Theater Review: Bigger Than Jesus

Rick Miller
“Bigger Than Jesus”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley
Jun 20-24, 2006
Nobody has more issues than a lapsed Catholic. “All of the guilt, with none of the calories,” is what one of my friends used to say.

And lapsed Catholics lurk everywhere. I myself wanted to be a nun when I was nine years old. Maybe it was the ritual, the easily memorized litanies and the clear-cut rules that appeal to those at that first level of Piaget’s stage of moral development. No doubt my lapsed Catholic father was very much relieved when I stopped serving pretend Masses with Necco Wafers and talking about taking the veil.

Rick Miller’s one man show “Bigger than Jesus” -- which plays this weekend at Zellerbach Playhouse as part of Cal Performances’ season –reminded me of the view of religion that comes through childlike – which is not to say childish – eyes. I want to say it’s a naïve view, but not naïve in an ignorant sense, but rather in an innocent one.

Miller, a one man tour-de-force, gathered kudos for his “MacHomer” a Simpson’s-inspired telling of Macbeth, which Berkeley Rep presented earlier in the year. In Bigger Than Jesus” though, he delves into the story of the Messiah and the underpinnings of Christianity.

Loosely framed on a Catholic mass, Miller’s 75-minute play ranges across space and time, with Miller playing Jesus as, variously, a drawling professor-cum-Borscht Belt comedian, a proselytizing minister, and a hyperactive flight attendant. It’s a versatile performance that Miller reels off with deceptive ease, but like a child’s game of playing Mass, at the end it left me unmoved and oddly uninterested in asking any of the bigger questions like, Who is this God anyway?

Early on, we find ourselves at the start of Mass. Those with any kind of Catholic background found ourselves murmuring “Thanks be to God,” at appropriate moments, without even thinking about it. Someone speaking with priestly intonation in a darkened room and then pausing for our response – it just seemed natural.

The production itself, designed by Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates and directed by co-writer Daniel Brooks, is superb. A video screen in the back and a smooth white floor that doubles as a white board make a simple set, but Chaisson and Kates meld video and sound together to make the kind of seamless experience that is incredibly difficult to achieve. Live video cameras that feed real-time images merge with pre-recorded tape and live action with a skillfulness that eludes a lot of theater productions these days.

It’s a clever production, and Miller makes a genial host – never too pushy with ideas, always inclusive.

Often lurking under the rational skin of a lapsed Catholic is an undercurrent of rage, or at least indignation. But there’s no rancor to Miller’s performance and his journey plays more like a didactic lecture, rather than any kind of commentary. I wished he had a little more bite. His notes on the portrayal of the historical Jesus, the development of the Christian faith and its place in the world today aren’t new, by any means, and it felt as though he were perhaps a little afraid to utilize the fullness of sarcasm that I sensed lurking behind the words.

Still, Miller attacks the stage performance with phenomenal vigor and he can be raucously funny at times. At one point he prowls the house, planting a kiss on the mouth of a surprised man in the front row of the audience. He turns the camera on us and exhorts us to wave our arms ridiculously in the air as if we were at a revival meeting.

“Quick, get your arms up before he comes over here!” my husband hisses at me. “You saw him, he’s crazy!”

And a re-enactment of the Last Supper using a five-inch plastic Jesus action figure (I believe I’ve seen the package and it says that he has “poseable arms and wheels in his base for smooth gliding action”) bopping along to a send-up of “Gethsemane” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” is utterly hilarious.

But Miller can also be touchingly honest and open about his own confusion. Perhaps his best moments are the revealing ones, where we find out little snippets of what he himself believes. But so much of the show is him not being Rick Miller that I began to wonder if he were afraid to directly address his own religious confusion.

In the end, the bigger questions were still there, waiting to be asked.

This review originally appeared on KQED.org.

KQED Profile: Basil Twist

“Puppetry is much deeper than people give it credit because it’s about life and death and what is the frontier there.”

-- Basil Twist

A San Francisco native, Basil Twist first became interested in puppetry through his mother, who was president of the San Francisco Puppeteers Guild. After stints working with designer and Broadway director Julie Taymor and the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in New York's Central Park, Twist became the first American to study at France's École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette.

He lives in New York's Greenwich Village, where he dreams up his shows and constructs puppets in a basement workshop. Spark caught up with Twist in San Francisco, where he was collaborating with dancer Joe Goode and playwright Paula Vogel to stage "The Long Christmas Ride Home" at the Magic Theatre.

Twist first made a splash in 1995 with "The Araneidae Show." Since then, he has won a Bessie Award for the show and been nominated for a Drama Desk Award for "Tell Tale." Though well versed in traditional forms, Twist often creates his own blended styles, pushing boundaries to adapt them to new theatrical expectations.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Dance Review: Joe Goode's "Stay Together"

Joe Goode Performance Group
“Stay Together” and “Deeply There”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
through June 11, 2006

Given the polished intellect and sheer professionalism that the Joe Goode Performance Group gives to maverick theater, it’s a little bit surprising that the company has never before paired up with that other maverick leader in town, Michael Tilson Thomas. But if the success of Friday’s premiere of their first collaboration “Stay Together” is anything to go by, this won’t be their last joint effort.

At twenty years old, the company is something of a San Francisco institution and the articulate Goode himself is well-deserving of his reputation as one of the most intriguing and offbeat theater masters around. And given how strong and carefully assembled his shows always are, it’s not a heavy criticism to say that the music has always been the weakest element. But the singsong tunes often seem to imply that this is a group of dancers not wholly comfortable with singing onstage, and the musical interludes scores were more often than not stitched together from a variety of sources.

Inspired by one of Tilson Thomas’s offbeat songs, and with an original score by the maestro, however, “Stay Together” knits concept with musical execution in a satisfying way, and at last, we feel that the wit of the music matches that of the theatrics.

And theatrical it is, blending video with stage and recorded with live, in a seamless and yet quirky and thoughtful way.

Suspended over the stage are two large screens, mirrored by a pair of small television screens to one side that display rotated versions of the same images. Strong dark lines run across a wash of red in the back of the space -- almost like a screwy horizontal hold on a TV screen broadcasting a Mark Rothko painting. And below in the darkened space, the dancers seem almost dwarfed by their surroundings.

In “Stay Together,” Goode plays Bob, a visual artist whose relationships loosely tie together the characters – notably his lover Bertie (Melecio Estrella), a manager played by Liz Burritt. It’s never quite clear what kind of artist Bob is. Perhaps an avant-garde video artist like Bill Viola, or a Mark Rothko sort of painter -- though the occasional voiceover intoning instructions to the dancers as they appear on the screens seems to indicate the former.

It’s a fractured view of existence, reflected in the fractured video effects and the zany episodes scattered throughout the work.

Goode’s ever-talented mainstay, Burritt creates yet another disarmingly neurotic character as she mugs in front of an onstage camera with her face projected in IMAX proportions behind her. Lines that could read as banal, are instead in her hands droll and amusing.

“I tell myself, ‘Stay together, listen deeply and something good will happen,’” she drawls, “I don’t know how that’s going to work out…” Meanwhile, four dancers move beside her slowly, like architectural exclamation points to her monologue.

As always, Goode’s monologues are wordy, and the work as a whole comes in many layers, like a neatly packed portmanteau. But the pleasure of it ultimately is in our mental unravelling of the imagery. Occasionally, the words pass us by, barely registering as we focus on disembodied heads running through a gamut of expressions as they floating over the space. Curiously, this has the effect of magnifying small moments and snippets of the monologue, without ever bringing them clearly into focus. Then just as you begin to get a grip on the deeper meaning of what a character might be saying, the faces melt away into storm clouds drifting lazily across the screens leaving behind a ghostly echo, a mix of taped and live effects that happens seamlessly.

The second half of the program is given to “Deeply There,” a work created in 1998 and trimmed here from evening length to fifty minutes. It is probably Goode’s best known work and to many, his best work.

The setting takes us back to the height of the AIDS epidemic, which coincidentally began twenty-five years ago. But anyone who’s ever kept vigil at a dying person’s bedside will instantly recognize the scene. Relatives and friends tiptoeing quietly about a house and warning newcomers not to be shocked by the fragility of the person in the bed.

There is truthfulness in the duet for Goode and the young Joshua Rauchwerger, who show that in essence, Goode’s choreography and drama is really about getting back to what some might call child’s play and others might call simple honesty. The silly comic moments -- a Jackie O dance led by Ruben Graciani, the rising hysteria of Burritt’s musings on the gay lifestyle – are interposed with tender poignant ones, such as the affecting Marit Brook-Kothlow’s turn as the family dog who considers what it means to be left alone.

Compared to the elegantly assembled “Stay Together,” “Deeply There” can seem wordy, even fussy. The video effects are less experienced and the transitions are less graceful, but there is a core of rage and raw feeling that suffuses this particular piece, and leave a deep impression of the bittersweet experience of saying farewell.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.