Engineer's Daughter

hamilton

I have very little to add to the very smart online discourse surrounding Thomas Kail's live capture of Hamilton currently streaming on Disney+, but will ramble for a moment anyway. I had seen it live in San Francisco last April (and I won the ticket lottery so was in the damn orchestra!) with a fantastic cast, and I definitely preferred our Hamilton Julius Thomas III's singing voice to Lin-Manuel Miranda's, as charming as Miranda is onscreen. But what pleasure to see that insanely talented Broadway cast up close and personal, with Daveed Diggs in particular absolutely running away with every scene he appears in. Like the rest of the country I am thinking way more critically than even a year ago about how the white enslavers are portrayed in the musical, and Miranda himself this week described criticisms of how he handled slavery as valid. The optismism palpable in the onscreen production (filmed in June 2016) is almost physically painful too, given all that has transpired since then. However, one of Hamilton's greatest achievements is its reclaiming and remixing of history, and now with it readily accessible to anyone who can afford Disney+, not just those who could pony up $$$ for a ticket, the narrative is further democratized. And I will forever love Miranda for giving Eliza the last gasp.

See also:

• Debating 'Hamilton' as It Shifts From Stage to Screen
• 'Hamilton' faces fresh criticism as film arrives at time of racial reckoning

les blancs

Of the pre-recorded theater options online, filmed back in that time when we could sit in an audience together, the plays that London's National Theatre have offered (for free, for a week at a time) on their YouTube channel have been seriously top-notch. This week's selection is particularly gripping: their 2016 staging of Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs, her last play and one that was never produced in her too-short lifetime. Hansberry makes the scourge of colonialism deeply personal by setting the action in an unspecified African country struggling to find its way to independence, at a mission run by white people who are not keen on examining their own racism and complicity. When Tshembe arrives home for a visit he finds himself in the middle of the maelstrom, and he is forced to confront the repercussions of centuries of imperialism as they resonate in his own family. The National Theatre's breathtaking production was directed by South African director and playwright Yaël Farber, and she makes powerful use of music and movement within the action of the play while simultaneously speaking to the very-present moment. I gave the cast a standing ovation in my living room.

See also:

• National Theatre at Home: Les Blancs

input july 2020

Books

The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu

I Don't Want to Die Poor - Michael Arceneaux

 

Movies

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Joel and Ethan Coen

Tangerine - Sean Baker

The Vast of Night - Andrew Patterson

Between the Lines - Joan Micklin Silver

Hamilton - Thomas Kail

Frida - Julie Taymor

You Are Not I - Sara Driver

Sleepwalk - Sara Driver

When Pigs Fly - Sara Driver

The Bowery - Sara Driver

 

Streaming

Never Have I Ever

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

 

Virtual Theater

Lungs at the Old Vic

Les Blancs at the National Theatre

The Line at Public Theater

input june 2020

Books

I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz - Eve Babitz

The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life - Andrew Blauner, editor

Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness - Tim Parks

Margery Kempe - Robert Glück

Marrow and Bone - Walter Kempowski

 

Movies

Dolemite - D'Urville Martin

The Watermelon Woman - Cheryl Dunye

The Owls - Cheryl Dunye

Pan's Labyrinth - Guillermo del Toro

Minding the Gap - Bing Liu

The Handmaiden - Park Chan-wook

But I'm a Cheerleader - Jamie Babbit

Return to Oz - Walter Murch

Mudbound - Dee Rees

Empty Suitcases - Bette Gordon

Variety - Bette Gordon

Luminous Motion - Bette Gordon

Apollo 11 - Todd Douglas Miller

Embrace of the Serpent - Ciro Guerra

Fantastic Mr. Fox - Wes Anderson

20th Century Women - Mike Mills

Beach Rats - Eliza Hittman

The Central Park Five - Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

Olivia - Jacqueline Audry

 

Streaming

Gentefied

The Midnight Gospel

Dark

 

Virtual Theater

Anno Domino at Stephen Joseph Theatre

State vs Natasha Banina at Arlekin Players Theater

Tartuffe at Moliere in the Park

the week that was

Things worth sharing:

1. Anyone who has read King Leopold's Ghost knows that Adam Hochschild excels at making even the most difficult and tragic events of history eminently readable, and his superb essay collection Lessons from a Dark Time illuminates some dark corners indeed but covers some hopeful subjects as well. Related, from The New Yorker: When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals.
2. For the collaborative show How To Fall In Love In A Brothel by Sunhui Chang, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and Maya Gurantz currently on display at Catharine Clark, the viewer is invited to engage with the exhibition at the level of intimacy that feels right to you. Watch a video in the media room, poke a hole in the shoji screens that form the central gallery installation, or schedule an "intimacy hour" to spend time inside said installation.
3. Guerrero Gallery is filled to bursting right now with art from three very exciting local artists: photography from Marcela Pardoa Ariza, paintings and installations from Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and paintings and sculptural work from Troy Chew.
4. Saturday evening I was at ODC for Signals from the West, a breathtaking amalgam of dance, video and performance art, sound, and more, envisioned by curators Claudia La Rocco, Hope Mohr, and Julie Potter. From their program intro: "Signals from the West is a multi-disciplinary conversation within the international celebration of the Merce Cunningham centennial. We invited ten Bay Area artists from the visual, literary, and performing arts to be in workshop with each other and with the choreographers and former Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener: an experiment for everyone." More experiments like this please!
5. Meanwhile back in Oakland, more excellent curation last weekend in the form of the film program Unruly Alliances organized by Amanda Nudelman and Rosa Tyhurst at Royal NoneSuch. I caught a screening Sunday afternoon that featured work by Patrick Staff, Connie Zheng, and Yetunde Olagbaju, and the group discussion afterward with Zheng and Olagbaju gave me much food for thought. Much love and restful energizing thoughts to Royal NoneSuch too as they close for a year-long sabbatical.
6. High Life (aka Robert Pattinson in Space) is not without its flaws, but personally I love it when Claire Denis fucks with my head. Other positives include solid black hole science, a spaceship designed by Olafur Eliasson, and a Tindersticks soundtrack.
7. I also did a rewatch of Clio Barnard's fascinating 2010 film The Arbor, in which actors lip-sync to interviews with friends and family of playwright Andrea Dunbar alongside newsreel footage and stagings of Dunbar's work.
8. And if you can squeeze a play into your busy schedule today or tomorrow, I highly highly recommend Nassim at Magic. Just don't read too much about it ahead of time, all of the fun is in the discovery.

go see this

Chelsea Knight

March 1 - Chelsea Knight at the Wattis.  As part of their year of programming that grapples with the practice of the great Andrea Fraser, the Wattis is hosting a "performative lecture" tomorrow night by NYC video and performance artist Chelsea Knight that promises to be totally rad.  She will be taking on the persona of an artist giving an artist talk and will be featuring clips of her past work.  Where fact ends and fiction begins, and vice versa, might be completely subjective.

 

Mica Sigourney by Robbie Sweeny

March 1 - The News: Queer Exceptionality at SOMArts.  For those who prefer their performance art with a gay cabaret twist, check out The News instead.  Every month a select group of local artists gathers at SOMArts to present new work, with each piece no longer than 10 minutes.  Tomorrow night writer Emily K. Holmes is the guest curator and has asked Mia Satya, John Cartwright and Mica Sigourney, Minji Sohn, Kiyan “Kiki” Williams aka Mx Sula, and wild card KVNDRY SINGS to consider the theme of queer exceptionality.  

 

Luisa Frasconi and Lauren Spencer

Through March 12 - Mechanics of Love at Crowded Fire.  Dipika Guha's inventive new play doesn't pretend to offer any ultimate answers about love, but her characters certainly try their best to figure things out.  Fairzi's husband Glen has a memory condition and keeps eloping with other women when he forgets he's married, but without any rancor Faizi invites the latest one, the ballerina Francesca, to live with her and Glen as a sort of personal assistant.  A genial mechanic named Georg further complicates matters, as does the fact that Glen's affliction appears to be catching...

 

Tyrone Mitchell Henderson and Tim Kang

Through March 27 - Aubergine at Berkeley Rep.  What began as a short play about food written by Julia Cho several years ago for Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor is now an exceptional full-length production that remains intimate even as it examines mortality and generational differences.  Cho manages to perfectly balance the hard stuff with a sharp sense of humor, but I guarantee there will still be a few tears as Tim Kang's Ray comes to terms with imminent death of his father, a Korean immigrant to the States.  Food remains a strong theme throughout the play too, and many of my favorite moments involved the characters describing Proustian memories of meals past.  Highly recommend, but do not attend hungry.

go see this

Rafael Delacruz and Quintessa Matranga

Through February 13 - Quintessa Matranga and Rafael Delacruz: 100% Stupid at Et al. The only overt collaboration in this show is the piece pictured above featuring those fetching camels, but the artists share a candor in their paintings and photographs that is a breath of fresh air in an overly self-conscious art world.  The gallery is also hosting a V Day Death Note screening Sunday evening organized by Elliott Cost and featuring Matranga and Delacruz as well as a host of other contributors, and then I very eagerly anticipate the Et al. Etc. space opening in the Minnesota Street Project later this spring.

 

Ehren Tool

Through February 13 - Ehren Tool: Meditation on the Impacts of War at 2291 3rd St. Speaking of Minnesota Street Project, while the complex's new set of galleries is getting ready for primetime this Dogpatch outpost has been hosting a series of excellent exhibitions.  This latest one featuring work by Marine veteran Tool is extremely moving, especially if you spend any amount of time handling the cups he makes that explicitly deal with the impact of military conflict on our society.  An integral part of his practice is to distribute the cups (I have one myself), and and he will be doing so at the show's closing on Saturday.

 

Hershey Felder

Through February 14 - Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin at TheatreWorks.  When I saw Mr. Felder do his Leonard Bernstein show at Berkeley Rep some time back I was thrilled when he mentioned at the end that he was in the process of developing a new play about Irving Berlin, and this delightful meditation on the so-prolific composer is the result.  Even those supposedly unfamiliar with Berlin will probably recognize a good portion of the tunes, and if nothing else it is sheer pleasure to hear Felder play piano and sing.  I personally could have done without the sing-along portions of the performance, but if you can't get enough of such things Felder is doing a special presentation on Monday of selections from the Great American Songbook with full audience participation encouraged/required.

 

Mercedes Dorame

Through February 14 - Interwoven: Indigenous Contemporary at the Thacher Gallery.  I've been to the lovely Manresa Gallery situated in St. Ignatius Church on the USF campus many times before, but little did I know there is also the Thacher Gallery tucked into the back of the nearby Gleeson Library.  This group exhibition at the Thacher was put together by the university's Curatorial Practicum students and is a wonderfully stereotype-busting survey of recent indigenous art.  With more than a dozen artists represented the threads connecting their diverse works include a respect for ritual and heritage (and often a sly sense of humor), but otherwise the show is a strong reminder that there is no one kind of "native" art.

 

Margo Hall

Through February 14 - Gem of the Ocean at Marin Theatre Company.  If you've ever seen any of the other plays in August Wilson's epic ten-play century cycle exploring the African American experience over the past hundred years this is where the story begins, in 1904 Pittsburgh in the home of matriarch Aunt Esther (the always-amazing Margo Hall).  Director Daniel Alexander Jones utilizes a beautiful "theatrical jazz" technique that leaves the stage fairly spare but turns certain scenes into pure poetry as the actors convey emotion and action through gesture and suggestion (and heaps of talent).  I was completely riveted throughout, and oh August Wilson writes such amazing words.

current recs

Through May 31st - Jaimie Healy and Teresa Baker: almost (IS) is at Interface Gallery.  I remain highly smitten with whatever Teresa Baker does, and here her thoughtful work is paired beautifully with Jaimie Healy's sculptural amalgamations. 

 

May 15-17 - May Day 2015 with CounterPulse.  Celebrate CounterPulse's 10 years in their Mission space and their imminent move to their new neighborhood with this weekend chock full of dance, performance, cocktails, a family-friendly block party, and more.

 

Through June 7 - Ondine by We Players.  To say too much would ruin the many wonderful surprises We Players have in store for you in their immersive interpretation of this very watery play, but believe me when I say you should dress in multiple layers.

 

Through May 24 - Head of Passes at Berkeley Rep.  MacArthur genius Tarell Alvin McCraney infuses his tale of a Louisiana family with elements of a Greek tragedy, anchored by an incredible Chicago cast and Cheryl Lynn Bruce as matriarch Shelah. 

one week

one week