Top 10 Cultural Experiences - July 2012

Trying something a little different here with my blog (After 5 years, can't I mix it up a bit?). I want to keep writing about the things I am seeing and doing that inspire, entertain and stimulate me, but I don't feel up to the challenge of cranking out thousand-word essays multiple times a week, the way I used to do. So I'm thinking that each month, I'll post a round-up of my top 10 cultural experiences, with a short explanation of why I enjoyed each one.

The list will be eclectic and draw from a variety of genres. A brilliant episode of a new TV show could be sandwiched between an old movie I just saw for the first time and a particularly thought-provoking Internet essay.  The only rule is that I have to have read/seen/experienced this thing during the designated month, and I have to have enjoyed it.

So here goes: Top 10 Cultural Experiences - July 2012

1. "Black Box" by Jennifer Egan (short fiction). When is the last time I got so excited about a New Yorker short story? Oh yeah -- "Escape from Spiderhead," by George Saunders, December 2010. Clearly I have a thing for futuristic sci-fi stories about people with things implanted in their brains -- not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "New Yorker story."

Indeed, in its structure and its voice, "Black Box" is like no story I've ever read before. It is masterfully controlled, a distanced and elliptical way of narrating a thrilling spy-adventure plot. Somehow, this only serves to ratchet up the tension even more. I started reading it on my lunch hour and didn't have time to finish -- I was in agony for the rest of the afternoon!

Though the story was published in June and I didn't read it until July, I'd somehow managed to avoid hearing that the unnamed narrator is a grown-up version of Lulu from A Visit from the Goon Squad. Reading the story, I was very proud of myself for figuring out that connection on my own. And the themes of "Black Box" dovetail with those of Lulu's Goon Squad chapter in interesting ways -- I wonder if Egan would ever consider adding this story as an addendum to Goon Squad, that novel's praise and Pulitzer notwithstanding? Because this story deserves to be read by as many people as possible.

2. Pint-Sized Plays at San Francisco Theater Pub (theater). Is it OK to put your own show on a list like this? Oh well, I'm doing it anyway, because the Pint-Sized Plays were a big part of my month. They represented the longest run ever of one of my plays: 7 performances, including a special presentation last Saturday at the Red Poppy Art House. And, because I didn't attend every performance, it's also the first time my work has been performed without me present. The five performances I did attend, however, caused a surprising range of reactions in the audience, which taught me a lot (I hope to do a longer post on this later).

Moreover, I was honored to be included among so many other funny, idiosyncratic plays. Highlights included Megan Cohen's BEEEEAR, starring Allison Page as a dancing bear who gets "growling-tipsy after the day's grueling toil," and Tim Bauer's Play It Again, Friend, a character study of a douchebaggy businessman (played by Cooper Carlson) who nonetheless claims "I see the good and then reflect it back -- I'm a mirror with eyes!" Special mentions also to Neil Higgins' hard work directing one play (Bill Bivins' Celia Shits) and acting in three others; and Matt Gunnison and Kirsten Broadbear's performances as the title characters in Sunil Patel's witty Man vs. Beer.

3. Olympics Opening Ceremony (TV/theater). I had a ridiculous amount of fun watching the Olympics ceremony while lying on my couch, drinking Cabernet, and live-tweeting it with some friends. Danny Boyle certainly knows how to put on a show! (I wasn't too fond of the screenplay or acting in Slumdog Millionaire, but thought that that movie gained whatever merit it had from Boyle's kinetic direction.) And I do consider this a piece of theater that just happened to be televised, with many astounding moments of stagecraft. Although it paid tribute to the expected, beloved icons of British culture, it managed to seem offbeat and loopy and idiosyncratic rather than corporate. I especially loved how uncontroversial its liberal political slant (with tributes to suffragettes and the NHS) turned out to be. And the Parade of Nations moved quickly while allowing me to indulge my Geography Nerd, French Nerd, and Fashion Nerd tendencies all at once.

4. The Scottsboro Boys, at ACT (musical). It's difficult to say that you "enjoyed" this show without sounding like you are making light of a very dark moment in our nation's history, so maybe "admired" is a better word. Kander and Ebb can still deliver biting but catchy songs, although as a whole the musical does feel like a bit of a throwback to their '70s "concept musical" heyday. Susan Stroman's minimalist staging was lively and brilliant, and Clifton Duncan gave a powerful performance in the leading role. Due to the subject matter and the casting and staging demands, I doubt that this musical will get many future productions after this tour is over, and I feel grateful to have seen it.

5. The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips (novel). I really love Arthur Phillips' writing: above all, when you read his novels, you can tell that he had fun writing them, devising plots and characters and set-pieces and opportunities to deploy puns and other curlicues of language. Yet his worldview also contains a sense of melancholy and loss. I am a total sucker for playful-but-melancholy art, because it chimes with my own worldview, so Phillips' novels really speak to me. And as it happens, the theme of The Song is You is about how it feels to find art (music) that speaks to you and changes your life. The main character is an emotionally numb middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with an up-and-coming rock singer and turns into a kind of anonymous Svengali for her. While the plot is a bit preposterous, Phillips gets a lot of other things right about our contemporary culture. I liked how he portrays the singer, Cait, as a hardworking young artist rather than just an object of desire; and how what she wants (or thinks she wants) more than anything is someone to mentor her and call her on her bullshit. And the novel wraps up in the way that I was rooting for, too.

6. The Canadian, at the SF Silent Film Festival (movie). On my birthday, I won a pair of free tickets to the screening of this obscure silent movie. I invited a Canadian-born friend of mine along to the screening, which packed the Castro Theater on a Saturday afternoon. We enjoyed it, with no need for any caveats like "it was really good for a silent movie." (Although the live musical accompaniment on piano and accordion was terrific!) The leading actress had a neat trick of looking out from under half-closed eyelids, which she used to great effect to look haughty and supercilious (in the first part of the movie); and stricken and pained (in the second part of the movie). Also, the weekend we saw this, that whole controversy about Daniel Tosh telling a rape joke had just blown up, and in the movie, the main character rapes his wife. (They've entered into a marriage of convenience where she locks herself in the bedroom and makes him sleep on a bench -- but it's the kind of movie where once you see that bedroom door close, you know it's going to get broken down.) After this startling scene, there's an intertitle: "The next morning wasn't just any day." And because of the hilarious understatement of this -- of course the day after you get raped is not going to be just any day -- everyone in the theater laughed. "Now that is how you make a rape joke," I said afterwards.

7. Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter (novel). Angela Carter is another author I really like. I began reading Nights at the Circus in London -- appropriate, as its larger-than-life heroine is a proud Cockney -- but finished it back in the U.S. This book has all the magical realism, stories-within-stories, theatricality, glorious excess, and love of life that you expect from Carter -- just a terrifically good yarn, full of vivid detail. The opulence, intricacy and fantasy of a Faberge egg -- an object which actually ends up playing a role in the story. Oh, I just know that I'm reiterating everything that has ever been written about Carter, but it's all true, even if her books are fantastical.

8. Cling to Me Like Ivy, by Samantha Ellis (play script). A few days after I met my blog-friend Samantha in person for the first time, I bought a copy of her play Cling to Me Like Ivy at the National Theatre bookshop. It's the story of a young Orthodox Jewish woman in crisis just before her wedding day -- a fairly intimate tale of family and friendships, though there's a stunningly theatrical climax at the end of Act Two. The heroine is believably caught between her respect for her cultural traditions and the temptations of modern-day London culture (represented by her best friend, who was born in India but is now thoroughly assimilated). Also, you know the old adage "To write a play, put a man up a tree at the end of Act One, throw stones at him in Act Two, and get him down in Act Three"? Well, Ellis does exactly that in this play, only with a woman instead of a man -- can't help but think this is a clever playwriting in-joke.

9. Brave (Pixar film). I saw Brave toward the end of July, so was not able to read or participate in all of the discussion earlier in the month about The Feminist Implications of Pixar's First Female-Driven Story. Which might be just as well, because that seems almost like too much freight for one movie to bear. (Pun on "bear" not intended.) Brave is not my favorite Pixar, I think because its script and story are more predictable, less dazzlingly constructed, than their best films. As someone who read a lot of fantasy stories about Rebellious Tomboy Princesses when I was a girl, I felt like Merida's struggle was somewhat familiar, even if I found her sympathetic and wanted to cheer when she stepped up at the archery contest to defend her right to remain unmarried. But the movie was gorgeous to look at and I liked the complexity that they gave to the character of the mother, positing that "feminine" skills like diplomacy are as valuable as "masculine" skills like fighting. More than anything, I hope the movie's box-office success will allow more female-driven movies to be made, till we get to the point where they are no longer remarkable or anomalous.

10. Salomania, at the Aurora Theater (play). Mark Jackson's latest play takes the #10 slot on my list, partly due to residual affection from how much I loved his play God's Plot earlier this year. Also because it allows me to note that I am having a surprisingly Salome-ish 2012: the "Cult of Beauty" exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor featured Aubrey Beardsley's original illustrations for Salome, and I attended the premiere of Al Pacino's Wilde Salome at the Castro Theater in March. (Both the exhibition and the film would have appeared on earlier editions of my "Top 10 Cultural Experiences" list had I been doing it back then.) I found Salomania a weaker play than God's Plot -- it didn't hang together as well -- but I like Jackson's approach to complex historical dramas that show how life and art influence one another.

Quick update to my post on the Bush Theatre

Today, the Bush Theater saw the rather critical blog post I wrote about them and BushGreen contacted me about it via Twitter. Yes, they are updating their submissions policies but still accepting unsolicited, unproduced scripts (one per playwright) from around the English-speaking world. They also stated that the Bush had commissioned Dominic Savage's Fear because his "process of improv was of great interest to us and we wanted to chart new and experimental territory." It was "part of an initiative to make new work in new ways."

If Fear was indeed developed through an improv-based process, that could account for some of the weaknesses I found in the script. When you commission improv-based or devised work, you never know what you're going to get, and sometimes the experiment will fail. All the same, it was odd that Fear's origins in improv weren't mentioned in any of the reviews I read or in the Bush's publicity (though I didn't buy a playbill, so maybe that would have included something about Savage's development process. P.S., Brits, what is with your insistence that people have to pay for playbills?)

I can't exactly fault the Bush for thinking that as a "new works" theater, they should explore alternative means of creating work, rather than relying solely on the scripts that are submitted to them. At the same time, I can't help being a bit disappointed that they're not devoting 100% of the slots in their season to producing some of those thousand scripts they receive in their slush pile each year.

Of course I could now segue into a discussion of the increasing prominence of devised work in U.S. and U.K. theater, and the implications of this. But I don't really feel like getting into that right now. For the time being, it sounds like we can still go ahead and submit our scripts to the Bush Theatre via BushGreen, and they will continue to be read and considered... but BushGreen isn't the theater's only source of plays to produce.

"Fear"? More like Disappointment: My night at the Bush Theatre

When I arrived in London last month, I secretly believed the stereotype that the Brits are better than us at everything theatrical. And why shouldn't I think that? I'd seen several excellent productions by U.K. theater companies on tour in America. But the first play I ever saw on British soil -- Fear, at the Bush Theatre -- was mediocre and thus, a terrible disappointment.

Probably it's good for me to get over my American inferiority complex and learn that the British theater can offer up a dud now and then. To realize that the touring productions I'd seen were, duh, the cream of the crop; and that any theater scene as rich and vibrant as London's (oh, how enviably rich and vibrant!) is bound to produce as many duds as masterpieces.

And although I found the production mediocre, my experience of attending the theater in London was great. I got to meet my lovely blog-friend Samantha Ellis in person; eat tasty, inexpensive chicken stew and browse the shelves of plays in the Bush Theatre café; stroll around Notting Hill in the twilight of the longest day of the year; and finish up the evening with thick hot chocolate that the waitress at Carluccio's gave us for free!

But all the same, Fear was disappointing. And I've been wanting to blog about my disappointment, but hesitated for a few reasons.

One, I saw the show's first preview, and maybe it just needed a few more nights in order to gel. I'm thinking of a moment where a character took off her elastic belt and struck another character with it -- but it was laughable because the actress was obviously flailing the belt as weakly as she could in order to avoid injuring her co-star. That seems like something that could be easily re-blocked to look more realistic.

Two, I'm trying to move away from writing "reviews" of shows where I just list what I liked and didn't like about them -- especially shows that most of my readers won't get the opportunity to see. Fear was at a small "fringe" theater in London, and lately my blog has been much more San Francisco-focused.

Three, I'm trying to move away from writing negative reviews in general, because, after all, I have my own reputation as a playwright (not just as an amateur critic) to consider, and wonder if I can afford to alienate anyone... even a fringe theater across the pond.

But the Bush Theatre isn't just any fringe theater. It is one of London's top-rated new-writing theaters, and, moreover, a couple of years ago, American playwriting blogs were abuzz with enthusiasm for its "BushGreen" endeavor. (see, e.g. this post by my friend Marisela Treviño Orta.) BushGreen is an online play submission system and a social networking site for playwrights. Using this platform, the Bush has a remarkably open submissions policy: they will accept any English-language play that has not had a full production in the U.K. They receive -- and read -- over a thousand scripts a year.

So when a theater that has such an open, laudable submissions policy decides to produce a mediocre script, I feel like I have every right to be particularly disappointed.

Moreover, I had to wonder whether factors other than the quality of the script affected the Bush's decision to produce Fear. This was the first play from writer-director Dominic Savage, who is better known in the U.K. for his work in television. The week before Fear opened at the Bush, Savage had a show called True Love air in prime time on the BBC -- five short semi-improvised dramas starring such well-known British actors as David Tennant. Was the Bush trying to cash in on Savage's fame by producing his first play? I can totally understand why a theater would consider this a smart business move, but at the same time, it's a disappointing choice from a theater that portrays itself as a new-writing venue where unknown playwrights can get their big break.

If you want to get some idea of what I disliked about Fear, you should read the What's On Stage review, which says, "It’s the kind of schematic, confrontational class warfare drama which might strike you as lively and promising in a schools, or youth drama, context -- where it would also seem more authentic -- but which shrivels in the spotlight at an establishment fringe venue." The play contrasted the lives of millionaire financier Gerald and his pregnant wife, with the lives of some young hoodlums who mug people like Gerald. There was one interesting scene where one of the thugs schooled his friend in the art of sizing people up to see whether it's worth the trouble of robbing them. I liked this scene because it was unexpected yet plausible. It was amusing to realize that criminals, just as much as fashionistas, must learn to identify this season's "It" handbag or shoes on sight. But other than that, the script was predictable, the dialogue unmemorable. Again, a theater that receives a thousand scripts per year should, statistically, receive many plays that are far livelier and more interesting than this one.

Evidently, the Bush Theatre has a new artistic director and is going through a period of transition -- they recently had an open forum event to discuss potential changes and updates to BushGreen. I just hope that Fear was an anomaly rather than the new normal for the Bush Theatre; that they will continue to have an open script policy and make good on their pledge to produce great plays by undiscovered writers; that they can continue to be one of the U.K. companies that causes Americans to sigh with envy, and not sigh with disillusionment.

UPDATE, August 6, 2012: please see my follow-up post here after BushGreen contacted me on Twitter.

"Beer Theory" in SF Theater Pub's Pint-Sized Plays Festival

I'm back! Miss me? I have had an incredibly busy month or so: family reunion, Europe trip, several birthday celebrations (including my own), friends and family coming to visit, and, last week, the opening of my latest play! This is "Beer Theory," a 10-minute play included in San Francisco Theater Pub's Pint-Sized Plays Festival.

I love Theater Pub and their annual Pint-Sized Festival -- they produced my play "Drinking for Two" in 2010, my first production in San Francisco. This year, Pint-Sized is bigger and better than ever: ten plays, six performances, live piano music, a dancing bear, a talking beer, corporate sponsorship from Good Vibrations, and a reappearance of the audience-favorite Llama character. Last week the show even went on tour to the Plough and the Stars on Clement Street -- I am thrilled that we got some theater west of Van Ness Avenue and also thrilled that, at six performances, this is the longest run any play of mine has ever had.

As for "Beer Theory," I can think of no better way to describe it than the tag line that producer Julia Heitner devised: "Boy Meets Girl. Apollonian Meets Dionysian." It's a meet-cute play with a twist, and, more than any play I've written, it gets at what it's like to be inside my head. It's inspired by A Visit from the Goon Squad and the Magnetic Fields concert and Sexual Personae and my own neurotic/over-thinking tendencies and a lot of other stuff besides. It's also my attempt to get over my fear of writing direct-address monologues!

"Beer Theory" has been sensitively directed by Katja Rivera and stars Rachel Ferensowicz (who once again proves that she is one of the most charming actresses in San Francisco) and Geoff Nolan (who plays one kind of romantic lead in my play and a very different one in "Circling," another of the Pint-Sized offerings).

Pint-Sized has received a lot of great publicity. Theater Pub did email interviews with me and with Katja. Lily Janiak profiled the festival in SF Weekly and gave us a nice review on her blog. Megan Cohen blogged about the audience reaction to her dancing-bear play, and that play made a new fan out of Rachel Bublitz. And we got some very mysterious and unexpected publicity from SF Daily Secret!

In short: you should come to one of the three remaining performances! Our brief foray into the Inner Richmond is over, but we'll be at Cafe Royale in the Tendernob on July 23, 30 and 31. Don't miss it!

Photo: Actors Rachel Ferensowicz and Geoff Nolan (with an innocent bystander in the middle) in "Beer Theory."

"A Writer Never Has a Vacation"

Ionesco said, "A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing."

Well, I'm off to go prove Ionesco wrong -- or try to.

Taking 15 days: San Francisco to New Jersey to London to Paris and back to S.F.

This has been a crazy month for me -- planning my trip, cramming in lots of theatergoing before my departure, the Olympians book was released, there's some stressful personal/family stuff going on -- which may somewhat explain my lack of blogging.

(You should check out my latest Theater Pub post, "Why Songs of Hestia Should Be On Your Summer-Reading List," though, if you haven't already.)

I don't know what my internet access will be like for most of this trip and I think my focus during my travels might be on personal journaling rather than public blogging... but I do hope at some point to write about some aspects of my trip. (I've already got tickets to see 2 plays in London!)

OK, so maybe I won't be proving Ionesco wrong after all. Writing is always a big part of my travels and while I may not be doing any playwriting while I am away, I still won't be able to turn off the journaling/blogging/putting-words-together part of my brain.

I'm exhilarated at the thought of returning to Europe after five years, but also exhausted from the busy month I've been having. Hopefully I can get a good night's sleep on the red-eye to London Sunday night and arrive there alert and wide-eyed and ready to take it all in!

SF Olympians III on IndieGogo

We at San Francisco Olympians Festival are currently running an IndieGogo campaign to raise funds for the festival's third edition, coming this December. (Featuring my new play The Love Goddess as one of 24 original one-act plays inspired by Greek mythology.)  There are four days to go until the campaign concludes and I'm pleased to say that we're just $200 away from our goal!  But don't let that stop you, if you're moved to contribute: any additional money we earn will go to paying the festival's writers, directors, actors, and poster artists. I think I can speak for everyone working on the festival to say that we will be so grateful for any contribution. Once again, our IndieGogo campaign ends on Thursday, so please don't delay!

A $48 contribution, by the way, gets you a copy of Songs of Hestia, the new book of five plays from the 2010 Olympians Festival, and my debut as a published author. (I wrote the introduction.) The book is also available on Amazon.com if you'd prefer to get it that way -- or if you need to buy additional copies for your friends!

"Tenderloin" at Cutting Ball: Voices of a Neighborhood

The week that Tenderloin opened at Cutting Ball Theater, I published a column for San Francisco Theater Pub that could be seen as disparaging the Tenderloin neighborhood. (It was mostly about how having so many S.F. theaters in the Tenderloin puts our artform at a disadvantage, since it's hard to entice people to visit the neighborhood and it doesn't get good foot traffic.) The timing of my article vis-a-vis the opening of Tenderloin was purely coincidental and I hope that no one made the mistake of interpreting my piece as a veiled swipe at Cutting Ball. Nonetheless, you could say that I seemed to set myself up in opposition to their play. My article took the conventional bourgeois attitude toward the Tenderloin; Cutting Ball's play is designed to counteract this.

Tenderloin has been over a year in the making. Led by director and documentary-theater specialist Annie Elias, the six actors in the piece interviewed Tenderloin residents and other people with a connection to the neighborhood, then shaped the interviews into a theater piece. In the tradition of other documentary-theater artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, they worked to reproduce the exact phrasing, cadences, vocal tone and overall affect of the interviewees.

The result is absolutely stunning from a performance standpoint. MVPs include Tristan Cunningham, who portrays a sad-eyed homeless beatboxer, an irrepressibly cheerful Filipina motivational speaker, and a cynical street-cleaner; and Rebecca Frank, an actress in her mid-twenties who somehow manages to transform herself into 86-year-old Leroy Looper, the "Mayor of the Tenderloin." Meanwhile, David Sinaiko, a middle-aged man with gray hair, plays Leroy's doting wife Kathy. Michael Uy Kelly plays a transsexual waitress, a retired police officer, and a Tenderloin resident with a hilarious story about being asked to take care of a baby. Siobhan Marie Doherty excels at playing tenderhearted female characters (a young woman in an abusive relationship; a massage therapist who provides services to Tenderloin residents) while Leigh Shaw plays more authoritative or powerful women (an activist lawyer; a pastor at Glide Church).

I also found the piece interesting from a playwriting perspective. After all, none of it was conventionally written, but it was wrought out of dozens of interviews -- the speakers are often juxtaposed in interesting ways so that they seem to be in dialogue with one another. I found the structure of the piece effective overall. Moreover, these people speak in fascinating, idiosyncratic ways, which I see as encouragement to be bolder in my own writing. There are times when I'll write a line and then strike it out, saying, "No one would ever say that in real life -- it's too weird/too flowery/too nakedly emotional/etc."  But, it turns out that when you interview real-life people, they do say weird, flowery, emotional, expressive things. And of course, this heightened language works great on stage.

As for the political and thematic messages of Tenderloin? Clearly, the piece is designed to display often-overlooked aspects of the neighborhood -- the architectural heritage, the children who are growing up there (little kids on bouncy-balls and a bubbly high-school student both appear in the play), the many acts of kindness and compassion that take place on a daily basis. The piece also comes out against city policies that have turned the Tenderloin into a "containment zone" for the poor and downtrodden and the social services that cater to them. It used to be that halfway houses and soup kitchens were scattered around the city, but starting in the '70s, they became concentrated in the Tenderloin, amplifying the neighborhood's problems. I found this point especially striking and persuasive because it parallels what I said in my Theater Pub column. I believe San Francisco would benefit if its theaters were located in neighborhoods across the city, rather than just in the Tenderloin; and I can now see how the city would benefit if there were soup kitchens or drug-rehab clinics outside of the Tenderloin, too. Moreover, if the Tenderloin has become synonymous with "everything people don't want," and the majority of San Francisco theaters are located in the Tenderloin -- does this also mean that theater is something that "people don't want," that they'd rather not have in their neighborhood? Something to think about.

Yet at the same time, I felt like Tenderloin sometimes went a bit too far in trying to make us love the neighborhood. We hear from a young woman from Palo Alto who feels safe and welcome in the Tenderloin... but we don't hear from any women complaining about getting catcalled or stared at, which has frequently been my experience. (OK, the catcalling is usually mild, along the lines of "Hey beautiful, give me a smile" rather than anything disgustingly sexual. Nor have I ever had the sense I would be physically assaulted. Nonetheless, it's not exactly fun to walk past a dozen guys loitering on the sidewalk and staring at you.) I wish that that perspective had been represented somewhere in the patchwork of stories that make up Tenderloin.

At the beginning and end of the show, the actors portray what we might think of as "typical" Tenderloin denizens -- drunks, prostitutes, the homeless and mentally ill. In the final scene of the performance that I attended, actress Rebecca Frank (whom I know somewhat) was playing one of these characters. She spotted me in the audience, caught my eye, made some comment about how tall I am, came up the aisle, and asked me to give her a hug. I complied, but at the same time, I was all too well aware that I was hugging Rebecca, a nice young woman pretending to be a homeless drunk, rather than an actual homeless drunk. Which, I think, says something about the limitations of theater. Tenderloin certainly taught me a lot, introducing me to some fascinating real-life people as channeled through the skillful performances of six talented actors. Perhaps I empathize a bit more with the Tenderloin now. But I'm not going to embrace any homeless drunkards any time soon.

Tenderloin has been playing to sellout crowds and was just extended for 2 more weeks, June 14-24. Tickets here.

Image: Rebecca Frank and David Sinaiko as Leroy and Kathy Looper. Photo by Rob Melrose.