The other recently opened Southern family drama is a kind of anti-Streetcar, an emetic for people who are sick of Gothic tragedy. Flesh and Blood seems to say, "All right. You want sex and sisters and dirty secrets? How about this?" It's probably not intentional. Elizabeth Dewberry's script seems earnest enough, and the actors do their best with it, but something's gone wrong when the most you can say about a sex-motivated sibling murder story is that it makes you laugh. The laughter is earned, because the writing has real wit, but the drama gets diffused among three or four situations that would make Southern Gothic plays of their own, including an absent father who's been killed by bad potato salad.
Flesh and Blood takes place in the suburban kitchen of a family of women in the hours after Crystal's marriage breaks up at the altar. Her sister Charlotte and their mother want to know what happened. Crystal is a glamorously dressed, libidinous woman with a headache. She doesn't want to tell anyone why her wedding fell apart, and her mother insists on hoping it's just a temporary problem. Mama fills the play's "Queen of Denial" role: She won't admit to herself that she fed rotten potato salad to her husband, on purpose, several years before. She's played a little woodenly by Patricia Silver. Charlotte, the good sister (she has a husband and kids), is played as a compelling prude by Linda Ayres-Frederick, who's best with her ranting monologues; but Molly Goode holds up the show as Crystal, with a funny, wide-eyed, falling-apart exasperation. When it comes out that Crystal has screwed Charlotte's husband, Goode takes on a cringing manner that seems equal parts angst and lust, which is not a bad way to describe the play itself.
Charlotte's husband is Judd (Ronnie Blair), who leaves for most of the play to get Kentucky Fried Chicken. One of the funniest scenes is the chicken meal after Crystal and Judd's bombshell revelation, when everyone feels too awkward to speak. Mama chitchats about Charlotte's job in a cancer ward, and goes on hysterically about the half-dozen other horrible ways three people could have chosen to die in the ward the previous week. "Well, they didn't," says Charlotte. "They died ah cancer." Uncomfortable moment. "I'm sure that's best," says Mama. But the heart of the play is tragic, something the playwright hasn't quite grasped. Maybe Dewberry had too much fun writing the script and forgot it was going to end in blood. Because the death scene doesn't work; it's too sudden and too pat. Flesh and blood kill each other every day, of course, and probably for the same reasons, but Dewberry hasn't committed the soul of these passions to paper.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Climbing the Walls
Vertical Dance: Peregrine Dreams, Urban Landscape. Choreography by Amelia Rudolph. Presented by Project Bandaloop at the New Main Library, Fulton (at Larkin), Oct. 24 & 30. Call (510) 654-4728.
With expansive summers, slight winters, and green thinking as common as red-light running, the Bay Area is a live hive of outdoor dance. The foundation of on-site performance is our reflexive responses to specific locales: What images do an empty lot, back alley, or skyscraper conjure up when you pass it on your way to somewhere else? But the thrill of the dances involves transcending the pedestrian. The pieces run to the wild side, atop 6-foot-high stilts, where fire escapes dangle bodies, moving cars shake off acrobats, and a high wall becomes a vertical ballroom. Implicit in the works' injury-prone acts -- and occasionally stated outright -- is the notion that stretching the limits of the body expands the spirit too; watching boundaries being burst enlarges us.
On a bright, windy afternoon late last month, I joined about a hundred people at San Francisco's New Main Library to witness the East Bay Project Bandaloop's 30-minute rappel-dance from roof to ground down the library's sheer wall. Watching them, I became smaller, not larger -- a wee speck overwhelmed by fear. While a voice gliding above trance music spoke about a human inclination to fly, I was thinking about our inclination to die when dropped from 100 feet onto bare cement.
As the program noted, Bandaloop Artistic Director Amelia Rudolph's Vertical Dance: Peregrine Dreams, Urban Landscape celebrates the endangered Peregrine falcon. And if the dance had simply stopped there, emulating these beautiful birds, I could have swallowed my fear and enjoyed the aerialists' angelic descent. Rigged like rock climbers and dressed in white, with ribbons of fabric fluttering from their wide-spanned arms, the performers (Heather Baer, Chris Clay, Karen Elliot, Suzanne Gallo, Peter Mayfield, and Rudolph) pushed off the wall to fly toward us like slow-mo flurries of snow, flatten themselves to the sky, or touch head to foot in luxurious backward arcs.
They would have done the falcons proud. But in claiming their performance was more than an homage to rare birds, they ended up making it less. Through much of the piece, a voice laurie-andersoned: "We think we are separate/ ... box ourselves in/ ... in control know it all/ But we are the wild body of nature." And later: "They build buildings: fear ... under chop of stone." It turns out Bandaloop's flying is not just an emulation of birds' freedom but an assertion that if we only got in touch with our natural spirit, we would fly too. Fear of flying is a byproduct of the desire to control one's environment. These New Age sentiments contradict the spectacle's evident control-freaked underpinnings: rigging as carefully designed as a corporate takeover. More importantly, they forget that fear -- a bothersome instinct, yes -- gives spiritual ascendance its beauty.
After the performance, I ran into one of the performers. "That was beautiful," I said. "Terrifying, too." She wrinkled her nose. Sensing I shouldn't, I asked, "Were you afraid?" She shrugged a hostile "No" and turned away from what she understood to be an artless question. It was as if some philistine had asked Barishnikov how he jumps so high. I was stuck on technicalities. But if a dance makes me afraid without either sharing my fear or responding to it, it's denying something fundamental to art: that it reflect your humanity, not accuse you of it. So when a work enacts a triumph over limits, as Peregrine Dreams does, it needs to recognize the force of those limits.
Here's a story for you: Once upon a time, Moses led his people out of slavery. His exodus was a struggle not to overcome fear, because the jealous God of Exodus is fear, but to make a covenant with it. When Moses was first faced with God, he closed his eyes; he begged God to let him go. By the time he received the Commandments, he stood with God "face to face as a man speaketh with a friend" -- not because God had changed, but because Moses had. He'd become used to God -- to his fear. You can be afraid and do godly things. Bandaloop's flying creatures disregard the human frailty at the heart of their inhuman acts. Until they attend to their humanity, sublimity will remain beyond their reach.
Project Bandaloop will perform as part of the Sky Dancers aerialist show this weekend at Brady Street Dance Center. Call 558-9355 for details.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
Slumlords and Ladies
Widowers' Houses. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Barbara Oliver. Starring Chris Ayles, Rebecca Dines, Terry Lamb, Joan Mankin, Jack Powell, and Tim Redmond. Presented by the Aurora Theater Company at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant (at Ellsworth), Berkeley, through Nov. 16. Call (510) 843-4822.
If he were still alive, George Bernard Shaw would admit before any scrawny critic got around to it that his first play, Widowers' Houses, is a museum piece. As a political rant it's a warm-up for Mrs. Warren's Profession, and it doesn't have a trace of the rebel's religion that makes Man and Superman so modern. Widowers' Houses is just a wicked jab at the Victorian bourgeoisie in the bourgeoisie's own language -- the comedy of manners. For its early socialist politics it relies on Shaw's own teen-age job as a rent collector in London; for urban color it owes a debt to Dickens. But the Aurora Theater Company is proving that a little wit and polish can turn even an old museum piece into a spectacular show.
The play deals with a young doctor just entering society who wants to marry a properly Victorian woman named Blanche. Her father, Mr. Sartorius, is rich, but Blanche doesn't know that his money comes from the rent on a row of the worst slums in London. The doctor is called Harry Trench. His mentor and friend is William deBurgh Cokane, a hilarious early example of the well-spoken Shavian blowhard, who dotes on good manners and "tact." When Trench and Cokane learn from Mr. Lickcheese, the rent collector, that Sartorius is a slumlord, young Dr. Trench asks Blanche to live without her father's money, a request that destroys their engagement. Sartorius reveals to Trench that his meager allowance comes from the same block of slums, and Trench's principles shatter. Eventually the men go into business together and raze the slums for the sake of a block of high-rent apartments, planning to kick out the poor tenants. Trench's marriage plans revive, and the properly Victorian couple lives happily ever after.
It may be Shaw's bleakest script, because it shows his society in a state of moral decay that looks, at the end, quite hopeless. In fact it looks not much different from ours. Apartment blocks are still neglected by slumlords and slums are still bulldozed for condos. Shaw knew this was no excuse for despair, though, and it says something about the word "maturity" that all his other plays feature heroes who rise above whatever moral morass they're stuck in. (Even if they die, like Don Juan: A moral morass is different from a tragic circumstance.) What would make an updated version of the same story seem tired -- and what makes Widowers' Houses a museum piece -- is that the persistent apathy of the middle classes is such old, old news.
Rebecca Dines plays a strong-voiced but priggish Blanche, managing the nice trick of being suggestive and prudish at the same time. Cokane is played obnoxiously by Jack Powell -- that's a compliment -- and Mr. Lickcheese, the groveling rent collector, is played with a perfect cockney accent and manner by Chris Ayles. But this is another show in Berkeley, like Evolution of a Homeboy, that seems to play mostly to an older crowd. I know it's a museum piece, but isn't school in session over there? Where are all the students?
-- Michael Scott Moore
In the Company of Men
Enter Achilles. Choreographed by Lloyd Newson. Presented by DV8 Physical Theater at Center for the Arts, Third Street & Mission, Nov. 6-9; call 978-ARTS.
DV8 Physical Theater's Enter Achilles, which made its San Francisco debut over the weekend, burns itself vividly into the subconscious with a blend of theatrical movement that is simultaneously tangible and surreal. U.K. choreographer Lloyd Newson started up the group over a decade ago with a collection of disillusioned dancers, and has built a reputation on difficult material: Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men was inspired by the Nielsen serial killings that terrorized gay London in the '80s; Strange Fish explored uneasy relations between men and women; My Body, Your Body dealt in sexual stereotypes; and MSM went where other companies haven't, or wouldn't, tackling the sexual tension between men in public toilets.
Enter Achilles is something like a combination of all of these. Wickedly funny, fiercely brilliant, the hourlong work makes a pass at the way men treat women, but it concentrates on the way men treat each other. Newson holds a graduate degree in psychology, but he doesn't bludgeon us with analysis, for which we should all be unendingly grateful. Achilles makes good on the company's mission to deliver their ideas clearly and unpretentiously; rather than muddling through all the reasons why, DV8 give us bad behavior simply as it is, setting it in perpetual motion and letting us draw our own conclusions.
Newson juxtaposes the macho high jinks with homoerotic overtones and brief glimpses of aching vulnerability and fear. Most of Achilles is set in a pub, where men in suits swill beer and watch TV. A movable set with mirrors, ropes, see-through doors, and a rising floor is integral to the action. Manly gestures like the headlock, the dog pile, the exaggerated karate chop, the crotch grab, the backslap, and air guitar are woven into fast-paced, high-flying contact-improv physicality. The characters are boorish but likable, possessed of a loose-limbed grace and a joyous, easy camaraderie, jostling for one another's pints to the tune of the English Beat's "Hands Off She's Mine" and bumping torsos to "You Sexy Thing." In one hilarious and inexplicable passage, the men hunch over and stomp around the stage in a pack, grunting and hoisting their beers above their heads, yelling, "Hey!" Newson goes so far as to have the men step out onto the stage lip and get in the audience's face: "We can see your tits through that blouse," yells one to a woman in the balcony.
We have the restless sense that things are going to get ugly, and they do. When two men try to pick up the same pint glass between their teeth, they find their lips too close together to be socially acceptable, and separate abruptly. Swift and brutal violence erupts when a stranger whose colorful suit contrasts sharply with the rest's drabness dances solo in the middle of the bar. Newson contends that men police each other, not allowing in others what they will also not allow in themselves; it's not a new idea, but Newson gives it a fresh twist when the effeminate guy rips off his suit to reveal a Superman costume underneath.
This same Superman pops up in delightfully surreal ways throughout the rest of the piece: on the roof playing accordion, or dangling acrobatically from the ceiling by a rope. At one point, he fashions the rope into a swing for one of his attackers, who briefly loses his macho bravado and becomes a carefree kid again. The tension climaxes when one friend discovers the other's female blow-up doll and drags it into the crowd as blackmail. Glasses are smashed, epithets are hurled, egos are shattered, and the doll is destroyed. You wonder how these men who debase their friends this way would treat their enemies. Newson leaves us with one last strange and indelible image, of the humiliated man clinging desperately to his linoleum floor as it tilts up toward the audience, scattering debris in its ascension.
DV8 screens its films Strange Fish, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, and Enter Achilles Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive, 2625 Durant, Berkeley; call (510) 642-1412.
-- Heather Wisner
