Exquisite and Pure Giselle

 Woody’s [rating:5]

“Journey’s End” is no “War Horse.” I saw no fantastical puppets.

“Journey’s End” is no “Apocalypse Now.” I heard no Wagnerian explosions or deafening helicopters.

“Journey’s End” is no “Saving Private Ryan.” I witnessed no gore.

What I did find, however, was considerable poignancy and a tough look at what war does to young men.

Regrettably, it mirrors the many wars across today’s globe.

It’s an exceptional anti-war drama, despite playwright R.C. Sherriff’s insistence — according to director James Dunn — that he didn’t set out to create that type of play.

It’s also the best Ross Valley Players show I’ve ever attended, and that’s saying a lot because I’ve seen many of their shows that were superb.

“Journey’s End” is a saga of disposable lives in the so-called Great War.

Its setting is a 1918 WWI British infantry dugout/bunker near St. Quentin, France, that’s about to be assaulted by German soldiers (“the Boche”). Its twin focus is on the interminable waiting (which may portend death) and a rushed 12-man patrol sent out to seize an enemy warrior.

The protagonist is Stanhope, a captain who drinks a lot to deaden the pain caused by the conflict and his fears that his men don’t respect him.

David Yen brilliantly portrays Stanhope, who originally was played by a young Laurence Olivier. Yen’s facial expressions and eyes become transparent windows to his character’s tormented soul.

His stage bouts with half a dozen bottles are neither over-the-top nor maudlin.

Yen is impressively supported by Tom Hudgens as Lt. Osborne, an ultra-proper officer who’s purposefully morphed into a kindly uncle to the soldiers, and Francis Serpa as 2nd Lt. Raleigh, a young, idealistic ex-school chum of Stanhope who’s stuck in hero-worship mode.

The rest of the all-male cast also is convincing: Philip Goleman as 2nd Lt. Hibbert, a cowering whiner; Sean Gunnell as Pvt. Mason, comic relief as a cunning kitchen worker always scrambling to make up for supply deficiencies; Stephen Dietz, Jeff Taylor and two actors who each assume dual roles, Steve Price and Ross Berger.

Special tribute must go to Dunn and his assistant dialect coach, Judy Holmes, for training the nine actors so well each accent stayed authentic throughout.

And never turn into caricature.

Deserving extra compliments, too, are Ron Krempetz for his set design (from real dirt on the floor to a hint of barbed wire peeking through an opening); Dietz for his sound design (crackling armaments getting closer and closer yanked me right into the action, and scratchy recordings of “Mademoiselle from Armentières” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” became instant time machines); and spot-on costumes by Michael A. Berg.

The two-hour play, despite having first been staged in 1928, miraculously avoids the clichés of the hundreds of war dramas, films and teleplays that came after.

There’s no token black, no token Latino, no token Jew.

There’s no super-patriot, no Dear John letter, no townie with a heart of gold.

Most importantly, there are no heroes.

There are, however, little touches that work especially well to break the tension — the awkwardness of a Brit and German trying to scale language barriers, the reading aloud of passages about the walrus and cabbages and kings, and a bizarre description of an earwig race.

By sidestepping most stereotypes and zeroing in on the human condition, Sherriff, who’d won a Military Cross after being wounded in the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, penned a play with multiple layers that retains its meaning almost a century later.

It won a 2007 Tony for best revival.

Dunn now has breathed new life into it by bringing to the production a rich history of directing and teaching theater arts for 50 years, including three decades at the helm of the Mountain Play.

Is war hell?

In the WWI battle of the Somme, 21,000 British soldiers died on the first day, and 38,000 more became casualties. Mankind apparently didn’t learn much from that episode.

Unfortunately, neither “Journey’s End” nor a multitude of anti-war tracts since have had the power to change anything.

“Journey’s End” will run at The Barn, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through Feb. 16. Night performances, Thursdays at 7:30, Fridays and Saturdays at 8; matinees, Sundays at 2. Tickets: $13-$26. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

 Woody’s [rating:3]

I feel like a nine-year-old boy who’s found a crisp new $100 bill on the sidewalk.

Reveling in discovery.

I’ve never been to the Gough St. Playhouse before, but I’ve obviously missed out on a lot if “The Pain and the Itch” is a typical example of what the CustomMade Theatre Company produces there.

“Pain,” a mega-black comedy by Bruce Norris, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of “Claybourne Park,” proffers a Thanksgiving meal piled high with biting insights into faux family values, racism, hypocrisy, wealth, dementia, a negligent death and, maybe, pedophilia.

When a financially comfortable, liberal, ultra-judgmental and phony family gathers for a Thanksgiving meal in New York, its members and hangers-on munch on Brussels sprouts and long festering resentments.

Norris unhurriedly peels the skin off the family’s smugness as adroitly as if he were wielding a paring knife and onion.

He’s skillful in warding off an audience’s tears but doesn’t avoid the cringe factor as his characters attack each other in overt, sometimes cruel ways.

Sometimes “Pain” is shockingly funny.

Sometimes not so much, like when the wife forces the husband to euthanize a cat to create a hypoallergenic situation for a second child.

 

Norris’ main tool is flashback — an effective freeze-frame device for the most part, but occasionally jarring and confusing.

Both the playwright and director Dale Albright make good use of Mr. Hadid (Dorian Lockett), an African American cab driver, an observer/participant who usually sits on one sideline or another but sometimes asks seemingly oblique questions about the cost of things.

The play centers on the hysteria of Clay (Justin Gillman), a golf-playing, porn-addicted, emasculated house-husband whose young daughter, Kayla (Gabriella Jarvie), has a major genital rash of unknown but possibly creepy origin.

He’s preoccupied by an unseen entity that’s been gnawing at the family avocados.

Clay lives in a world of hyperbole (“Why don’t I just move out? Why don’t I go upstairs and hang myself?”).

His wife, Kelly (Karen Offereins), a standoffish lawyer who tries to hide her own pain behind a cloak of intellectuality, continually puts him down.

Her excuse?

She feels she’s been abused — by “sarcasm” and “neglect.”

Cash (Peter Townley), Clay’s self-centered plastic surgeon brother, the black sheep of the family because he’s a Republican, is involved with a bigoted, coarsely sexual 23-year-old émigré, Kalina (Eden Neuendorf), who’d been repeatedly raped in her native Eastern European country.

The brothers’ condescending, saccharine, baby-talking mother, Carol (Jean Forsman), is a socialist on the brink of dementia.

With the possible exception of Neuendorf, whose accent is so thick it makes some phrases impossible to make out, all the performers acquit themselves rather well. Especially considering that Norris’ words are so barbed and that the actors are asked to talk over each other with great frequency and volume.

“The Pain” isn’t quite as polished as “Claybourne Park,” which it pre-dated by six years. The nastiness in “Pain” verges, in fact, on mean-spirited and vicious.

Moreover, the play shows that Norris (himself Caucasian) is slightly obsessed with ridiculing the hypocrisy of rich, white folk.

Still, the show’s absolutely worth a look-see.

And so is the almost hidden CustomMade troupe, ensconced in a bright but intimate black-box theater with exceptionally comfy seats and dedicated to “producing plays that awaken our social conscience.”

Opening night, more than a few of those 55 seats were empty. That’s a crime: They certainly deserve to be filled for the entire run of the two-hour show.

“The Pain and the Itch” plays at the Gough St. Playhouse, 1620 Gough St. (in the basement of the Trinity Episcopal Church, at Bush), San Francisco, through Feb. 16. Performances Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. Tickets: $22 to $35. Information: (415) 798-2682 or www.custommade.org.

 Woody’s [rating:4]

My father wanted me to taste everything that wasn’t life threatening and become a well-rounded member of the literati.

So he took me at age 8 to “Man and Superman,” George Bernard Shaw’s battle of the sexes comedy.

The play was way, way over my head.

And way, way too long.

I eventually became hooked on Shavian wit anyway (though I didn’t learn where the “v” came from when the form of the Irish playwright’s name was changed).

I also became hooked on theater as a whole, and I did understand why: It could instantly transport me into an alternate world or lifestyle, one I’d not experienced before (and might never, in fact, experience in “real” life).

Seeing the new American Conservatory Theater production of Shaw’s “Major Barbara” instantly transported me backward, to those halcyon days of my youth, into a mental place that caused me now to smile throughout the 109-year-old play (which I’d first watched half a century ago).

In short, I enjoyed it.

Yet somehow the talky ACT political comedy — despite impeccable performances, set and costuming — came off as too intellectual and (even with ostensibly passionate speeches) too impassionate.

I had the feeling it too frequently tickled my cerebral cells rather than my funnybone.

Besides, being in a theater for 2 hours and 40 minutes, was slightly more than my hindquarters could comfortably endure — although the play itself didn’t feel long at all.

“Major Barbara” unfortunately proves, however, that not much has changed in 109 years, especially if you consider the growing gap between ultra-rich and ultra-poor, the continued cynicism of business (particularly regarding the manufacture of weaponry), and the blind zeal that religious faith can spawn.

The storyline is straightforward: Barbara Undershaft (Gretchen Hall), daughter of a ruthless millionaire whiskey distiller and bomb manufacturer (Dean Paul Gibson as Andrew Undershaft), is happily saving souls within the framework of the Salvation Army.

But when her father buys favor through a big donation, she quits — even as the plutocrat’s money saves the mission and leads to 117 conversions in a single day.

Her subsequent quest for reconciliation and inner peace shapes what, in the final analysis, becomes the crux of this morality play.

Along the way, the two leads are superbly supported by Kandis Chappell, who steals the show with her hilarious performance of Barbara’s controlling mother, Lady Britomart Undershaft, and Nicholas Pelczar as Adolphus Cusins, who adores and virtually stalks heroine Barbara.

Not one person in the 15-member cast, in fact, is anything but excellent.

Aiding the theatrical illusions, the massive, mobile set by Daniel Ostling is incredibly effective (though sometimes dwarfing the actors).

And costuming by Alex Jaeger leaves no doubt about the era of the action.

The show is a co-production with Theatre Calgary, a Canadian troupe. Its director, Dennis Garnhum, has noted that the result is what happens when “two theaters from two countries…share our similarities and our differences.”

He’s written, too, that he and Carey Perloff, ACT’s artistic director, selected ‘Major Barbara’ for the same reason: its “overwhelming relevance” to 2014.

Good choice.

Garnhum, not incidentally, managed to extract every possible laugh from the script, then added a few of his own via direction that underscores the inherent humor by means of an exaggerated glance or toss of the head.

While most of the themes tackled by Shaw resonate currently, his women display leadership qualities but few touches of feminism. Early on, for example, the matronly head of family states succinctly (while trying to encourage her son to take more familial responsibility):

“I am only a woman.”

Similar to most episodes of “Law and Order,” Shaw outlines both sides of each issue yet, ultimately, makes sure his thought process isn’t left to the fancies of an audience: Consider when the father proclaims that poverty is “the worst of crimes” and that poor people “kill the happiness of society.”

The playwright’s sharpest tools aren’t polemics, though. They’re swift, clever banter between characters, and they’re sarcastic or sardonic outbursts.

Shaw, of course, was an Irish playwright with well-defined opinions, a writer who won both the Nobel Prize for literature and an Oscar (for “Pgymalion,” the film forerunner of the hit Broadway musical, “My Fair Lady”). His creations, it could be argued, cleared the path for latter-day theatrical masters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Tom Stoppard.

A perfect sidelight: An honest-to-goodness, four-piece Salvation Army band played outside the theater before the show, its familiar strains foreshadowing a major component of “Major Barbara.”

And a last thought: Barbara’s father’s consistent intimidations were strikingly reminiscent of recent bullying by a New Jersey governor.

“Major Barbara” plays at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco, through Feb. 2. Performances Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Tuesdays, 7 or 8 p.m.; matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $140. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

 Woody’s [rating:4.5]

It was a one-night stand.

But I’ll long remember it as a theatrical ménage à quatre, which, clearly, is one person better than a ménage à trois.

The harmonious homecoming of the Kinsey Sicks took place at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. And, as might have been prophesied, the quartet’s social satire was both outrageous and outrageously funny.

And as raunchy as ever.

I hadn’t seen the drag queen tour de farce in more than a decade. My loss.

This go-round, a 20th anniversary bash by “America’s favorite ‘dragapella’ beautyshop quartet,” spoofed — mainly through original lyrics and music — a potty-load of 21st century TV reality series.

The foursome labels its musical comedy “America’s Next Top Bachelor Housewife Celebrity Hoarder Makeover Star Gone Wild!”

I doubt if I’d have laughed harder even if I’d ever seen any of the original reality shows they were lampooning (or if I’d known beforehand that the show was an outgrowth of their having once been contestants on “America’s Got Talent”).

The Kinseys (who wear male attire when not on stage) were, as always, downright irreverent.

No body parts were safe from their wit.

And, naturally, there were endless overt and innuendo references to gay sex, gay sex and, in case you missed it, gay sex.

The Kinsey Sicks website provides a quick rundown of the current cast — “The Boys Behind the Girls.” Its cheeky tone is in keeping with the act, but there are serious undertones.

Ben Schatz (“Rachel“) co-founded the Kinsey Sicks with Irwin Keller and is its chief lyricist. A Harvard Law grad, he started the first national AIDS legal program and was on President Clinton’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

Keller (“Winnie”), who’s responsible for many of the group’s musical arrangements, is a linguist and lawyer who authored Chicago’s gay rights ordinance. He also acts as lay rabbi of a small Cotati synagogue.

Jeff Manabat (“Trixie”) joined the Kinseys in 2004, and Spencer Brown (“Trampolina”) jumped on the vocalwagon in 2008.

The homecoming show also briefly featured Maurice Kelly, who’d originated the Trixie role. She sizzled while doing offering an updated rendition of “Fever” in a white gown that recalled Glinda the Good witch from “Wicked.”

The cavernous Castro has 1,400 seats, and a quick glance showed virtually none was empty. I, in fact, got there somewhat late and was relegated to the last row of the balcony, from which I could hear almost every barbed phrase, many of which (including countless f-bombs) can’t be reprinted by family newspapers or websites.

If lyrics became too dense or too fast to discern, however, I simply tuned into a cappella excellence that the Kinseys’ vocal instruments command.

The throng appeared to be 99.4 percent gay male, with a smattering of lesbians. A handful of others, including me, represented the straight population. If there were any LGBT-bashers, they stayed in hiding.

Parents wisely kept their tiny kids at home.

Pre-show slides on a big screen set the mood. They skipped through the Kinseys’ history, mostly in color but occasionally dating back the full 20 years to black-and-white stills.

The concert-burlesque also included tidbits from old but still vibrant concoctions.

For instance, the two-Jew, two-Gentile, big-haired, big-harmonied quartet offered excerpts from “Oy Vey in a Manger,” which they just presented on the Sonoma State University campus, proving that the Kinseys and their fans prefer naughty over nice.

Highlights of “America’s Next Top…” were retooled versions of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “Santa Baby,” as well as aggressive originals that asked the question, “Why the F—k Aren’t We Famous?”

The encores were superb.

One gospel-based piece truly jumped, and the poignant closing tribute to former Kinsey performer Jerry Friedman (and, presumably, AIDs casualties) brought the entire crowd, many of whom had been only one or two degrees of separation removed, to its feet.

Throughout the show, pop and cultural references were rife. Inserted, for instance, were often-snarky mentions of Rachel Maddow, Frida Kahlo, Simon Cowell, Susan Boyle, Dick Cheney and George Clooney.

Throwaway lines rocketed in every direction.

Like an old Henny Youngman routine, if you didn’t laugh at this gag, that phrase, or any specific alliteration or allusion, there’d be another along in a second.

Some were groaners.

Such as: “Van Gogh didn’t have an ear for music.”

After the two-hour show, which featured smatterings of audience participation, came a bonus: Deborah Doyle, president of the California Library Association, moderated a question-and-answer verbal roundelay featuring Kinsey input, serious and not.

The uproarious but thoughtful quartet has appeared in Las Vegas, off-Broadway and in 42 states — and they’ve put out two DVDs and eight CDs.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that in keeping with their clever, dense-and-dirty delivery, the four drag queens would probably rejoice in my indicating that they’d put out at all.

A 20-year retrospective about the Kinsey Sicks will be displayed at the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St., third floor, from Feb. 8 through July 10. For information on upcoming appearances of the group, check out www.kinseysicks.com or call (415) 326-4679.