"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.

Ode to the Props Master

Here's "Ode to the Props Master," my other contribution to Theater Pub's "Odes of March" show celebrating all of the different people who make theater possible.

What would Hamlet be without a skull?
What would The Seagull be without a gull?
And Hedda Gabler’s famous for her pistols,
As Laura, for her menagerie of crystal.
For farce, you need a slapstick to cause mirth;
For Sam Shepard, a buried child to unearth.
The Angel of America needs her book,
And Captain You-Know-Who must wear a hook.
What would Willy Loman be without his cases?
Or Damn Yankees sans bats and balls and bases?
R and J without a dagger is a bore,
As is Titus without gushing blood and gore.
Othello needs the fatal handkerchief,
And ingénues their smelling salts to sniff.

The Props Master takes care of all these things --
Flowers and asses’ heads and fairies’ wings.
(These are the props that you need for Midsummer;
I say this for the benefit of newcomers.)
He scrounges, cadges, buys what can be bought,
Finds everything he can, and makes what he cannot;
Brews tea, which actors then pretend is whisky,
Since real booze on the stage is far too risky.
Or he’ll take paper and dye it in more tea
So it seems from another century.
‘Tis he who knows the source to get a sword,
And fifty nifty uses for cardboard.
He sees each object’s soul; and makes it fit in
With what the director’s staged and writer’s written.

And then he lays the props upon a table
And makes for each a designated label
And a space marked by lines of masking tape
Befitting each odd item’s size and shape.
And then the props master begs and implores:
“Do not move any prop – unless it’s yours!”

If only life were like this! If only we’d
Have someone else to find the things we need
And lay them neat and tidy on a table
For us to use, and thus our acts enable;
To see to every object, trinket, token;
Keep it in trim; repair it if it’s broken.
If only we could organize our things
And place them on a table in the wings!
O world edged by these masking-tape borders!
O props master, o paragon of order!

He gives us props; let us give props to him!
For this is the whole purpose of my hymn.
I praise him for his zeal and his proclivity
For mixing discipline and creativity.
Salute him then with twenty-one fake guns
And drink his health with tea – not Jameson!
--------------
NOTES:

• I chose to write the Ode to the Props Master because I thought it'd be fun to make rhymes about things (all of the different objects that the props master must find), mixed in with references to well-known plays and the props they require. Very quickly, I came up with the lines "What would Hamlet be without a skull? / What would The Seagull be without a gull?" and therefore, determined that the poem would need to be in heroic couplets.
• Heroic couplets are FUN to write. I can totally see how Alexander Pope churned out line after line of them.
• Only later did I realize that the form of the poem also suited the message I was trying to convey. Heroic couplets have a very orderly, neat and tidy feeling, and my poem is about how the props master keeps everything neat and organized. And then I felt very clever -- without even realizing it, I'd followed Sondheim's key principle of "content dictates form"!
• As with my Costume Designer ode, the demands of poetic form superseded my desire to invert traditional gender stereotypes. Thus, I used the singular masculine pronoun "he" at all times to refer to the Props Master.
• Surprisingly, I did not come up with the silly pun on "He gives us props; let us give props to him!" until very late in my process of writing the poem. This might be the most ridiculous line in the whole piece -- the semicolon adds to the ridiculousness, I think -- and thus it is my favorite.
• My original idea for staging this piece at the Theater Pub show involved having one person recite the poem while two Assistants pulled props out of bags as they were mentioned, tossed them around, and engaged in general tomfoolery. This had to be toned down a bit for the actual performance -- the Cafe Royale didn't want us throwing things around, and we were not able to source all of the props mentioned -- but the general idea remained. Neil Higgins recited the poem, while several of the other actors that night brought out prop pieces and eventually put them into a masking-tape grid. Unfortunately, I was seated behind a pillar and didn't get to see any of this (!) but it got a good reaction from the crowd. Especially the rubber chicken that we used for the "seagull" and the baby doll wrapped in rags that was the "buried child." (Dead animals: great for comedy!)

Ode to the Costume Designer

Hey, remember when I wrote two poems for San Francisco Theater Pub's show in March? I always meant to post the poems on my blog when the "Odes of March" project was over... so here, albeit belatedly, is "Ode to the Costume Designer."

Cinderella and others got dressed in their finery
By magic, by fairies, by sprites.
In theater, our fairy’s the costume designer; she
Makes clothes to enchant and delight.

Her taste is eccentric and never generic. Her
Knowledge of costume impresses.
And many an actor first gets into character
By wearing the right shoes or dresses.

She knows how to flatter your hips, breasts, or pelvis
By artfully adding some trim
And when a director hates actors in velvet
The costumer humors his whim.

Like one of the mice in The Tailor of Gloucester
She stays up all night sewing seams
She sheds not a tear for the sleep it will cost her
Making raiment of radiant dreams.

Clothes are not silly; a character’s fashions
Can show us the depths of his heart.
So let’s pay homage to the costumer’s passions,
Her talents, her efforts, her art.

------------------------------------
NOTES:

• I tried to be clever with the rhymes but I worry that some of them are a bit too precious ("finery" / "designer, she"). However, I will defend "Gloucester" / "cost her" till my dying day.
• I wrote stanza #4 first, and it's still my favorite -- not only for the "Gloucester" rhyme, but for the "raiment of radiant dreams" line.
• The rhyme on "Gloucester" and "cost her" also dictated that the costume designer in my poem is female. Which made me feel like I was reinforcing gender stereotypes, in a way that I would prefer to avoid, but my rhyme-snobbery won out over my feminism :-)
• The reference to the velvet-hating director is an in-joke about my friend Stuart.
• On performance night, this ode was performed by Aoife Davis as the costume designer, dressing Jessica Rudholm in a beautiful gown.