The Kids Are All Right @ SF Theater Pub Blog

Funny sometimes how life works. It'd been years since I saw any high school theater productions, and then last weekend, I saw two of them in two days. Schoolteacher friends of mine invited me to both In and Out of Shadows, performed by the Marsh Youth Theater, and The Boy Friend, produced by the Bay School.

I wrote about the experience in my latest column for San Francisco Theater Pub's blog, and got a little sentimental about youth theater in the process.

BONUS: here's a photo of the cast and crew of my high school production of Little Shop of Horrors. It must've been taken almost exactly 10 years ago: we performed the show in late February of 2003. I am second from the right, in the pink dress and platinum blonde wig. I don't think it suits me.

"The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco" - there's more to the story!

On Saturday night, I was at a small party hosted by a friend of a friend, in an apartment north of the Panhandle. A framed book cover, hanging on one of the kitchen walls, caught my attention, and I went over to investigate it.

The cover was plain but elegant: light blue, with a cream-colored rectangle containing the book's title, written in a fine italic script: The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco.

All at once, I started freaking out. The good kind of freaking out, that is. Because, last spring, I fell head-over-heels for a song called "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco," by the Lucksmiths, a band from Melbourne. For a long time last year, they were my new favorite band and "The Chapter In Your Life" was my new favorite song. I couldn't believe I'd never heard it before. I wanted to tell everyone I knew (particularly all of my San Francisco friends) to drop everything and listen to it ASAP. In short, I am probably one of the few people in the United States who is an evangelist for this song, so it felt like some kind of gorgeous serendipity to stumble upon that framed book cover in that apartment kitchen.

The owners of the apartment had no idea that there was a song called "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco," so I made them find it and watch it on YouTube as I sang the excellent lyrics under my breath. "Are you ever coming clean? / Or will I never know the meaning of the lines you scribbled out / So that I couldn't read between?" Brilliant stuff.

They also took down the picture frame and opened it up, to show me the Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco book. It's a slim guide to the city and its sights, dating from the late 1940s. You can get a copy on Amazon. I didn't get to look at it for very long, but it's probably fascinating — I love vintage travel guides! The woman who lives in the apartment told me that some New York friends had given the book to her when she moved to San Francisco.

Knowing that the Lucksmiths stole the title of their song from an old book doesn't diminish my appreciation of their music. In fact, I enjoy learning where artists get their ideas. And because you really can't ever have too much Lucksmiths, here's the video again:

Sylvia, You Deserve Better

My recent obsession with Jarvis Cocker led to my discovering the show he hosts on BBC Radio 6 Music, which then led to my discovering 6 Music in general. And it's pretty great: a commercial-free alternative-rock station, playing lots of new indie music plus some fun, unexpected oldies. I now frequently listen to it at work, instead of relying on my iPod. When I arrive at work in the morning, it's late afternoon in the UK, and Radio 6 is playing the "teatime" show hosted by Steve Lamacq. (And how charmed am I that they call it the teatime show rather than the drive-time show? Very charmed.)

One regular feature that Lamacq does is called the "National Anthem," where he reads a news story (typically a kind of whimsical human-interest story — not a major headline) and invites his listeners to suggest songs whose titles/lyrics have something to do with that situation. For instance, last week Lamacq found a news story about a cosmetics company that plans to market perfumes based on the '70s, '80s, and '90s, and the listeners decided that the appropriate National Anthem for that story was "Smells Like Teen Spirit." You get the picture.

Meanwhile, I've also been following the controversy about the new U.K. cover for the 50th-anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which ignores the book's sad and serious themes in favor of a colorful, frivolous image of a woman with a powder compact:

(Personally, when I saw the Bell Jar cover, what it most reminded me of is the cover of the 50th-anniversary edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's, another book that people want to pretend is far more full of Midcentury Manhattan Glamour than it really is. But at least the Tiffany's cover is a bit darker-colored and more serious-looking; the Bell Jar one is a total mismatch for the book's themes.)

And then, well, you know I've been listening to a lot of Pulp lately, and I realized that if the Bell Jar cover controversy were a National Anthem story, I knew the perfect song for it. What could it be besides Pulp's "Sylvia"? The one whose chorus goes "I know that you deserve better"?



Obviously, the Sylvia that Jarvis Cocker is singing about isn't Sylvia Plath, but I wonder if Plath is the reason he chose that name for the character in his song. If you're writing about a beautiful and troubled girl, your lyrics will gain an extra resonance if you name the girl "Sylvia," patron saint of the beautiful but troubled. It's a lovely name, and sounds similar to trendy names like "Sophia" and "Olivia," but it's rarely used, perhaps because of its tragic associations.

Which is really a shame. As are so many things related to Sylvia Plath. "You deserve better" is what I'd like to say to her on this, the 50th anniversary of her death. A better book cover. A better marriage. A better era in which to be a female artist.

"Why Torture is Wrong" at Custom Made: Every woman adores a Fascist

Custom Made Theatre has decided to celebrate Obama's second term by producing Christopher Durang's anti-George-Bush play from 2009, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. Well, if there's one surefire way to stir up a San Francisco audience, it's by producing an anti-Dubya play that paints its right-wing characters as ludicrous cartoons — indeed, one of them speaks in Looney Tunes voices.

We in the theater community refer to the play casually as Torture (which makes for some odd-sounding conversations — over the last few months, my friend Claire Rice, who directed this production, regularly said things like "I'm busy with Torture all weekend") or maybe by the first half of its lengthy title. However, I responded to the play not for its satire of the War on Terror, but more for what's suggested by the second half of its title, The People Who Love Them. Walking into the theater, I didn't think the title made much sense (and the grammar is definitely odd), but now I think it was a perfect choice on Durang's part. Because the play implies that we live in a world where men do the torturing and women fall in love with them anyway. It's a bleak vision, even for Durang, whose comedy has always rested on a foundation of darkness and dread.

The play begins when a young woman, Felicity (played by Eden Neuendorf in Custom Made's production), wakes up after a drunken night on the town to discover that she's married to Zamir (Sal Mattos), who is possibly a terrorist and definitely a nasty piece of work. Felicity runs to her parents for help, but her mother Luella (Jennie Brick) is scatterbrained and ineffectual, and her father Leonard (Paul Stout) is a blustering right-winger with a hair-trigger temper. The situation steadily disintegrates until Zamir is held hostage in Leonard's secret torture lair upstairs. It's all fun and games until someone loses a finger?

Felicity's parents are so dysfunctional that it's a wonder that such a normal young woman came from such a messed-up background. At first, Luella seems like a typical Durang ditz; in the original New York production, she was played by Kristine Nielsen, who's made a specialty of such roles. Try to have a serious conversation with Luella, and she'll start chattering about the plays she's seen recently. But this isn't just a way for Durang to shoehorn in all his witty quips and opinions about American theater. Instead, in Jennie Brick's excellent performance, it becomes clear that Luella is a desperately unhappy woman who spends all her free time going to the theater in order to escape her troubled marriage. And yet, despite Leonard's blind bloodlust, another character, Hildegarde (Teri Whipple), has a crush on him. And despite Felicity's mistreatment at the hands of Zamir, and her father's insanity, her instinct is to try to reconcile the two men, rather than to run as fast as she can from what is obviously a bad situation. As a woman, she's been socialized to be a peacemaker — and as her name "Felicity" implies, she's an optimist who seeks a happy ending.

Leonard and Zamir keep their women subservient by means of threats, coercion, and violence. Meanwhile, Reverend Mike (Jonathon Brooks) initially comes off as one of the saner characters onstage — yes, even though he's a minister who moonlights as a hardcore porn producer. But when Mike urges Felicity to forgive Zamir in the name of Christian charity, I found him just as hateful as the other men in the play. Religion, Durang implies, is just one more tool that the patriarchy uses to oppress women.

In the world of this play, then, men are torturers, women are their Stockholm-syndrome-besotted victims, and nothing can end well. Nonetheless, Durang constructs an ending in which Felicity, with the help of the play's omniscient Narrator (Christopher P. Kelly), turns back the clock and tries to rewrite the story. In an interview with the Blank Theater, Durang stated, "As I was writing the play, Felicity and I became one — we BOTH didn't want the play to spiral down into darkness that the actual torture seemed to necessitate dramatically. She and I wanted the play to end differently. In my 20s, I was more cynical/despairing (even though I still wrote comically), but I often sent audiences home with rather dark last moments. After a while, though, I don't want to send the audience home bummed out or distressed... I want to see what's hopeful."

I wasn't sure what to make of this ending choice when I saw the play. On the one hand, it felt like a simplistic cop-out: unwilling to face up to the darkest implications of the situation that he constructed, Durang quickly tagged a happy ending onto the play. On the other hand, the ending is deeply disturbing: Felicity (and Durang) can think of no way out of her predicament that doesn't involve rewriting the laws of space, time, and human behavior. And that might be the most terrifying thing of all.

Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them is playing at the Custom Made Theatre through  February 17. Disclosure: I received a press comp to this show.

How to Host a Living Room Reading @ SF Theater Pub Blog

I am not Martha Stewart, but I have the same initials. And in my latest column for SF Theater Pub, I offer some tips on how to successfully host a script reading in your living room.

Because a living-room reading is the first time that we playwrights hear our work aloud, it can be a surprisingly nerve-wracking process. My tips are about how to calm your jitters and ensure that you and your guests/actors have both a pleasant and productive time.

Go check it out, and feel free to add your own tips in the comments. I'd love to hear from actors or directors about what they feel makes for a successful living room script reading!

And Bay Area residents, mark your calendars for April 15, 2013 -- that's when my new translation of Jean Cocteau's Orphée, which was the subject of my living-room reading on Wednesday night, will be produced at Theater Pub!

Now with extra Pulp

Since this blog is intended as a chronicle of the art I'm making and experiencing, I've been meaning to tell you about how, a few months ago, I became obsessed with the '90s band Pulp. But it can be hard to write about things that you love unreservedly — it takes courage to share your passions, and not merely your opinions, with the world. In fact, I've been tinkering with this post for weeks, hesitant to take a deep breath and publish it. But then, today, Pulp's first new song in a decade became available on iTunes — so I should post this in the interest of timeliness, right?

I'm prone to sudden, random obsessions — stumbling upon a movie or a song or a performer that, for whatever reason, resonates with me so deeply that I need to research it to death and make it an integral part of myself. So, back in November, I was wasting time on the Internet and came across the music video for "Common People," Pulp's biggest hit song.



I'd vaguely heard of Pulp,  but this was the first time I'd ever listened to any of their music. As I watched the video, my thoughts were roughly as follows:

1. This is a pretty good song.
2. This guy is odd-looking.
3. No, wait, this is a really good song.
4. I want to do this song at karaoke. I wonder if they have it?
5. He may be odd-looking, but he's incredibly charismatic.
6. And he has some sweet moves.
7. He is milking this "rock-and-roll frontman" thing for all it's worth.
8. OK, he's hot! He is really, really hot.
9. Is it weird that I think he's hot?

Subsequent internet research revealed that "this guy" is named Jarvis Cocker; that I am far from the only woman to find him attractive; and that critics tend to consider Pulp the best of the Britpop bands and "Common People" one of the best songs of the '90s. Cocker is famed for his sense of style, his onstage shimmying and posing, and his witty songwriting — and for being heterosexual despite all of that. In the U.K., where people affectionately refer to him as just "Jarvis," he is considered a national treasure and one of the coolest men alive.

Of course, all this raised the question of why he and his group had failed to register on my consciousness previously. I mean, why didn't anyone ever tell me about this tall, skinny British guy who wears hipster glasses and sharp suits, dances "like a sexy rubber band," and writes great lyrics? Hell, in 2011, Nirmala Nataraj titled her Olympians Festival play Selene, or Someone Like the Moon after a Pulp song — and Nirmala is uber-cool and glamorous, so why didn't I take that as a hint to investigate this band right away?

At the same time, I was glad to learn that my initial instincts were correct: this was a band and singer worth knowing about. Especially because I'm always on the lookout for catchy and well-crafted pop/rock music that also has something interesting to say. So I downloaded Pulp's major albums and have been listening to them on repeat. They've become the soundtrack to this period of my life; I'm even doing silly things like quoting the lyrics in my diary.

Because the songs are quotable, and super smart. It's almost impossible to avoid knife-related metaphors — "keenly honed," "sharply observed," "cutting wit" — when describing Jarvis Cocker's lyrics. While Oasis, the most successful Britpop band, are known for writing nonsensical lyrics, Pulp songs tell coherent, though often sordid, stories. They're full of racy come-ons, withering put-downs, and wry despair. The lyrics may not be complex in the sense of being brilliantly rhymed or packed full of wordplay, but they're complex in the feelings and situations they evoke. For instance, from Pulp's 1995 masterpiece Different Class, "Disco 2000" is an exuberant disco-rock song about nostalgia, failure, sexual frustration, and "damp and lonely Thursdays"; "Sorted for E's and Wizz" is a "let's get high and go to a concert" song that ends with the narrator losing his friends and wishing he could call his mother; and "Something Changed" is a sweet love song with an oddly philosophical twist. There's also an anguished ballad about "Underwear."

As a singer, Cocker has a rangy baritone voice and a fondness for punctuating his lyrics with sneers, sighs, gasps and other effects. There's something theatrical about his singing — you can hear it in "Common People," how he goes from aloof quipping to impassioned belting in the course of one song. Another thing he likes to do is deliver spoken monologues to musical backing, which sounds risky but somehow works, thanks to his charisma and the band's talent. (I particularly love "David's Last Summer," a gorgeous and heartbreaking monologue about a summer idyll and its inevitable end.) Overall, I'd say that Pulp's appeal is in the anthemic grandeur of the music mixed with the biting specificity of the lyrics. They have a knack for creating pop hooks on both guitar and synthesizer, and it pleases my feminist sensibilities that the keyboardist is a woman, Candida Doyle. If you are also a Pulp newbie, check out the Guardian's top 10 Pulp songs for beginners.

Actually, I don't know whether to refer to Pulp in the present or the past tense. They disbanded in the early 2000s, reunited in 2011 for some touring, and, as I mentioned, just released a new song. But also, evidently, they're about to go on hiatus again. It's a bit confusing, and I selfishly wish that they'll continue on in some fashion. Otherwise, it's rather embarrassing to discover and fall for a band just before they call it quits for the second time.

Meanwhile, Jarvis Cocker (great name for an English rock star, that) has made two solo albums and become something of a Renaissance man. He's revealed a literary side, publishing a book of his lyrics and writing a very funny and insightful review of The John Lennon Letters. And I've become addicted to the show that he hosts on BBC Radio 6 called, with typical irreverence, "Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service." He plays eclectic records, commemorates events that happened on this day in history, and delivers droll between-songs musings in his Sheffield accent. It's like a much hipper and quirkier "Writer's Almanac" and always causes me to download a motley assortment of songs from iTunes.

I find myself incapable of getting a crush on anyone, even a celebrity, if all he has going for him are his looks. Even as a preteen, I never crushed on boy-band members, no matter how cute they were, because I didn't think that they were interesting people. So I guess it makes sense that when I do get a crush on a rock star, it's on a wry British eccentric. Humor and intelligence are sexy. Though geek-chic outfits, snake-hipped dance moves, and innuendo-filled lyrics don't hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Troublemaker plays at Berkeley Rep through February 3.

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