- OTHER MEDIA
|
- Substantial storytelling in Bousel’s ‘Giant Bones’
By: Janos Gereben, special to the San Francisco Examiner May 20, 2010
-
-
- SAN FRANCISCO — The world premiere of Stuart Bousel’s “Giant
Bones” is a big play in an admittedly small-sized venue, the 80-seat
Exit Theatre in the heart of the Tenderloin. It is a dramatization of stories
from Peter S. Beagle’s “Giant Bones,” the sequel to his
novel, “The Innkeeper’s Song.”
-
- Beagle, 71, is best known for the novel and film “The Last Unicorn.”
San Francisco playwright Bousel, 31, also directs the production. The rich,
attractive work, featuring an outstanding cast of 10, is certain to go
on to other venues.
-
- The play is admirably complex and riveting, but lamentably self-indulgent.
It runs too long, at three hours, including intermission. Tighter writing
and faster pacing would improve it greatly. “Giant Bones” is
similar to Bill Cain’s “Equivocation,” Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s
“Shakespeare Wallah,” and, with a bit of a stretch, “Kiss
Me Kate,” in that all follow the fortunes of a theater company.
-
- The play begins with phantasmagorical tales, led by the title story
about benevolent, fast-disappearing giants with strange rituals, which
provide the work’s somewhat murky philosophical message. Yet near
the end of the first act, the audience discovers the show’s framework:
The tales are enacted by a small, feisty group of actors in a mythical
kingdom. There, nasty princes seek to overthrow the king, called The Jiril
(Jay Smith), and manipulate the company leader (Rik Lopes) to insert messages
to their followers in the play performed at the court.
-
- As the plays-within-plays-within-the-play unfold, the playwright and
cast members in multiple roles keep the action intriguing and understandable.
Lopes, who has the leading role in the main story, is also outstanding
as the good magician struggling with Jessica Rudholm’s evil queen.
-
- Mikka Bonel gives a thoroughly winning performance as the deceptively
plain-and-simple village girl, pursued by Lopes’ pathetic king, and
eventually rescued by the excessively loud B. Warden Lawlor’s magic
fish.
-
- In a primary part, Paul Rodrigues plays a good guy, but he’s even
more remarkable in other roles, especially the disheveled Lord Durgh caricature
and theater-company persona as Chachak.
-
- There isn’t a weak link in the cast. Chris Struett, Katrina Bushnell,
Kai Morrison and Sara Eve Breindel deliver, playing many roles and avoiding
bloopers in three hours of an extremely talky play
|
|