GELFAND’S WORLD-OK, let's start with the big one. The Endless Summer, Bruce Brown's tour de force about 1960s surfing, will be shown in San Pedro on Sunday, October 12. It's ostensibly about two men's search for the perfect wave, or perhaps it's about some deeper theme on the search for perfect joy in life. It doesn't matter, because the wave-scapes brought audiences out to stand in line in places from Santa Barbara to Boston.
Those of us who saw it when it ran back in '66 still remember the iconic line, "You should have been here yesterday." That may be one of life's truisms, but it also translated west coast surf humor to the starched collar audiences of New York and Chicago.
The rest of the San Pedro International Film Festival or SPIFF for short, will be running a remarkable collection of features, documentaries, and lots more surfing celluloid over the weekend of October 10-12. Most of the action will be at the Warner Grand Theater, itself an iconic art deco structure built in the heyday of the early sound era of 1931. There's a lot in the schedule, but let me point out that Friday's opening night film stars none other than Juliette Binoche, known for her Oscar winning performance in The English Patient and for her breakout role in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The SPIFF is in its third year, and will be featuring some interesting historical documentaries, including an important work about the labor movement on the west coast docks, and a heartfelt history of the Boys and Girls Club. Then more features and surf movies.
The development of a work of art
A few months ago, I mentioned the latest work by the new company at the San Pedro Repertory theater group, otherwise known as Theatricum Elysium, or TESPR for short. Director and coauthor Aaron Ganz took a chapter out of Tennyson's King Arthur story, The Idylls of the King. The story, and the play taken from it, is called The Lady of Shalott.
Ganz built a story that is half opera, half ballet, and half drama. OK, that's a lot of halves, but in this case, the description is accurate enough, as there were songs and dances and acrobatics and the battle between good and evil, darkness and light, intermingled with the internal fight between virtue and temptation.
The course of study for your humble observer was to observe how a piece like this could develop, starting with the early rehearsals and continuing to develop throughout the public performance schedule. There was an ever-evolving script, a collection of willing actors and actresses, and a lot of gutty work.
In it's earliest incarnation, The Lady of Shalott was a dozen or so players developing individual scenes through long hours of rehearsal and improvisation. Since the original story involves King Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, along with Arthur's hateful bastard son Mordred, we had a plotline that began with the familiar, but went on in a rather adult version, more risque than we're used to seeing at the PG level.
Why was this process interesting to watch? First, there is TE Rep's addiction to what is referred to as the immersive theater. That is, a theatrical production that invites the audience to walk through rooms from one scene to the next, creates physical contact between the cast and the audience, and in the case of this company, brings the audience into the action once in a while.
It's definitely an unusual theatrical experience when a member of the cast takes you by both hands and pulls you into a dance number, or takes you by the shoulder and guides you into another scene in a different room. It's nothing like what you are going to experience in the standard theater setting. It turns out that there are snags that can crop up when a theater company does these sorts of things, so the group practiced how to herd the audience, what level of touching was appropriate, and how to deal with an overly boisterous audience member.
The other eccentricity, if you want to call it that, is that the rooms are not very large, so the audience is jam packed right next to the action. In a sense, everyone has a front seat, and that seat is on and in the playing area.
The lead character, the Lady of Shalott, played in lovely fashion by Cassandra Ambe, is herself suffering from bewitchment, but manages to find ecstatic love with the shamed and degraded Lancelot, leading to the birth of a son and finally her untimely death. Not content to give his heroine a tragic role alternating ecstasy and pain, including a truly horrid demonic possession scene, author Ganz has required balletic skill from his Lady. He has added Vivienne, played as smilingly evil, by Rachel McVay, to torment the Lady. I have to hand it to McVay: One of the audience members standing next to me whispered in shocked tones, "She's evil!"
Between the early performances and the later ones, there was a remarkable evolution in the performance by Mordred's mother, aptly played by Hillary Harper. The relationship between Arthur and Guinevere developed into something more laden with meaning, even as the part of Lancelot became something of a focal point.
It's a little hard to point the finger at how drama evolves, but the way a line is spoken -- whether the force is exerted on a word in the middle of a line or at the very end -- can be meaningful, because the effect of drama done well is to lead the audience through an emotional arc (or roller coaster, if you prefer) that is partly the schematic laid down by the playwright and partly the individual reaction of each audience member.
The sum total of lines made right is to make the play emotionally engaging for the audience. At a certain point, there is enough that is working that the play works as a whole, and the audience is drawn into the story. Academics refer to this phenomenon as the willing suspension of disbelief, but for the cast to win that suspension requires creating something that is worthy of belief.
The Lady of Shalott was herself the embodiment of someone not quite of this world, but determined to make something of her lot. She was ably partnered by Sam Fleming as Lancelot, while King Arthur (William Reinbold) and Guinevere (Jamie Ann Burke) were a cute couple until the moments when they were revealed as sinners and adulterers.
The point of this musing on a brand new play in a small, startup theater company, is that art sometimes takes shape in strange places, in cultural backwaters, and can even happen a few blocks from the busiest shipping channel this side of Hong Kong. It's remarkable to see a group this young, tasked with creating a collection of roles and melding them into a coherent story line.
What is also important to note is that a production like this requires a lot more than some auteur waving a magic wand, out of which beauty and truth emerge. It is the collective work of all the players, creating their own roles and mutually creating interactions with each other, that ends up building into an experience that the audience is drawn into. We've learned over the years that film is of necessity a collaborative art, but we sometimes tend to forget that it's a similar case for live theater.
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TESPR took even one more step in obliterating the fourth wall. The whole theater was decorated as if it were the inside of a museum. Before the play begins, audience members are invited to walk through and look at the exhibits. Then as the play begins, one of the ostensible museum visitors, playing the part known as the Modern Girl, and played as adorable yet mournful by Paris Langle, is emotionally drawn into the exhibits. She is particularly drawn to the painting of the Lady of Shalott. The Modern Girl continues to walk through the scenes, even staying in character during the two intermissions. That's commitment.
Langle plays the part as projecting her own inner pain onto the Shalott story. One might imagine her role as representing the theater goer or opera audience member who really gets it, who suffers with the tragic heroine and exalts with the triumphant knight. It's a bit of a dramatic conceit to put a modern observer in the middle of what would otherwise be a 6th century fairy tale, but the Modern Girl role is, in a sense, an emotional guide to what is happening with the other characters. She could be, in one sense, the story arc brought to life.
TESPR began its San Pedro incarnation by doing Shakespeare's Hamlet. Not content to take up easier fare, it is now preparing to do Oedipus Rex. Ah, youthful ambition. It will be interesting to see what transpires.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 78
Pub: Sep 26, 2014
