A magical occurrence takes place inside your head when you're caught up in the pages of a good read.  So much information flies by that the images can barely keep up.  That's how adaptation was born: folks caught on real quickly that films & stage plays couldn't include everything and so they went to town chopping up stories into manageable bits. Then we raved on about how the "book was better than the (fill in the blank)". Talk about coming around full circle.  

If you like your stuff straight, look no further.  In its tenth season, San Francisco's Word for Word remounts its production of Upton Sinclair's OIL! Chapter One: "The Ride", running November 6 through December 7 at Fort Mason.  For the uninitiated, WFW started out with the premise that actors could make that magic inside your head happen onstage with spare staging & minimal sets and they are darned good at it.  You might quibble with the choices they make—after all nobody can actually see what's in your mind—but you can't fault them for their material unless you flat out don't care for the book, in which case you need to make better choices for your nights out on the town.

In my own flurry of stage work these past three months, I've had few nights off to attend shows.  My choices of what to see were dictated by more than a stab in the dark (being networked by email does grab one's flagging attention).  Interestingly enough, the three shows I did see had nothing at all in common, ranged from the North Bay, out to the suburbs in the East  and then to San Francisco.

Masquers Playhouse in Pt. Richmond, has established Envision, an alternative program which gives a brief nod to the risky & edgy.  Sondheim's Assassins was their pick for a two weekend run and my pick  'cause I like Mr. S.  Not enough performances to polish a production, but these folks were never really going for the glitz anyway.  It's a chance to workshop something nobody ever does, so the tiny stage, the cheesy look, the accompaniment emanating from off stage left somewhere and the earnest attempt at navigating a difficult score—all can be taken for just that: a game shot (sorry) at this distasteful subject.  I was unfamiliar with the work which gives me a fresh perspective.  It was extremely gratifying to hear the cast's uniformly clear presentation of the text.  Not a word missed, which with Sondheim is a requirement.  But I'd also have to confess that it seems to be a bit of a muddle as a completed work.  The images that remain are of pain and derangement which is fair enough and the "Something Just Broke" ensemble was rough & heartbreaking.  But trying to shoehorn Lee Harvey Oswald into a coven of evil doers was...bizarre.  From my point view as somebody who can say where I was when JFK was shot, I ain't buyin' the conceit and furthermore, it irritated me, but that could be what it was supposed to do.  Even so, at the arrival of the 'piece de resistance' it was clearly meant to be, all I felt was the 'resistance'.

At Onstage Theatre,  my partner & I had the good luck to find somebody at the box office to comp us in at the last minute to their production of Office Hours, a clever little thing by the apparently well-loved Canadian playwright Norm Foster.   I'm following my own dictum not to overload myself with other people's ditherings and I've only just now gone to his website,  so I'll just come right out with a thumbs up, before somebody tells me I shouldn't.   The theater space is cramped and the budget obviously limited, but once again, if you can look past that to the energy and fun, there's an overall confidence from the beginning that carries through all evening.  I especially enjoyed Ben Ortega's many faces (though he was missed in the second act.)  There's an assurance in his presence that translates instantly into laughter without any seeming effort.

Coming out of an Indian restaurant, we were startled to see a familiar face on a flyer:  by gosh, I said, isn't that Sharon Lockwood?  And by gosh it was, at Brava Theater Center in SF's Mission District, starring in a revival of Joan Holden's adaptation of  Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed.  The book chronicled her experiences cross-country trying to make it on her own as a wage earner.  I have to go see that, I said; hadn't seen Ms. Lockwood since the Berkeley Rep Lysistrata Project, I think.  Maybe she was in that, can't remember whether I just saw so many local women that she could have been up there.  I know she was in the Oresteia last year.  Anyway, always a pleasure to be up on her latest venture.  But what was this adaptation?  Long time Bay Area fixture Ms. Holden pitching in at a theater for, by, with, about and into Women!  I can be a pretty rabid feminist when called upon, so a piece about women subtitled On (Not) Getting By In America gets me hot.  And well I would be if only one thing could happen:  could we please clone Julia Brothers?  This was not an evening of convulsive hysteria by any means. It's a serious subject and funny as Sharon is, and she is allowed to be funny a couple of times, she is not up there to be funny because women skating on the edge of disaster is not funny.  But Julia Brothers is astounding.  She's everywhere, doing everything.  The show belongs to Sharon, but Julia has an eerie ability to morph, while Sharon has to be the spokesperson and it becomes Julia's showcase.  Sorry, Sharon, I came to see you, and left with Julia.

In the cozy theater community hereabouts, if you work at all, you're bound to run into colleagues, which is a good thing and a bad thing.  Sometimes I have history with the venue, sometimes with the folks in the production or on the crew.  I've had my conflicts in trying to remain objective in writing about shows.   My policy as a reviewer is to remain out of the fray.  If I've got something good to say, by god I'll say it, but if I've got negatives—forget it.  With the exception of something concerning the piece itself, I've got no percentage and no desire to ruin somebody's afternoon with invective.  They'll call me an idiot and feel insulted anyway, so what's the point?  I figure if I point out what I did like, the conclusion can be drawn at will about the rest.  And I have upon occasion run across productions that I felt were awful & that were hard to sit through; if I can barely face coming back after intermission, I'll just put a 'not recommended'.  

I came about this strategy as a direct result of two things in my checkered past.  One was when I was 15 and had just opened as the Nurse in Robinson Jeffers' Medea—obviously, I was in high school & no one expected me actually to be old enough to play the role, but I loved the feeling of the words in my mouth—and the show was reviewed in the local paper.  Because our particular high school had an extremely strong Drama department with a reputation for excellence, they were not surprised, but I was.  The reviewer had apparently fallen for me & used terms that still make me blush (of course I saved it!)  The tricky bit was when I got to the theater that night and my teacher/director looked me right in the eye and asked me if I had read the review.  I took the innocent route and said 'no'.  I think he was relieved, I'm still not sure, but I feel like it was a test.  If I admitted that I had read it, he would warn me not to let it go to my head.  If I said I hadn't read it, I was off the hook. But I had read it and it did go to my head.  Not in the 'get me' way, but far worse, in the self-consciousness of my subsequent performances.  I tried, but was unable just to focus on what the text was saying; it had become part of what I was doing on stage.  But I kept reading reviews.

Gotta fast forward quite a while to the second incident which is now almost a dozen years ago; I know that because it is that long since my brother-in-law was killed in the spring while flying a routine courier route through some mountains.  He was the youngest of six children; the oldest had been my husband, dead in an automobile accident on a routine business trip to Scotland back in 1980. My mother-in-law had lost her first born and now her 'baby': both young men in their thirties, both leaving young sons and widows.  This latest accident was on a Monday.  They found him on Thursday and I was on a plane to go to my sister-in-law's side on Friday night.  My return plane ticket was for Sunday night.

Everybody has to confront mortality, most not so rudely, but sooner or later it's going to come up. People don't ordinarily take piano-vocal scores with them to funerals, though.  I was in rehearsal as the lead in the U.S. premiere of a one act opera.  When I got back from the funeral,  we ran a full tech Monday night, full dress Tuesday, preview Wednesday & opened Thursday.  On Friday, we scanned the major local paper & found that had we been bowling pins, none would have been left standing.  The reviewer had obviously consulted a dictionary in search of more adjectives with which to revile the entire cast, but for me he saved the really special ones.  I even got my own paragraph.  There was nothing to be done except carry on, but it was tough facing everybody at the theater.  I remember that when I came in the door at the cast party after we closed, our conductor rapped his knuckles on the coffee table in appreciation of  my efforts.  We'd spent months together and it felt good to be welcomed to a celebration of our work. 

Although that small opera company didn't survive, there has been enough work to keep me well-oiled over the ensuing decade and with no reliance on either the bottle or any other recreational balm for a wounded spirit. But personally, I don't read reviews until after the run, or in the case of something I want to go see, until after I've seen it when I can compare it with my opinion.  If somebody backstage insists on posting something, I just walk on past.  If I can't avoid comments, at least I can avoid imprinting something I've read on the inside of my eyelids where it vies for attention with the pleasant images I cultivate for calmness.  And I have to say in all sincerity,  that that guy was an idiot.  No, to be more precise, a cretin.  (Of course I mean the second guy, but you knew that.)

Films of Note

Intolerable Cruelty

The Cohn brothers are using George Clooney up like a box of Kleenex. I hope GC can survive.  Since I can still watch any number of the brothers' movies all the way through and enjoy myself thoroughly, I'm not worried, but don't count this movie amongst those gems.

Runaway Jury

I'm presently appearing in a play set in Atlanta Georgia, so I'm definitely up on my Southern accents and Dustin Hoffman, given his background, does such a finely nuanced & gently fluffy dialect that it is truly a pleasure to hear him talk, even if it is in a standard courtroom drama.  Nice to see Hackman do something a shade darker, too.

Bubba Ho-Tep

No idea who this Bruce Campbell fella was, so the joke was on me to find myself in the middle of an absolutely berserk, largely drunken and joyously forgiving  audience watching yet another tale of the King come back.  Ossie Davis is getting like fine wine, too.  He's so smoooooth.

Casa de los Babys

Heard that John Sayles took a skeleton crew on into the locations in this film & conscripted locals & shot on the fly.  It has that quality and only suffers from the didactic form the script takes (read: Message)  Rita Moreno is a hoot.

School of Rock

I strictly went to this strictly to confirm my impression from Jack Black's radio interview on PBS that he belongs to a subset of young men lost in search of Humor.  I wish him well in his quest.  I don't know that I wish to accompany him any further in it.

Luther

How totally weird that I work part-time for a small company who just this month hired a new guy and his name is...Luther!  How weird is that?  I found out after the movie that the only reason my atheist partner wanted to see this is because he thought it might be based on the play by the name of 'Luther' in which the man's chronic constipation is dealt with at length.  O, that that had been the case!

©2003 Claudine Jones

For more commentary and articles by Claudine Jones, check the Archives.

Like an orthopedic soprano, Actor/Singer/Dancer Claudine Jones has
worked steadily in Bay Area joints for a number of decades.  With her
co-conspirator Jaz Bonhooley, she also has developed unique sound designs
for local venues.  As a filmmaker, she is doing the final cut of YOUR EAR IS
IN YOUR NOSE, destined for release next year or whenever her long time
technical task wizard Animator Sam Worf gets his head out of his latest
render.

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