Engineer's Daughter

notes from the weekend

• I was thrilled to hear the Cantor was getting the Morris Hirshfield exhibition that received such rave reviews at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and it does not disappoint. Hirshfield was a self-taught artist who came to painting late in life for a brief but prolific career, and his animals and nude ladies are utterly bewitching.
• Meanwhile Hansol Jung's Wolf Play at Shotgun is also well worth your time as it tells the story of a young Korean adoptee who processes his feelings by imagining he is more lupine than human. As always Shotgun does some really stunning tricks with the staging, and the cast also features some of our local best.

notes from the weekend

• I'd never attended a SPARC Theater production before but the chance to see Lauren Gunderson's Silent Sky, about the women at Harvard who made important contributions to the field of astronomy, under the canopy of the actual night sky in Livermore was just too good to pass up. And both the idyllic outdoor location at Darcie Kent Vineyards and the production itself, focusing on the brilliant Henrietta Leavitt as played by Elena Wright and full of Gunderson's trademark firecracker dialogue, was well worth the schlep.
• As I'd hoped, I was able to visit many galleries on Saturday and started with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, where their What Are Words Worth? group show is their last exhibition before the space closes for good (sigh). The curators chose work from the McEvoy collection that utilizes text in sculpture, photography, collage, neon, you name it, and with one whole gallery dedicated to the work of German conceptual photographer Natalie Czech of whom I am now a new fan. Thank you for all the great exhibitions, McEvoy!
• Meanwhile over at Creativity Explored, one of my fave writers Hilton Als curated a beautiful show called Figuratively Speaking: Art in Advertising, Writing in Art. Primarily featuring the work of Douglas Sheran and his transformations of magazine print ads into subtle pieces of abstract art, the exhibition also includes a single artwork each by Bertha Otoya and Roland Record to create some thought-provoking juxtapositions.
• And Jessica Silverman has not one but two fabulous shows up right now, the first being Jeffrey Gibson's Once More With Feeling featuring a series of his mesmerizing mixed-media collages. Gibson freely incorporates elements of his Native heritage including beadwork and pattern and then throws in song lyrics besides, creating a riot of color and reference, and I could stare at any one of these pieces for an hour.
• The other exhibition, Isaac Julien's Once Again...(Statues Never Die), is a complete showstopper as it conjures scenes out of Black history and culture filtered through Julien's sharp eye. Julien is referencing specific figures from the past but you don't have to know that to appreciate how he reframes the narrative and shifts our collective gaze.
• Last but definitely not least I took myself out to the Concord Pavilion last night for the Hot Summer Nights tour and specifically to see my girls En Vogue and TLC. I can't remember the last time I'd been at a show that large and certain aspects of the experience were absolutely ridiculous but also I danced like I was 16 again.

a room with a view

Like many women of my generation I've seen the Merchant-Ivory A Room with a View approximately a million times (yes I own the DVD), and I was also the type of teen that took the novel along with me as my sole cultural distraction when my pre-college "wilderness orientation" stranded me by myself in the Sierras for 24 hours. So normally I might have been a little nervous about the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley adaptation currently playing at John Hinkel Park, directed by Andrew Calabrese, except I knew local theater hero Stuart Bousel was the writer doing the adapting and I trusted his passion for the material implicitly. Sure enough, this is an entirely charming and faithful Room, with a wonderful ensemble cast sending their English accents to the back of the rustic outdoor amphitheater. Tyler Scott Null and Sophie Ruf (pictured) are perfect as George and Lucy, fumbling toward each other across barriers of class and social convention, and I loved how they made use of the park's environs leading up to their famous first kiss. The production contains many other clever touches too, such as the use of "marble" benches to denote the Italian setting at the beginning of the story or the way Bousel uses multiple characters to deal with moments of exposition. When answering the question "Something you want the audience to walk away with?" in the program, Bousel says, "That life is short and precious, and all of us play a role in one another's lives, often in ways we can't foresee, but what we can do is choose to be kind, generous, honest and above all else: engaged."

Masking? Only a smattering, but it was outdoors so my concern was low even as I continue to mask.

notes from the weekend

• You never think a scam will happen to you, but Lauren Smerkanich's excellent new play The Dignity Circle at Central Works is an incisive look at how smart modern women might fall for the culty appeal of a doomed MLM. Ringleader Angela, played by an incredibly persuasive Sierra Marcks, cloaks her scheme in the language of female empowerment and perhaps actually thinks she's doing good...while raking in cash from her marks, of course. It's always worth seeing the productions Central Works has on offer and this one is particularly compelling.
• Otherwise I've had some bad luck with the timing of my art and gallery visits recently, but hopefully next week I'll have a nice rundown. In the meantime stay safe tomorrow and keep raging against the dying of the light in this godforsaken country.

notes from the weekend

• A show at Berkeley Playhouse is always a low-key way to see a good musical and to enjoy some top-notch local talent besides, and I thoroughly enjoyed the world premiere of Laura Marlin and Phil Gorman's Becoming Robin Hood there Friday night. An alternate take on the origin of my fave hooded outlaw, the musical allows several other characters to be heroes as well. And DC Scarpelli as the Sheriff of Nottingham is worth the price of admission alone.
• The new Caitlin Cherry exhibition at the Wattis is a stone-cold stunner, a floor-to-ceiling mural composed of both paintings and digital prints all rendered in gorgeously lurid color. Cherry's depictions of Black female celebrities seem to swirl together and shimmer before your eyes, a comment on how contemporary culture subsumes personality, yet up close the women still retain their power.

notes from the weekend

• Regina Morones is incandescent as the title character in Shotgun Players' Yerma, adapted from the Lorca play and directed by Katja Rivera. On the surface the story is about one woman's too-consuming desire for a baby, but the viewer can also extrapolate outward to conundrums women have faced through the ages and to Lorca's own struggles with his sexuality. Risky, powerful work.
• The new exhibition at Letterform Archive, Subscription to Mischief, is absolutely superb, viewing graffiti through the lens of the '90s zines that both documented it and helped to legitimize it as an art form. I'm always blown away by Letterform's meticulously researched wall texts, and though the East Coast is strongly represented there are many local legends in the show besides.
• Catharine Clark recently extended its gallery space into the rooms next door, and the Jen Bervin exhibition that is there right now is an excellent inaugural use of the space. The centerpiece of the show is the Mississippi River, visualized by the artist in hand-sewn sequins and positioned so that it spills down one entire wall and winds its way across the ceiling, but Bervin's other conceptual work (test tubes containing the ashes of burned journals, "poems" of silver thread) is also quite lovely.

notes from the weekend

• The Chron didn't like it but I thought Josh Costello's adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano at Aurora was a wonderful, with particularly affecting performances from local faves William Thomas Hodgson as Cyrano and Leontyne Mbele-Mbong as Roxane. Costume designer Maggie Whitaker outdid herself too, cleverly integrating African fabrics and period frippery into her designs.
• ICA San José is just bursting with awesome exhibitions right now, beautifully curated to lead a visitor from Masako Miki's neon outside the gallery, to Susan Blaustein's sensuous paintings in the room just inside the front doors, to Bridget-Riley-themed work in the main galleries by Sarah Hotchkiss, Lordy Rodriguez, and Susie Taylor, to Rudy Lemcke's installation about the transit of Venus in the projection room, to Rhonda Holberton's melding of the digital and the physical in the back room.
• And while I was in town I ambled on down to the San José Museum of Art because Sadie Barnette has a new exhibition there and I always love to see her glitter-spackled meditations on family and community. I was also excited to see the Kelly Akashi show again, which is so deliciously uncomfortable, and to marvel again at her use of materials.
• I leapt at the opportunity to see NEA Jazz Master saxophonist David Liebman live at the California Jazz Conservatory Saturday night, accompanied by Liberty Ellman on guitar, Jeff Denson on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. He started with Cole Porter and ended with John Coltrane, and Mike Zilber jumped on stage to help out on his own sax for a couple numbers too.
• Two period plays in one weekend! Under Patrick Dooley's direction at Shotgun, Pierre de Marivaux's The Triumph of Love crackles with wit and humor, even if the audience is not quite sure how to feel about the duplicity of the main character at the end. She wins at the game of love, but at what cost to those around her? Very real.
• Last but definitely not least, Mick LaSalle wrote a tribute to my friend Steve Salmons that had me wiping away fresh tears. I've been trying to get my own words together about how much Steve meant to me but I'm not quite there yet, and I really appreciate what Mick was able to capture about what an amazing individual he was.

prospero's island

I've seen a couple very intriguing interpretations of The Tempest recently, first virtually via Round House Theatre where Prospero is a magician, and then live at the Herbst Saturday evening for the premiere of Prospero's Island, a new chamber opera by Allen Shearer and Claudia Stevens. The couple set the action on the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas just after WWII, and this time Prospero is a mad scientist keeping the secrets of his Nazi past from his daughter Mandy. It's a brilliant update, allowing Ariel and Caliban to be the human-animal hybrid outcomes of tragic experiments, and a strong theme of respect for our natural world runs through both acts as well. The production itself was incredibly polished and featured strong vocal performances and many delightful moments, including a chorus of penguins played by members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Shakespeare remains ever malleable and relevant to our current moment.

Masking? Supposedly required but not enforced and practiced by about 70% of the audience.

res-erection

Birdie Bob Watt as A Crab On Uranus

Spring has sprung in the Bay Area (in between atmospheric rivers) and the Cockettes are celebrating with a marvelous musical revue at the Oasis saucily entitled "Res-Erection." Featuring old tunes and new by original composer Scrumbly Koldewyn, who also performs, the show careens joyfully from irreverent takes on the Easter season, to explicit scatological and sexual references, to the kinds of stunning torch songs that Sylvester used to sing with the original incarnation of the group in the '70s. At the performance I attended last night the cast remained fiercely undaunted in the face of minor technical difficulties, and the supportive audience heartily cheered them on and howled with laughter as the performers barely missed a beat. At a frightening time when queer lives are under attack in America, the flamboyant, gender-fluid artistry of the Cockettes is as defiant as ever, and they do it with plenty of glitz and glitter besides.

Masking? I was one of maybe five maskers in the building, not unexpected at a cabaret show but it still would have made me nervous without my immunity.

witness

Through November 13 - Carrie Mae Weems: Witness at Fraenkel Gallery

In a week where we learned that U.S. police killings were undercounted by more than 17,000 over the past 40 years, it felt like a gift to be able to survey the work that Carrie Mae Weems has created over that same period of time. While her photographs could easily fill an entire floor of a museum, Fraenkel has curated a  focused selection that displays the breadth of her practice and creates meaningful juxtapositions besides. Two pieces from her famous Kitchen Series are here, in which Weems places herself into quiet scenes of domesticity and relationship, as well as heartbreaking newer work that speaks directly to police violence against Black bodies. I also loved the cluster of photos from her series Family Pictures and Stories with their depictions of family dynamics and Black joy. And then I stepped out of the gallery and directly into Market Street to join the Women's March and to yell for choice and reproductive rights. 

Other things I liked this week:

• Motley Stones by Adelbert Stifter. Set in the Austrian/German countryside and written in the nineteenth century with a surprisingly modern sensibility, these thematically-linked short stories are pure poetry, especially in the translation by Isabel Fargo Cole. Stifter wrote, "We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race."
• Working Girls by Lizzie Borden. Sex work is nothing but work in this 1986 masterpiece that follows a day in the life of working girl Molly at a high-end brothel in New York. With innovative cinematography and realistic interactions amongst Molly and her fellow workers nothing is gratuitous either.
• With virus transmission still at Substantial in Alameda and San Francisco counties I'm still opting for virtual culture where I can, and Crowded Fire's fantastic play The Displaced, written by Isaac Gómez, still managed to scare the bejeezus out of me even from the safety of my couch. What happens when the ghosts of gentrification become real?
• I was similarly grateful this week for Opera San José and their wonderful online presentation of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, an opera that just goes to show artists have been exploring the fraught relationship between the two composers long before Amadeus.