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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.
