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DIVAfest's 'Olive Project' a smooth start to festival season

by Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle April 26, 2005

 

There's been no order from on high that I'm aware of, nor is there a conspiracy afoot, but somehow, late spring has become festival season. The Exit Theatre's DIVA-fest and Impact Theatre's Impact Briefs one-acts festival opened over the weekend. The Magic's annual Hot House, TheatreWorks' Spring Festival of New Works and the BATS Improv Long-Form Festival open this week. The Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Best of PlayGround Festival, San Francisco Improv Festival and, biggest of all, the San Francisco International Arts Festival are coming up in May.

First up is DIVAfest, now in its fourth year of developing and showcasing new works by women. This year's program consists of four fully staged shows --

two ongoing at Exit's two Eddy Street stages and two one-week runs at Exit on Taylor (Mia Paschal's "Some Life" last week and Abby Schachner's solo "The Abortion Show ... or Uhh ... bortion Show" this Wednesday through Saturday -- plus workshops and poet Diane di Prima reading Saturday afternoon.

Of the two shows that opened Friday -- Sarah McKereghan's "Ambivalent Geneses," and "The Mandala Olive Project" -- I opted for the more topical "Olive," which proved an intriguing, raw, inventive and promising intro to festival season. Conceived by Arab American director-performer Denmo Ibrahim and Jewish American director Amy Mueller, and co-developed with the ensemble, it's a provocatively allusive, nonlinear performance meditation on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It starts with olives in the Exit Cafe. Exit Artistic Director Christina Augello appears in friendly show-and-tell guise to discuss the importance of olives to Mediterranean cultures and relate a cunning fable, using olives as puppets, on the best way to harvest them -- one of the few things, she notes, upon which Arabs and Jews seem to agree. Once she ushers us into the Exit Stage Left, though, another commonly held belief asserts itself. Each group believes it has an ancestral claim to the same land.

Four actors inhabit many parts, some characters, others more like attitudes. Totter Todd's moody, lyrical live score provides an evocative soundscape for Ibrahim's choreographed stagings within the frayed draperies and sculptural lights of Amanda Ortmayer's design. Meditative passages bump up against overly broad caricatures, such as those satirizing American TV newscasters' dismissive coverage of Middle East peace efforts (the phony deeply concerned frowns are a nice touch).

Ibrahim is particularly effective conveying Palestinians' pain at the loss and fragmentation of their lands in an understated faux slide show and in a mimed stepping-stone passage with Rebecca Noon and Joseph Estlack (she and Noon are brightly comic as haughty olive tasters as well). An idyllic scene of Arab women preparing dinner and a lovely Hebrew song inject aspects of hope, as childhoods afflicted by violence convey the ongoing tragedy.

It doesn't all add up. It isn't meant to. But "Olive" provides pungent food for thought

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