MANKIND'S LAST HOPE is hope for Alameda Theater Review of MORNINGS AT SEVEN ATTRITION, AT THE EXIT THEATRE REVIEWED A REVIEW OF FOUR SHOWS BY PETER LEVY
MANKIND'S LAST HOPE
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
You take a staid town like Alameda—it is graced by stately Victorians and dominated by the invisible hand of oligarchs.
Alameda has a deep seated resistance to change that manifests itself in a variety of ways: the speed in which abandoned military property gets reused; the dispatch at which decisions regarding movie theaters are arrived at; and even the response time for coping with demographic changes within the local school district.
In Alameda one would expect to find a little theater—under-100 seats—where reheats of old classics are the usual fare.
And, you would expect to find a respectable civic light opera, which one truly does in Alameda.
But now, Alameda has a fragment of the fringe counter-culture housed at the Virago Theatre on Blanding Boulevard (could THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW be next?).
The current opus on stage at Virago is MANKIND'S LAST HOPE.
It's a grim depiction of what could happen if a horde of highly evolved insects—resembling cockroaches—were to invade and conquer earth and its inhabitants.
Naturally, due to mankind's demonstrated proclivity to casually reach for aerosol insecticides, to deploy deceptively inviting roach motels and to grind roaches under heel, the roach-like invaders have no choice but to enslave all humans as a precautionary act of self defense.
The roach-like invaders recognize that humans have special skills: humans like to whittle, they craft excellent greeting cards and posters, and they are good at manufacturing stretchy things like rubber bands and supportive under garments.
So the roaches draft the humans into forced labor: manufacturing greeting cards, toothpicks and rubber bands.
The invaders, as a myriad of science fiction movies and novels have already suggested, have a penchant for human flesh.
These invaders prefer to devour happy people as opposed to sultry and melancholy ones.
Despite the description thus far, MANKIND'S LAST HOPE is a comedy, and a good one at that: it is a major leap from the mainstream sit-coms that pose as prime time comedy.
Kenneth Sears is one of the conspicuous acting talents in this show.
MR Sears plays Hank, one of the forced crafters of greeting cards and posters.
MR Sears builds his character on body language, inflection, timing and expression: he makes excellent use of nuance and adds more to his character than perhaps even the writers envisioned: any director should fight to get Sears into his or her cast.
MS Chloe Bronzan plays Alex: one of the underground rebels trying to decontaminate earth from the man-size roaches.
Given that MS Bronzan first enters the stage costumed only in a few cargo straps she captures the audiences attention early on but to her acting credit she maintains stage presence even after cargo straps or web belts are swapped for less revealing army fatigues.
Writers Dan Brodnitz and Jeff Green have squeezed a ton of gags into this show.
Characteristic of experimental theater, some gags work while other fizzle.
Hopefully the show remains a work in progress and the directing and writing team can weed out what doesn't work and replace it with funnier material.
While it is true that creativity is largely synthesis, unless one is writing a parody or a satire, it is best not to be able to recognize from whence the elements of synthesis derive.
Unfortunately, much of the story line and many of the gags seem to be traceable to their origins.
The alien invasion and subsequent exploitation of Earth and its humans hearkens back to L. Ron Hubbard's BATTLESHIP EARTH and echoes in such sci-fi epics as INDEPENDENCE DAY and WAR OF THE WORLDS.
BATTLESHIP EARTH is set in 3000 A.D. while MANKIND'S LAST HOPE is set in 2055 A.D.: virtually the same time period.
Actually, as a movie BATTLESHIP EARTH is not as bad the critics universally panned it to be: had it been a little worse it could have easily become a camp classic.
Some the minor gags in MANKIND'S LAST HOPE are easily connected to Mel Brooks' SPACEBALLS.
While Brooks created a Mog: part man; part dog, Brodnitz and Green create a man with a cat's tail instead of a dog's.
Brooks has his villain Dark Helmut surreptitiously playing and talking with action figures; while Brodnitz and Green have their villain, Bongar, furtively playing and talking with action figures.
Despite its gags and plots being pulled out of the film archives, MANKIND'S LAST HOPE is an enjoyable evening: the cast is clearly enjoying itself and such fun on stage is highly contagious to an audience.
For a break from tradition stage fare and a good time in Alameda get thee to MANKIND'S LAST HOPE.
For tickets to this funny, gonzo show call the box office at 510-865-6237 or visit the Virago web site at www.ViragoTheatre.org.
Sidewalk Politician and Arm Chair Liberal
MORNING'S AT SEVEN
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Altarena Playhouse of Alameda is currently staging the Paul Osborn comedy: MORNING'S AT SEVEN.
While Tolstoy claimed that the lives of ordinary people were as interesting, or possibly more interesting, than the lives of aristocrats, nobility and royalty, he never wrote a story centered on a domestic, a serf, a peasant or anyone who owned less than 1000 hectares of Russian soil.
Somehow Tolstoy fought the temptation to make more interesting lives the centerpieces of his novels and continued to detail the well-appointed ennui of the landed gentry, leisure class and those who spoke French as a second language.
American playwright Paul Osborn, however, unapologetically explores the lives of the ordinary people that Thomas Gray may have reflected on in that country churchyard.
While Chekhov explored the rural lives of THREE SISTERS, Osborn takes the subject one step further and explores the lives of four sisters; all who have the genuine luxury of never having moved apart from one other.
If Emerson is right, and traveling truly is a fool's paradise, then a family Diaspora is just another version of that fool's paradise.
Family squabbles, unless they involve chipped teeth, broken china, fire arms or 911 calls, are blessings in disguise; they are merely the shadow or flip side of living and interacting with our own loving and contentious kin.
Such living is something mankind did for the first two million years of its evolutionary or intelligent design or creationist history.
It was not until the economy of the post WWII era convinced us opportunists that it was best to contact relatives via long distance phone calls or Hallmark greeting cards on Thanksgiving Day, rather than to have them at our table gnawing on our turkey, lathering gravy onto our linen tablecloth and guzzling our cooking sherry.
Osborn's four sisters bristle under the personality synopses their father anointed them with: "Esty's smartest, Arry's wildest, Ida's slowest, Cora's mildest."
While only Ida had cause to demand family therapy, all the sisters resisted their characterizations, but like Euripides' Oedipus the more they resisted their identities, the closer they were driven to them.
Structurally, it is amazing how Osborn matches the later template or formula of Tennessee Williams.
As in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, the entire first act depicts how static and arrested life has become for the four sisters and the people with whom they are intertwined.
Their lives have become Procrustean fits.
Rather than whirling in harmony, the sisters are like intermeshed gears that have seized; the audience experiences a palpable tension and yearns for release in the second act.
Against their best interests, the family capitulates to habit; panders to their security interests and honors their fear of change: the entire cast of characters collectively and covertly works to hold the others in check.
Only the cashiered Professor—David, husband of sister Esty—recognizes the total state of stagnation and psychological arrest the four sisters and their families have slumped into.
While David is too obnoxious, pompous and arrogant to be taken seriously by the sisters, his heavy-handed tyranny does serve as a catalyst for revolt and the necessary stimulus for change.
As the cliché goes, things have to get worse before they can get better and David is just the man for the job: he drives his wife Esty out of their home and lures Carl away from his home with Ida.
In the end, everyone musters the courage to shift gears, albeit in unison, and the family happily survives the minor cataclysms of change.
MORNING'S AT SEVEN is a snuggly written play.
It depicts the warm, cozy, secure, feelings engendered by the closeness of big family life while honestly exploring the tensions and discomfitures inherent to a tightly knit family ensconced within a small community.
Our contemporary society is fed a mixture of sound bites, action thrillers, Red Bull and bumper-to-bumper freeway commutes; as a result, the pacing of MORNING'S AT SEVEN seems frustratingly slow.
Although the tempo is probably characteristic of the time and setting of the play, director Sue Trigg could have squeezed some of the air or dead time out of the show.
Brisker pacing could make the show more stimulating for those of us accustomed to stroboscopic action and such rapid fire fare as BOURNE IDENTITY part XI, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE PART XV and OCEANS 27.
For tickets to this thoroughly enjoyable nostalgia piece of theater Americana, call the Altarena Box Office at 510-523-1553 or visit their web site at www.altarena.org.
ATTRITION
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Exit on Taylor, never reluctant to stage daring experimental theater, is currently hosting the Ambit Theatre Company which is presenting ATTRITION; written and directed Marilee Talkington.
Rarely does one experience the intensity of such a tightly integrated play: it braids sight and sound and script into a steel cable that tugs the audience through a gauntlet of emotions.
The fractured pieces of the set (by Andrew Lu) hold the characters of the play in the isolation tanks that their broken spirits have culled, condemned and exiled them.
The lighting (also by Andrew Lu) is a metaphor for the agonizing stygian depths of the psychological chasms in to which the characters have tumbled and lie marooned.
The script, both tragic and poetic, dovetails the characters by having one character step into the syncopation of another character's monologue to finish his or her thought.
The play consists of four characters: a poet who has lost most of her memory and all of her words, a young women who was sexually abused by her grandfather for nearly ten years, a young man who takes up arms against an abusive step-father only to ratchet up his abuse while serving life in prison, and a female business executive who tries to out run the furies of her self-imposed limitations only to find herself assaulted by paralyzing anxiety attacks.
Miss Talkington's script has a structure akin to Greek tragedy: the same strengths that vaulted and elevated the protagonists in early life serve as scaffolds and gibbets in their later lives: the poetess is surrounded by her poems all of which collectively chant to remind her that she has Alzheimer's disease and can barely assemble or hold a thought much less craft a poem; the young man that mustered the courage to end a senseless cycle of abuse for both his mother and himself finds himself tormented in prison for taking up arms against a sea of injustices, and the female executive accidentally invites in crippling self-doubt when uses sky-diving as a tool to taunt fear and to exhilarate herself with intimate danger.
The collective effect of set design, sound and script, which is sustained by masterful acting, is not only riveting but it allows the essence of the play to penetrate deeper into the consciousness of the audience.
ATTRITION brings one face to face with personal demons: fears of how the abrasive sands of time will eventually erode our corporeal and mental beings; the baggage, scars and un-lanced carbuncles we tote from our early life experiences, and the tenuous nature of strength and courage that can capriciously abandon us without warning.
ATTRITION makes one aware of the major league demons that torment so many people of the world and ATTRITION makes one appreciate with good humor the minor league pesky imps that needle us with mere trifles in our relatively secure lives.
If you would have liked to have trucked with Dante, Virgil and Menninger, then this show is definitely your portal to the psychological netherworld. It is equal parts entertainment, edification and epiphany. To get tickets, call the box office at 415-440-4913 or visit the Ambit Theatre web site at ambittheatre@yahoo.com.
Sidewalk Politician and Arm Chair Liberal
FOUR PLAYS BY PETER LEVY
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Masquers Playhouse of Point Richmond recently presented the Bay Area with four plays that could easily be called "The Best of Peter Levy" or "Peter Levy's Greatest Hits" or "A Levy Festival." If only Mr. Levy spoke Yiddish he could arguably be the Bay Area's incarnation of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Levy is clearly in a league of his own; although, given his wit and his irony, one catches occasional whiffs and reflections of Chekhov, Wilde, Neil Simon, Thurber, Woody Allen and perhaps Shaw.
First in the Masquers' line-up was THE TITANIC REVISTED. In writing this one act, Mr. Levy surely speculated that if the doomed vessel had set sail from England, then certainly the majority of the passengers were British; furthermore, with that many stodgy Brits onboard, surely one couple would have wiled away their remaining hours playing gin rummy and keeping a stiff upper lip. Levy invents that couple and then draws on a reliable ethnic stereotype to depict the details leading to their final shuffle of the deck and last sip of cocktails. If only the aplomb depicted by Levy's two representatives of the British ruling class had buoyancy, the Titanic could have limped into New York harbor. While a comedy focused on the sinking of the Titanic seems a bit of a stretch, to his credit, Mr. Levy makes it work.
The second feature of the evening was MOURNERS, a tale of three men, all of whom have discretely shared the same indiscrete woman. They are brought together after her funeral by the design of her surviving husband to square off with one another. While the meeting could have been a wake of sorts, the occasion only serves to set the men at odds with one another. Watching the show, one cannot help but wish that lady libertine, the professor's wife, might have had a fourth lover. Collectively, the mourners might have formed a poker club and shared sordid anecdotes while the cards were being shuffled. Mr. Levy cleverly constructs the play as a delicate balancing act: no one gets more than his share of sympathy, no one gets more than an equal cut of the blame and no one gets to ascend to moral high ground. The cool moral indifference of their shared lover seems to have deprived the men of any meaningful memories of her. It seems that individually their experiences with her create a void instead of filling one and that their common denominator serves not to join them but to centrifuge them into isolation.
Of all Mr. Levy's offerings, THE INTERVIEW seems to have the closest brush with Chekhov. Were the director to ask the actors to effect Russian accents, dance a Mazurka rather than a tango, and prop the stage with a steaming Samovar, this play could almost be a Chekhov parody. Arthur Hamilton, imbued with self confidence encroaching on arrogance, interviews for a domestic position with Miss Phoebe Watson. Against the wishes of her overstepping maid Hilde, Ms. Watson becomes very familiar with Arthur in short order. To Hilde's horror, Arthur lands a job with Miss Watson that is much weightier than that of mere butler. Levy seems to have a knack for manipulating his audience. First he gets the audience to root for his character and then he brings to fruition the very things he got his audience to hope for. As a result of this machination, the play is as viscerally satisfying as it is funny.
In the final piece of the evening, Mr. Levy demonstrates his ability to shift moods. FRIENDS is decidedly a New York piece. Not only is it set in New York, the characters are obviously dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers. Mr. Levy, a self-confessed Californian, seems to be able to deftly paint authentic New Yorkers with some fine literary brush strokes. Ruth Appfelbaum and Max Horowitz's argument over a park bench quickly but credibly evolves into a love story. Before lapsing into a fugue to relive the torrid scenes from Erich Segal's LOVE STORY, visualize Ruth as a sixty plus woman who has been ridden hard and put away wet by three itinerant husbands. Then visualize Max: sixty plus literati who made a career of creating crossword puzzles for the New York Times and now finds himself sleeping under the New York Times to keep himself warm in Central Park. Both characters are living out their remaining golden years fighting off the reaper and infirmity with one hand and penury with the other. FRIENDS is a gentle warning. It tells us several things about life. One, you always realize the truth about your situation in life long after it would have been crystal clear to any stranger. Two, there is no such thing as a retirement account that is too big. And three, when you don't think you need a friend is probably the time you need a friend the most. FRIENDS is in a sense redemptive for Mr. Levy. Just when you think he puts wit, irony and glibness ahead of sincerity, he trumps his series of plays with warmth, compassion and a genuine human spirit.
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