ride telling

One advantage of my little blue hatchback car is that there's enough room to fit my bicycle in the back. Since I'm not a long-distance bicyclist, this means I can take the machine out to places where I want to make shorter distance rides.

Thursday being an equitable spring day, with the grass green and the wildflowers in bloom, and also not the height of tourist season in those parts, I undertook such an expedition, and rode my bicycle to Sinshan.

And if you don't know where that is, then never mind.

theatre review: is he dead?

While I was going out anyway, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued to prompt me to add a side trip to attend a production of what was billed as a new play by Mark Twain. Yes, despite his renown, my favorite 19th century American writer is still producing new work, in the sense that a lot of his writings have still not been published, even in scholarly editions.

This one has, but only recently, and its first stage production was only a couple years ago. As a dramatist, Twain's reputation is not good, but the scholar who riffled through his play manuscripts thought this one genuinely funny and well-plotted.

It's called Is He Dead?, and the title appears in the play as a question asked by an art collector who decides against purchasing the painting he's considering when he learns the artist is still alive. It just isn't worth so much; it doesn't have that cachet. (As a character, the artist is actually Twain's own creation, but he appropriates the name and work of Jean-François Millet, to establish that this really is a great painter.)

So the artist, tired of starving in his garret, decides to stage his death to increase his marketability. For reasons not made entirely clear, he then hides himself by disguising himself as a woman, his own (imaginary) sister.

At this point, the reviewer inevitably mentions Charley's Aunt, which - I didn't realize this until I looked it up - actually predates Is He Dead? And after seeing it myself, I can go further than other reviewers have and say that, aside from the plot set-up (which is a bit sluggish, and Twain doesn't do anything with the question of why dead artists' works are considered more valuable), this play is an outright ripoff of its predecessor. The artist, a rather sober, even gloomy fellow in his own persona, becomes a whooping comic figure as a woman, various unlikely men fall in love with "her", and this complicates everyone else's romantic relationships. Comic homophobia is, of course, assumed.

Nevertheless, it's a pretty good ripoff, at least once it gets going. The second act, full of those "quick, hide this character offstage to prevent an awkward encounter" twists beloved of farce, is a pretty good one. The funniest moment is the trick used to prevent anybody from looking too closely in the coffin, which plays nicely off a casual set-up line in the previous act. (Donald Westlake once used exactly the same trick for exactly the same purpose, but I'm sure he invented it independently.)

Cinnabar Theatre, a semi-pro community theatre in Petaluma with the least believable parking lot I've ever seen at a theatrical venue, did a fairly good job with it. The actors had enough character that you could tell everybody apart in the crowds of Millet's acquaintances that frequently filled the stage. When the villain - this would be the part for milwaukeesfs if his company ever does it - makes one of his entrances and the audience, taking up an encouragement from the pre-show announcement, booed him, the actor shot an evil grimace back at us before continuing. The actors tried really hard and poured themselves into the show; the only problem is that you could see them doing it, which might partly have been the result of performing in a style suited for a somewhat bigger space than we were in. But lively farce and deliberately over-written characters encourages this.

Worth the side trip, and I'm glad I've seen it. But the little man in the seat is just alert, not applauding.