Woody Weingarten

My wife keeps me busy by endlessly assigning me unwanted tasks.

Like finding her lost cell phone.

And umbrellas.

My search parties are mobilized weekly.

Not long ago Nancy phoned from downtown San Anselmo while walking our little white rescue mutt.

No, she hadn’t misplaced our biodegradable poop bags.

“Please come and rescue me,” she wailed. “I’ve lost my keys again.”

I scoured virtually every inch of her trail — Creek and Inspiration parks, block after block of San Anselmo Avenue, the lawn of Town Hall.

I pushed aside foliage where Kismet had deposited some stinky stuff and Nancy had bent over to collect it. I checked each early-blooming flower, each parked vehicle. I kicked aside fallen leaves that had accumulated at curbside.

I stopped counting at 1,439,574.

Diddly squat.

Happily, a young lad found the keys soon after we’d retreated to our home. He turned them into the police, whom we’d been smart enough to notify.

Losing this ‘n’ that has for sure become too habitual for both of us.

As well as for a slew of our aging friends.

On a whim, Nancy and I crafted a list — and noticed that losing something isn’t necessarily bad.

When she partially lost her hearing, for instance, she could no longer hear my snoring.

And when I lost my taste for alcohol, weed and Pall Malls, she — not to mention my liver and lungs — was grateful.

Losses also can fill our mental safety deposit box of anecdotes.

Nancy once got a Jaguar tour of the Civic Center parking lots when she coaxed a young attorney into helping her locate her vanished Camry by pleading, “Pretend I’m your mother.”

Then, of course, there’s the negative side of the ledger.

Topping my list of worrisome recent disappearances is my diminished eyesight, abetted by cataracts.

To counteract my growing anxiety, I’ve stooped to regularly kissing the rings of Kaiser Permanente ophthalmologists and optometrists in San Rafael.

At the bottom of my list of worries are my granddaughter’s missing and wiggly baby teeth. I’d be willing to bet the 8-year-old doesn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy anymore but firmly believes in the five-dollar bill she gets for slipping a tooth under her pillow.

Lost through inflation along the way has been the value of a buck. I used to give my kids a quarter. And I felt no deprivation whatsoever even though my parents stiffed me completely.

Some losses undeniably are permanent.

My underwear somehow evaporated in Europe, for example, while quick drying on a wine rack.

Nancy’s luck with AWOL clothing is infinitely better. A hotel employee once took the trouble to mail her back an unwashed, wrinkled nightgown from a Bahamas vacation.

But the truth is, my wife doesn’t fret in advance about losing things.

That’s mainly because she strongly believes in karma and always returns what she finds.

I can verify this fantastical account about a wallet she found: When she called the owner to inform her about it, the woman was dining with Nancy’s dermatologist.

Finding is, naturally, the flip side of losing.

My 75-year-old wife recently unearthed an old, old, old supposedly lost outfit in the way-back of her closet.

She wore it just for giggles while strolling with Kismet in Fairfax one evening. A woman she didn’t know approached her just to say, “What a magnificent vintage dress.”

Without losing a beat, Nancy answered, “Thanks. It goes with the face and body — I’m vintage too.”

Losing things is hardly a new experience for us.

In fact, my wife and I wrote a song called “Lost It Blues” for our unproduced musical revue, “Touching Up the Gray.” And we’re still living out the lyrics, despite having composed the piece 16 years ago.

“I’ve lost 2 billion pens, 3 dozen pinky rings

“Over the last 40 or 50 years.

“And where’s the car I just parked

“With all its dings.

“I’ve lost count of what I’ve lost.

“It’s so embarrassing.”

But the song ends on a more serious note by referring to what we both consider our biggest loss — our youth:

“Time is irretrievable,

“It is unbelievable

“I had time on my hands,

“But now it’s lost.”

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Sandy Riccardi is an accomplished New York comedienne-actress.

Tall and attractive.

With a robust, polished singing voice.

Pianist Richard Riccardi has played with San Francisco’s symphony, opera and ballet companies — and accompanied Pinchas Zuckerman, Joel Grey and Diahann Carroll.

But he’s short and bald. And has a gravelly singing voice.

Yet he’s Sandy’s trophy husband.

She even sings an incomparable homage to his hairless head.

At Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater recently, the pair presented a loving, charming cabaret act, “My Raunchy Valentine,” that made me laugh aloud often and feel good for 90 minutes.

Mostly, the rib-tickling diva vocalized and mugged.

Mostly, Richard played.

With tongue permanently implanted in cheek, and with lyrics that leaned toward the clever, they started with the downside of texting and tweeting (“you don’t quite care enough to call”) and ended with gallows humor from a Rodgers and Hart tune about serial husband-icide.

In between, they dealt with a “Southern girl’s mating call — ‘I can hardly taste the liquor,’” waggish fallout from forgetfulness and blame, and other comic pitfalls of the wrinkling process (with a pill-filled bottle doubling as a rhythm instrument).

I did find the “My Raunchy Valentine” title a touch misleading, though.

The Riccardi duo performed several tunes with double entendre after double entendre but its major focus was on the snags and snares of relationship.

They used their own as comedic fodder.

Sandy noted, in fact, that they total five marriages between them — and illustrated “Our Perfect Family” with a stage-length scroll featuring stick figures of the blended family (including three nurses from Fiji).

“He’s a glutton for punishment,” she noted of her husband. “I’m the third wife Richard has seen through menopause.”

The couple offered many original numbers, then interjected amusing parodies of such familiar ditties as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Memories” and “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

Twice, the pair — married six years with 4 million YouTube hits under their collective belt — paused the merriment to execute love ballads penned for each other. Once, Sandy apologized for being saccharine (“we were supposed to be anti-Hallmark”).

All in all, I found the show fluffy and fun.

And I definitely could relate to their occasional public expressions of love.

To continue our Valentine’s Day tradition, I’ve already purchased the hundreds of tiny candy hearts I’ll hide in my wife’s music books, desk drawers and medicine cabinet — and tuck into various clothes in her closet.

I know she’ll undoubtedly take similar liberties with my things.

And if the past is any indication, we’ll still be finding each other’s sugar treats for months and months. And smiling.

And that’s the way we like it. After all, we consider each other a trophy spouse.

Even though we, too, have five marriages between us.

“My Raunchy Valentine” was part of the Sunday concert series at Cinnabar, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N., right off Hwy. 101, Petaluma. Upcoming shows in the series, all beginning at 7:30 p.m., include The Ring of Truth Trio on March 15, Red Hot Chachkas on April 19, Le Jazz Hot on May 17 and Amanacer Flamenco on June 14. Tickets: $15 to $30. Information: (707) 763-8920 or cinnabartheater.org.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 4]

Did the National Football League mutate into a life-threatening disease?

Is the sport too lethal to survive?

An ensemble cast tackles such questions head-on in “X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story),” a world premiere play at the Berkeley Rep.

And not unlike 320-pound offensive linemen relentlessly pounding the weakest links of a defense, it repeatedly bellows that if the NFL doesn’t radically change, it will become extinct.

Soon.

If I hadn’t previously agreed with that conclusion, the docudrama wouldn’t have convinced me — because its Gatling gun approach, covering every angle while targeting the league, blunts its punch.

The play focuses on head trauma.

On CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease of the brain that can only be diagnosed post-mortem, actually.

But it also probes other life-altering injuries, ever-changing rules, fans’ mindset, financial inducements, segregation, class warfare.

All serious topics.

Director Tony Taccone makes sure, however, to inject humor that mitigates the heaviness.

Using clever slo-mo pantomime.

A bevy of one-liners.

And sight gags — with the funniest, in my eyes, being a foul-mouthed caricature of an Oakland Raiders-type fanatic cloaked in football gear (accented by a skull on his chest).

“X’s and O’s” was written by super-fan K.J. Sanchez with Jenny Mercein, one-sixth of the acting ensemble and daughter of NFL running back Chuck Mercein, best recalled for his Green Bay Packers’ stint in the 1967 “Ice Bowl” championship game when the wind-chill factor registered minus-48.

They based their piece on interviews.

With players and their kin, parents of young hopefuls, fans, physicians and academics.

While nurturing the commissioned play in The Ground Floor, the repertory theater’s arm that develops new work, the playwrights changed names to protect the innocent.

And, I’d suggest, the guilty.

The ironic title titillates me, considering that the play boldfaces the negative. But the “love story” is distinctly a torrid affair between fans and a league that generates $10 billion a year while maintaining its status as a nonprofit.

Dwight Hicks, 58-year-old ex-San Francisco 49er safety who earned two Super Bowl rings and played in four Pro Bowls, is the show’s box-office draw.

The athlete-actor faltered several times opening night as if struggling to remember dialogue. But he, like the others, portrayed multiple characters and otherwise acquitted himself well.

Acting wasn’t the show’s decisive factor, though.

The mood was.

The docudrama’s imaginative high-tech set helped. It featured a canopy and walls with, first, a diagram of a football play (with its traditional X’s and O’s), then myriad projections of the game’s history, violence and popularity.

Despite its core being prickly, the show sometimes felt tedious (though only 80 minutes long).

Aficionados knew the facts.

A program article by Madeleine Oldham, dramaturg and director of The Ground Floor, referenced the 1990s when ex-players “seemed to be exhibiting things like memory loss at relatively young ages, mood swings, or personality changes.”

Evidence “of a link between football and brain injury reached a tipping point” in 2005, she wrote, after an autopsy on 50-year-old Pittsburgh Steeler ‘Iron Mike’ Webster showed “the inside of his brain mirrored that of a much older man.”

Many NFL alumni, Oldham added, “were often dealing with headaches, depression, the inability to remember simple things, lack of focus, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide.”

“X’s and O’s,” like football itself, doted on statistics.

My online search verified them: More than 5,000 player-plaintiffs quickly signed onto 250 concussion-related lawsuits against the league. Add 1,000 if you count spouses.

Numbers aren’t at risk, though.

Human beings are.

That, of course, is the point of the play, in which I found numerous memorable lines.

Such as, “I love watching someone suffer” and “How do you go from superman to man to nobody?”

Sportscasts have recently been riddled with endless speculation about “Deflategate” and which New England Patriots player or employee let air out of the championship game balls.

Somehow I believe questions raised by “X’s and O’s” are more imperative.

 “X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story)” will run at the Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. (off Shattuck), through March 1. Night performances, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14.50-$79 (subject to change). Information: www.berkeleyrep.org or (510) 647-2949

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

[Woody’s [rating: 4]

I thought deceased playwright Noël Coward was so yesterday.

And I feared 89-year-old Angela Lansbury might fit into that pigeonhole, too.

But “Blithe Spirit,” which originally debuted on Broadway in 1941, proves my pre-show presumptions were way off.

All three are charming — despite their antiquity.

In the small but crucial role of second-generation medium Madame Arcati (at the Golden Gate Theatre), Lansbury is an absolute rib-tickling marvel.

It’s a part that earned her a Tony Award for the 2009 Broadway revival.

Opening night in San Francisco, I found the character actor’s physical comedy — as well as her ability to zoom her vocal elevator from squeaky to bass and back again — delightful.

But major kudos also are due Susan Louise O’Connor, whose comic antics in a secondary part are honed so finely they virtually steal the show.

As maid Edith, she manages to transform her earliest lines of  “Yes, mum,” “Yes, mum” and “Yes, mum” into comedic diamonds.

Laugh-aloud gems.

She’s so good at it, and in becoming a mousey creature stuck alternately in fifth and slo-mo gears, she almost outshines Lansbury in the slapstick-with-pinpoint-timing department.

Almost.

Lansbury had the opening night audience in her palm before the curtain went up.

Director Michael Blakemore deserves recognition, though, for acutely and cutely layering the manifold moments of shtick — and for making at least the first half of a protracted 115-minute two-act play move swiftly.

I can offer shout-outs, too, to Charles Edwards as an ultra-correct, ultra-British Charles Condomine, who asks the medium to conduct a séance in his living room so he can use it in his novel, and Jemima Rooper as Elvira, the churlish, lethal dead wife he summons despite remembering “how morally untidy she was.”

Such phraseology may seem archaic in print, but when used on stage it holds up.

Astonishingly well.

“Blithe Spirit,” which followed otherworldly films such as “Topper” and “The Ghost Goes West” into the public’s imagination and favor, allegedly was written in a week.

But Coward’s velocity doesn’t show through.

His wit does.

Adding to the onstage fun are old-fashioned projections of scene names and action, accompanied by screechy sounds from vintage recordings.

As well as ectoplasmic special effects that peak just before the final curtain.

On a personal note, repeated use of Irving Berlin’s “Always,” ancient enough to have been my parent’s favorite song, hit me right in the labonza.

Angela Lansbury’s 70-year career includes harvesting five Tonys, six Golden Globes and an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. She starred on Broadway in “Mame,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd.”

She’s best known, of course, for playing Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote.”

Which I never saw.

In spite of the original series being on TV for 12 years (and the cable re-runs still going strong).

She first awed me, rather, in a 1962 Cold War film thriller, “The Manchurian Candidate,” while playing the conniving mother of a potential political assassin.

Her “Blithe Spirit” characterization couldn’t be more dissimilar.

She portrayed Madame Arcati as a bent, cantankerous, peculiar old lady with a distinctive shuffle. But when it came time to take her bows, the nearly nonagenarian’s body was suddenly erect, and she was smiling and sprightly.

Why’d I like her and this play so much?

Maybe because too many shows nowadays are heavy, heavy, heavy.

In contrast, “Blithe Spirit,” which Coward appropriately subtitled “An Improbable Farce,” didn’t require` me to think about it, chew on it, discuss it, worry about it or dissect it.

All I needed to do was sit back and enjoy it.

It and Lansbury, that is.

Last year, the living legend made headlines when Queen Elizabeth aptly made her a dame.

She’d earned the honor.

And clearly, to steal a line from a hit Broadway show she didn’t star in, she’s still up there in the footlights proving “there is nothing like a dame.”

Especially a spry old one.

“Blithe Spirit” will play at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco, through Feb. 1. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $45 to $175 (subject to change). Information: (888) 746-1799 or shnsf.com.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Let anyone refer to “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” in the past and I’d probably think of the Grateful Dead.

That may be dead thinking now.

In the future, I’m likely to think instead of “The Cable Car Nymphomaniac,” a clever, bawdy musical comedy by the new FOGG Theatre troupe in San Francisco.

It’s that good. That fresh. That funny.

Its sex component was inspired by real events: In 1964, ex-dance instructor and Michigan transplant Gloria Sykes hit her head on a pole when her cable car lurched. Her suit against San Francisco five years later claimed the accident had caused a “demonic sex urge” that forced her have relations with more than 100 guys. The jury awarded $50,000.

Drugs in the show aren’t prevalent, merely a couple of joints (including one hand-me-down laced with slapstick).

And while the wide-ranging music is unlikely to fascinate Deadheads and is hardly integral to the storyline, its absence would greatly have diminished my enjoyment.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll indeed, just not your garden variety.

The situation lends itself to exaggeration, for sure, and being an easy target for parody. So it may surprise that the overriding theme of “Nympho” has less to do with sexuality per se than how a torpid housewife rouses to make her own choices.

(Although a major sub-text is that females are still being vilified for being sexual in the 21st century.)

I must admit, however, that “Nympho” left me a little flustered.

Praising virtually everybody connected with a production isn’t my usual critical style.

But consider, for instance, Tony Asaro.

He’s one of three FOGG founders, and doubles as its artistic director. Here he also deserves major credit for extraordinarily bright and sometimes salacious lyrics (“I’m the bourbon that melts your ice” and “adjust your slacks ‘cause here comes Gloria”).

He’s also composed 17 inventive melodies that gambol from hard rock to doo-wop to dissonance.

At the same time, Kirsten Guenther’s scythe-sharp book keeps the nearly two-hour, intermission-less show thrusting forward.

Director-choreographer Terry Berliner’s ingenuity becomes visible especially via a whimsical tango lesson and when comical angels flap their wings.

Berliner, who utilizes ensemble members in both male and female roles, clearly plays to his seven-member cast’s strengths.

Particularly David Naughton as Bruce, an uptight lawyer trapped in an outmoded morality; Steven Ennis, who excels in several cartoon-like, rubberfaced light-in-the-loafers roles; and Alex Rodriqguez, who wrings guffaws from super-seductive Eduardo and a mega-cheery plastic-ware peddler.

None of the other actor-singers are slouches either.

Take the company’s executive director, Carey McCray, for instance, who portrays hard-edged Esther, Bruce’s intern who contemptuously observes that “there is a system and it works as long as a woman knows her place.”

And who then roars, “Men fix the world — women fix lunch.”

Or Rinabeth Apostol as Gloria, the young woman saddled with constant male vibrations, someone who allegedly “sends out a carnal SOS.” Or Courtney Merrell as Bruce’s wife, Bryce, a gal desperately seeking herself. Or Hayley Lovgren, who energetically fills out the ensemble.

By the way, I found all the singing voices two octaves above adequate.

Supported effectively by Robert Michael Moreno’s keyboard and his four musical cohorts.

Oops! Almost forgot Jeff Rowlings.

His ingenious set design turns three cable car images and four wooden benches into about 217 stagecraft sensations.

I’d also be remiss if I ignored the costuming of Wes Crain, who jauntily contrasts Gloria’s ditzy glitziness with a fortune cookie-spouting guru’s over-the-topness.

FOGG, an acronym for Focus on Golden Gate, wants to examine the Bay Area’s history, communities, heroes, concerns and ideologies. So yes, “Cable Car Nymphomaniac” is indeed San Francisco-centric, including a lyric asserting that Gloria “gets around — from Laurel Heights to Union Square.”

But the locale’s only a backdrop.

I can easily see the musical doing well with sophisticated audiences in New York, St. Louis, London — actually, anywhere people would enjoy originality, wit and assorted music.

If a problem exists with the show, it’s that Asaro and company have set an incredibly high bar for their next production.

And the one after that.

And…

“The Cable Car Nymphomaniac” will run at Z Below, 470 Florida St., San Francisco, through Feb. 8. Night performances, Wednesday through Saturday, 8 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $25-$30. Information: (866) 811-4111 or www.foggtheatre.org.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

What might you get if you’d locked Noël Coward and Neil Simon in a room with Margaret Mead after they’d toured Tanzania?

A witty comedy tinged with a hint of sadness.

“Impressionism,” actually written by Michael Jacobs, is embedded at The Barn in the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross, where I watched standoffish New York City art gallery owner Katharine Keenan (played by Mary Ann Rodgers) and burned out photojournalist Thomas Buckle (Tom Reilly) take eight scenes and 80 minutes to become whole.

But their journey often amused me.

Even though Katherine couldn’t bring herself to sell the gallery’s paintings, and Thomas couldn’t let himself snap pictures.

Even though each permanently hid out in the gallery because of life’s wounds — hers from a series of failed relationships, his from seeing too much of the world’s underbelly.

Director Billie Cox, fastidiously peeling back the pair of human onions, nimbly helped me learn who they were by utilizing flashbacks that shifted not only time but place.

And by brilliantly using “invisible” paintings.

The two lead actors give top-drawer performances, surely not equal to those of Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen in the play’s 2009 Broadway debut but way beyond acceptable for community theater.

Much of the play’s dialogue is sharp.

Katherine snarkily revealed a warped world-view by exclaiming that men, whom she refers to as “you people,” exist only “to knock me over.”

More seriously, she ruled about art that “getting it accurate isn’t as important as getting somebody to feel something.”

Thomas, correspondingly, described the self-imposed constraints on his photographic art this way: “I won’t take pictures of anything that [won’t elicit] true joy.”

And the two adversary-friends playfully debated whether life is Impressionism or Realism.

Nobody wins.

But nobody loses either.

Before the opening night performance Cox had primed me and other critics by explaining that the show may only contain “one-act but it’s about the second act of our lives.”

The main conceit of “Impressionism” is that Katharine has employed Thomas for two years and — shades of Scheherazade — he regularly entertains her with stories about the coffee he brings her each morning.

Though the play is officially labeled a romantic comedy, Jacobs, a writer and producer whose work has been featured on Broadway, TV and in film, has put so many obstacles in the duo’s path — much like potholes in many real African roadways — it can sometimes mean a bumpy ride.

It’s certainly a different breed of big African cat than Cox’s last outing at the home of the Ross Valley Players.

That was “Twentieth Century,” which I called a “shamelessly silly…time-machine homage to Broadway creatures of the night-lights.”

In “Impressionism,” the protagonists are informed by artwork masterfully projected onto the gallery’s rear wall. And scenes are connected by both blackouts and slideshows of paintings most likely familiar to even non-art lovers.

Empty frames on the set walls bothered me a bit, however. I was never sure if they were meant to be symbolic, and I found the device distracting.

“Impressionism” probably shouldn’t be summed up by the following exchange:

Katherine — “I don’t understand anything.” Thomas — “Neither do I.”

Nor could a revitalized Katherine be allowed to condense everything into, “What if I wanted to…be ravished in a chair once in a while?”

But she might summarize the show by observing, of both art and life, “You can’t get it when it’s right in front of you — you have to step back…you have to step back to see it other than splotches.”

“Impressionism” is definitely more than the sum of its splotches.

“Impressionism” runs at The Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through Feb. 15. Night performances, Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14 to $29. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

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

 

[Woody’s [rating: 2.5]

Two long rows of seats bordering the latest AlterTheater stage were so tightly packed it could have been a disaster had anyone needed a bathroom break mid-show.

A single theatergoer’s bad breath, in fact, might have been nearly as bad.

But, thankfully, nothing disrupted the world premiere of “Landless” in a storefront next to Johnny Doughnuts on west 4th Street in San Rafael.

That was a good thing because I, like everyone else opening night, needed all my faculties to absorb the breadth of issues  — and myriad flashbacks — proffered by playwright Larisse FastHorse in a mere two hours.

Enough, actually, to swamp my mind:

Native American heritage, homelessness, racism, bullying, discount stores choking ma-and-pa shops, the proliferation of casinos, and — in case that’s insufficient — friendship, love and benevolence.

It was as if she wanted to probe in two acts every feeling she’d had in her 43 years.

Her thematic pileup parallels the set, a mélange of cartons and racks of outdated and broken dreams from the life of Elise, a worn out and tapped out 68-year-old whose fingers are wedged in a metaphoric post-recession dike at her Matthews Mercantile store.

Not everything in “Landless” is hyper-serious, though.

Or depressing.

FastHorse sporadically uses humor as a leaven.

The play takes place in a small town where a new Walmart is squeezing fourth-generation Main Street merchants. But to find the heart of “Landless,” FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation originally from South Dakota, interviewed local Indian elders, shopkeepers and business district residents.

Plus the homeless.

Silver makes the drama’s heart pound rapidly by passionately running a proverbial gamut of emotions as Elise.

And Nick Garcia is alternatively childlike, joyous, unhappy and angry as Josiah. a Hispanic-surnamed boy/man Elise had rescued 17 years before, a gay dreamer who’s part of a “landless tribe” seeking federal recognition.

He repeatedly tests the topic of identity.

“Do you know what it’s like to know who you are?” he ponders.

Emile Talbot and Michael J. Asberry fill out the cast by proficiently assuming several supporting roles each.

Mood-heightening lighting by Jack Beuttler also is noteworthy, especially since the storefront windows are left undraped so passersby can sneak a peek.

Bay Area theatrical legend Ann Brebner is an ex-casting director who led the drive to restore the Rafael Theatre and co-founded the Marin Shakespeare Company. Jeanette Harrison co-founded the nomadic AlterTheater in 2004, when the troupe turned a rocking chair store into a performance space.

Jointly, they directed “Landless.”

The two worked extremely well together, Harrison told me, but some rehearsal differences led them to test opposite ways of doing some scenes and then choose.

Opening night jitters, I suspect, can be blamed for multitude lines spurting forth before their cues were uttered.

That problem will undoubtedly get ironed out quickly.

But other flaws are not so easily corrected.

The faint recorded musical backdrop, for example, seems more intrusive than illuminating.

And I found some clichés irritating. Such as “You are not alone.” Or, “I need you to walk out this door and never look back.”

From play to play, the AlterTheater moves from storefront to storefront in downtown San Rafael, priding itself on prompting artists to “dream big, take risks, and push themselves to the limits of their imagination…and then take another step.”

I believe by exploring Indian culture and heritage, certainly not a mainstay of the Bay Area theatrical scene, it again has met that objective.

Now, if it would focus on a couple of the planet’s ills and not try to solve all of them at once…

“Landless” will play at the AlterTheater’s temporary space at 1619 4th St. (at G), San Rafael, through Feb. 1, then at the A.C.T. Costume Shop Theater, 1117 Market St. (at 7th), San Francisco, Feb. 12-22. Evening performances in San Rafael, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m.; matinees, Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets: $25. Information: (415) 454-2787 or www.altertheater.org.

Check out Woody Weingarten’s www.vitalitypress.com blog, or contact him at voodee@sbcglobal.net.

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

I normally love playwright David Mamet’s rhythms.

And his caustic humor.

Nor am I put off by his usual torrent of f-bombs.

But “The Anarchist” is cerebral horseplay of a noticeably different color. It’s Mamet soberly executing mental calisthenics, taking both sides of an argument at the same time.

Using longer — and complete — sentences. Without vulgarities or drollness.

And with less of individuals talking over each other.

In a new Theatre Rhinoceros production, Mamet still does what he does best — poke beneath the veneer of characters to exhume the vagaries of human nature.

I see it as an 85-minute double diatribe.

Director John Fisher combines with Mamet to offer an intensely dramatic, philosophical feast that pinpoints a two-woman tug-of-war over rehabilitation, faith and sex.

But they present a dense repast not easily digested.

The storyline?

A lesbian anarchist on the day of a parole interview confronts a female “representative of the state” — perhaps her warden, maybe a prison psychologist, conceivably a parole officer — who will decide whether she should be freed.

The drama stars Tamar Cohn as bilingual, properly educated Cathy, an admitted terrorist killer of two guards in an echo of a real incident involving the Weather Underground in the 1970s.

She performs in tandem with Velina Brown as Ann, Cathy’s interrogator who may have been persecuting her —perpetually.

Both actors are splendid.

Flawless, in fact.

Each steeps her character with flesh and blood, with all the nuanced emotional back-and-forthness humans bring to challenging situations.

Each excels, too, at extracting the most from Mamet’s prose.

Such as Cathy’s pithy, “Neither God nor human worth can be proved.” Or, “The state does not have [the] power to put me on the cross.”

Fisher, meanwhile, magnifies the duo’s conflict by placing Brown, whose height is imposing and whose demeanor is appropriately unbending, next to Cohn, whose smaller, chameleon-like body can shift in an instant from servile to haughty.

Cohn, who lives in Marin County “with a terrific husband and a decrepit cat,” adroitly depicts an inmate who’s served 35 years and become a believer in Christ despite her Jewish upbringing.

Brown, co-artistic director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, deftly reproduces a bureaucrat plagued with a major decision just before her tenure ends but hell-bent on having the prisoner reveal where her former accomplice/lover is.

Fisher and Mamet are, in a sense, joined at the hip.

Mamet had encouraged Fisher as a young director. And Fisher directed his “Boston Marriage” at The Rhino, America’s longest running queer theater.

When I attended “The Anarchist,” news bulletins became a factor.

I found it chilling that a trio of terrorists murdered a dozen people in the Paris office of a satirical publication the same day.

An anachronistic chunk of recorded pre-show music — Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changin’” — also bothered me. I understood its symbolic value but the tune was jarring because it pre-dates by years the founding of the Weather Underground, whose terrorism had begun at San Francisco’s Ferry Terminal.

I’ve enjoyed Mamet creations for decades — “Glengarry Glen Ross,” which earned the Pulitzer Prize in drama, “Speed the Plow,” “American Buffalo,” “Oleanna,” “Race.”

As I do with Picasso’s diverse periods, I revel in Mamet’s — from his earliest male-oriented works (that emphasize character and the way people really talk) to his middle years (in which plot grows more important) to his latter-day female-oriented plays and their accent on social and political issues.

But “The Anarchist” is by far his thickest, most intellectual, wordiest exercise — and arguably the least entertaining.

The playwright apparently insisted that I — and the young, mostly gay crowd at The Rhino — work harder than I’d wanted.

It was as if I were expected to hold my breath for the duration of the play lest I miss a crucial phrase or concept.

Ultimately, however, the drama merited my full attention — even though critics bashed the original 2012 Broadway offering with Patti LuPone and Deborah Winger.

Causing it to run only 17 performances.

“The Anarchist” plays at the Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson St. (at Front and Battery streets), San Francisco, through Jan. 17. Evening performances, Sundays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 3 p.m. Tickets: $15 to $30 (subject to change). Information: (800) 838-3006 or www.TheRhino.org

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

Almost all the buyers are incurable addicts.

So are the sellers, who occasionally purchase items when not volunteering.

But don’t be misled: There are no drugs. No booze. No butts.

Used books are their preferred vice.

Some are addicted to romance novels, bodice-rippers and the like. Some are drawn to true murder stories. Some favor volumes about sports or politics or scientific expeditions to the outskirts of civilization.

And some — like my wife — lean toward lighter fare, such as the humor of David Sedaris.

The buyer-fanatics would make the register in San Anselmo’s 20- by 40-foot Town Books ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching if the spanking new store had a machine instead of a cash box.

Me? I’ve bought nothing yet.

A voracious book reader into midlife, I’ve since turned to alternate worlds provided by newspapers, magazines, websites and, if you believe my spouse (who insists I’ll read anything), the backs of cereal boxes.

Cinnie Barrows — Friends of the Library stalwart who’s been as responsible as anyone for the shop’s birth — is much more typical.

She got hooked on books when her parents read to her “at a very early age. Then, still pre-school, I started using the library in my small West Virginia hometown. It was above the jail.”

She’s still addicted.

But others involved with the library, she insists, are even more so: “Some of the Friends read all the time.”

Cinnie’s worked her way down to wearing only two hats — “volunteer coordinator, which means I’m in charge of recruiting, and being the Tuesday manager.”

And she’s quick to cite two other Friends instrumental in the store’s gestation, Sue Neil and Shelagh Smith.

Sue, with her daughter Julie, helmed the shop’s design, including racks in the center of the room that clear away for special events.

She’s particularly proud of the shelves.

They were hand-picked, one by one, she says: “They’re all old bleacher benches from St. Louis that were re-purposed — some red, some black, some that had chewing gum on the bottom that had to get scraped off.”

Shelagh, who oversees Friends’ finances, co-wrote the volunteers’ handbook with Joan Boodrookas, the organization’s president.

Unpaid regular Sharon Bluhm commends it.

And says, “Fiction sells well — because it’s what we have most. So do children’s books and cookbooks.”

Early revenues hit between $500 and $600 a week, but they were based on being open only Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 10 to 4.

“When you consider most books sell for under $5,” says Sue, “even at $500, that’s a lot of books.”

Sales are expected to rise now because Fridays have been added.

Proceeds will help the library with what Debbie Stutsman, tow n manager, calls “a myriad of…things not covered by the general fund or parcel tax budgets.”

At least two volunteers staff the store at 411 San Anselmo Ave. each morning, two more each afternoon. Each day has a designated manager.

Though Town Books opened mid-September, the official launch wasn’t until last month, when 150 book lovers jammed what once housed Riccardo’s Italian restaurant and its endless empty bottles hanging from the ceiling.

Down San Anselmo Avenue, Michael Whyte, owner of Whyte’s Booksmith, rejects my question about competition. “I feel it’s more collegial,” he says. “The more bookstores in San Anselmo, the better.”

Whyte’s been supporting library projects for 30-plus years — “generously,” comments Cinnie.

Most of Town Books’ stock comes from individuals cleaning out their homes — folks like Lisa Mackey. “My mom is ill, in a nursing home,” she tells me, “and I’m bringing her books here.”

“Here” is the single room, but down the hallway is a 16×22 office where Eli Welber scans non-fiction barcodes to see if they can be marketed on Amazon.

His current online inventory is about 500 tomes. He expects the number to go up exponentially.

The afternoon I visit, a San Anselmo newbie who prefers anonymity scours the place for books dealing with the history of American poetry, while Oliver Kaufmann of Ross surfs the shelves (he’d earlier bought a novel and two nonfiction volumes).

They voice delight.

Some — like Kat Hench, who lived in San Anselmo but now resides in Novato — come to Town Books seeking something specific but don’t find it.

Few leave empty-handed.

But almost all, addicts or not, somehow leave with a smile on their faces.

Check out Woody Weingarten’s new blog at www.vitalitypress.com/ or contact him at voodee@sbcglobal.net.