SKITTISH . . . not for the skitterish nor faint of heart. AN IDEAL HUSBAND: OXYMORON OR CONTRADICTION IN TERMS DRIVING MISS DAISY REVIEWED
SKITTISH
Courageously reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the S.F.B.A.T.C.C.
The Skittish Company is currently staging SKITTISH at the Stage Werx Theater at 533 Sutter Street in San Francisco.
If you suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, have a chronic case of the Erotic Fantasy Fugues, or you have difficulty following plot lines that unwind longer than your Bolo Tie, then this coterie of one-act comedies could be your bucket of tea, demitasse of espresso or beaker of infusoria.
Anyone who religiously read or studied the NATIONAL LAMPOON in graduate school is probably familiar with the wit of Bruce Moody: he wrote for Nat Lamp.
In his present incarnation, Bruce is responsible for SKITTISH: he wrote it.
Before you start doing word associations, pouncing on puns or sub-vocalizing your phonetics, be assured that Bruce is not socially inept and the show exudes confidence.
SKITTISH is neither a parody nor a satire of men who wear skirts and drink unblended highland malt distillates; a haggis is NOT consumed before, during or after the play; nor will anyone toss a caber into the audience.
SKITTISH is six one-acts with a simple format: each act is written for two actors, two chairs, a table, and a door.
Despite the opulent set design, one should not assume that all the production capital all ended up going into props and plats.
The Klieg lights are well directed by Ty MacKenzie and Light and Sound are under the capable guidance and technical expertise of Joshua Ferrise.
Renowned Argentinean Director Alfredo Fidani seeded the cast with Equity Actors.
MR Fidani directed the artistically acclaimed Dario Fo Festival of Plays immediately following Fo's acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1997.
The slightly ambiguous, non-traditional, non-linear script is securely sustained by a very capable cast.
The sketches are as novel and thought provoking, as they are funny.
Each comedy is different: "some are laugh out loud funny . . . some are smile to yourself funny" and some are scratch your head funny.
This is a world premiere of SKITTISH and limited edition T-shirts are available in all sizes.
For more details, surf on over to www.skittishcompany.com .
To order tickets by phone, call 510-787-2706 and demand to speak to Mike Saugar or Bruce.
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AN IDEAL HUSBAND
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.
Growing up in Central New York, one encountered only two minorities: the Irish and the Polish.
If truth were known, neither the English-Americans nor the German-Americas of upstate New York ever referred to either group with such neutral monikers.
The Irish, with nary a straight nose, uncauliflowered ear or seamless brow amongst them, were flagrantly called Micks or Monkies.
And as for the Polish . . . need we explain?
It seems that everyone yearns to feel like a majority, even if one has to invent a minority.
Then there was the Jewish man who fell over-board while cruising the South Pacific.
When rescued twenty years later, his rescuers noted that he had built two synagogues on his tiny atoll.
A rescuer approached the marooned man regarding the extra synagogue: "I can understand building one synagogue, but why two?"
The marooned man proudly retorted, "Oh that. That's the synagogue I don't go to."
Even on an atoll rising barely a foot above sea level, someone living in total isolation, fueled by a primal hierarchal imperative, can create a sense of moral, ethical, cultural or religious high ground.
Oscar Wilde lived his prolific years as a minority in London.
Had he lived in his native Ireland, there too he would have been a minority: an Irish Protestant.
In English Victorian society, the Irish—Catholic or Protestant—were entirely inferior to the English.
To some, the Irish were an inferior species; to the quasi educated: the "hibernicus" was touted to be Darwin's "missing link."
The Irish Scholar Declan Kiberd once stated, "If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it . . . "
Kiberd goes on to hypothesize that poetry and story-telling in Ireland served as an antidote to the political and intellectual suppression by the dominant occupying English culture.
In 1171 AD. King Henry II of England invaded Ireland and the English have continued to govern Northern Ireland ever since.
Think of it, over 800 years and the Irish are still bucking their annexation while the Mexicans of Alta California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas have only been subjugated for 150 years and yet they are picking our produce, skimming our pools, tarring our roofs, painting our fences, cleaning our houses and tending our yards, as if the annexation happened while the Cordilleran Ice Sheet was in retreat.
The Irish are stubborn: their folk songs, poetry, prose, ethnic jokes, pipe bombs, sniper fire, Molotov cocktails, ambushes and satchel charges all reflect a dauntless antipathy for the English.
As an outsider—ensconced at the heart of all that is English i.e. London—Oscar Wilde saw the British ruling class through objective eyes.
With such detached vision, Wilde could "dissect, vivisect and eviscerate the rectitude of the British ruling class in sharply satirical plays such as AN IDEAL HUSBAND, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE and LADY WINDEMERE'S FAN."
Many of Wilde's leading characters are leisure class rotters: effete parasites that are too rich, cultured and educated to be called parasites and so they are given titles like Lord, Duke, Duchess, Sir, Lady, etc.
While these rotters may have temporarily celebrated Wilde's genius and brilliant dexterity with the English language, they smiled waiting in patient ambush to restore him to the proper place of the Irish.
The California Shakespeare is currently performing AN IDEAL HUSBAND.
The play reflects life at the very nucleus of the British Empire: at that miraculous and brief time in World History when a group of dandies from small island off the coast of France were able to mysteriously muster the where-with-all to grab the entire planet by the cajones and to plant the Union Jack into one third of the Earth's real estate.
You might ask yourself: what were these dandies and their fawning and fetching ladies were doing while the planet groaned beneath the onerous British yoke?
A satirical and ironic answer to that question is provided, with all the necessary irony, by Oscar Wilde.
The big question of the $4.75 per gallon, ice capless summer, is: Why are you driving to Ashland?
Greenhouse gases and fuel pump penury aside, this play is superb.
Read the bios of the cast, duh.
Ashland? Been there! Done that! Everyone of them.
Take Elijah Alexander for example—he plays Lord Goring—a brilliant actor, a comedian, handsome, strutting, arrogant, macho, nuanced: his comedy is in the physical and in the spoken: gesture, expression, movement, posture, timing: every element of his acting points to laughter.
Elijah has a bio that reads like WHO IS WHO AMONG AMERICAN'S GREATEST ACTORS: it should.
You can drive your Lincoln Navigator from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow and not find comedy like this.
And what about Stacy Ross who plays the nefarious MRS Cheveley?
Hey, let's hope she IS just acting or else some guy is going to need a pre-nuptial contract as thick the L.A. phone book and one that's underwritten by both the California Bar Association and the Gambino Family.
If you are still licking your wounds and sorting your pocket change from your last divorce, you need to see Stacy do Cheveley—suddenly you will feel like the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligned with Mars.
And speaking of comedy: Danny Scheie has restrained himself to the extent that he plays Vicomte de Nanjac and Phipps.
Seeing Danny show such caution so as to avoid upstaging the principals, is like listening to a Ferrari V-12 with eight of its ignition wires pulled.
Director: unleash that man!
Grab the ole wicker picnic basket, some fetid cheeses, Ciabatta and couple bottles of a rustic pinot grigio muy frio and make haste for Bruins Theatre in Orinda.
Call the box office at 510-548-9666 or surf over to info@calshakes.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
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DRIVING MISS DAISY
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
What is it about the name Daisy?
Why is Daisy associated with poor driving?
Are actuarialists aware of the correlation that exists between vehicular destruction, motorized mayhem, carnage and drivers named Daisy?
Should Daisys be made to pay more for collision and liability insurance?
Would you loan your fully customized, candy-apple finished, chopped-n-channeled, Pinto GT Turbo to a woman named Daisy?
We think not.
The first Daisy of Demolition Derby fame to incompetantly grip a steering wheel did so in 1924.
The cars in those days had barely enough power to be lethal weapons—road kill of anything bigger than a possum or a marmot was a luxury few people could afford, nearly impossible—but that would not stop the airheaded yet determined Daisy Buchanan.
Following a poorly conceived social mixer, Daisy was driving back to West Egg, Long Island, when Myrtle Wilson mistakenly tried to mistakenly flag her down.
Whether is was her lacrimous eyes, a bipolar mood swing, myopia, hot flashes, a cell phone conversation or her untreated homocidal instincts, little Miss Daisy Buchanan—albeit a literary invention of F. Scott Fitzgerald—completely flattened Myrtle i.e. her devoted husband's favorite paramour.
It was Myrtle's second painful brush with the snobby Buchanans that day: Tom, Daisy's husband, had whopped her one for reciting Miss Daisy's name in vain; and now, Daisy had nearly made her into a hood ornament.
Aside from sending Myrtle to the Great Racetrack in the Sky, Daisy tragically crumpled the front fender of Tom Buchanan's yellow roadster and up-rooted a row mail boxes before regaining margin control of her vehicle.
It would be 24 years before the next Daisy—also of literary invention—would sit incompetantly behind the wheel.
This Daisy—a composite element of Alfred Uhry's imagination—would take out her neighbor's car, garage and tool shed: all while attempting to back her own car out of her driveway.
Unlike the waspy Daisy of Fitzgerald, this Daisy was Jewish: thoroughly ensconced in Atlanta, Georgia.
Rather than pay risk pool insurance premiums, Miss Daisy opts—with her son's insistance—to hire one Hoke Colburn to drive her for the next 25 years.
The rest of the story is contained in the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning play DRIVING MISS DAISY by Alfred Uhry.
Most people know the play via its Academy Award winning film adaptation staring Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy.
The play was the first of three "Atlanta Trilogy" pieces by Uhry.
From now until August 17 th, the award winning Ross Valley Players (RVP) will be performing DRIVING MISS DAISY at The Barn in the Marin Garden Center.
Berton Bruno plays in Hoke in the RVP production and is clearly an accomplished and highly experienced actor.
MR Bruno creates a Hoke that brilliantly radiates all the kind human vitues implicit to his character: dignity, patience, understanding, integrity, competancy and perspicacity.
Anne Ripley is ideally cast as Daisy: she reaches the hard-boiled core of her character.
Miss Daisy is a retired elementary school teacher; MS Ripley's characterization of Daisy serves to remind some of us why we repeated the third grade as many times as we did.
Alex Shafer as Boolie—Daisy's attentive and devoted son—has captured not only his character but MR Shafer could safely drive through the deep south disguised as a cracker: MR Shafer has mastered the genteel southern drawl of the red clay states.
Would someone pass MR Shafer the black-eyed peas, the fried chicken and the Hopping John?
Director Cris Cassell's work is clearly apparent in the pacing of the play: while Daisy rapid fires her stubborn invectives and abuses, Hoke takes time to speak: subduing his reactions, measuring his response and sagaciously deflecting Miss Daisy's verbal indiscretions.
The dynamic between Hoke and Miss Daisy is gradually elevated to a profound friendship, almost exclusively due to the soul and patience of Hoke.
A Sound Designer—who is clearly very dedicated to her art—Billie Cox, has selected a most appropriate chronological collage of songs for the scene transitions in the play.
The play is essentially a string of pearls: each one a carefully crafted vignette that reveals the new directions and new dimensions added to the slowly evolving relationship between Daisy and Hoke.
While the script provides some clues as to the time period of each scene, the songs selected by MS Cox nail the era with nostalgically precise musical associations.
To say that the Ross Valley Players have embellished a masterpiece would nearly be an understatement.
This play is not to be missed.
For tickets call 415 456-9555 or visit www.rossvalleyplayers.com , yah all hear now.
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