A Bright Room Called Day

Debbie and I went to the theater in San Francisco last Friday night, seeing a production by the La Luna Theater Collective of Tony Kushner's play A Bright Room Called Day.

The play is being performed Friday and Saturday nights through November 8, with an additional performance on Monday, October 27, at the EXIT on Taylor (one of three venues of the EXIT Theater), 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets cost $20; call 415-721-9682 for reservations.

We had read the play some years back in a book- and play-reading group to which we belong, but the details had faded from our memories, and we came to it essentially fresh.

The play concerns the reactions of a small group of artists and intellectuals, connected to each other largely through the German filmmaking industry, to the advent of Hitler and the Nazis, in 1933. By interleaving the short scenes with a "present-day" (1990) pair of characters, Kushner draws parallels between the plight of the characters of the past and our own lives today. These parallels are more apt in America under the rule of the Shrub than they ever were when his father was president.

The production was well-cast, with the performers inhabiting and delivering their roles excellently. My largest criticism is about the writing and structure of the play itself: the many brief scenes seemed fragmented to me, with the fragmentation getting in the way of what ought to be a long, slow, steady buildup of the drama and tension.

Marking the scene breaks are captions, presented by slide projector, giving the date and outlining events of the day. A slide saying something like "February 20, 1933 - Later that night" resonates unfortunately with the film Start the Revolution Without Me with the constant narrated repetition of the date: "Still 1789...."

Kushner is wordy and long-winded – the production is more than two hours long – but his writing is nonetheless powerful and authentic.

One speech particularly moved me, spoken by Husz, an exiled Hungarian cinematographer:

Shut up. Listen.
There is something calling, Paulinka.
If you still retain a shred of decency
you can hear it – it's a dim terrible
voice that's calling – a bass howl, like
a cow in a slaughterhouse, but
far, far off...
It is calling us to action, calling us
to stand against the calamity,
to spare nothing, not our blood,
nor our happiness, nor our lives
in the struggle to stop the dreadful day
that's burning now
in oil flames on the horizon.

What makes the voice pathetic
is that it doesn't know
what kind of people it's reaching.
Us.
No one hears it, except us.
This Age wanted heroes.
It got us instead:
carefully constructed, but
immobile.
Subtle, but
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.
It happens.
A whole generation of washouts.
History says stand up,
and we totter and collapse,
weeping, moved, but not
sufficient.

The best of us, lacking.
The most decent,
not decent enough.
The kindest,
too cruel,
the most loving
too full of hate,
the wisest,
too stupid,
the fittest
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.

The Enemy
has a voice like seven thunders.
What chance did that dim voice ever have?
Marvel that anyone heard it
instead of wondering why nobody did anything,
marvel that we heard it,
we who have no right to hear it–
NO RIGHT!
And it would be a mercy not to.
But mercy ... is a thing ... no one remembers its face anymore.

The best would be
that time would stop
right now,
in this middling moment of awfulness,
before the very worst arrives.
We'd all be spared more than telling.
That would be best.

Theatrical Striptease

We went to Berkeley Rep this evening, "we" being Debbie and I, joined by Lori Selke and Steven Schwartz, as well as Kimberly and Shannon Appelcline. Tonight's play was Fräulein Else, "translated and adapted" by Francesca Faridany from the novella by Arthur Schnitzler, part of Berkeley Rep's more experimental and adventurous Parallel Season.

When Scott Marley commented on Suddenly Last Summer, Berkeley Rep's current Main Stage production, he described what he called the Striptease, the slow buildup of suspense in advance of some revelation or event as a means of holding the audience's interest. Early in Fräulein Else, we become aware that we are watching such a striptease. Else, a nineteen-year-old guest at a resort in the Alps, played by the playwright, is anxiously awaiting a special-delivery letter from her mother. There is a delay, and she is frustrated — and then she postpones reading it, and her reading is drawn out, and it takes a while for the truth to be told and Else's predicament to be revealed.

Scott warns that such stripteases must not be drawn out too long, lest even the most stunning revelation be reduced to anticlimax. This was not a problem here; I felt like I had recognized the dramatic device without having been abused by it.

Then, to my surprise, the process repeated itself, both as a critical metaphor and as an actual striptease! At the play's climax approaches, the audience is tormented with the question of "Will she do it? And what precisely will she do?" And then she does, in a manner surprisingly different from what we are led to fear, tear her robe off and walk naked on the stage, provoking sudden chaos among the other characters.

Schnitzler was one of the pioneers of writing the stream of consciousness, and Faridany's adaptation conveys this phenomenally well. It's a tour-de-force of writing and performing, backed by excellent direction and set design. It's the first fully satisfying performance in Berkeley Rep's 2002-03 season.

Kimberly Appelcline had her reaction to the play up on her LiveJournal before I even began my own blog entry; but Debbie and I had the oh-so-onerous task of entertaining Steve and Lori afterwards. (Don't throw me in that briar patch!)

Suddenly Last Summer

It seemed like nobody in our Berkeley Rep subscription group wanted to see a Tennessee Williams play. We wound up swapping tickets around our friends. Dave Nee and Scott Marley took Lyn Paleo's and Doug Faunt's tickets. D. Potter got Lisa Hirsch's. Kimberly Appelcline stayed home, so her husband, Shannon, passed her ticket along to a friend of his. The extra ticket went to Sabyl Cohen (who showed up in a dream I had the other night). The only original subscribers to go were Shannon, Debbie, and I.

The play Suddenly Last Summer is terrific, but the Berkeley Rep's production was problematic. I dozed through far too much of Violet's opening monologues — maybe I was just too sleepy, but our consensus afterwards was that the actress, Randy Danson, just wasn't up to the role, which demands much more presence, piss, and vinegar than she was able to deliver. Likewise, Joey Collins didn't give enough to the role of Dr. Sugar. The bright spot of the cast was Michelle Duffy, playing Catharine, who eclipsed everyone else in the cast every moment she was on stage, showing herself in a vivid technicolor compared to the other castmembers' pastels. She wasn't overplaying; Catharine's role demands it. But Violet's role demands it also, and what the audience got from her was pastel.

In the curtain call at the end, Duffy was visibly drained. Taking her bows seemed to take effort.

Scott Marley had scathing things to say afterwards about the set design and the direction. I rather liked the set myself, but could see what he meant. And I strongly agree with what he said about the lighting: that there were enough unsubtle changes in lighting early on that when the lights hit their bright peak during the climax of Catharine's final monologue the impact was lessened. The earlier lighting changes should have been much more subtle.

We had dinner beforehand, all of us except Shannon and his friend, at the Taiwan Restaurant, on University, just to the west of Shattuck Ave, and after the performance the whole group talked the play to bits at Coquelet over coffee and dessert. I can complain about the production, but the evening as a whole was rich and satisfying.