This is Drama Masks, a Bay Area performing arts column from a born San Franciscan and longtime theatre artist in an N95 mask. I talk venue safety and dramatic substance, or the lack thereof.
Three recent news items gave me pause.
The first was the record-time career implosion of the latest District 4 supervisor. (Having lived in the Sunset for a year and a half, I’ve probably walked past Beya Alcaraz numerous times without knowing it.) The second saw Mayor Bluejeans dust off the ol’ right-wing chestnut of telling addicts “Get clean or go to prison,” a method we know for a fact does not work. The third was the news that disability activist Alice Wong had passed away.
It’s funny: Alice and I were never properly introduced, but I’ve stood by her side countless times over the past five years. We frequently stood outside SF City Hall advocating for stronger COVID safety measures when the rest of the world decided they were comfortable letting an airborne virus run rampant. Indoors or out, I wore a mask because Alice couldn’t. She begged people to do so. It’s no coincidence that the exact same time I wrote this piece for 48 Hills, Alice was writing this piece for Teen Vogue.
I never spoke to her one-on-one, but I took comfort in knowing we were always talking about the exact same thing. Every time I saw her chair roll up in front of City Hall, it put a face to the risk of pulling back on lifesaving mandates just to please Capitalist interests. I hope she felt the same whenever she saw my (masked) face.
That’s what irks me about several of the obituaries to her that have popped up: far too many of them feature the terms “during COVID”, “during the pandemic”, or some other variation. Those terms are a slap in the face to everything Alice represented. Go ahead and click on the Teen Vogue article above. In it, she says—in no uncertain terms—that pandemic is not over and that treating it like it is puts everyone in danger, particularly people like her. That wasn’t the first or last time she said that very thing, and science has proven her right.
People like Alice are part of the reason I named this column “Drama Masks” and open with the above paragraph. I’m relatively able-bodied, but haven’t been able to indulge in my love of acting for the last five years, save for a handful of times. It’s not worth the risk to my or anyone else’s health. My theatre experience is now limited to staying in the crowd. I know I’m not the only one who feels unsafe. That’s why each and every review features me mentioning how many other audience members are masked, how well the air does or doesn’t flow in the venue (via CO² readings on my Aranet4), and if the show/venue still offers COVID-safe programming.
I do all those things because I love theatre and want everyone to experience it. I do it to help other safety-conscious folk know just how serious the risk of watching live theatre can be. I wish that risk wasn’t there, but it is. Alice knew that risk. She spent her final years warning us about it.
After proudly joining her at so many rallies (I still have my beloved t-shirt from our demonstration outside the SF Dept. of Public Health last April), I’m sorry I won’t get to share a theatre audience with Alice. I would’ve loved to hear her thoughts on shows and how well a venue’s accessibility stacked up. I have no idea whether she read any of my reviews, but I’d love to think that one of them exposed her to a show or company that was as safe to experience as it was entertaining to watch.
So, if you wonder why I’ve spent the last five years as “that guy in the Flo Mask,” now you know why. The Alice Wongs in the audience deserve nothing less.
Ercole Amante at ODC
There’s an art to reviving a forgotten work. It’s often done just so someone can say they did it. They don’t bother to consider original context or modern re-evaluation, they just want to brag about being the one entity to do something against the grain. I dare say SF indie opera company Ars Minerva had the right idea in mind—and the talent to realize it—when they took on the literally Herculean task of reviving Antonia Bembo’s lost 1707 work, Ercole Amante (“Hercules in Love”), which ran November 15-16 at ODC Dance.
I’m sorry that I’d never even heard of the Venetian singer-composer until now, as her life is an opera waiting to happen. No wonder she was drawn to compose for a previously existing libretto about Hercules: He’s one of the most operatic characters in Greco-Roman mythology.
The Bembo composition of Francesco Buti’s libretto for Ercole Amante is, as Ars Minerva promoted it, “one of the earliest surviving operas by a woman.” After being performed for no less than Louis XIV, the piece was lost to time before being revived for a German concert performance in 2023. The AM version is the first proper production in over 300 years.
And what surprise does that a three-century-old opera hold for a modern audience? As directed by AM artistic director Céline Ricci, it’s probably how damn funny the show is. Perhaps this is Ricci’s own take on the material or maybe it was always there, but the best way to describe both the show and its title character (baritone Zachary Gordin) would be “Himbo Hercules.”
It’s no mistake that although the uncredited set design maintains a classical aesthetic, it still contains modern barbells, a bearskin rug, and a taxidermied stag head in Herc’s man-cave. This is a dude who opens the show boasting about his oh-so-great manliness (Gordin certainly has the chiseled physique for the role) only to be so insecure about it that he tries to steal the fiancée (Iole, played by soprano Lila Khazoum) of his own son (Hyllo, tenor Maxwell Ary).
Goddess Venus (soprano Melissa Sondhi) is all-too-eager to help Herc steal the young ingenue, via shenanigans that pre-date Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but goddess Juno (soprano Aura Veruni) is eager to see him fail. Somehow, the elements themselves get involved, as does a lowly page (contralto Sara Couden).
The only hiccup in Ars Minerva’s production has little to do with the troupe themselves, so much as the text. It’s incredibly hard to tell who each character is when they’re first introduced. As mentioned, Gordin’s chiseled physique lets one instantly know who’s headlining this opera about Hercules. But every other character walks on without introduction, leaving one lost as to who they are and why they’re so interested in Herc’s meat-headed buffoonery. Add to that the fact that two of the sopranos strongly resemble one another and it’s easy to get lost keeping track of this non-English scenario.
Yet, it’s to the credit of Ricci and her collaborators that we’re still captivated by the action on stage. With the assistance of projections by Entropy, Ricci cranks up the “ridiculous” volume high. Consider the introduction of Iole and Hylla, a three-century-old scene that reads as a clichéd scene of lovers wooing. Ricci leans into the ridiculousness and plays the scene with the right note of parody that doesn’t at all undercut the seriousness of later dramatic scenes, nor does it subvert the talent of all the performers. She understood the assignment and had real fun with it. Probably not as much fun as costumer Marina Polakoff—whose over-the-top threads frequently lit up and had June wearing actual storm clouds—but fun, nonetheless.
The HVAC of the ODC was relatively decent, with CO² levels peaking around 1,826ppm during the two-act show. More importantly, the audience seemed truly enthralled by this revived piece (some a bit too much, as they gauchely took photos mid-show). It’s a shame that this revival production lasted only three performances, because Ars Minerva successfully gathered a talented ensemble to prove that “dumb-jock comedy” is truly timeless.
