Woody Weingarten

We reveled in our fantasy.

Instead of deck-lounging in San Anselmo, our minds rocketed to Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous part of Tanzania in East Africa that’s housed humans for 20,000 years.

Why there?

God knows, since neither my wife nor I’d ever thought of going there — even when playing “let’s pretend.”

The mental trip was a lot cheaper than real airfare, of course.

And we definitely needed a break, fast approaching total pooped-outedness because of our typically intense, neurotic scheduling.

“I haven’t spotted a native all day,” I mused aloud, “but I have noticed animals nosing around.” Three deer-in-residence that devour whatever flowers dare pop up in our yard were grazing only a few feet away.

I had no clue what they were fantasizing.

Our compulsiveness made us set rules even for last month’s “impromptu” four-day staycation.

We’d monitor but not answer phone calls and emails. Nancy wouldn’t work on her upcoming piano-and-patter performances, nor I on promoting my book, “Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer.”

We mulled taking our dog, Kismet, to a West Marin beach, leisurely buying pants at the Northgate Shopping Center, taking out mu shu from Ping’s in San Rafael.

No deadlines. No schedule. No pressure.

The first morning, I asked our Zanzibarian chef to scramble eggs, with diced onions throughout.

When done, I said, “My compliments to the chef.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

Funny how much “he” resembled my wife.

The eggs were perfect. But we decided we’d prefer eating out most of the time, as if we were in a faraway Airbnb instead of at home in Marin County.

Relaxing has never been our long suit, though.

In fact, years ago I tried pulling off a Do-Nothing Day. It lasted under four minutes, after which I found myself checking 13 bookmarked news sites, exercising, phoning my daughter in New York, walking our dog at Drake High, helping Nancy unclog a filing cabinet, hauling a box to our storage shed, writing to an agent, and crafting a column.

We did better together.

One day we even watched a triple-feature in bed.

Best was “Alive Inside,” gifted us by Nancy’s Sausalito cousin, Laura Scott — a documentary about personalized music on iPods breaking through the solitary confinement of nursing home patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

It made us weep.

And rush to our checkbook.

The film also made me again appreciate Nancy’s shows. She regularly plays in memory-care and other senior facilities — geographically spread from The Redwoods in Mill Valley to Atria Tam Creek in Novato.

For years she’s told me of residents exiting almost catatonic states to tap their toes and fingers, swing their arms and mouth words from once forgotten tunes.

A two-way blessing, indeed.

Our second staycation day included laughing and crying at a Fairfax matinee of “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” and slowly strolling downtown in San Anselmo.

That was followed by a day of Nancy dipping into Ann Patchett’s anthology, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” and my reading Roger Ebert’s autobiography, “Life Itself” — books with mega-positive messages.

But our best “go-nowhere day” was the one in which we went somewhere.

Unscheduled.

We rode past Fairfax and San Geronimo through manifold tunnels of trees to South Beach, where we watched huge waves blithely erase both human and dog prints from the sand for hours.

And we topped off the jaunt with an elongated outdoor lunch at Perry’s Inverness Park Grocery while watching sheep across Sir. Francis Drake Blvd. that were even more tranquil than we.

Wristwatches seemed wholly out of place.

Though we did make it through the staycation without working, we also re-discovered our love for — and addiction to — the endeavors that comprise “our revolving-door lives.”

Well, to be honest, we almost made it.

Our final staycation hours were corrupted by a computer glitch on my iMac.

I gave myself papal dispensation to work it out.

Nancy and I chortled at my obsessiveness — and copped to preferring the excitement of fifth gear to the stability of first.

But even if we never repeat our four-day experiment, we at least learned we can take time off from overload.

Maybe half a day.

Or an hour.

Hey, watch out Zanzibar, here we come again.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com/

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” would merit a rave review were the theatrical company decades old.

But it deserves special acclaim because the two-character, two-act drama is Flynn Spirit Productions’ first outing.

Let’s say, six stars out of five.

Paul Ulloa and Charlotte Garwood, who named their new venture after their son, Flynn, have said they “want to bring risk-taking and [emotionally] moving theater to audiences and artists.”

They’ve fully met both prongs of that goal.

From the git-go.

Ulloa gets maximum credit because he effectively doubles as the play’s star, assuming the violence-prone title role opposite Kimberley Roberts’ power as Roberta, a divorced mother tormented by the ever-present image of an ugly sexual encounter with a family member.

Both tattooed characters in their mid-30s are foul-mouthed, angry, father-hating, tortured souls — the epitome of self-loathing.

Both seek compassion and forgiveness.

And both shout a lot — almost eardrum-splittingly — in the 20-minute first act, which is as intense as anything I’ve seen on a Bay Area stage in many a moon.

Playwright John Patrick Shanley and director Estelle Piper turn down the decibel count a notch for Act 2, which is nearly twice as long — and soften the would-be lovers into something approximating likability.

That let me breathe normally again.

And be grateful for experiencing something fresh, crisp and improbably believable in the 48-seat Phoenix Theater, high up in a building just off Union Square in San Francisco.

What had drawn me there was the playwright, John Patrick Shanley, who’d written two other plays I admired, “Doubt” and “Moonstruck.”

It wasn’t the fact that Danny, a possible killer known to his fellow truck drivers as “The Beast,” believes his inner pain (“everything hurts all the time”) will lead to a heart attack, or that unemployed Roberta thinks she’s nuts, desires punishment and fantasizes about being blissful in jail, and has relegated care of her 17-year-old son to her parents.

It wasn’t that either’s desperate craving for tenderness, for happiness, for love, may appear too rapidly.

Or that they both are momentarily naked.

And it certainly wasn’t that the set reminded me of a seedy neighborhood bar in the Bronx where, on my first newspaper job, I’d frequently guzzled tap beer with locals.

In any case, I’m glad I could watch two downtrodden theatrical caterpillars morph into butterflies.

Despite Danny undoubtedly remaining, as Roberta labels him, “a caveman.”

“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” runs at the Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason St. (between Geary and Post), Suite 601, San Francisco, through May 3. Night performances, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $30. Information: www.eventbrite.com.  or (510) 843-4822.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com

[Woody’s [rating: 2.5]

She’s in a dual struggle — to transcend prejudices of her redneck family and to deflect ridiculing of her singsong name, Sally Talle.

He’s in an uphill battle to conquer his fears of remaining an underdog and misfit.

And to neutralize her anxiety about being adversely linked with him.

They’re an unlikely pair of walking wounded, unlikely to triumph over her kin’s biases.

Whether they eventually can is the puzzlement of “Talley’s Folly,” a two-character drama that won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1980 and is currently being revived by the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley.

I found the new, 97-minute production much like life itself — sometimes electrifying and fast-moving, sometimes sluggish enough to be doze-worthy.

It also made me remember a classic Yogi Berra phrase: It’s déjà vu all over again.

“Talley’s Folly” focuses on circa-World War II differences in religion and class — and on a prickly intimacy achieved through verbal and physical dances of love on the Fourth of July, 1944.

And because it’s replete with a glut of references to barefaced anti-Semitism, it repeatedly jerked me forward to scary 2015 headlines from Europe.

Sally’s family was once one of the two wealthiest in Lebanon, Missouri, a community that happens to be prolific playwright Lanford Wilson’s real hometown.

So the Talleys had severe expectations of her — the gentile princess.

Matt Friedman, a Lithuanian-born Jewish accountant from St. Louis, arrives unexpectedly after a year away — to persuade Sally, a nurse’s aide once fired as a Christian Sunday School teacher, that he loves her and that she should escape with him.

He’s disregarded her not answering his letters.

They verbally fence in her family’s rundown boathouse (the physical folly of the title). They talk and talk and talk, and finally swap secrets (which, in my opinion, dovetail a little too easily).

Insults become part of the mix.

She accuses him, for instance, of not having “the perception God gave lettuce.”

He in turn knocks her family (particularly brother Buddy, who apparently can’t see him as anything but a semi-human outsider/Communist-socialist/traitor).

Lauren English plays Sally with Southern drawl and demeanor intact, opposite Rolf Saxon, who’s utterly convincing as the urbane Matt.

“Talley’s Folly” is a serious play laced sporadically with humor.

Especially funny is Matt’s rambling opening monologue to the audience (which he repeats at breakneck speed).

Imitations of Humphrey Bogart and a repugnant German likewise evoke amusement.

For most of the play, though, Sally and Matt are both awkward, “private people” trapped in their histories and what she might have called their Sunday best.

It’s as if they were pimply teenagers at ages 31 and 42.

And they essentially resemble one of his verbalized thoughts: Because people are like eggs, they must be careful not to bump into each other too hard.

The play was directed by Joy Carlin, a Bay Area theatrical hall-of-famer who portrayed Sally in the 1979 American Conservatory Theater production of “Fifth of July,” the last part of Wilson’s trilogy, which the Aurora will reprise from April 23 through May 17.

Although “Talley’s Folly” — which acts as a prequel within that trilogy — is filled with conflicts, it’s almost action-less.

Which makes Carlin’s task of injecting life nearly impossible.

She actually does amazing well considering the loquacious raw material Wilson provides.

“Talley’s Folly” runs at Harry’s UpStage at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through June 7. Night performances, Tuesdays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $30-35. Information: www.auroratheatre.org or (510) 843-4822.

 Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Bernie Krause’s been my friend more than 25 years.

In case you don’t recognize it, that statement’s a disclaimer.

A necessity — because the world premiere of “Biophony,” an exceedingly inventive Alonzo King LINES Ballet created collaboratively with Bernie, just exhilarated me.

Which I’m sure would have happened had I never heard of either of them.

“Biophony” is, simultaneously, aural and visual.

But my reaction was visceral.

Without warning, “Biophony” stripped away my desire and ability to experience it intellectually.

I’ve used the word brilliant in reviews before. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d had the foresight to know I’d need it for this three-way alliance (the third partner being English composer Richard Blackford, whose instrumentation has been tapered).

The experimental 38-minute piece opens with the clear chirping of an American cricket.

But the nine-movement work is performed without protracted breaks so I wasn’t always sure when I was being transported to the Amazon or Tanzania or the Arctic to hear a cornucopia of baboons and orangutans and chimpanzees, geese and ducks and exotic birds, wolves and pigs and giraffes, humpback whales, frogs, bees, creaking branches, waves and rain and thunder.

Even after reading the extensive program notes, I wasn’t always certain what critters or environmental elements were making the sounds I was hearing.

And I missed a lot.

A second, third or fourth hearing could be beneficial.

I was sure, though, that the natural sounds became incredibly melodic and worked divinely as a symphonic composition.

I was also positive Alonzo’s magical ballet blended perfectly with those sounds — a ballet that featured 11 dancers fashioning (on terra firma, sea and air) unconventional creature-like movements.

Bernie’d recorded the sounds in the wilds — jungle, tundra, wherever.

Alone mostly.

And in concert, so to speak, with the likes of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

Almost ­ — after his first ecological recording in Muir Woods and his initial soundscape installation in 1983 for the California Academy of Sciences — 5,000 hours of field recordings of 15,000 species in their natural habitats over a 50-year span.

Presto!

Enter “Biophany,” which consists of handpicked highlights from that collection — soundscapes of animals in self-contained ecosystems.

A unique orchestra-chorus.

In a KQED interview the day of the opening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Alonzo said, “You want people’s…hearts to be opened.”

They were.

In an Exploratorium conversation, he said of his work: “I don’t want it to look like choreography…If it [does], it’s not working.”

He succeeded at that, too.

Alonzo’s choreography is impressionistic and impressive.

Ditto the minimalist costuming (diaphanous wisps can be found hither and thither).

And since the set is basically a black backdrop with tantalizing ambiance and floor mosaics designed by Axel Morgenthaler’s lights, audiences can easily imagine themselves in sundry milieus.

Alonzo, who’s dreamed up close to 200 ballets for the troupe he founded in 1982, conspicuously let the dancers be themselves (alternately original, acrobatic and graceful).

Bernie, meanwhile, mulled if audiences “would get” his underlying message — “an elegy and eulogy” for natural environs that are vanishing because of man-made intrusions.

Time will be the jury.

I must note, however, that ballet purists — especially those whose tastes are limited to productions like “Swan Lake”  — may be unable to wrap their minds around this breakthrough effort.

Is “Biophony” completed? Conceivably not.

In an email to me, Bernie wrote, “With the curtain [going] up in five hours, I’m still in the process of making changes.”

The previous night, after grueling deliberation, he’d eliminated the elephants.

Bernie’s normal conversation often contains heady words unfamiliar to most: Bioacoustician. Geophony. Anthropophony.

No matter. We’ll stay friends even if I don’t fully grok his vocabulary.

Our friendship can’t compare, anyhow, to his with my wife, which dates 62 years to their Detroit school days together.

But back to now.

In a 22-minute prelude, seven members of the Philharmonia Baroque Chamber Players played short pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel while King’s company feverishly blanketed and owned the stage.

Bernie earlier had voiced a tongue-in-cheek fear “Biophony” might replicate the opening of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” — incite tomatoes being thrown.

I saw no fruit hit the stage.

But I did feel whitecaps of applause as the audience — partially stunned by the brilliance of the work, partially stunned by a somewhat abrupt ending — rose to give “Biophony” an extended standing ovation.

“Biophony” will run through April 12 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. (at Third), San Francisco. Night performances, 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 5 p.m. Sundays. Special gala performance, 6 p.m. Saturday, April 11. Tickets: $20 to $65. Information: http://www.@linesballet.org or 1-415-978-2787.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

No one plays board games in the new comedic drama, “Sister Play.”

And there’s no jump rope.

Repartee is the main pastime adult sisters Anna and Lilly engage in, alternating clever lines that guarantee Magic Theatre audiences will laugh loud and long.

Playful, zigzagging yet revealing soliloquies also flow from the mind of writer-director John Kolvenbach to the mouths of the siblings.

The same is true for two other off-kilter characters, Malcolm (Anna’s wooly-headed husband), and William Casy, a enigmatic drifter from Texas whom Lily picks up from the side of a Cape Cod highway.

All their monologues seem to begin with logic but end in amusing morasses of fractured philosophy and religion.

In between?

Non-sequiturs. Hyperbole. Near-gibberish that sounds poetic.

The setting is a rundown cabin to which we’re introduced when Malcolm thinks aloud: “What percentage of this place is mold, do you think?”

But the key question is if family fortresses and defenders can be over-protective.

I unconditionally loved Kolvenbach’s character-driven play.

I loved how all four intimately intertwined — and how so much of the human condition unraveled so quickly.

I loved how long toenails and a foot fetish, towels and the singing of a Roy Orbison tune, “Blue Bayou,” became comic foils.

But always I could sense an underlying seriousness.

Such as an early metaphoric foreshadowing when frantic, Lilly (wondrously fleshed out by Jessi Campbell) insisted that Anna (played with steely older-sister determination by Lisa Brescia) put her total weight on Lilly’s lap.

Such as later discussions of getting pregnant.

Such as the funny asides and mental meanderings of Malcolm (through the artistry of Anthony Fusco, a Richard Jenkins lookalike and soundalike who’s an A.C.T. stalwart), and the marvelous deadpan drawl of Patrick Kelly Jones as William.

Whether the dialogue was rib-ticking or solemn, I couldn’t wait to find out what came next.

Now and then, though, I was faced with pithy character summaries.

I can still hear 30-year-old bed-hopping Lilly saying, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And Anna griping to her late, lamented father, “You left me holding the bag.”

Add to those Malcolm’s assertion that “I’m a pamphlet between two related tomes…written in a language I don’t understand…two books telling one story.”

And this poignant couplet: Anna — “You seem lost.” Lily — “I am.” When this goes to two lines it is hard to follow.

The company’s artistic director, Loretta Greco, showed great perceptiveness when indicating in the program guide that Kolvenbach’s characters here, as usual, “binge on mayhem.”

Some of his skillfully crafted chaos was psychological (probing constructive love vs. smothering love).

Some was tangible (therapeutic book-throwing).

In either case, Kolvenbach’s timing — and each actor’s, in fact — must be labeled exquisite.

Magic devotees were probably already familiar with the playwright’s talent, because Kolvenbach’s “Goldfish” and “Mrs. Whitney” were staged there in 2009.

Yet “Sister Play” proves that even a basically flawless show can’t satisfy everyone.

One elderly woman, after telling me during the opening night’s post-play reception that the acting had been excellent, twice added, “I don’t understand what was funny.”

Rather than be rude, I left my response unsaid:

“In my opinion, almost everything.”

“Sister Play” runs through April 19 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard and Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Night performances Tuesdays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $60. Information: www.magictheatre.org or (415) 441-8822.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

I left “Jewels of Paris” with lingering thoughts of flashy costuming and fleshy lack of costuming.

But that doesn’t mean I overlooked the new revue’s substantial, silly satire.

Or its clever songs. Or unadulterated bawdiness.

Or copious kitsch.

My afterthoughts insisted on zoning in on a couple of dangling participles and more than a few dangling body parts.

“Jewels of Paris,” a new musical revue presented by the Thrillpeddlers at the Hypnodrome in San Francisco, is clearly a throwback — first by comically reconstructing for me the City of Lights and the artistic revolution that exploded there in the Roaring Twenties, then by jerking me back to old-timey burlesque and shocking campus musicals.

Spoofed effectively along the way are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker, Pierrot (the sad clown of Commedia dell’Arte fame) and — yes, after all it is France — Marie Antoinette.

Yet never would I think this revue might draw audiences from an umpteenth touring company of  “Chicago.”

It’s way too South of Market for that.

“Jewels of Paris” will surely pull in exactly what it aims for: mainly gay audiences (in and out of leather), and heterosexuals interested in a funny show that revisits the kind of original Scrumbly Koldewyn melodies he composed for the legendary Cockettes, the psychedelic, chiefly drag theater troupe he co-founded.

Here Koldewyn puts his fresh musical and lyrical jewels on display, so to speak.

As well as his talents as musical director and piano- and synthesizer-playing accompanist — all the while managing to keep the nostalgic jazzy rhythms alive without becoming overly redundant.

He also contributes to the book (sketches that are also credited to Rob Keefe, Alex Kinney and Andy Wenger).

Just for giggles, naturally.

Lyrics can be amazingly droll. Consider lines such as “They see me as savage and shoeless, but I’m just a flapper from St. Louis” or “Wait — I’ll torture you with my metaphors.”

Noah Haydon, meanwhile, is responsible for the choreography, ensuring each movement (ranging from a mock can-can to simulated sex) be precise enough so none of the 16-member cast (many of whom play multiple roles) stumbles into another on the small stage.

The campy revue’s so professionally staged on a set that’s seamlessly moved piecemeal by the actors undergoing myriad wig and costume changes, in fact, there’s not a single “oopsie” moment.

In addition, extraordinary solo performances are proffered by drag queen Noah Haydon torch-singing “Singer in a Café,” Kim Larsen crooning “Oh What a World,” and Birdie-Bob Watt lamenting “Chic and Tragic” as Pierrot.

Russell Blackwood, the production’s director, induces a well-paced balance between farce and music — and safeguards the overriding theme that human differences must be acceptable.

The ensemble cast raises diversity to new heights.

Actor-singers are white, black and Asian; male, female and possibly other; skinny and fat, tall and short, hunky and frumpy.

But don’t look for a plot. It’s absent.

And direct links to France tend to disappear during the second act of the two-hour performance.

Thrillpeddlers, their website informed me, “have been performing authentic Grand Guignol horror plays, outrageous Theatre of the Ridiculous musicals, and spine-tingling lights-out spookshows in San Francisco for nearly 20 years.”

Guess which of those categories “Jewels of Paris” fits into.

Here, however, is a mammoth red flag.

I recommend you stay far away if you’re turned off by nudity (male and female, frontal and backal), by straight and gay postures that don’t demand an advanced degree in gymnastics but do require open-mindedness, by cross-dressing and other gender-bending, by the mere idea of S&M, or ridiculing depictions of a bearded lady and a hunch-backed “Quasi-homo.”

If you’re adventurous, however, it’s a one-of-a-kind San Francisco treat that could tingle your pleasure palate vastly better than Rice-A-Roni.

Because the back-of-an-alley theater holds only 45 people, with first-come, first-served seating except for a handful of higher-priced boxes in which you can recline (or otherwise unbend), I’d recommended that tickets be purchased in advance.

My wife and I chanced to sit in the Hell box, with its fiery red seat covers and wall mirror at genitalia level.

Perhaps because we enjoy the unfamiliar and rare, it and the show were heavenly.

“Jewels of Paris” runs through May 2 at the Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., San Francisco. Performances are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.  Tickets: $30-$35. Information: 1-415-377-4202 or www.thrillpeddlers.com

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com

“Public art,” country music singer and visual artist Terry Allen once decreed, “is for the birds.”

Well, yes ‘n’ no.

“Our fine-feathered friends may be great fans of artwork, for a good reason,” I find myself countering, “but even when they blitz it with their white bombs, it’s still art that human beings can appreciate.”

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m among those humans.

I periodically meander into places not far from my Ross Valley home to re-appreciate stuff I’ve treasured before.

My 8-year-old granddaughter often tags along.

I just like looking. Hannah’s favorites are those she can climb.

So, naturally, she’s long been partial to Sugarfoot, the antlered stag that stands tall on the lawn outside San Anselmo’s Town Hall.

She’s been climbing on the anatomically correct metallic critter ever since she was 3 — so her rump has greatly added to the sheen of the sculpture’s back.

She originally decided Sugarfoot was a lost Santa reindeer who’d chosen my adopted hometown as his.

And was magical.

Now she just considers him a handy place from which she can hang upside down.

Hannah has also enjoyed caressing the abstract marble Bufano bear that stands on a pedestal in front of the Ross Town Hall, a gift from residents Jerry and Peggy Flax.

I, too, like the bear — and most of the work by San Francisco sculptor Benny Bufano.

But I also relish that he was a blunt-speaking peacenik.

He reportedly, after an accident severed it, sent half his “trigger finger” to Woodrow Wilson in protest of World War I.

Years later, after Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, he sculpted “St. Francis of the Guns” out of melted-down weapons turned in by citizens.

I’m pretty sure his Ross bear bears no political statement, though.

The artist, in a tale that might be apocryphal, purportedly advised the town on the animal’s care and feeding, including an admonition to “polish regularly with Carnauba auto wax.”

Early this year, Ross hired a contractor to repair cracks and other damage in the marble. Since then, the town’s prohibited kids from scaling it, even for photos.

Before the fixes, however, we managed to snap a couple of Hannah giving it, logically, a big bear hug.

Since she’s a consummate animal freak (no surprise — her abode, where a barnload of horses used to board, is now home to a dog, a cat, two goats and two pet lizards), she also adores Al Guibara’s bronze statue of Blackie the horse on a Tiburon pasture.

She loves, too, hanging out in Imagination Park — land of a gadzillion selfies, adjacent to San Anselmo’s town hall — with the Lawrence Noble pop-art bronze statues of film characters Yoda and Indiana Jones.

Both are life-sized, although Indy’s about 6-foot-3 and Yoda merely 2-1/2 feet high.

Marin’s most famed artwork, in my view, is the Civic Center, an imaginative structure in San Rafael built after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed it.

The golden spired, sky-blue roofed tourist attraction — a location for the sci-fi movie “Gattaca” and Lucas’ first feature-length film, “THX” — was Wright’s last commission and is somehow still avant-garde today, 53 years after the first section was completed.

I cherish it.

Almost as much as I hate most monochromatic oils hanging in museums that demand I take a wild guess at what bizarre sense of beauty an artist had in mind while slapping paint onto a canvas.

The truth is, virtually any art is problematic for me because it can’t be attached to my refrigerator with a magnet like Hannah’s hand-drawn thingies.

Still, she and I often jointly enjoy examining the charming, playful murals in Fairfax that adorn the tall outer wall of a Bolinas Avenue store or the short wall at the nearby baseball field, as well as the colorful obelisk in front of the Ross Valley Fire Station in downtown San Anselmo.

Not to mention the sky paintings made by jet planes or shifting clouds or blinking stars.

Humorist Dave Barry once defined public art as that which “is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.”

He may be right.

But writer Oscar Wilde was definitely wrong when he proclaimed, “All art is quite useless.”

It’s fun.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com/

[Woody’s [rating: 3]

Sophisticated Natalya, 29, is having a premature midlife crisis.

So she flits between rage and passion.

She ignores the steady, boring love of her husband, Arkady, and the fawning adoration of a friend/wannabe lover, Michel, only to fall for Alexsey, her young son’s naïve 21-year-old tutor.

That’s the heart of “A Month in the Country,” a lightweight comedy of manners weighed down by a touch of the mustiness I should have expected from a play penned in the mid-1800s by Ivan Turgenev, Russian novelist famed for “Fathers and Sons.”

Yet the ensemble cast of Ross Valley Players largely keeps things effervescent and, through its professionalism, overcomes the sluggish pacing the playwright built in.

Not to mention his repetition.

The dozen community theater thespians were good enough, however, to ward off my sporadic desire to snooze.

I admired, too, other elements of the play adapted in 1992 by Irish dramatist Brian Friel (a Tony Award-winner for “Dancing at Lughnasa”):

• Friel’s updated language (“I’m not one of his college sluts”).

• Costume designer Michael A. Berg’s fetching women’s attire (a calculated contrast with his unexciting men’s formal ware).

• The artistic accomplishments of Ken Rowland, who’s created more than 100 extraordinary set designs for the company since 1982 but out-extraordinaried himself with this show’s elegant ebony-and-rose vision of a posh country estate (universal enough to have been located in the Hamptons as easily as Russia).

• Director James Nelson’s brave choice to absent anticipated Russian accents while not limiting actor Ben Ortega’s Hispanic inflections in the role of Michel — and then including comedic German dialect by Mark Shepard as Herr Schaaf (a character with a penchant for malapropisms such as calling himself “a lecher” when he means archer).

Unusual, besides, is the use of offstage actors mouthing interior musings for several characters.

Particularly outstanding performances are turned in by Shannon Veon Kase as Natalya; Wood Lockhart, the veteran workhorse of the RVR troupe as Dr. Shpigelsky, a “bitter, angry peasant” hanger-on who prefers being a matchmaker; and Ortega.

Despite the farcical facets of “A Month in the Country,” Turgenev’s pre-Chekhovian thesis might be summarized by one character declaring “I’m afraid all love is a catastrophe” and another proclaiming “when you find yourself enslaved by love…you’ll know what real suffering is.”

Cynical? Perhaps.

Snarky?

Without doubt.

But great fodder for what advance publicity tells us “A Month in the Country” does — let us laugh at our own foibles (and sometimes misguided appetites).

And yes, the 150-minute period piece is long, as well as long-in-the-tooth.

But that having been said, it’s ultimately as cheery as the recorded bird sounds played before the show starts.

“A Month in the Country” plays at The Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through April 12. Evening performances, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14 to $29. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or www.vitalitypress.com

[Woody’s [rating: 4]

Actor-comic Ron Tobin has mastered, I’d guess, at least 17 voices and 42 verbal sound effects.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Plus, give or take, 28 accents.

He can instantly change faces — and identities — by distorting his mouth or brow and scrunching up or widening his eyes.

His elastic body and swinging hands can conjure up hysterically dysfunctional and hysterically funny men, women, dogs and a cat.

During a one-man show at the Del Valle Theater — “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy!” — Tobin portrayed, in quick succession (and with exquisite comedic timing) a nasal stewardess, a cabbie from a Middle East country, a guru from India, an 83-year-old Jamaican gated community guard, a phlegm-ish uncle  — as well as the constantly bickering title characters based on writer-comic Steve Solomon’s ethnically divided parents.

I’m normally a tough audience for comedians. But Tobin made me laugh out loud repeatedly.

The show isn’t seamless, though.

It’s uneven, and may lean too heavily on potty humor.

It also becomes fleetingly awkward when a singular poignant grandma moment unexpectedly interferes with the cresting comedy.

And some of its gags and situations are older than Moses.

Like the clichéd notion of his wife loving sex — until the second they wed.

Promotional materials call the monologue “one part lasagna, one part kreplach and two parts Prozac,” and say it’s really all about leaving dinner “with heartburn and a headache.”

But I’m pleased to report “My Mother’s Italian” is much funnier than its publicity.

I couldn’t begin to count all the one-liners crammed into the two-act, 100-minute show that ran for two years in New York City and has toured internationally in more than 200 cites since.

What absolutely worked for me were the numerous set-ups about the aging process — especially hearing loss (maybe you had to be there, but mom hears “Lebanese” instead of “lesbian”) and bodily non-functions.

And the obvious ethnic jibes (“What are genitals?” “Those are the people who aren’t Jewish”).

Most of the jokes, such as those, play vastly better on stage than they read in a review. And the laughter they provoke is appropriately contagious.

A guy behind me saw the show in San Diego with Solomon and found it side-splitting enough to see again with Tobin.

He couldn’t stop laughing the second time around.

The cackles of several women near him were so raucous they nearly drowned out the next three punch-lines.

Tobin had learned his script well. But he also inserted an amusing smidgeon of reality. In a five-minute encore, he riffed about having gotten lost while trying to find the Walnut Creek theater where I saw him perform — after I, too, got lost.

“Tell your friends,” he mockingly pleaded, “not just about the show — about how to get here.”

“My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy!” will run through March 29 at the Del Valle Theater, 1963 Tice Valley Road, Walnut Creek. Evening performances, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 6 p.m. Matinees, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $45 to $65. Information: www.LesherARTScenter.org or 1-925-943-7469.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com/

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

One plus one can add up to more than one might expect.