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Woody Weingarten

Woody
Weingarten

Jul 06 2012
Love0

New Eve Ensler play hopes to motivate young women

By Woody Weingarten

“Emotional Creature,” a new Berkeley Rep play by Eve Ensler, is all about empowerment and diversity for young women.
And universality.
Ensler’s obituary undoubtedly will start with the phrase “creator of ‘The Vagina Monologues,” referring to her word-medley that’s been translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries.
   
But now, while she’s alive and well and dripping with success, she’s into promoting what she calls the V-girls, members of a youth movement she believes will “amplify their voices and ignite a global girl revolution through art and activism” — to, in effect, reshape the world.
Ensler’s involvement stems from the fact that, according to the United Nations, “one in three women will be beaten or raped during her lifetime.”
The V, she explains, stands simultaneously for victory, valentine and vagina.
Cast of Berkeley Rep’s “Emotional Creature” brings Eve Ensler’s words to life. 
Photo, courtesy kevinberne.com

“Emotional Creature” focuses on all three of those elements in a string of disparate vignettes in a monologue-montage punctuated by singing and dance.

Consider the following:
• A high-school clique disses an outsider, keeping her off balance by changing from moment to moment who and what’s “in.”
• Youths jauntily swap sexual details with friends.
• Girls show obsessions with body image (focusing, for a change, on a nose job rather than boob enhancement) and clothing (short skirts are not an invitation to rape).
• Barbie symbolizes the unattainable — as well as the inability of women to communicate about their plights.
• Third-world women become sexually enslaved, or are forced to suffer clitoral mutilation.
“Emotional Creature,” based on Ensler’s best-selling novel, “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World,” also rips stories from news headlines (or, perhaps, episodes of “Law and Order”).
It dramatically bares, for instance, the suicide of a gay teen not bullied by peers but rejected by her parents.
Although the show does inject sporadic bits of humor, most of its exposition and delivery are hyper-serious — ranging from melancholy ballads to an anthem-like piece that extols a dozen activists such as Angela Davis, Joan of Arc, Julia Butterfly Hill and Anne Frank.
A world premiere tightly directed by Jo Bonney, “Emotional Creatures” — which runs under an hour and half — is headed for off-Broadway in the fall. 
Meanwhile, each of the six current cast members — Ashley Bryant, Molly Carden, Emily S. Grosland, Joaquina Kaulkango, Sade Namel and Olivia Oguma — is a pro at a young age. Individual skills with accents are especially deserving of plaudits.
There’s always a touch of polemic in Ensler’s creations. “Emotional Creature” is no exception.
Before the show starts, for example, projected images include statistics that scream at you: “The body type portrayed in advertising as ideal is possessed naturally by only 5% of American females.” “When asked to cite their hobbies, 80% of girls aged 13-18 listed shopping.”
Once “Emotional Creature” begins, the proselytizing doesn’t end. Heavy-handed rhetoric runs wild: “Would you rather be called a dyke or a bitch?” “Would you rather be killed in a high school shooting or a nuclear war?”
When it’s over, cynics may find the play and its weighty messages to be an expanded update on the 1971 hit song by Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman,” aimed this go-round at younger females.
My wife, an older female, thought the show was impressive — and important.
That figures. She has a vagina.
I wasn’t as touched. I found it superficial and riddled with old news.
But then, of course, I’m missing that key organ.
“Emotional Creature” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 15. 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 to $73, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.
Jul 06 2012
Love0

‘Scottsboro Boys’ skewers racism via satire, minstrels

By Woody Weingarten
The minstrel-show framework of “The Scottsboro Boys” may be irritating for several minutes — until the brilliance of the device osmoses into your brain cells.
Outmoded burlesque and tambourines become the underpinnings of our oppression of blacks.
By limelighting a defunct racist motif, along with faded components such as the cakewalk and tap-dancing, the musical effectively makes white racism prance before your eyes like a carnival mirror distortion.
It might make you writhe, though.
And when the American Conservatory Theatre production ends, you may experience a slightly bad aftertaste — not from the show but from the realization that  racial discrimination isn’t dead. Case in point: southern states currently trying to block minorities from voting in 2012’s presidential election.

The Interlocutor (Hal Linden) is flanked by Mr. Bones (Jared Joseph, left) and Mr. Tambo (JC Montgomery) in “The Scottsboro Boys,” playing at the American Conservatory Theater. 
Photo by Kevin Berne.

The musical starts with solo banjo-pickin’ followed by a tableau of nine teenaged black boys unjustly accused and repeatedly convicted in Alabama of raping two white women in the 1930s.

It ends by detailing how pathetically they fared as men.
In between, there’s enough in the two-hour, intermission-less show to offend anyone who’s distressed by racial inequality — seasoned with enough hope to believe the future will be better.
The ensemble cast is excellent, with strong voices and equally strong dramatic and comedic chops. It’s so forceful in a true team effort it’s hard to pick a standout, even though Jared Joseph as Mr. Bones and JC Montgomery as Mr. Tambo glisten in their exaggerated postures.
C. Kelly Wright also turns in a subtle, stellar performance as a symbolic black woman, The Lady, mute until the very end.
Metal chairs are used, surrealistically and effectively, to represent everything from jail cells to a train car. Unfortunately, their sheer cleverness could detach theatergoers from emotions the storyline might otherwise evoke.
The surrealistic flavor is intensified by black men portraying whites, the lone Caucasian in the cast being former “Barney Miller” TV star Hal Linden as the Interlocutor.
It’s also odd, though purposefully staged that way, to find two black men playing caricatures of the white female accusers via bug eyes and clown-like gestures.
Barbed lyrics by Fred Ebb repeatedly bring you back to reality, however.
Consider a tune that begins with allusions of grits, honeysuckle and “mammy” but morphs into cross-burnings and lynchings.
In contrast, burlesque humor seeps from David Thompson’s book, including this grisly exchange: “What do you call a black boy in an electric chair?” “A shock absorber!”
“The Scottsboro Boys” has a running subtext about telling the truth.
But the harshest truths stem from moments of painful satire. A “white” St. Peter, for example, informs a black man he can enter Heaven but he must go “through the back door.”
A score that’s basic John Kander, alternately bouncy and mournful, is counterbalanced by Ebb’s edgy words. Check out a bigoted prosecutor verbally abusing a recanting witness with claims she accepted “Jew money” for her testimony.
None of that should be surprising, considering Kander & Ebb’s semi-obsession with mankind’s underbelly (as evidenced by their “Cabaret,” “Chicago” and “The Kiss of the Spider Woman”).
Costumes here are extraordinary, ranging from ragtag garb of the defendants to the crisp, pristine whites of the minstrels. Also exemplary is the lighting, especially in instances where creative silhouettes dance behind live characters.
Although “The Scottsboro Boys,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, played but 49 performances on Broadway in 2010, the opening night San Francisco audience couldn’t have cared less. It clapped and cheered throughout, then rose in unison for a standing ovation.
One exiting woman intoned uncomfortably, “It’s painful to re-experience all those civil wrongs before they became civil rights.”
But another theatergoer probably spoke for most when she declared, “Wow! Everything about it was wonderful.”
“The Scottsboro Boys” plays at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco, through July 22. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7 or 8 p.m. Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $95. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.