Nobody's Perfect

Mother Nature purportedly abhors a vacuum. And yet, the process of maturation and development seen in so many species requires a great deal of patience coupled with an understanding that not every plant or animal achieves perfection. Whether from genetic mutations or exposure to harsh environmental factors, variations are bound to occur.

In her charming travel article for BBC News entitled Japan's Unusual Way To View The World. Lily Crossley-Baxter explores the concept of "wabi-sabi."

"A Japanese colleague told me how, when visiting Kyoto as a teenager, she had hurried through the grounds of Ginkaku-ji (a wooden Zen temple with quiet gardens) eager to see the more famous Kinkaku-ji, an ornate temple covered in gold leaf and perched above a reflective pond. Bright, stunning and glamorous, it lived up to her expectations, a far more impressive beauty than its traditional sister temple. A few decades later, however, she returned to find the gold garish and, while it was certainly eye-catching, there was little beyond the immediate gratification of the gold leaf. Ginkaku-ji, however, offered a new fascination: the aged wood held countless hues and patterns, while the Zen moss and dry sand gardens offered a frame for nature’s many shapes. Unable to appreciate these things as a child, she had grown to see the ravages of time as a deeper source of beauty, far greater than a two-dimensional flash of gold."

The Kinkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan

The Ginkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan

"The term ‘perfect’ (which stems from the Latin perfectus, meaning complete) has been placed on an undeserved pedestal in many cultures, especially the West. Prioritizing flawlessness and infallibility, the ideal of perfection creates not only unachievable standards, but misguided ones. In Taoism, since no further growth or development can take place, perfection is considered equivalent to death. While we strive to create perfect things and then struggle to preserve them, we deny their very purpose and subsequently lose the joys of change and growth. Although seemingly abstract, this appreciation of transient beauty can be found at the heart of some of Japan’s most simple pleasures. The pure acceptance of a fleeting beauty that would garner no more than a few photos in the West is something of an inspiration. While the appreciation may be tinged with melancholy, its only lesson is to enjoy the moments as they come, without expectations."

Whether coping with Type 1 diabetes or learning how to overcome a speech disorder like stuttering, living with nature's imperfections is something that requires careful adjustments and a disciplined approach to certain parts of one's daily routine. For years, playwrights have found hidden gold in stories about people whose success in overcoming personal challenges has inspired others.

• William Gibson's Tony Award-winning 1959 drama, The Miracle Worker, depicts Annie Sullivan's struggle to teach the young, deaf, and blind Helen Keller how to read Braille and communicate through sign language.
• Frederick Knott's 1966 thriller, Wait Until Dark, features a blind housewife who is terrorized by three con men searching for a doll filled with heroin. Her only means of defending herself is to turn off the lights in her apartment in order to gain an advantage over her assailants.
• Bernard Pomerance's 1977 drama, The Elephant Man, was based on the story of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), a British man who suffered from a horribly deformed body.

• Mark Medoff's 1979 drama, Children of a Lesser God, which focused on the relationship between a deaf student and her hearing-abled professor, won the 1980 Tony Award for Best Play.
• Founded in 1989, DeafWest Theatre Company received national recognition for its revivals of Big River and Spring Awakening (both of which incorporated sign language into the production).
• In 1984, when Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's beloved musical entitled Sunday in the Park With George opened on Broadway, few critics drew a link between Georges Seurat's use of pointillism as an artistic technique and the possibility that the French artist might have been somewhere on the autistic spectrum.

• Based on a mystery novel by Mark Haddon, a 2012 play by Simon Stephens entitled The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time revolved around 15-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, an autistic teenager who is trying to figure out what caused the death of his neighbor's dog. Directed by Marianne Elliott for the National Theatre of Great Britain (as well as the production's subsequent Broadway transfer and national tour), Bunny Christie's scenic design and Paule Constable's lighting design became critical elements of the storytelling process that allowed audiences to understand what was going on inside Christopher's mind.
• Since the 2007 debut of The Big Bang Theory, audiences have come to recognize the character of Dr. Sheldon Cooper as not just a child prodigy, but someone whose behavior might make him seem like a high-functioning person on the autism spectrum.

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Up in Walnut Creek, Center Rep is presenting the West Coast premiere of Mark St. Germain's poignant two-hander entitled Dancing Lessons (which received its world premiere in 2014 from the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts). Upon first meeting his characters, the audience is immediately made aware that each has been carrying around a shitload of emotional baggage for quite some time.

As the play begins, Senga Quinn is licking her wounds in a pity party for one. A Broadway dancer who has suffered a career-threatening injury to her right leg, her allergy to a particular surgical anesthetic may make it impossible for an orthopedic surgeon to operate on her knee. The result is a steady regimen of self medication in which pain pills are swallowed with a swig of booze. With her movement hampered by a leg brace, she is not a happy camper. The constant arrival of voice mail messages from the aunt who raised her (Senga's mother died during childbirth) does nothing to alleviate her misery. Her aunt's desire to come stay with Senga in her tiny, cluttered Manhattan apartment only makes matters worse.

Sharon Rietkerk as Senga in a scene from
Dancing Lessons (Photo by: www.mellophoto.com)

Living two floors above Senga is an attractive professor of geosciences who works very hard to overcome the hurdles presented by his autism. With a keen mind and an insatiable thirst for data, Ever Montgomery prefers to refer to himself as an "Aspie" even though the medical field seems to be trying to distance itself from the use of Asperger syndrome as a clinical diagnosis. Ever needs help with a very specific personal problem and has learned from the building's janitor that Senga might be the one person to save him from an evening of excruciating embarrassment.

Sharon Rietkerk and Craig Marker in a scene from
Dancing Lessons (Photo by: www.mellophoto.com)

Ever's crisis has been precipitated by the fact that he is about to be honored at a professional awards dinner and must be able to dance at the event. As someone who prefers not to have anyone look directly at him (and who suffers from an almost crippling fear of human touch), Ever is acutely aware of the challenges created by his Asperger's. Much like Sheldon Cooper, he doesn't understand humor (especially sarcasm), but knows how to do meticulous research. By calculating what a Broadway dancer's weekly earnings at union scale should be, he has decided on a wildly exorbitant figure (more than $2,000) which he is offering to pay Senga for one hour of instruction in how to dance.

Sharon Rietkerk and Craig Marker in a scene from
Dancing Lessons (Photo by: www.mellophoto.com)

The set-up is perfect for a romantic comedy which, for a constellation of factors, will not be resolved with the man and woman falling head over heels in love and living happily ever after. However, for two seriously flawed individuals struggling to maintain their fragile sense of dignity, St. Germain's "meet, but not cute" first encounter progresses through a script of surprising depth as Senga and Ever learn how to let their defenses down long enough to find ways they can help each other.

Working on a unit set designed and lit by Kent Dorsey (with costumes by Brooke Jennings), Center Rep's production has been directed by Joy Carlin in a manner that demonstrates compassion coupled with coaching and desperation buffered by grace.

Sharon Rietkerk and Craig Marker in a scene from
Dancing Lessons (Photo by: www.mellophoto.com)

Sharon Rietkerk (seen frequently on Bay area stages in a variety of musical roles) brings a world-weary sense of defeat to Senga, whose sole reason to exist (dancing) may have suddenly been taken away from her. Senga's interactions with Ever are made more poignant by the fact that she is confronted with someone who may be battling much tougher life hurdles but is willing to fight for every piece of information that can help him to succeed.

The role of Ever Montgomery offers a keen challenge to an actor who must not only demonstrate a lack of understanding of many things most people take for granted, but incorporate into his characterization the nervous body language of someone with Asperger's. Not only must his character be carefully and continually observing Senga, his learning process is nowhere as intuitive as a dancer's. As a result, his clumsiness is more social than physical.

Craig Marker and Sharon Rietkerk in a scene from
Dancing Lessons (Photo by: www.mellophoto.com)

St. Germain gives the audience a taste of fairy-tale romance during a final interlude in which the two wounded souls are seen dancing as they might imagine they could. It is a beautiful touch of magical realism with which to end the play before St. Germain gently brings his audience back down to earth. While both actors shine in their roles, Craig Marker gives one of his most impressive performances in years.

Craig Marker and Sharon Rietkerk in a scene from
Dancing Lessons (Photo by: www.mellophoto.com)

Performances of Dancing Lessons continue through November 17 at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek (click here for tickets).

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For the first time in 20 years, the San Francisco Opera is staging Richard Strauss's opera, Arabella (which received its world premiere from the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden on July 1, 1933). This is a work I've only seen performed twice before: in 1980 at the San Francisco Opera with Kiri Te Kanawa in the title role and in 1983, in a more provocative production starring Ellen Shade at the Santa Fe Opera which one friend considered "borderline pornographic." In my review of that production (designed by John Conklin and directed by Mark Lamos), I noted that:

"Updating the opera from its original setting during the 'allegedly gay Vienna of 1860' to the pre-Anschluss Vienna of the late 1930s, Lamos forced audiences to focus their attention on the characters and how they interact with each other. Rather than a sweet operatic ingénue, Arabella looked like an aging spinster who would be stuck working in Macy's for the rest of her life. The Fiakermilli was changed to a Sally Bowles-type cabaret singer whose vulgarity at first shocked, then conquered the butch Mandryka. The most startling metamorphosis involved the characterization of Matteo, who was portrayed here as an incipient stormtrooper whose Act III transformation was utterly believable. One not only understood the character's pathetic gullibility, but pitied Matteo for his total lack of sophistication. One was also forced to confront and understand Zdenka's latent S&M tendencies."

San Francisco Opera's new co-production of Arabella debuted at the Santa Fe Opera in 2012 and was subsequently staged at the Minnesota Opera in 2013 and the Canadian Opera Company in 2017 before arriving at the War Memorial Opera House. Unlike the production I saw in 1983, the setting has been advanced 50 years (from 1860 to 1910), which director Tim Albery describes as "a time of hedonistic triviality blind to the looming cataclysm of the war which would destroy all the certainties of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Ellie Dehn stars in Arabella (Photo by: Cory Weaver)

The production's designer, Tobias Hoheisel, has stressed a greyish look for the scenery which can be used to suggest a worn-down Viennese hotel or the fading glory of a golden era (the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912 was a mere hint of what was to happen during World War I. As Albery writes in his program note:

“Does the craving for money and status distort what is real and authentic in human relationships? Is there a harmony in the natural world that we have lost as we hurtle ever faster into the future? Two young sisters face having their emotional futures sacrificed to their parents' financial desperation. Arabella must choose a husband from one of three aristocratic suitors before the evening's ball. Her younger sister, Zdenka, has to live her life disguised as a boy because her parents lack the money to clothe her and bring her out into society. Arabella encapsulates within herself the dilemma of the longing for financial security, not only for herself but her whole family, pitted against the desire for romantic freedom. She loves fun, beautiful things, the adoration of men -- everything that money and society can offer. But she also feels an emptiness, knowing instinctively that life and love can and should be something more.”

Brian Mulligan as Mandryka in Arabella
(Photo by: Cory Weaver)

“Then Mandryka arrives from the country: unsophisticated, totally unconcerned with fashion or the opinion of others, fully content ruling benevolently over his country estates as a kind of Austrian Tolstoy, rooted in his beloved countryside. Arabella immediately recognizes that, unlike anyone she has ever met, he is utterly his own person; that together, away from the world, they will be complete ‘for all time and eternity.’ Of course, Arabella is a romance, so Mandryka conveniently has inherited the enormous wealth necessary to support the rural idyll that Arabella chooses. But beneath the entrancing lyrical outpourings of Strauss' music and the charming improbabilities of the plot lies the endlessly fascinating question: What is the good life?”

Not having seen a live performance of Arabella in 35 years, I had forgotten how one key change in stage technology could make this very "talky" opera feel like a tender, new experience. There's no doubt that the pyrotechnics of Fiakermillli's music in the Act II ballroom scene will impress any audience (especially in the hands of an extremely capable coloratura soprano such as Hye Jung Lee). But in today's crass and fast-moving world, the subtler (and often more poignant) charms of Viennese life more than 100 years ago come to life with a special layer of warmth thanks to the use of Supertitles which, lest we forget, had not yet completely transformed the operatic experience in 1983.

Hye Jung Lee enlivens Act II of Arabella as The Fiakermilli
(Photo by: Cory Weaver)

For me, the result was a much more intimate awareness of the societal challenges facing Arabella's parents -- Count Waldner (Richard Paul Fink) and his wife, Adelaide (Michaela Martens) -- who have fallen on hard times and can no longer pay their bills. The plight of Arabella's younger sister, Zdenka (beautifully performed by Heidi Stober) added a layer of tenderness to Arabella's concern about her family's ability to save face in a critical moment.


Tagging along during Act II's ballroom scene (while learning to cope with Arabella's rejection of their marriage proposals) were Scott Quinn as Count Elemer, Christian Pursell as Count Lamoral, and Andrew Manea as Count Dominik. Jill Grove made a brief appearance as a fortune teller while, as Zdenka's secret love (Matteo), Daniel Johansson delivered an impassioned performance as the confused and clueless young soldier who had once wooed Arabella and misguidedly thought that she still wanted to marry him.

Daniel Johansson as Matteo in Arabella
(Photo by: Cory Weaver)

Soprano Ellie Dehn gave a performance of incredible warmth and sensitivity in the title role while her husband-to-be, Mandryka (Brian Mulligan) brought a touch of old-fashioned romanticism and confused jealousy that resolved into a kindness and generosity of spirit sorely lacking from today's portrayals of love and (if it still exists) courtship.

As in many of his other operas, Strauss saved some of his most exquisite music for the final 20 minutes of Arabella. With conductor Marc Albrecht on the podium and director Tim Albery giving a master class in how to slowly and silently let a soprano descend a curved staircase while milking the score for all its glory, this production of Arabella ended with a soft and quiet love destined to last rather than a brief infatuation that will sparkle and then quickly fade.

Ellie Dehn stars in Arabella (Photo by: Cory Weaver)