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Brave

by Mark Jackson and Jordon Flato

Art Street Theatre
review by Michael Scott Moore SF Weekly (May 20, 1998)
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Art Street Theater’s new production calls itself a
“Tragicomedy” for some reason, when what it really is is a
Movement Piece With Three Story Lines That Interweave to
Make a Statement About America. “Tragicomedy” is pithier,
but it also makes the show sound freighted with deep and
involving characters, which it isn’t. Brave will remind some
people of Art Street’s last production, R&J, because it uses
movement, songs, and fractured dialogue to capture something
fleeting about its subject. Even in R&J, which took its
characters from Romeo and Juliet, the focus was not on the
characters so much as what Art Street was doing with them;
here the shallower characters work as types to build a mosaic
of the local, contemporary American scene.

In anyone else’s hands this would be boring. Art Street,
though, makes it funny. There’s a “political lecturer from the
right” (Mark Jackson) who argues with a “fanatic from the left”
(Lisa Maher). They both spout sense and nonsense; the only
consistencies are that the lecturer declares while the fanatic just
questions (which makes her not quite a fanatic), and that they
both keep trying to hogtie each other with duct tape. That’s
one story line. Then there’s a “young single mom” (Beth
Wilmurt) and “her ten-year-old son” (Jake Rodriguez), who
repeat one scene showing Mom coming home tired from work
four or five times, until it starts to grate. Each repetition changes
some detail in the script, and it reminded me of something
William Burroughs once said in an interview about a series of
modern paintings that changed some slight detail in color or
tone from canvas to canvas. Burroughs said the literary
equivalent would be the same page typed over and over, with
only a sentence or two altered. He never tried it because it
struck him as a boring exercise; and it has to be said that the
onstage version is none too exhilarating either. That story
improves, though, and the third story, about a “young man with
a mission” (Jordon Flato) and a “young traveler” (Bricine
Mitchell), actually sparkles with Mitchell’s performance. The
young man’s mission is to pry open some essential coldness in
the American psyche by talking to total strangers; the young
woman wishes he would go away. Mitchell does such a
charming job as the put-upon traveler she may amount to the
top reason to see the show.

All three stories deal baldly with private and national identity;
together they give an interesting impression of a country in flux.
Art Street has somehow managed, again, to make itself
entertaining without being straightforward or clear. This time
they’ve gone a little over their time limit, though. R&J was
perfect at one hour; the 20 extra minutes in the new show feel
excessive.

Brave. Written and directed by Mark Jackson. Starring
Jackson, Lisa Maher, Beth Wilmurt, Jake Rodriguez,
Jordon Flato, and Bricine Mitchell. At Exit Stage Left,
156 Eddy (at Mason), through May 30. Call 673-3847.

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