There is something gutsy and resolutely untrendy about a young woman writing a two-hour, one-man play about God, fatherhood, and gardening. But as Heather McDonald, the bespectacled, monkishly pretty playwright, has shown in her short but fertile career, trends can't compete with simple beauty. Like her first play, the heart-searing and funny Dream of a Common Language, which dealt with the psychic plight of female artists, An Almost Holy Picture exhibits the same uncommon ability to wind a very personal tale around philosophical conundrums.
"There are three experiences that have shaped my experience of God," begins Samuel Gentle, the former minister and church groundskeeper. The narrative tapestry that follows is an evocative, delicate, at times riveting meditation on the relationship between faith and personal experience. Gentle's first encounter with God occurs as a child on a cranberry bog, when he hears a voice whispering, "Follow me"; the second when his youth-group bus crashes, killing nine children; the third when his daughter is born with an endocrine condition, leaving her covered with fine silky hair.
Though Gentle obviously adores the furry Ariel, he spends much of the play sighing over her imperfection, questioning God, and shuddering at the cruel remarks of his daughter's classmates. After the umpteenth sigh, one begins to feel sorry for the little girl -- not because of her hairy skin but because she has a father brooding in the garden 24 hours a day (he sleepwalks). Just as the character who weeps profusely often leaves no room for the audience's tears, so too the character who feels sorry for himself stifles commiseration. Luckily, Samuel Gentle's misplaced self-pity takes center stage in the beautifully rendered climax. Gentle's violent outburst and subsequent realization that it is his own shame that hurts his daughter the most redeems much of the hand-wringing of the first half of the play.
J. Michael Flynn's performance as the mild-mannered Gentle never missteps but also never fully transcends mere technical prowess. Each moment feels premeditated, finely crafted, and too careful. Loy Arcenas' set of garden tools, dirt yard, and angled towering stone walls resonates with Stephen LeGrand's soundscape of church bells, melodic snatches, and breathing to create a world that is at once cosmic and intimate. Sharon Ott's elegant direction (in her last production as Berkeley Rep artistic director) unearths the many themes submerged in the play but too often underscores McDonald's slips into gooey sentimentality and Protestant ponderousness. Gentle's rendition of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" -- all while miming rocking a baby in his arms -- goes on until the tender moment turns saccharine.
Gentle's grand realization is that his spiritual life springs from his propensity for self-reflection: "I think about everything. It's my thoughts that give me my real comfort," he says. This hints that McDonald believes his tireless self-involvement is a saving grace rather than a fatal flaw. Despite her crystalline prose and vivid symbols, her portrayal of this passive, angst-ridden man trembles with equivocation. The brazen, funny characters that Gentle depicts in his stories -- Ariel; his wife, Muriel; and his neighbor Inez -- make one yearn for McDonald and Gentle to throw open the garden gates, and let in action, humor, and the most unholy mess of the world.
-- Carol Lloyd
Clubland
The Sweetest Hangover (and other stds). By Ricardo Bracho. Directed by Roberto Varea. Starring Vidal M. Perez, Art Desuyo, Alan S. Quismorio, Gabriel Morales, Saun-Toy Latifa Trotter, B. Chico Purdiman, and Al Lujan. At the Brava Theater Center, 2789 24th St., through April 27. Call 647-2822.
For the anomie-stricken types who populate writer Ricardo Bracho and director Roberto Varea's The Sweetest Hangover (and other stds), life's ups and downs are reduced to slipping through a whole lotta cracks: Relationships fracture, voices fail, cocaine is inhaled, and jokes are told as they plummet through the everyday fissures of a queer world. Suavecito Octavio (Vidal M. Perez) runs Club Azlantis -- the place his fellow lumpen of color call "home." While scoping the selection and counting the green, Octavio feels conflicted. He wants to be in love -- to fill the "glory hole in his heart" -- but has serious intimacy hang-ups. When he romances tag artist-cum-bouncer Samson (Art Desuyo), he tries to avoid everything but the physical throb, barking "Pelamela." Outlawed in a homophobic, racist culture, Octavio struggles to unlearn his impulses to hide and to deny himself love and affection.
While Octavio stews, others float in and out of the club. Natasha Kinky (B. Chico Purdiman) crosses divides sexual and temporal. She pops estrogen, lip-syncs to Diana Ross, and recovers African histories. Fellow voguish talent-show artist Plum (Saun-Toy L. Trotter) carves out a space in between the beats and tunes in to the African souls lost in the middle passage, to the "salt water deep inside the Atlantic of my body." Other club regulars include Puerto Rican "Miss Thing 1" (Gabriel Morales) and Filipino "Miss Thing 2" (Alan S. Quismorio), who offer Dr. Seuss-inspired sophomoric rhymes on what it means to grow up queer in macho-based Latino cultures.
The play's fragmented and elliptical style is supposed to reflect and emphasize the psychic wrenchings the characters endure in a white-male heterosexist norm. Unfortunately, Bracho and Varea go overboard with didactic one-liners, characters who function primarily as textual signs, and storytelling pastiches. When Octavio shows up at a missing persons bureau, name-checking Geronimo and Tupac and declaring, "I am missing from history ... missing from myself," the jackhammering gets way too loud, the cracks way too big, and the hangover too sour to be sweet.
-- Frederick Luis Aldama
Seductive Logic
Seduction. By Leonard Pitt, Ruth Zaporah, and Rinde Eckert. Directed by Eckert and Jim Cave. Starring Pitt and Zaporah. At A Traveling Jewish Theater, 2800 Mariposa (at Florida), through May 4. Call 399-1809.
The clearest words in Seduction come at the beginning, after a man and woman walk onto a bare stage in '30s-style traveling clothes, carrying beaten leather bags. "All that's left of Seduction, Kansas, is a train station and the remnants of a town," says a voice over a loudspeaker, adding that anyone here would only want to leave. Then there's the sound of wind.
The man looks a little like Charlie Chaplin, with a bowler hat, suspenders making his pants look short, and a bow tie. (No mustache or stick.) The woman wears a long, black, front-buttoned dress and her own shapeless hat. They grumble shyly and ignore each other. The man hears a train and while he tries to flag it, lights play on his panicked face and a roaring sound comes over the speakers. It's unmistakably a train -- right there on the edge of the parchment-colored stage -- but it doesn't stop.
So the two people are stuck. That's the premise of Seduction. At first they avoid contact, each as shy and peculiar as Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean. The woman clatters around in her bag -- which seems to be full of loose plumbing -- and the man sits on a bench to sing "Wish you were here ..." in a Spike Jones kind of way, starting each line mellifluously and then grinding the last word as if he's been stabbed. Then the woman suffers a seizure of tics. They try to sit together on the only bench until a loudspeaker makes a garbled announcement and the two of them freeze, bug-eyed, trying to make out the voice.
Almost without words; with noises, dance, and purely executed movement -- and without a twinge of pretension -- Ruth Zaporah and Leonard Pitt play out a hesitant love story in the deserted depot. They created the show with the director, Rinde Eckert, and they've moved with astonishing grace into the mordant cartoon universe where Beckett liked to play. Every gesture, like every line of Beckett's, obeys a weird overriding logic that may be the show's biggest achievement, because it's so seamless and funny. Keeping up the tone needs good comic acting; maintaining the wordless narrative needs sharp pacing and directing; the dance and movement must have needed an extraordinary amount of practice -- and it's all there. One brilliant scene has Pitt on the bench with his hat rising from his lap to the rushing sound of backward-playing music. Pitt is a trained mime who can make the hat seem to float and then push it back down, apparently with force -- a parlor trick that had the audience rolling because it looked so much like an erection.
To do this without seeming frivolous is a sign of real sophistication, a rare blend of discipline and lightness of touch. What else can I say? If you like Charlie Chaplin, Mr. Bean, or Beckett, you should see this before it moves out of A Traveling Jewish Theater's tiny room.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Myths
Phaedra and the Nurse. Written and performed by Theresa Dickinson and Ann Woodhead. Directed by Sara Shelton Mann. At Bindlestiff Studio, April 3-12.
There aren't many mature leading women in the pantheon of literature and pop culture. Forget those Edie McClurg plump motherly types, we're talking about the independent, sexual dynamo your mom becomes after you've left home and she rediscovers herself. Lady Macbeth, Anna Karenina, Barbra Streisand, and Cruella de Vil spring to mind, but they're hardly representative of a demographic group. And aside from Mrs. Robinson, it's rare for such characters to exhibit sensuality. Self-described as "seriously middle-aged," Ann Woodhead and Theresa Dickinson, the creators of Phaedra and the Nurse, use dance and Greek legend to question the lack of attractive and mature role models.
Mythological Phaedra was a queen caught between mother and mistress, the poles of feminine sexuality. In Euripides and Ovid, she's the wife of Theseus, the Attic warrior who slew the Minotaur. During one of Theseus' long absences, she grows amorous toward her stepson, Hippolytus. Phaedra prays to bad-girl Aphrodite for some filial affection, but Hippolytus is monastically dedicated to the virgin Artemis. In classical mythology, when familial and sexual bonds cross it's with disastrous results, but Woodhead and Dickinson aren't interested in playing the hyperdramatic, suicidal finish. To them, Phaedra is a victim of an old patriarchal paradigm: the dutiful wife who must sit on her sexual desires because she isn't a tight-skinned, thin-lipped Audrey Hepburn anymore.
The premise is played out elegantly in eight short movements. The droning Greek chorus is condensed to a few voices on tape, replayed in short bursts. A naked stage, underlit by votive candles and footlights, eliminates visual clutter. The Phaedra history is provided in the program; the show moves swiftly from there. Three-foot-high Barbie dolls puppet as Artemis and Aphrodite, interrupting the dialogue to bicker about fat-free diets and cheesecake. Yes, Barbie is a bit tired to use in this way, but her startlingly disproportionate dimensions once set some very real (or unreal) standards.
And anyway, this is a sideshow to the choreography. Dickinson, once a member of Twyla Tharp's company, is dancing as the audience enters. Accompanied by Stephen Kaufman's original and mournful compositions on the violin, she is the nurse, the slave who follows Phaedra to a new country. A counterpoint to boisterous Phaedra, the nurse does not have the luxury of mourning her fading beauty. The nurse's dance attacks the closed walls of the performance space as a chatty Woodhead, playing Phaedra, applies her makeup and discusses face lifts. Later, when Woodhead begins her final dance, a spinning tarantella praising the vigor of her womanhood, the nurse has crawled into her grave. Phaedra and the Nurse knows that not all women have the leisure to liberate themselves from the standards set by Vogue; but if they don't celebrate sagging breasts, who will?
-- Julie Chase
