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Cinghiale! by Emilie Miller

Speaking in Tongues by James Bovell

Strange Love by Perry Alley Puppet Theatre

review by Robert Hurwitt in the SF Chronicle (January27, 2004)

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The wild boar is only a metaphor, but the full frontal puppet nudity is for real. The suspect may have committed a murder that may not have happened. Stories get fractured to intriguing and frustrating degrees.

The annual January theater explosion is upon us, that secondary season opener when companies large and small begin their post-holidays shows. Some three dozen productions have opened in the Bay Area this month. As usual, the three primary stages of the Tenderloin's Exit Theatre are filled with offerings, making it a good place to start taking stock of the new year's small theaters so far.

It's a mixed bag of less and more provocative explorations of the demons that haunt some women's psyches. The theme crops up in literal form in the puppetry of "Strange Love,'' gets a more allusive if murkier treatment in Emilie Miller's "Cinghiale!" and is most suggestively and disturbingly intertwined with men's inner demons in Andrew Bovell's "Speaking in Tongues."

"Strange Love" is the most disappointing of the three and "Cinghiale!" the most frustrating. "Strange Love," on the Exit's main stage, is a trio of playlets by the Perry Alley Puppet Theatre of New Hampshire, essentially singer-dancer puppeteers Andrew and Bonnie Periale accompanied by pianist- composer Larry Siegel. The work is sweet, sincere and unexceptional, cloyingly precious in a dance-and-puppetry "The Tree of Life" girl's coming-of-age fable (with boring demons) and heavily didactic in the service of multicultural acceptance in "Jack & Yettl."

"Jack & Yettl" at least has the most beguiling puppetry in its clog- dancing stick figures. The most potentially inventive piece, "Share & Share Alike" -- about a woman's secret affair with her lover's conjoined twin -- features the least creative puppetry and a concept still awaiting development.

The demon in Miller's solo piece is also explicit. It's the cinghiale (Italian for "wild boar," as she tells us often) of her title. It's hard to know what Miller wants us to make of it, though, in part because the connections in her multicharacter solo are so elusively allusive, but more because she and director Michael Lederman hadn't figured out how to cope with the Exit Stage Left's live acoustics by opening night, and much of the text got lost in echoes.

Miller is an appealing and generous performer, who moves beautifully (choreography by Nicola Bosco) and embodies her characters with varying degrees of success, least convincingly when relying on a trite upper-class accent. The characters -- all women who hunt in some sense and a boar- friendly girl with debilitating allergies -- and the theme may be less generic than Miller has managed to make clear so far.

The ambiguity in Bovell's "Speaking in Tongues" grows more compelling in the course of his curiously fractured narrative. His 2001 drama, in a West Coast premiere by the Actor's Collective at Exit on Taylor, is particularly intriguing for anyone who's seen the fascinating Australian film "Lantana," which Bovell and director Ray Lawrence developed from this script a year later. "Tongues" is "Lantana" in embryonic form.

Director Jon Drawbaugh and his cast don't do the material full justice, but they make a strong effort. Four actors play nine roles in Bovell's intercut fragments of an ever more intricately intertwined tale of four couples disintegrating in a web of infidelities, miscommunication, therapy and possible murder.

The performances aren't as disturbingly nuanced as those of Barbara Hershey, Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush et al in the film, but Karen Finch gains magnetic force as the disappeared therapist, Gabrielle Fisher does nice work as a pair of her rivals, Daryl Lozupone is affecting as her conflicted husband and Kevin Rolston is strong as a repressed cop and a pathetic suspect.

For anyone who's seen the movie, it's intriguing to look at the ways in which Bovell expanded upon these characters and situations. But "Tongues" stands its own unsettling ground. And Drawbaugh's didgeridoo-infused staging, framed in Australian outback videos and the bark paintings of Cynthia Poulos' set, makes a case for it that transcends a few strained Aussie accents and underdeveloped moments.

Unburied treasures: One-night stands get some new respect with two new programs at the Marsh and the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Starting in February, the Marsh unveils a Wednesday San Francisco Treasure Series -- one-nighters by local gems such as Charlie Varon (Feb. 11), Marga Gomez (workshopping her "Los Big Names," Feb. 25), the Joe Goode Performance Group (April 7), with Jeff Greenwald, Josh Kornbluth, Pamela Z and others yet to come.

In a similar vein, the JCC's Eugene & Elinor Friend Center's inaugural season opens its Edgewise solo series with Jeff Raz's "The Whole Megillah" March 4, followed by Varon in an evening of monologues (April 1) and Sara Felder's "June Bride" (May 13).

Life upon the wicked stage: Actors' Equity's annual report is out and posted on its Web site (www.actorsequity.org). The good news? Membership total earnings reached an all-time high of $264.5 million. The sobering reality: The percentage of members working in any given week remains steady, as it has for years, at about 15 percent. The nationwide average annual salary for a professional actor last year was $14,995.

It could be worse. Consider Italy, where Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo -- whose hit "The Two-Headed Anomaly" satirizes Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing government for corruption and curtailing civil liberties -- is being sued by a member of Berlusconi's party for a million euros for defamation and "persecution." Probably couldn't happen here. It's hard to imagine a member of this administration taking that much interest in the theater.

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