The funniest piece of satire I've ever seen on TV was a documentary on Neiman-Marcus, I think called The Store. It involved nothing but a microphone and a camera. The narratorless film showed footage of training sessions and strategy meetings in the sales department, hoping the Neiman-Marcus people would eventually make fun of themselves, which is just what they proceeded to do. It's high praise to say that Kristina Robbins' original one-woman show about the culture of Mary Kay cosmetics, The Face by the Door, could be ranked with that documentary, because the Mary Kay sales director she's created is a work of satire almost subtle enough to pass for the real thing.
Claire Beaumont, a strident and insufferab-ly upbeat woman who rouses her Mary Kay rookies like a cheerleader mom ("Oh, give yourselves a hand," and, "Can I just say, 'Wow'?"), offers her spiel without a shred of irony. Mary Kay is not about makeup, she explains, but self-esteem. Her big sales idea is a "face" -- a box of cosmetics -- for customers to keep by their front door as an outpost against the bottomless horror of ever having to rush out in public with naked cheeks. She paces in front of her audience, full of perkiness and poise, turning the small Marsh theater into a seminar hall; she asks her rookies to repeat, "I have my face, and I'm ready to go for it!" and members of the audience at the Marsh last week unreluctantly did.
Robbins is hilarious. Her story follows a young woman, Kate, through a Claire seminar and the start of a cosmetics career; Kate also meets Claire's ex-sales partner, Mickey, a drunken, bitter, middle-aged woman who's largely responsible for Claire's success. Between imaginary cigarettes and drinks Mickey tells about her past with Claire until the story turns, imperceptibly, into a minidrama of lesbianism and denial. Mickey is just as funny as Claire, although since Robbins herself is too graceful and lithe to look like a swaying, middle-aged wreck, slipping into character takes a few seconds. This is not a big problem. It's noticeable when the women face each other, with Robbins easily switching to Claire but lagging a little with Mickey; but it doesn't keep the spectacle of two women arguing in the body of a single actor -- rendered with nothing but voice, gesture, and a fine sense of pacing -- from being enormous fun. "I am not that way!" Claire tells Mickey, meaning lesbian (although she is, she is). "You can keep your kumbaya to yourself!"
The weakest character is Kate; her pair of monologues -- they bookend the show -- feel like a throwaway device. She's the self-esteem-lacking young woman in the middle, overwhelmed by Mickey and Claire. Her friends say, "God, Kate, cosmetics? I thought you were a feminist," which may be the baldest reminder that The Face by the Door is political. But, happily, it's also art, because Robbins has the essential talent of keeping out of her own way, and the guile and intelligence to let her targets make fun of themselves.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Intelligent Carnality
Entertainment for the Apocalypse. Written and performed by Core. At the Brady Street Studio, Friday, April 18.
A dark cul-de-sac off Market Street. A siren's thin ribbon of sound winds through a drizzly city night as five dancers in ski masks and orange reflector vests stomp, fly, and collide in an odd amalgam of folk dance and cartoon battle. Car headlights glance off the wet asphalt where the dancers whoop and splat, creating a scene that is both unsettling and buoyant. One masked figure stands atop a chain-link fence to deliver an elliptical call to action: "Nature is not your friend; you must be a friend to nature. Play the role, be the artist, the activist, the teacher. Play the role!" Suddenly the group breaks through the crowd and we follow them down the alley to the theater. They enter singing, then burst into more raucous, airborne acrobatics.
We don't know what theatrical planet we have landed on, but it hardly matters. The aliens are fascinating and tireless, endearing and almost comprehensible. We gather something about fears of the future -- madness sweeping the population, power struggles, sexual deviance, endless self-reinvention -- but like all great performance, the form eclipses the themes and raises them to irrational soothsaying magic.
Welcome to Entertainment for the Apocalypse, an evening of wild movement, delicate dementia, and exquisite music by the interdisciplinary company that calls itself Core. Though Entertainment is its first full-length show, the performers are longtime denizens in the San Francisco underground performance scene. All work (and sometimes live) at 848 Community Space (at 848 Divisadero), where members teach classes, perform, publish books, and propagate their radical sex-positive tribalism. Such in-crowd collaborations often create art that is interesting anthropologically but too preachy to enjoy. But after a decade of watching Core's five performers in various solo and collaborative forms use art as a pulpit for their body-based spiritual and political agendas, I was heartened to see that they've realized that intelligent carnality needs no slogans.
Instead, they embody their beliefs, enthralling us with their sheer versatility. Each performer plays drums, sings, dances, and acts, and together the group exudes quirky collaborative genius. Whether it's Stanya Kahn's sultry singing voice, Stephanie Maher tearing up the stage with her animalistic physicality, Jess Curtis' channeling the poignantly paranoid character of "Tiny Man," Keith Hennessy's gender-bent clowning, or Jules Beckman's lush one-man band of guitar, drums, and vocals, the performance tribe transmit their anarchic spiritual message through the example of visceral interaction and uncompromising individuality.
The raw, multimedia nature of the work is reined in by the group's precise attention to smooth transitions, quiet moments, and clarity of focus. Throwing and catching two flying utility chairs, Beckman and Hennessy compete in a unisoned duet of stamina and grace. Kahn, dressed in a surreal costume of inner tubes and marshmallow Peeps, emancipates her rubber ducky from a tin bathtub home before descending into lonely madness. In the midst of a demonic percussive symphony on five chairs, the group breaks for a casual meal of canned sardines.
Though the show does at times fall prey to the cliches endemic in most apocalypse art -- a woman babbles as she warms herself over a trash can fire, characters say unfortunate lines like: "The world is on fire with status and abuse!" -- Entertainment for the Apocalypse carves into uncharted territory with insatiable vision, beauty, and humor.
-- Carol Lloyd
Reality Bites
Dalliance. By Tom Stoppard. Directed by Katie Bales. Starring Patrick Dooley, Paul Vincent Black, Sandie Armstrong, and Marin Van Young. Presented by Shotgun Players at La Val's Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid (at Hearst) in Berkeley, through May 31. Call (510) 716-9082.
In 1896 libertine Austrian Arthur Schnitzel shocked domestic middle-classers by playfully debasing human interaction in his play Liebelei (sometimes translated as "Light o' My Life"). In the late '80s British director Tom Stoppard renamed the play Dalliance, cranked up its playfulness, added an avant-garde stylistic self-consciousness, and altered the nomenclature: fraulein, for example, became "popsie." Now Shotgun Players director Katie Bales takes up the play, adding to it a dash more charm and a tad more perversity.
The setting is fin de siecle Vienna, where on-the-go Theodore (Patrick Dooley) tries to fish ex-dragoon Fritz (Paul Vincent Black) out of a metaphysical quagmire. Unlike Theo, who calls a "mink" a "mink" and considers them trophies to be won, Fritz can't stop sighing for the unavailables. Theo prescribes wine and women. Enter demimonde-ish Mizi (Sandie Armstrong) and the blue-eyed little innocent Christine (Marin Van Young). Product of a phallocentric world, Mizi confounds Theo with her pink low-cut pinafore, hard-to-get attitude, and trenchant talk. "We want to be dragooned," she announces. Christine's too sticky for Fritz's taste, but her persistent feel-sorry-for-me tactics break down his emotional reserve. The arrival of a gentleman (Michael Storm) brings startling news, eventually churning up dark secrets that lead to intimations of everyone's fragile mortality.
Under Bales' direction, and with some excellent acting, Dalliance is about more than carnality. Occasional pinches remind us that a play is a play, and reality -- well, reality. The audience is not allowed to escape into illusion. The characters speak in a transnational pastiche of Scottish, Irish, and West Coast U.S. dialects, and the script brandishes a Pirandello-esque self-reflexivity and various anachronisms. During a neat scene-switch from Christina's apartment to the beginning of a play-within-a-play, Fritz remains center stage; "Are you sure I've never been here before?" he asks. At another point, a character describes a bottle of wine to be from "mille neuf cent soixante-neuf."
Bales et al. assume they've got an audience already familiar with such metadramatic modes. Otherwise the characters would have to teach the audience how to understand the play -- which occasionally Bales' direction seems reluctant to do. Christine, for example, is a plainly earnest character here; the production's strokes aren't broad enough to paint her as what she really is, a parody of the manipulatrix. She steps out of the piece's overall playful feel, declaring at the end that Theo is a "shitbucket." But then again, maybe that's the point. People, even in the invented world of plays, are too complex to classify.
-- Frederick Luis Aldama
The Ward
What the Butler Saw. By Joe Orton. Directed by Sarah Stillpass. Starring Rebecca Stow, Walter Niejadlik, and Lee Kiszonas. Presented by the Chameleon Theater at Venue 9, 252 Ninth St., through May 10. Call 626-6404.
What the Butler Saw ends with a shameless display of Winston Churchill's penis, bronzed. I might as well reveal the fact, for those who like bronzed penises or really can't stand them and want to attend or avoid the play for that reason. Offensiveness was Joe Orton's method. "It's the only way to smash the wretched civilization," he wrote in his journal -- recording a scrap of conversation with his lover, Kenneth Halliwell -- while he was immersed in Butler. "Sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they'll be screaming hysterics in no time." For jealous lovers' reasons Halliwell killed the playwright with nine hammer blows to the skull a few weeks after Butler was finished, in 1966.
The play is basically about a fouled-up job interview. Geraldine Barclay comes into a London psychiatric clinic for an interview with Dr. Prentice, who is a lech. He convinces her that she should strip as part of the interview; but right after she does, his wife walks in. Mrs. Prentice is a lush with peccadilloes of her own to hide, and the twining catastrophes of the doctor and his wife trying to keep their little sins a secret fuel a hugely convolved and ridiculous play. Mad plot contortions fall in with the theme, since the story plays out in a psychiatric clinic -- the only sane character, Miss Barclay, is quickly committed to the ward. "Notice the obstinacy with which she clings to her suburban upbringing," Dr. Prentice says to a government inspector named Dr. Rance when Miss Barclay refuses to get out of her clothes again, to put on a patient's robe. Dr. Rance: "Have you tried shock treatment?"
Butler's big irony is that the British sophistication Orton brings to his low humor is exactly what makes it so good. His razor wit is stropped and gleaming, even if his idea of civilization as a madhouse deteriorates because he can't follow it through. The story resolves with a deliberately stupid Freudian twist; and the Chameleon Theater's cast, unfortunately, runs out of steam before that. Sarah Stillpass directs the show with the idea that overwrought performances won't spoil the spirit of the script, and they don't, except that most of the cast can't feel the down moments, and during the high-energy ones you can almost see Walter Niejadlik and Mark Hardwicke (as Drs. Prentice and Rance) laughing at themselves. Lee Kiszonas plays a compelling Mrs. Prentice about half the time, and John Elliot Kirk is better as a pageboy-in-drag than he is as the pageboy himself. Rebecca Stow turns in the one true performance; she shows tact and intelligence as the constantly put-upon Miss Barclay and comes off, like her character, as the only sane person in the ward.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Buried Child
When the World Was Green (A Chef's Fable). By Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. Directed by Chaikin. Starring Alan Mandell, Corie Henninger, and John Maxwell. At the Magic Theater, Building D of Fort Mason Center, through May 11. Call 441-8822.
When the World Was Green (A Chef's Fable) is perfectly inoffensive. It's superbly acted and directed, there's a nice clean story line and tidy closure on the central conflict. Like approachable Thornton Wilder scripts, it will be overplayed by high schools and colleges looking for literary quality combined with affordable sets. That is if it isn't completely forgotten. Remember A Memory of Two Mondays by Arthur Miller? He probably doesn't either. Great artists have their mediocre moments; When the World Was Green is an off night in stage sports for Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. It won't dent their distinguished oeuvre; but it lacks the agitated, visceral writing of Shepard's other works and the drifting, desperate souls that Chaikin is master of. It's hollow but not hauntingly so.
We're in an eerie, existential wasteland. The set is a gray prison cell with one hard bed and the classic window with bars. A pianist strikes single notes like a death knell as the inmate tells his story. The unnamed convict has killed a man -- the wrong man, actually, somebody who looked like his cousin Carl and drank the same wine. Carl, the intended target, was marked for death because of an old European blood feud. (A good mule died mysteriously in a field and a family was divided.) The victim puffed up and keeled over from poisoned mashed potatoes. His assassin is emotionally indifferent to this crime. He was destined to avenge the insult; if the wrong guy died, c'est la vie. He's old, he's tired, his work is done. Insomnia and a lack of appetite are the only punishments the old man brings on himself.
This emotional distance is broadcast to the audience, and there's nothing to sympathize with or despise about the weary old man. Only his regular visitor, a young reporter trying to investigate his story, seems to care. The nameless woman, played delicately by Corie Henninger, is on a similar manhunt. Her father abandoned her when she was an infant, and she wanders New Orleans waiting to cross his path. Through a series of interviews the pair bond on the subject of obsessively stalking loved ones and sprout a cautious friendship. Potential friction (did the man accidentally kill her father?) emerges, then fades. Most of the tension comes from the inner conflicts laid out in the monologues that are placed tidily between the duologues like black keys on the piano. The balance is admirable, but the script is too tight and even; the characters never too sentimental or tragic. The emptiness of human life can be devastating and the collaborators have successfully dramatized this topic before, but this simply isn't their strongest work.
-- Julie Chase
