(no subject) Review Review
THREE SECONDS IN THE KEY
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The San Francisco Playhouse has moved: it used to be located at 530 Sutter Street, now it is just across the street at 533 Sutter. Do not attempt to jay walk across Sutter from the old location to the new: if the docile San Francisco police have a choice between issuing a theatre dweeb a $50 citation for jay walking or busting some burly street denizen, jacked up on PCP or Crack, for sidewalk micturition and intimidating tourists, who is going to get selected?
Now that we have found the new San Francisco Playhouse, what is its current offering? THREE SECONDS IN THE KEY written by Deb Margolin and directed Leigh Fondakowski. The title hearkens to a rule in basketball: a player, offensive or defensive, can not stand in that region of the court between the foul line and the basket for more than three seconds. In a metaphorical sense, THREE SECONDS IN THE KEY, like the title FLASH DANCE, describes our lives on the great cosmic scale.
It has been 2500 years since Sophocles roamed the streets and graced the stages of Athens; with the right genes and enough sex, we might live to be 100. Our life span is less that 4% of the time it took civilization to descend from the cultural Olympus of OEDIPUS REX and the Ecstasy Cults of Dionysus to miasmic bogs of reality television and the Tabloid Cults of Brittney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. If we compare the average human lifespan to the age of the universe, then the time we spend as the sense organs of that universe is just the flutter of Glassy-Winged Sharp Shooter’s aileron.
When presented with rock solid evidence of just how trivial and ephemeral our lives are, and what an inconvenience we are to the environment, we have a couple general routes we can travel after we have viscerally connect with magnitude our insignificance. THREE SECONDS IN THE KEY explores one of those pathways.
Amy Resnick plays Mother: a single Jewish mother of a nine-year-old boy and New York Knickerbocker fan. She is incapacitated by the chemo-therapy used to treat her Hodgkin’s Disease. Life has been reduced down to nausea, snoozing in and out of reality, and watching Knicks basketball with her son.
While Mother is hovering between life and death, the Knicks are having a bad season: mostly due to one Player. This Player, played by Paul Oakley Stovall, is rumored to be targeted for trade. In the phantasmagorical netherworld of chemo-therapy, Mother begins having liaisons with an apparition of the failing Player. Using the wisdom, strategies and jargon of the basketball court, the Player sets Mother’s feet squarely on the heroic path to life.
The performance this reviewer witnessed received a standing ovation and rightfully so: it was flawless. Yet the script prompted questions. It lacked symmetry. The Player needed help too and yet there was no evidence that Mother was delivering. Mother asked the Player questions for which the Player provided no answers. Strange that a play would be structured in such a way that an African American NBA Player would be placed in service to a Jewish woman, without a balanced exchange. Oh well, a small sticking point in an otherwise great play.
The run of THREE SECONDS IN THE KEY is ending soon. You should look for it to reopen somewhere in the bay area. It is well worth the money and the time. For tickets to the few remaining shows, you are invited to contact the ticket office at 415 677-9596 and to check out the SF Playhouse website at www.sfplayhouse.org.
U.S. Naval Aviator and Lieutenant Commander Retired
Math Teacher at Encinal High School A.U.S.D.
San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Sidewalk Politician and Arm Chair Liberal
NATHAN THE WISE
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Theatre FIRST of Ninth Street in Oakland is currently presenting Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s reconciliation piece: NATHAN THE WISE. Set in Jerusalem at the end of the twelfth century, the characters of the play serve as worthy representatives of the three major faiths of that tiny star crossed region.
A brief plot synopsis would run as follows: Saladin: the Moslem Turk, is ensconced in Jerusalem, presiding over the Holy Land and busy repelling Christian crusaders. One day he spares a captured Knight Templar from execution. The Knight reminds Saladin of his own brother whom he has not seen for over twenty years. The pardoned Knight Templar subsequently rescues Rachel: a fair, presumably Jewish, maiden from a fire in the home of her Jewish father: Nathan and her Christian mother: Daya. Nathan and Saladin are friends. In the tradition of MERCHANT OF VENICE, Saladin wants to borrow money from the Jew, in this case Nathan. In the tradition of all love stories, the Templar and Rachel fall in love following the rescue. And in the tradition of OEDIPUS REX and COMEDY OF ERRORS, Saladin, the Templar, Rachel and Nathan discover how invisibly intertwined their lives have been for decades. While the principals of the play discover, explore and enjoy their commonality, Crusaders and Turks, remaining steadfastly and resolutely focused on trivial differences, sustain the religious hecatomb outside the palace of Saladin.
While the play might seem like a modern metaphor for Arabs and Jews, Americans and the Taliban, or Americans and Iraqi Insurgents, or Bloods and Crips, it actually dates back to 1779 when it was first published in German as NATHAN DER WEISE. The hopes for world peace expressed in the play are reminiscent of John Lennon’s lyrics for IMAGINE. The interminable religious and cultural bloodshed however are reminiscent of an Arab expression: “I fight against my brother; my brother and I fight against my cousin; and my brother, my cousin and I fight against the stranger.”
According the Richard Dawkins, author of THE SELFISH GENE, a genetically determined predisposition to bloodletting tribalism has been sewn into our DNA. Evolutionary success and numerical superiority at the tribal level are favored by the adaptive strategies of virulent ethnocentricity and rabid xenophobia: by killing off the strangers, you drive his DNA to extinction while your own DNA flourishes. By contrast, exogamy too is an adaptive strategy: it too is wired into our DNA. Exogamy makes us see the foreign and exotic as erotic. When we kill off the male strangers we are then free to enjoy the spoils of war: to exercise the privileges and perquisites of victory with the exotic women: i.e. duplicate our DNA.
Even if the Crusades are thundering on as the curtain descends on NATHAN THE WISE, the play expresses some hope. Perhaps with the internet, the would be combatants of the world might have the opportunity to get to know each other before decapitating each other with bread knives. The pacifying potency of the internet is obviously recognized by leaders who would like to sustain the murder rate. Given a mix of poverty and censorship, familiarity and friendship with the manufactured enemy is denied. Communication with the enemy is tantamount to treason, spying and religious apostasy. Propagandists manipulate the atavistic tribal instincts that incline a people toward hostility and genocide. In an information age, eventually propaganda may ultimately fail to motive tribal instincts toward religious homicide. NATHAN THE WISE was banned by right-wing Extremists in 1922. Later its was banned by the Nazis. It contains truth. See it while Homeland Security will let you.
For tickets to a thoroughly thought provoking play, call the box office at 510 436-5085 or contact Theatre FIRST via www.theatrefirst.com.
Sidewalk Politician and Arm Chair Liberal
CAMELOT
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Romanticism, as defined by the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is “the rehabilitation of everything medieval that had been held in contempt by the Renaissance and Enlightenment.” Furthermore, “romanticism has worked the growth of modern democracy toward a belief in progress and toward ‘liberty, equality and fraternity.’” Romanticism, given that its rise coincided with the industrial revolution, was “a solace and an escape” from the “unlovely works that science, technology and industry were building.”
CAMELOT first opened at the Majestic Theater in December of 1960. Lerner and Loewe, who co-wrote CAMELOT also created BRIGADOON and A ROYAL WEDDING. All three opuses are escapes from the modern world and retreats into a contrived, chimerical romantic world of royalty, chivalry and nobility. However, given the wake-up calls provided by the irreverent tabloid press, the public’s willingness to suspend its sense of disbelief regarding the actual nobility of the nobility has become extremely curtailed.
Thanks to high-resolution photographs and graphically detailed accounts of aristocratic malfeasance and general hanky panky, the “unlovely works” that royalty wreaks on itself are all too apparent. We are no longer naïve enough to enjoy the original script of CAMELOT. The moral bankruptcy of the effete European royalty, blue bloods, sangreale and sangre azul is too well known and clashes too stridently with the saccharine optimism the musical originally expressed. Thanks to Prince Charles, Camilla and people of their ilk, the script of CAMELOT had to be retooled by the children Alan Jay Lerner: Michael and Liza Lerner. Thanks to their revisions, the musical does not chafe on audiences who no longer support the divine right of kings nor their petty self-centered indulgences.
“Wouldn’t it be exciting to have a war fought over you?” Guenevere muses in the first act. In the second act, King Arthur and his army are laying siege to Sir Lancelot’s ancestral home: Joyous Gard: they are attempting to retrieve their unfaithful queen. Currently our country is engaged in a war fomented and grounded on nearly the same whimsical caprices that Guenevere expresses and for which King Arthur obliges her. Why should the “simple folk” as Guenevere calls them, be called upon to sacrifice themselves for the honor of a Queen who has plainly lost her honor. Perhaps in future, more politically correct revisions, Arthur and Lancelot will simply play a game of chess and let the winner take all.
Politics aside, great voices, great acting and great songs rescue CAMELOT from the brink of obsolescence. Michael York stars as Arthur and is absolutely regal in his bearing, his manner and his very British articulation. James Barbour, as Lancelot, is the voice of the show: his rendering of “If Ever I Should Leave You” is second only to the definitive by Robert Goulet. For tickets call the American Musical Theatre of San Jose at 1-888-455-SHOW.
U.S. Naval Aviator and Lieutenant Commander Retired
Math Teacher at Encinal High School A.U.S.D.
San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Sidewalk Politician and Arm Chair Liberal