By the end of Strip! Bare-ly Legal you find out who is circumcised and who wears cock rings -- in both the cast and the audience. Nominally a theater piece, Strip! Bare-ly Legal is actually an erotic male-dance revue with little plot and a lot of wit. (The show's billed as an "environmental" piece, which means that the play goes on in and among the audience a la Tony and Tina's Wedding.) Strip! distinguishes itself from the slap-and-wriggle dancing of the Tenderloin fun houses with practiced choreography, but there's still ample opportunity to tip dollar bills into jockstraps.
Instead of turning lewd, the licentiousness fuels buoyant, naked fun, suspicious stains on the velour parlor couches notwithstanding. On the sidewalk outside the South of Market Rococo Showplace, paying guests mingle with actors and the "host," Uncle Mortie. The story is that Mortie is springing for an 18th-anniversary party at the club for David and Todd, complete with cake for everyone. Once inside the den of arched brick and gilt cherubs, guests are introduced to the entertainment, a dance corps called the Tomcats. They enter in skimpy lycra and leopard prints, the most clothing the men sport all night. A Tomcat in training, Precious, circulates with a box of T-shirts, candy, and change for tipping the dancers. Give him the chance and Precious will shyly tell you about his day job in a dance store with miles of colored leggings.
The plants in the audience are even better; sitting across from the anniversary couple is Matt, the fiance of David's ex-wife. Straight, miserable, and mildly homophobic, he sulks throughout the show and draws nervous tension away from the bald and glossy bodies on stage. He's also a preemptive warning to audience members who aren't good sports and don't sing along when prompted -- because no one wants to be like that stiff from Walnut Creek. The club's maitre d', Mr. Mephistopheles, whispers gossip about the attractive Matt to the women in the audience. Smile for Mr. Mephistopheles, ladies, and maybe you'll be pulled up on stage (I know this from sad experience), wound up in Jimmy Bob's rope trick, and get up-close-and-personal with Jimmy Bob's G-string.
But the ringleader and star of Strip! Bare-ly Legal is Ms. Kitty (a.k.a. Stephen J. McCarthy). The proprietress of the club sings, tangos, pimps her boys, and works the audience with flirty ad-lib. "Wiggle!" she orders Precious. "Wait for your tip!" she commands. ("Oooo, Cirque du Soleil!" she coos as he stands on a chair.) The line between performers and audience, fuzzy to begin with, is gone by the end of the show. Things devolve into an amateur strip show, as Ms. Kitty hand-picks men from the crowd to indulge in an exhibitionist fantasy. One genuine member of the audience came prepared with snap-off underwear. It's a good night at the theater when you've been tied up and permitted to remove a man's cotton thong, but it's even better when simple stunts and solid performers convince you to leave politics and apprehensions at the door and just have fun.
-- Julie Chase
Cracking the Cosmic Egg
Going, Going, Gone. Written and directed by Anne Bogart. Performed by the Saratoga International Theater Institute: Ellen Lauren, Tom Nelis, Karenjune Sanchez, and Stephen Webber. At the Magic Theater, May 7 to 18.
An elegant middle-aged couple pauses on the threshold of a futuristic living room. There's a white couch and a portable bar of neon liquors. "'God does not play dice.' Who said that?" the woman barks. "Hey, who said that? 'God does not play dice'!" The man -- yammering about space, time, black holes, and quarks -- ignores her. Nothing they say resembles ordinary conversation outside of the theoretical physics wing of the local NASA lab. And yet, as they banter about molecules, quibble over the big bang, and fix each other drinks in their Jetsons-inspired abode, there is something oddly familiar about their interaction. Against the starry sky backdrop, a younger, primly dressed couple approaches in slow motion. Suddenly, you realize that while the script almost entirely comprises technical discussions of new physics, the emotional action follows the arc of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Welcome to the postmodern universe of Ann Bogart's Going, Going, Gone. Anyone familiar with the work of the New York-based experimental-theater director will not be surprised by the heady brew of quantum mechanics, philosophy, and classic American drama. Since 1993, Bogart and her company, the Saratoga International Theater Institute, have been pioneering an expressionistic, physical approach to theater that severs language from its ordinary usage and rebuilds meaning through a technique called "The Viewpoints." The result is an elegiac shadow of ordinary communication: visually fertile, intellectually weighty, and emotionally distant.
This esoteric approach to performance would seem to be the perfect vehicle for a play that claims to "translate the recent breakthroughs in quantum physics into a theatrical realm." To create the script, Bogart and her company assembled a quotation collage that intersperses the writings of physicists like Einstein, Heisenberg, and Stephen Hawking with passages from the Bible, T.S. Eliot, Poe, Goethe, Robert Frost, and Lewis Carroll. But Going, Going, Gone does not crack the cosmic egg for our collective understanding. Rather, it showcases the otherworldly talents of its performers.
Like many artists and popular writers in recent years, Bogart is trying to argue that the precepts of the new science are the creation myth of our time. Like the pop physics- inspired movie Mindwalk, Bogart buys into the spurious notion that scientific concepts can function as a philosophical foundation for modern life. Chaos theory, black holes, and curved time may ignite our imaginations, but these phrase are largely groovy names for reams of mathematical equations referring to a conjectured, hypothetical reality. When the concepts are transplanted into human terms, the meanings become twisted and trivialized. Like the 19th-century social Darwinists who invoked Darwinian biology to explain racial inequality, people who employ the new physics as an ad-hoc philosophy not only distort the ideas' original intents, they unknowingly preach metaphysical beliefs in the name of scientific "fact." For instance, in her explanatory essay, Bogart asserts that "Physicists agree that you cannot focus with too much effort on the notions in the new physics because the act of looking changes them. You must use an indirect approach. You must use fuzzy logic." This is just a bastardization of the Heisenberg Principle, which makes for an effective metaphor in certain anthropological situations (a documentary crew, for example, altering the reality it's filming). But it's not meant to suggest that scientists do not think deductively or that we shouldn't.
While Going, Going, Gone may fail in its desire to persuade us of its scientific and philosophical concepts, it traveled at the speed of light toward a new vision of theater. The warp-vector sound design by Darron West and the spare black-and-white set by Neil Patel combined with Bogart's voraciously resourceful staging to create a galactic domestic scene. Stripped of the emotional blueprint of a conventional script, the actors were forced to plumb the very depths of physical and vocal expression. Shifting seamlessly between impassioned utterance and abstract gesture, they worked together in a combustible mix. Drawing their fire from old-fashioned human friction, the actors often relied on the comic parallels between science and sex. "Things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale," the "Martha" character (Ellen Lauren) leers at her feckless husband (Tom Nelis). During an illicit embrace with her male guest (Stephen Webber), she rumbles, "Mathematics is to physics what masturbation is to sex, eh?" Though the actors' virtuosity became its own pleasure, one wondered how much more powerful the performances might have been had they been built off of a more emotionally-grounded script.
In the end, as the "Martha" character begins reciting from Genesis with the "George" character interjecting obtuse scientific counterpoints, it becomes glaringly clear just how impoverished the language of science currently is as a source of meaning for the ordinary person. Like our own daily lives, the Bible's story of creation is about love, loneliness, and desire. Perhaps someday, human beings will breathe deeply at the invocation of the Heisenberg Principle. But for now, Going, Going, Gone doesn't persuade that theater is a viable forum for the transmittal of every form of knowledge. This doesn't in any way demean theater; it just emphasizes its distinctiveness. After all, if Stephen Hawking had set out to formulate an equation based on Albee's three-act play, chances are, he would have missed the point altogether.
-- Carol Lloyd
Night and 'Day
Lady Sings the Blues (The Flip Side). Directed by Sean Vaughn Scott and Winston Williams. Written by Mona Scott. Starring Gerri Harris, Nina Causey, Pheleta Santos, Cheryl Robinson, and Amber Harris. At the Black Repertory Group Theater, 3201 Adeline St. (at Ashby) in Berkeley, through May 25. Call (510) 652-2120.
Billie Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, reads like a sassy testament, colorful and ready-to-dramatize, starting with her girlhood in Baltimore, where she scrubbed steps at a whorehouse for the favor of hearing records on the neighborhood's only Victrola. You'd think that putting it onstage would be easier than reproducing the smoldering textures of her songs. But the Black Repertory Group, in Lady Sings the Blues (The Flip Side), ends up using the story as a tottering framework to showcase some fine singing by Gerri Harris, Pheleta Santos, Cheryl Robinson, and Amber Harris. From the ashes of stiltedly-read book passages and rote, wooden scenes, each woman manages to evoke a living Lady Day with elegant versions of songs like "The Man I Love" and "God Bless the Child."
The show starts with a passage about Billie's parents' wedding. The curtain opens on what's basically a wedding snapshot, a posing bride and groom. Nothing happens and the curtain closes. Then there's a song -- "Lady Sings the Blues" -- by Gerri Harris, and the scene shifts to the whorehouse in Baltimore. Amber Harris is the youngest actor in the cast and maybe the most talented: she plays a willful, precocious young Billie asking the madam for work and imitating the prostitutes until she gets chased home by her mother. Pamela Flax (as her mother) and Phyllis Williams (as the madam) are also good actors, doing their best with a flimsy script. The scene leads into a smooth version of "Love For Sale," and while Gerri Harris sings the cast provides a staged background for the music. These backgrounds -- the whorehouse and, later, Jerry's Club in New York -- accomplish what the Repertory has set out to do, which is paint a staged, musical portrait of Holiday.
The weakest scene is a literal take on "Strange Fruit," Holiday's song about lynching. The poem she adapted for this song reminded Holiday of her father, who died of a hemorrhage in Dallas after being turned away from several hospitals for baldly racist reasons. Gerri Harris does a beautiful job with the song, but the lynching onstage isn't a scene from the actual racism that Holiday "encountered relative to her music," as the program promises, and it's played with unconvincing grief, which just makes it awkward.
But the scenes in Jerry's Club are interesting and funny. The best sequence shows Holiday trying to audition as a dancer. She fails, and as a last resort tries to sing. Amber Harris holds down these young-Billie parts with a confident, natural style; she also has a powerful voice that she hasn't quite learned to control. The other women, in no particular order, take turns as the adult Billie, and by the time Pheleta Santos appears as the third polished and warm-voiced edition of the mature Lady Day it's both obvious and beside the point that the show exists for the songs.
--Michael Scott Moore
A Relative Mess
My Uncle Sam. By Len Jenkin. Directed by Cliff Mayotte. Starring Joe Bellan, Jennifer Bainbridge, Mary Beth Caton, and Robert Parsons. Presented by Rough and Tumble at the 450 Geary Studio Theater, 450 Geary, through June 15. Call 673-1172.
Comedy is a curious alchemy. It can take the awful, irritating base stuff of everyday life and turn it into something hard and bright. When it works, the payoff is undeniable. When it doesn't, the material lays there, inert and unremarkable. Upstart company Rough and Tumble's highly acclaimed productions of Tom Jones and Macbeth suggested that artistic director Cliff Mayotte had mastered this baffling science. But My Uncle Sam, the group's latest foray into the land of laughter, reminds us that clever antics do not necessarily produce the goods. One needs the magic words, which Len Jenkin's play unfortunately lacks.
The story follows a character ("The Author") in his reveries about his Uncle Sam, an elderly bachelor and traveling salesman of novelty items. From his solitary hotel room, Uncle Sam recalls his younger years, particularly a trip in search of the disappeared brother of his sweetheart, a tough-talking barmaid named Lila. As if this awkward conceit (author-imagines-old-man-remembering-past) isn't enough create a Grand Canyon of ponderous prose between the audience and the action, Jenkin alienates the audience further with a mess of stage cartoonery. In the end, the botany professor who grows flesh-eating plants, the clique of bumbling gangsters, the suitcase of lurid novelty items never inspire much more than bewildered squinting or, as in the case of the man next to me at the show, a nice long nap.
Part of the problem is that Jenkin -- and to some extent Mayotte -- is too eager to show off his avant-garde wackiness. Too much of the show is presented with the broad ta-da! of a circus performance. Maybe in a different town (or century), a scene in an opium den would be considered risque, or a multiple-narrator technique might be construed as cutting-edge. But here today such stylish stuff merely comes across as pointless, particularly since it's not grounded in a compelling story or theme. Without enough intellectual substance to appear postmodern, without a keen enough wit to pass as satire, My Uncle Sam emerges as a hodgepodge of styles, story lines, and schtick. In the service of the flawed script, Mayotte runs his 11-person cast through an obstacle course of quick transitions and campy characterizations. If Len Jenkin's play has an emotional center (and I'm not at all sure that it does) such stylistic graspings only serve to occlude the play's nuances.
Joe Bellan portrays Old Sam with an undeniable feel for early 20th-century working-class cadences, but he never develops the emotional variety that would allow us to see Sam as an individual rather than merely a type. Clad in cardigan sweater and reading glasses, Robert Parson plays the Author with the chummy avuncularity of John Boy Walton. This gather-round-the-fire attitude only reinforces the suspicion that the play is a slight indulgence, not a tale of urgent import. At one point, he beams at the audience with a broadcaster's smirk and says: "He never told me a story. I'm telling myself one for him." (How nice for you, but what possible bearing does this have on us?)
Despite its many shortcomings, the production displayed numerous minor treasures. The sound design and musical composition, by Mayotte and Joshua Pollock respectively, punctuated the evening with a soundscape as rich as the text could have been. Amid a solid cast, a few performers positively glimmered. The magnificent grotesquerie of Michael Carroll, the seamless frippery of Blancette Reynolds, and the bad-girl poise of Mary Beth Caton and Jennifer Bainbridge offered ample pleasures, while we waited for the comic chemistry to kick in.
-- Carol Lloyd
