Bay sayers Essay Example For Students

Bay sayers Essay Up until the last week of April, the Marsh was located in the back room of an artsy little Mission District espresso joint called Cafe Beano. Patrons would walk in off Valencia Street, maybe get a cup of something or a health-foody hunk of pastry from the cafe counter, and head through a narrow door into a space the size of a one-car garage. The seating consisted of several rows of mismatched chairs, mostly dinette-set orphans and garage-sale stragglers. The cramped stage area looked just spacious enough to hold a single performer. A theatre with space for only one actor? No problem: the Marsh, founded in 1989 and managed ever since by a determined young woman named Stephanie Weisman, functions principally as a solo theatrical gymnasium, a haven for one-person shows by San Franciscos small army of storytellers, reconteurs, monologists, stand-up autobiographers and talky performance artists. With no grants from anywhere, scant advertising and only sporadic newspaper reviews, it has presented up to a dozen attractions per weekin progress works by seasoned pros like Corey Fischer, Josh Kornbluth and Merle (Ian Shoales) Kessler, and newcomers like Yehuda H. and Kate Perryto very receptive audiences. The name Marsh, Weisman says, is metaphoricalits where the gook is, and down deep the diamonds. Anyone whos serious about solo work can get into our late-night series, and if theyre good they can go on. Its survival of the fittest without having to eat anyone at the bottom. Recently the Marsh faced a sudden crisis: City building inspectors deemed Cafe Beanos back room unsafe for public assembly and padlocked the place. Without missing a beat, Weisman made a few phone calls, gathered up the chairs and lighting instruments, and with the help of friends moved the Marsh to its fourth location in three years: an empty storefront next door. That same night, the show (Merle Kesslers latest) went on. The resilience of the Marsh offers one signal among many that solo theatre is thriving in San Francisco. At a time when most of the key local repertory companies are struggling with real estate woes, declining government funding, shifts of artistic leadership, or all of the above, the single dramatic voice is being heard loud and clear and relatively unencumbered all over town. This autumn San Franciscos third annual Solor Mio Festival will showcase two dozen solo performers from the Bay Area and beyond. But one could argue that the city is hosting a solo drama festival nonstop. One-person shows dominate the calendar year around at two other popular alternative venues, Life on the Water and the Climate Theatretogether they co-produce Solo Mio and have presented such locally based soloists as John OKeefe, Brenda Wong Aoki, Josh Kornbluth and Susan Van Allen, as well as notable out-of-towners like Spalding Gray, David Cale, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes. Soloists also pop up frequently on many other local stages: at Josies Cabaret and Juice Joint, Brava! Women for the Arts, Footworks Studio, New Langston Arts, the Cowell Theatre, Intersection, 1800 Square Feet, 21 Bernice, and (across the Bay in Berkeley) La Vals, the Julia Morgan Center and 2019 Blake. Bay Area repertory theatres are not ignoring the genre either. Last January, the Asian American Theatre Company hosted Tsunami: The Next Wave in Asian American Performance/Art, a series of one-person shows. Berkeley Repertory Theatre presented a successful run of John OKeefes Vid in 1991, recently premiered Geoff Hoyles solo memoir, The Convict Returns, and has commissioned for its 1992-93 season Mother Jones, a monodrama about the famed labor organizer by singer-actress Ronnie Gilbert. For the many writers, actors, visual artists, jugglers, dancers and yarnspinners interested in pulling together shows of their own, San Francisco is hospitable territory, with an array of ongoing workshops devoted to the solo art. Bill Talen, a performer-writer and co-artistic director of Life on the Water, teaches one; director David Ford, performance artist Nina Wise, and Corey Fischer and his fellow members of A Traveling Jewish Theatre (all of whom have appeared in one-person shows) offer others. Certainly, San Francisco isnt the only city to embrace the recent tidal wave of solo performance. Artists from throughout the country have been attracted to this inexpensive, user-friendly genre, which offers performers maximum aesthetic control and promises the audience maximum intimacy. Experimental venues from Highways in Los Angeles and Sushi in San Diego, to the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis and the Painted Bride in Philadelphia, have aided and abetted the trend. And for solo artists in search of national breakthrough opportunities, New York leads the way with Dance Theatre Workshop, P.S. 122, Lincoln Center, the Kitchen, the New York Shakespeare Festival and an array of downtown cabarets. But San Francisco seems to have the greatest concentration of theatrical soloists, and one-person drama has a particular municipal resonance. The genre is somehow emblematic of the citys personality, right in sync with its reputation as a haven for zaniness and eccentricity, and as a breedi ng ground for cultural misfits and counterculture experimenters of all stripes. That image of the city dates all the way back to the Gold Rush era of the mid-1800s, when San Francisco went from hamlet to teeming, flamboyant metropolis virtually overnight. It revived in the 1950s, when beatniks Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were on the scene, flourished again during the phantasmagorical Summer of Love of the late 1960s, and persists today in a lively, youthful bohemia that thrives despite high rents, earthquakes and urban corrosion. In a sense, the city has spent the last 150 years living up to its own mythology of rugged but flashy individualism. Solo theatre artistsa breed which Life on the Waters Bill Talen characterizes as being like Mao in the mountains in a time when our individuality is utterly threatened by media saturationare upholding a regional tradition. It is an apt coincidence that San Franciscos first professional performance, given in 1849, was a solo show by Stephen Massett, a self-promoting New England songwriter, singer, monologist and mimic who barnstormed the globe as Jeems, Pipes of Pipesville. A century later, the city would play a crucial role in the careers of such inspired comedic commentators as Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams, all of whom honed their off-center acts in North Beach nightspots. The new crop of soloists in the 1990s are more numerous, more ethnically various and more conciously theatrical and narrative in their approach than those who went before. They are also more aesthetically diverse, representing the great range of impulses that can lead to self-made, singular performances. One of the most influential figures on San Franciscos solo scene, even though he lives in New York, is autobiographical monologist Spalding Gray. Gray first appeared locally at the San Francisco International Theatre Festival in 1981, at an early stage of his solo career. He has returned with a new monologue almost every year since (most recently Monster in a Box, performed at the 1991 Solo Mio Festival) to face an increasingly large and enthusiastic following. Grays unadorned art candid, revelatory and entirely reliant on the direct bond between teller and listenerhas been an inspiration to many San Francisco practitioners. Bill Talen, who began telling stories with a rock band accompanying him, remembers seeing Gray in 1981 and being moved to start the process of taking away elements music, lights, songs, paring things down to just telling the story, making a statement, giving a dramatic report about what you see, what you believe. Thats what Spalding, with his plain table and his little glass of water, is about. He relaxes you out of your alienation. Talen adopted the autobiographical report-from-the-interior mode in American Yoga (about a memorable car accident) and several other well-received monologues. (Hes since moved on to two-person shows, including the award-winning Political Wife, and beyondjoined by pick-up companies of local actors, Talen performed his Apple Pie with George and Jane, a ritualized parody of political fund-raising dinners, at motel banquet rooms across New Hampshire during that states presidential primary.) The psychological memoir format has also richly served many others, including the up-and-coming Josh Kornbluth. Red Diaper Baby, which recalls Kornbluths New York-Jewish-Communist upbringing from a childs perspective, was workshopped over a two-year period at the Marsh and opened in June at the Actors Playhouse Off Broadway following an extended run at New Yorks Second Stage and has recently been optioned for film. Like some other solo spielers, Kornbluth started out in comedy clubs but gravitated toward theatre after he saw Gray perform, and after he moved to San Francisco. In also theatre theres so much more lattitude in what you can do, he explains. Part of it is environmental: In stand-up, the venues range from the toilets to the really nice septic tanks, and the jokes are the excuse to sell drinks. Even the most sophisticated comedians run into a wall, because you cant stretch peoples attention spans and arent allowed to do stuff that makes them uncomfortable. In San Francisco, Kornbluth felt he could stumble around and find a voice, and people would be interested. After Red Diaper Baby (initially titled Josh Kornbluths Daily World) came Haiku Tunnel, based on his experiences as a temp worker in a law firm, and last years The Moisture Seekers, a detailed, poignant account of his sexual initiation at the hands of an older married woman. As a once-if-not-future center of the human-potential movement, San Francisco is perhaps unusually receptive to stage confessions filled with intimate details and psychological revelations. John OKeefe wrote and directed half a dozen fascinating original plays before his solo pieces. Shimmer (about his boyhood experiences on an Iowa youth detention farm) and Vid (about his scuffling days as a Berkeley playwright) brought him genuine local celebrity and gratifying national recognition. OKeefe makes a point of insisting, however, that his monologues are only semi-autobiographicaland that he invents and embroiders his memories generously. (Vid, for instance, entwines two stories: one fantastic, the other realistic.) That creative flexibility helps him avoid one of the pitfalls of the monologue form, and one San Francisco is no stranger to: excruciating over-indulgence in solipsistic self-psychoanalysis. Says Stephanie Weisman, Every now and then I have to tell people, come back with a story to perform and not just a set of experiences. And Kornbluth notes he has learned to embellish a true story from the very first time I tell it. As I start to retell the story more and more, I change the real people its based on more and more, because I want to create a literary arc, like you get from reading a Grace Paley or Bernard Malamud story. The more I fictionalize, the more I feel free. In a city very concious of its ethnic multiplicity, the solo autobiographical monologue has also become an outlet for cultural self-definition and a mechanism for demystifying race and otherness. Bay Area soloists Lane Nishikawa, Wayne Corbett, Emily Shihadeh, Marijo, Albert Greenberg, Marga Gomez and Brenda Wong Aoki, for example, have fused reminiscences with meditations on larger sociological issues. The Aristotelian hacker EssayKali: (Westside whistle) Narrator: I go inside. No Westsiders. The bell rings. In front of me, this white guy. Not like Moorie Goldbaum or Big Mike but really white. Steven: Hi, there! Narrator: Hes handsome. With wavy brown hair and green eyes. Like a Kennedy! Steven: Im Steve Newcomb and his is my girlfriend Sherry. Narrator: Sherrysky blue dress, golden hair. She smiles at me. Brenda: I wanna be her friend. Narrator: Then the teacher walks to the front of the class. Judy: Im Judy, Judy Sloane. But in this class, I hope you call me Judy. Oh! Look at you! Look at you! Youre nervous! Of course! Its your first day of school. Youre sitting here in Lit. 1, the gifted class, thinking, Oh my god! Am I gifted? Dont worry. You are. Now, most of you know each other but theres one person I know you dont know because she just got here. Hai Nyugen from Vietnam. Welcome, Hai! Hai: (With a French accent) In Vietnam, I read Cyrano de Bergerac, Les Miserables, et Madame Bovary. I look forward to reading the literature in your great tongue. Judy: Thank you, Hai. If theres one thing I want us all to learn, its how to live together in peace. (Cross) So this semester were going to study Utopian literature. Utopia. Does anyone know what that means? Tommy? A ride at Disneyland? No. Thats Autopia. Utopia is a place where people live together in harmony. By the end of this semester I want each of you to come up with your own model for a perfect world. Your first reading assignment for the semester: Aldous Huxleys Brave New World. Class dismissed! Brenda? Can I speak to you for a minute, please? Brenda, I think Hai could use a friend. Brenda: Why me? Im not Vietnamese. Judy: But you are Oriental! Put yourself in her place. Youre in a new country. No friends Narrator: So every day, I sat next to Hai trying to dress and talk so that everybody knew I was not like herF.O.B. Fresh Off the Boat. From Vid John Lion invited me to join him at a national conference on Buddhism and the Theatre in Boulder, Colorado, hosted by Chogyam Trungpa, a guru who was one of the major spiritual leaders from Tibet on the run from the Red Chinese. John joked about eating brown rice and sleeping on a straw mat. The major theatres and performers from around the country were to attend. When we arrived at the airport we were greeted by a famous playwright, Jean-Claude van Itallie. At last, I thought, Im going to meet some famous people. I could use some spiritual grounding, too. Things were looking up. When we got to the ashram we were welcomed by a good 250 avid Buddhists. We were treated to a huge feast of Tibetan delicacies. I was gratified to find wine, beer and whiskey in abundance. In no time at all we were becoming inebriated. But still, no guru. People were getting zealous about each other when I heard someone whisper, Hes coming! Two young women came in, one carrying a cushion, the other a small table with a large bottle of sake and a glass. I was seated in the front. Everyone went quiet. A short man with a jack-o-lantern face entered. He had a shriveled arm that dangled lifelessly from him. He sat down on the cushion, the two lovely Buddhist nymphets on either side. One of the girls poured a glass of sake, handed it to him. Trungpa sipped his sake and smiled at us. He welcomed us in a strangely high and innocuous voice. It seemed everything he said had a double meaning. He was welcoming us and yet he was challenging us; he was gracious almost to the point of servility and yet he was our judge. He introduced several members of his staff. They had a kind of gung ho casualness. Suddenly he said, Nowgo dance! Trungpa retired, followed by his handmaidens. The lights were dimmed, the doors in the hall were opened and rock-and-roll music was sent over the speakers. Instantly the acolytes were dancing. The theatre people almost immediately followed suit as if they had read some itinerary that had slipped my attention. I was too drunk to remember much of what followed. There was a lot of making out and screaming and finally several fist fights. The art luminaries seemed enchanted and perplexed with it all, as if perhaps what they were witnessing was some sort of secret Buddhist ritual. The next day, several theatres displayed their wares. Robert Wilson took an hour to walk across the room while a teenaged girl counted from one to ten. The Open Theater performed American Indian chants, shaking big Indian rattles and intoning things in Brooklynese like, We are separate from each other. We should be one! Jerzy Grotowski was supposed to come but he was delayed in Europe having his blood changed. Andre Gregory filled in his slot by taking members of the audience and whispering instructions in their ears, creating a kind of personal mystery play between him and the performers. I was nodding off when a group from California came and improved everybodys dreams. It all ended with a two-hour critique in which they slam-dunked each other unmercifully. Later that night Trungpa gave a lecture. I heard during the dinner break that he had bunged up his arm in a fit of intoxicated inspiration. He thought he could drive his car through the side of a mountain. He tried. It didnt work. After that he switched from Seagrams Seven to sake. From Red Diaper Baby My father, Paul Kornbluth, was a Communist. He believed there was going to be a violent Communist revolution in this countryand that I was going to lead it. Just so you can get a sense of the pressure. And anything my father told me I would believe, because my father was a physically magnificent man: He was big, and he had this great potbellynot a wigly-jiggly, Social Democratic potbelly; a firm, Communist potbelly. If you bopped it, it would bop you back. It was strong. He had powerful legs, from running tract at City College. And he had these beefy arms. And he was nakedvirtually all the time. And all over his body he had these patches of talcum powderyou know, Johnsons Baby PowderI guess, because he was a big man and he would chafe. Particularly around his private parts. He had me on the weekends, and I wouldve liked to have slept in late on the weekends, but I couldnt because my father would wake me up. This is how hed wake me up: Hed come bursting into my room and then hed stop in the doorway; when he stopped, the talcum powder would come bouncing off of his ballsit was like the entrance of a great magician. And then hed come running up to my bed, and looming over me hed sing: Arise ye prisoner of starvation Arise ye wretched of the earth. I didnt know that was the internationale; I didnt know that was the international Communist anthem. I thought it was my own personal wake-up song. Check it out: Arise ye prisoner of starvationits time for breakfast. Arise ye wretched of the earthits five afucking clock in the morning and Im being woken up! And if I didnt show the proper signs of life right away, my father would lean down over meand his graying long hair would straggle down, his beard would flutter down into my noseand hed go, Wake up, Little Fucker! Wake up, Little Fucker! That was his nickname for me: Little Fucker. Nothing at all pejorative about it, as far as my father was concerned. For my dad, calling me Little Fucker was like calling me JuniorBeloved Little One. Little Fucker. I knew from a very early age that one day I must grow up and become a Big Fucker. And I assumed that that would be about the time that I would lead the Revolution. Cause my dad had told me over and over that all of the great revolutionaries were great fuckers. But at this time I was just lying there in my bed, and my father would be looming over me with histo meenormous penis swinging around, spewing smoke, powder, whateverwhile I just had this little, six-year-oldtraining penis. From The Chocolate Quarry I work part time in a slaughter house. I get thereoh, bout 6:50 a.m. |Bout the time when the cattle, thousands of em, are filing out of the boxcars into the plantwhich is basically a concrete box. Black Angus. Real friendly critters, minding their own business as usualjust chewing their hay. No problems. When it comes their time, they walk right into this wooden structure upon which stands a guy with a sledge and a spike (some kinda kosher way of killing, I think it is) and he places the spike and BAMlegs buckle, flop down, dust fly. And let me tell you thats it. I mean that cow isnt quivering or flappin round like a fish or nothin. Were talkin deadWere talkin big-D, little-e, little-a, big-D DeaD. And the next in line doesnt move an inch, its not soundin off or rolling its eyes or wiggling its earsit just walks right up and the guy with the spike and sledge places it at just the right juncture and BAMlegs buckle, flop down, dust flytwo outs bam bam goodby mu moo. And then the gaf co mes down and hooks her under the jowl, hoists her up, shes spinninand then we got this amazing clamper tool clamps up on round her neck and shoulders and rips that hide right off. And then the conveyer brings her to(ta da!)and I take my little knifelike an exactoreal sharp, and make a cut from her neck to her anusand her guts just basically fall right out. And I take my pressure hosecleanin out the cavity. And theres usually some flaps of stuff hanging onto the spine, so I have to get in there and scrape it out. I step insideandlet me tell you when Im inside weve got a totally different story. Its warmI mean out there its cold, gotta be kept at about 43 degrees farenheit for obvious reasons, and it echos. But insideits warm and quietand the colors. The complexity of design. The detailthe silvery membrane and the purple veins and arteries, the red muscle and bone and fat and membrane. Its a phenomenon to behold. And I stay in there as long as I cansometimes I take my knife and cut a fine little slice off the tenderloin and lay it on my tongue and suck on it till it disappers. I mean, this is my own little.And the steam is rising like spirit. Misha Berson is theatre critic for the Seattle Times and a frequent contributor to this magazine.