Theater review: 'Maple and Vine' at American Conservatory Theater

A sparklingly original idea can be both a godsend and a dead end for a playwright, as Jordan Harrison’s “Maple and Vine” serves (entertainingly, for a good while) to remind.

The clever conceit of this play, which is receiving its West Coast premiere at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, is that an alternative to the modern 24/7 rat race has been established by a cult group known as the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence. Sick of being enslaved to their smartphones, this community of burned-out professionals and nostalgia freaks collectively turns back the clock to the 1950s, reenacting life as it was lived in the good old Eisenhower days, before the Internet and political correctness ruined everything.

Theater review: 'The Caretaker' at the Curran Theatre

 Clarity is not commonly thought to be one of Harold Pinter’s signature virtues. But when his work is done right — and the penetrating British import production of “The Caretaker” starring two-time Tony winner Jonathan Pryce at San Francisco's Curran Theatre is nearly flawless — there’s a dreamlike lucidity that will have you seeing deep into the underground pathways of human nature.

When Pinter burst onto the British playwriting scene in the late 1950s, his enigmatic style proved exasperating to many of the day’s leading critics, who could tolerate mystery only if it came with an intelligible explanation, some moral or message they could comfortingly relay to their readers. Not given one, they grew frustrated by this cocky upstart whose characters spoke, as one impatient reviewer put it, in “non-sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings.”

“The Caretaker,” which premiered in 1960, turned out to be Pinter’s breakthrough play, the work that inspired a new receptiveness to his dramatic tactics. Characters behave in ways that are every bit as opaque as the menacing festivities of his earlier play “The Birthday Party” (the flop that became a classic). But the psychology of “The Caretaker,” even when elusive, is too real to be dismissed as flamboyant gimmickry.

Music review: John Adams' 'Absolute Jest' in San Francisco

When John Adams was a young composer and conductor in San Francisco in the early ’70s, he would often perform the experimental music of John Cage and other radicals, which was the hip thing to do at the time. But he has said that all that avant-garde business could leave him musically dissatisfied, and he’d go home and put on recordings of late Beethoven string quartets.

That is essentially what he does in a provocative new orchestral piece -- an Adams-ized mélange of late Beethoven -- commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony as part of music director Michael Tilson Thomas’ American Mavericks festival here.

The premiere at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night was sandwiched between just such radical ’70s pieces as Cage’s anarchic “Song Books” Wednesday and Feldman’s opaque Piano and Orchestra, which followed Adams on Thursday’s program.

So is Adams merely reliving his youth, or is he perhaps a maverick’s maverick, rebelling against the festival’s prevalent progressive spirit? The wise-guy title of the new piece is “Absolute Jest.” And it’s a great entertainment, as long as you don’t think too hard about it. 

Music review: San Francisco Symphony's John Cage 'Song Books'

The San Francisco Symphony is 100. Michael Tilson Thomas, who first conducted the orchestra 36 years ago, is in his 16th season as music director, and he has done more to give it a national profile than anyone else. But the anniversary that perhaps means the most for the San Francisco's unique brand is the 12th of Tilson Thomas’ American Mavericks festival.

A Mavericks celebration is going on here at Davies Symphony Hall with a two-week festival (that will also tour the Midwest and New York) and the remarkable thing about it is that -- in no small part due to Tilson Thomas’ powers of persuasion that get unlikely stars to perform unlikely music -- outlier composers don’t seem quite so mavericky anymore.

Wednesday night's program began with a half-hour staging of excerpts from John Cage’s anarchy-centric “Song Books.” The singers were Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk and Jessye Norman. Yes, that Jessye Norman, the regal opera star. She was magnificent. They all were.

Book notes: 'David Park: A Painter's Life' by Nancy Boas

David Park: A Painter's Life by Nancy Boas

UC Press, $49.95

David Park (1911-1960) was a first-rate painter who found himself in a tough spot in fall 1946. Clyfford Still, the imperious and voluble artist who would pioneer Abstract Expressionism, wanted to take over the advanced painting class that Park taught at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. The administration turned him down, and Still harbored a grudge for years.

Park went on to paint his way out of the dilemma, finding the means for a distinctive type of figuration that could be convincingly infused within muscular abstraction. In "David Park: A Painter's Life," Nancy Boas (Society of Six) draws on 20 years of interviews and research to tell the story of how Park came to spearhead Bay Area Figurative art, spawning Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown and others. This welcome volume is the first full biography of a Northern California artist.

ALSO:

Rush Limbaugh sculpture is planned for Missouri statehouse

Art review: 'Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series' at OCMA

Art review: 'Alighiero Boetti by Afghan Women' at UCLA Fowler Museum

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Kathleen Turner will return to 'High' for a San Francisco engagement

Despite a disappointing run last year on Broadway, Matthew Lombardo's play "High" will return with star Kathleen Turner for a San Francisco engagement March 21-25.

Beleaguered by sluggish ticket sales and middling reviews, ''High'' -- the story of a relationship between a nun and a 19-year-old drug addict -- closed after eight regular performances, causing Perez Hilton, of all people, to fret over Turner's career. 

But he worried too soon. The two-time Oscar and Tony nominee has been selling a certain journalist's fiery humor in "Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins" at the Geffen Playhouse since it opened Jan. 11, even if, as The Times' Charles McNulty pointed out, the script really isn't hot stuff.

Turner, he wrote, "has that same 'Do you really want to reckon with me, cowboy?' bravado that makes this straightforward tribute to Ivins ... diverting despite its pedestrian nature." Entertainment Weekly had higher praise for the show and its star, writing that Turner "fully embodies the late journalist" in a can't-miss performance.

No matter its troubles on Broadway, "High" nabbed Turner a Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance. Perhaps it'll find its heart in San Francisco. Tickets for the SHN Curran Theatre run go on sale on Friday.

ALSO:

Broadway's 'High,' starring Kathleen Turner, will shutter early

Kathleen Turner to portray journalist Molly Ivins at Geffen Playhouse

Theater review: 'Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins' at Geffen Playhouse

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo: Kathleen Turner stars as Molly Ivins in the "Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins" at Geffen Playhouse. Credit: Mark Garvin / Philadelphia Theatre Company production

Vermeer's 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' coming to San Francisco

You may have seen Scarlett Johansson impersonate her onscreen; now you can see her in the flesh, or, should we say, in the oil: Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With A Pearl Earring” will come to the De Young Museum in San Francisco next January, the first stop on a three-venue American tour of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, the Hague.

The Dutch museum is sending 35 paintings on a two-year tour, announced Friday, first to the United States, then to two museums in Japan, while it undergoes renovations. “Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis,” will run Jan. 26-June 2, 2013, at the De Young, then move to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Frick Collection in New York City (where the show will be scaled down to 10 works and presented as “Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis”).

“Girl With a Pearl Earring,” painted around 1665, was last seen in the United States in 1995 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in a 21-picture exhibition focused solely on Vermeer.

Reviewing that “once-in-a-lifetime….or even once-in-many-lifetimes” event, Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote that “sometimes, as in the exquisite 'Girl With a Pearl Earring,’ the sitter in the painting returns your focused gaze. An inexplicable charge rushes through the experience, as when an electrical circuit is suddenly completed.”

Book: The surrealist self-portraits of Francesca Woodman

"Francesca Woodman," edited by Corey Keller, with essays by Jennifer Blessing and Julia Bryan-Wilson

SFMOMA and D.A.P., $49.95

Would photographs by Francesca Woodman, most notably her nude self-portraits that walk the line between powerful and vulnerable -- pack the same punch if you did not know about her suicide in 1981 at the age of 22? That question is hard to avoid when looking at the beautiful new book published by SFMOMA on the occasion of the museum's current Woodman survey -- her most ambitious retrospective to date. But by publishing an unprecedented number of pictures by the artist in roughly chronological order without interceding commentary, this book gives readers at least a fighting chance to see the images in themselves: Surrealist-laced self-portraits that explore sexual identity as much as mortality and together represent a young artist's coming of age.

--Jori Finkel

www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Image: Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–78; gelatin silver print; 5 1/8 x 5 1/16 in. (13 x 12.9 cm); courtesy George and Betty Woodman; © George and Betty Woodman.

ACT to honor Annette Bening, A Noise Within founders

San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre -- one of the top theater schools in the country -- is launching a new annual award in January called the Conservatory Awards, honoring outstanding alumni and donors. ACT said it will recognize actresses Annette Bening and Elizabeth Banks at the Jan. 24 inaugural ceremony. In addition, the school will honor the co-founders of L.A.'s A Noise Within -- Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who are also ACT alumni.

Bening will receive the Edward Hastings Career Achievement Award. The four-time Oscar nominee studied at ACT and acted on the mainstage from 1984 to 1986 as a member of the company's core acting group. Banks, who is receiving the Rising Star Award, has acted in movies including "Seabiscuit," "Invincible" and "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."

A Noise Within was co-founded in 1992 by the Elliotts, who currently serve as artistic directors. The classical repertory company operated in Glendale for many years before recently moving to its new home in Pasadena. The Elliotts will receive ACT's Contributions to the Field Award.

The Elliotts co-founded A Noise Within with Art Manke, who is also an ACT alumnus. (Manke left the L.A. company in 2001.) When asked why Manke isn't being honored, a spokesman for ACT sent the following reply:

Fall arts picks: Theater

 
Big spectacles are awaiting us this fall — “Bring It On: The Musical” at the Ahmanson Theatre, “Jesus Christ Superstar” at La Jolla Playhouse. But I’m looking forward to some smaller-scale works that seek to make up in offbeat charm what they may lack in expensive special effects.

Among these are two musicals that are carving their own quirky paths — “I’ve Never Been So Happy,” a work by the genre-busting Rude Mechs (“The Method Gun”), and “Hey, Morgan!,” the Black Dahlia’s foray into indie musical comedy.

David Henry Hwang’s comedy “Chinglish,” opening on Broadway in October, stands out amid the new dramatic offerings this season. And closer to home there’s John Leguizamo’s “Ghetto Klown” — a solo effort that will no doubt populate the stage as though it were a massive extravaganza.