stage matters / By William Kowinski

Hello, Tartuffe…

Tartuffe is in the outdoor Rooney Amphitheatre, and because of Blue Lake’s noise ordinance mandating that the show must be over by 10 p.m., Fields has shortened the script somewhat. There will be live music in Afro-Cuban style, suggesting the colonialism that the attitudes in the play enabled. “That’s talked about in the play, too. We’ve added some pre-show music and integrated some `carnivale’ aspects into the production, particularly because it’s outdoors,” Fields said. “But once we get into the piece, we really are doing Tartuffe .”

Returning to Robert Hurwitt for a moment, his mixed-to-negative review of this Tartuffe at Marin was grossly distorted in the Marin Theatre publicity to make it sound like a rave. Out-of-context and therefore mendacious quotes are unfortunately standard these days, but agree or disagree with his conclusions, such misrepresentation applied to a play about hypocrisy is disconcertingly ironic.

Dream House was a challenging, entertaining and provocative 80 minutes of theatre presented by visiting artist Elizabeth Fuller at the Arcata Playhouse last weekend. In this solo piece she wrote with her partner Conrad Bishop, Fuller played seven “sisters” who are exaggerated aspects of herself. Apart from the domestic and physical comedy (complete with the locally de rigueur clown nose) it was notable for playful cascades of inventive language and skillful use of recorded and processed voice, Laurie Anderson-style. The house that the characters are building is a potent metaphor for self, or even the world. (“Ecology” means “earth household,” and when reading the next day about the onrushing crisis of e-waste, I recalled a line in this play that says there is “no place called Away ,” as in “throw it Away .”)

Though after one viewing I’m not sure the various levels of metaphor or elements of structure worked as well as they could, at its heart it was courageously uncompromising as well as relevant to its audience. It was a winsome and bracing presentation that remains with you and inspires further consideration, and a terrific example of what else theatre can do beyond our usual fare. Thanks to Fuller’s ensemble, Independent Eye, and the Arcata Playhouse for bringing it to us.

Next up at the Arcata Playhouse is a benefit for the Humboldt Community Breast Health Project, a “titillating cabaret” called Thanks for the Mammaries, this Friday, June 15, at 8 p.m.

More at stagematters.blogspot.com. You can leave comments there, or e-mail stagematters@sbcglobal.net.

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