A Friend Thanks Us for a Gift of Tea

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Dear A:

D left the nicest message on the answering machine yesterday. Too bad we weren’t home to glow with pride in real time. Where we were was at a matinee performance at the California Shakespeare Festival of Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” I have a notion you were exposed to that play during run-up to prelims, i.e., you came across a reference in a book saying it was Shaw’s first play and that the title character's profession was prostitute/madam and the play was controversial. And you (if you were like me) thought, “Well, that couldn’t possibly have been entertaining given the constraints of 1894 – couldn’t have been entertaining then or now.”

So it was curiosity that drove me to insist we add Mrs. W. to our CalShakes playlist, kind of “academic,” you know, feeding the knowledge center and telling the pleasure center to shut up and sit down. Thus, it was quite a shock to find so much pleasure in the production. Shaw was a champion of the well-made play, and this is well made (though a bit static in the setup: two folk sitting and talking at one another like talking heads on a news set). I don’t think it was just the acting that made it plausible that a Cambridge math whiz would excuse her mother for her life as a prostitute (an inevitable and appropriate accommodation to the oppression of women under capitalism) and then condemn her for her life as a madam (a morally indefensible embrace of the exploitation inherent in capitalism).

It plays better than it summarizes.

The pleasures of living in the Bay Area in a nutshell: Too much good stuff. And we hope you drop by – singly, or with D, or (like James Dickey) with some woman you met on the plane. (But we would much prefer D.)

An Underheard Play: The Rest (and Too Much of the First) is Silence

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By which I mean Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days" is a brain play, best suited to a small venue, cramped and intimate. The actress has all the lines, and she spends the first act buried to her waist in an earth mound and the brief second act buried up to her neck in the same dirt. (Dirt = death? Whatever it represents, it's winning.)

It's all voice and facial expression, all one big physical metaphor. The ideas behind it all are still true enough. But the play itself is transparent. We see right through it to those ideas, which makes it an easy play. (May I call it Powerpoint Drama?)

Letting it be swallowed up outdoors with half the audience straining to see and to hear -- which was my own experience at the CalShakes performance this afternoon -- invents difficulties that present no rewards.

Robert Hurwitt likes it better than I do, though I agree with his praise of actress Patty Gallagher -- who parachuted into the role when celeb Marsha Mason dropped out (and don't get me started on aging stars yearning for one last ego trip down Sunset Boulevard).

Gallagher really is excellent. Hurwitt says that, "Buried up to her neck, it's remarkable how well her expressive features and Beckett's words can fill so large a space."

Except they don't. Game try, though, in what I, as eyewitness, now have the right to describe as one of Beckett's lesser efforts.