Indian Ink – coming full circle

Just back from a phenomenal performance of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, directed by Carey Perloff. Saw Ms. Perloff in the foyer after the play and I told her that our first play at the Geary Theater was the ACT production of Indian Ink in 1999. We came back each year as season ticket holders for 15 years after that, and our numbers grew as the ACT plays became a way for our extended family and close friends to meet in the city. Now here we were at another production of Indian Ink. She told me it was full circle for her too as Firdous Ramji had played the son Anish Das in 1999 and now in 2015 he was playing the father Nirad Das!

Stoppard’s interweaving timelines are masterfully staged by Perloff at the Geary and that was what had enticed us in 1999. Since then we have seen excellent depictions of parallel timelines in The Invention of Love and Arcadia and now again in India Ink.

Brenda Meaney as Flora Crewe was both earthy and ethereal as demanded by the play. Her friendship and subsequent relationship with Nirad Das was crackling with chemistry. Roberta Maxwell as Eleanor Swan and Pej Vahdat as Nirad Das’s son Anish kept the mystery of Flora’s sojourn in India alive as they slowly peeled away the layers of the past. Who was Flora Crewe and what was her relationship with the painter Nirad? Anthony Fusco played Eldon Pike, searching for the details of Flora’s life, bungling his way through the mystery one footnote at a time.

If you have not seen it yet, then you have exactly one week to do so! This one is not to be missed.

Once in a Lifetime – when sound came to the silents!

Once in a lifetime one gets a chance to watch a play written by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Only the lucky see it mounted as magnificently and as well acted as the ACT production of this classic.

A brand new musical adaptation in THE CITY – Tales of the City

The American Conservatory Theater did it again – a wonderful musical adaptation of an iconic book that captured the essence of a city. When Armistead Maupin came to San Francisco he was securely in his closet but the city, and the sexual revolution that it was undergoing in the 70s, encouraged him to put his social experiences into a news paper column (that later made it into a book, and a TV series) and to come out of the closet.

Sartre’s No Exit – Hell is other people!

And now for new year resolutions! ahoy there 2011

I decided to make this list before the revelry of the 31st made me lose my judgment. After a few margaritas and some loud music one tends to make all kinds of resolutions that seem foolish the next morning. And then the guilt sets in. So this year I am starting early. In 2011 I resolve to:

1. Spend less time Twittering (I know I know – it is Tweeting) and more time reading. My stack of books is growing at an alarming rate and has been ignored for too long.

A. R. Rahman’s marvel of light and sound – but where’s the music? (part 2)

I have so much to say about the AR Rahman Bay Area concert, a show that was stunning as a spectacle, but thin on the ground as far as music went.  You cannot have Benny Dayal, Neeti Mohan, Javed Ali, Shweta Pandit, and Blazee as showcased singers and get a good music program.  OK there was Hariharan, but he sang maybe three songs and was hardly present.  The one exception, and possible late addition, was Shaan.  But Shaan has not sung much for ARR so we did not hear any of his signature songs!

Rahman himself sang some of his gems and one such number was Khwaja Mere Khwaja from Jodhaa Akbar.  Dressed in traditional costume, with a turban, and sitting on the steps on stage with a harmonium, Rahman did do justice to the song!  The crowd was in transports even though this is not a song that can elicit much audience participation because of its introspective nature.

The golden silence of Olympia Dukakis – ACT’s VIGIL!

I was heartbroken when Marco Barricelli decided to leave the core theater company at American Conservatory Theater and move to New York. His flamboyance, his sheer size, and that deep voice had created many a wonderful character in ACT productions, the most memorable being that of Tony Roma in GlenGarry Glen Ross. So it was time to cheer when ACT announced that Marco would be back, in the Morris Panych written and directed VIGIL. That he would be joined by Olympia Dukakis, was the icing on the cake!

The Caucasian Chalk Circle – test of a mother’s love!

Brecht wrote drama that typified street theater, with many intersecting stories, and relied on an audience that viewed the play without the benefit of a fourth wall. Born in Bavaria at the turn of the century, he was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and settled in California. During the war years he wrote some of his most influential plays including The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944) , while also trying to get work in the movie industry. An avowed Marxist, he was brought before the House Un-American activities committee in 1947 and and left to go to East Germany where he ran the state financed theater company until his death in 1956.

Yet another boring love story? Phedre pulsates with forbidden passion!

The American Conservatory Theater joins hands with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Ontario, Canada to present Jean Racine’s retelling of the Greek tragedy, Phedre. Directed by Carey Perloff, this masterful presentation runs almost two hours with no intermission. The drama unfolds on a minimal yet striking stage with “tree” trunks made of coiled pipes in cages, and a forest floor made of shadows from trees limned in light.

stage design

(Stage design from Words on Plays)

Political Satire at its best – David Mamet’s November

The American Conservatory Theater’s West Coast premiere of David Mamet’s November, directed by Ron Lagomarsino (television pilots include Picket Fences – Directors Guild Award, Homefront – Emmy nomination), is a bellyful of laughs!

What can one say about a playwright who has won a Pulitzer and been Oscar nominated twice? That he is a genius? His political beliefs were squarely on the liberal side but then he came out and said this:

“I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered. Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.”

A surreal Coward – Brief Encounter

Sir Noel Coward, eminent playwright, actor, singer, songwriter and entertainer, was known for his chic and suave style. His one act play “Still Life” was made into a classic film Brief Encounter, by the master of mood David Lean. A shared Palm D’Or at Cannes and a Criterion Collection release testifies to the enduring value of that film.

On the face of it, Brief Encounter is not a complicated tale – it tells of a chance encounter at a train station between two married people, their falling in love, an unconsummated affair, and the eventual resolution of the situation. In the trailer of the Criterion version of the Lean film, the simplicity comes out foremost, aided by the music of Rachmaninoff:

The animal within us – Albee’s At Home At The Zoo!

American Conservatory Theater

Edward Albee wrote the one act play Zoo Story in 1958. It was first performed in 1959 at the Berlin festival in German and the success of the 1960 off-Broadway production firmly established Albee as a uniquely honest voice among the playwrights of America. Zoo Story dealt with the emptiness in everyday life and the anger it can engender in people. It also contrasted the life of the complacent to that of those living on the edge. “I’ve been to the Zoo. I said I’ve been to the Zoo. MISTER, I’VE BEEN TO THE ZOO!!!!” screams the on-edge Jerry to the calm and phlegmatic Peter. And then proceeds to talk about anything but the zoo, all the while edgily circling the park bench Peter is sitting on. And we hear a lot from Jerry on what exactly is bothering him about his existence, while Peter is the perfect foil, rich, married, with two daughters, two cats and two parakeets! There are animals all around Jerry, and we are not talking of just the landlady’s black dog – he describes the landlady’s heaving bloated body as she tries to corner him every time she sees him. So the alienation and anger that is part of Jerry’s life was amply clear to readers and theater goers from 1960 onward, and Zoo story remains one of Albee’s most significant plays.

But who was the mousy and affluent Peter? Albee felt the need to revisit Peter, as Peter was only seen through Jerry eyes and dealt with rather contemptuously. So in 2004 (46 years after penning Zoo Story) he wrote a “prequel”, a one act play called Homelife which shows Peter in his perfect off-white, clinically clean, and ordered Upper East Side apartment, interacting with his perfect wife Ann. In this perfect environment Ann is an insomniac who is crying out for MORE in her life. And is not afraid to vocalize all her yearnings to the husband with whom she never has conversations! Things chug along in the edgy but somewhat usual way, and then take that unexpected and brutal turn peculiar to Albee, but now familiar to us from plays like The Goat where the protagonist has an affair with, yes, a GOAT! But despite this foreknowledge of Albee’s work one is still stunned by the revelations that the unassuming and staid Peter makes to his wife! And then wanders off to the park to sit on a bench and encounter Jerry – who has just come from the ZOO!

Albee has now decreed that the Zoo Story can only be produced with its companion piece preceding – and calls the two act play At Home At The Zoo. So does this first act merely add to The Zoo Story or does it change it? In this rewriting Albee makes a few significant changes to The Zoo Story – he modernizes some references – Peter now earns $200k a year, and the popular novelist is Stephen King! But most importantly the bit where Jerry says “”You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow, if you don’t see it on your TV tonight.” is now absent. In earlier versions of Zoo Story this was interpreted to mean that either Jerry had freed some animals at the zoo, or that he was seriously contemplating taking his own life. Now it seems that his handing a knife to Peter and then eventually impaling himself on it, may not have been premeditated. What if it was not the neurotic and edgy Peter that Jerry met? What if it was some jocular type? Would they end up parting ways amicably or even heading to the nearest bar? So telling us about Peter and making him more well defined, almost seems intended to increase the ambiguities within the Jerry character. And Peter also becomes the character that ties two acts together and is thus way more significant than Jerry, who was the focal point in Zoo Story. Is this also tied into the times in his life when Albee wrote the two halves? As a young man he gave us Jerry, full of disenchantment with life and angst; as an established, distinguished, and well recognized playwright he gives us Peter, a man who is settled into an affluent but unsettled life!

The play has two static sets but director Rebecca Bayla Taichman manages to keep us throughly engaged by having the edgy Ann and the manic Jerry move around this static setting. Renee Augeson is perfect as the ever needy but somewhat shallow Ann, who has no clue what is seething beneath the surface of her husband’s apparently placid exterior. Anthony Fusco delights as Peter – he is mousy and dull until the climax of act one and then the scales fall from our eyes. This allows us to see him in act two as we would never have seen him in the stand alone Zoo Story. Manoel Fileciano as Jerry is manic and loud at times, but perhaps the part does require some of the loudness. All in all At Home At The Zoo is vintage Albee, maybe not as shocking as Who is Sylvia, or The Goat, but close enough to tell us that the Albee of the 60s has further sharpened his skills at shocking us to the core with the edgy side of life. Well worth a watch.

A forever kind of love – Boleros for the Disenchanted!

Jose Rivera is the first Puerto Rican to earn an Oscar nomination – for his adaptation of the Motorcycle Diaries. He was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in the mainland USA when his parents emigrated there to try and realize their American dream. They did manage to send two of their eleven children to college and Jose was one of them. In Boleros Rivera tells a very personal tale – set in two time periods. In the first Flora (his mother) has just had her heart broken by a philandering fiancé and she then goes off to her cousin’s to repair it. There at a street corner, over the strains of her (and her two-timing fiance’s) favorite Bolero, she meets Eusebio, an ensign in the National Guard who has missed his bus. As Eusebio misses his bus two weeks in a row, the two fall in love and decide to get married. Flora’s father and mother have already lost a child to the evil maws of America and they listen in horror as Eusebio tells them that he and Flora will move there too.

Then we jump forward 40 years to Alabama to meet Flora and Eusebio again. Now Eusebio has had both legs amputated due to diabetes, and Flora looks after him all day long, from cleaning him up and feeding him to withholding the remote and the Mets games when he is acting up! Into this mix walk in a young Puerto Rican couple who want to get married and are seeking counsel from Flora and Eusebio. Eusebio tells them what life has been like for Flora as she looks after him day after day. He then says he saw an angel who told him he is about to die and needs to confess. He confesses to a few extramarital affairs that shock his long-suffering wife! Flora threatens to kill him and consigns the Mets (Eusebio’s favorite team) to perdition.

Running through the play is the theme of slow decay of the Puerto Rican life style, the despair among young and old alike on the island, the visions of the American dream they all carry, and how the dream is shattered as the Puerto Ricans are far from embraced by the mainstream. But it really is an ode to love, told through an exploration of the various kinds of love one encounters at different stages in life. There is Flora’s young and idealistic love for her fiancé, there is Manuel’s selfish love that tells him Flora is the gem he should have but there are countless other women he needs because he is a man and men are different from women, there is Eusebio’s love for Flora and this is a pure and idealistic love, there is Flora and Eusebio’s love for their unborn children that forces them to leave Puerto Rico and go to New York so they can provide for these children, there is Flora’s love for the crippled and bed-ridden Eusobio – now a staid and in the groove love, there is Eusebio’s love for the old Flora – now a love full of the burden of gratitude. But Eusebio’s dream of the angel of death sets in motion a cataclysm that cause Flora to look at his infidelities and realize that Eusebio’s love for her still matters to her. Eusebio forgoes a euthanasia solution and when asked why all he can reply is he’d rather be like this and still be with Flora! In the end the triumph of love over death, pain, disillusionment, infidelity is the strong message that Rivera sends to us. He does all this boldly with wit and humor and charm. The play does not have a dull moment and the dialog crackles with one-liners like “As much as Jesus loved his cross”, when Flora tells her mother “I thought you love Pappy”!

The production is excellent with minimal but highly effective sets and Carey Perloff’s directs deftly. The cast does a commendable job and does double duty in the two time periods of the play. Lela Loren plays the young Flora with a naivete and charm coupled with a will of iron that is extremely touching. Drew Cortese’s young Eusebio is again naïve but ebullient. Flora’s mother and father are played by Rachel Ticotin and Robert Beltran. The back and forth from love to hate between this couple is that of two who cannot stand each other and yet cannot live without each other. And the same couple play the older Flora and Eusebio with an equal amount of familiarity, love and hatred between them. Does Rivera want to tell us that we play out the same old drama generation after generation? Only the characters change but not the screenplay? But that in the end the love that binds couples together forever is of the “in sickness and in health till death do us part” kind? That is something we feel we knew all along, but Eusebio and Flora’s journey brings the message home with a brutal kind of reality.

War Music – Logue meets Groag at ACT

Chrisptopher Logue is writing his own interpretation of Home’s Iliad, book by book, piece by piece. A man with no real poetry credentials, and no knowledge of Greek, his interpretation is a semi-modernization based on previous translations.

A Winter’s Tale – in the domicile of the Bard of Avon!

A longstanding desire to see a Shakespeare play in Stratford-upon-Avon, was fulfilled when I managed to snag tickets to a Winter’s Tale at the Courtyard theater in Stratford.