"Terminus" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG!

"It's a voice I'm certain I recollect, someone I taught in school, I suspect, then am sure of. Yes. A girl named Helen I had for maths. A fucking mess. Though that's a tale best told at another time. For now, she's saying she needs an abortion. Fine. I ask her how many months she's gone, she says 'Nine.'"

---Character A, from Mark O'Rowe's "Terminus"

Read that out loud and you will pick up the lilt of the internal rhymes. Mark O'Rowe's one hour forty-five minute (no intermission) "Terminus" consists of three characters giving ten to fifteen minute monologues, one character following the other, all told in what sounds like verses from a Poetry Slam. It's not an easy evening. You need every ounce of concentration just to make sense of what you are watching and hearing. But give it awhile, because once the story takes on a form you may find yourself, as we were, spellbound.

Things will begin to pop into your head. We thought of Vikram Seth's magnificent "The Golden Gate," a novel about San Francisco written completely in sonnets. The connection is how something can be at once so literary and full of heart.

The three actors (Stacy Ross, Marissa Keltie and Carl Lumbly) are nothing short of brilliant, which is admittedly an easy word to use. So consider this: since they never speak at the same time, nor do they interact with each other, it is a necessity for each character's next monologue to continually one-up the previous one, or the show will drag. It never does. Ross's secret guilt gives her surprising strength, Keltie's innocence brings her to the strangest love this side of Star Wars, and Lumbly is just plain terrifying. Each actor has a reserve, and that reserve has another reserve under it. By the end of the evening they have used themselves up. You find yourself wondering how they will do this show every night for the length of the run.

But after the show, Lumbly said: "I can't wait for tomorrow."

It's dark and smoky in the theater, but this makes sense since we are apparently in Hell. Robert Brill's coal-mine like set and Gabe Maxson's smoke and low light seem perfectly reasonable when faced with issues of life, death, afterlife, monsters, rape, worms, payback, Bette Midler and a goodly collection of Irish guilt. 

You won't see another show like "Terminus" this season. But after Opening Night there are only 17 performances left. If you love great acting and writing, and we know you do, please don't miss this one. 

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG!

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Terminus" Four Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. Each actor plus director Jon Tracy earn one star each, while the Bangle goes to Artistic Director Loretta Greco for having the courage (and, apparently, a supportive Board of Directors) to mount this peformance. "Terminus" makes you squirm. And stretch. Did we mention squirm? We can't stop thinking about it.

---------------
"Terminus"
The Magic Theatre
Fort Mason Center, Building D
San Francisco
Through July 15

"Abigail's Party" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

An English play written in 1977 about tasteless middle-class people would normally be greeted with a smile and a nod or two. It was that way the last time Mike Leigh's "Abigail's Party" came through town in 1998 at the old Aurora. But this time San Francisco Playhouse has an ace up its sleeve -- Susi Damilano. She may have born to play the role of Bev. A fine comic actor, Damilano allows Bev to be so crass and oblivious that you would strangle her if you could stop laughing. The crasser she gets, as when she is dancing seductively with Tony (Patrick Kelly Jones), the more we gasp. Damilano and the rest of this fine cast make a lightweight play memorable.

Jones, with his barely contained disgust for both his wife and the party he has been forced to attend, and Remi Sandri as Lawrence, Bev's henpecked real-estate salesman husband, give a strong undercurrent to the story. Angela (Allison Jean White) and Sue (Julia Brothers) have no defense against Bev's aggressiveness. They sit and watch as Bev realizes her goal to to get everyone drunk so she can torment her husband. 

Amy Glazer directs. The show is a true two act play and longer than we are used to seeing these days, but does not drag. And you get a surprise ending which, thinking about it later, isn't really much of a surprise. If you were Lawrence, you'd do it too.

 RATINGS:     ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Abigail's Party" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. The cast, direction and story earn one star each and Damilano's performance brings home the Bangle. Nobody takes the easy way out -- Amy Glazer does not allow Damilano to leave character for an instant, nor does Julia Brothers stand up and scream as we might expect. One word of warning: they smoke real cigarettes and cigars. Some of us love it. Be aware.

"Abigail's Party"
San Francisco Playhouse
450 Post Street (2d floor of Kensington Park Hotel)
San Francisco
Through May 24
$30-$100

Will Durst: "Boomeraging - From LSD to OMG" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

It probably helps if you've been around the block a few times, circled back and then forgot where you were going, but even if you're not a boomer Will Durst will make your shoulders ache from laughing. Or maybe it's bursitis.

Every Tuesday night until November, Durst will be helping us use the Marsh as an alternative to going to the gym. He is so danged funny. We get 90 minutes of joke after joke after joke, but we also are allowed inside a little bit this time. Durst has always made us laugh, but it's nice to hear him talk about his family (especially his Dad -- one of our favorite moments is watching him do his father's four-part groan when getting out of a chair).

Basically, it's a rant. 

Durst is 61. He thinks that is old, only not in comparison to igneous rock formations. He remembers (so do we) being his parents' TV remote control. ("You! Get up and change the channel!") He remembers when doing drugs didn't involve a co-pay. Bada-bing bada-boom.

But he also comments on being invisible as you get older, and he is kind enough to give us the meaning of life:

"It ends."

"Boomeraging" is Will Durst's most satisfying show yet and the best part about it is we can go back every couple months on a Tuesday night and watch the whole thing evolve. 

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼  ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Boomeraging - From LSD to OMG" Four Stars. Sure, it's a solo performance, and sure, there is no staging to speak of, and sure, he doesn't change costumes nor does he have one (visible) tattoo. He's just a very funny man. We feel better when we come out than when we walked in. And now we know why our Dad was always fiddling with the change in his pocket.

---------------

Will Durst: "From LSD to OMG"

The Marsh

1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Tuesday nights through November 6

$15-$35

"The Arsonists" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The play is delightful, the message not so much. Written in 1953 in his native Czechoslovakia, Max Frisch seems to be lampooning blind totalitarianism at the same time he is sticking it to the wealthy who choose to live with their heads in the sand. The issue here -- a businessman who has invited two arsonists into his attic because he is afraid to appear too terribly bourgeois -- is one we can relate to easily. We see what we choose to see, even with our house about to burn down around us.

You have to love the two arsonists -- Tim Kniffin (Eisenring) and Michael Ray Wisely (Schmitz) never pretend to be anyone except who they are. Bottom line: they love burning things up. Schmitz (seen above with Gwen Loeb as Mrs. Biedermann) is also a pathological liar, and he has figured out that his tales of personal woe elicit embarrassed generosity from others, especially Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann.

We know Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) is a bumbling plutocrat, but it takes us awhile to realize he is also guilty of mistreating an ex-employee.  Perhaps it is this guilt that causes him to try so hard to appease Schmitz with good cigars, excellent food and accommodations in the very attic that every person in the theater, except for Biedermann, knows Schmitz is planning to burn down.

We love the attic scenes. It is theater of the absurd mixed with a touch of The Simpsons, as Biedermann  absolutely refuses to acknowledge what he is staring at with his own eyes. There is an epidemic of arson in the city? You have dragged barrels of gasoline into my attic? No, nothing out of the ordinary here.

 The firemen and their (lengthy) unison chanting seem a little strange -- as much absurdist theater from the mid-50s seems to us now. But the message remains strong. If someone tells you they are intent on burning down your house -- they probably will.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼ BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Arsonists" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. The sets, acting and direction (Mark Jackson) earn one star each. Special mention to Dina Percia for her delightfully frustrated Anna. We give the BANGLE to the bad guys -- who doesn't love bad guys who are truly bad? Especially when they have such nice smiles?

------------
"The Arsonists"
The Aurora Theatre
2081 Addison Street, Berkeley
Through May 12
$32-$50

"Being Earnest" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

Oscar Wilde was a lamp light of modernity in the fog of 1890s London. Irish by birth, he took shots at English society and relationships at a time when it was easy to be ostracized for being different. (You have to love a man who entered the US in 1882 by stating: "I have nothing to declare but my genius.")

"The Importance of Being Earnest" was written in 1895, five years before the author's death. It was fresh then. But it is 2013.

Victorian society has become an easy target, even when set on Carnaby Street in the mod 1960s, so we would have loved to see Paul Gordon and Jay Gruska, the songwriting team with a pedigree for taking classical stories and turning them into musicals, try a different approach then one familiar English cliché after another. The World Premiere of Gordon and Gruska's "Being Earnest" has some cute songs and funny moments, but that's about it.

Euan Morton and Hayden Tee, as the two would-be Earnests, are fine singers, as are Mindy Lym as Gwendolen Fairfax and Riley Krull as Cecily Cardew. But the songs are one-trick ponies, one jumpy and witty tune after another. There are two standouts: "Brothers," the show's featured song, which is repeated throughout the show with changed lyrics, and "Cecily," sung by Morton in Act One.

"Being Earnest" is well constructed, acted and directed. It will bring a smile to your face. Just don't look for too much more.

RATINGS ☼  ☼  ☼  BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Importance of Being Earnest" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. If you love Oscar Wilde, you'll enjoy a familiar, entertaining evening of thee-a-tah. The BANGLE goes to Costume Designer Fumiko Bielefeldt for Gwendolen's Carnaby Street dress and matching boots, plus the white hat. When you call up a single memory of this production, it's going to be this dress.

---------

"Being Earnest"

Theatreworks

Mountain View Center for Performing Arts

500 Castro Street, Mountain View

Through April 28

$23-$73

"The Happy Ones" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Liam Craig is a great actor. He plays Walter Wells as if he has climbed inside his skin. At the start of the play, Wells proclaims that he, his wife and two kids, and his close friend Reverend Gary Stuart (Gabriel Marin) have the perfect lives. These Southern Californians are indeed the happy ones. But then the phone rings and Walter's world is turned upside down. For the rest of the play we see him attempting to climb out of an enormous emotional hole and he goes about it with class. Craig and author Julie Marie Myatt give Walter what we almost never see anymore -- a suburbanite with a soul. Walter's life has been challenged, but he is determined to get through it on terms that he and we can applaud.

Gabe Marin's Gary is the world's worst clergyman and he knows it. The pastor of the Universalist Unitarian Church, he is a wandering soul fatally attracted to divorcee Mary-Ellen Hughes (Marcia Pizzo). Gary and Mary-Ellen try to comfort Walter, but their efforts are as clumsy as everyone else's. We can safely tell you there is death involved, but this is not a story about death. When they wheel in Bao Ngo, played by the amazing Jomar Tagatac, a touching story begins, where anguish and mistrust lead slowly to friendship.

We cannot give Tagatac enough credit. His suffering has enveloped him, but he maintains a restraint that would, with a lesser actor, come across as unreal. Liam Craig's character drives the show, but Bao Ngo is the one we cannot forget.

Director Jonathan Moscone, and Scenic Designer Erik Flatmo have developed a pinpoint choreography with the stage crew to make many scene and prop changes occur flawlessly on the Magic's small stage. It's like a show within a show -- and they have to do it with the lights out.

There are memorable quotes, but they're all spoilers so we're not going to give you any. "The Happy Ones" is one of the best shows we've seen this year and you won't want to miss it.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼  ☼
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Happy Ones" Four Stars. Acting, Directing, Staging and Writing all merit a full star each. We love how the plot turns with a big surprise in Act One, and we then set out on a great ride through to the end of Act Two, when the author pays us off and thanks us for our efforts.

It is also nice, as Producing Artistic Loretta Greco says at the outset, to have "a strange thing happen in the middle of the play: people get up and leave the theater. This is called an intermission." Intermissions are becoming as rare as lengthy attention spans in today's theater, often with good reason. Not here. We've got a lot to think about.

------------
"The Happy Ones"
The Magic Theatre, San Francisco
Fort Mason Center
Building D, Third Floor
Through April 21
$22-$62

"Reasons to Be Pretty" ☼ ☼ ☼

Lauren English (Steph) has The Stare. Greg (Craig Marker) can't stand up to it. Few can.

At the same time, one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing good short stories is to always give your reader at least one character to root for. Perhaps this is the heart of our problem with Neil LaBute's "Reasons to Be Pretty." The Stare notwithstanding, LaBute has not given us anyone we feel like cheering.

The four person ensemble works hard. Steph and Kent (Patrick Russell) get to throw spectacular temper tantrums. In fact, Steph does it twice.

But we are asked to make sense out of her nuclear meltdown anger at her boy friend Greg for saying something that appears to have been, at worst, a silly comment by a silly boy. We are asked to have sympathy for Steph's friend Carly, the security guard (Jennifer Stuckert), who is a uniformed and uninformed shrew. Most of all, we have to keep putting off our strong desire to grasp Greg by his shoulders and shake him until he lets the air out of Kent's tires and change cities. 

In the terrific "Fat Pig," another work in LaBute's trilogy that deals with human foibles about personal beauty, we saw something vicious and uncomfortable. The author was angry. Here, though we like the acting and director Susi Damilano paces the show well, LaBute feels distant. Instead of venting he is lampooning.

FULL DISCLOSURE: A man is writing this column. He may be clueless. His wife thinks so. She says she knows why Steph reacts as strongly as she does. This puts her husband in a difficult position. He says he would never say something as stupid as what Greg said about Steph. He gets The Stare.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Reasons to Be Pretty" Three Stars. It's all in the writing -- we want to know sooner why Steph goes so over the top, which is crucial to liking or being confused by the show. We have no idea until the end, and the final scene lasts a long time.

Bill English's set is spectacular -- you walk into the theater and run right into the wall of a giant white lunchroom. The new roundabout (a gift, by the way, from Berkeley Rep and "Chinglish") makes the set and some sharply executed scene changes possible. The production is a treat to watch.
-------

"Reasons to Be Pretty"
San Francisco Playhouse
450 Post Street (second floor of Kensington Park Hotel)
San Francisco
Through 5/11/13
$30-$70