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DIVAfest

review in the San Francisco Chronicle May 24, 2004 (Robert Hurwitt)
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Cabaret, WWII drama and a women ditching her parts

A woman rises to power by discarding her vagina. The cabaret singer wears big bedroom slippers and lives in a barrel. Women tell tales from prison, Texas and the world of "leather dyke" belly dancers. Oh yes, and a discarded vagina delivers tentative standup comedy routines.

 

It's diva time in San Francisco, a city in which that commodity is never in short supply. The Exit Theatre's third annual DIVAfest is up and running at Exit's four spaces -- a two-week, curated showcase of nine solo and ensemble works, plus one film and a photo exhibition, all "of a female persuasion." Most of the pieces are new, some were developed at Exit and, judging by my small sample, the quality is pretty high.

 

It's a diverse bill, covering a range from prison docudrama ("The Women on Death Row Project," co-produced by Unconditional Theatre) to sketch comedy ("Drama Queens Come Clean," which only played the first weekend) to dance ("Love Dances") to solo dramas ("Boxcar Bertha" and a reprise of last year's "Last of the Red Hot Dadas," both performed by Exit artistic director Christina Augello). And that doesn't even include the odd species of drama and cabaret I saw.

 

Cameron Galloway's "The New District Manager" is a curious, beguiling blend of comedy, anti-comedy and feminist drama. Janet Roitz's "A Tingle Tangle Cabaret" tangles with the cabaret form from an off-kilter perspective. Erica Blue and her co-creators' "Talking Machine" is an imagistic World War II drama created through improvisation, text collage, music, movement and other elements. None seems fully finished as yet, but each exhibits considerable promise.

 

The most ambitious of the three, "Machine" is also the most imaginative and -- despite some less-than-fully realized ideas and performances -- the most magnetic. It's also the only one that comes with its own "novella," a handsomely produced (if poorly edited) brochure containing fantastically poignant biographies of the characters from all over war-ravaged southern Europe who've ended up in the play's Italian mountain boarding house. It isn't necessary to read the booklet to enjoy the piece, though. It may even be a little counter-productive, providing more background than is helpful. As created by author-director Blue and the eight performers (with collaborator Eponine Cuervo-Moll), "Machine" is a hauntingly allusive collage of evocative elements: created and found text, hypnotic movement, raw film footage (Mike Kuchar) and more.

 

Ethereal quality

 

The set (by Gregory Kloehn and installation artist Libby Werbel) is a pregnant chaos of sheets, shirts, loaves of bread, clotheslines and household objects.

 

The music -- by Dan Plonsey, John Shiurba and Rob Pumpelly -- has the bumptiously ethereal quality of a dimly remembered Italian village band. Comic and pointed visual quotes from Italian film classics crop up along with passages from "The Communist Manifesto" and a Winston Churchill wartime exhortation to the Italian people (vividly used as a wedding toast).

 

The machine in question is a two-way radio, emitting wartime static, scraps of music and oracular messages. The people are an odd lot -- odd enough that the uneven performances blend pretty well -- of quirky women and men longing for love, revolution, revelation, El Dorado, peace, sex or epiphany. The impact is intriguing, often riveting, funny, banal, affecting, overreaching and generally mesmerizing.

 

Roitz's "Tingle Tangle" is pleasant as well, but more problematic. Accompanied by the capable pianist Billy Philadelphia and directed by Beth Wilmurt -- whose "Cabaret Rebel" was a hit at last year's DIVAfest -- Roitz is attempting a similar comic deconstruction of the cabaret format.

 

She's the torch song diva in heavy blue eye shadow, flimsy red slip, silk robe and prosaic slippers or huge flippers, clambering out of a barrel to croon an Irving Berlin, Noel Coward or Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer number.

 

Deadpan diva

 

Roitz is charming, composed and a skilled deadpan diva. The problem is that she hasn't the voice or technique to handle many of the songs. She's terrific on a smoky, torchy "Satan's Little Lamb" (Arlen and Mercer), sweetly enticing on Joe Jackson's "Be My Number Two" and enchanting as a sexy, frazzled mom on Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger's "Lowdown Lullaby." But her swing numbers lack ease, and she often has to push her range uncomfortably on other songs.

 

Galloway's "New District Manager" isn't as tight or as fully developed as it could be, but is sweetly and comically entertaining nonetheless. Created by Galloway in collaboration with Meredith Eldred, composer Dave Malloy and co- performers Sean Owens (who wrote the lyrics) and Mark Romyn -- and brightly, if at times slackly staged by Libby O'Connell -- it's a provocatively funny short play about a woman who's had her vagina removed as she's climbed the ladder of executive success.

 

Galloway is hilariously tough, bossy, preoccupied and increasingly power- mad as district manager Catherine Honeycutt -- and beguilingly confused, "girly-girl" sweet and inept as her castaway vagina (V) turned performance artist-standup comic. The deceptively unprepossessing Owens and Romyn turn in surprisingly versatile work, with Owens as the man who thinks he loves Catherine, or her vagina, and goes on a quest to find the missing part, with Romyn providing invaluable backup.

 

Laugh-out-loud funny

 

The characters could be better defined and Galloway has only scratched the surface of Catherine's mania or V's identity. But so much of the play is beguiling or laugh-out-loud funny that most of its flaws only become apparent once it's over. When Galloway is working her magnetic, dotty charms or Owens is single-mindedly singing the "Quest" song, with Romyn's wonderful vocal sound effects, the "District" is full of bright possibilities.

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