SAN DIEGO THEATRE SCENE
"CURTAIN CALLS"
By Pat Launer
03/31/04
It was a week of spiritual connection:
From a crucifixion to a 'Resurrection,'
With Hell and Heaven charting their
course
In C.S. Lewis' 'Great Divorce'
And 'Frankie and Johnny' were overheard
Saying, L'amour? Bien sur -- C'est
L'Absurd!
MILLER LITE??
For more than 50 years, Arthur Miller has been the conscience
of the country. His plays have underscored our hypocrisy, conflicted loyalties
and flagging sense of personal and societal responsibility. "Resurrection Blues" has all these elements, but I don't think it'll ever be up there
in the pantheon of his classic 'greats.'
It's his first foray into satire, and that's been a big surprise
for many people. But the premise of this play was actually foreshadowed a dozen
years ago, when Miller wrote a trenchant, Swiftian piece in the New York Times
advocating, with mock solemnity, the privatization of executions to be enacted
for paying customers in Shea Stadium. "The take would be sizeable,
considering the immense number of Americans in favor of capital
punishment," Miller wrote. "The condemned would, of course, get a
percentage of the gate to be negotiated by his agent or a promoter if he so
desired... " see? He does have a sense of humor. But frankly, his
latest play would do better without it.
Of
course, the timing of this production is impeccable. We've heard discussions of
public TV viewing of capital punishment. And the audience is already paying to
see a crucifixion, thanks to Mr. Gibson. Of course, the excesses of our greed
and materialism are ever-spiraling upward, and the nefarious underpinnings of political
decisions… well, what can we say in this election year? And now, just when we
need it most, it's Miller-time.
In "Resurrection Blues," a
dictator in an unnamed South American country has twin crises on his
hands: his country is beset by drugs,
violence, civil war and gross economic inequities; and a young man from the
mountains has achieved a Christ-like following. The dictator decides to solve
both problems by crucifying the Messianic revolutionary and selling the
broadcast rights of the event to an American television station for megabucks
which would go a long way to bailing him out.
There's a moral fervor about the piece,
which exposes media vulgarity and excessive consumerism, not to mention
hypocrisy at the governmental, religious, political, personal and professional
level. But Miller veers off-course, from moralist to moralizer. Much of the
play is sober and preachy; the rest is implausible or heavy-handed. We've got
an all-powerful General who's impotent; a pregnant, insecure strong-but-weak TV
director who calls her Jewish Mother in times of stress, and who falls into bed
with the man who embodies everything she's against; a shallow, greedy,
one-dimensional TV executive; and the drugged-out hippie acolyte of the
spiritual leader who gets to have the last word. There are other
less-than-fleshed-out characters, such as the failed-suicide, crippled apostle
of the Messiah, niece of the General, who is the mouthpiece of moral outrage.
She engages in heated exchanges with her father, an equivocating intellectual
who's going through his own spiritual and psychological crisis, and who
ultimately learns, as does the General, that All You Need is Love.
While the play may nail American
society to the cross of economic corruption and media monstrousness, it isn't a
satisfying spectacle for the paying customer. And director Mark Lamos and his
cast don't do too much to help. On opening night, though the production was
earnest, everyone was declaiming, nearly screaming. There was barely a
connected, credible interaction or conversation all evening. But the
monologues, of which there were many -- some smugly comic, some sermonizing --
were consistently well executed -- especially those of the beret-wearing
intellectual, Henri (Daniel Davis) and the druggy/disciple Stanley (Bruce
Bohne). The acting approaches varied widely; some performers were far more able
to capture the satirical style than others. Few lived up to the whimsy of
scenic designer Riccardo Hernández's attractive, Crayola-colored set, bright
red panels imprinted with a Spanish-language constitution and flanked by a
cartoonish green palm tree.
The points about the
military-political-media axis are made with sledgehammer subtlety it's
impossible to ignore. And Arthur Miller was right there in the audience, for
gosh sakes. And that was inspiration enough. But the play felt unpolished,
disappointing and disengaging.
VANTAGE POINT
Just in the nick of time, I caught the near-final performances of
the two Vantage Theatre productions at the Lyceum: "Frankie and Johnny
in the Clair de Lune" and "C'est L'Absurd." And
even though I'd seen two of the three pieces before, I was happy to pay another
visit. Priscilla Allen does a star-turn in both the Absurds, but Charlie
Riendeau certainly holds his own (inside the Phonograph horn) in Jean Cocteau's
"The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower." The duo was humorous and vastly
varied in their voices and accents. Lovely performances! And those costumes! In
her set, costume and art design, Nadja Lancelot does a splendid job of evoking
Picasso, who created the original set and costumes for the 1917 premiere. The
black and white Eiffel-like painted drop, the cubist masks with
Picasso-perspective faces -- sheer delight.
The first time I saw "The Wedding," last year at the
Actors Festival (smaller space, the Ark Theatre), it seemed tighter, more
specifically choreographed (by Esther Emery and director Robert Salerno). This
time, it was a bit looser, seemingly more random in movement. but the cast of
16 remained quite strong, and highly amusing, capturing the right, light touch
for the absurdist, bizarre proceedings that skewer society -- its technological
inanities, lack of communication, need to document every act, and create
faux-celebrations. Once again, Jim Turner was noteworthy as the hapless
Photographer, who tries to take a picture of the wedding party, but can't get
control of his camera (technology on the fritz -- then as now!); hunters,
lions, ostriches, bathing beauties and all manner of weird stuff keeps coming
out of it. Turner's moves are pure Buster Keaton; his malleable face and
rubber-legged body are perfect in this silent-film pantomime charade.
Turner appears again, with Allen, in Ionesco's "The
Painting." She is terrific as The Corpulent Gentleman, a rich but parsimonious
man who pretends to care about and collect art, while he abuses the poor,
starving artist (Turner). But he is victimized too, by his invalid sister
(Laura Bozanich, very funny) who seems like his prey at first, and then emerges
from that sham to do a sadistic number on her bro. The tables turn with
breakneck speed, and the physical and linguistic pas de deux is hilarious.
Allen is big and broad and comical; Turner does his Little Tramp bit. Bozanich
is a monstrous chameleon. Jennifer Eve Kraus and Rachael van Wormer provide
ballast. But this is Allen's show, and under Salerno's direction, she sparkles
and shines, commanding the stage, showing off her expansive talent and
prodigious humor. A vicious commentary on the art world and the perception of beauty,
not to mention sibling S&M. A perfect mate for the "Wedding," in
a witty translation by designer Lancelot and director Salerno.
UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS
Speaking of revisits, Lamb's Players Theatre has returned to C.S.
Lewis' "The Great Divorce,"
which was adapted for the stage by Lamb's artistic director Robert
Smyth. After a successful premiere in England, the company presented a small,
one-night production last spring. That, too, was so well received, that they
decided to mount a full production.
"The Great Divorce" is
Lewis's "Divine Comedy."
The narrator in the allegory bears strong resemblance to the writer, but is
here transformed into a wide-eyed, inquisitive young woman (Cynthia Gerber).
The author's Virgil is the Scottish writer George MacDonald. His title is
a riff on William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," which
suggests that there will be an ideal union of the secular and divine, or Heaven
and Hell. Lewis sees instead an unbridgeable divide.
Set at first in a nondescript
neighborhood, the seeker is taken on a bus trip from Hell to Heaven. Hell is a bleak, dreary Grey Town, vast and lonely, hovering in a
perpetual rainy twilight. Heaven is a Bright Plain, an idyllic wilderness
paradise, a garden country of rivers, mountains and trees. On their day-trip,
the ghosts meet in Heaven those they knew when alive; these Spirits try to
persuade them to remain, which they can do if they turn to God rather than
concentrating on themselves.
Often considered a brief
masterwork of Christian thinking, Lewis's book expounds the theory that those who are in heaven are there because
they want to be, and those who are in hell are there because they want
to be. In other words, it's more about faith and free will than divine
judgment. The fantasy underscores the ability of humans to rationalize and
justify their (our?) behavior, whether it be as an overbearing mother, an
under-appreciated writer, a cynic who believes everything is a sham, a man
riddled with lust, or an entrepreneur consumed by career.
The wizards at Lamb's bring all their
copious talents to bear in recreating this dreamlike, phantasmagoric journey.
Jeanne Reith creates a spectacular array of fantastical costumes. Deborah
Gilmour Smyth composed an eerie, ethereal soundscape and Nathan Pierson
provides ghostly lighting. Mike Buckley's set is a double mountain of detritus,
the stuff of everyday living: chairs and suitcases, all the things that consume
us and must ultimately be left behind.
Robert Smyth directs the ensemble and
joins it for the multiple roles each enacts on the various planes of the
afterlife. All get to play to type and exercise their accents (some to better
effect than others). But the second act does drag on, and the text devolves
into theological sermonizing when MacDonald (David Cochran Heath) starts his
lecture/explanation of all that we've already seen and intuited. A 90-minute
more-condensed version would make all the points as well, and maintain audience
focus and attention. This meditation on good and evil can be provocative and at
times it is wondrous to behold. But briefer would be better.
A LOCAL TREASURE LOST…
On February
19, a great chapter of San Diego theater history was brought to a premature
close. After a long struggle with illness, Martin Gerrish, age 78, went
to the Great Stage in the sky.
The
influential local actor/director started the Drama Department at Grossmont
College, where he taught for 25 years (1961-1986). In 1976, he became president
and founder of Octad-One Productions, which presented provocative plays that he
acted in or directed and often designed and constructed. Over the years, he was
involved in more than 100 productions around town, at theaters such as the Old
Globe (where he won three Atlas Award -- for playing King Henry II in "The
Lion in Winter," Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and for
directing "The Runner Stumbles"), North Coast Rep, Coronado
Playhouse, Lamplighters and the Mission Playhouse. He appeared in a movie,
"Bottom of the Bottle" (1956), with Joseph Cotton and Jack Carson. In
1985, he began a small summer Shakespeare festival, Shakespeare by the Lake,
which created a lovely, picnic-friendly setting for pared-down productions of
the Bard's comedies -- nestled in the grass, next to the little manmade lake
beside the ECPAC amphitheater.
In his
collection of memories is a note from Craig Noel, dated February 13, 1976,
following his appearance in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
"I know
on several occasions I told you how much I liked your Big Daddy," wrote
Craig, "but I want to tell you that it is one of the finest performances
ever seen at the Globe Theatre. It was really a consummate interpretation of
the role... Bless you and best wishes."
Gerrish was
dashing in his youth, reminiscent of the young Olivier. By the time I met him
and his hard-working, costume-designing wife, Elaine (who died in 1993, after
43 years of marriage), he was a snow-white-bearded, dignified fellow known as a
tough taskmaster but a terrific actor and director. I used to love going to
those intimate little productions in the Marketplace at the Grove, near SDSU. I
saw a marvelous "Rose Tattoo" (starring the late, lamented Terri
Orr). I adored seeing Martin performing in "Dear Liar," the Bernard
Shaw/Mrs. Patrick Campbell epistolary duologue (by Jerome Kilty), with the never-to-be-forgotten
Katherine Faulconer, who was a Grossmont College colleague and Octad board
member. That show was directed by Gerrish's long-time companion, Bill Farnum.
The same
year, 1995, though he always said he only wanted to direct, Gerrish again got
roped into acting -- in Israel Horovitz's "Park Your Car in Harvard
Yard." The serio-comedy concerned
an old curmudgeon who, as a teacher, flunked many of his students, including
the central female character.
"It
parallels a great deal my own career," Gerrish admitted to me at the time.
"I taught for 25 years. And according to some of my students, I was a
difficult as Jack Brackish, the main character in the play."
But like the
character, he also will be long remembered, by those he encouraged, like Donald
Pugh, Wayne Erreca and Jeffrey Jones, and those of us in the audience whom he
surprised, thrilled and inspired. Craig Noel called Martin Gerrish "a true
craftsman; a wonderful performer and an imaginative director." I couldn't agree more.
There will be
a gathering of friends and family in La Mesa this Sunday, April 4 from 4-7pm.
For further info, contact Clark Myers (619-589-0147) or Trina Kaplan
(858-278-5018; trina1@san.rr.com).
And now, for THIS WEEK'S 'DON'T
MISS' LIST
"Kiss of the Spider Woman" - spectacular performances, provocative play; at 6th @
Penn Theatre, final performance Wed. 3/31. Miss this at your own peril!!
"Ashes to Ashes" and
"The Lover" -- dark, cynical, enigmatic, delicious;
wonderful performances by Ron Choularton and Cristina Soria, directed by Robert
May… At 6th @ Penn Theatre, through the weekend (closing April 4).
"Macbeth" -- just as dark, spooky, intense and supernatural as you'd expect
from Sledgehammer; it doesn't disappoint. At St. Cecilia's; EXTENDED through
April 3.
"The Gingerbread Lady" -- wonderful ensemble work, delicious performances; serious Simon;
Renaissance theatre at Cygnet; through April 25.
"M. Butterfly" -- the most amazing (true) story ever told! Excellently co-produced
by Diversionary and Asian American Rep; at Diversionary Theatre, through May 8
"Two Sisters and a Piano" -- passion and politics from Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz;
steamy story, provocative performances; on the Globe's Cassius Carter Centre
Stage, through April 11
Think PEACE this Palm Sunday
and Passover…. And then go to the theater!
©2004
Patté Productions Inc.