Utopia, myopia
The year in theater.

By Robert Avila

Remember, your closest exit may be behind you.

Airline safety drill

ANOTHER YEAR OVER and still no apocalypse. Time, then, to look back at the theater season.

Coming out of a theater can be accompanied by any variety of emotions, but they rarely include – unless you have money in the show – fear. This limitation, by the way, clearly doesn't apply to Hollywood movies, whole categories of which are designed to make you afraid of your own shadow. I can't watch most of them anymore; they're too scary, and I have to walk through a dark garage to get to my apartment.

I believe Aristotle explained why this is so, but frankly he didn't see Soul of a Whore. Campo Santo's production of Denis Johnson's explosive verse play was many things – hilarious, arresting, provoking – but in the prophetic urgency of its worldly revulsion, it was chilling. Its world premiere at Intersection for the Arts, where Johnson is the resident playwright, was unquestionably a season highlight.

And then there was Fintushel's Apocalypse, Eliot Fintushel's entrancing one-man recitation of the Book of Revelation at the Marsh in June, which had me convinced throughout dinner afterward that my goose was cooked. As the old saying goes, when talk about marauding prostitutes riding scarlet beasts with seven heads and 10 horns starts making sense to you ...

The final bow

Living in the best of all possible worlds, as the TV keeps insisting we do, can present troubling contradictions.

"When even Utopia is stained, where do we find our hope?"

I recently watched the Shotgun Players' exuberant production of The Death of Meyerhold, I found myself nodding my head knowingly to this plaintive query by poet Mayakovsky (Clive Worsley) until the woman seated behind me finally insisted I stop. A proper review of this ambitious and intriguing play by writer-director Mark Jackson will have to wait a week or two, but suffice it to say its uneven but overall ingenious and kinetic account of the career of the great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold (Cassidy Brown) fits well into the fraught mix of art and political action stirred up by our own time.

Moreover, the play presents a seductive collaboration, two years in the making, between Jackson (cofounder and artistic director of San Francisco's experimental Art Street Theater) and Berkeley's ever industrious Shotgun Players – two distinct parties with a mutual talent for going after big ideas, and damn the small theater label, while reinventing stodgy classics with real flair. Shotgun earlier this year mounted a spirited and memorable outdoor production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Now, along with Art Street's Kevin Clarke and cofounder Beth Wilmurt, it brings the same brazen energy, humor, and savvy to this formidable portrait of one of Brecht's more critical influences.

Indeed, unlike me, Meyerhold is far from gloomy. It's full, even too full, of playful spontaneity and good-natured humor to be less than affirming and hopeful, for all its intrinsic worrying about creeping totalitarianism, then and now. But a little escapism isn't necessarily bad. As Stanislavsky (Richard Louis James) says, echoing Meyerhold, "We need more than reality to get to the truth."

The star-spangled bladder

Urinetown and Bat Boy, for instance, were big fun and sharp satire too, and I doubt I'm alone in counting them among the best musical theater all year. Urinetown, in particular, brought nothing short of relief from the constricting patriotism of Fourth of July weekend. And I have to respectfully disagree with audiences who think such shows, which take as their starting point playground humor, only reinforce a puerile disposition in an already infantilizing mass culture and are themselves very childish expressions. To me they're anything butt.

Lighthearted programming hasn't been an excuse to sacrifice quality or integrity, as San Jose Repertory Theatre's jubilant and wonderfully adroit productions of The Odd Couple and Noises Off handily demonstrated, as did TheatreWorks' enjoyable remounting of Sondheim's A Little Night Music. (Obviously welcome medicine, both Noises and Night Music have since moved to San Francisco and been extended into January).

At the same time, bracingly sardonic explorations of American culture found their way into one long-overdue American premiere, Crowded Fire Theater Company's fearless and nearly flawless mounting of British playwright Edward Bond's A-A-America!, and one terrific revival, American Conservatory Theater's production of David Mamet's American Buffalo.

Two unexpected musical theater forays this year must also be mentioned. Aurora Theatre Company's capped an admirable season with a unique, site-specific performance of The Play of Daniel, in collaboration with the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, staging the 12th-century liturgical drama in the thematically and acoustically rich setting of Berkeley's St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Thick Description ended its season with the world premiere of Firebird Motel, a winning 60-minute chamber opera by David Conte, with a libretto by poet David Yezzi, which was beautifully realized by director Tony Kelly on the intimate Thick House stage. Both events were bold experiments, especially for modest-size companies, and fresh surprises.

Everybody's a critic

Speaking of escape, now we hear ACT has had to recast the role of Torvald in its upcoming production of Ibsen's A Doll's House because the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services (new name for the old INS, now part of the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security) denied a visa to Geordie Johnson, the well-known Canadian actor who had planned to make his U.S. debut in San Francisco. He will be replaced by the able Stephen Caffrey. Of course, one expected those 007 wannabes in Homeland to take full advantage of the situation and go on hassling, for instance, Cuban artists. But one has to wonder if in fact famous Canadian stage actors are figuring near the top of the president's daily security memos (which I understand double as place mats for the breakfasting chief executive). Or is this just more evidence that the Bush administration is bent (and I think that's the precise word) on rolling out some invisible barbed wire barrier around the United States, lest any cultural emissary from the ever increasing land of "them" slip through and begin, subversively, to fraternize? Maybe Johnson will try again next year and succeed. Then he can star in a production of An Enemy of the People.

Casting calls

It's difficult to say with any specificity what makes a memorable performance. But sometimes you're compelled to try, either because you're being paid by the word or the charm of a performance won't leave you alone. There were many instances of the latter case for me this year, and I'm the richer (metaphorically) for it. Here, in brief, are offered a few honorable mentions, (with many others included in the next group below): Marco Barricelli and Lise Bruneau, Les liaisons dangereuses (ACT); L. Peter Callender, Julius Caesar (California Shakespeare Theater); Margo Hall, Bethlehem (Campo Santo); Gerald Hiken and Barbara Oliver, The Chairs (Aurora); Sarah Jones, Surface Transit (Berkeley Repertory Theatre); Amy Resnick, The Old Neighborhood (Aurora); Gabe Marin, Thirst (Thick Description).