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1999 Bay Guardian Goldie Award
Dan Carbone

SF Bay Guardian September 22, 1999
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By Brad Rosenstein

IN A TOWN where every conceivable wrinkle in solo theater
seems to have been ironed out long ago, Dan Carbone crept out
from under the bed and lit the mattress on fire. His show at last
year's Fringe Festival, Up from the Ground, was a strikingly
original, funny, and touching exploration down some seriously
skewed mental pathways. Whether depicting a little boy's strange
encounter in a cabbage patch or a space monkey poignantly
shuffling off to another galaxy, Carbone created indelible moments
from random brain detritus: Jonathan Winters meets Cocteau.

"I either have all the right influences or all the wrong influences,"
says Carbone, who acknowledges the formative impact of
everyone from Firesign Theatre to Luis Buñuel. As an NYU film
school grad, Carbone had originally hoped to commit his bizarre
visions to film but was met with a predictably baffled response in
Hollywood. He decided to convey his ideas directly to an
audience, and he worked with San Francisco solo performance
mavens Anne Galjour and Grace Walcott to hone his material.
Trying bits out in small venues, Carbone was amazed to find that
"the further out I got, the more abstract it became, the more people
got it and were there with you."

Carbone lets his ideas gestate for long periods of time, drawing
heavily on dreams and developing pieces that are more like music
or stream-of-consciousness doodles than linear narratives.
Naturally, the unclassifiable nature of his work has been a
challenge to getting it more widely seen. But Carbone is
undeterred, forging ahead with a new piece about Salvador Dali
("He's back from the grave with some new paintings," he laughs),
and is considering a more serious (and marketable) screenplay
about the artist. He also continues to scan his dreams for the
seedlings that can grow into a piece. "I love creating other
realms," he says, "but you have to be very true to the original
source, and then be really brave enough to present it."
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