Merseyside Miracle: "Paradise Street" at EXIT Theatre

The Queen and her courtiers. Christina Augello as Elizabeth, Phil Wong as Mulrooney,
Luke Brady as Essex. Photo by Jay Yamada.

Maybe a year and a half ago, my friend Stuart Bousel invited me and several other actors to his lair in the hills to read through a rarely-produced, genre-bending Christmas play about sex, violence, monkeys, miracles, Anglo-Irish relations, urban renewal, and a midnight visitation from Queen Elizabeth I.

I didn’t quite know then what to make of Clive Barker's Paradise Street—I still don’t quite know—but I know that the cast and crew* that Stuart has assembled to give this show its American premiere at the EXIT Theatre this month are killing it on all levels.

Cat Luetdke has expertly coached them on five different British Isles accents. They’ve removed a row of seats in the auditorium to accommodate Queen Elizabeth’s farthingale (designed by the amazing Brooke Jennings). Phil Wong gives a beautifully detailed performance as Mulrooney, the homeless Irish prophet. And Kyle McReddie, Jeunée Simon, Nicole Odell, Luetdke and more are great as the ordinary Liverpudlians witnessing a most unusual Christmas miracle.

More and more, when people ask me for general advice on playwriting, the only thing I can say is “Don’t be afraid to GO THERE. Don’t be afraid to BE WEIRD.”

(“Don’t be afraid.” The first words of the angel to the shepherds of Bethlehem.)

The team behind Paradise Street has certainly Gone There, and they’ve brought back tidings of both sorrow and joy. An off-kilter Christmas play for the end of an off-kilter year.

The EXIT Theatre production of Paradise Street plays through December 17 in San Francisco.

*Disclosure of bias: I am friends with many of the people involved in this production but had no involvement myself beyond that initial living-room reading. I attended the Saturday 12/3 performance and paid for my ticket.

#Eurojetsetters

My friend Stuart Bousel has been writing observational short stories as Facebook status updates, based on people he sees and conversations he overhears in airports or restaurants.

I have been sitting around Heathrow airport for the last two hours waiting to learn whether I'll get a seat or not on the overbooked flight back to SF; to distract myself from my anxieties, I did as Stuart would, and observed my neighbors, and wrote this.

 #Eurojetsetters

They ask if the seats near me – the bucket-shaped orange tweed chair, the squashy black leather couch – are taken. I say “No,” and “No problem,” knowing I sound like a slightly vulgar American whenever I say that, and cringing internally at how my speech betrays me.

They are a party of three, presumably a family, but an unusual one: three Eurojetsetters. The daughter has long, lush, rich-girl brown hair, and a lush pouting mouth, and lush olive skin, and wears a black miniskirt and black tights that probably cost forty euros. The mother is very bon chic bon genre: bottle blonde, grey cashmere sweater, navy blue knit jacket with big gold buttons, skinny cropped beige pants, and Prada wedge sneakers. The father has wavy gray hair that all must call “distinguished,” and a fine light-blue shirt that’s unbuttoned slightly too much, and designer jeans, and black loafers.

They have Longchamp bags and snakeskin bags and pebbled-leather bags.

They all have untraceable accents.

The man takes the chair; the women sink into the squashy couch.

I think of being friendly and offering them my free chocolate. The coffee shop gave me three free morsels of gianduja because my voucher was for five pounds’ worth of food and by golly, they were going to give me my money’s worth.

I am held back from the fear that my gianduja is of insufficient quality for such sophisticates. They seem like people who have strong opinions on gianduja.

Mother and daughter hold their phones two-handed in front of their faces, click through Instagram photos, chatter softly in their untraceable murmuring voices, compare notes on what they see.

“That’s what childhood should be like. Free,” says the woman. “It makes my heart hurt.”

She strokes her daughter’s long, lush, rich-girl hair.

The father reads Den of Thieves, pen in hand. He furrows his brow and pushes back his distinguished hair from his forehead, a studied gesture.

“They take the nicest photos, don’t they? This is a beautiful picture of the chateau. I want to go there; I want to be a child there. If that school was an English school in the country, a boarding school, would you go there?”

They offer their phones to Daddy so he can look at the photos. He strokes his chin with his left hand, and I notice he doesn’t wear a wedding ring, but the woman does. I try to puzzle out whether or not they’re married.

“Looks lovely, ja? The French way of life. I would like to go.”

The woman strokes the girl’s hair again. One primate grooming another. They would like to groom her for a good marriage, in the Milan cathedral I think, and a honeymoon in Tahiti.

“Stef, have you canceled with your brother? Because I think they think that we’re coming over on Monday.”

He furrows his brow and strokes his upper lip with his thumb as he texts his brother. They don’t have a good relationship. There is resentment and ill-feeling on both sides: my distinguished friend here thinks that his brother, who lives an average middle-class life in some suburb, is boring and basic; the brother regards this Eurojetsetter with a mix of schadenfreude and envy. He’s probably glad to know that their flight has been delayed and none of their money or style or sophisticated unplaceable accents can help them now.

“Next weekend, what do we do?”

“Toulouse.”

The mother continues to groom the daughter’s hair, the family’s pride and joy. Oh, all the Prada sneakers in the world cannot compare with the glory of that hair, which cannot be bought or sold, which grows entirely free!

The father still strokes his lip, finishes the onerous duty of texting his brother, then returns to his book with a still more furrowed brow.

Mother is trying to get set up on Instagram; she peppers the girl with soft, barely audible questions and opinions. “I’m just going to post interior pictures. Just let me post interior pictures, gardens, sunsets, pretty ones. Who am I now following? Three people. Nobody’s following me back; oh that’s marvelous. Will you follow me back, so I have one follower?”

“Stop asking me these questions,” says the girl. Even when she is irritated with her mother, she talks in a voice that I have to strain my ears to hear. The clicking of my computer keys almost drowns out the dialogue.

“Shall we go and eat something?”

“What time is it?”

“Twelve-twenty.”

“We go now. By the time we’re there… By the time we’re served…”

They do not move.

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” says the mother, still on Instagram.

The women scroll on their phones, the man strokes his forehead as though he were performing an auto-phrenological examination.

“Look, look! She was invited to the palace! Their Royal Highnesses request the pleasure of Madame M— at the reception for the launch of Pledge on Thursday. I don’t know what that is,” says the mother, still on Instagram.

“Oh, there you are. We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars,” she says, dreamily, still on Instagram.

“I’m a very bad dresser,” she says, two minutes later. I don’t know how much irony is intended by that statement but I do think that wedge sneakers are an abomination.

Another two minutes go by. “You know the girl who I’m staying with, the guy has the coolest house in Notting Hill. Blenheim Crescent, so cool.”

“How d’you know it’s cool?”

“Because it was up on the Internet, the house and garden.”

The girl lightly taps the man on the knee with her phone.

“We’re going?”

“Yeah. Don’t forget your charger.”

“Let’s go to Carluccio’s.”

“Thank you,” they say to me, gathering their pebbled-leather bags.

“No problem,” I say again, and hope that my eyes do not betray me as a spy, a gawker, an envious observer even more to be feared and hated than that bothersome brother, because the ties of familial love do not bind me to these people, and I have a laptop computer and two hours to kill in the airport.

2015 Ends, 2016 Begins on the Theater Pub Blog

I sang in the Theater Pub holiday musical this year, too! This is Stuart Bousel and me as the Specialist and his Assistant in "Go To The Mirror," from Tommy. Photo by Paul Anderson.

Time for another round-up of my contributions to the San Francisco Theater Pub blog over the past few months.

In early December, my fellow Theater Pub blogger Ashley Cowan and I teamed up for a special two-part piece looking at the ups and downs of being a tall actress. (I'm 5'8", Ashley is 5'9".) We interviewed other tall ladies and shared some of our own stories about typecasting and insecurities, triumphs and inspirations. Ashley's Part One; my Part Two.

Theater Pub's year-end tradition is to ask each blogger to contribute a Top 5 list. This time around, I chose to write about five delightfully surprising performances that I saw onstage in 2015, from Bay Area actors Madeline H.D. Brown, Adam Magill, Heather Orth, Thomas Gorrebeeck, and Siobhan Marie Doherty.

For the second year in a row (see my acceptance speech from last year), my friend Stuart Bousel cited me in his annual "Stuey Awards" honoring Excellence in Bay Area Theater. My 2015 Stuey is shared with everyone who worked on the Olympians Festival staged reading of Tethys and Oceanus -- which I was nervous as hell about, but came off really beautifully. I don't quite agree with Stuart's conclusion that Tethys "feels like it could be lifted and fully produced as-is," but I'm flattered that he thinks so, and the success of the reading has definitely made me excited to continue working on this script. Stuart also gave a brief nod to our rock-music duet in Tommy -- ha!

I began 2016 by writing about one of the best books I read in 2015: the memoir How To Be a Heroine, by my friend, the playwright Samantha Ellis. In particular, I was drawn to the sections of Samantha's book where she describes the tensions between being a people-pleasing good girl and being a self-actualized artist. I recommend it to any female artist who's working through those types of issues.

This week, because Theater Pub is currently producing short plays inspired by the indie-rock musician Morrissey (two performances left! See it Monday or Tuesday evening), I decided to look at the flip side of that. That is, I highlighted four indie-rock songs inspired by theater, by the Decemberists, the Magnetic Fields, St. Vincent, and the Weakerthans.

I'd Like to Thank the Stucademy

Stuart Bousel wrote 5000 words last Monday explaining why he wasn't going to post his Stuart Excellence in Bay Area Theater Awards, a.k.a. SEBATAs, a.k.a. "Stueys," this year. So it was a surprise when, round midnight last night (trust Stuart to post his awards at the witching hour), a post went up on the Theater Pub blog announcing the 14 Stuey winners—including me!

My "Best Breakthrough" Stuey recognizes my successfully self-producing Pleiades last August. "I was blown away by how organized and focused Marissa was, how determined she was to do it as best she could even the first time out," Stuart wrote. "Marissa strategized and planned, gathered information, raised funds, and was just in general super smart about it all. Was anyone surprised? Not really. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take one more moment to tell her she did an amazing job. Everyone looking to produce a show in 2015: call Marissa. She knows what she’s doing."

Inspired by last night's Golden Globes and by Stuart's own honesty in always speaking what's on his mind, I wrote an acceptance speech and posted it to Facebook this morning.

In my dreams, this is what I'm wearing to accept my Stuey Award.
Marchesa, Fall 2014.

"And the 2014 Stuey for Best Breakthrough goes to... Marissa Skudlarek, Pleiades."

(Applause. I get up from my seat, glide to the podium. At least I'd like to think I glide. The last time I wore high heels and a long gown, at the TBA Awards, I tripped and fell halfway down a flight of stairs and bruised my ankle. [Fortunately, no one witnessed it.] My friend Maura said this made me the Bay Area Jennifer Lawrence and that made me feel a little better, 'cause who doesn't want to be JLaw, but it's been two months and my ankle is still slightly tender. But this is all a daydream in which I'm wearing a gown that probably costs as much as my whole production of Pleiades so yeah, I glide, OK?)

"Gentlemen and la—wait, the Stuey Awards committee consists of only one gentleman—I gratefully accept the Stuey for Best Breakthrough. Of course, I think it’s kind of funny that in the citation for the award, I am praised for, basically, being a perfectionist and having my shit together—wait, can I say ‘shit’ here, or will I get bleeped?—when I often feel like my perfectionism is detrimental and that I don’t have my shit together at all. Like Stuart says, awards are kind of weird. And there’s a certain existential terror, too, in the idea of ‘Oh my God, if I’ve broken through, now I have to keep doing this.’ But honestly, all neurosis aside, I agree with our illustrious host and one-man awards committee that the Internet has gotten kind of awful recently, full of criticism and judgment and not the good kind of criticism and judgment, the place where you can always, always find someone who’ll tell you why you’re doing it wrong. And in a tough environment, in a tough year, I am genuinely touched that someone is willing to say in public that he thinks I’m basically headed in the right direction. That many of us in this room are headed in the right direction. And maybe this thought, and this award, will help me pick myself up faster in moments when I’m bogged down by neurosis and self-doubt. And in the meantime, yes, if you want to talk about best practices for self-producing, drop me a line and we’ll plan a coffee date. Awards have only as much power as we give them, but if this award can make me more personally hopeful or result in more knowledge about self-production being circulated in our community, then its power will be harnessed to a good cause. Thank you again."

(And I glide offstage.)

A couple of thoughts that I'd like to add tonight:

It's a little odd to get this award from Stuart, because his theater company, No Nude Men, was the nominal producer of Pleiades. It wasn't a financial arrangement. Instead, Stuart granted me the prestige of the NNM brand, with its 10+ years of history in the Bay Area; we had a few producer-y chats over coffee; and he let me text/email him with Silly Newbie Producer Questions as they came up. So I feel like a lot of my achievements as a producer simply involved asking good questions and listening to the advice of someone who's produced indie theater here for over a decade. Maybe that's rarer than it seems (Stuart would know), and maybe it's also a bit nepotistic. Fear of appearing nepotistic or biased, in fact, was one of the reasons that Stuart almost didn't post his awards this year. But hey, they are his awards, this is show business, and both he and I are people who overanalyze our actions, so who am I to quibble?

One thing I haven't overanalyzed, though, is the experience of producing Pleiades. Right after it closed, I became overwhelmed by a health crisis and a breakup, in quick succession. So I didn't really get a chance to take pride in my achievement, or to sort out my feelings about the show separately from everything else that was happening in my life. The wounds from my surgery and my breakup have now healed, and I've integrated those events into my self-narrative—but I haven't fully integrated Pleiades. (I haven't even been able to bring myself to open the script on my computer and incorporate the tiny changes that I made in rehearsals.) So winning a Stuey, having my efforts recognized, feels like an anchor, grounding me more firmly in sanity, reality, accomplishment. Yes. I wrote and produced a play. People noticed. And I shouldn't allow anything else to overshadow that.

Happy Holidays from THE DESK SET

The rumors are true: I'm going to be appearing in a play next summer for the first time in years. I'll be playing the supporting role of Elsa and serving as Dance Captain in a production of the classic 1950s office comedy The Desk Set, by William Marchant. The production will be directed by Stuart Bousel, produced by No Nude Men, and presented at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco.

Above is a photo of the full cast (I'm standing, second from the right). The Desk Set takes place around Christmastime and though our production happens in July, we decided to start our promotional campaign early by doing a holiday-themed photo!

We also took photos of smaller groups of characters. Below are the four main women: Jeunee Simon as Sadel, Kitty Torres as Ruthie, Megan Briggs as Peg, Allison Page as Bunny.

Here I am with my fellow supporting women: Carina Lastimosa Salazar as Miss Warriner and Lisa Drostova as the Mysterious Lady. I am wearing one of my grandma's cocktail dresses from the '50s. It always amazes me that she had such a va-va-voom dress (there is a nude-colored fabric lining underneath the black lace, and the illusion is quite realistic in person) but Elsa is the office sexpot, so it's character-appropriate! Though also a little strange -- I have never played a sexpot or had to do a stage kiss before.

And here are our handsome gentlemen: Abhi Kris as Mr. Bennett, Andrew Calabrese as "Shirtsleeves," Nick Trengove as Abe, Alejandro Emmanuel Torres as Kenny, and Alan Coyne as Richard.

Randomly and bizarrely, we discovered that a teenage Barbra Streisand played my role, Elsa, in a summer stock production of The Desk Set just a few years after the original Broadway production. Here's a picture from the office-party scene of that production; Barbra is dancing, second from right.

And if you want to know the plot of Desk Set or what I think of it as a play, here's the review I wrote on Goodreads.

The Desk Set: A Comedy In Three Acts by William Marchant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For a mid-century, middlebrow comedy, The Desk Set is kind of a bizarre play. On the one hand, it's loaded with 1950s kitsch: female employees running out of the office midday to buy party dresses at Bonwit's; jokes about philandering executives and sexpot secretaries; a rather un-PC joke about Mexicans. The main character is a super-smart, capable, acerbic woman named Bunny (something that really puzzled me when I saw the film version as a child -- how could the no-nonsense Katharine Hepburn play a woman with such a silly name?) who spends a bit too much time hoping that her boss/boyfriend, who's clearly not as awesome as she is, will put a ring on it.

On the other hand, The Desk Set is a play about four intelligent working women who fear that they are going to be replaced by a computer, which is a surprisingly modern problem. The depiction of Richard, the character who wants to install computers in the office, also feels perceptive about how "techies" behave: he's not a bad guy, but he's kind of single-minded and socially awkward. While the play has a happy ending that suggests that people and technology can coexist, 21st-century audiences may find it a little more poignant than originally intended. After all, the women in the play work for the research department of a broadcasting company, where their job is to do fact-checking and answer queries like "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" (The play takes place around Christmas.) But these days, you can just pull out your iPhone and ask Siri.

All photos (except for the Streisand one) by Cody Rishell.

November Spawned a Monster

I didn't write a Theater Pub column this Thursday, because of Thanksgiving. And also because the editor needed to run the VERY VERY SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT that after a hiatus of a year and a half, Theater Pub will return to presenting free live theater in San Francisco bars as of January 2015. (HUZZAH!)

Four weeks before that, I wrote a column that I didn't link to at the time, because I realized I was kind of phoning it in. ("Horror Vacui," from October 30. Read it if you want to read my thoughts on some memoirs I've read recently, or what I did the night the Giants won the World Series. Gosh, doesn't that feel like ages ago?)

But two Thursdays ago... ah, two Thursdays ago, I wrote what is now the most-read (and I believe most-commented) piece in the history of the Theater Pub blog. I took blogger George Heymont to task for failing to perceive the clearly feminist message of Megan Cohen's "Centaurs, or the Horse's Ass," which had greatly affected me when I saw the script in its Olympians Festival staged reading. Heymont responded in the comments section and the back-and-forth got pretty heated.

I attended all of the readings of the 2014 Olympians Festival and it seemed like one of the key themes this year was female anger. Maybe that's appropriate: Stuart Bousel likes to point out that the Greeks had a lot of female monsters, more than most other cultures. The entire final week of the festival was devoted to female monsters, and other plays re-imagined the centaurs, Geryon, and the Minotaur as female. The spontaneous applause that broke out after a feminist rant in Veronica Tjioe's Minotaur play was one of the most satisfying moments I've had in a theater in 2014.

Shitstirring (lots of it) @ SF Theater Pub Blog

What happens when two verbose, overeducated people who always want to have the last word start to argue about the ethics of stirring shit up, our responsibilities to ourselves and to our fellow humans, and the best way to live in an imperfect world?

You get me and Stuart Bousel, my editor at the Theater Pub blog, going head-to-head in the comments section for several rounds.

The argument started when I used my Theater Pub column this week to quibble with some aspects of Stuart's earlier piece "In Defense of Stirring Shit Up." Then he responded in the comments section to quibble with some of my points, etc. It got very heady and somewhat heated, but I am proud of what I wrote, and I think it's worth reading.

Go over there and enter the fray... if you dare.

"Rose of Youth" Staged Reading on March 29

Mark your calendars, 'cause I have exciting news! My full-length play, The Rose of Youth, will be presented in a staged reading at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco on March 29.

If you're a longtime reader of my blog, you might recognize that play title — though I haven't mentioned it, or thought about it, in years. The Rose of Youth was my senior thesis play at Vassar. I wrote it in fall 2007, and it received a production as part of the Drama Department's Dynamo Theater Lab project in spring 2008.

And after that incredible experience, I honestly expected that I'd put the play in a drawer and forget about it. I had written it specifically for my college: it's a backstage drama about Vassar's 1934 production of Antony and Cleopatra. But its huge cast means that no professional or indie theater company would consider producing it, and even if cast size were no obstacle, I thought it was just too "Vassar" for anyone else to care about it.

Well, never say never. Or something like that. The Rose of Youth will be one of three staged readings on the last weekend of March, as part of a mini-festival of backstage comedies that we're calling "Behind the Curtain."

The festival came about when my friend Stuart Bousel posted on Facebook that he'd written a new backstage comedy about a theater company producing Arcadia. Another friend of ours, Meg O'Connor, congratulated Stuart and added that she'd written a backstage comedy as her senior thesis play in college. "How funny, Meg," I wrote in response, "I also wrote a backstage play as my senior thesis. We should trade."

But where my instinct is just to say to Meg "Let's read each other's scripts," Stuart's instinct is to say "Let's put on a festival!" (This is why we love him.) He secured the EXIT Theatre for the weekend of March 28-30, and now "Behind the Curtain" is happening. Meg's In the Wings is the Thursday show, and Stuart's Pastorella is Saturday. Here's the festival poster (by Cody Rishell):

So this is going to be a trip and a half. It will be so strange and wonderful to return to The Rose of Youth, five years and three thousand miles later. This also marks the first time that I'm directing my own work in God knows how long. I mean, having produced the play five years ago, I already know that the script works and I'm not planning to make any changes or revisions to it. All the same, I'm a little bit nervous about directing! I'll be the only person to blame if things go wrong!

Casting is still in progress, but so far, Patrick Barresi, Jan Carty Mash, Travis Howse, Theresa Miller, and Jonathon Brooks are lined up to appear.

Look for more updates as March 29 draws closer.

Domestic Goddess: "Juno en Victoria" by Stuart Bousel

Juno en Victoria, currently playing at Stage Werx in a production by Wily West Productions, is doubly distinguished: the second Stuart Bousel play to premiere in June (the first was Edenites) and the second Olympians Festival play to receive a full production (after Hermes, in March). Fortunately, it lives up to its pedigree!

One of my favorite aspects of the Olympians Festival is how the writers re-contextualize ancient myths, setting them in other historical eras where they will resonate better. Thus, Juno en Victoria re-imagines the story of Hera, goddess of marriage, as a Victorian comedy of manners -- a perfect match of theme and time period. When Hera says at one point, "I am my marriage," it doesn't sound like hyperbole, but the simple truth. Stuart is also a literature nerd who gets a kick out of mashing up Greek mythology with Victorian fiction and history, and the play is rife with fanservice allusions.

(Geeky playwriting tangent: I am also impressed by the way Edenites and Juno display Stuart's command of two very different dramatic structures. Edenites is a series of short scenes modeled after a talky '90s indie movie, while Juno is an old-fashioned three-act, one-set, drawing-room comedy. Interestingly, though, both plays deviate from the norm by including several direct-address monologues. I felt that the monologues worked a little better in Edenites than in Juno, although the penultimate monologue in Juno is one of the play's best jokes, and Hera's concluding speech is a knockout.)

The play takes place during an English summer in the High Victorian era, at Zeus and Hera's country house. They seem like a happy couple, and their youngest daughter Hebe is about to make an excellent marriage to Heracles (amusingly portrayed as a Bertie Wooster-ish twit). The main action of the play, though, focuses on Hera and her spinster sister, Hestia. Hestia suspects that Zeus is philandering again, and is determined to find out the identity of Zeus's new paramour. Hera, meanwhile, appears unconcerned by her husband's dalliances; thus we (and Hestia) wonder whether Hera is just putting on a front. Adding some Cockney attitude to the cast of characters are the family's servants, Iris and Ganymede.

With Edenites, I felt like the male and female roles were equally well written and performed, but, for personal reasons, I connected to the women's stories more. Juno en Victoria, though, is unquestionably the women's play. The men are supporting characters, Zeus never appears onstage (though his presence looms large), and the women in the cast also seem to inhabit their roles more fully. Kalinda Wang, as Iris, is no glittering rainbow-goddess, but an embittered young woman who gives full voice to her working-class resentment. Kat Bushnell is a vivacious Hebe, making a memorable entrance where she trips, breaks a tea-set, and curses like a sailor.

The play's innovative characterizations -- Heracles as a likable idiot rather than a hero; Hebe as a Victorian girl who clearly won't just lie back and think of England on her wedding night -- show that Stuart's love for Greek mythology and the Victorian era never crosses the line into slavish reverence. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of Hera and Hestia, the central characters. In myth, Hestia is the modest and self-effacing virgin goddess who gives up her throne to Dionysus. In Juno en Victoria, Hestia is a meddling busybody with a sharp tongue. At the staged reading of Juno en Victoria (then called Hera) last summer, I was seated behind a pillar and couldn't see any of Celeste Russi's performance as Hestia. Nonetheless, her dry line readings and impeccable comic timing had me in stitches. Fortunately, Russi is reprising the role of Hestia in this production, and she's even better when you can see her as well as hear her.

Most importantly, of course, there is Hera. In myth, Hera is often portrayed as a nagging shrew, but the Hera of this play is complex and sympathetic. As Hera, the lovely Michelle Jasso perfectly embodies the Victorian ideal of "the angel in the house" (perhaps we should say "the goddess in the house"?). Her characterization reminded me of Elizabeth McGovern on Downton Abbey -- warm, understanding, irresistibly cozy, and surprisingly open-minded. She is dignified and gracious, the perfect hostess, but possesses a secret, steely strength.

In the Victorian era, A Doll's House shocked audiences by showing a charming wife and mother who left her marriage when she realized it was built on a lie. In our own time, Juno en Victoria is surprising because it investigates the psychology of a wife and mother who chooses not to leave her marriage, though she knows it is based on a lie. But could you really expect the goddess of marriage to behave differently?

Juno en Victoria plays at Stage Werx through July 2. Tickets here.

Disclosure: this play was written by my friend Stuart Bousel, directed by my friend Claire Rice, and is associated with the Olympians Festival, for which I am a co-producer...

Top image: Celeste Russi as Hestia, Michelle Jasso as Hera. Bottom image: Michelle Jasso as Hera, Kat Bushnell as Hebe.

Those Hedonistic "Edenites": Stuart Bousel's New Play at the Exit Theatre

There's a stereotype that most plays by young (and even not-so-young) writers will be autobiographical in nature, attempts to transform their own life experiences into theater and maybe get revenge on a few ex-lovers while they're at it. But, in my experience, that hasn't really been the case. My playwright friends are writing about the Greek financial crisis or zombies invading small-town Texas -- not about everyday life in San Francisco at the beginning of the 2010s. And I can't remember the last time I saw a play that made no bones about being autobiographical. Thus, there is something oddly refreshing about my friend Stuart Bousel's Edenites: A Play About San Francisco, described in its self-mocking press release as "a stylish piece of theatrical fluff, pretty much an exercise in drama as therapy, in which actual experiences are being thrown up on stage by the writer in a flagrant attempt to make sense of his own life." Edenites is honest about the way we live now (e.g. it admits that many 30-somethings still live with roommates), without trying too hard to be trendy or hip (no name-dropping and just the right amount of San Francisco in-jokes). You may find that the play invites you to make sense of your own life too.

Edenites is an ensemble comedy-drama about a group of people in their mid-30s, centered around Hugo (Kai Morrison), a San Francisco gay man in an open relationship. Normally, Hugo is content to live off his trust fund, date the pop-culture buff Xavier (Brian Martin) and have flings with other men, such as the seductive Aurillio (John Caldon). But during the week Edenites takes place, two things happen to shake Hugo out of his aimlessness and complacency. First, his old friend Chester (Ryan Hebert) comes from Tucson for a visit. Then, for the first time, Hugo sleeps with a woman -- the outspoken bisexual Lisa (Kristin Broadbear).

Hugo's other friends aren't much more successful at personal relationships. Chester is still hung up on his ex-girlfriend Imogen (Xanadu Bruggers), a successful novelist who happens to be in San Francisco on a book tour. The married couple Trent and Jenny (Ben Kruer and Megan Briggs) are stressed out with a new baby in the house. Rounding out the cast are Kira Shaw as Hugo's hipster roommate and Chris Struett as a queeny bookstore owner.

I mention all of the actors by name because one of the strengths of Edenites is its cast, largely made up of what we might call the Stuart Bousel Stock Company. (Three of the actors were in Stuart's recent production of M. Butterfly at Custom Made, and others of them have also been in Bouselian projects.) I was struck by how well they all lived in their characters' skins, not only acting as they spoke their own lines, but reacting to their fellow performers and Stuart's funny and bittersweet scenarios. Perhaps it helps that some of the actors, notably Brian Martin, are modeling their characters after real people whom we and Stuart know.

And a strong cast is key to the success of Edenites, because the play is all about exploring the depths of its characters -- showing how they surprise one another and even surprise themselves. Imogen may be successful and stylish (as played by the redheaded Bruggers in white blouse and pencil skirt, she looks like a 21st-century Joan Holloway), but her story proves that "it's a comfort to know that even famous people don't have their shit together" -- one of the lines that really resonated with me. Lisa may at first seem like a spoiled, sex-crazed barfly, but she earns a round of applause when she stands up for herself, chews out an old friend, and triumphantly proclaims "I am a flower!" Jenny chafes under the role of "new mom" and becomes neurotic, angry, and self-loathing; I love these kinds of female characters and Briggs gives an excellent portrayal.

All right, I probably related to the women's stories more than I did to the theme of gay men in open relationships, which forms another major part of Edenites. But this has to do more with my own experiences and expectations, than with Stuart's writing or direction. Speaking of direction, I love how he re-configured the Exit Stage Left into a theater-in-the-round format.

The relationships and situations in Edenites are universal enough that it could probably be re-written to take place in Seattle or Chicago or other liberal/ gay-friendly U.S. cities. Still, it doesn't lie when it bills itself as "A Play About San Francisco." It captures the way that, in this city, you will never stop running into people from your past. It captures our hedonism, our snootiness, our greed -- the defense mechanisms we use to hide our sentimentality, which is what really defines us. In Edenites, there's a leitmotif of characters moving to New York, a sense that New York is where all the really ambitious and predatory people go, leaving the San Franciscans frolicking in the Garden of Eden. I'm reminded of the eternal wisdom of "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen": "Live in New York once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in California once, but leave before it makes you soft." Over the course of the play, Hugo learns that he's far less jaded, and far more easily hurt, than he thought he was. I talked to Stuart about this theme afterwards. "Yes, exactly," he said. "The characters all think they're so tough -- but we can see that they're bleeding all over the stage."

Edenites plays at the Exit Stage Left through June 25.

Disclosure (if it weren't obvious): Stuart is clearly a friend of mine, and he comped me my ticket to Edenites.

Image: Edenites poster designed by Cody Rishell.

"Giant Bones": A Magical Night at the Theater

On Friday night I went to see Giant Bones, the world premiere play based on a book of short stories by Peter S. Beagle, as adapted and directed by Stuart Bousel. (Disclosure: Stuart is a mover and shaker in the SF theater community and an acquaintance of mine, so I'm writing about this show because I want to support my friends, not because I fancy myself an objective theater critic.) Rumor has it that Beagle was convinced that no one could successfully adapt his stories into a coherent work of theater, then read Stuart's script and was absolutely floored! He lives in Oakland now, and lent his support and guidance to the production.

Stuart's brilliant idea was to use the old device of a play-within-a-play to tell multiple stories in one evening. When we watch Giant Bones, we are ostensibly watching a performance by the "Jiril's Players," a traveling theater troupe in some medieval-ish fantasy kingdom. In Act I, the Players perform three different fairy-tale-like stories, and we also get to eavesdrop on some of their backstage goings-on. In Act II, the Players enact their own story, telling how they lost their royal patronage and were forced out on the road.

My parents were in town this weekend, so they were my theatergoing companions at Giant Bones, and they both really enjoyed it--even my mom, who normally hates anything fantasy or sci-fi. But, as I said, the stories in Act I are mostly in the vein of fairy tales, the kinds of stories that we all enjoyed as children: wizards, wicked tyrants, talking fish, tribes of giants. And the story in Act II, being a tale of political intrigue and courtiers' maneuverings, doesn't involve any magical elements at all. Instead, it becomes a moving parable about the power of theater and how it can be used and abused. I know, there are a lot of plays about plays out there, and sometimes it can seem like an overdone topic. But not when it is really well done--written, staged and performed by people who truly do know and love the power of theater--the way that Giant Bones is.

The Jiril is played by the commanding Jay Smith, and his Players are a troupe of nine talented actors who easily take on multiple parts. I especially liked Jessica Rudholm's expressive use of gesture in her role as a wicked queen, and Rik Lopes' self-assurance in the role of Dardis, the manager and star actor of the theater troupe. Kai Morrison amuses as he plays an assortment of villains, and also composed the song that opens Act II.

Giant Bones continues at the Exit Theater through June 19. As an added perk, everyone who attends the performance will receive (in a few months) a special limited-edition copy of Beagle's book Giant Bones. Amazing! I've never attended any other theater production that offered such a special tie-in souvenir--and believe me, this play has made me curious to read the rest of Beagle's stories!

Here is a promo video where Stuart and some of the cast discuss their work on this production. Congrats to them!