Building a Better Mikado
For a while I’ve been grappling with how I’d deal with The Mikado the next time I had to review it.
Angst at the Picnic
In some ways the play is as perplexing as its title. The latest world premiere from Crowded Fire Theater, Amelia Roper’s She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange (a title I’m completely incapable of reading without singing it to the tune of Beck’s “Where It’s At”), features four people sitting around in a park making awkward small talk for 75 minutes. They’re two investment bankers and their spouses, and there’s some material in the play about financial shenanigans and the consequences thereof, which is a timely topic but touched on only elliptically. Instead there’s a lot of forced smiles, bizarre non sequiturs and existential dread. They’re almost all strangely childlike, like confused grade schoolers perplexed by the world around them.
San Francisco Values
I was born and raised in Berkeley, where most people can be safely assumed to be pretty liberal, and nothing sets my teeth on edge more than the belittling portrayal of the place I grew up as some kind of wacky radical madhouse, the view embodied in terms like “Berserkeley” or “San Francisco values.” My native Bay Area may make a mockery of itself on occasion—hometowns do that sometimes—but I’m always mighty sensitive about anything coming along to make it look silly.
