PERFORMANCE

AVAILABLE LIGHT IS BACK

the negative space of collaboration

By Kelly Lai

A Classic is Back

Lucinda Childs, John Adams, and Frank Gehry’s Available Light premiered in 1983 at the Los Angeles Museum of Modern and Contemporary (MOCA). The piece is now considered to be one of the most significant works to come out of American performance and is thought by many to be a masterpiece. Each of the contributing artists—Childs, Adams, and Gehry—have become world famous in their respective fields of dance, music, and architecture. The present remounting and tour of Available Light (at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall) is a chance to go back to a moment when they all were on the cusp of fame and see how they negotiated creating a piece of art together. And the issue really is about artistic collaboration and the way they imagine it.

ART

POLIT-SHEER-FORM FOR ONE AND ALL!

an artist(s) quest for individuality and community

By Pinyuan Li

He's our man.

Polit-Sheer-Form: Fitness for All at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) opens with an incredibly striking image: a 61 3/10 × 47 3/10 inch portrait of a man wearing a perfectly ironed white shirt with a blue badge, awkwardly parted hair, looking straight ahead, and possibly to nowhere. Most people who see it just glance at it for two seconds, avoid eye contact and then go on. Who is he? Why is his portrait here? Why are they so disinterested? Perhaps because his face is uninspiring and seems to be as normal as you could possibly get. He is an average man of no particular note. And that’s your first mistake. You should be very interested in this boring man and everyone who sees this show should be, too. No one has ever quite looked like that, so normal and so non-noticeable. How is that possible? The answer is that he is not one man, but the amalgamation of the five artists who make the group Polit-Sheer-Form (PSF). The man’s name is Mr. Zheng (Mr.Polit).

PERFORMANCE

THE SUPREME LETDOWN

not a lot of laughter, well some, at the comedy event of the year

By Sarah Kim

Are they responsible?

Jack Black and Kyle Gass, the two members of Tenacious D, rounded up an incredible group of performers, the best comedians in business today, for an all-star mega-event of laughter called Festival Supreme. When I first heard about “Festival Supreme” I was super excited to attend the greatest comedic event ever on the face of the earth. Demetri Martin, Sarah Silverman, and Patton Oswalt, all in one place. Supposedly Flight of the Conchords and Kristen Schaal were also supposed to be there, but I think they canceled or I made it up in my overeager mind or God wouldn’t allow that much greatness in one place. And yet the big dude was allowing Craig Robinson from The Office, the surrealist pop duo The Mighty Boosh, Eric Idle from Monty Python, weirdos Tim and Eric and offensive hand-puppet Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to grace the heavenly “Festival Supreme” lineup. I wanted to see everything and I wanted my mind to be blown and my gut busted—from laughter. The tickets were costly (one million dollars and some change) and the journey would be far (500 pioneering miles down Highway 5), but I was hell-bent on going to the “Festival Supreme.” I booked a one-night stay at a questionable motel, drove down with my best friend and jabbered all the way about how awesome the “Festival Supreme” would be.

PERFORMANCE

BONNIE AND CLYDE ARE REAL PEOPLE!

a review of the Shotgun Players' "shotgun" production of Bonnie and Clyde, playing until September 29th

By Samantha Bean

Bang! Bang!

Bonnie and Clyde. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie and Clyde. Serge Gainsborough and Bridget Bardot’s Bonnie and Clyde. Tabloid Newspapers’ Bonnie and Clyde. Depression Era Heroes Bonnie and Clyde. Badass Outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. Crazy Lovers Bonnie and Clyde. When you take on Bonnie and Clyde you are taking on a long history of myth, both American and Romantic. The English playwright Adam Peck’s Bonnie and Clyde is an alluring reworking of what it actually might have felt like to be Bonnie and Clyde. It’s a startling idea and cuts through all the mythic dreck surrounding them to posit a different, more potent and striking myth of its own: that we remember Bonnie and Clyde not because they were larger than life, but because of their embrace of the mundane and the everyday.

PERFORMANCE

A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE

an appreciation of Keith Hennessey's Turbulence, A Dance Against the Economy

By John Wilkins

It all could fall

I saw Keith Hennessey’s Turbulence, A Dance Against the Economy over three months ago and still can’t stop thinking about it. It’s not just the performance, which is stunning enough in and of itself, but the way in which it demands a rethinking of aesthetic priorities, aims and what’s possible in the theater and for that matter art in general. For me, there really has been a before and after Turbulence. I can’t quite get around what it proposes and accomplishes. It certainly isn’t about aesthetic quality or breaking barriers or subverting or embracing taboos, all superficial aspects of the performance and post-modern aesthetics, but instead Turbulence takes on a richness of feeling, a belief that art can disrupt what is ordered and dead and create, for fleeting moments, a world of truth and reality that you just know, that if you wanted to, you could grasp. In this way, Turbulence is defiantly and unabashedly utopian in its aspirations: it implores us to dream and to join the dreams of others, both politically and emotionally. It proposes that there is a more vibrant and loving world than the one we live in, that our desires are worthy, that the imagination is not a dream, but a reality, with repercussions as powerful as the economy.

PERFORMANCE

4000 MILES IS A LONG WAY TO GO, BUT YOU SHOULD GO

a review of Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles at ACT, playing until February 10th

By Alexander Quionenes-Bangs

Photo Kevin Berne/Leo thinking

When the actors took the stage for their bows I was startled at how few there were - unlike so many large cast plays that are full of forgettable characters, Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles is about a few fully rendered, hard to pin down people and somehow that makes you feel as if you had been watching an entire city. We aren’t bathing in the radiance of extraordinary individuals or superstar actors, but instead get the opportunity to connect with people we might see everyday, people who have problems that might happen to us. The fate of the nation doesn’t ride on the shoulders of these characters, what happens to them has no national significance, and yet Herzog makes us see that their lives are significant as an Electra or Lear, and as knottily complex. That raises us, not to greatness, but to an appreciation of how we live.

PERFORMANCE

A MUSICAL ABOUT A BROKEN MAN

a review of Tom Waits' musical of Woyzeck at the Shotgun Players, playing until January 27th

By Alexander Quionones-Bangs

Photo: Jessica Palopoli/Great Sadness

The Shotgun Players’ production of Tom Waits’ musical version of Georg Büchner’s proto-modernist masterpiece Woyzeck is a big play on a little stage, and I wish they had done more to accentuate that. The songs are in your face, the emotions are raw and it doesn't go on for too long. Director Mark Jackson, along with Musical Director David Möschler, has also managed to put on a show that doesn’t just feel like a bunch of actors singing Tom Waits’ songs, but a fully realized drama that happens to feature a bunch of actors singing Tom Waits’ songs. It’s a nice trick and suggests new possibilities for musical drama and Woyzeck is certainly not your typical musical.

PERFORMANCE

THE LIMITS OF BEAUTY

a review of Mary Zimmerman's The White Snake, playing at the Berkeley Rep until December 23rd

By Alexander Quionones-Bangs 

Photo Jenny Graham/More than beauty?

“A tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme...” No, wait, that’s the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, but given the age of the “White Snake” story, it’s not surprising that there are parallels to other fairy tales of note. Snaking a course between adaptations ancient and old, director and writer/adapter Mary Zimmerman retells this centuries old Chinese legend in a myriad of ways. An interspecies love story of sorts, The White Snake is about Xu Xian (Christopher Livingston), a scholar who thinks he falls in love with a woman (Amy Kim Waschke), but soon finds out that she’s actually a snake, a beautiful white snake. In turn, our snake dreams of becoming a goddess, but along the way falls prey to the most human of emotions, love. They’re not quite Romeo and Juliet, but their problems have real complication and fascination and Zimmerman’s visually sumptuous retelling of this timeless story is a treat to all that your eyes can take in and more. Still, there’s one overriding question here: is the actual play, like its namesake, worthy enough within to withstand looking past its obvious beauty.

PERFORMANCE

WHEN 90 MINUTES FEEL LIKE 20

a review of ACT's production of Sophocles' Elektra, playing until November 18th

By Alexander Quionones-Bangs

Photo: Kevin Berne

The Geary Theater is not small, and at over a thousand seats it’s hard to feel cozy or intimate. Designer Ralph Funicello decided to take advantage of this, pushing the set into our faces and making it seem as if the actors are about to fall into our laps and soak our clothes with their blood. It’s an exciting gambit and right in line with the aesthetic aims of ACT’s production of Sophocles’ Elektra, which manages to make 90 minutes feel like 20. That’s a fantastic achievement. Yet, I kept wondering throughout Carey Perloff’s super-charged production if contemporary audiences, including me, could still relate to the force of this 2,500-year-old tale and Sophocles’ way of telling it. You can definitely feel the distance, both in its conventions and concerns, and yet there are parts of Elektra that are as violently explosive and sharp as any action movie made today.

PERFORMANCE AND THE ELECTION

PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON, ROCK GOD!

a review of SF Playhouse's production of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, playing until November 24th

By Alexander Quionones-Bangs

That's our President

Alex Timber and Michael Friedman’s Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is a rock, no, let me be more exact about this, a rock/emo/punk blend musical about a young, hot, wild President who enjoys dropping f-bombs as often as his contemporaries drop dead from frontier living, who gets a kick out of kicking political ass, and when things get dark and lonely cuts himself so that he knows that he’s real, a bloodletting bond he shares with his eventual wife. The play is both entertaining and educational, but the parts that are entertaining are not educational and the parts that are educational are not entertaining. In the end, despite this odd schizophrenia of enjoyment and knowledge, Bloody, Bloody is well worth the Jacksons to see it: Jon Tracy’s direction is lively and the play does answer a question that has haunted American politics for over a century: what if Andrew Jackson were a rock star?

PERFORMANCE AND THE ELECTION

SINGING ASSASSINS

a review of the Shotgun Players' production of Steven Sondheim's Assassins, playing until November 11th

By Velia De Iuliis

Here we go

As pure theater goes, there’s nothing like a Presidential assassination. It might be a one-time-only performance, but what a performance. The Shotgun Players' production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins follows nine of our most infamous citizens and tries to get at what drove them to think that assassinating the President was a good idea and that they were ready to play the starring role or at least the villain in a national epic. It’s a complex and ambitious project and Shotgun’s choice of material at this moment and time is deliberately purposeful. If you love theater, you love chaos; although assassinations are not the type of theatrical chaos we want, or if we do, we should think long and hard about our desires. Shining a light on these characters is a necessary act and we don’t just get the ones we are well aware of, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald (they both have three names), but a host of lesser known assassins ranging from Charles Guiteau (Steven Hess) who killed James Garfield (1881) and Leon Czolgosz (Dan Saki) who killed William McKinley (1901) to Giuseppe Zangara (fabulously played by Aleph Ayin), who assassinated Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak but who really wanted to kill President Roosevelt (1933).

PERFORMANCE

THE NORMAL HEART WILL TAKE YOU BACK

a review of ACT's production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart

By Velia De Iuliis

Photo: Keven Berne/©ACT

For my generation, people in their 20’s, AIDS is a bit of a distant topic. Everyone understands that it’s not good news, but it feels abstract, not lived, not a part of our consciousness, not in our faces everyday. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is a reminder of what AIDS once felt like to those who had to face the disease head on, culturally, politically and sexually. The Normal Heart premiered in 1985 in the beginning of the middle of the crisis, when everyone was thinking about AIDS, whether they wanted to or not.