Page 2 of 3
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.
