a hedonistic spree—traveling and eating good food and hobnobbing with interesting people. Voraciousness in the face of death.

So I can relate to Anna, the heroine of The Baltimore Waltz, an American woman in her early 30s who receives a fatal diagnosis of Acquired Toilet Disease (ATD) and responds by taking a tour of the great cities of Europe and having a lot of sex. Lauren English’s performance as Anna shows a woman shaking off her good-girl inhibitions and letting her instincts drive her. Accompanying Anna on her European trip is her brother Carl (Patrick Alparone, precise and dapper in flannel pajamas, velvet slippers, and a suit jacket). Every other character in the show—doctors, waiters, European locals—is played by Greg Jackson, who seems to have made a specialty of quick-change comic versatility: his bio also lists credits for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and The 39 Steps.

Carl & Anna in the Parisian croissant-bed. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

There’s a strong sense of whimsy to The Baltimore Waltz, as Carl and Anna travel through a primary-colored, storybook version of Europe. (It’s probably significant that both characters work with children in their day jobs: he is a children’s librarian and she is a first-grade teacher.) In Paris, the headboard of the bed is decorated with croissants and the stagehands wear berets; in Amsterdam, the bed has a tulip-patterned coverlet and the stagehands wear Dutch bonnets.

Indeed, if The Baltimore Waltz were ever made into a movie, I think it should be directed by Wes Anderson, that most whimsical of filmmakers. It already features a lot of Anderson motifs: a caper-style plot, train journeys with stylish luggage, Central European bellhops who wear those funny little caps, characters who seem suspended between childhood and adulthood, allusions to classic cinema (The Third Man, in this case). This production reinforces the Anderson connection by having the actors take their bows to Joe Dassin’s song “Les Champs-Elysées,” which also plays at the end of The Darjeeling Limited. 

The trick with whimsy in theater or cinema, of course, is to employ it in service of a deeper emotion. Eventually, The Baltimore Waltz reveals that there is a heartbreaking reason for all of the kookiness and stereotypes of Carl and Anna’s European trip. Childlike escapist fantasies can be a defense mechanism against real, adult pain.

The Baltimore Waltz plays at Magic Theatre through April 16, 2017. I received a free ticket through the Magic Theatre’s press office.

"Hir" at the Magic Theatre: Neither here nor there

The Lily's Revenge, Taylor Mac's 4.5-hour carnivalesque fantasia that the Magic Theatre produced in 2011, is still one of my favorite theatergoing experiences in San Francisco. It turned me into a raving Taylor Mac fangirl and filled me with anticipation for his new play at the magic, Hir. I knew that this would be a very different piece from Lily's; Mac isn't starring in it, and it's a two-hour dysfunctional-family drama with a streak of dark comedy. Still, what I loved most about The Lily's Revenge was how smart and well-constructed the script was – it had great bones, underneath all the sequins and makeup. I looked forward to seeing what Mac would do when working in a more realistic mode. I hoped that Hir would be intelligent and insightful and, in its own way, as revolutionary as The Lily's Revenge.

Jax Jackson as Max. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

Hir tells the story of Isaac, a soldier who returns from a 3-year tour of duty to find his home in disarray. His father, Arnie, has suffered a debilitating stroke. His mother, Paige, is refusing to clean the house, running the air conditioner full blast, and abusing and neglecting her invalid husband, all as revenge for the years of domestic abuse he inflicted on her. And his teenage sister is now his teenage brother, Max, a "transmasculine fag" who insists on the pronouns "ze" and "hir."

In its title and its marketing, Hir purports to focus on gender-identity issues. But Max isn't the protagonist; ze's the last character to enter, and at times, hir story feels like an afterthought. Paige's ego and personality dominate the play, and she seems to do most of the talking in Act I. Meanwhile, the character it's easiest to identify with is Isaac – he's shocked to discover how crazy and dysfunctional his family has become, and we're right there making those discoveries alongside him. What this means, though, is that the character we identify with is the only person onstage who's a young, able-bodied, heterosexual, white, cisgender male. I have to believe that Taylor Mac is too smart not to have done this on purpose – but I can't figure out why, after making his name writing plays that speak from the perspective of "drag queens, freaks, queers, mermaids, shamans," he is now asking us to identify with a straight white dude.

Ben Euphrat as Isaac, Nancy Opel as Paige. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

And, in the end, there were a lot of things about Hir that I just couldn't figure out. It's a perplexing, unsettling play – in the sense that I never understood why the story was being told or what it aimed to accomplish. (The rest of the audience seemed to feel the same way; the applause was the most half-hearted, "WTF was that?" applause I've ever heard.) The Lily's Revenge felt revolutionary both in terms of its form and its content: revolutionary in its empathy, its inclusiveness, its sense of community. Hir feels like a throwback, despite the references to 21st-century issues like the Iraq war, crystal meth, and transgender teens. To a large extent, it's a "they fuck you up, your mom and dad" play – and we've all seen plays like that before.

I suppose it's refreshing to see a play in which a soldier has been made more empathic, rather than more brutal, by the experience of war; and in which a suburban mom embraces her child's gender transition rather than being freaked out by it. But that isn't enough to make Hir a compelling evening of theater. Moreover, Paige's commitment to Max's gender identity may defy stereotype, but in many other respects, she's the biggest cliche of all: the smothering, self-absorbed, monstrous mother, Mama Rose on steroids. Paige is depicted as someone who's read a lot of feminist and postmodernist theory and then completely misinterpreted it, e.g. she thinks that because her husband beat her, it gives her the right to make his life miserable after he has his stroke. You can imagine a conservative pundit watching Hir and then saying "see, feminism turns women into man-hating monsters!" I'm sure that this can't be Taylor Mac's intent… but then, I'm not sure what his intent is. Is Hir supposed to depict the here-and-now? Because it really felt neither here nor there.

A Bouquet of Additional Thoughts on "The Lily's Revenge"

Unquestionably, the major event of May 2011 for me was The Lily's Revenge. First, as I said in my earlier blog post, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and it led me to ask myself many questions about what I want to do with my art, what theater can and should accomplish, why I tend to write realistic narrative plays if that's not necessarily the kind of theater that moves me the most, etc. In short, Lily's twined itself around my insides and gave me what I call, partly but not really in jest, "an artistic crisis." Which, I figure, is only healthy; at my age, I ought to have artistic crises. Though I feel humbled and confused, I also feel awed, moved, and inspired. It's funny, I think of myself as a sensitive aesthete, but rarely am I ever so in thrall to a work of art that I see. It happened more often when I was still in school.

Meanwhile, the Lily's cast and crew discovered my blog post and passed it around, and Taylor Mac himself linked to it on Twitter, which completely made my day, and the Magic Theatre invited me to the cast party! So I ended up seeing the show again, at its closing matinée, and dining and drinking and dancing with the cast afterward. I am so grateful to the good and generous Magic staff and Lily's cast. At the party I did not feel like a poser or an interloper, even though I am just an enthusiastic audience member and they had been collaborating on this massive project for 2 months. But then, The Lily's Revenge is the kind of show where you can get randomly hugged by a cast member before you take your seat, where the audience shouldn't feel like they are "just" spectators, where it's all about building connections and spreading the love. The closing-day audience was so supportive -- the show ran about 15 minutes over because we kept interrupting it to applaud -- and the party was so warm and loving. It expanded my faith in humanity.

And I'm glad, too, that I got over my petty fears of "will people think I'm weird if I see the show a second time? Is my having gone nuts for this show a sign of weakness?" Loving something, being enthusiastic, is so often seen as uncool. It is so easy to be jaded. Thus, one of the many points of The Lily's Revenge is that love and commitment are acts of courage, not of weakness. It is an un-jaded piece of theater, and the least we can do is to be un-jaded in return.

OK, by this point you probably think that I have joined some hippie cult, and I admit that The Lily's Revenge is the very definition of cult theater. (if that's not a tautology -- didn't theater evolve out of religious rites and cult ceremonies?) It's something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it, and it resonated very deeply with themes that are preoccupying me.

My blog post about Lily's, therefore, led to some amazing things for me. But I do wonder if it helped to sell any tickets. In contrast to its New York production, The Lily's Revenge wasn't a sellout success here in San Francisco; when I bought my ticket for the closing performance, there were still plenty of seats left. Well, in New York the show got rave reviews in the New York Times, Time Out New York, etc; here, the show got a polite, but hardly enthusiastic review in the Chron and a very snarky headline ("Five-Hour Play Is Five Hours Too Long") in SF Weekly.

Even more strange, to my mind, was the fact that the theater community wasn't as excited about The Lily's Revenge as I expected. Several friends told me that the only reason they wanted to see it is that they knew some of the performers. OK, thanks to that 35-person cast, every theater person in San Francisco knew someone in Lily's (let's praise the Magic, again, for staging the show with local actors and directors) and it's laudable to support your friends' endeavors. But still -- I was amazed that that was the only reason people wanted to see it. If you love theater, why wouldn't you want to see a big, ambitious, wacky and entertaining 4+ hour epic that roared into town in a cloud of literal and figurative glitter? Why wasn't that enough of a selling point?

I can speak only for myself, but I was excited about The Lily's Revenge from the day the Magic Theatre announced it -- long before I knew that friends of mine would be acting in/directing/hanging lights for the show. In fact, my first thought was "SUCK IT, NEW YORK" (my internal monologue can be surprisingly vulgar). I had read the New York reviews and also heard that many New Yorkers who wanted to see this play had been unable to get tickets. But now it was coming to San Francisco, and I'd get to see it! And probably without having to stand in a line! Sometimes there are advantages to living in a smaller, less theater-crazed town. But then, somehow, it went from "Yay, I can get a ticket" to "Hell, I could buy twenty tickets to closing day if I could afford them! What's the matter with San Francisco?"

Is it that we resent the Magic for devoting its resources to a New York-based artist, in a season where they did not produce any Bay Area playwrights? There seem to be two competing schools of thought on this matter: one says "theater should be local, support local artists and stories, don't let New York City dominate the national theatrical conversation, don't be in thrall to the latest New York hit." The other school of thought says, "Isn't it awful that most new plays get only one production and have a very hard time getting produced again? Stop the premiere-itis!" On the one hand, we're supposed to condemn the Magic for producing a "New York hit"; on the other hand, we're supposed to praise it for giving a second production to a challenging and complex play! This kind of thinking can really tie you up in knots -- and take your attention away from the value of the work itself.

And when it comes to the work itself, did The Lily's Revenge affect me so deeply because I was already favorably disposed to it, because I'd looked forward to it for a year? I realize that's a possibility; but it doesn't make my reaction any less true or valid.

Besides, I went to Lily's expecting to have a good time at a crazy and ambitious piece of theater; I was not expecting to have an artistic crisis! And I wrote my earlier blog post about the show in the hopes of encouraging others to go see it, not in the hopes of getting invited to the cast party and meeting Taylor Mac! I really could not have predicted any of this. And I feel very lucky.

Flower Power: "The Lily's Revenge" at Magic Theatre

First things first: Don't be scared, it's not really five hours. It's four hours and fifteen minutes, and Magic Theatre has just slashed ticket prices for the final dozen performances, so what are you waiting for? Don't read my blog post on The Lily's Revenge -- run out and experience it for yourself!
Seriously, there are so many things I want to say about this amazing piece of theater, but I also realize that one reason I loved it so much is that I had almost no idea what to expect and was thus continually surprised. You don't even get a playbill until after the show is over; additionally, the playbill doesn't have a lot of extraneous material in it -- no interview with Taylor Mac or essay(s) about elements of the play. I've seen many plays that aren't very challenging or hard to understand, but whose playbills are nonetheless filled with explanatory essays. Whereas The Lily's Revenge is a five-act, four-hour allegorical fantasia about marriage, environmentalism, community, narrative, meta-theatre, and more -- and the creators have faith that the play can speak for itself. This feels almost radical.

But then, nearly everything about The Lily's Revenge is radical and nervy and surprising and filled with an insane amount of faith and trust. It is a massive undertaking: it has something for everyone, but, because it's so overwhelming/overstuffed, it's also guaranteed to include elements that put you off. Nonetheless, the result is incredibly inspiring on multiple levels. When was the last time you saw a play that began with the gutsy pronouncement "This play could very well last for the rest of your life!" and then actually lived up to that promise? At least, it's been three days since I saw The Lily's Revenge, and I still can't stop thinking about it, and I know it will reverberate for me for a long time to come.

But what's it about, anyway? A stripped-down plot description would be something like: "A walking, talking Lily seeks to become a human so that he can marry the Bride, and gets caught up in a war between the God of Nostalgia and the God of the Here-and-Now." New York theater artist Taylor Mac is the show's creator, writer, and star performer. He acts, mugs, sings, plays the ukulele, exudes charisma, looks good in a tuxedo and even better in his green-glitter-lipped, flower-collared Lily drag. The Lily, as written, is kind of a diva, and Mac is good at grabbing the spotlight, but also good at stepping back and letting his 30+ collaborators have their time to shine.

All of the actors perform with impressive commitment, energy, and passion at every moment; I don't know how they keep it up over the course of 255 minutes, six shows a week. You get the sense that all of the performers and, indeed, all of the artistic collaborators truly believe in what they're doing -- if anyone was even slightly skeptical, this show would topple like a house of cards. But everyone has willingly put all their eggs in Taylor Mac's basket (big kudos to the Magic Theatre for taking this risk!) and they know that this gamble will pay off.

For The Lily's Revenge isn't "just" a play -- it's an exercise in building community between artists and audience. There are moments of audience participation throughout the play and during all three intermissions. The first intermission is a communal dinner, the second is a cast-and-audience dance party. I spent most of the third intermission in line for the restroom, but nonetheless got serenaded by a Lilac as I waited! The intermissions are delightful palate-cleansers; plus, they make you more involved in the show and thus, more receptive to what it has to say.

And The Lily's Revenge has got a lot on its mind. It's a play about marriage, and it has a very queer sensibility, but it's not explicitly about gay marriage. It's a plea for love but also for thoughtfulness -- for deeply caring, in every sense of the word. There's also the big theme about Nostalgia vs. the Here-and-Now; how nostalgia, in the form of outmoded cultural narratives, can be used as a tool of stasis or oppression.

The play is so dense that I am still realizing things about its craftsmanship and structure. For instance, in Act I, the characters frequently name-drop Hegel. In the car on the way home, I realized the reason for this: Hegel's big idea was thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and that's the way The Lily's Revenge is structured. I also got a lot out of reading what critics have said about the play's New York and San Francisco productions. I love this quote from Backstage: "A surprising but suddenly obvious connection lands just right: Both theater and marriage are essentially pure, intimate relationships that have only been corrupted into institutions."

The structure of the play even mirrors the central conflict between nostalgia and the here-and-now. The Lily's Revenge comes down pretty clearly on the side of living in the present (that's probably another reason for the audience participation and community-building), but Taylor Mac also calls himself a "pastiche artist." And a love of pastiche means a love of old-fashioned or passé artistic genres -- that is, a love of nostalgia. A play about anthropomorphic flowers is automatically nostalgic; reminiscent of children's theater, and of works of art from the Victorian era -- think of the talking flowers in Alice in Wonderland.

For a pastiche artist, there are two challenges: to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, and to create something that speaks to the present moment rather than being mired in the past. The Lily's Revenge, in its beautiful and crazy way, overcomes both these hurdles. Like a flower, it has its roots sunk deep into the earth, and a spirit that blossoms toward the light.

Image 1: Lily (Taylor Mac) has his diva moment, surrounded by the Flower Girls; photo by Jennifer Reiley.
Image 2: The Great Longing (Mollena Williams) tries to shut Lily up; photo by Daniel Nicolletta.

The Girl in the Boys' Club: "What We're Up Against" by Theresa Rebeck

A good friend of mine, knowing that playwriting can be a bit of a boys' club, recently forwarded me Molly Lambert's article In Which We Teach You How To Be a Woman in Any Boys' Club from thisrecording.com (also seen on Jezebel). Good essay; I enjoyed it. And, more than anything, I wished that I could forward it to Eliza, a young woman I met last week -- a smart and driven architect working at a firm that's a poisonous, hostile boys' club.

But I can't actually forward it to Eliza, because she is a fictitious character: the heroine of Theresa Rebeck's play What We're Up Against, currently in its world premiere at the Magic Theatre. Still, it's funny how much Rebeck's play comes across as a dramatization of the situations brought up in Lambert's article. Lambert talks a lot about what you should do if there are two women in the boys' club -- you and someone else -- and the same situation arises in What We're Up Against. There is another woman at the architecture firm besides Eliza: Janice, a mediocre architect who is happy to be the token woman in the boys' club. I liked how Theresa Rebeck is willing to show that not all women are feminists devoted to shaking up the status quo. But I thought that sometimes Janice was portrayed as unbelievably stupid (it is one thing to be a mediocre architect; it is another thing to say "Why can't we just rip all those air ducts out, anyway?"). And the play would have been more complex if there were a clearer sense that Janice was sometimes playing a role, emphasizing her femininity and helplessness so that her co-workers would continue to like her. As it is, she really did seem just that naive.

Eliza, on the other hand, is a tough cookie who is sick of being passed over -- especially when Weber, a man who has not been at the firm for as long as she has, is the new golden boy. Her co-workers tell her that, in architecture, no one does anything interesting their first ten years, but Eliza can't help feeling that gender plays a part. And she hasn't even heard how her co-workers Stu and Ben talk about her behind her back: the first scene of the play features the men saying that Eliza is a "bitch" and a "cunt" after she pulls a stunt to get their attention. "This is what we're up against," one of them says; I love how Rebeck's title can cut both ways. The men feel threatened by their female colleague, but "what we're up against" also refers to the sexism that we, as women, are up against.

I also liked how Rebeck is willing to make Eliza unlikable at times. Even though Eliza's cause is just, she sometimes goes about things the wrong way. She can be abrasive, she can be too unaware of what other people think of her, she can miscalculate and overreach. I couldn't help comparing her to Amanda, the heroine of Sarah Treem's A Feminine Ending, another recent-ish play about a young woman in a boys' club (Amanda is an oboist and aspiring classical-music composer). Amanda has her flaws -- she's insecure, and she can act impulsively -- but those flaws are a lot more endearing than Eliza's flaws. And I think that a play is stronger when its main character is not wholly admirable. At the very least, it helps redeem Rebeck from the charge that she is being one-sided and polemical.

Rebeck has a good grasp of the way that workplace sexism manifests itself in the 21st century. Unlike in the Mad Men era, none of the men make lewd remarks about Eliza, even though she is an attractive young woman. The oldest man, Stu, has the most reductive view of gender. The youngest man, Weber, definitely feels threatened by Eliza, but less because of her gender than because she's simply better than him. He's happy to join the old boys' club because it works to his benefit, but he is less inherently sexist than Stu.

I don't want to oversell What We're Up Against. It realistically portrays an important part of modern life that is not often shown onstage: office politics crossed with gender politics. But it is sometimes hard to care about the architects' project of redesigning a shopping mall, and the supporting characters could use more complexity. The first scene (in which the theme of sexism is the most prominent) is funny but a bit heavy-handed, and the subsequent scenes take too long to deepen the themes.

But I enjoy seeing feminist themes in mainstream theater, and I appreciate that Rebeck has written the role of Eliza, which allows an actress to portray emotions and qualities that are uncommon in roles written for young women, but which are very easy to relate to.

What We're Up Against is at San Francisco's Magic Theatre through March 6.

Photo from Magic Theatre. Sarah Nealis as Eliza; Rod Knapp as Ben.

$10,090 from 44 Donors

A few months ago I blogged about The Sunset Challenge, the Magic Theatre's campaign to raise $10,000 from donors to go toward the writing and production of a new play by Octavio Solis. I donated $20.

I was just digging through some papers and discovered the letter acknowledging the receipt of my contribution and the success of the campaign. It said "Magic Theatre was able to raise $10,090.60 from 44 donors."

And that took me by surprise: the number of donors is so much lower than I had expected. If every donor had given the same amount, the mean contribution would be $230. And because I, and likely others, had given much less than $230, that means that most of the money had come from just a few people. (Did the 80-20 rule came into effect: 80% of the money coming from 20% of the donors?)

I know that $230 or $250 is not an insane amount of money -- you don't have to be a millionaire fat cat in order to donate $250 to a charity or an arts organization. All the same, it is hard for me to imagine having $250 (or more) lying around and giving it to a theater company and feeling 100% sure that I had made the right choice. Maybe it would have been better for me to buy something useful with it? Or bank it, put it towards a longer-term savings goal? Or donate it to help the denizens of the Haiti refugee camps, or to protect the environment, or...?

But $20, I can spend without guilt. And I was truly excited that the Magic Theatre seemed to want my $20 for the Sunset Challenge. It solicited my donation on Facebook, it made the project sound like a community effort... a collaboration between a San Francisco writer and two San Francisco theater companies to write a play that takes place in a not-so-well-known neighborhood of our city. And so, after all that, I must confess to being really disappointed that only 44 people donated, and that many of them had to have given substantial sums in order for the math to work out.

I know it's churlish of me to complain about this; the Sunset Challenge achieved its goal, and I'm just looking a gift horse in the mouth. But, when I gave my $20, I thought I would be one of many proud first-time donors to the Magic Theater. And yet there weren't so many of us, after all...

Playwrights in Person, part 2: Liz Duffy Adams (plus "Or," at the Magic)

When I went to see a preview performance of Or, at the Magic Theatre on Friday 11/5, playwright Liz Duffy Adams was in the house, and participated in a talk-back after the show. I have actually met Liz Duffy Adams on two other occasions, not that she would remember me -- first when I was an intern at JAW the summer they workshopped her play The Listener, and then last February at a Playwrights' Pub Night. So I didn't say hello to her, though I did ask her a question during the talk-back.

Or, (yes, that's the title) is a farce inspired by the life of Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn a living as a playwright. According to the show of hands at the talk-back, I was one of only 2 people in the audience to have read any Aphra Behn -- chalk it up to my majoring in drama at a former women's college, and being a proud female playwright with a nerdy interest in my predecessors. Under the "favorite quotes" section on Facebook, I have had, for several years, this morsel of Behn:

If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves, I lay down my quill--no, not so much as to make comparisons, because I will be kinder to my brothers than they have been to a defenseless woman--for I am not content to write for a third day only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero, and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful world, and scorn its fickle favors.

I am no longer sure if, like Aphra, I "value fame as much as if I had been born a hero." But I am amazed at the guts it took for her to write this in the late 1600s--I find it inspirational, and so I keep it on my Facebook profile.

Clearly, Liz Duffy Adams also finds Aphra Behn an inspirational figure (and Or, has Aphra speak this very quote). The Aphra of Or, is a confident, alluring woman who can seduce both men and women, help thwart Catholic plots against King Charles' life, and, in between all this romantic and political intrigue, find the time to write masterful plays and poems. Yes, she is a superheroine! But somehow, that made me less interested in the play. I have often thought that if your reason for writing a play is to tell other people "So-and-so (or Such-and-such) is Really Awesome," the resulting play is not likely to be very good, because it will lack dramatic tension. So, watching Or, I already knew that Aphra Behn was Really Awesome, and therefore wanted more from the play. Considering the difficulties of being a female writer in 1600s England, I thought that the play's Aphra should have had more moments of vulnerability, instead of sailing through her life with such aplomb. Somehow, she manages to "have it all": enough time for indolent sensual pleasures, and enough time for writing! OK, I'm jealous.

One of the gimmicks of Or, is that this classic door-slamming farce is performed with just three actors; one (at the Magic, Natacha Roi) plays Aphra, and two others take on all the rest of the parts. Maggie Mason was hilarious and captivating in the female roles: saucy actress Nell Gwynne, surly housemaid Maria, and imperious impresario Lady Davenant (whose mile-a-minute monologue was the highlight of the play). But I thought that Ben Huber, in the male roles, didn't do enough to distinguish King Charles II from secret agent William Scot, and his voice sounded dismayingly Southern California. (The actors in this production employ their natural accents. Roi and Huber are American; Mason is English.)

At the talk-back after the show, I asked Liz Duffy Adams a very muddled, very playwright-nerdy question that went something like this: "When you're writing a play that's set in the past--and clearly you did a lot of research for this--how do you balance the desire to be faithful to what you know of the past, and to teach the audience about it, with the desire to just tell a story, you know, the requirements of drama?"

"I don't know, that's something I was asking myself all through the writing process," said Adams. "Did I succeed? You tell me."

I asked this question for a couple of reasons. Partly because I wrestle with this question when writing a play that's set in the past -- how to balance my desire to cram all my research and tons of themes into the play, with the need to make things clear and not leave too many loose threads. (I was recently talking with a friend about my play that takes place in the 1930s, agreeing with him that it suffers from my trying to cram everything in.) For, while I like big, ambitious, geeky plays, I also think that the primary purpose of theater is not to educate. Or, at least, not to educate about historical facts... it is to educate about human behavior and the human heart.

And I wasn't sure whether Adams had completely succeeded at achieving this balance between cleverness and emotion -- despite the breezy, farcical, "this is not a staid old history lesson" tone of her play. It seemed, from the questions people asked during the talk-back, that their primary interest in Or, was historic: they wanted to know if these events had "really happened" (Was Aphra Behn really a spy? Was she really King Charles' lover?). And they valued Adams not so much for her original writing and construction of a farce plot involving these characters, but rather for introducing them to Aphra Behn, and to an era of British history that many people are not familiar with. Wouldn't it have been better if they were so taken with Adams' writing that they had been full of questions about how she came up with this plot, these characters in these configurations? Or if they had talked about what the play made them feel, not what made them think? Or am I just an unredeemable playwriting-nerd?

Well, if I can be a woman and an unredeemable playwriting nerd, I guess I have Aphra Behn to thank for that.

Image: Maggie Mason as Nell Gwynne, Natacha Roi as Aphra Behn. Photo by Jennifer Reiley (found on the Magic Theater's Facebook photos page).

The Sunset Challenge

Because I want to support new theater.

Because I so appreciated Octavio Solis' direction of The Brothers Size at the Magic Theater.

Because Campo Santo is awesome.

Because after the cheap-ticket-and-free-glass-of-wine at the Magic last week, I could stand to give them a little more of my money.

Because I'm tickled pink at the thought of a new play called Sunset that takes place in my neighborhood, the Sunset District of San Francisco.

Because I do unto others as I would have them do unto me: if I ever become a well-known playwright, I'd sure as hell like it if total strangers donated money to help support the development of my new play!

This is my way of saying that I just contributed $20 to the Octavio SUNSET Challenge, which is seeking to raise $10,000 within the next week to commission and develop a new play, Sunset, by local favorite Octavio Solis (in collaboration with Campo Santo). All donated funds will be matched 100% by the San Francisco Foundation’s Artists Matching Commission.

I'm excited to see what comes out of this...

Sizing up "Brothers Size," at the Magic

Last Friday, kind of on the spur of the moment, I went to see The Brothers Size at the Magic Theater. It was a night full of "I love my town, I love my life" moments. My friend Marisela posted on Facebook that the Magic was offering half-price tickets to that night's performance of The Brothers Size; at 6:30 PM, I called the box office to take advantage of it. The MUNI buses worked smoothly and efficiently to take me to Fort Mason, where the Magic is located. In the parking lot outside, the Off-the-Grid street food festival was taking place, so I got some yummy paella for just $5. Inside the theater, a friend of mine was working concessions, and let me have a glass of wine for free after discovering that she was unable to make change for my $20 bill. Taylor Mac was in town for initial rehearsals of The Lily's Revenge (SO excited about that--though it's still 6 months away!) and I sat in the same row as him during the post-show talk-back!

But, most important and most thrilling was that I got introduced to the work--and the world--of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney. This young man (turning 30 this month) is already considered one of the most important playwrights in the country--and with The Brothers Size, it was easy to see why.

This fall, three Bay Area theaters are each presenting one of the plays in McCraney's trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays. After seeing Brothers Size, I scrambled to find someone with whom to travel to Marin and see In the Red and Brown Water at Marin Theatre Co., before it closed on October 10. Fortunately, I was able to attend Red and Brown Water last night. (The third play, Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet opens at the end of the month at ACT.)

So now I have a LOT to say about McCraney, his work, the plays considered individually and in comparison with one another, the productions I saw... and I think I'll have to split my thoughts into multiple blog posts. First up: The Brothers Size. Though it's the middle play of the trilogy, it's the one I saw first (and the one McCraney wrote first, actually), so I want to begin there.

The Brothers Size. Eighty minutes, three actors. It feels like a very tight, streamlined play--yet at the same time it allows for bursts of lyricism and dream sequences. The intensity of the characters' emotions is what keeps the play pushing relentlessly forward until its powerful conclusion.

In a nutshell, The Brothers Size is about two brothers who are very different from one another, who hate each other fiercely and love each other fiercely. It's certainly not the only play to ever tackle this subject, but that's because this love-hate clash is a strong basis for drama. Ogun Size is a hardworking auto mechanic in a poor African-American community in Louisiana. His ne'er-do-well younger brother, Oshoosi, has just been released from jail and has come to live with him. The third character in the play is Elegba, a young man who grew up with the brothers and became Oshoosi's partner in crime (and in prison).

The relationship between the brothers is very well-written and, at the Magic, perfectly performed by Joshua Elijah Reese (Ogun) and Tobie Windham (Oshoosi). I was surprised to read in Reese's playbill bio that he had studied dance in college; not that he was clumsy or ungraceful, but he was so grounded as Ogun, such a solid, steady presence in his heavy work boots. Meanwhile, Windham plays Oshoosi as a charming scamp who flirts shamelessly with the audience (I was in the front row and he made eye contact with me on three separate occasions). He wears thin-soled sneakers and is constantly in motion, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

I wasn't quite as impressed by the character of Elegba. He is supposed to be a mysterious, dangerous, trickster figure. But I felt that in this play he was less mysterious than nebulous.

One of the most distinctive features of McCraney's writing is that he has his characters speak their stage directions in the third person: "Ogun enters," "Oshoosi smiles impishly." I am not usually a fan of this device (cf. one of my old posts about its use in a play called Doris to Darlene) and had worried that I would dislike McCraney's plays because of it. But, I have to say that in The Brothers Size, it worked about half the time--more than I was expecting it would! It can indeed add an extra dimension to the play, calling your attention to something you might not have noticed otherwise. But it can also feel slow and redundant. There's a scene early in the play where Oshoosi hangs around the garage and annoys Ogun, who is fixing a car (see photo at top of post). Ogun keeps sliding out from under the car and then sliding back under it, and every time he does this, he narrates it. Meanwhile Oshoosi is narrating his own actions too. The effect of this is to make the scene take twice as long as it would otherwise, which therefore blunts its force.

Thus, my favorite parts of the play did not involve showy theatrical devices--but rather good, solid dramatic writing. Highlights include a grimly funny scene where the three men talk about what it's like, as a black man, to be pulled over by the police; and Ogun's monologue when he finally explodes and gives Oshoosi a "do you know how hard it is for me to be your brother?" speech.

The Brothers Size is a powerful drama and the Magic Theater gives it a production that makes it easy to understand why the theatre world is buzzing about Tarell Alvin McCraney. I highly recommend it--it plays through October 17.

Image: Tobie Windham and Joshua Elijah Reese as Oshoosi and Ogun Size at Magic Theatre. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

"No man is feliz till he's six feet under": Oedipus El Rey

Blind, a modern-day adaptation of Oedipus Rex by Craig Wright, just opened in New York to bad reviews. But, perversely, I almost wish that I could see it for myself... because I recently saw another new adaptation of the Oedipus legend--Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro--and it was really amazing. So I'd be curious to see this other play to learn why Wright gets it wrong (ha!) and Alfaro gets it right.

It sounds like Wright's play, like Sophocles' original, focuses on the ninety minutes it takes King Oedipus to discover that he has killed his father and married his mother--a single scene, played out in real-time. But Alfaro's play dramatizes the backstory: he shows the young Jocasta giving birth to Oedipus, and how exactly Oedipus killed Laius and fell in love with Jocasta. It is vivid, it is fluid, and it covers a broad emotional palette. In ninety minutes, there's a tender love scene accompanied by a haunting a capella rendition of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," a rousing party celebrating Oedipus and Jocasta's wedding, a dream sequence where Oedipus converses with prophetic owls, and a truly shocking and gruesome ending. There were only six actors--Oedipus, Jocasta, and a four-man chorus who take on other roles as needed--and minimal scenery, enabling the play to cover so much ground so swiftly.

Sophocles' play is a detective story with a cathartic punch at the end, but the detective-story parts of the plot are glossed over in Alfaro's version. It's much more of a human drama, all the way through. He streamlines the original myth: Oedipus learns the truth shortly after marrying Jocasta, rather than after they have four children together. Also, in his version, Oedipus's foster-father is Tirésias, the blind prophet, not some random king of a neighboring city--which is such an amazing way to reinforce the theme of blindness that runs through the play, and makes Oedipus' decision to gouge his eyes out that much more resonant.

The Los Angeles Chicano setting of Alfaro's adaptation also lends it interest--I particularly liked the Chorus's translation of Sophocles into a contemporary Hispanic idiom, especially the final moral: "No man is feliz 'til he's six feet under." But I came out of Oedipus El Rey thinking less about how it was a "Hispanic play," and more about how it rewrote a familiar myth in a compelling and moving way, with a great storytelling instinct.

Oh, one more thing: I loved how Alfaro made the Greek concept of "hubris" intelligible to contemporary audiences by writing Oedipus as a very young, very cocky man. So not only the will of the gods, but Oedipus' youthful arrogance is to blame for what happens--he's sure that Laius deserved to die and that Jocasta will go to bed with him. And Joshua Torrez, who according to his playbill bio is only just out of college, did a great job in the role.

Oedipus El Rey has been a critical and commercial hit for the Magic Theatre and has been extended to March 14.