Off-key Pitch
It’s always baffling to me when someone ascribes a poor review of a show to some kind of preexisting personal grudge on the part of the critic. On the one hand, I understand it: When you don’t want to consider that criticism of your work or the work of someone you love might be valid, you look for any reason you can possibly think of to discount it. The critic just doesn’t understand, the critic must have been having a bad day, or the critic must have it in for you. Either of the first two might be valid, although not nearly as often as people want to think, but the third is just nonsense. And it’s by far the one I hear most when someone writes in to complain about a review. In fact, someone recently commented on my review of Chance saying that if I described a freestanding nonfolding chair as a folding chair, it must be because I was lying to try to scare people off from the show.
I can’t speak for all critics everywhere, and thank goodness I don’t have to, but I never, ever go to a show with the intention of trashing it. It just doesn’t happen. I go to a lot of theater—sometimes 120 shows a year—and yet there are a lot more shows that look interesting that I can’t possibly get to, because I’m just one man and I have to spend some time at home with my lovely wife and our lovely dog. So I have to choose carefully what I go to see, and I’m not going to pick something that I have no reasonable expectation that I’ll enjoy. Life’s too short for bad theater. Obviously, despite my best efforts to pick stuff that looks good, I’m going to see some clunkers from time to time. It’s an occupational hazard. But I always want them to be good, and if I give a show a poor review it’s always because I had hopes for it and am disappointed that it wasn’t better. Why would I go somewhere with the intention of having a bad time? It doesn’t even make sense.
Nobody would want the above to be an intro to a review of their show, because after all that you know it’s not going to be a terribly positive one. But I thought of this anew when I went to see Central Works’s Pitch Perfect, because from time to time a play is just going to rub you the wrong way. I was in a perfectly good mood when I went to see the show, it’s a company whose work I follow and find interesting, and the actors are all people I like. But within 10 minutes after the play began, I was wishing I hadn’t come.
Hello, Foxes!
Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes may be set in 1900, but the subject matter has something to say to the present day, being essentially about the rich screwing over common folk (and each other) to become even more rich. A new-money family on the rise in the South, the Hubbards are so hungry to make a profit that they’re willing to stoop to pretty much anything to make it happen. Having married into a cotton plantation, they’re wooing a northern cotton mill to come to town and stand to make millions on the deal, but they need the investment of sister Regina’s estranged, terminally ill husband to make it happen.
Time Passes
I know he’s a fellow Berkeley High alum and all, but I could never get into Thornton Wilder. I’ve seen polished professional productions of Our Town and I’ve seen shakier community ones, but never one that I didn’t find mawkish. It’s just not my thing. So I’m maybe not the best audience for Wilder Times, Aurora Theatre Company’s assemblage of four short plays by Wilder, two from 1962 and two from 1931, but because it has a fabulous cast I decided to check it out anyway. I’m pleased to report that I found myself pleasantly surprised by two of the plays, even if the other two left me cold.
Live Through This
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #92: Honey Brown Eyes, SF Playhouse, September 27.
Show #90: Night over Erzinga, Golden Thread Productions, September 18.
Don’t Cockpunch the Messenger
“The god came back. Shortly afterward, the world ended.” That’s what Lauren Spencer tells us as the narrator and sometime bartender in Hermes, a new play playing at the Exit Theater in a No Nude Men production directed by Sleepwalkers Theatre artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp. Spencer says this several times, in fact, handling the poetic repetition with grace and sparkling intelligence.
