I passed a guy on the sidewalk today who had several prominent tattoos, as indeed so many people do these days. I was thinking idly about how much things have changed, and how 25 or 30 years ago I knew very few people with even one tat on a shoulder, and now I know people with full-sleeve and even in a few cases full-body tattoos.

And I suddenly flashed on a stage direction from some play from at least a couple decades ago, about being wary of a man with two tattoos. The stage direction seemed so striking and funny to me at the time that I could remember just about the whole thing, except for what play it was from and what the character’s name was. Thinking back on it now, though, the stage direction seems rather quaint and small-minded. But the sharp way it’s phrased still made me chuckle to think back on it.

Yay for the Internet. Took me fifteen seconds to discover that it’s from Larry Shue’s brilliantly funny farce The Foreigner, which I saw the premiere of in New York City in the late 1980s. I remember it got poor reviews, but it was playing at a small off-Broadway theater (at the Astor Place Theatre I’m pretty sure), and thanks to some extra capital it could afford to run for a month or so to poor houses while hoping for good word of mouth to spread. Which it did and became a nice success, running for over a year if I’m remembering.

I saw the play twice, the first time when the houses were still poor and then again several months later. I bought a copy to read a few years later, which is when I found out the play had funny stage directions, too. Here’s the stage direction that accompanies the entrance of the creepy thug Owen Musser:

(Psychologists tell us to beware the man with two tattoos. One, he may have gotten on a drunk or a dare. But two means he went back. Owen is a two-tattoo man.)

Dave and I saw Mark Jackson’s new play Salomania at the Aurora Theater last weekend. It’s a terrific piece of theater. I’m nearing a deadline so I can’t take the time to write much about it, but this is the last weekend so I wanted to at least mention that it’s well worth seeing.

What’s most awesome about the play is the staging. The play itself is something of a collage of scenes that take place in a number of very different locations — a World War I battlefield, a London courtroom, a pub, the central character’s memories and fantasies, to name a few. I thought the dialogue and characterizations were mostly rather weak and two-dimensional, but the staging is brilliant and makes it all work. The way that the scenes are juxtaposed — often even superimposed — and played out on Nina Ball’s wonderful set is consistently breathtaking and beautiful.

Seven actors play all the parts. The cast is consistently good. Madeline H.D. Brown is terrific as Maud Allen, the controversial dancer whose libel suit against a reactionary newspaper is the center of the play.

Among the others, I thought Kevin Clarke was a particular standout, bouncing back and forth deftly among three (or was it four?) different roles and making them all distinctive and engaging. (He did a similar task in Mark Jackson’s God’s Plot at Shotgun Players a while back, and with similar panache.)

I think this is only the second play of Mr. Jackson’s I’ve seen, the other being God’s Plot, and I thought that play had similar weaknesses in the writing but phenomenal strengths in the staging. But we’ve seen a few other plays directed by him, and they’ve all been strikingly staged and acted. I’d say Mr. Jackson hasn’t found his voice yet as a writer, but as a director he’s amazing.

Dave and I saw Spunk at California Shakespeare Theater Friday night. It’s terrific! Full of life and spirit and color and playful invention, lots of music, and tons of heart. The show is based on three stories by Zora Neale Hurston (an author I’ve been meaning to get to know better for several years now, but haven’t actually read yet), adapted by George C. Wolfe.

Among other things, I am extremely grateful to be able to say now that I have seen Peter Callender jiving around the stage in a vivid red-orange zoot suit, which he does in the middle piece, “Story in Harlem Slang”. Not the usual sort of role for him, but he’s terrific.

I was a bit startled at first by the earthiness of some of the language, which even includes one use of nigger, flung as part of an insult from a black man to his wife, and several instances of Zigaboo, sometimes shortened to Jig, used very casually among the characters in “Story in Harlem Slang”, all of whom are black. I wasn’t shocked — like most people I know about my age, when I was a child I was taught that nigger was the worst kind of hate speech and never to be used under any circumstances whatsoever; but I’ve had a couple decades by now to get used to hearing young people of all races using it among themselves as though it were just teasing. All the same, I found it startling to hear the words used in a play set in the 1930s. Obviously, I have to assume that they’re in the play because they’re in Ms. Hurston’s stories, and that they’re in her stories because she heard them used in this way in the Harlem culture around her. So the use of those words in Ms. Hurston’s stories kind of skewers my perception that that kind of casual use was a recent thing.

Anyway, I don’t want to make too much to make out of a few words. Overall, the language in the play is vibrant with life and color, and I’m looking forward to reading the play so I can savor it better — the second piece in particular is loaded with unusual turns of phrase that rush by, one after the other.

I thought Peter Callender was a standout as Sykes, a tyrannical (and cheating) husband. But everyone in the cast is terrific, and they all get their turns to shine. Dawn Hall makes the emotional journey of Sykes’s long-suffering wife vivid, both moving and very funny. Dawn L. Troupe sings many of the songs in the play, and beautifully. Tyee Tilghman is a hoot in the second story as a hick who comes to Harlem and becomes a suave ladies’ man. Aldo Billingslea and Omoze Idehenre give complex and endearing performances in the third story (the best of the three, it seems to me), “The Gilded Six-Bits”, as Joe and Missie May, a pair of newlyweds whose happiness is troubled by the temptations of higher living. (It’s a really beautiful piece of writing, too.)

Dave and I saw The Scottsboro Boys at ACT last week, thanks to a discount offer on Goldstar. It’s Kander and Ebb’s last score, as Fred Ebb died before the show was finished.

The show is based on the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers sentenced to death for raping two white women in Alabama in 1931, despite a conspicuous absense of evidence that any rape occurred at all, and the two women having rather obvious reasons to lie. The show uses the minstrel show as its central metaphor — in addition to the nine young men, there are a Mr. Bones and a Mr. Tambo, who play various parts, and an Interlocutor. (There’s also a black woman who watches the story silently — her purpose is a mystery for much of the show but becomes clear by the end; I’m not going to give it away.)

As I watched the show, though, it seemed to me that the use of such an emotionally charged metaphor was never really justified, even though it’s used in some inventive ways. There were moments when I thought the point was going to be that people on all sides looked at the case and saw whatever they wanted to see, in the same way that most blackface performers relied on the audience bringing in with them a willingness to see its simple preconceptions about blacks reinforced. But this idea was never really developed.

Besides which, the show itself, it seems to me, relies on a liberal audience bringing in a willingness to see its simple preconceptions about racial prejudice reinforced. The young men are guileless victims, the white Southerners are venal buffoons. This is fun for a while, but well before the end of the show I was wishing there were some three-dimensional characters somewhere. If this play were about an issue that we didn’t come into the theater already having strong emotions about, I don’t think we’d be stirred. The show paints everything in big, broad strokes and downplays or eliminates all sorts of inconvenient human complexities about the case that could get in the way of our seeing it in simple good-versus-evil terms.

Nothing is said, for example, of the fight that started the whole mess. Nothing is said of the fact that, during their trials, some of the young men were frightened into claiming under oath that they witnessed the alleged rape and accused others of having taken part in it.

It seems to me that the script verges on out-and-out dishonesty at the end, when we’re told that Haywood Patterson, one of the young men, died in jail, and the clear implication is that he was still serving his sentence for the nonexistent rape. In fact, Mr. Patterson managed to escape after 18 years in jail, and he fled north to Detroit, where he lived in secret for three years until the FBI arrested him; the governor of Michigan, however, refused to extradite him, and he gained his freedom. But less than a year later, he killed another man in a fight; Mr. Patterson claimed self-defense, but he was convicted of manslaughter, and it was while he was in prison for this crime that he died of cancer at the age of 39.

Which, it seems to me, is a pretty darned compelling story. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the one actually told in the show is thin.

From what I’ve read, in fact, Mr. Patterson had quite a mix of admirable virtues and serious faults — hot-tempered and easily pushed to violence, yet passionate and intelligent — in both cases, to a much greater degree than the play shows us. His too-short life would make a terrific story for the stage, I think, but this one seems to me to shy away from both extremes, downplaying both his faults and his virtues, making him out to be a very ordinary guy trying to find his path in an extraordinary situation. As I write this, I realize that this is a perfectly valid story to want to tell, but turning a fairly recent historical event into something very different and yet continuing to say that you’re telling a true story seems a bit dicey to me. Maybe the writers would have done better to turn it into an explicitly fictional event, like the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, or found an actual event that better fit the kind of story they wanted to tell.

There’s another and more abstract reason that I’m not wild about the minstrel show metaphor, too. I’m just feeling like I’ve seen this basic device tried over and over and over again in musicals: An unpleasant story, or sometimes just a particularly unpleasant part of a story, is told for ironic effect through the relentlessly upbeat music of some bygone popular song style or styles. I’ve occasionally seen it done brilliantly, as in Chicago, the Loveland sequence in Follies, parts of Assassins, the Grand Canal sequence in Nine. More often I’ve seen it done not so brilliantly, as in Grind, Barnum, Rags, and so on and so forth and so on and so forth. Ultimately it’s a device that’s difficult to get a lot of depth or scope or heart into, and I’m kind of tired of it. I remember already being kind of tired of it in the musical theater writing workshop I was part of for many years way back in the 1980s. I’m tired of it even though there’s such a sequence in the second act one of my very favorite musicals, The Golden Apple (which as far as I know was the first show to use the device in any kind of extended way, back in I think the 1950s).

I hate to crab so much about the show, though, because in spite of all this, there are a lot of things in it to enjoy. The performances are winning. The singing is great. The dancing is absolutely spectacular. But I kept hoping for more depth and character in the story, given the seriousness of the subject matter, and it never got there.

Dave and I went back last week to see The Tempest at CalShakes a second time. Wow! The show has really strengthened a lot since we saw it in previews, and it was good then. The production doesn’t have the intensity of the shoestring production we saw at Butterfield 8 a while back, but it has all kinds of life and color and spirit and magic. And clarity, too — I think this was one of the clearest and most understandable performances of a Shakespeare play I’ve seen. Definitely worth seeing the second time.

On Friday Dave and I saw the second preview performance of The Tempest at California Shakespeare Theater. Tempest is not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but I thought this production was surprisingly playful and charming and a lot of fun.

The play is reduced to just eleven roles, and those eleven roles are played by just six people, five of them playing two parts each and the sixth playing just one. There are also three more actors dressed in black who are spirits assisting Ariel, but who speak no lines. The doubling of the roles is lively and fun and adds a bit of agreeable foolery to the play, which is so often done in a ponderous, portentous manner, or so it has seemed to me. In this production, the play has a whimsical lightness I haven’t seen it have before, and for the most part it suits the play well.

I thought the two standouts were Nicholas Pelczar and Michael Winters. Mr. Pelczar was especially deft somersaulting (both figuratively and, at times, literally) back and forth between the serious young lover Ferdinard and the drunken clown Trinculo, making two very different characters out of them and switching between them adroitly. Mr. Winters was just as deft in his own way, doubling as Prospero and Stephano and defining both characters very sharply. Either performance by itself would have been terrific; pulling off both in the same evening is remarkable.

And yet I felt all the same that that doubling, which kept Mr. Winters busy and required some quick changes of character at times, kept Prospero from having all the weight and power that he usually has. If only one part in the production is to go undoubled, I wonder why it isn’t Prospero, making use of the asymmetry in the scheme to put more focus on the character at the center of the play.

Instead, it’s the actor playing Alonso — a less important role than either Prospero’s or Stephano’s — who has no other part to play. What’s more, Alonso is played by James Carpenter, who has easily the most commanding stage presence in the cast. It seemed odd to me, and a missed opportunity to make better use of Mr. Carpenter. I wonder if there’s some technical reason I’m not seeing that it couldn’t have been Alonso and Stephano who were doubled instead.

Still, it was only the second preview, and things may have fallen better into their intended balance by opening.

The set and costumes and lighting and choreography (for Ariel and her attendant spirits) are all delightful — it’s an eye-filling show. The shipwreck at the beginning is a wonderful, imaginative, thrilling sequence. The moment near the end where Ariel is freed from her servitude at last is especially striking, bringing all those elements together for a few surprising moments of delight and beauty, and I’m not going to say any more about it than that.

I’ve looked at a copy of Miller’s adaptation now, which I’d never seen or read before, and I’ve added some more thoughts to my post about the play.

Short version: It seems to me that Miller’s adaptation is very different from Ibsen’s original in a crucial way, presenting Stockmann as seriously heroic where Ibsen presents him as comically misguided. So The Great Divide seems to be inspired by Miller’s adaptation, not Ibsen’s play. Whether that’s a good thing probably depends on how you feel about the Miller and Ibsen versions.

Dave and I saw The Great Divide at Shotgun Players in previews. It’s a new play by Adam Chanzit inspired by Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People, moving the setting to Colorado and changing the crisis from contaminated mineral baths to contaminated drinking water due to fracking (hydraulic fracturing used to extract gas and petroleum from the ground).

The production is good, with fine acting and inventive staging. But I found the play itself ultimately unsatisfying. It’s driven more by the desire to present all sides of a difficult social issue, and to spur the audience into thinking about what could be done about this issue in reality, than by the desire to tell a good story. The result is rather earnest and not, I think, entirely successful on either level.

But I don’t really see how a play ever can succeed at being a fair presentation of the complexities of a general social issue. A specific actual historical incident, perhaps. But as soon as you’re presenting a fictional incident that is supposed to be typical of a whole slew of similar incidents, the playwright is completely open to charges of stacking the deck — which is fair enough, because the playwright has stacked the deck, cannot possibly help but stack the deck. The very act of creating the story is one of carefully stacking the deck, and the playwright can as much as possible stack the deck so as to maximize the illusion in the theater of not having stacked the deck, but he or she cannot stack the deck so as to not have actually stacked the deck.

So if your goal is to heighten the audience’s interest in a particular social issue, I think the better approach is to drop fairness from your list of primary goals — it’s unattainable anyway — and concentrate instead on creating memorable characters and putting them through a compelling story.

Which I think is what Ibsen did in An Enemy of the People. The play doesn’t try to be “fair” about any particular issue; Ibsen didn’t give a damn if we left his play feeling a fresh determination to find better ways of handling future cases of contaminated mineral baths. He wanted to tell us a strong story about how a particular social dynamic works, how a self-effacing idealist who genuinely loves his community can step by step, and through no extraordinary fault of his own, be driven to become his own opposite: an idealist who stands self-righteously in opposition to that very community. In the final act, we see him slipping over the edge into full-out zealotry, insulting and threatening people who are trying to compromise with him, pulling his children out of school just to spite his community, and beginning to savor his alienation not just for the sake of his principles but for sake of the zealotry itself, for the heady buzz he gets from it.

The play is a mix of seriousness and satire, and the characters are in part satirical types, Tomas Stockmann included. It should have been a Frank Capra comedy starring Jimmy Stewart as Dr. Stockmann.

Later: Dave tells me that he first read the play in high school, and it was Arthur Miller’s version, which I don’t know at all. And he tells me that at the end of the play Stockmann is a completely heroic figure, standing up for truth in the face of the entire community. That may be Miller’s Stockmann, but I don’t think it’s Ibsen’s; Ibsen’s Stockmann is going over to the dark side where he’s not only lost his compassion for his community but forgotten his love for his family as well, seeing his situation as a crisis so extreme that it justifies his ordering them around like flunkies — and taking it for granted that they will of course do anything and make any personal sacrifice necessary to support him in his cause.

In an earlier play, Brand, Ibsen painted a picture of a man so zealous that he would not budge in his idealist convictions, even slightly, even when there is nothing physically at stake, only his own pride — not even when the very lives of his wife and child are at risk. In Enemy, Ibsen shows Stockmann taking the first steps toward becoming another Brand. Only, unlike Brand, in Enemy Ibsen makes sure that we see the comic side of things, too, and not just the serious side alone. (By the way, Ibsen himself described An Enemy of the People to his publisher as a comedy on a serious subject.)

Here’s Stockmann in the last act of Ibsen’s play, the mild-mannered doctor turning into a bitter and unforgiving zealot — and with no idea how comical he’s starting to sound:

Dr. Stockmann And look, Katherine — they’ve made a great tear in my black trousers, too!
Mrs. Stockmann Heavens! And that’s your best pair!
Dr. Stockmann Never wear your best trousers when you’re going out to fight for freedom and truth! Not that I care about the trousers — you can always sew them up again for me. But that the rabble should dare to attack me like this, as if they were my equals! I’ll never be able to abide that!

“Not that I care — you can always sew them up again for me”, he says, without the least idea that if he’s going to expect his wife to spend the rest of her life patching up his trousers after his fights, maybe her opinion about all this ought to count for something with him!

Stockmann decides the only answer is to leave not just his town but the whole corrupt country, but even his dreams of becoming a hermit are grandiose:

Dr. Stockmann If only I knew where I could buy a South Sea island or some unspoiled forest —
Mrs. Stockmann But think of the boys, Thomas!
Dr. Stockmann How strange you are, Katherine! Would you like the boys to grow up in a group like this? You saw for yourself last night that half the people here have lost their minds, and the other half don’t have any minds to lose.
Mrs. Stockmann Yes, but, Thomas dear, you also said some reckless things.

A little later:

Petra You should just laugh at them, Father.
Horster They’ll change their minds, Doctor.
Mrs. Stockmann Yes, Tomas, sure as you’re standing here.
Dr. Stockmann Yes, but it’ll be too late! They can wallow in their filth and be sorry that they’ve driven a patriot into exile!

Friends come to try to talk sense into Stockmann, and he chases them out by threatening to clobber them with his umbrella. And then the revelation: Stockmann discovers that he is tainted by the community’s “filth” as well, that there is in fact no getting away from it. And does he gain from this the insight that all of us are in fact tangled up in the complicated web of nobility and guilt that we’ve built for ourselves in our civilizations, and that maybe the better way to deal with all this is with compassion and sympathy for our shared weaknesses and strengths? Of course not! His response is to cling even more intensely to his view of himself as the only noble and pure soul to be seen anywhere around, to become even more unforgiving toward his community, and to vow to stay in the town and renew his battle against them all — all the while oblivious to how his overblown ranting, his dwelling on his torn trousers, and his chasing people around the room swinging his umbrella at them are turning him more and more into a buffoon.

Now, this is just the comic side of things I’m stressing here, and Ibsen has also shown us all the serious things that have led to this change in Stockmann, in such a way that we see the heroic side of his character as well. It’s hard to journey through the events of the play and blame the guy for losing his sense of proportion. But Ibsen also makes sure we see that he is in fact losing his sense of proportion.

Still later: Dave’s put up a window display at his bookstore with some paperback editions of An Enemy of the People in various translations, to tie in with the Shotgun production (the bookstore is The Other Change of Hobbit, at 3264 Adeline, a couple blocks north of the Ashby BART station and a couple of doors down from The Vault Cafe — an easy walk from the theater, too, so go visit!), and one of them is the Arthur Miller version, so I’ve had a chance while at the store to skim through it and read the last act. The Miller adaptation seems a lot more serious and earnest than Ibsen’s original, and Miller’s last act removes most of the comedy and presents Stockmann as pretty much a thorough hero. Gone is what seems to me to be one of the main themes of Ibsen’s play, that at the start of the story Stockmann is very, very naive and foolish about the world, and the story ends he is really just as naive and foolish as ever. Ibsen was invariably harsh with the idealists in his plays, no matter what side of an issue they were on, and he often made both comedy and tragedy out of the way they refuse to compromise with their ideals and end up making a far worse mess out of things than they would have if they’d been realistic and practical in the first place. But Miller clearly admires Stockmann and wants us to see him as noble and dignified, and the comedy in Ibsen’s lines and stage directions is toned way, way down or eliminated.

And it seems to me now that The Great Divide is probably inspired not by Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People but by Miller’s, and those are quite different things. And I may have to give The Great Divide another chance — I may have come in with the wrong expectations to see it fairly.

Dave and I took advantage of a discount offer on tickets and went back to see Anatol at the Aurora again. We both liked the play even better the second time. The performances were even stronger, sharper, and funnier than before. Also, we got to see the play from the opposite side of the stage (the Aurora has a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides), so we could see everything from a different angle — great fun, so thank you, ye gods of seat assignment. The Aurora has been one of my favorite companies since their days playing in a large room at the Berkeley City Club, and this production was no exception.

I gather from the comments I’ve seen on Goldstar and elsewhere that this hasn’t been a popular production. I’ve seen comments and a couple of reviews that complain that the central character isn’t likable and that makes the play itself impossible to enjoy — an attitude I totally do not understand. It seems to me that liking a character and being interested in what happens to the character are two different and to some extent even independent things.

Some of what I’ve read also suggests that some people are assuming that Anatol is supposed to be sympathetic and was regarded as sympathetic by nineteenth-century audiences, which is just wrong. If you cringe frequently at what Anatol says and does, then you’re getting the play, and you’re getting it in more or less the same way that its contemporary audiences got it; you’re just not getting that you get it.

One reviewer seemed to think that Anatol was a success originally because of its frankness about sex, but that our changing attitudes toward woman have dated the play and made it impossible now to approve of Anatol’s womanizing. That’s not quite right; there were plenty of plays in the nineteenth century that were every bit as frank about sex — really, many that were far more so. So many, in fact, that the theater had a reputation as not being quite a nice place for really respectable people.

However, in a typical nineteenth-century play, after the audience had had its fill of racy fun, the last scene would show conventional virtue triumphing. What was shocking about Anatol wasn’t the frankness about sex but the lack of explicit moral judgment. Anatol is presented for our examination and amusement, not as a simple theatrical type, neither as a single-minded villain nor as a shallow buffoon, but as a complicated psychological portrait with a few good points along with all his many bad points. If the final scene were replaced by one in which Anatol either shoots himself in despair or is forever reformed by the true love of a good, pure woman, the play would have looked a lot like a hundred others. But Schnitzler neither reforms nor kills off Anatol at the end of the play, just leaves him to continue on his self-deluded way, and some in the audience in those days found the absence of a firm moral judgment to be unsettling. Looks like some still do.

Anatol at the Aurora was terrific. Mike Ryan is both adorable and exasperating as Anatol — he made me believe that women would keep falling in love with Anatol and also made me believe that women would keep breaking up with him. Tim Kniffin as Max is funny and quite a bit more acid than I’ve imagined Max to be when I’ve read the play.

Delia MacDougall is really brilliant and often hilarious as six of Anatol’s lovers — a different one in each scene. Her performance is partly a tour de force and partly a quick-change stunt, and I’m not sure that in my ideal production I wouldn’t rather see two or three women splitting the roles, but she pulls off the six roles with great style and assurance.

She’s especially touching as an former lover of Anatol’s in a chance encounter on Christmas Eve, and especially hilarious as a ballerina eagerly wolfing down the expensive after-performance supper of oysters and champagne and Sacher torte that Anatol is buying her, determined to enjoy it even though the two of them are quarreling all through the meal, for she knows that the relationship is ending and that it will probably be her last fancy supper for a long time, and she can’t bear not to savor it.

Barbara Oliver’s staging is lovely, inventive and lively, but at the same time simple and direct. (I was misremembering before, though, when I said she directed that wonderful Vanya — welcome to late middle age, Scott. She was in it but did not direct it.)

Seeing the play in performance for my first time, I found that some parts of it seemed fairly facile to me again, just as the whole play had when I first read it in college. While I like the play much better now than I did in college, I can see why I felt the way I did. Some of it is predictable stuff. The first scene in particular seems that way to me, taking a fair amount of time to reach a conclusion that is telegraphed early on, and I think it gets the play off to a weak start.

But along with the sometimes-too-pat plotting is a lot of wonderful insight into a character who is maddingly, hilariously oblivious to his own nature and how he sabotages himself in his relationships with women.

The play is in seven unconnected vignettes; in this production one is dropped and the order of the others is slightly changed — probably in large part to make Ms. MacDougall’s changes of costume and character more manageable. Nothing wrong with any of that, but as long as they were switching things around, I do kind of wish that they’d dropped the first vignette instead. The vignette they don’t use involves Anatol’s affair with a married woman, and to me it has a bracing bleakness to it — on the page, anyway — that the other scenes don’t have, even the bittersweet Christmas Eve scene, and it makes an affecting contrast with the comedy of most of the scenes.