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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.
