The Stuart Excellence In Bay Area Theater Awards for 2013

Stuart Bousel gives us his Best of 2013 list. 

Three years ago I decided that I wanted to start my own Bay Area Theater Awards, because my opinions are just as legitimate as anyone else’s, the awards I give out are as valuable as any other critical awards, (recipients of the SEBATA, or the Stuey, if you prefer, get nothing but my admiration and some free publicity), and also because there’s a fairly good chance that I’ve seen a lot of theater the usual award givers haven’t seen. The best thing about the Bay Area theater scene is that there is a huge diversity in the offerings, and so much on the table to begin with. No one person can see it all, and therefore it’s important to share with one another the highlights of our time in the audience seat, if only to create a greater awareness of what and who is out there making stuff.

Also, there are some people who think I don’t like anything, and I feel a need to not only prove them wrong, but to do so by expressing how much of the local color I do love and admire, as opposed to just pointing out that the reason they think I don’t like anything is because I generally don’t like *their* work (oh… I guess I did just point that out, didn’t I?). Normally I post these “awards” on my Facebook page, but this year I decided to bring them to the blog because the mission statement of the SEBATA is pretty in-line with the mission statement of Theater Pub, and having come to the close of an amazing year of growth for the blog, it now has a much farther reach than my Facebook page could ever hope to have. Congratulations SF Theater Pub Blog- you just won a Stuey.

Anyway, because I am a product of the generation that grew up with the MTV Movie Awards- and, because I’m the only person on the voting committee and thus can do what I like- I have decided that my categories are purely arbitrary and can be stretched to allow me to write about anyone I feel like. The two limits are 1) I can’t give myself an award (though I can have been involved in the show on a limited level) and 2) I won’t go over thirteen (though there may be ties for some awards). Because seriously, how (more) self indulgent would this be without either of those rules? Oh, 3) I won’t give out awards for how bad something was. I’m here to be positive. And chances are those people were punished enough.

To all my friends and frenemies in the Bay Area Theater Scene… it’s been a great year. Let’s you and me do it again sometime. Well… most of you.

And now, presenting the Fourth Annual Stuey Awards…

BEST THEATER FESTIVAL
“Pint Sized IV” (San Francisco Theater Pub)
Pint Sized Plays gets better each year, and it’s honestly one of two things I actually miss about working at the Cafe Royale (the other is the uniqueness of doing Shakespeare there, which for some reason works in a completely magical way I wish it worked more often on traditional stages). This year the festival was put together by Neil Higgins, who did an amazing job, and I think we had some of the best material yet. The evening as a whole felt incredibly cohesive, with a theme of forgiveness and letting go, archly reflective of our decision to leave the Cafe Royale, and I think incredibly relevant to a lot of our audience. We knew Pint Sized could be very funny, and very socially pointed, but I’m not sure we had ever conceived of it as moving and this year it was, thanks in no small part to our writers (Megan Cohen, Peter Hsieh, Sang S. Kim, Carl Lucania, Daniel Ng, Kirk Shimano and Christian Simonsen), directors (Jonathan Carpenter, Colin Johnson, Tracy Held Potter, Neil Higgins, Charles Lewis III, Meghan O’Connor, Adam L. Sussman) and actors (Annika Bergman, Jessica Chisum, Andrew Chung, AJ Davenport, Eli Diamond, Caitlin Evenson, Lara Gold, Matt Gunnison, Melissa Keith, Charles Lewis III, Brian Quakenbush, Rob Ready, Casey Robbins, Paul Rodrigues, Jessica Rudholm). The evening would start off with a magical performance by the Blue Diamond Bellydancers, whose combination of skill and spectacle got our audiences excited for what was to come. As we moved through the pieces, each by turns funny and poignant, each in some way or another about finding something, losing it, letting it go, and then coming back stronger, you could feel the audience grow warmer and closer each night. By the time Rob Ready gave the closing monologue, fixing each audience member in turn with a smile, you could feel everyone really listening and you could hear a pin drop in the room, and that’s saying something for the noisy by nature Cafe Royale. I think a lot of love went into the festival this year, and not just because it might be the last, and the product of that love was real magic and like the best theater- you had to be there. And if you weren’t, you really missed out.

BEST SHOW
“The Motherf**ker With The Hat” (San Francisco Playhouse)
I saw a lot of decent, solid, well done theater this year but I had a hard time connecting to a lot of it, which was rarely a flaw with the show and probably had more to do with where I was/am as a person (lots of change this year). Then again, something about really good theater is that it can get you out of your own head and into some other world, for a while. Towards the end of the year, I saw three shows I really really liked: “Crumble, or Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake” at Bigger Than A Bread Box Theater Company, “Peter/Wendy” at Custom Made Theater Company, and “First” at Stage Werx, produced by Altair Productions/The Aluminous Collective and Playground. Still, San Francisco Playhouse’s production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “The Motherf**ker With The Hat”, directed by Bill English, was probably my favorite show of the year. Who knows why it has an edge on the others? Maybe because as someone who spent most of their childhood weekends in New York it seemed oddly familiar, or maybe it was the deft handling by the universally excellent cast (Carl Lumbly, Gabriel Marin, Rudy Guerrero, Margo Hall, Isabelle Ortega) of the complex relationships and dialogue that Guirgis does so well, or maybe it was just refreshing to see such a simple, honest play in what, for me, was a year characterized by a lot of stylistically interesting but emotionally cold theater. There is something very passionate, scathing, bombastic and yet also humble and forgiving about Guirgis’ work that I think makes him such an important voice in modern American drama and English’s production brought all that out with an easy grace. The show really worked, and got me out of my head, and when I went back to my life I felt much better for the journey. What more can you ask of a theater experience?

BEST READING
“Paris/Hector” (San Francisco Olympians Festival)
I attend a lot of readings every year, and run a reading festival myself, so I’ve come to greatly value a really well done reading. This year, the award goes to director Katja Rivera and writers Kirk Shimano and Bridgette Dutta Portman, whose pair of one acts about the pair of Trojan princes Paris and Hector made for one of the best nights of this past year’s San Francisco Olympians Festival. Part of what I loved about it was that in one evening we saw the amazing variety the festival can offer: Kirk’s play was a comedy with a poignant moment or two, while Bridgette’s was a faux-classical drama- written in verse no less. Though the writers are the center of attention at the festival, credit really has to be given to Katja Rivera, who as the director of both pieces, made many simple but effective choices to highlight the best elements of both works and utilize the talents of her excellent cast: Yael Aranoff, Molly Benson, Jeremy Cole, Mackenszie Drae, Allison Fenner, Dana Goldberg, John Lennon Harrison, Michelle Talgarow, Alaric Toy. With the combined excellent story-telling of the performers (including beautiful and surprising singing from Yael, Molly and Dana), the thoughtfulness of the scripts, and the cohesiveness of the whole, this night of the festival stood out best in what was a consistently strong year at the Olympians.

BEST SHORT PLAY
“My Year” by Megan Cohen (Bay One Acts Festival)
Megan Cohen’s “My Year” is the kind of thing I wish more short plays would be: dynamic, personal, and complete. In a sea of short plays that are really fragments, or meet-cute plays, it’s always lovely to see something with a beginning, a middle, and end, and full-formed characters having actual interactions and not just feeling like Girl A and Guy B, thrown together by the whimsy of the playwright to make a point (though of course, the right playwright can pull that off- which is why so many people try to ape it). A friend of mine described “My Year” as “A fun little 90s indie film on stage” and my reaction when watching it was “Oh, Dear God, convince Meg to let me write a companion piece to this!” because let’s face it: at least a third of what I write is a 90s film on stage. My own vanity aside, what I loved about this play (directed by Siobhan Doherty, starring Emma Rose Shelton, Theresa Miller, Nkechi Live, Allene Hebert, Jaime Lee Currier, and Luna Malbroux) was that it felt constantly on the move, while still being mostly composed of intimate moments between a group of women at a birthday party. Like a lot of the theater that I really loved this year, it also just struck a personal chord, watching this young woman (Emma Rose Shelton) trying to enjoy the party her friends have thrown for her (though she doesn’t like surprise parties) despite there being no food and a random stranger (Theresa Miller) who worms her way in only to turn out to be the troublemaker she’s originally pegged for. Megan’s writing had its usual combination of smart and sentimental, but whereas a lot of her other work heads into absurdity and/or extreme quirkiness (not that this is bad), “My Year” stayed very grounded and found its meaning in that effort to stay grounded, making what might be a quiet little play in anyone else’s oeuvre, a nice change of pace in Cohen’s. The final moment, where the characters howl at the moon because what else are you going to do after a shitty birthday, felt like a communal sigh even the audience was in on, probably because we could all relate to Shelton’s character, and while having always loved and admired Meg’s work, this is probably the first time I related to it so wholeheartedly.

The Peter O’Toole Award For General Awesomeness
Linda Huang (Stage Manager, Tech, Box Office, Everything)
You know how the Oscars and Tonys give out Lifetime Achievement Awards for people whose contribution is so massive that it would kind of be criminal to pick one work or contribution so instead they just get an award for basically being themselves? You know, like how Peter O’Toole got that award because at some point somebody realized that he was pervasively brilliant and always in fashion and therefore easily forgotten because things like “Oh, well, he’ll win next year” often times factors in to who we recognize, meaning things like reliability and consistency do not? Well, for the first time ever in the history of the SEBATAs, I’m creating The Peter O’Toole Award for General Awesomeness and giving it to Linda Huang, without whom, in all seriousness, I believe that small theater in San Francisco would probably grind to a halt. Earlier this year, I got recognized by the Weekly as a “Ringmaster” of the theater scene, but frankly I (and people like me) could not do what we do without having Linda (and people like her) constantly coming to our aid despite being paid a fraction of what they’re worth and half the time being forgotten because what they do isn’t in the immediate eye of the audience. Linda is a total gem of the theater scene. She wears many hats, though she’s probably best known for running light boards, and one of my favorite things when attending the theater is running into her, usually working in some capacity I previously was unaware she was qualified to do (note: Linda is qualified to do everything). What I love best about Linda (aside from her cutting sense of humor and tell-it-like-it-is demeanor) is her incredible generosity: she does so much for local theater and rarely gets paid, and even when she does get paid she often says, “Pay me last.” A true team player, and one we don’t thank enough, especially as she’s the only person who seems to know how to get the air conditioning in the Exit Theatre to work.

BEST BREAK THROUGH
Atticus Rex, Open Mic Night In Support of the Lemonade Fund (SF Theater Pub/Theater Bay Area Individual Services Committee)
I never expected to include a note about someone who performed at an open mic/variety show, but I wanted to shout out to Atticus Rex, a young performer who literally made his performance debut at the San Francisco Theater Pub/ISC fundraiser for the Lemonade Fund this year. A last minute replacement, Atticus and a friend performed some original hip-hop for our audience of mostly performance professionals and their friends, and despite the formidable crowd and the first time nerves, he basically killed it. Even when he made a mistake it worked: he’d call himself out, apologize, and start again, somehow without ever missing a beat. His lyrics are very tight and poetic, and the contrast between the power in his words and his humbleness at approaching and leaving the stage works so well you’d almost think it was an act- except he later confessed he’d never performed live before, and it couldn’t have been more sincere. With genuine hope he never loses his sincerity, while also continuing to grow his confidence and experience, I wanted to take a moment to say congratulations once again, and thank you for reminding us all what it looks like to really take a risk onstage.

BEST CHEMISTRY
Genie Cartier and Audrey Spinazola (Genie and Audrey’s Dream Show, SF Fringe Festival)
What’s potentially cuter than “Clyde the Cyclops?” Very little, but these two ladies and their breathless, funny, and surreal little clown show come dangerously close to giving Clyde a run for his money, and it’s the only show I saw at the Fringe this year that I wished my boyfriend had also seen. Bravely straddling the bridge between performance artists and acrobats, this collage of monologues, poems, jokes, mime, clowning, puppetry, stunts, music, and children’s games, is like watching two hyper-articulate kids on pixie sticks go nuts in a club house, but only if those kids had an incredible sense of timing and arch senses of humor (not to mention very flexible bodies). I’ve never been a huge fan of circus stuff (I like it as an accent, sometimes, but as entertainment on its own it doesn’t tend to hold my interest long), but I think I’d be a fan of anything that had these two women in it. Their ability to play off each other is the key to making their show work, and when you watch it you have that sense of being let into the private make-believe world of people who have found kindred spirits in one another. It’s an utterly magic combination and from what I know of other people who saw it, it basically charmed the pants off everyone. Or at least, everyone who has a soul.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR
Ben Calabrese (Apartment in “Crumble, or Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake”)
I saw a lot of great performances by men this year (Sam Bertken in “Peter/Wendy”, Tim Green and Gregory Knotts in “First”, Paul Rodrigues “Pint Sized Plays IV”, Will Hand “Dark Play”, Casey Robbins “Oh Best Beloved!”), but this one really took my breath away (though since Sam Bertken actually got me to sincerely clap for fairies in Peter/Wendy, he gets a second shout out). Ben’s role, which is to literally embody the voice of a neglected apartment, is the kind of role that could either be the best thing about the show, or the worst. Luckily for Bigger Than A Breadbox’s production of “Crumble, or Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake (written by Sheila Callaghan), Ben rocked it. Bouncing around the stage, dive bombing the furniture, all the while spouting, eloquently, Callaghan’s beautiful and complex monologues, Ben was so utterly watchable it was impossible not to buy the conceit of the role, and so moments when he has an orgasm from having the radiator turned on, or turns his fingers into loose electrical wires, don’t seem ridiculous, but made immediate and total sense. It’s usually not a compliment to tell an actor they did a tremendous job being an inanimate object, but what Ben did so well was illustrate that a home, while not “alive”, does indeed have a life to it. And if that life occasionally fixes the audience with Ben’s particular brand of “scary actor stare” why… all the better.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS
Brandice Marie Thompson (Georgia Potts in “First”)
Oh, this was a tough one. As usual, the actresses of the Bay Area are kicking ass and taking names no matter what their role, and my decision to pick Brandice above the rest is because I think she best exemplified that thing which so many actresses have to do, which is take a relatively underwritten role in a play about men and turn it into a rich, believable character who somehow manages to steal the show. Evelyn Jean Pine, who wrote “First”, is a fantastic writer and she writes women and men equitably well, and due credit must go to her for the creation and inclusion of this character in a story mostly about male egos, but in a lesser capable actresses hands, this role could have been annoying, or forgettable, or purely comical, and Brandice avoided all of these traps while making the character utterly charming at the same time. The truth is, her arc became much more interesting to me than that of the main character, and I think a strong argument could be made that “First” was just as much about Georgia as it was about Bill Gates. Director Michael French no doubt had a hand in this too, but in the end it’s a performer who makes or breaks a role and Brandice’s ability to combine mousy with spunky with unexpected and yet thoroughly authentic character turns was deeply satisfying to watch. Georgia kicked ass and took names, because Brandice does. Runners up: Melissa Carter (“Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake”, Bigger Than A Breadbox), Allison Jean White (“Abigail’s Party”, SF Playhouse), Sam Jackson (“Oh Best Beloved!”, SF Fringe Festival), Courtney Merril (“Into the Woods”, Ray of Light), Elissa Beth Stebbins (“Peter/Wendy”, Custom Made Theatre Company).

BEST FUSION THEATER PIECE
“Nightingale” (Davis Shakespeare Ensemble/SF Fringe Festival)
This little gem at this year’s fringe festival was adapted from the myth of Philomel by Gia Battista, with music by Richard Chowenhill, directed by Rob Sals (with Battista), and staring Gabby Battista, April Fritz and Tracy Hazas as three remarkably similar looking women who each take a turn playing the heroine of a bizarre fairy tale (all the other characters in the story are played by them as well). Dance, pantomime, narration, song and traditional theater techniques all came together in a way that was astonishingly clean and charming in its simplicity. The black and white aesthetic used to unify the look of the show and performers gave the whole thing a quality both modern and timeless, and in its gentle, dreamy tone the sharp elements of social commentary and satire often seemed more brutal and impactful. Of everything I saw at the Fringe this past year, which included a number of excellent works, this piece has stayed with me the longest.

BEST SOLO SHOW
“Steve Seabrook: Better Than You” by Kurt Bodden (The Marsh)
I saw a lot more solo performance than usual this year (including works by Annette Roman, Laura Austin Wiley, Alexa Fitzpatrick, Jenny Newbry Waters, Rene Pena), and realizing how good it can be is, in and of itself, kind of a miracle because I used to say things like, “Theater begins with two people” and “If Aeschylus had wanted to write sermons he wouldn’t have added Electra”. Kurt’s show was not created this past year, it has a long history, but I only saw it in its most recent Marsh incarnation and I’m hoping he’s been able to find ways to keep it going (his Facebook feeds indicate this is so). A satire of motivational speakers and the cult of self-improvement, “Steve Seabrook” manages to be so much more by combining satirical fiction with moments of the kind of personal monologue (still fiction) that permeates solo shows. The result is a sense of development, of a story (Steve’s) unfolding in real time while another story, (Steve’s Seminar) plays itself out over the course of a weekend. Playing off the convention of a backstage comedy (we see the seminar, then we see Steve when he’s not “on”), Kurt’s brilliance as a performer is evident in the seamless transition from one to the other, again and again, carrying a throughline that shows us not only why Steve buys into his mantras, but why any of us buy into anything we’ve come up with (or adopted from someone else) to keep us moving through life’s ups and downs. At once very funny and cutting, while also moving and real (and yes, fuck it, kind of inspirational), Kurt’s show also gets a nod for its fantastic takeaway schwag: a keychain light with Steve’s name on it, with which every audience member is encouraged to shine their light in a dark world.

BEST DIRECTOR
Rebecca Longworth and Joan Howard, “Oh Best Beloved” (SF Fringe Festival)
“Oh Best Beloved” got a lot of attention and deservedly so- well acted, well designed, it was a genuinely fun piece of theater. Perhaps most deserving of being singled out in the project, however, are director Rebecca Longworth and partner Joan Howard, who share credit for conceptualizing the show (in which Joan also played a part and had, in my opinion, the single best moment in the show), and who lead the rest of the company in adapting the material from Ruyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories”. Anyone who saw the show could easily see that it had about a million moving parts, and Longworth and Howard’s ability to keep all those plates spinning on a small budget and under the strict conditions of the San Francisco Fringe Festival (they literally put up and pulled down a full set with each performance) is worthy of award in and of itself, but the level of commitment and craft they were able to pull from their design team and performers was equally as impressive. Everything about the show, even the parts that didn’t work as well as others, felt thought through and done with panache, making this ambitious and unique experience a delightful jewel in the SF Fringe Festival’s crown.

BEST DESIGNER
Bill English, “Abigail’s Party” (SF Playhouse)
Scenery in general doesn’t do much for me. I enjoy good scenery, but the best scenery should kind of vanish into the background, in my opinion, and be something you barely pay attention to. As a result, I’m often just as happy with a blank stage, or really well thought out minimal set, as I am with a full one, so long as the play I’m watching is good. That said, every now and then I will see a set I just adore, and this year it was Bill English’s set for SF Playhouse’s “Abigail’s Party”, by Mike Leigh, directed by Amy Glazer. Basically a living room/dining room/kitchenet combo, this fully realized “home” was very well crafted as a place, but more importantly, it really worked as a place where people lived. The 70s style was at once present without being overwhelming, evoking the time period without looking like it was a homage to the time period, or a museum dedicated to 70s kitch. I mean, it honestly reminded me of numerous homes I’d played in as a child (I was born in 1978) and all the wallpaper looked like wallpaper in my parents’ home before my mother completely re-did the house in 1990 because “we can admit this is ugly… now”. The amazing thing about English’s set is that it didn’t seem ugly, in spite of being made up entirely of patterns and colors we now find appalling. He made it all work together, the way people once did, and the final result was simultaneously comfortable and dazzling. I remember thinking, waiting for the play to begin, “I could live here.”

And last, but not least, every year I pick…

MY PERSONAL FAVORITE EXPERIENCE TO WORK ON
“The Age of Beauty” (No Nude Men Productions/The Exit Theatre)
I had taken a break from directing my own work, but with this nine performance workshop I allowed myself to re-discover that, as much as I like directing plays by others, there is nothing quite as satisfying as feeling like I’m telling a very personal story of my own and having the final say on how that happens. Of course, such experiences are only rewarding when you get to work with great actors, and I was lucky to have four amazing women (Megan Briggs, Emma Rose Shelton, Allison Page, Sylvia Hathaway) who were willing to go on this adventure with me, always keeping stride as I made cuts and changed lines, memorizing a mountain of material in Emma and Sylvia’s case, and crafting subtle characters who had to be both different from each other and relatively interchangeable at the same time. When I had a hard time articulating what I was going for, they would nod and smile and then show me what I meant by doing it better than I could describe it. When the show opened by the skin of its teeth it had one of those minor miracle opening nights, where even though you’re just a tiny bit unprepared (all my fault, I kept changing the script), it somehow all comes together and really works. Over the course of the show, as their performances grew and refined (our final two nights were simply perfect), I was able to see what flaws still remained in the script (two pages, middle of scene of scene two were cut the day after we closed), and any writer of new work will tell you that’s the best experience you can hope for on a first production. Shout outs to my awesome design team Cody Rishell, Jim Lively and Wil Turner IV! “The Age of Beauty” helped restore some of my lagging faith in the theater process, and made me commit to doing more of my own work in the coming year.

Stuart Bousel runs the San Francisco Theater Pub blog, and is a Founding Artistic Director of the San Francisco Theater Pub. You can find out more about his work at http://www.horrorunspeakable.com.

Theater Around The Bay: A Critic Isn’t Batman

Stuart Bousel talks about why he’s nowhere near as worked up about a bad review as some people think he should be… and why nobody probably ever should be.

So, over the weekend, as I was listening to a first reading of the first draft of a new play (my adaptation of Kristin Hersh’s memoir, RAT GIRL), an article on another theater website, HowlRound, was apparently causing some distress amongst my circle of theater associates, largely because the writer, Lily Janiak, had written less than flattering things about both my play and the play of a friend of mine, FANTASY CLUB by Rachel Bublitz Kessinger. To be fair, Rachel (and her director, Tracy Held Potter) got the worse end of the stick, but to be fair to Lily as well, her article was less a review of either of our plays (or a third play, WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW, by Monica Byrne) as it was a meditation on whether or not her ability to critique a show is influenced by her own personal aesthetics, taste, and (since this was a comparison of three plays “about women”) the social-political agenda that she personally, as a woman, wants to see satisfied by a theater experience ostensibly focused on women. As I read her article, she ultimately concludes that yes, of course, all these things factor in, but she still feels she can tell a “good” show from a “lacking” one. In light of all that (and regardless of whether or not I personally feel, based on her work, that Lily has reached the point where she can think outside of her own perspective), I really found her inclusion of my play in her article rather flattering, and my reaction to it directly can be summed up by the following post on Facebook:

Everyone keeps asking if I’m going to have a response to a play of mine being mentioned (somewhat negatively) in a HowlRound article and I have to keep telling people I just don’t really care. Ironically, I may now have to write a blog about how and why I just don’t really care… To me, that is a worthy topic: about how I long ago stopped putting much weight into criticism- even though I absolutely think criticism is valuable and I’m happy, as an artist, that my work gets talked about at all. But that’s just it- the goal here is to stimulate conversation, not like… be loved by everyone. And the truth is, the article isn’t really about my play, and to some extent the writer, who I know personally and think very highly of (even though I frequently disagree with her), is crediting my play with having made her think about what part her own personal taste plays in her review of what she sees. Which I take as a compliment. The whole part where she doesn’t like how some of my female characters talk too much about their ex-boyfriends is like… whatever. The point of the play isn’t about women who can’t get over men, it’s about how all people struggle with their past and what relationship it continues to play in their lives. But even if it had been a play about women who can’t get over men- THERE ARE WOMEN LIKE THAT, and while you may not be interested in that, it doesn’t mean their stories shouldn’t be told. Just means you should go see something else. As a gay man who is frequently sitting at shows where I see disappointing representations of gay life and gay people (frequently created by gay theater artists and gay theater companies, I might add), I long ago realized that my personal taste isn’t everyone else’s, and something isn’t bad or unworthy, just because it isn’t how I want it or would do it/say it. To me, her article is about her coming to realize that and I’m kind of just shrugging and thinking, “Good for you, and thanks for spelling my name right when you credited me as part of that process for you.” Job well done on both our parts, I say.

If you’re interested in reading Lily’s article, you can do so here. If you would like to read a different perspective on my show, you can do so here. It’s worth noting that both reviews are written by critics I know personally (Sam openly states that in his article, but the fact is Lily was in the same festival a year earlier), neither of whom I think has a particular personal bias towards me as an artist, as one thing I have really tried to establish about myself over the years is that I treat everyone the same, whether they’re into my work or not, so long as I feel they are coming at my work from a place of honesty and make a reasonable effort to speak their opinions coherently. Do I feel that Sam “got” this particular play and Lily did not? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean I think Lily’s perspective is wrong so much as it’s just hers and her perspective is one that is seeking an experience that isn’t the same as the experience I sought to create as an artist. Which obviously is disappointing to her, but the suggestion that my characters are not strong portrayals of women or speak like television characters is really just her opinion- and she’s entitled to it. I mean, I put the work out there, and if I’m allowed to do that (and I am, and should be), then she is allowed to have a reaction and articulate that reaction (and as a critic, she’s obligated to do so). The risk we all take, artist and audience, is that one half of that equation might not work for the other half of the equation. That doesn’t make either half wrong, in and of itself, merely unsuited for one another.

But again, talking about Lily’s review specifically, isn’t all that interesting to me, so much as talking about how I got messaged by fifteen or so people, over the course of Saturday and Sunday, asking me, “Did you see this yet?” and then “What do you think?” after I confirmed, yet again, that I had seen it and certainly have the ability to recognize my own name when it pops up. What I began to realize, however, is that what people really couldn’t understand was how I could have read the article and not had a strong reaction to it, and so the assumption was, as more and more time passed without me talking about the article, that I must have been in ignorance of it. A fair assumption, I suppose, especially as Tracy Potter and Rachel Kessinger had been talking about it on their Facebook pages and Tracy had gone so far as to post a response in the comments section on Lily’s article. Around person eleven or so to ask me what I thought, I finally replied, “Do you think I should be angry or upset? ‘Cause I’m not. I just find it all kind of amusing that more people are writing or calling to ask if I’m upset than to congratulate me on the good reviews I got when the show was up and running.” The friend in question (who for the record, is always very supportive) replied, “I think what makes this special is that being mentioned on HowlRound at all is kind of a big deal.” I wrote back, “Yeah, I guess it is. And then again, it sort of isn’t.” And there in lies the twist that, to me, makes for a more amusing blog post than anything I might have argued about this particular critic’s response to this particular play of mine.

Once upon a time, when I was 19 and a junior at Reed College, an early but cornerstone play of mine, THE EXILED, came very close to being made into an independent film. Well, as close as most films get, meaning it died on the table early in the process and nothing in regards to that effort has happened since. If you know anyone working in the film industry, you probably know that the number of never-made movies far outweighs the number of ones that get into the production phase (where many films also die), let alone the number that actually get finished and then released (the day you find out how many finished films sit forever in some studio storage space somewhere, never to be screened, is the day you really truly realize just how small a percentage of aspiring artists ever actually see their efforts presented to an audience on even the most humble level), but a never-made movie is still farther along than a never-considered screenplay and it’s astounding how traumatizing something that never actually happened, can be. And how it can really put into perspective, for the rest of my life, what any critic (professional or amateur) will ever say about my work.

So what exactly did happen? Well, I scrambled to write a screenplay after the boyfriend of an actress who liked the play (and wanted to play the female lead) rashly decided to finance a film of it. This happened in 1998, when making independent films was sort of the raison d’etre for my entire generation (besides going to the music store and spending all night in coffee shops), but what made this particular situation a little different is that the aspiring film producer in question was able to use his connections as a former alternative/extreme sports star (a la Jason Lee) to open a number of doors that led to rooms none of us was really experienced or equipped to walk into, let alone hold our own in. He teamed up with a co-producer who was the son of a prominent entertainment lawyer (and of course, an aspiring actor himself) who in turn pulled his own strings (namely, using his dad’s contacts to bypass agents and get my hastily assembled screenplay directly into the hands of celebrities), and the result was that my work was suddenly being read by some really famous people long before it should have been, and not even remotely in the right context or with the correct layers of agents, organizations and other protections that would have probably stopped, or at least mitigated, the level of direct correspondence that ultimately resulted in me being forwarded (by the co-producer/wanna-be actor) an outrageously nasty email where an actor who had been approached to play the male lead basically said I should be executed and my work should be mulched for toilet paper. I think I’m actually making him sound more polite than he was. Anyway, I was forwarded that email as an explanation for why the co-producer suddenly wanted me to completely re-write the script and then subsequently walked on the project once I refused to do so without some kind of contract promising me some kind of control and ownership of my screenplay and more importantly, my stage-play.

Now, real producers would not have let an actor’s bitchy email bother them, but I wasn’t working with real producers and I definitely was not working with artists: I was working with people who were looking to ride a cultural wave to fast fame and hopeful fortune and the whole thing had never been about me, my work, or film-making as an art form. If they had been interested in any of those things, they would have known that it is hard to make a movie, and that rejection is part of the game, particularly when you are doing something new or different or with people who don’t have enough celebrity clout to get a free pass on their “work” no matter how good or bad it is because everyone just wants to be associated with them. Real producers and real artists know that when the going gets rough, as it’s bound to, that’s when it’s most important to stand by your people and your work. Even at that age, I knew that, and I was prepared to dig my heels into the project and see it through to the end and the only reason I rationally walked away was because my agent at the time, bless her, calmly said to me over the phone, “You are young and this will not be your only opportunity, and you need to realize that if this movie even gets made, and I doubt it will, there is virtually no chance it will be something you want your name attached to because none of these people share your vision and that is the only thing that would make sticking this out worth doing.” I knew she was right and we killed the contract the next day. A year later, EXILED had its first small theater production and was well-received and has been periodically produced in small theaters across the country since. I’m happy every time it happens and almost never think about the debacle that was it’s three months in “pre-production”.

Except, sometimes, when I get a bad review.

I am very lucky, and generally speaking my work receives positive reviews. Even when it doesn’t, it’s rarely trashed (I can only think of one out-right pan I have ever received) and usually the critic appears to have at least taken it seriously, discussing the problems and merits of the piece, demonstrating that at the very least it gave them something to think about and was, thus, worthy of their time. I long ago realized that I do not create mainstream theater and I am okay with that. Actually, I’m proud of that. Sure, sometimes I feel unappreciated, unpopular, or like there is just no point in doing what I do, but I don’t know any artist who doesn’t feel that from time to time, and on the plus side I know that I am my own man, that my work has integrity and reflects my ambitions and beliefs and not someone else’s prescription for success, and on those rare occasions I do score a hit or a critic really gets what I do it’s all the more gratifying because I know they’re not just blowing sycophant smoke up my celebrity asshole. My former agent would frequently remind me that my work was “not-marketable”, “too esoteric”, “too smart”, “not trendy” and “difficult” and all that used to rankle me, but now I realize that all that boils down to her opinion and ability to sell me to people who probabably held similar perspectives. None of whom would do my work well anyway. On one level it does suck that I apparently have small hope of being a famous, oft-performed writer; but if the price of fame and fortune is that I change my art into something that doesn’t reflect my voice, then it comes at much too high a cost, and by the way, the majority is still not everybody and there is no shame in being a niche voice that speaks to a niche community. These days, a strong cult following appeals far more to me than universal acclaim ever did. The universe always finds something new to crow over; cults honor forever.  Similarly, the words of someone who gets my work, matter so much more than the words of someone who doesn’t; even when that someone is famous or is associated with some kind of “big deal”, be it a studio, a theater,  or a publication. Being successful at a business that is at least one third luck and one third who you know, doesn’t actually make you someone worth listening to any more so than someone who hasn’t achieved the same level of “success” but may have put in just as much (or more) work.

So who was that actor who wrote the nasty email proclaiming this was literally the worst thing he’d ever read? Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just call him “Batman”. The people who know me well know why and the rest of you can have fun thinking about it. Who he is honestly doesn’t matter because in the end all that did matter was that he was kind of a big deal then, and he’s an even bigger deal now, and regardless his opinion means nothing at all beyond being his opinion and the fact that he is famous adds no more weight to his words.

Or maybe it does, but not in the way that most people think.

See, when I got that email, I cried. I mean, seriously, I got to the first derogatory comment and burst into tears. And then I had to get through the rest of the e-mail and it just got worse and worse and worse. Where a simple “no” would have sufficed, Batman felt a need to go the extra mile and really just express over and over how it was basically insulting to him to have even been asked to consider the part he was being offered (which is amazing because honestly, even if a project is not for you, it’s always an honor to be asked and anyone who sees otherwise has a ridiculous ego that will only harm them one day and sure enough, Batman has developed a nasty reputation). The particulars of what he wrote do not matter, all that matters is that at this point in my life, though I had been bringing my writing to workshops for three years now and subjecting it to public viewing and review for just as long, nobody had ever just torn me to shreds so ruthlessly, so explicitly, and so comprehensively, tearing apart not just my work but me as a person, even though he knew nothing about me. In this actor’s defense, he had sent the email to the producer, not me, and maybe would not have been so nasty if he had known I’d end up reading it (maybe) but I was 19 and I just simply lacked the experience to react in any other way than total horror and sadness, taking entirely personally what was, in reality, the ridiculous ranting of an egomaniac actor who has most certainly made far worse films than the one I wrote. Anyway, I ran downstairs to a friend who lived on the floor below (at the time I was living in a dorm) and gushed out my sorrow and despair.

“Batman doesn’t like my work! Batman thinks I should be taken out of the gene pool! Batman couldn’t even finish his morning coffee because he hated it so much!”

Seriously, he’d said that in the e-mail.

My friend, who is herself an accomplished sci-fi/fantasy writer, listened to about five minutes of my wailing and then cut me off with the incredibly insightful, “Stuart… Batman… read your screenplay.”

Which, looking back, is the only part of the entire experience that matters.

I believe we need critics. As a producer, I need reviews to market my own shows and the work of the artists who create under my banner, whose work I believe in enough, be they writer or actor or other type of theater maker, to risk not only my finances but my reputation. As an artist, I like reviews (and I always read them and don’t believe people who say they don’t) because I like knowing my work is being seen and instigating reactions and conversations- whatever those reactions are and wherever those conversations may lead. Also, sometimes, a critic will show me something about myself and my work I didn’t see, and that’s always valuable, whether they illuminate a positive or negative aspect. Sometimes they are also just dead wrong and that’s valuable too as it documents how a work can be mis-perceived or fails to strike the proper chord with someone. I know that something needs to be fixed when I have been watching the show, night after night, silently feeling the same way, and a critic who nails the problem I already know is there is a jewel to be cherished. On the other hand, if I love my show, it kind of doesn’t matter to me what the critic says. And for the record, I have occasionally read really positive reviews of my work that made me roll my eyes because, as much as they liked it, they clearly didn’t “get it.” Being understood is actually, for me, way more important than being liked or loved. It’s certainly more gratifying. But I try not to begrudge any audience member their experience and just be grateful that they were there and had one at all. I’m not making art to be loved, but I am definitely not making it to be ignored.

Ever since I figured that out about myself it’s been much easier to absorb the bad reviews along with the good. Sure, it’s disappointing from time to time and as a producer it can be stressful if I feel like it’ll damage the financial success of a show. When someone I like and respect doesn’t like my work it’s not a happy thing, but it’s also not a requirement of knowing me or being my friend, and I’d rather an honest conversation about what I do than a dishonest one, and I do my best to engage people who I like and respect but don’t like my work because it can be valuable but also because at some point it’ll probably happen at least once with everybody I know since I chose not to surround myself with idiots and paid escorts. Honestly, part of being an artist is accepting that some people are just not going to be my audience, and that includes some of my friends and it definitely includes some critics, most of whom are no more bias free than anyone else who has ever seen more than one play, read more than one novel, heard more than one song. Once I figured all that out it really takes whatever sting was left out of whatever someone has to say, and on the rare occasion a habitual detractor or the perpetually unimpressed colleague does throw me a compliment I’m like, “Oh, thank you, what a pleasant surprise”. What’s nice about that is, since I’m not looking for approval from them, the compliment can be a good thing without becoming something I pin my identity as an artist upon. Far too many people I know, no matter what they say, are living for approval, be it from friends or critics or the audience or the industry, and that is a dangerous thing to base your art on because it’s entirely out of your control and entirely subjective.

The truth is, I’m not looking for approval from anybody except the artists I’m working with on a given project, who must buy into or share my vision for what we’re doing together to truly work. For them and they alone, on a case by case basis, am I still willing to put my ego into such a vulnerable position. Occasionally, I catch myself letting someone’s words get to me without any real validity to what they have to say, but when it comes right down to it, I recognize that I have to have confidence in my work and if I don’t that’s my issue to deal with, not the result of somebody else expressing their opinion. When it comes to your art, other people’s opinions are only as valuable as you let them be, and once you’ve been torn apart by Batman, it’s astounding how many people who are supposedly “a big deal” suddenly aren’t any more. Not because they are or aren’t Batman, but because in every situation, regardless of the critic, I am still me.

And time has proven that not even Batman can stop me.

Stuart Bousel is one of the founding artistic directors of the San Francisco Theatre Pub. You can find out more about him, AGE OF BEAUTY, THE EXILED and more of his work at http://www.stuartbousel.com.

Theater Around The Bay: The Year of the Snake

Stuart Bousel meditates on the end of a long season of growth.

2013 has been, for me and many I know, a strange year.

Not a bad year, like last year seems to have been for an overwhelming number of people, but a strange year. “Slippery” as I keep calling it, “hard to pin down”, and one where I keep feeling a sense of two steps forward, one to one-and-a-half steps back, on all fronts: personal, professional, social, artistic, financial, health-wise. Which does mean I think I’m making progress this year, but it’s a fatiguing, draining kind of progress, like I’m in a waltz with my mid-30s where we’re slowly making our way across the dance floor but in this circular fashion that seems to re-tread as much ground as it covers. Again and again it seems, just as I’ve mastered a step and taken a lead, something comes along to pull me back to where I was, and the same conversations, the same self-doubts, the same bad habits, re-emerge to remind me I haven’t learned anything except how to identify, better, what is wrong. An important step towards finding a solution, of course, but at what point do we admit we’re wallowing, or just paralyzed?

I thoroughly believe that the life examined is the only life worth living, but something has to be learned from that examination to make it worthwhile, and we have to demonstrate we’ve learned something by implementing the changes we know we need to make, otherwise the learning itself is of little value. The question is always how and when, and for some reason nobody ever talks about the process of change itself, what it’s like to actually go through the transformation. It’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason: as human beings we are enormously pre-occupied with the Before and the After, and tend to gloss over or resent the journey. Which is absurd when you realize the journey is pretty much all there is, and is pretty much happening constantly. When we tell people to “live in the moment” we’re saying, “embrace the journey” but to many that’s like saying, “love the airplane to the Bahamas” and most of us love the sitting on the beach with a margarita way more than we love going through security and keeping our fingers crossed for as few delays as possible.

My recent play, “The Age of Beauty”, was, to a great extent, about all this: the journey, the arrival, the before and after, the processing of all these things and our relationship to the past-to-future continuity of our lives and each other. A series of four conversations, all variations on the same themes, it was a talky, subtle little play that I knew not everyone would get and not everyone would find interesting or enjoyable, but since I don’t make art for you (I make it for me and accept that you are going to have an opinion on it) I decided to put it on anyway. Over the last few years I’ve been focused less and less on my own work and more and more on other people’s work, and while I do find that rewarding I’m finally realizing it needs to be a balance or I start resenting people for what’s really, in the end, my own lack of reciprocity towards myself.

Because I am lucky enough to have a relationship with the Exit Theatre where they could step in as co-producers I was able to produce the show for a song, and because it is an all female cast and there are always more women in this theater scene than opportunities for them, I was able to cast four excellent actors who basically pulled together a difficult show (disguised as a simple one) in three weeks of rehearsal, the first week and a half of which was primarily focused on cutting the script by fifteen minutes and understanding what subtle variations in each conversation made it valuable to have all four and not just one. Because even on a budget of zero I needed to find a way to make the play cost less, I acted as my own tech operator and house manager and box office and thus watched every single performance of my show, something I haven’t gotten to do (or wanted to do) in years and it was enormously edifying. By the end of the short run I knew I wanted to cut another page and a half out of the second scene of the show, and I also knew that I had created a beautiful little gem of a play as I watched it evolve from a good opening, through a couple of awkward, plodding mid-run shows, into a really refined, poignant, highly actable (thank you, actors) character study of why and how smart people who have reached the end of their youth, but are not yet old, process their lives and chose to either engage, dis-engage or wallow just a little bit longer in the past. The final two performances of “The Age of Beauty” were, in my opinion, the best of the run, and became the artistic experience I have been hungering for since the year began: I learned something, I was moved, I believed in what I was watching as an audience member and I was proud of what we’d done as creators and I could have cared less what other people thought about the work (I only ever really care when I’m secretly dissatisfied with it myself) because I had experienced what I needed to experience to make it worth doing.

Two steps forward, baby. Two big steps forward.

Then three days later I made the decision to not take on any directing or producing projects for the next six months (beyond the Olympians Festival, which I am the executive producer for but it’s an annual thing and thus entirely different), and it was like the orchestra suddenly changed and I was waltzing backwards, feeling oddly panicky and unappreciated and ridiculously focused on how, out of 360 tickets available for the run, we only sold 209 (including comps and half-priced tickets), and how we got one mediocre review (never-mind we got numerous solid and ecstatic ones), and how, of course, several of my nightmare audience members had attended what I considered to be “the bad performance” and always seemed to see my shows on “bad nights.” I complained about all this to everyone who would listen and beat myself up for not being… I don’t know… more aggressive on the marketing? A different kind of playwright who would have written an easier, more accessible show? God?… and by Thursday morning I was in a deep enough self-pity hole that I couldn’t go to work and instead lay on my bed staring at the ceiling while workmen tore my apartment apart, finally fixing a water-damaged wall that’s been there as long as I have lived in that apartment (nine years). Around 2 PM that day I got a knock on my door, and it was the guy in charge telling me they were done, ahead of schedule, and that I should wait 24 hours before rehanging all the pictures in our living room. “Why?” I asked. “Oh, we repainted all your walls,” he said, and then sauntered off into the afternoon. I closed the door after him, stepped out into the living room, and was almost blinded by how white the walls were.

Now, in a play or movie or book, the obvious symbolic fresh start here would mark one in me, the main character, but what I think I’ve been learning from this year is that life just does not work that way. You see, I now know that you make a decision to change, and then you spend some time figuring out what that means and just how exactly you’re going to make it happen and since the odds are that whatever plan you come up with isn’t going to go off without a hitch, you then also spend a lot of time revising those plans, abandoning those plans, processing that as well, and then coming up with new ones, and the truth is, the changes tend to kind of happen while you’re not looking, almost as a side result of trying to change. Or to take my newly painted walls as an example: we spent years trying to get the landlords to fix just this one thing and never even realized that by doing so, we’d end up with freshly painted walls the whole house over. In fact, because that was sort of an unexpected result, it was sort of hard to accept, at first, and was even rather overwhelming. I walked around looking at the walls and instead of thinking, “this is great” I actually thought, “God the carpet looks terrible now, we really need to get that redone too,” and “Oh, how annoying that I need to rehang these pictures.” Way to accentuate the positive you know? But that’s human nature. All it takes is the right timing and a bad mood for even the best of us to look at a gift and say, “Eh. I have three already and this one isn’t even in a color I like.”

I would venture and say this summer, now drawing to a close, has been the weirdest part of a weird year, and for a lot of people I know there is an intense desire to finally shake off an uncomfortable skin of one kind or another and emerge whole and new, ready to embrace change: the trouble is, few of us seem to really know how to make that happen, no matter how deeply we wish it. Some people I know are running off to grad schools, others are changing day jobs, changing artistic focuses, changing groups of friends and collaborators, changing lovers. I am taking a break. Or, well, a break by my standards, since I’m still working the Fringe, still running my own theater festival, still writing two plays and trying to finish off another, still doing… well… a  lot of stuff. I had imagined that break being something I eased into but it’s been more like a bellyflop that began this weekend when I blew off not one, not two, but three shows involving friends of mine, all of which I already had tickets to. I only pulled myself out of my apartment because my housemate returned Saturday with an out of town guest in tow and my boyfriend threw a housewarming party/goodbye party for a friend of ours, aptly named “You’re Leaving But I’m Still Here.” And while I knew my theater friends would forgive me missing their shows (especially since most of them hadn’t seen mine- for which they are totally forgiven) I knew my boyfriend would have every right to resent me for missing a party that marked his own recent change of domicile (he upgraded to a real apartment after years of studio living). Half-way through the party (which was back to school themed complete with Capri Suns and bowls of snack sized candy bars) I felt suddenly drowsy and went to lay down “just for a moment” in my boyfriend’s bedroom. I woke up at 11 AM the next day. I had never even said goodbye to our friend who is moving away. The air was heavy with a distinct feeling of “You’re Leaving But I’m Still Here.”

We spent Sunday wandering around the neighborhood, exploring a place we’d been to before, but now that one of us lives there, it suddenly feels like it’s “Our Neighborhood” and that sense of ownership is truly transformative, allowing us to see familiar things in an entirely new way. Eventually, we ended up at a bar where a friend of ours works, and sitting in this place that is decidedly unlike any other place we usually hang out (and noticeably devoid of theater people, our bartending friend aside), we found ourselves looking out the door of the bar at a view of San Francisco we never get to see, soaked in afternoon sunlight, looking magical. “I’m falling in love with this city again,” says my boyfriend, and it’s an important statement because in the last year we have talked constantly of moving, feeling like this city is changing into a place we don’t feel welcome in, and like it will never live up to what we both want in a theater and art scene, an intellectual mecca, a place of opportunities and a community that can be truly supportive while also being challenging and truthful. But tempering those feelings has always been the realization we might just be burnt out or we might just be working on the wrong projects with the wrong people, or we must just need a personal transformation of some kind. But what and how and when to transform always complicates the obvious. It’s great to say, “I need to change,” but hard to finish the sentence after “into…”

If you follow Chinese astrology, that this is the Year of the Snake seems absolutely appropriate, especially if you see snakes the way both the Celts and the Greeks did: as emblems of re-birth, healing, wisdom. Personally, I don’t like snakes. I was incredibly fascinated by them as a child, but one bad run in with a rattlesnake at the age of thirteen (and the gist of the encounter can be summed up with “you don’t realize how loud those fuckers are until you’re about to step on one”) pretty much made me scared of them for life. I’m probably the only person in the world for whom “Snakes on a Plane” was a genuine horror movie, and if it was a choice between snakes and sharks, I’d choose sharks any day. Despite this I do recognize how the snake serves a symbolic purpose in both its shape and ability to coil, and its uncanny and relatively unique ability to shed its skin, appearing to rejuvinate itself in a manner most sentient creatures understandably envy.

Of course, what many of us don’t think about is that the snake doesn’t exactly do this at will, but rather as part of a cycle, and there is a time for it that arrives when it arrives, only after the snake has formed a new skin beneath the old one, changing on the inside long before it changes on the outside. That dramatic moment where it suddenly sheds its skin is the shortest and, in some ways, the least significant part of the process, and again, not really in the snake’s control. All the snake gets to do, consciously, is rub itself against some rocks and squirm out of the husk in an effort to ease along what Time and Nature have already decreed will happen. Which is not to say that Human Will alone can’t instigate change, but from the outside perspective I’m gonna lay it down: most of us are just rubbing some rocks and squirming out of the husk and it’s usually Human Vanity that is dressing it up to look like an epic. Of course, if you’re into Greek mythology (and Celtic mythology) you know that the heroic is that which happens specifically because we are, to some extent, the play things of Time and Nature, and that heroism is a combination of defiance and cooperation with the Powers That Be. Defiance in the sense that we do not accept we have no control over our lives, and cooperation in the sense that we tend to get a lot more by pushing forward than running away.

On Sunday the 18th, around dusk, I felt the seasons change. It’s one of the few mystical things I believe about myself, but I have always felt like I know, exactly, when a seasonal shift has happened. Riding around with a couple friends of mine that following Monday, we watched the lightning flash above the city and one of them remarked that it seemed like a “bad sign” but I disagreed. “It’s good,” I said, “It’s marking the seasonal shift. We’re going to have a long harvest this year. Longer than usual, I think,” and I really do think this. The planting season seems to have been forever ago… like somewhere in late 2011 or early 2012, and it’s been laying under the earth for quite some time, sporadically reminding us of its existence with little bursts of fruitfulness that inspired hope, or disappointing yields that made us think it’s never going to happen. But of course it’s going to happen, and if it takes a while well, that’s maybe because we need to learn to live in the moment a bit more, and enjoy the journey. But live long enough and life is really more a matter of “when” than “if” and it’s the benevolence, not the whim, of Nature that we build a new skin below the old one, before it’s time to shed it . Doesn’t mean we always like that skin, or personally feel it’s ready to go, but when it’s time, it’s Time.

Rub yourself against the rocks, and squirm, squirm, squirm until the husk falls off.

Stuart Bousel is a founding artistic director of the San Francisco Theater Pub and a prolific Bay Area writer, director, producer and theater maker, who is currently taking a six month semi-hiatus. Find out more about him at http://www.horrorunspeakable.com.

Theater Around The Bay: Llamalogue

Stuart Bousel will not be changing names to protect the innocent.

Last night at Theater Pub, the fourth installment of The Pint Sized Plays opened and you should make it a point not to miss this production because it will be our last show at the Cafe Royale.

Also, it’s a very enjoyable evening. After a magical prelude by the Blue Diamond Bellydancers you will be induced to much laughter by volley after volley of razor wit interspersed with life lessons and dramatic moments. At the end of the 80 minutes of drinking themed shorts we bring out the Llama, the un-official (who are we kidding- he’s official- we made t-shirts) mascot of the San Francisco Theater Pub, originally created for the Pub by Elana McKelahan, played for the fourth year in a row by Rob Ready and written, for the second year in a row, by me.

I have often said the Llama is the spirit of the Pub and this year he delivers a bittersweet speech. It’s part ode to Megan Cohen’s dancing bear (played, last year, by Allison Page) and part rumination on the nature of loss, milked as much for laughs as possible but with perhaps a bit more sting than in the past. He concludes the speech (and the evening) valiantly trying to bolster himself (and the audience) with some pop music, before wandering off into the night and the lights go out on the silent, empty space. It’s funny and sad and a fitting end to our time at the Cafe Royale, if perhaps a bit melancholy.

“My bear would never betray the Llama like he does in your play,” Megan Cohen said to me.

“This isn’t about your bear,” I replied, with a wink, “it’s about the idea the llama has attached to the bear.”

Here is my goal in life as a writer and as an artist: to make fun of shit, and to get you to think about and appreciate yourself and the world around you. For years I have been trying to create a new breed of romantic satire where I validate the meaning of it all, even as I validate the likelihood that everything is meaningless. On an individual basis, I want you to laugh, and then I want to rip your heart out and hand it back to you with tears in my eyes and a kiss on my lips, leaving you intact and healing but with a lot to think about. I love you painfully and I want you to know that. Also, I absolutely believe theater is a transformative art (otherwise, why bother), and I want to transform you, if not in the theater than sometime later when you’re sitting by yourself and suddenly it hits you what this was really all about. I have faith that this happens because I have seen it happen, I have had it reported back to me by people it’s happened to, and I have experienced it myself. And I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t gone through this at least once in their life. It’s the same sadness I feel for people who tell me they don’t believe in Love. I always think “how gray the world must be for you,” and then I think, “but it will happen some day- and how exciting that will be for you too.” That’s me, putting the romance back into romantic satire. I want you to have your big moment even when you adamantly refuse to accept such a thing could occur. It almost matters more when it happens to people like you.

Speaking of big moments, today is the 16th anniversary of my older brother, Edwin, dying. This is not, generally speaking, something I advertise, but it’s never been something I hide either. I just find that it tends to make people uncomfortable, so I don’t bring it up unless I need to, and it happened so long ago now that many people who currently occupy my life don’t know I ever had a brother named Edwin, let alone that he died, tragically, at the age of 23. When I get asked by new friends, or even older friends who have never asked before, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” I tend to reply that I do, indeed, have siblings, and leave it at that. Only if asked where they live, or what they do, do I ever mention that one is dead. At which point most people get very crestfallen, tell me how sorry they are, and then suddenly it’s my job to comfort them and let them know that it’s okay: it was a long time ago, and I dealt with it (therapy, an HIV scare, some really colorful drug experimentation) and there is nothing else they need to say or do. He’s gone and it’s sad because I was only 18 and never really got to know him, but it’s also life. Everything ends, including other people. Including you. Including me.

I recently told the cast of my new play, Age of Beauty, that I worship the idea of Light and I do, but it’s partly because I need something to balance a dark world view and aesthetic. And I don’t mean that kind of recent college graduate, post-modern, “I-totally-threw-in-a-rape-scene-following-a-baby-eating-scene-to-shock-you” type of dark. I’m dark like the Bronte Sisters, Arthurian legends and the Shakespeare comedies are all really dark and if you’re intrepid and open to it you can see it, but I also employ lots of little tricks to mitigate my darkness because I’m fundamentally a gentleman and I don’t enjoy awkward silences with people who would rather just glide on the surface. Humor, particularly self-depricating humor, is very present in my work and daily conversation as a way for me to say, “don’t take this too seriously” for fear of you doing so and we all suddenly end up on Intervention together (which I would just find amazingly tasteless). Symbolism is also a very big thing for me: I often say things very openly in my shows but in ways that make sense to virtually nobody else (in the form of, say, a character who constantly cuts black paper into strips, or a certain song that plays behind a monologue spoken by a character who can turn the lights on and off at will) so that the choice can be dismissed as weird instead of the quiet revelation of my inner turmoil that you’re actually seeing. I love the idea of “hidden in plain sight” emotions because I feel that most pain is like that: constantly surrounding us, but we’re blind to it, sometimes accidentally, but often willfully, often because it would just take too much work to understand it, so we’re better off just pretending it’s not there or not significant. Sometimes I revel in being misunderstood as much as I revel in being perceived clearly. Both states have their advantages.

It is no secret that I love the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and there are a number of reasons why but if I had to pick one thing, above all others, that I love, it would have to be his dark aesthetic of loss. The right people know what I’m talking about, how he threads through his encylopedic histories and silly hobbit antics a miasma of sorrow over the slow disintegration of a world that can never be gotten back, only glimpsed from a distance or heard in echoes. The great irony of the War of the Ring, which in Middle Earth marks the end of The Age of The Elves just as the Trojan War marked the end of The Age of Heroes in Greek mythology, is that it will be won by people who will come out of the dust only to find that they have lost the world they fought to preserve. This is because it either no longer exists, or because they have become different people in the course of the war, and even once restored to where they began they no longer fit in with the larger puzzle they were knocked out of. The Lord of the Rings is not so much a fantasy novel as it is an epitaph for Middle Earth and all that Middle Earth stood for in Tolkein’s mind. It is an epic rumination on the excruciating pain of moving from one era of your life into the next, the “painful progress” that Harper, in her final scene in Tony Kushner’s Angels In America, would so eloquently embrace as the only way for her to move on from her disaster marriage. For all it’s adventure and romance and humor and joy, Lord of the Rings remains one of the saddest books I know and yet also one of the most life affirmative because in the end of one age does lie the birth of another and at some point, like Samwise “I’m Back” Gamgee (or Harper Pitt if you prefer), if you’re lucky enough to survive the shit that happens to you there comes a moment you suck it up, shake off the remnants of shadow, say goodbye to the past and embrace where you are now because your only other choice is to lay down and die and that’s not really an option.

Though it is a temptation.

If the Llama is the spirit of the Pub then I think the reason this year’s speech is so bittersweet is because the Llama, like the Pub, has grown from a brash and confident celebrant staking his territory into a tired and battle-worn survivor of a long war who isn’t sure if he either lost or won, only that he has survived to see the end of an age. An age that was, for San Francisco Theater Pub, The First Age, and thus will always be truly significant, no matter what happens next. If my words, through the Llama, seem bittersweet it’s because the process of ending this age is both bitter and sweet, as almost any necessary process is. We have so much to be proud of, and so much to look forward to, and so much to mourn, all at the same time. I tried to capture that with the Llama, couching it in much symbolism and self-deprecating humor to make the pill easier to swallow, but yes, I also hope it sits uneasy in your stomach for some time after. We had something real, a home that was often times as much a curse as it was a gift but always an integral part of what we were doing, and for a while there will be a hole where it used to be, the same kind of hole left by an ended love affair or a lost object. Or a dead person.

Everything ends, including other people. Including you. Including me. Including projects we really care about, sanctuaries we’ve found, experiences we’ve cherished. That’s why it’s important to sing and dance while we can, even as we know it won’t be forever, because we know the singing and dancing must end, if only because both are very tiring activities. Only when we embrace the fundamental brevity and meaninglessness of life and all that life encompasses does it become meaningful and we transcend to something eternal: the recognition that nothing ends, it just changes. My brother was only here for a short time, but he made an impact on me I’ll have until I die, and through whatever I leave behind and the people I impact, he continues to influence the world and so in many ways I have never thought of him as gone even though I hardly ever talk about him now. I’m starting to sort of see the Pub’s time at the Cafe Royale the same way: as something slipping into the chronicle of my life, bound to influence me for many years to come, but also relegated to the past. Like my brother. Like the first theater company I ever ran. Like my youth, frankly. Which I really miss sometimes. But fairly certain I wouldn’t go back to, even if I could. But you can’t. Life only moves forward, and not everyone, or everything, is there for the whole ride. Something worth mourning, the value of which I get because I have a dark aesthetic that recognizes life is all about loss. Amongst other things.

“You had a really good, really impressive run of it,” Les Cowan, without whose patronage Theater Pub never would have existed, said to me last night, the two of us talking about Pub’s time at Cafe Royale like we were at a wake.

I couldn’t agree more, but I replied, “I kind of can’t wait to be done,” because that’s true too and that’s the angle I’m starting to focus on these days. Because I’ve reached the point where I kind of just want to sing one last song and then head off into the night looking for the next thing- knowing that there will be a next thing. Because there is always a next thing. Because having a dark aesthetic often means worshiping the Light, and believing very much that the end of one age is the birth of another.

And because I am a Llama, and that’s true wherever I go.

Stuart Bousel is one of the Founding Artistic Directors of the San Francisco Theater Pub and was recently named by the SF Weekly as “Best Ringmaster” of the San Francisco indie theater scene. His short play, Llamalogue, will be performed by Rob Ready four more times at Pint Sized Plays IV, which plays tonight and July 22, 29, and 30 at the Cafe Royale, always at 8 PM. Don’t miss it!