Tinder mercies
In Leah Nanako Winkler’s inventive new play, a first date between strangers takes an unexpected turn
Leah Nanako Winkler’s new play Thirty-Six, currently running at Shotgun Players in Berkeley, centers on a Tinder date between two youngish New Yorkers, which made my reaction to the piece feel entirely apt. I spent the first ten minutes or so squirming in my seat, convinced that I’d made a terrible mistake in coming. I hated the characters and found the dramaturgy weird and off-putting. I wondered whether it would be possible to cut my losses, bolt from my seat and do something else with my evening. That was not, in fact, an option; in Shotgun’s wonderfully intimate little theater, I was about 15 feet away from the actors, who I was certain would break character and do me physical harm if I disrespected their efforts so blatantly. “Fine,” I thought to myself, “I’ll stick it out, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to enjoy myself.”
How wrong I was. The seductive intelligence of Winkler’s 90-minute chamber work, staged with high-tech crispness by director Michelle Talgarow, sneaks up on you. Before you know it, Jenny (Lauren Andrei Garcia) and David (Soren Santos) are opening their hearts to one another and to you — a bit at a time, then more fully. And you’re hooked. They parry, they argue, they have sex, they argue some more. They offer glimpses of their respective life histories and value systems. They may not find love, exactly, but they eventually find something, and the audience feels invested in every step. (The date, incidentally, begins with some extremely graphic sex and only later gets around to talking and intimacy. To this conventional-minded boomer, the effect is like a daring formal inversion along the lines of Harold Pinter’s reverse-chronological masterpiece Betrayal; but for all I know it may amount to theatrical photorealism.)
The play’s title refers to what is evidently a well-known article from the New York Times’ Modern Love column, which offers a checklist of 36 questions designed to spur love between two strangers by helping them probe one another’s vulnerabilities. David, hoping for a personal connection, arrives with a plan to work through this list together. Jenny, who wants nothing more than a quick screw, isn’t interested. Still, they make their way through the list, simultaneously contemptuous of its vacuities (“What is your most treasured memory?” “What does friendship mean to you?”) and open to its vague possibilities. One of Winkler’s many pieces of deft sleight-of-hand is the way she allows for both of these possibilities at once. The list is bullshit, but it’s also real — or at least Winkler makes you believe it could be. The magnificent transparency of Garcia and Santos’ work, as rigorously detailed as a close-up magic act, shows you every nuance of this double consciousness.
And even if there are no Pinteresque shenanigans with time, Thirty-Six does boast a wondrous high-concept wrinkle. On designer Randy Wong-Westbrooke’s antiseptic set, lit like an airline terminal by Spense Matubang, David and Jenny spend the entire evening at a physical remove from one another — a physical manifestation of their emotional distance. When they pass drinks or David’s iPhone back and forth, the handoff is mimed across an expanse of space. When they copulate, they do it with elaborately synchronized movements at opposite sides of the stage. Actor nic feliciano, in a role designated “Stage Directions,” provides voice-over narration to help the audience make sense of interactions (both physical and emotional) that we can only see in its bare components. It’s like an Ikea play; all the pieces are there, but Winkler and Talgarow make the audience do a lot of the assembly work. And as irritating as the conceit can be at first, it winds up carrying deep metaphorical weight. Like an extra character, the distance between David and Jenny takes up space on the stage. But when these two strangers do finally connect — my god, you really feel it.
Thirty-Six: Shotgun Players, extended through Dec. 29. www.shotgunplayers.org.
Elsewhere:
Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle: “Winkler’s writing has its cake and eats it, too — sending up rom-com tropes and indulging in them at the same time. The passion of initial dislike becomes the passion of desire.”
Nicole Gluckstern, KQED: “By design, the play often feels like an exercise in eavesdropping, even surveillance, following the two leads around New York City.”
Semper pie
When Jenna, the title character in Sara Bareilles’ 2015 musical Waitress, starts inventing a new pie, there’s a kind of pixie-dust aura that forms around her. The melodic and verbal leitmotif that runs through the show to signify the fundamental emotional power of pie crust (“Sugar…butter…flour”) wells up, and a row of singer-dancers waft past her from behind, each one murmuring the name of an ingredient and depositing it over her shoulder into the waiting pan. As staged by director Susi Damilano and choreographer Nicole Helfer in the production that opened at San Francisco Playhouse last Wednesday night — just in time for Thanksgiving — this recurrent sequence creates a wonderfully dreamlike atmosphere.
It's also a nicely judged counterpart to the parallel scenes in the winsome 2007 film on which the musical is based. In the original version, written and directed by Adrienne Shelley, each pie-making moment was shot from overhead, with a change of lighting and a sudden switch to stop-motion photography as Jenna (Keri Russell in the movie) let her imagination run rampant, using baking to fend off the world’s challenges — an abusive husband, a dead-end job, an unwanted pregnancy. In both versions, Waitress asks us to invest a lot of emotional energy and faith in the redemptive power of pastry.
We do it, too. Bareilles’ songs are fresh and tuneful, adding a patina of breezy charm to the source material. There are country ballads and swing numbers in close-knit Andrews Sisters three-part harmony, brassy blues and tender pop lullabies. Jenna gets a big 11 o’clock number (“She Used to Be Mine”) to look back on the ups and downs of her life, and Ruby Day, in a performance that deftly blends quiet assurance with bursts of extroversion, grabs hold of the opportunity and makes the most of it. Jessie Nelson’s book stays faithful to the original storyline while adding a few comic wrinkles, as well as the Black characters that Shelley somehow forgot to include.
But if Waitress is never less than entertaining, it’s also a somewhat slender amusement. If I had sat down the next morning to write up my reactions, as I’d hoped to (as I always hope to), I suspect I would have had something more concrete to offer. After a few days, though, it’s all begun to fade into a lovely but evanescent memory, like the aroma of a pie I don’t recall eating.
Waitress: San Francisco Playhouse, through Jan. 18. www.sfplayhouse.org.
Elsewhere:
Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle: “For all of Susi Damilano’s compassionate, imaginative direction — which makes a kaleidoscopic ballet out of pies and appendages or sends two actors aloft during a fantasy sequence — this production suffers from a near-fatal flaw. ”
Gabe Meline, KQED: “[Waitress] is a story about love, and family, and muddling through somehow, with a wholesome and sweet payoff — a salve for the cold winter months.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #244 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Helpful tip: After decapitation, cry of pain is connected (2,5)
Last week’s clue:
African nation is angry at a non-EV? (10)
Solution: MADAGASCAR
African nation: definition
angry: MAD
a non-EV: A GAS CAR
Coming up
• Santa Rosa Symphony: Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” is strictly speaking an orchestral work, but the vocal aspect is just as important. Mahler calls for a chorus and two female vocal soloists, and among the main attractions of the upcoming performances by music director Francesco Lecce-Chong and the Santa Rosa Symphony is the chance to hear soprano Esther Tonea — one of the most extravagantly gifted young singers to come through the San Francisco Opera’s training program in a long time — along with mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag and the Santa Rosa Symphony Chorus led by Jenny Bent. Warum hast du gelitten?, a world premiere by American composer Jonathan Leshnoff for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, shares the program. Dec. 7-9, Weill Hall, Green Music Center, Rohnert Park. www.srsymphony.org.
• Isidore String Quartet: This young American ensemble has garnered new attention since winning the Avery Fisher Career Grant last year. I haven’t heard the group in action yet, but I’m drawn by the program for their upcoming recital for Stanford Live, a collection of 20th-century masterpieces that includes Henri Dutilleux’s great Ainsi la nuit and the Five Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff. Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2 and the Ravel String Quartet, meanwhile, fill the standard-repertoire slots. Dec. 8, Bing Concert Hall, Stanford. live.stanford.edu.
And — many thanks for plugging my beloved Santa Rosa Symphony! #SRSymphony
This episode of Pacific Aisle filled me with joy at the verve and precision of your writing—and also made me feel like a total slacker for failing to produce much critical prose lately. Inspired!