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.
Transparency is a good thing. Yes, everyone has secrets. You may not be Terry O’Quinn in The Stepfather, but you probably have some things you’d rather not be made public. Hell, I love Violet Blue’s books because they simplify digital privacy for the layperson. That’s all the more necessary in our DOGE-ified world of daily data breeches.
Yet, plenty of entities would benefit from being more open. I love SF Ballet, but in the last two years alone, they’ve been the subject of an injury lawsuit, target of a major ransomware hack, the “bad guy” in an ugly labor dispute, and were infamously slow to cancel their scheduled performances at the newly Trump-branded Kennedy Center (despite a 7,000-signature petition pleading for cancellation). Each time, the company always chose to play things close-to-the-vest, refusing to let anyone in on where board members’ heads where at and how soon decisions would be made. That kind of thing hurts the people with a lot emotional investment in the organization.
I was at last week’s opener to the company’s new production of Don Quixote (through March 29). Great show, beautiful staging, amazing dancers. During the finale, Francesco Frola had a misstep and wound up limping off-stage. The performance finished without him (Sasha de Sola is nothing short of amazing), but Frola didn’t come out for the bow. In the days since, neither he nor SF Ballet have given an update on his condition, despite many requests by press and by fans. All we’ve seen is that the role has been recast for the remaining performances.
I sincerely wish him a swift recovery, but this is yet another instance of SF Ballet’s counterproductive “them-and-us” thinking that antagonizes its most loyal patrons. Sure, we’re not entitled to the details of anyone’s personal life, but we’d at least like an acknowledgement that our concern has been heard and will be addressed. We don’t need to see everything, just to hear that we’ve been seen.
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||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| world premiere by ACT at The Strand
I’ll say this for Eisa Davis: she has a helluvan ear for the naturalistic. I may not always be won over by her work, but her prose hits the ear as realistically as the kids one may hear on the bus. Most “modern” writers sound like they learned to write dramatic speech by watching ‘80s sitcoms. So, when Davis chose write a story about a quartet of teens, it’s comforting to think they she actually listened to how such a quartet would talk.
Not everything is as memorable about ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| (world premiere through April 19 at the ACT Strand, SF). For one thing, that title is a pain-in-the-ass to type into a document without it trying to auto-format. Secondly, Davis may be holding a bit too tight to her characters’ love of the free-form, as there are plenty of instances where the play goes off on tangents that lead nowhere.
The story follows students of a Bay Area music program: Fax (Hillary Fisher), a classically-trained vocalist; her enby friend Rile (Yeena Sung), a skilled pianist with a short attention span and high drug tolerance; and Margot (Naomi Latta), an introverted, know-it-all drummer. Fax’s rigid training favors structure above all else. Jazz-loving Margot is as blasé about music as she is her own life, hopping BART tracks “to shed a little fear—that’s what music wants from us!”
Their budding friendship creates a rift between Fax and Rile, who actually shares Margot’s encyclopedic knowledge of music. As finals approach for the program, it looks as if the three may come together in (pardon the pun) perfect harmony. As always, life has other plans.
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned horn-player Clementine (the Bay Area’s own Gianna DiGregorio Rivera). Well, that’s because the play treats her as little more than a plot point. It’s as if Davis threw in a fourth character to meet a quota rather than from any story motivation.
As directed by ACT’s outgoing AD Pam McKinnon, the quartet is a believable collective of teen musicians, all of whom do their own playing and singing. To Davis’ credit, the characters’ heightened emotions and misunderstandings are true of any teen since the dawn of humanity. What’s more, it’s a relief that not everything is wrapped up neatly at the end. Yet, much of it feels like throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. The talent does; not so much the melodrama.
The Strand’s HVAC made the theatre was absurdly cold on opening night, obviously a response to the unseasonable warm weather. Nevertheless, even with a full house, CO² levels on my Aranet4 never went any higher than 709ppm. Considering that I saw, maybe, two other masks in the house (three, if you count the industrial N95 Fax wears onstage to protect her voice), those numbers made me worry a little less.
As Pam McKinnon begins to wind down her time at SF’s biggest theatre, her skills as a director remain top-notch. That’s why it’s odd to say that the Pulitzer-winning Davis has yet to fashion a script that doesn’t feel like a homework assignment.
||: GIRLS :||: CHANCE :||: MUSIC :||’s world premiere runs through April 19 at the ACT Strand, SF. Tickets and further info here.
Macbeth at Magic Theatre
Say this for Play On Shakespeare: they swing for the fences. They assemble top Bay Area talent to create some truly off-the-wall productions of the Bard’s work. No problem there. They just seem more interested making noise above all.
Their latest experiment is Macbeth (through April 5 at Magic Theatre, SF), set in pre-Guiliani New York. Why then? Who knows? Our eponymous upstart (Catherine Castellanos) doesn’t seem to be a crook, let alone some would-be don. Yet, the mad ramblings of three lime-green ladies (Kina Kantor, Juan Amador, and Danny Scheie) has her all ready to kill the king. Plus, her wife (Sarah Nina Hayon) seems all-too-eager to help.
Director Liam Vincent has a powerhouse cast and gives them each some great moments. (Nora El Samahy’s Banquo is the stand-out.) Yet, the show never fits the story into the setting organically. It’s more “Let’s speak Shakespeare” than “Shakespeare’s classic fits this context.” It probably could have, but this is little more than a gorgeously grungy aesthetic choice (full applause to designer Carlos-Antonio Aceves) than a modern-day parable.
I wasn’t the only one masked, but I was glad to once again see the Magic’s plug-in air purifiers when CO² levels topped 1,312ppm. Not the worst I’ve seen for a building that old.
I’m genuinely curious to see what show Play On Shakespeare tackles next. I don’t think they’ve quite pulled off how to amplify the stories themselves, but they still make adaptations that have to be seen at least once.
MACBETH runs through April 5 at the Magic Theatre, SF. Tickets and further info here.
