Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

It could be that I have been burned by the Circus of the Sun.

Now, I fully realize there are worse things to suffer in life than weariness of Cirque du Soleil, the phenomenally successful new-age Canadian circus troupe. And I also realize that to be weary of Cirque means I’ve had the great good fortune to see a whole lot of Cirque shows.

The first Cirque show I saw, Alegria, remains my favorite; a common occurrence, I’ve come to learn, among Cirque fans is that your first time is usually your favorite time.

That initial experience really is magical. It’s the kind of experience you long for in any theatrical endeavor, be it Hamlet or Don Giovanni or Oklahoma! Soaking in the Cirque mystique — the gorgeous, colorful costumes, the rich, worldly music, the mysterious sense that somehow, somewhere the obscure “story” of the show actually makes sense — is tremendously transporting.

I left the Grand Chapiteau (even Cirque’s name for its blue-and-yellow-striped tent has pretensions) that first time thinking I had just seen the most brilliant thing ever.

I don’t usually like clowns, but I liked the clowns in Alegria (among them was Slava, who turned his wondrous bit in that show into an entire, and entirely awful, theatrical experience called Slava’s Snow Show).
And I found the music so intriguing I went out and bought the CD.

Color me a Cirque du Soleil fan circa 1995.

I’ve seen pretty much everything since, including all the permanent Las Vegas shows. Now we have the latest tour, Kooza, making its U.S. debut in San Francisco Friday (Nov. 16), where it continues through Jan. 13 before moving down to San Jose from Jan. 31 through March 2.

The arrival of a new Cirque used to set me all atwitter. Now, from my jaded, seen-it-all perspective, I shrug my shoulders, raise my eyebrows and mutter, “Maybe,” or if I’m feeling French-Canadian, “Peut-etre.”

The last Cirque show to come through the Bay Area, Corteo,” had its moments, but it also had some horrors (one Act 2 clown routine is probably the worst I’ve seen in a Cirque show).

The mega-Cirque shows in Vegas — Ka (the Cirque with an actual plot), Zumanity (the naughty “adult” Cirque), Love (the Beatles Cirque), Mystere (the one with the giant sea snail) and O (the one Cirque that maintains its magical hold year after year) — have a tendency to be mind-numbing simply because they’re so big, so multifaceted and so much the same.

Sure, they all have their themes and gimmicks, their beauty and their thrills. But it’s all essentially ladled from the same Soup du Soleil.

Does anybody really remember what differentiated Varekai from Dralion?

Now that I’ve whined about the pioneer of modern circus, let me share what interests me about Kooza. Two words: David Shiner.

Bay Area audiences know Shiner to be a master clown. Better yet, he’s a master bitter clown — belligerent, aggressive and hard-edged.

We have enjoyed his sour alongside Bill Irwin’s sweet in the brilliant clown show Fool Moon, which played the Geary Theater twice — in 1998 and 2001.

Shiner is the first American writer-director of a Cirque show, and he has said that Kooza, a made-up word inspired by “koza,” Sanskrit for “box, chest or treasure,” goes back to the origins of Cirque — back when Shiner was working on Nouvelle Experience in Cirque’s late ’80s-early ’90s days.

The show, Shiner says, is about “human connection and the world of duality, good and bad. The tone is fun and funny, light and open. The show doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s very much about ideas, too.”

That sounds promising. The emphasis seems to be on acrobatics and clowning and features a stunt called “Wheel of Death.” Hard to resist the lure of potential death at the highbrow circus.

Whatever it takes — I’m ready for the “irk” to be taken out of my Cirque du Soleil attitude.

Kooza continues through Jan. 13 (now extended through Jan. 20) in the tent in the parking lot behind AT&T Park, corner of Third Street and Terry A. Francois Boulevard, San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 4 and 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 1 and 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $38.50 to $81. Call 866-624-7783 or visit www.cirquedusoleil.com.

The big yellow-and-blue-striped tent — the Grand Chapiteau — is heading back to the Bay Area.
Cirque du Soleil’s latest touring show, KOOZA, will have its U.S. premiere Nov. 16 in the parking lot behind San Francisco’s AT&T Park. The show then moves to San Jose Jan. 31.

You can never tell with the quirky Cirque, but this show sounds pretty straightforward — a return to a more traditional circus tradition of acrobats and clowns. The director is David Shiner, a clown well known to Bay Area audiences for his work with Bill Irwin in Fool Moon and for his performance in the early Cirque show Nouvelle Experience.

KOOZA, currently on tour in Canada, centers on a character called The Innocent, a “melancholy loner in search of his place in the world.” Creators promise “bold slapstick humor” as The Innocent encounters The Trickster, The Pickpocket and, most intriguingly, The Bad Dog.

Tickets are $55 to $90 and go on sale to Cirque Club members June 28 and to the rest of us in July.

Visit www.cirquedusoleil.com or call (800) 678-5440.

Irwin, Turner find laughs, depth in howling Woolf
three stars [1/2] stars Painfully funny

Why is it we’re still interested in George and Martha, the bellicose spouses in Edward Albee’s 1962 drama in which very little happens?

Within the first few minutes of the play, Martha calls George a “dumbbell” and tells him, “You make me puke…If you existed, I’d divorce you.” Then she describes him as a “simp,” “blah,” “cipher,” “zero.”

Ah, marriage.

Albee’s play doesn’t shock as much anymore, but more than 40 years after its sensational debut, it still stings. Maybe that’s why we’re willing to sit through George and Martha’s nightmarish relationship. We go to the theater to feel something, and a sting is something.

Of course our interest in George and Martha depends largely on the actors playing them, and in the touring Broadway production of the play now at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre, Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner (above) are putting on a hell of a show — hell being the operative word.

With her Body Heat and Romancing the Stone days behind her, Turner has evolved into something of a sexy linebacker. She’s still sexy and gravelly voiced, but she’s also big and scary. There’s a vehemence to her underscored by intelligence that gives you the distinct impression this woman isn’t going to take any crap from anyone.

And Irwin, beloved in the Bay Area for years as part of the Pickle Family Circus and later as one of the world’s greatest clowns, seems at times to turn George into a clown, but he also manages to make the character so tightly wound, so deeply troubled it seems he’ll pop his sanity spring at any moment.

The Turner-Irwin pas de deux — under the sensitive direction of Anthony Page – is more than enough reason to see this sturdy production, especially if your only memory of the play is the 1966 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. This version is much funnier, much less shrill and, thanks to Albee’s 2004 revisions, much more mysterious.

To watch George and Martha eviscerate each other in front of their late-night, post-party guests Nick (David Furr, below with Turner) and Honey (Kathleen Early) is to witness performers truly come alive in front of their audience. Are George and Martha really as awful as they seem, drinking up a storm and screaming at each other about deeply personal failures and flaws? Or are they playing games and putting on a show for their own perverse amusement?

There’s no real answer, but that’s pretty much it for plot. Somehow, Albee manages to stretch the mystery (and satisfy our voyeuristic need for “schadenfreude,” the German notion of finding happiness in the misfortune of others) over three acts, titled “Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht” and “The Exorcism.”

It certainly helps that Furr, as the latest golden boy to catch Martha’s eye, and Early, as his quick-to-vomit lush of a wife, are such compelling victims of George and Martha’s twisted idea of an evening’s entertainment.

Nick and Honey are shocked by George and Martha’s sparring, but George reassures them: “Martha and I are merely exercising, that’s all.”

Well, they get quite a workout.

By Act 3, when the constant cocktails have turned everyone into zombies and the games get really ugly, Albee is aiming for something more than harsh comedy or dark social satire. As George and Martha talk about their (possibly fictional) son, their games become more exposed and their need for each other more blatant.

This is where the production flattens out some. Genuine emotion feels foreign, and, like addicts, we’re left wanting just a little more bile. Seeing George and Martha as damaged human beings rather than well-armed matrimonial guerillas is, sorry to say, a disappointment.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is exhausting, but in a good way. By the end, you feel you’ve experienced something, even if that something makes you feel you’ve had too many drinks, cigarettes and fights and you can’t wait to leave the stuffy living room (terrifically realistic set by John Lee Beatty and lights by Peter Kaczorowski) you’ve been happily trapped in.

We’ve appreciated Albee’s sharp, funny writing and the expertly nuanced performances, but, like Nick and Honey, we just want to go home and see if any of the wounds are visible.

To paraphrase George, that, as they say, is that.

For information about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? visit www.shnsf.com.

The Bay Area fell in love with Bill Irwin more than 30 years ago when he clowned around with the Pickle Family Circus.

One of our most inspired physical comedians — his best work can stand alongside Chaplin and Keaton — Irwin is doing what clowns do when they get older: He’s getting serious.

In recent years, we’ve seen Irwin at his clowning best in Fool Moon at American Conservatory Theater, and also in his more serious mode in Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, also at ACT.

Earlier this week, Irwin returned to his old stomping grounds in the horrific clown show known as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which begins previews April 11 and opens April 13 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre. This is the same stage where Irwin goofed around (brilliantly) in Largely New York in 1977.

This is sort of a victory lap for Irwin, who snagged a Tony Award for his portrayal of George, the dour, bespectacled academic whose wife, Martha — played on this tour as on Broadway and in London’s West End by the formidable Kathleen Turner – is as bad at holding her liquor as he is.
Of the original 1963 production, critic Walter Kerr had this to say: “It’s a horror show with laughs.”

Irwin has his own quick description: “A love story with acid of various kinds.”

Speaking on the phone from Chicago, the tour’s pre-San Francisco stop, Irwin says he has seen the play shift from an “incendiary, somewhat shameful thing” in the early ’60s to classic status today.

“Edward wrote this play in his early 30s, yet he knew how to write a love story and about marriage,” Irwin says. “Even in his wild youth he knew it. One of the best compliments we got early on — we were out of town in Boston before the Broadway run — and somebody told me after the show that Kathleen and I seemed married the moment we walked onstage.”

Irwin’s transition from clown to serious, Tony-winning actor began with Beckett, which then led to a Broadway stint in Albee’s The Goat (or Who Is Sylvia?) alongside Sally Field.

Now that he’s played two Albee husbands — one drunk and ferocious, the other having an affair with a goat — Irwin says he sees some similarities.

“There’s some unnameable quality in Edward’s dialogue. It’s sharp, and there’s always a cause and effect. There’s just this underlying `Edwardness,’ which is to say, a fascination with language, puns both good and bad and easy learnedness.”

The most famous version of Virginia Woolf is the movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Irwin saw it when he was 17, and unlike Albee and Turner, he’s a fan of the movie.

“It’s a very funny play, and the movie is generally considered to be unfunny, but I find it much funnier than I remembered,” Irwin says.

In the rehearsal hall, when Irwin was desperate for any crumb of information that might help him put a distinctive stamp on the character of George, Irwin recalls hearing Albee discuss his fantasy casting for the movie.

“Edward said he had been hoping for a different cast,” Irwin recalls. “He wanted Bette Davis and James Mason. That gave me a clue. Burton was a big, barrel-chested, powerful man. My take on George is different. From the moment I heard Edward say the name, my George has had a little James Mason going.”

Albee has done some judicious cutting to the play — though it still runs nearly three hours — and added back in all the swear words that were excised in the ’60s.

“There’s more ambiguity to the play,” Irwin says. “It’s less clear to the audience and to the characters what’s going on and whether people are fabricating or talking about something that actually happened.”

Being a physical comedian, Irwin — who turns 57 April 11 — is used to arduous shows, but Virginia Woolf is a challenge.

“My friend Nancy Harrington, who helped us create Fool Moon, said that Fool Moon was a whole lot easier than what I’m doing now. In a certain sense it’s true and not true. We just had some time off from the tour, and I went home. I was in my bed in my house, and I didn’t sleep well. I felt I should be doing the play every night. I had anxiety dreams. I can tell you, I’m going to miss this play. It will be a weight off my bones when we’re done, but this play is in my bones — for better and for worse.”

Initially, Irwin was nervous about his chemistry with Turner — would there be any? At an early reading, with director Anthony Page in a sweltering dance studio, things didn’t go so well. “I had trepidation going in, and even more going out,” Irwin says of the experience. “But the play, man, it holds even when you’re bashing through it under terrible circumstances. A few days later, we sat down and readit for Edward and some producers. We had a different pair of actors playing the younger couple, and the whole thing lit up. We know something nice was happening when one of the producers, who said she could only stay for the first act, stayed for the whole thing.”

Since, then, Irwin says, there has been very little “grad school” analysis of the play in favor of focusing on the emotions and — this might surprise some — the humor.

“I hope it doesn’t feel like we’re doing a classic play respectfully,” Irwin says.

As for Irwin’s future beyond Woolf, he is, as he puts it goodhumoredly, “contractually forced” to create a new show for the Philadelphia Theatre Company. The working title is The Happiness Lecture. There’s also a “small film” director Jonathan Demme wants him to do this fall.

“Life has intriguing possibilities,” Irwin says. “Despite aging and going deper into middle age, life is exciting. Now, if we could just extract our nation from its terrible foreign policy.”

Ah, Bill Irwin, ever the clown.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? continues through May 12 at the Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets are $50-$80. Call (415) 512-7770 or visit www.shn-sf.com for information.

Note: New Conservatory Theatre Center hosts “A Conversation with Bill Irwin” at 7 p.m. April 23 at 25 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$50. Call (415) 861-8972 or visit www.nctcsf.org.