meg o’connor

I write this in the third day of my neighbor’s 60’s-70’s hits marathon. I have heard my share of BeeGee’s, Gloria Gaynor, and luckily The Four Tops. Not the soundtrack I would pick for writing up a Chekov show, but perhaps some revelations will come out of this…(as Wild Cherry comes on…)

I had the pleasure of seeing the highly acclaimed CalShakes’ Uncle Vanya. I had read the play while in school, and remember reading it with the doom and gloom I associated with Chekov, thanks to Stanislavski. I didn’t know I was supposed to laugh at the jokes- this performance taught me how to read and enjoy Chekov.

It is not to say that all Chekov is an episode of Friends. Even Uncle Vanya has a tragic end, but it had so many levels that when you arrived at the sad ending for the family in the country, it was poetic.

Uncle Vanya is about a family that has been turned upside down by the presence of the Professor and his stunning wife, throwing the men in a frenzy over the wife, and the family in a frenzy with constant worry for the Professor’s comfort. Vanya is fed up with his unrequited feelings for the beauty, and the Professor’s demands, that he can’t take it anymore, and attempts to kill the Professor. The play ends as the Professor and his wife leave, and the family gets back to their life before ‘the occupation’, and they find they are very, very unhappy.

It was my first show at CalShakes. Their lovely outdoor theater, with the rolling hills as the back drop was already charming, but for this show, they released cows to graze on the hills. It was funny, and helped put us in the environment of Russian country-side. And the set was a clever, ever-changing, labrynth house, perfectly suiting each scene. Even the costumes were done in perfect taste.

And the acting was superb. The title character was played with such humanity, even when he is attempting to kill the professor, you are still sympathetic towards him. And poor Sonya, played so innocently, yet strong, I’m sure every woman, if not every person in the audience, felt they had been Sonya at some point in their life. Even the sad schmuck who never gets paid attention to was played so child-like, desperately seeking approval and acceptance, you just wanted to rush the stage and hug him.

The only strange acting or directing choice was that of the country Doctor, Astroff. Everyone else had a straight American accent, and the doctor had an English accent. It was not very distracting, and it added to his charm, but in the end, it was the one choice I did not follow completely.

The adaptation by Emily Mann was beautiful and funny, and I look forward to reading her other adaptations of Chekov works, as well as hoping to see more of Chekov plays being performed with his original intentions in mind: to laugh, to cry, to get angry. To have the audience inspect themselves as they left the theater, finding similarities with characters, and discovering what that means.

I also look forward to see CalShakes’  next show, Twelfth Night…disco style.

In the immortal works of Kool and the Gang- “get down on it!”

This was the weekend that I needed to be over for over a month now. As posted earlier, I was performing with San Francisco Renaissance Voices in the chant opera, Ordo Virtutum, and it was exhausting. I was also managing the Cutting Ball Theater’s general auditions, which meant I was receiving about five emails a day requesting or cancelling an audition time. The auditions were this weekend, and it feels great to have them be over. And I was also constantly emailing theaters about renting spaces for The Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco (my most recent employer). And with running around from SF to Palo Alto, to SF to Berkeley, to SF…I haven’t had much me time. No time to soak in a warm bath, or sip a glass of wine, or curl up to a good book. Well that is about to change!!!!

My birthday is this Saturday, and I intend to RELAX. I have a new book picked out, I have a location in mind (though I would be happy to stay in the city), and I have a certain someone I would like to join me (my boyfriend), though I hear the quality of escorts is getting better every year.

Cutting Ball’s upcoming season looks to be really exciting. It looks like this:
Victims of Duty by Eugene Ionesco
Mud by Maria Irene Fornes
ThomPain by Will Eno
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

We also have a Hidden Classics Reading Series, which we host at a bookstore in the city, and the line up for the year is:
The Pelican by August Strindberg
Magnetism of the Heart by Aleksander Fredro
Helen by Euripides

And we we are hosting workshops that are open to the public, featuring a new translation of Pelleas and Melisande and …and Jesus Moonwalks th Mississippi. It is going to be a very busy, hectic, amazing season, and its coming right on up!

The Playwrights’ Center of SF also has a lot going on. September through January, we will have a staged reading once every month- I’m not sure what who or what we’re reading, but it is bound to be exciting.

I am off to a production meeting with PCSF, and then home to the Roomie, to catch up and eat some chocolate, and maybe watch some bad forensic science show.

I am sure I will run out of awful puns soon.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from someone I didn’t know, asking me to audition for a film I’ve never heard of. I went, of course. (Prepared to storm out if they asked me to take off any clothes.)

I go to the audition, a little wary, not sure what to expect, but have a lot of fun. I leave thinking I actually have a shot at being in a movie. And lo-and-behold, I get an email a couple weeks later, asking me in for a second audition! Let me tell you about this movie:

The premise: Ron, the son of shoe farmers (they grow plants that grow shoes…) is tired of his lowly farming life. He wants to be rich and famous. His family’s crops aren’t what they used to be. The shoes used to grow sparkly and beautiful, but now they’re just ole’ brown boots. Ron is tired of it. So, his family allows him one week to find his fortune, and he hops on a bus to New Citysville. There, he meets Lupita, an aspiring fashion designer who immediately falls in love with Ron, though Ron shows very little sign of recipricating. Ron finds a poster for a…wait for it…Fetish Competition. Ron and Lupita get together four ‘co-workers’ to help them win this competition. And their biggest competition in the competition? A character named…Bitch. Bitch Big Stuff.

And not only is the plot completely bizarre, but there is music. It is a full length musical comedy. The directors and producers are aiming to make it the next cult classic, and who knows. Maybe it will be. It is definitely in the same boat as Rocky Horror and any John Waters movie- strange, campy, and oddly cast.

I say oddly cast because…they cast me. I play Lupita, the quirky, love sick fashion designer. I help Ron in his struggle to get rich. It is going to be a blast. We start filming in September, and I anticipate that I will blog about this quite often. This will be my first real experience working on a film, so- wow!

Back to work.

For the past week, I have been working with Cutting Ball Theater, helping them put up their latest show, Avant GardARAMA. Everytime I am around the people who run this company, I am reminded why I want to work in theater all over again. They are normal, talented, honest people who genuinely love the work they produce, and it shows in each performance.

This show fits them to a T. It is a night of three short, experimental one acts, each so different from the next, and each so interesting. The first short is by Gertrude Stein, entitled Accents in Alsace, featuring all three of the actors involved in the production. It is a ten minute, three person poem. Very structured like most of Stein’s work, and I reacted to it like I do with most of Stein’s verse. I read it once, think what the hell? and let it stew for a while. The wonderful thing about this piece is that it is performed, and intentions, and explanations, and a story, all come out through the actors movements and facial expressions. Though it is my least favorite piece of the evening, it is probably now my favorite Stein piece.

The next short is a wonderful one act by Suzan-Lori Parks: Betting on the Dust Commander. Another equally puzzling, but very entertaining short play. It examines a man and a woman living together, both fascinated by a horse that brought them together, Dust Commander. The woman even adopts horse-like behavior, and the man jockey-like behavior, putting another twist on the observations of relationships. It is funny and quick paced, though I’m sure more than a few audience members wondered if the actors had gotten lost and started over- the play repeats itself. When it seems like the the play is wrapping up, they circle right back to the beginning, and go through it all again. That silly Parks.

The final piece, a world premiere by Eugenie Chan, is really something to see. It is called Bone to Pick, and it is loosely based on the myth of Ariadne and Theseus. The show centers around Ria, a waitress in a diner at the end of the world. There are some gorgeous lines, and some really moving moments, and they are performed exquisitely by Paige Rogers, who also happens to be the Associate Artistic Director of Cutting Ball. Though I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it on the stage (I have been working backstage, so I’ve heard it plenty of times) I will see it in the next few weeks, and I hope others do too.

Even if experimental theater is not your cup o’ tea, or if you want to see some fine acting, or you just want to support a wonderful theater company, come on down to Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor st. (In the ‘loin)

Favorite Line from the Show: “Dust is little bits of dirt, Mare. Little bits. Separate dirties…that fuzzicate themsleves together.” From Betting on the Dust Commander

I am off to do the dishes!

I sing with San Francisco Renaissance Voices (SFRV). It is a small choir that focuses on early music. I’ve been singing with them for almost a year, now, and have had the privilege to sing a lot of beautiful music. I bring it up, because I am currently in rehearsal for our biggest project to date- Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard von Bingen. Ordo Virtutum or ‘Ritual of the Virtues’, is a chant opera, and arguable the earliest opera ever written. It centers around a struggling soul, trying to decide whether to embrace the pleasures of the flesh, or deny them and walk with the virtues, guaranteeing her entrance into heaven. The Virtues try to give their best sales pitch, but the villain of the opera, The Devil, lures her away from the Virtues. They continue their ritual, of singing their praises to each other, and do they win the soul back? Does she deny The Devil and her body? Well, you’ll just have to come see one of the five performances we’re putting on.

The rehearsal process is a bit strained. We meet only once a week, continuing our standard choir rehearsal schedule. The problem is, typically we have our music for our concerts, but this is a performance, and we are expected to memorize it. So, a three hour rehearsal becomes half memorization time and half choreography time (that is right, there will be dancing.) We have sung quite difficult music before, and this music is all chant, so it isn’t too tough- but this is definitely the biggest project we have ever taken on.  And we are sweating.

But here is the up-side. We’re really good, and no matter what, the performance will be beautiful. We are wearing Indian saris, and learning Indian dancing. Though it is 70 minutes of chant, it is really beautiful, and we hopefully will make it as fun to watch as it is to listen to.

And a note to the few who read this: my website is not done, yet. It is a work in progress. Just…you know…throwing that out there.

I was surfing Tix Bay Area on the TBA site just to see what was out there, and saw the title of a play I recognized: Blasted by Sarah Kane. I c licked on the link, read what little information there was, and bought my ticket. It didn’t matter that the ticket wasn’t cheap (though not pricey either) and it didn’t matter I knew so little about the theater company putting it on, or the hotel it was being put on in. It was a Sarah Kane play, actually being performed, so I had to go!

Blasted is a story that takes place in a hotel room in Leeds. It is about Ian, a journalist and awful human being, Cate, a simple young woman who was formerly in a relationship with Ian, and a Soldier who rips their tiny hotel-room-world apart. Ian spends the first half of the play trying to have sex with Cate, but she makes it clear she is not sharing this hotel room with him for that reason, and has to constantly push him off of her. Scene one ends and with scene two you find out Ian has raped Cate. You can see she has been forever changed by this, and her simple, child-like, attitude is now gone. Ian’s actions create a war inside the hotel room, and outside of it. A soldier bursts into the room and terrorizes Ian for three scenes, telling the intimate details of his lost love, his motivation to fight, and his torture techniques, which he later tries out on Ian (rape and sucking the eyeballs out of his sockets). Cate returns with a baby someone has thrown to her in the chaos of the war outside. The baby dies and Ian, starving, eats it and dies as well. Cate is left alone in a crumbling hotel room, in war-torn Leeds, with three dead bodies surrounding her.

An upper, huh? This production (put on by 19;29) was performed in a hotel room in the Mosser Hotel, and the eight-nine audience members are given black cloth masks to wear, and are invited to walk around the action as it happens. The ‘audience’ was warned the action may become overwhelming, and at anytime, we were welcome to leave. It felt like we were entering into something far more dangerous than just a play, which I appreciated, since Sarah Kane writes very dangerous plays. And there were some aspects of the performances that were stellar, and some that left the already abstract story more confusing than it needed to be.

What I loved:

The fact it was put on in a hotel room! And there was no designated audience section. We were the walls, the vase with the flowers in it, the seat at one point (Ian sat in the lap of an audience member). We didn’t have the added comfort of the distance from the front row to the stage- we were in Ian’s hotel room, watching terrible things happen, as if they were happening to us, and that was the most daring and effective part of the show.

The soldier blew my mind. His performance truly showed how complex a mindless killer can be. This soldier has killed so many people, but not just for his country. He is avenging the death of his lover, Col, and no matter how many people he kills, no matter how gruesome his acts are, Col can never come back, and in the end the soldier finds relief in suicide. And this actor (I don’t know the names, we received no programs) hit every note spot on. He completely committed, and carried the performance to a new level.

The playwright. I love Sarah Kane. I don’t love watching terrible things happen to people. I don’t love rape, torture, pain, suicide- but I love that this woman wrote these disturbing plays to make sure theater wasn’t this safe place for people to run to. I love a good Neil Simon comedy or a Stephen Schwartz musical, but if that was all live theater was, it would be lacking. Sarah Kane writes the impossible, and people make it happen. That inspires me to write.

What I loved-not:

It was performed by Americans. Sarah Kane writes like a Brit. She uses terms like “pet”, “love”, and “football match”. Ian and Cate should have english accents, but in the play they spoke with classic american accents, which would be fine, if they had tweaked the slang. Though, then there is an exchange between Ian and the soldier, and Ian talks about being Welsh, and when it is an American claiming he’s Welsh…well, it just doesn’t fly. Even though there were times I was inches away from Ian or Cate, the inconsistency distanced me.

And I found Ian and Cate were overpowered by the soldier. Neither of them truly committed. Some examples of non-committal: at one point Cate tries to bite off Ian’s penis. In this scene, Ian just pushes her off of him. No scream, barely any twinge of pain. Come on! A woman is biting off your penis, and you don’t scream! It happened again when the soldier sucks out his eyeballs. Someone is sucking the eyeballs out of your sockets! Really?! You got nothing!?!?! And Cate played her role a little too child-like.  Even when terrible things happened to her, she just seemed disconnected from her character, and taking the obvious acting choice. I could not imagine performing either of those roles, so I feel like the hypocritical jerk, but if you put on Sarah Kane, I think you have to respect her enough to find the people who can actually do justice to her words.

Moment of the night:

I bonded with other audience members and we all went out for dinner afterward. We spent the whole meal discussing the play (which was such a relief. After seeing a show like this, you need to talk it out.) and drinking beers. They were a delight, and it reminds me I live in an awesome city. One of the women I joined for dinner is a performance artist, and she is blogging about her experience. Check it out at      http://unstills.com/

I have begun a new play, and I am going to re-read my outline and first scene, see if I have anywhere to go, and then prepare for rehearsal tonight. (More on that later.)

I have just returned home from the theater.

(I’m all about class)

I saw Octopus by Steve Yockey at the Magic Theater. Octopus is about a couple who decide to invite another couple in their bed, and the consequences that come with it. There is jealously, guilt, uncovered secrets, and an HIV scare. (Oh, and full-frontal male nudity)

And as the lights came up and the last image of the play was fading from my mind, I just wasn’t sure whether I loved it, or loved it not. It was on the (long, stinky, warm) bus ride home I realized I fell more on the loved-it side of the fence.

What I Loved:

The first thing I saw was the set. This was not the first set of Erik Flatmo I had fallen in love with, but I think my crush on this set will last. On the small Sam Shepard stage, there was this perfectly contained, trendy apartment. It looked comfortable and real. When the lights in the apartment were out, this faint blue light surrounded the black square, and it made it feel like an apartment at the bottom of the ocean.

Leading to my next love-it moment. The title, Octopus. Love it. Three of the foursome are told (via telegram) that the fourth is at the bottom of the ocean, and is eventually killed by a sea monster. This is also the character who discovers he is HIV positive. In the end, you discover that this monster isn’t the giant AIDS Octopus…it has nothing to do with the disease. It is the monster they created together. When the four men, with their eight arms, were amid the orgy, one member of the main couple allows himself to be devoured by this monster, while the other half just watches. And this monster has the power to kill their relationship…and them.

And finally, I really enjoyed the acting. Four gay men were portrayed as characters, not as stereotypes, and it was very refreshing. I was impressed by all four performers, but the one who really stayed with me was Liam Vincent, who played Max, a member of the ‘other couple.’ He had wildly manic monologues that he performed flawlessly and it was a real joy to see him grapple with so many emotions within a few seconds.

Favorite line: “Don’t say my name like it tastes bad.”

What I Loved-Not:

It happens in most plays, but it always bugs me- forced humor. I think playwrights feel they first have to lull an audience in with a few jokes before hitting them with the real story. An example from this show: the sassier member of the couple tells his partner to stop stomping around in his judgement boots. I giggled. But then ‘judgement boots’ was pressed. What are judgement boots? Etc. To me, I think a playwright has to trust that the audience is already there, ready to watch a story. They are not there to see stand-up. Don’t force laughs.

And what really bugged me…was the little write-up in the back of the program. I wish I hadn’t read it before the show, so I could have had an un-biased eye. The writer claims that the ‘remarkable’ thing in the show is what is ‘unremarked upon in the play.’ She claims the fact that these four men aren’t struggling to be accepted, or that they don’t even mention that they’re gay, is what makes this show unique. I found that to be untrue. If the fact that they were gay was never discussed OUTSIDE of the play, and the story was described as four lovers fighting against a symbolic sea monster, then it could truly be considered a victory for the gay community. This writer also compared Steven Yockey to Tony Kushner- and that did me in. I kept on comparing this script to Angels in America. HIV running rampant, lovers considering leaving because it would be too hard, true love finding a way, crazy-Harper-esque monologues- there were too many similarities. Maybe there wouldn’t have been as many had I not read the back of the program. The world may never know.

But I would suggest to friends to go see it (though it c loses in two days) and see for themselves what the octopus meant to them.

And now for the best part of going to a play- the inspiration that follows. Farewell, I am off to experiment with the experimental.

-This blog may cause interest in theater, music, new plays, and may complicate current opinions.
-Quitting this blog may greatly reduce your risk of seeing good performances in the Bay Area.
-Reading this blog by pregnant women may result in super-genius children.
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