Lonesome Quill

We saw a premiere of the new Lisa Kron play at the Berkeley Rep last night. And . . . I give it a hmm.

They’re still working on it, and here’s what I hope they do:

1) Edit down a half hour

2) Delete all soliloquies (pretentious)

3) Dial down the mania in the opening scene

4) Take the political/personal parallels to a subtler place

I think it could be a great play. Right now it feels like a good play, flawed and periodically irritating, small-scale predictable, larger-scale surprising. The second act far outshines the first, and it shouldn’t take that long for things to deepen.

But Kron is [THEMATIC SPOILER ALERT] doing something that I don’t think you see too often in mainstream theater, which is skewering white, middle-class liberals. And she doesn’t fully let you know she’s doing it until the end, which is fantastic. Until then it’s not clear where her sympathies lie.

In fact I’d have preferred slightly more ambiguity in the ending, but mostly it’s quite satisfying (and humbling) to watch the humbling of someone we didn’t fully grasp was due for a humbling.

Humble humble humble.

Worth seeing. Lots to chew on. LONG.

On Friday night we saw American Idiot, the Green Day musical, at the Berkeley Rep. John liked it better than I did. I think if you love Green Day, you love the musical; if you don’t, probably not.

I had two arguments: 1) no irony and 2) wrong venue. It needed a rock arena. John agreed that the audience should have been standing, with room to dance. It’s a weird thing to experience 1.5 hours of ceaseless pounding, thrashing, punk-pop energy while sitting primly in your seat, surrounded by aging Berkeley hippies.

At any rate, as we pondered the genre question (Should American Idiot have remained simply an album, or does it work as a musical?), I started to think of ideas for musicals. The first thing that came to me: Cupcakes: the Musical.

The plot: A band of ragtag cupcakes, each with a unique personality evinced in its frosting, band together against a giant, fascist  cake, who is spearheading a movement to force all cupcakes to mesh into a single cake.

The theme: Obviously, individuality vs. conformity, which is basically the theme of every Broadway musical ever performed.

The climax: A dark-hearted automaton baker (whose brain has been colonized by the fascist cake) attempts to trick the cupcakes into submitting to a psuedo-cake situation by lining them all up on a tray and beginning to frost over all of them at once.

The subplot: A self-righteous muffin tries to convince the cupcakes to change their nutritionless ways, to no avail.

The finale: The cupcakes, victorious, swarm the stage in a joyous song-and-dance number, embracing the muffin (who has seen the error of his ways), slicing the cake (whose pieces take on unique personalities), and inviting everyone in the audience to embrace their personal quirks (or hopes and dreams, whatever).

The only problem is that I really love cake, and I’m not a huge fan of cupcakes (problematic frosting-to-cake ratio, plus inconvenient shape for consumption), so I’d be writing against my gut. Ha.

Meanwhile, I thought of an idea for an SNL skit: The Impatient Chef. Basically, it’s a cooking show were the chef begins to lay out a very complicated series of steps to create a fantastic dish, only to get impatient and dump a jar of tomato sauce over raw pasta. “Same thing,” she says. “You’ll never know the difference.”

Last night we saw the new Berkeley Rep play, a series of five shorts by Tony Kushner. Three of them—including one that reproduced a real-life incidence of tax fraud in New York City, to no apparent point—were amusing enough, but not particularly inspired. The first and last, however, were vintage Kushner: riveting, wildly imaginative, politically searing, and funny.

Most memorable was the final one-act, which was very high concept, such that I could almost see the thought bubble popping up over Kushner’s head: Laura Bush arrives to read to three Iraqi children. The twist: they’re dead. Killed by American bombs, and not even during either war: between the wars (i.e., all the more galling). What does she read to them? “The Grand Inquisitor,” from The Brothers Karamozov. What is her position on their deaths—and on her husband’s policies? That is the point of the play. Kushner makes her sympathetic, if not blameless, and I left the theater with a lot of feeling for her. (Fantastic fantastic acting, too, by Kate Eifrig.)

My only wish for the script, and this is admittedly a ridiculous wish for a Kushner play, was that it be a little less partisan. In other words, I didn’t want Kushner’s position to be so obvious, and I didn’t want Laura Bush to be quite so simple.

Example: While I can believe that, against her public persona, Laura Bush might feel that she personally will have to pay for the deaths of Iraqi children, I find it much harder to believe that she would be repulsed by her husband. It should be both: She should both love and support her husband and also find the deaths of Iraqi children impossible to bear. That is the world I can imagine her living in, and that is a fascinating and very human place to be.

Instead, Kushner gives us a woman who secretly despises her husband—the ears, the smug self-satisfaction, the learning disabilities—in precisely the ways that liberals do. And that’s more wish fulfillment than provocative theater.

We saw Macbeth. And, while I’m not normally a fan of bloody, Gothic, horror-infused political thrillers, I loved it.

1) The set: a deconstructed, industrial-chic staircase spiraling from front stage left to the tippy-top of the stage at back right—a crazy elevation gain, with actors basically having to launch themselves up the final few yards. And skirting the front rim of the proscenium was a sculpted sea of dead bodies, lodged in a bog, protruding at various angles. It looked like bronze, but it must have been plaster, with an excellent paint job.

2) Lady Macbeth’s wardrobe: scarlet. Everything she wore was gorgeous and reflective, sequined or sheeny, with the level of formality increasing as the play went on. She began in a floor-length sheath, hair in a partial up-do, and graduated, in the banquet scene, to an Oscar gown with a train, hair in a sculpted bridal swoop. (Her wigs were blonde, perhaps to challenge expectations. It worked: I had to overcome my resistance.) On a dark stage, with almost everyone else in black, the effect was stunning. And of course, in the nightgown scene, Lady M was in white cotton, scraggly hair in a nest. She unraveled beautifully. It was, in fact, one of the best bits of theatrical unraveling I have seen.

Still. I had questions about the play.

1) Why are there witches? True, Shakespeare is fairy-positive. You see woodland sprites in his plays. But there aren’t witches elsewhere in his work, except for Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, who never appears on stage.

You might argue that the witches are there to plant the seed of Macbeth’s ambition. But he seizes upon the idea of killing Duncan way too quickly for any kind of psychological sense, unless he’s already been thinking about it—which is what the director posited in the program. He views the witches as a manifestation of what’s already happening within Macbeth. So . . . again, why do we need them? Shakespeare’s very good at getting psychology across without resorting to the paranormal.

2) What’s the point of the comic scene with the porter? Macbeth has just killed the king. Macduff is pounding at the door. The stage is practically shaking with horror. And Shakespeare takes five minutes for punning about drunken impotency? Tonally, it’s all wrong.

John and I spent some time mulling these questions. (He was in favor of the porter.) And then, the following night, we saw a fantastic world premiere which answered both of them.

It’s called Equivocation (Bill Cain), and it takes Shakespeare and the King’s Men as its protagonists. King James, newly on the throne, commissions a play that is basically propaganda, and Shakespeare has to wrestle with how to stay artistically honest in a repressive regime. What does he write? Macbeth! Cain comes up with hilarious, touching, and utterly believable reasons for both the witches and the porter. Apparently, he has the same questions I do about the play—and that was my favorite thing of all.