Shortbus

After I saw Indiana Jones I came home and watched Shortbus, a non-pornographic movie about sex by John Cameron Mitchell. Pretty much the only reason I rented it was because one of the stars, Jay Brannan, lives in my building.


I watched it on my computer with an internet explorer window open the whole time. and so I wasn't really paying much attention to it. The best part about it is how in between scenes, the camera flies over this really cool animated model of New York.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I'd intended to go to see a new play by Neil LaBute tonight.  It was sold out, so I thought, why not Indian Jones instead?  

My verdict? Phantom Menace is to Star Wars as Crystal Skull is to Indiana Jones.  

I'd leave it at that, except I want to add that my heart aches for Karen Allen, who seems so happy to be in a movie again.  My only comfort is that she's probably making a lot of money.  

How Theater Failed America

I hadn't heard of Mike Daisey until I read a review of his show How Theater Failed America in the NYT.  It's a one man show.  A monologue.  Him sitting at a desk and talking.  Whatever you want to call it.  Since I wasn't sure if I could make his show, I found an audio version online.  I listened to the first 5 minutes and turned it off, unimpressed.  But then about a month later I couldn't sleep, and my thoughts kept coming back to the article I'd read about Mike Daisey, and so I turned on  my computer and googled him.  It turns out he is incredibly prolific.  He started doing these one man shows in Seattle in the early 2000's.   I also saw that his show had transferred to a different theater and was still running.  So tonight, I went.  

The theater was packed.  I couldn't believe it.  Before I went to the show, I saw a few clips of another Daisey show on You Tube, and I kind of had an idea of what I was going to see.  I knew he would be sitting down and telling a story.  I had no idea it would last 1:45 minutes.

It was the most memorable show I saw this weekend, by far.  What seems amazing to me is that Daisey doesn't write a script.  He keeps a few pages of notes on the desk, and then just pretty much rants off them.  The show is a scathing critique of regional theater in America, but the show itself is an inspiring example of what theater can be.  It's a comedy.  I didn't laugh much, but most people around me did.  

He ends his show by saying there is young person in the audience who is going to make a lot of failures but who is going to do great things, blah blah.  He manages to pull it off without too much cheese, and it was kind of neat to think he might be talking about me.  Why not?  I'm a young person in his audience.  

After the show there was a panel discussion.  I guess each week after his show there are panel discussions with different themes and new panelists.  This week's theme was do-it-yourself theater, and the panelists seemed to have an impressive resume - the guy who wrote the book to Urinetown, a woman who took her solo show Well to Broadway,  and various others.  Now, I  tend to love panel discussions.  I love how people on panels always seem like they have everything together.  The right clothes, the right hair, the right vocabulary.  But this group of panelists didn't fit the mold.  They looked pretty sad actually, and pretty tired.  They didn't seem like any kind of role models to me, and I actually started feeling scared I'd end up like them.  I'd convinced a friend to stick around for the panel discussion, citing how much I loved panel discussions as a reason he should stay.  But in the middle of tonight's discussion I couldn't take it anymore and ditched my friend and left. It's such a shame.  Daisey's show was so inspiring.  I'm trying to erase the panel discussion from my head, but I can't really.  

'Tis Pity She's A Whore

Last night I saw 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Impact Theater in Berkeley. One of my classmates, Jai Sahai, was in it, so my other classmates and I went to check it out.

Good stuff, this show. It was written by John Ford in the early 1600s, so it comes across basically like Shakespearian English. Considering that, they did a great job putting a modern spin on this and keeping us interested.

Things that were awesome:

• The opening scene! With a modern hip-hop-esque song playing, the play opens with different characters in their own moments of time: the hitman/bodyguard is on his knees praying with rosary beads, a couple is having an affair, the lead female (Annabella) is pulling petals off a flower one by one. It all syncs perfectly with the music and feels like you're watching a modern live music video, especially when Annabella unexpectedly bites the head off the now-plucked flower on the last beat of the music.


• The chemistry of the two lead characters! Considering this play is about incest and love between a brother and sister, it would seem tempting to present this in a spoof way or have a couple "winks" to the audience. But not here. These characters act their hearts out until the passion they feel for their sibling is on par with Romeo and Juliet or any other epic couple. They handle the intimate bed scenes surprisingly well and do an amazing job of making us feel their passion for each other even in scenes where they're physically apart. Impressive stuff!


• The concentration! This theater is actually in the basement of a pizza/beer/sports place in Berkeley that is full of college kids. On the plus side, you can eat pizza while you watch the show. But at the same time, tons of noise and footsteps from above pour into the theater despite their best attempts to soundproof it. Therefore, major props to the actors of this show who were not only able to do challenging, emotional material and stay completely in character, but also able to pull our attention away from the college kids above and into every moment of this play.


• Jai! Not being biased because I know him, Jai completely stole this show in every possible way. He transformed his slow-to-mature character, who is being forced by his rich uncle to court Annabella, into a modern teenager straight off the streets of Oakland. With modern slang, modern movements, and a thoroughly impressive amount of energy; he springs off walls, bounces while playing video games, and jumps around in place, completely capturing the energy of puberty in a way to rival even the teens in Spring Awakening! It's an amazing performance and when he becomes the accidental victim of a poisoned dagger meant for someone else at the end of Act I, the entire audience is shocked to think we'll have to sit through Act II without him (I heard many audience members actually voice this complaint). Also, Jai does amazing death scenes, so it was great to see him get to do one in this show.


• The gore! This show has it all when it comes to violence; guns, knives, stabbings, knife fights, poison, hair pulling, and even a bloody heart on a dagger that drips blood onto the stage! The special effects were absolutely unexpected and impressive considering the low-budget feel of the rest of the show (check out the dagger-across-the-neck effect they handle so realistically here).
  
  
  
  I also loved how the director decided to handle the growing number of dead characters. The first woman to die at the start of Act II gets politely placed in the corner of the stage by the hitman/bodyguard. As the show continues, he keeps literally piling bodies in that corner, and it's a great visual since they then spend the rest of the show lying there dead. Nice job on the part of those actors who have to stay in place where they're dropped for the rest of the show!


• The extras! In a brilliant move, this director chose to add a whole string of young men to this cast who are not in the script. They have no speaking part and their entire job is to appear, one after the other, in every scene with the older mother. Each time, one of them stands near her, and often massages her neck, but they never speak. Basically, they just represent a string of "boy-toys" that the mother has and is constantly refreshing. It's so creative and effective and hilarious. Nice work!

Wow, I had a lot more to say about this show than I thought when I began writing this. :)

In terms of what didn't work in this show, I think Jai's character was SO strong and entertaining, that every scene he wasn't in felt a bit like a let-down. Also, he was the only character that was significantly "different" in the way he delivered the old-English dialogue. It would've been fun to see a few other characters tweaked (accents? pacing? mannerisms?) to add more variety and modern-flare to this show. But otherwise, it was definitely well acted and an impressive undertaking. Great job!

Prince Caspian

Well, one of us had to see it and take one for the team. This just happened to be my turn.

Being in no way a fan of the first Narnia movie, I'm not sure what possessed me to give this one a try. I think I was hoping the movie would focus more on Prince Caspian and that he'd be a more interesting character than the four annoying children. I also vaguely remembered that Prince Caspian sails this high seas quite a bit, so I thought that might be cool to see.

Well, no luck. No sailing or ocean scenes in this movie. The closest we get is a few moments of the children playing in the ocean when they're first transported back to Narnia. I happened to recognize this place as actually being Cathedral Cove, an amazing place on the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. I haven't been there, but I definitely heard about how amazing it is from my time traveling in New Zealand. It was pretty exciting to actually recognize a film location in real life.



At any rate, I was able to pinpoint a bit more about why the Narnia movies fail so completely. My latest theory is that the main four children really have no camaraderie. They are constantly saying to each other "I told you so" or "See, you're an idiot" or "Why should I trust you?" or "I'm going my own way, see you later." At no point do we get the sense that they care for or support each other. It made me realize that, in Harry Potter movies, even when Ron and Hermione are fighting, there's still a deeper feeling of connection and love beneath it and you know those characters would do anything for each other in heartbeat. That's what makes the Narnia movies so hard to get into, if the main siblings don't trust each other, why should you, as the audience, trust them?

It doesn't help matters that their acting is rather weak as well. Especially the youngest girl- blech.

Another thing that ruined Prince Caspian would have to be the accent of the title character. It's a mix between a Russian spy and Inigo Montoya ("you killed my father, prepare to die"), and it's by far the most distracting thing of this whole film. I couldn't help remembering the story about how Mike Myers filmed all of Shrek is a normal voice and then they went back and redid it with a Scottish accent. I spent most of this movie trying to imagine what it would be like if Prince Caspian had a Scottish accent, and decided it would have been vastly improved.

The one scene that was decent in this film involved a surprise attack of a castle by griffins air-lifting Narnians onto the towers. The camera angles really worked in this scene and it really felt like you were flying in as well. It was exciting and interesting. Otherwise, the rest of the movie was pretty mediocre. The CG mouse was way too similar to Shrek 2's Puss in Boots. I won't even bother ripping on the rest of the CG animals.

Anyway, skip it. And let's stop seeing Narnia movies from now on.

Octopus Revisited

I know it's cheating to do another post about Octopus, but I find myself with more to say about it and I also discovered some cool photos from the show that I wanted to post.

First of all, I'm amazed how much this show has stuck with me and stayed in my thoughts since I saw it. I can't remember the last time I was still discovering symbolism and finding new meaning in a show weeks later, just by replaying it in my head. Also, I can't stop telling people about it. For all those reasons, it deserves this second post. :)

Here is a great shot showing the way the water plays out on stage. This scene comes from about halfway through the show, so the water's depth will double before the show ends, but even here you can see how interesting it is to have the characters interact as their world is being flooded.



I just recently realized that the only window in the main characters' apartment is in the shape of a porthole! Nice.



Below is a cool shot from the scene that takes place on the bottom of the ocean floor. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this scene. At first I really wished this character would deliver his dialogue in a more surreal way, like from a "ghostly narrator" or in a disconnected overview type voice. Instead, he gives his monologue as if you were having a long talk at a coffee shop with him, very enthusiastically and sincere and it felt like such a contradiction to his setting. The more I think about it though, the more I think that's an effective way of getting at their message that we all face the "dark unknown depths of the ocean" in our daily lives and have to deal with "what lurks in the darkness."



On that same note, I'd like to take back my critique of the dialogue in this show from my last post. The more I think about it, the more I can't imagine this show without the rhyme and meter that it has. It really is effective and really is almost a character in and of itself. After some reflecting, I think more realistic modern dialogue wouldn't be half as effective as they way they have it now. I just wanted to officially change my stance for the record.

Meanwhile, the final scene in this play really deserves to be called out. Not only is the staging and acting brilliant in that scene, but the actual stuff they're saying is amazing- almost every line is jarring and powerful, and the culminating final moments are really some of the best I've ever seen on stage. The final line of the Telegram Delivery Boy is perfect, and perfectly met with what is happening to the other characters. I really can't give enough praise to how impressive this final scene is!

Ok, now I feel a bit better about having given this show the writeup it deserves. Hope you can see it sometime!

Passing Strange

Meet Stew. He's a performer from Los Angeles who's written a memoir show and brought it to Broadway. It's nominated for best musical. The show started out at Berkeley Rep, so maybe you already know something about it.

Plot Summary: Stew narrates the story, and an actor plays the young Stew. Young Stew lives in LA and doesn't fit in with his church. His mother bugs him. He decides that music is the most important thing to him. Then he moves to Amsterdam to be free. Then to Berlin. And then his mother dies and he feels bad. The end.

I went to this show because everybody loves it, and I hear nothing but praise for it. And yah, I laughed. I cried. (The actress playing the mother was amazing, and she was an understudy.) But I also rolled my eyes a lot. The best part was the beginning when young Stew goes with his mother to church and joins up with rebels in the church choir who smoke pot in their cars. This is when the show is the most fun. The show becomes annoying though when Stew starts tackling questions like "what is real?" and "what is art?" His answer is that "only art is real." When I left the theater I felt like taking a bunch of art and throwing it in the trash in protest. The very last line of the whole show includes the phrase "the real is a construct." Blah blah blah the real is construct blah blah. BLACKOUT. What kind of an ending is this?

I'm also wondering if it's possible to write and star in a Broadway musical about yourself that doesn't make you see so self-obsessed.

Port Authority

One of the benefits I hope to get from this blog is to retain my overall experience of the theater and movies I see a little longer.  Whatever it is I feel I've learned after seeing a show, or whatever catharsis I've had, tends to dilute over the walk home, and it's always such a shame. 

So tonight I saw Port Authority, starring John Gallagher, Jr, of Spring Awakening fame.  It's a collection of monologues told by three generations of Irishmen.   (It was very weird at first to hear John Gallagher speak in an Irish accent, but I think he did it well.)   Each of the monologues deals with falling in love and then not taking the opportunity to pursue it.  (I'm not quite sure if the "middle aged" character's monologue fits exactly into this mold, but you get the point.  Regret and love. That's what the show was about.)

Gallagher's character, Kevin, loves a girl named Claire.  Claire has a boyfriend and Kevin has a girlfriend named Trish.  Claire and Kevin are housemates, but Kevin never makes his move.  He decides there are fighters and there are people who go with the flow, and he thinks he and Claire both fit into the latter category.  He thinks Trish is a fighter, and so he resigns to being with Trish.  

It's the ho-hum, this-is-the-way-things-are attitude in each of the monologues that makes them so sad.  

Lee, don't let me turn out like Kevin!

Port Authority

by Conor McPherson

Octopus

Tonight I saw an interesting play called Octopus by Steve Yockey. This was its "West Coast Premiere" so I assume it's been out on the East Coast for a while. You should catch it if you can, it's definitely worth seeing.

Here's the blurb:

A love story rendered through a post-modern gay lens, Octopus examines the fallout of one night of lust on four men. This universal story of love, jealousy, and commitment commingles with a mysterious telegram delivery boy and a ravenous monster from the ocean floor.

There's a lot of cool stuff say to say about this play, as well as some things to critique. Without wanting to ruin it too much, I'll just make a list of what made it really different from anything I've seen on stage before:

• The opening scene involves a four-way full-nude make-out scene with four men. The eldery audience didn't quite know what to make of it.


• The use of water in this show was absolutely amazing and truly refreshing :). Not only would certain characters show up with water pouring out of their clothing somehow, but the set itself was slowly flooding during the entire show. This becomes more effective when rivers of water start running through the main character's apartment and soon a lake pools on the apron of the stage (clear plastic walls keep it from spilling into the audience). Quite a few dramatic arguments take place in this lake, and even a few fight scenes- which is a really satisfying thing to watch on a stage, with all the splashing! It was also fantastic when and how the characters entered and exited water to mirror what was happening in the story.


• I think most post-modern writing usually tends to bring in more and more surreal things to a normal person's life until chaos spins wildly out of control and it all spirals downward infinitely until the lights go out or the novel ends or someone dies. But to my complete joy, this play takes you into the depths of total chaos and insanity, but then pulls you out with a very satisfying and not despairing conclusion. Granted, it's no "happily ever after" but it's definitely a new twist and I thought it worked in a hopeful yet realistic way. A character grows and changes, rather than just "going insane" upon realizing his tragic flaws- which I never see!! It was great.

Now to be fair, I will add a few critiques:

• It was disappointing to have HIV be such a prominent issue in this play. For a play that is being lauded as "universal" and pushed as one of the few gay-themed plays whose characters could easily be straight and have the same script, I was definitely disappointed to see how much time was spent focused on HIV. I think this play would've been much more powerful if the "unknown" was left vague and although it still tried to keep that possibility going, there was far too much insistence on correlating "gay" and "HIV", in my opinion.


• Since so much of this play was modern-day and "every-day", it would've been nice to see the dialogue also more modern. It felt "theatrical" and "formal" and that took away a bit from the believability, thus making the surreal events less shocking and effective.

But all in all, still definitely worth seeing. Check it out if you get a chance! I'm curious how other directors/set designers would handle the water- I bet there are a lot of fantastic ways. I asked the lady-answering-questions-in-the-lobby how it was handled in the Atlanta version, but she didn't know.

Lee

The Birds

Tonight I saw a cool performance of The Birds as part of "Attack of the Killer B-Movies" at The Dark Room Theater.

Having never seen the original Hitchcock film, I probably am unqualified to review this. But instead I'll just review it from the perspective of someone who had never seen the film. The result being: it was awesome!

As you know, we debated how they would handle "the birds" themselves. To the joy of the audience, they used a variety of amazing techniques. The gull attack on the boat was a fake bird on a string. The birds flying in through the chimney was done with video projection and actors flailing. Some birds were done with flashlights and cutouts, other birds were never shown but just pointed at and described. The phone booth scene was done amazingly by Josh Lenn (my friend in the show) who used his hands to create birds and slam them into the non-existent glass. But my absolute favorite creative way they handled the birds was an opening scene in a pet shop, where actors held metal grates in front of their faces and used their own heads to be the birds. They would whistle and look this way and that, it was surprisingly effective and amazing.

Anyway, the show found a perfect balance of scaring us and making us laugh, all the while not taking itself too seriously and making great use of the tiny space they had for performing.

I also loved all the references to Bodega Bay and I'm so glad our own trip out there gave us a taste for the desolation and fear captured in this story. "You know what makes this fog so scary... ten minutes ago it was floating over the pitch dark Pacific Ocean."

Rose part 2

Hey Lee,
I never did get to watch La Vie en Rose.

Nick