~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals

by Dan Carbone

review in San Francisco Bay Guardian by Brad Rosenstein

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Hello Dalí
Dan Carbone gets mighty surreal as Salvador.

By Brad Rosenstein

FOR ANYONE WHO saw his brilliant
solo piece Up from the Ground, it
would take little inducement to join
Dan Carbone on another expedition
into the netherworlds of his
imagination. His latest work, Salvador
Dalí Talks to the Animals in the
Heaven on Top of Heaven, is now
premiering at Exit Theatre as part of
its Absurdist Season. It unites
Carbone with a cast of seven actors and designer-director John
Sowle in a surrealistic meditation on Dalí's life and work.

Given the kind of direct access Carbone has to his unconscious,
this would seem like a match made in the heaven on top of
heaven. Linear narrative clearly will not do for a subject like Dalí,
and Carbone is in his element conjoining images from the 20th
century's preeminent subverter of logic and his own compelling
dreamworld. Dalí's dripping clocks and incongruously placed
shellfish seem natural companions to Carbone's iconic cows and
windup toys. But initially the meeting of surrealist and surrealist is
a bit too much for the piece to handle.

After an inspired opening sequence in which sycophantic talk
show host Zachary Strayhorn (Paul Gerrior) summons up the spirit
of Dalí, back from the dead with some new paintings, the show
loses itself in random sitcom and children's show parodies. These
troubled metaphors for Dalí's ironic pursuit of bourgeois innocence
don't come off, and it's only with the beautifully surreal introduction
of Dalí's bitch-goddess muse Gala (Erica Blue), a lobster
blossoming from her genitals, that the piece finds its heart and its
spine.

The second half is considerably better, as Carbone skips nimbly
across Dalí's tortured relationship with Gala – a strange, funny,
and touching partnership that offers no shortage of surrealistic
drama. As with Dalí's finest "dream photographs," Carbone is at
his best when his wonderfully unfettered imagination is grounded
in recognizable realities, rendered fresh by unexpected
conjunctions and nightmarish precision. The piece also has an
acute understanding of Dalí's carefully cultivated eccentric public
persona as both distinct from and inextricably linked to his work; it
subtly reveals how the artist simultaneously profited from and
became the victim of his own joke.

The cast is excellent, particularly Blue as the superbly fiendish
Gala, and Carbone with his blustery, randomly accented Dalí.
Gerrior is sharply comic, and Vince Camillo is hilarious as the
apotheosis of a hippie Jesus. Sowle gets the evening's madcap
but mournful tone just right, his versatile sets creating dreamlike
transformations with minimal means, and Nina Barlow's marvelous
masks and prognathous Dalian mustaches add to the show's
zippy texture. Carbone is one of the Bay Area's most original
voices, and at its best this show takes you places you've never
been. With some rethinking it could become astonishing, a
"paranoiac-critical hallucination" to rival Dalí's own.

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