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Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals

by Dan Carbone
review by Michael Scott Moore SF Weekly (May 10, 2000)
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Facial Hair By Michael Scott Moore
Steve Winn's amusingly ill-informed
article last month on fringe theater in
the city suggested that the '60s, '70s,
and even the '80s were more
adventurous times for playgoing here
than the '90s. That might well be true.
But how would he know? The
Chronicle critic makes a point of
missing most local experimental stuff.
(He held up Teatro ZinZanni as a
"deconstruction," but he doesn't seem
to have heard of Art Street,
Unconditional Theater, or Kaliyuga
Arts.) Fortunately -- and by accident
-- the Exit Theater is testing Winn's proposition this month with a pair of
plays, one old and one new, in its Absurdist Season.

 

Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals also concerns a cultural icon with
eccentric facial hair. It's Dan Carbone's first full-length play, as far as I
know -- developed especially for the Absurdist Series -- and Carbone
has got to be the oddest fish in our pond of experimental theater.
Shaped like a turnip, with a greedy boyish smile and a furze of gray hair,
he looks nothing at all like Salvador Dali, but that doesn't restrain him.
The play's first half shows the ghost of the old Spaniard in heaven,
fielding talk-show questions from a cultured cow. Carbone plays Dali in
a white robe, with towering mustaches. The illusion is barely convincing
until the second act, though, when scenes from Dali's lifelong affair with
Gala Eduard play out in semirealistic fast-forward.

Carbone made a local name for himself at the '98 Fringe Festival with
Up From the Ground, an elegant short piece about a Southern family
perplexed by a giant, beautiful flower growing in its cornfield. The story
itself had a bizarre sad beauty, and the snatches of comic surrealism
Carbone performed as companion skits were among the funniest things
I've ever seen onstage. In one scene he compared a reverent but tacky
portrait of Christ with a photo of a smiling horrible monkey wearing a
pretty bow. ("Jungle Belle.") Jesus and Jungle Belle both reappear in
Dali. Their portraits are oddly similar, and remembering them from Up
From the Ground nearly made me fall out of my seat.

By itself, though, Dali isn't as funny. The homage to a great surrealist
runs on the idea of surrealism rather than surrealism itself. In Act 1, after
the talk show, Dali's ghost does a sitcom (I Love Dali), goes on a tiger
hunt, and appears as the Easter Bunny in the scatological dream of a
cow as scripted by the writers of a children's program. My God, is it
weird. Some parts are even funny. But the work as a whole feels like a
vaguely self-conscious jumble of goofy ideas; the show has no
coherence -- logical or otherwise -- until the second half, when Dali
rejects his TV family for Earthly memories of Gala.

The discipline of realism is good for Carbone, and his impressions of
Dali at various stages of life -- young and in love, middle-aged and
successful, decrepit and cuckolded -- improve with John Sowle's
costumes. Unreal scenes still erupt into the story (Dali's art-crit slide
show, for example), but the events of his life need no embellishment by
the end. The best scenes show Gala cruising for boys in the back of her
limousine, and flirting with the lead of Jesus Christ Superstar, Jeff
Fenholt. (True story.) Of course Fenholt looks like Jesus. And when
they join the king and queen of Spain -- the queen with a brace for her
arm, so she can wave -- who out-foul-mouth a couple of hip '60s art
types, it's clear that Carbone has found his way into a new kind of
strangeness.

The show is uneven but fertile, exuberant. Erica Blue plays an icily
enigmatic Gala, Marin Van Young is ideal as Twinkle Ann, Paul Gerrior
is strong in all his roles, and Vince Camillo makes a good hippie.
Director John Sowle has done a valiant job in stringing it all together.
Dali, furthermore, beats The Beard at its own game. And although our
'90s scene could be larger, the evidence from this pair of shows suggests
that experimental theater is doing just fine.

Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals in the Heaven on Top of
Heaven
By Dan Carbone. Directed and designed by John Sowle. Part of the
Exit Theater's Absurdist Season. Starring Carbone, Erica Blue, Paul
Gerrior, and Marin Van Young. At Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy (between
Mason and Taylor), Tuesdays and Wednesdays through May 24.
Admission is $8-10; call 673-3847.

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