In a drawing room on a stormy moonlit night, a candle burns below a bad portrait of an arch-browed brunette. A torrent of violin arpeggios descends with the stage lights. From the first crack of lightning, Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep resides in a world of elaborate artifice. We never really arrive at "Mandacrest, the Hillside estate" or "various places in Egypt" -- the play's explicit settings -- but see those fictive places through the scrim of camp theatricality. Men in drag, dancing mummies, impossible double casting, allusions and quotations from Shakespeare to Poe to Hollywood B movies, all create a craggy landscape of absurd plot twists and excessive stock characters that seduce even as they beg for ironic analysis.
To call Ludlam a master of the spoof glosses over his work's tantalizing complexity. As the founder and playwright in residence of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York City for 20 years, he carved out an idiosyncratic genre that emphasizes our layered perceptual apparatuses and aesthetic baggage as much as story, character, or theme. Depending on what classics you've read, or how many late-night movies you've been subjected to, the work may seem alternately impenetrable and familiar, profound and moronic. Plays anchored by such a plethora of shared references often pale next to less culturally ingrown theater.
But Ludlam's commitment to his overwrought, fantastically codified style proves that a good imagination can indeed sift gold from ordinary filth. After their rousing success at Aurora's tiny parlor theater in Berkeley, directors Tom Ross and Danny Scheie brought the show across the bay in an unprecedented Magic/Aurora co-production. It's easy to see why this two-man performance warranted a special arrangement. Seizing their multiple roles with ferocious clarity and unflagging mischief, Berkeley Rep's Charles Shaw Robinson and Magic's Danny Scheie turn the stage into a whirlwind of quicksilver affectations, mutant accents, and gestural parody. As the convoluted plot erupts around the death of Irma Vep, werewolves, vampires, an ancient Egyptian tablet, and the love of Lady Enid and Lord Edgar, the actors' frenetic costume changes become central to Ludlam's joke. "God, he'll never change," Scheie enunciates while waiting for one of Robinson's late entrances. "I said, God, he'll never change!" By constantly calling our attention to the actors, Ludlam creates roles that are both exceedingly difficult and juicy. Watching Scheie and Robinson play off one another, I often forgot to laugh but found myself gaping in astonishment.
-- Carol Lloyd
A Summer Night's Dream
Pericles. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Roger DeLaurier. Starring Remi Sandri, Melanie Hermann, Michelle Morain, and Lynne Soffer. Presented by the California Shakespeare Festival at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, Siesta Valley, Orinda, through Aug. 2. Call (510) 548-9666.
Pericles is the perfect Shakespeare to compete with summer's cinematic action-packed blast. It doesn't have the speed or feisty babes of a $100 million blockbuster, but it does have incest, pirate kidnappings, plagues, long-lost daughters, and divine intervention. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is forced to set off on a Ulyssean adventure after he discovers the incestuous secret of a princess he's wooing and her daddy sends assassins after him. This is just the first act; the rest of the play is equally baroque. But watching Pericles get jerked around by the Fates is entertaining in the same way it was satisfying to watch L.A. incinerate in Volcano -- somebody's life is worse.
So if the prince's story is so fun and accessible, why isn't this play performed more often? Because Pericles is the ugly stepchild of the Shakespearean canon. (It was excluded from the seminal first folio of 1623, probably because it was a collaboration.) The Bard didn't write the first nine scenes, and the whole was likely pieced together by actors looking to make a quick buck on a bootleg script. But some intrepid theater companies ignore the issues that twist academic knickers; the directors of the California Shakespeare Festival know a bankable script when they read it. The strengths of their production lie in playing up the pretty costumes and words that don't tax the mind in this season's heat.
The play's at-least-I'm-not-that-sucker catharsis and romantically optimistic vision cover the lack of character development. Pericles is a good guy from beginning to end, free of moral dilemmas and hamartia. When the Fates batter his boat, take his wife, or ship his peachy teen daughter into a brothel, he doesn't fight back or question the divine order. He simply puts on a hair shirt and waits for the happy ending. This is a summer play: Good is good, the bad guys wear masks, and Pericles is just a damn nice guy. Even the poetry is light on metaphor and meaning.
A pantomime to lively Middle Eastern music starts the show. We see Pericles grow from a child with a bowl haircut to a young man taking on the mantle of armor. As Pericles, Remi Sandri bears a pleasing resemblance to Nick Cage, and has that distant look affected by epic heroes and leaders. The first two acts drag a little, and Shakespeare's mystery collaborator has a habit of giving away the plot before the characters get to it -- most irritatingly, leaking the scandal of the royal incest before Pericles has read the riddle. But CSF glosses over these imperfections with a flurry of blockbuster devices: noise, costumes, and perky sidekicks. Clattering castanets and percussive music drive on the storm that shakes Pericles' ship; the costumes range from pinned-up sheets to abundant swirls of velvet. Daughter Marina (Melanie Hermann) has the treacly charm of Jasmine from Aladdin, with her thick, curly hair and midriff peeking out of puffy harem pants.
Archaic elements are eliminated largely by the recasting of women in male roles. In the play, there's a "chorus" in the form of a character called John Gower, a medieval poet. CSF's chorus is Lynne Soffer, a muse sporting a garland and flowing white robes, who fits into the context of the story better than a crusty verse man. Lisa A. Porter turns in one of the strongest performances of the show as a bawd in a whorehouse trying to sell off the virginity of Pericles' daughter; she's rascally, conniving, and the perfect foil to Marina's goody-two-shoes attitude.
Pericles is a romance along the lines of The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, but where those plays explore the darker side of family and illusion en route to a happy ending, Pericles sticks to a simple "be true to yourself" path. The creative efforts of CSF might not be enough for die-hard dramaphiles, who've come to expect spectacle and substance in their Shakespeare, but if you like your picnic plays on the lighter side, CSF's offering is as solid as Pericles can get.
-- Julie Chase
Radio On
All That Fall. By Samuel Beckett. Directed by John Sowle. Starring Verona D. Seiter, Paul Gerrior, and Lawrence Motta. At Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy (at Turk), through July 29. Call 673-3847.
A vintage cabinet radio stands stage front in the Exit Theater's production of All That Fall, with a pile of books on top, and a close look at the spines reveals that the books are old Samuel Beckett paperbacks. So the show's main prop is a pun on the play itself -- "Beckett on the radio," ha ha ha -- since All That Fall, of course, is Beckett's famous radio play. The rest of the stage is built up to look like the inside of a broadcast studio in the 1950s, with a stool, three live old-fashioned mikes, an upended bicycle, boxes of gravel and other props for sound effects, and actors in period costume milling around before the show. The mikes are wired to a speaker inside the vintage cabinet: Director John Sowle has proved that watching All That Fall onstage doesn't have to keep you from hearing it over the radio.
At first this may seem like cheating. I was hoping to see Maddy Rooney walk her torturous way along a road to pick up her blind husband at the train station; instead we see an earnest group of actors focusing on the noises they make into a mike. Verona Seiter plays Maddy from the stool, wearing bifocals, with nothing but a beautifully controlled voice full of stern rolled R's and a keen sense of elderly outrage. Maddy is a cantankerous old woman who seems to want help, attention, and even sex from the men she meets in the road; but she insults and abuses everyone. The creaking effort of heaving her into Mr. Slocum's car is one of Beckett's excellent dirty jokes, and when Slocum forgets to help her out at the station, she says, "I do not exist! The fact is well-known!" She's a wretched, ineffectual woman, trying to help her blind husband home. Paul Gerrior plays the husband, Dan, with a thick, expressive voice like Seiter's, Irish-inflected and doddering. "Just cling to me and all will be well," Maddy says, and they struggle over a ditch. Beckett's faith in romantic love was about as strong as his faith in God. The title comes from Psalms 145:14: "The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down," and when Dan remembers the line out loud near the end of the play, he and Maddy have a hearty laugh.
Sowle's cast moves around the studio making footsteps in gravel, twirling bicycle wheels, neighing and twittering like birds, letting script-leaves fall on the floor. The symphony of noises is tuned and tight, and the acting is seamless except for two off accents and one overwrought speech. When it's over, the actors relax into their other roles, as performers in a studio, pretending to be so unaware of what they've just created that when the applause comes, in waves, nobody even bows.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Boys' Life
Scooter Thomas Makes It to the Top of the World. By Peter Parnell. Directed by George Simkins. Starring Gregg Leadley and Will Simkins. Preceded by: Contract, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Sara Heckelman; and The Thing of It, by Grant Gottschall, directed by Louis Parnell. At the 450 Geary Studio Theater, 450 Geary (at Mason), through July 28. Call 673-1172.
On purpose or not, Pour Boys Productions has spent the last three years chronicling American boy-ness. The scripts they've picked are masculine -- Pvt. Wars, by James McClure; Boys' Life, by Howard Korder; Mamet's American Buffalo (which was excellent) -- and their latest was a group of three very male one-acts, including a boy-centered tragedy called Scooter Thomas Makes It to the Top of the World.
Contract and The Thing of It were amusing warm-up vignettes about acting. You might call "The Thing of It" a vaguer title than "Contract," and in fact the script was less focused. Duff, a young actor, bickered with a casting director named Richard about his audition: "You sucked," Richard explained, and Duff hit him. He also forced him to undress, but after Richard stripped to his waist he choked Duff from behind with his belt. Everyone thought Duff was dead. The twist at the end was clever, but the piece was hazily acted. Bill English never found his voice as Richard; Preston Morgan forced his lines as Duff; their fights weren't compelling; their timing was off. When Duff explained his violent behavior with Hollywood lingo -- "I'm networking" -- it sounded like a good line dropped into a sagging improv piece.
Contract, on the other hand, was a model of focused one-act writing by Theresa Rebeck. Louis Parnell played a Hollywood agent, Phil, interviewing an actor, Tom, who protested after Phil backed away from representing him. Phil explained that actors are "nothing" in Hollywood, and Tom (Finn Curtin) came back with a pathetic speech about the sanctity of his craft. "Out of oblivion we make art!" he said, and Phil pitched into him again. Then Tom changed strategy. The two men tried to out-"mindfuck" each other until Tom won a contract with the agency. "Welcome to Hollywood, babe," said Phil, and the stage darkened. Not hugely original, but the pointed writing helped Parnell drop into a cruel and strident voice as Phil and allowed Curtin to be his amiably scattered stage self.
After intermission came the longer one-act about Scooter Thomas, who wisely avoided Hollywood. Scooter is dead, in fact, and his friend Dennis started the play by telling the audience about their friendship while he packed for the funeral. Every line Gregg Leadley addressed to the audience as Dennis felt unnatural compared to the flashback scenes with Scooter, but the flashbacks were the engaging meat of the play, and Leadley and Will Simkins did an entertaining job as American boys at different stages of immaturity. The growing-up rites of elementary school principals, junior high PE coaches, sex, and applying to college widened a chasm between Dennis and Scooter that seemed to run along (totally unexplored) fissures of class. Dennis became an architect; Scooter drifted into loneliness and suicide. Simkins drove most of the scenes with irrepressible overgrown-kid energy, but after you grasped the point that Scooter Thomas couldn't find his footing as an adult, and wasn't going to make it to the top of anything, the climax as it was written felt unenlightening and rote. It's a shame, because a keen tragedy about stalled adolescence these days could resonate in America like a kettledrum.
-- Michael Scott Moore
