HOME	Avant Gardarama
OTHER MEDIA	New playwright stands out at Avant Gardarama Avant Gardarama: Short plays by Eugenie Chan, Suzan-Lori Parks and Gertrude Stein SF Chronicle July 26, 2008 (Robert Hurwitt) Directed by Rob Melrose. With Felicia Benefield, Paige Rogers and David Westley Skillman. (Through Aug. 16. Cutting Ball Theater at Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. One hour, 40 minutes. Tickets $15-$30. Call (800) 838-3006 or go to www.cuttingball.com.)   "Someone needs to treat me like a piece of meat, know what I mean?" It isn't just the way the woman in the soiled diner-waitress outfit says the words that makes them drip carnage and sensuality. It's Eugenie Chan's script. Sex, rib eye, combat, hunger, T-bone, K-rations, incest, bestiality, Greek myth, modern warfare, seduction and tenderloin suffuse and invigorate the last play in Cutting Ball Theater's "Avant Gardarama" program of short experimental works by American women. Chan's "Bone to Pick" is the one new play on the bill. The plays make up a historical triptych, from Gertrude Stein's 1922 "Accents in Alsace" through Suzan-Lori Parks' "Betting on the Dust Commander" ('87) to "Bone." If each is longer than the last - at 12, 30 and 40 minutes, respectively - it's also sparer (from trio to duet to solo) and more potent.   That's not just a tribute to the deceptively concentrated intensity of Chan's writing, though holding one's own in the company of Stein and MacArthur "genius" Parks ("Topdog/Underdog") is a notable achievement for any emerging playwright. It's also a reflection on the quality of Artistic Director Rob Melrose's stagings. His Stein is gently but not memorably evocative. His Parks is a puzzling misfire. But his staging of "Bone" is sure-handed and unobtrusively intense, featuring a finely crafted, seductively natural and moving performance by Paige Rogers, Melrose's associate artistic director and wife.   Stein's "Alsace" is an allusive, elusive prose poem about people trying to retain their humanity in wartime. David Westley Skillman, Felicia Benefield and Rogers deliver Stein's cryptic and comic lines meaningfully within Cliff Caruthers' evolving video landscape on the reflective-foil walls of Michael Locher's striking set.   "Dust Commander" is a potentially corrosive piece about a marriage in a repetitive rut. Benefield is an intriguingly complex, comic wife, with Skillman as her controlling spouse. Melrose, who's done well with Parks' plays before, fails to find the depths and variety in the play's repeating cycles.   He and Rogers more than redeem things with "Bone," Chan's intriguing modern take on the legend of Ariadne, deserted by her lover, Theseus, after helping him kill the half-bull, half-man (and her half-brother) Minotaur. The script, commissioned by the company (with the Magic Theatre/Z Space New Works Initiative), vividly intertwines elements of the myth, contemporary warfare, meat butchering, sexual longing, hunger, political geography and creepy incestuous overtures.   Working on a desert landscape (complete with longhorn skull), surrounded by Caruthers' evocative soundscape and the spectral reflections of the audience, Rogers is nothing short of riveting as a mythic presence in Southwestern everywoman guise. "Bone" is richly rewarding right down to its marrow.
HOME