How people behave in a crisis can usually be broken down into three categories: Those who panic, those who freeze because they feel helpless, and those who quickly take on the reins of managing others by telling the frozen folks where to go and what to do while trying to keep them away from the more hysterical persons in the crowd.
After eight solid years of weathering severe financial, political, and climate crises under the steady leadership of "No Drama Obama," Americans now find themselves struggling to keep the stress and noise in their daily lives down to a dull roar. It ain't easy. At a time when hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and floods can trigger extremes of emotion, instead of running through the streets like Chicken Little and screaming "The sky is falling! The sky is falling," some high-maintenance types prefer to let their anxiety erupt on Twitter, talk radio, and in charged political environments.
As the Trump administration fans the flames of racism, sexism, classism, confusion, and confrontation in its eagerness to pit one American against another, many citizens feel as if they're about to jump out of their skin. Recent coverage of mass shootings have made people so jittery that the mere sound of a motorcycle backfiring caused hundreds of people to flee Times Square in terror.
A provocative piece by Brian X. Chen in The New York Times about the far-reaching power of today's technology entitled "I Shared My Phone Number -- I Learned I Shouldn’t Have" offers plenty of sobering food for thought. Far more alarming are Sarah Jeong's Op-Ed piece entitled "When the Internet Chases You From Your Home" and Brianna Wu's "I Wish I Could Tell You It’s Gotten Better -- It Hasn’t."
Anyone old enough to have lived through 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis remembers what it was like to wonder if the world would suddenly come to an end. Whereas many people once turned to science fiction, bodice rippers, and soap operas for escapist fantasies that could bring vicarious thrills into their daily lives, today's headlines are far more frightening and, in some cases triggering, than the fictional escapades that once brought us much safer doses of pleasure.
One of my tactics for maintaining a sensible level of serenity is to avoid having my television on all day long or watching news reports on cable TV. Part of that approach is calculated to eliminate the constant drumbeat of musical leitmotifs designed to create tension. Besides, it's just as easy, a lot more calming, and a whole lot quieter to read the news online.
As a theatre critic, I much prefer to keep the drama in my life onstage. It's also helpful for me to avoid spending time with those vampiric narcissists and drama queens who insist on being the center of attention (but rarely listen to words that are not coming from their own mouths).
Two recent dramas highlighted the critical difference between real life challenges and the challenge of pumping enough drama into a soap opera to get it renewed. While each story delivers plenty of laughs for the audience, there's no mistaking the fact that most, if not all of the characters are dealing with what we now call "first world problems."
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Just Theater (in association with Custom Made Theatre Company) is currently presenting the Bay area premiere of an exceptionally well-written back yard dramedy by Molly Smith Metzler. Cry It Out shines a spotlight on the trials and tribulations of first-time motherhood, the risks and benefits of postpartum sisterhood, the cruel realities of income inequality, and the confused concerns of the privileged male gaze. Originally commissioned by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cry It Out received its world premiere during the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays. It subsequently won an American Theater Critics Association/Steinberg Citation for Best New American Play.
A great deal of the motivation for writing Cry It Out came from the playwright’s personal experience as a new mother. She is quick to explain that:
“The ‘cry it out’ sleep method is a disputed, controversial method of teaching your baby to sleep through the night by leaving them to scream their lungs out. It’s aggressive and not unlike what new parents go through. It’s terrifying. You can cry out for help all you want, but no one is coming to your side with answers. You have to figure it out on your own. We had a daughter at a time in my life when we did not have money. It was shocking to wake up one day and realize that I did not have the money to send my daughter to the outstanding preschool where I wanted to send her, that I didn’t have the money to get a nanny, that I did not have the money to get a babysitter so I could write a play. Many people do not have the luxury of such choices, which is what makes new parenthood the perfect lens through which to examine socioeconomics.”
“This play is about how unfair the socioeconomics of child care are in this country. The title leads people to expect something soft, with lots of tears and breast milk. But what’s surprising is that the male character is ‘crying it out’ most loudly. I can’t think of another time in life when you get to make new friends as an adult. You’re home with a baby, you need to socialize the baby, and you need company to survive. So for the first time in decades, you’re out at the library or coffee shops trying to make a new friend. It troubles me when Cry It Out is marketed as a chick play because the whole point of the play is that parenthood isn’t a women’s issue."The protagonists of Cry It Out are two postpartum mothers who meet by accident in a local supermarket and discover how desperate they are for some kind of companionship in which no one spits up on them or screams in their ears. After exchanging phone numbers, Lina (Martha Brigham) and Jessie (Lauren English) are surprised to discover that their back yards abut each other in such a way that the only physical limitation on future coffee dates is the range of each woman's electronic baby monitoring device.
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| Martha Brigham (Lina) and Lauren English (Jessie) in a scene from Cry It Out (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
As they get to know each other, it becomes obvious that Lina and Jessie come from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds. Jessie is an attorney at a Manhattan-based law firm who will become eligible for a promotion to partnership after she returns to work. Having married into a wealthy family, her priorities are much more focused on her infant than on an opportunity for her husband to acquire the cottage next to his parents' home in one of the wealthiest communities on Long Island.
Nervous about whether she is doing everything right, hungry for approval, and with a soft heart that can easily be exploited by strangers, she is growing more and more interested in remaining a stay-at-home mom who can shower her infant with attention. It doesn't hurt that her husband's parents have already paid for one of the most expensive preschool programs for their grandchild or that there are lots of important decisions the young couple need to learn how to make together with their child's best interests in mind.
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| Poster art for Cry It Out |
Lina, on the other hand, is about as down to earth as one can get. Having married a young man whose employment history has primarily been in fast food joints and a halfway house, it's important that she return to her entry-level job at a local hospital as soon as possible. Raised in a blue collar family (where getting thrown out of a bar can earn one a badge of honor), Lina has strong trepidations about what will happen when her mother-in-law (who claims to be living sober) stays with them to help care for the baby.
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| Martha Brigham as Lina in Cry It Out (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
Living further up the hill (and looking down on Lina and Jessie's homes) is a wealthy couple with a creepily convenient telescope. Mitchell (Justin Dupuis) has much more economic freedom than Jessie or Lina, yet has derived surprisingly little happiness from the arrival of their child. Having watched their coffee klatches from afar, he approaches the two women to ask if they would be open to letting his wife, Adrienne (Lauren Spencer), join them so she could socialize with some other first-time mothers. While Jessie is quick to acquiesce (and not at all disturbed by Mitchell's request that she text him after Adrienne returns home), Lina's street smarts warn her that this is not a good idea.
Having worked in a hospital, Lina is fully aware that any young mother who has a chauffeur to drive her around, a white nanny to look after her child, and a rich husband who is eager to send trays of appetizers to their neighbors just to get his wife out of the house, is bound to cause problems. A jewelry designer who has just signed a major retail client, when Adrienne arrives in Jessie's back yard she is surprisingly rude, refuses to look up from her iPad, and acts like a total bitch. Filled with rage about any assumptions that she might not know what she's doing (or that she should take a break from her career to take care of the baby), Adrienne has no intention of wasting her time hanging out with other mothers when she could be growing her business.
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| Lauren Spencer as Adrienne in Cry It Out (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
Working on a back yard unit set designed by Randy Wong-Westbrooke (with costumes by Brooke Jennings, sound design by James Ard, and some evocative between-scenes lighting transitions designed by Beth Hersh) Molly Aaronson-Gelb has directed this production with a careful sense of dramatic balance to ensure that, when Adrienne erupts in rage, her behavior offers a shocking contrast to that of her less privileged neighbors. The four-actor ensemble does a stunning job of bringing Molly Smith Metzler's play to life, with top honors going to Martha Brigham for her portrayal of the practical Lina. Lauren English and Justin Dupuis have more sympathetic moments as Jessie and Mitchell while, in her two brief appearances, Lauren Spencer burns up the stage as a rich bitch who can be a total witch.
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| Lauren Spencer (Adrienne) confronts Lauren English (Jessie) in a scene from Cry It Out (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
Performances of Cry It Out continue through September 1 at the Custom Made Theatre (click here for tickets).
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One of the quieter delights during the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival was a gentle farce entitled Tel Aviv on Fire. Directed by Sameh Zoabi (who co-wrote the screenplay with Dan Kleinman) the film revolves around the behind-the-scenes chaos during the shooting of a soap opera (also named Tel Aviv on Fire) which takes place during 1967's Six Day War and is modeled after The Young and the Restless. |
| Poster art for Tel Aviv on Fire |
The protagonist is a lanky, somewhat goofy Palestinian man with little talent who, thanks to the generous nepotism of his uncle Bassam (Nadim Sawalha), has been given a job as a writer/consultant on the project because he speaks Hebrew fluently and can identify certain words, phrases, or inconsistencies which might offend the sensitivities of Israeli viewers.
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| Kais Nashif stars as Salam Abbas in Tel Aviv on Fire |
Basically, Salam Abbas (Kais Nashif) is a Middle Eastern doofus who has the misfortune to cross paths with Captain Assi Tzur (Yaniv Biton), a megalomaniacal Israeli guard stationed at a security checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. The fact that Salam is a writer for "Tel Aviv on Fire" creates an opportunity for the power-hungry and buffoonish Assi to manipulate the young Palestinian since Assi cannot, for the life of him, understand why his wife, Sarah (Ula Tabari), and all the Israeli women he knows watch the popular soap opera with such intense devotion.
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| Kais Nashif (Salam) and Yaniv Biton (Assi) in a scene from Tel Aviv on Fire |
By withholding Salam's passport, the macho (and extremely unsentimental) Israeli guard blackmails the writer into letting him dictate plot twists that he thinks will make him score points with his wife whenever he predicts what will happen in a coming episode. What Assi does not know is that the show's backers do not want to renew the series and have not been able to find a believable ending for the story.
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| Lubna Azabal as the actor Tala (who portrays the spy, Rachel) in a scene from Tel Aviv on Fire |
Further complicating Salam's life is the fact he can't get his former girlfriend, Mariam (Maisa Abd Elhadi), off his mind. Meanwhile, Tala (Lubna Azabal), the middle-aged French actress who portrays a spy named Rachel in the soap opera, is eager to finish off her final scenes so that she can return to Paris. Salam's writing partner, Nabil (Amer Hlehel), doesn't want the soap opera to end because he needs a steady income in order to support his wife and children. Maisa (Laëtitia Eïdo) is a young actress working in the wardrobe department who would be happy to replace Tala as Rachel.
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| Yaniv Biton (Assi) and Kais Nashif (Salam) in a scene from Tel Aviv on Fire |
Others in the cast include Salim Dau as Atef (the director of soap opera), Yousef 'Joe' Sweid as General Yehuda Edelman (Rachel the spy's Jewish romantic interest), Ashraf Farah as Marwan (Rachel's other romantic interest who is supposedly a Palestinian terrorist), and Yazan Doubal as Marwan's friend.
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| Bay area actor Adam Magill (Photo by: Jeff Berlin) |
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