Home Alone with Take-Out Theater

“Portrait of a Man in Evening Dress”

by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (c. 1885 )

Home Alone with

Take-Out Theater

by Jamie Jobb

Not unlike maître d's and chefs, theater people locked down at home by pandemic virus have been exploring unique plots to ply their craft in a world where Nobody’s In The House. So, as menus and playbills gather dust, restaurants are relying on Grubhub or DoorDash while performers are choosing platforms like Zoom or YouTube to convey their programs to folks ordering take-out theater at home.

It’s as if the internet has turned show business inside out: where The Audience now seems to be the focus and everybody just wants a role as casual content-providing performer “interviewed” at-home. More of a tour than an actual “show” – with lights, action, special values of live production. Stuck in its own seat, the homebound audient just wants to chat with itself?

What’s up with that?

A few critics have begun to imply the Zoom performance model lacks legs, as we say. Here’s Cleo Levin explaining that feeling in Slate:

“The truth is, no matter how much technology gets involved, I can’t pretend that I’m at a night club when I’m in the same sweatpants I’ve been wearing for two weeks (and I am too stubborn to get dressed up when I will, technically, be alone). I cannot shake the feeling of loneliness with flat images of my friends on a screen. I’ve realized how much someone’s physical presence matters—how important it is to actually have the bulk of another person beside you, the little noises they make, their micro-expressions, the ability to follow their gaze and see what they’re looking at.”

Exactly – to feel like we’re part of an actual “live” audience in “real time”, not pixel prisoners of broadband short attention spans!

Then there are the artistic directors and performers themselves, many of whom seem to believe they’re appearing on Facebook instead of on stage. They chat rather than perform! Like “talking heads” – and we don’t mean David Byrne’s great band.

Also, very few on-line players seem to have full awareness of where their “camera” is … particularly on a cellphone or a pad where more than one “lens” stares back at The Talent. This is a fatal mistake. It squelches any intimacy when a performer seems to be looking askance, or beyond us. We wonder: “Are they lost?”

Video veterans know the camera is no casual observer. It sees your eyes most of all. Any savvy on-line performer MUST account for that essential narrative “eye-line match” in performance. Otherwise the actor appears a little “nuts”, or at least clueless as toWHERE the audience actually sits, which could be literally ANYWHERE.

Plus, can’t anybody think about home studio lighting? Even stuck-at-home professional cable-news talking heads don’t know how to light themselves in front of their bookcases and framed artworks. It’s as if COVID-19 is attacking the central nervous system of performance itself!

I recently suffered through several local live-stream theater “events”, some of them involving performers and companies I’d seen many times on stage in San Francisco and Berkeley. None of these nascent “shows” on line seem even remotely dramatic.

One of them was a big disappointment, by a solo performer I know who’s incredible live – he can recreate the feeling of a neighborhood parade complete with marching band and crowded street, all by himself. I’ve seen him feed off his audience free-range in The House; but home-alone in his living room, this performer falls flat in live-stream.

We can tell his performance “chops” are not there, obviously. He’s NOT looking at us – he seems totally unaware of his “camera”. This casual “hang-out” show ain’t actually performance.

An even worse example of muddled laptop tv is an enfeebled effort at Virtual Audience Humor called “Bill Maher's Home Box Office". This sheltered-in-place-show tanks at the very top because it's so obviously faked-as-fake, that it's not funny.  Maher’s disingenuous post-ironic eye-line view of an obviously absent and historically disconnected "audience" destroys any semblance of humor he can muster as a live-streamer. We see right through his fluffery.

But these incipient prototypes will improve once home-bound theatre folk begin to think like filmmakers. Below are two excellent recent examples of how digital video may be used to heightened theatrical effect on line – well beyond what anyone could see if seated in The House. The first is a solo performance by an acting author who relied on a couple of friends to accomplish his modest live-stream debut. The second is a Shakespearean extravaganza which clearly demonstrates The Royal National Theatre’s decade-long commitment to broadcasting live works from London to audiences seated elsewhere around the globe.

* * *

Paul Sussman shows he understands “eye-line match” in live-stream show

1.

Paul Sussman’s

“Listen Up, Jimmy Carter!”

(23 minutes)

Performing playwright Paul Sussman likes to say he honed his quills for farce and melodrama during a long career in non-profit financial management. That’s not as oxymoronic a punchline as it appears, particularly in the Bay Area where Silicon Valley largess flows onto tax-sheltered ledgers of social change. This insider’s knowledge grounds Sussman’s unique world view.

I met Paul two decades ago in a Charlie Varon workshop in San Francisco. Among Charlie’s students, Paul’s work stood out for his ability to quickly pull focus, jump cut and still keep his story on track. Like Rafa Nadal scrambling to chase a cross-court half-volley drop-shot at net in The French Open.

A Monday Night Marsh veteran, Sussman also mined his developmental experience as a student/political activist, which fed the premise of his “Listen Up, Jimmy Carter!” – recently live-streamed on his YouTube channel.

An initial tech glitch paused Paul at the start. But once his narrative kicked in, it became clear the man has a knack for commanding a computer screen. He knows how to “make” closeups. His body can get physical when he has to say something his words alone cannot convey.

Sussman has written and performed well over a dozen pieces at the Marsh and elsewhere. But this was his first fully-developed solo performance in the acting author’s living room where, like the rest of California, he’d been ordered to stay by governor Gavin Newsom.

Set in his May 1976 memories of Baltimore, Sussman acknowledges his story is chronologically anachronistic. “It was a different time ... Politics was different. 1976 – it was crazy! A nightmare of a president had just been defiling the office, wreaking havoc on the land, dragged kicking and screaming into an impeachment process which the Republicans sabotaged at every turn. (he moves in for a closeup with a nod toward current events) … It was a different time!”

Within the first two minutes of the piece, Paul produced a Jimmy Carter bobble-head, which he directly addresses as a “capitalist-tool peanut-farming fraud”. Carter was the “feel-good moderate” frontrunner among a mass of 15 candidates in the Democratic primary for president that year. Sussman, a Michigan radical Peace Corps volunteer, opposed everything midstream Naval Academy Lieutenant Carter represented. Truth to Power, and all that.

At one priceless moment in the short piece, Sussman pulls out what must be his most prized possessions as a writer: his own journal from when he was six-years-old! He clearly delights to read his own youthful “flowery prose” documenting the day JFK came to town on a train: “How caboose! So cool! But I fear Kennedy's charisma may obscure the neocolonialist Cold War wolf hiding in the sheep’s clothing of volunteerism.”

Indeed, kid ... You go get ‘em!

Let’s hope Paul continues his in-house performances. As expected, he’s set a very high bar for himself and everyone else. To track what Paul Sussman is doing, subscribe to his YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCifyFkvlT992CpLNGVYOHIg

Even a living room has depth-of-field when it comes to performance space

Sussman used fixed camera to great effect, creating “closeups” by moving into it

* * *

“Some are born great,

some achieve greatness, and

some have greatness thrust upon them.”

-- William Shakespeare

Stunning stagecraft commands The Royal National Theatre’s “Twelfth Night”

2.

William Shakespeare’s

“Twelfth Night” or “What You Will”

(two hours, forty-three minutes)

In 2009, The Royal National Theatre introduced its first season of what has become internationally renowned as “National Theatre Live” now recast by the pandemic as “National Theatre At Home”.

Long before any COVID-19 lockdowns, these programs were professionally broadcast from The National stage(s) into cinemas and theaters across the planet. Depending on end-point venues, the plays were streamed simultaneously with the London performance. In some time zones, the show was delayed to more timely coincide with a local audience otherwise asleep when the play originally aired in London.

National Theatre At Home recently offered live-stream viewers worldwide an incredible gift – a free screening of William Shakespeare’s comedy of mistaken identifications -- “Twelfth Night” on YouTube. This was no light, midsummer night’s entertainment, filmed as it was before a live audience in April 2017, when such crowds were able to assemble. The almost three-hour production was so vividly intense that we watched it twice over four nights.

As suggested by the vibrant YouTube screen captures posted herein, the stagecraft is spectacular in The Olivier Theater where spectacular stagecraft is the hallmark. The Olivier’s well-rounded floor-plan harkens to Greek amphitheaters which were designed democratically – every seat meant to be within earshot of actors speaking behind masks without microphones.

Soutra Gilmour’s astonishingly flexible set was designed around the pivot point of the Olivier’s concentric-ringed rotating stages – A set of three interlocking staircases, all framed together and each opening up to provide varied backgrounds for the action. All at once, the set suddenly became a shipwreck, a hospital, a gymnasium, a courtyard, a pool and spa, a brick-walled street, a prison, a patio, a night club, a chapel, an orchard, a topiary garden. The overall design allows for most fluid transitions as players move from one scene to the next.

The excellent cast of twenty actors proved itself very nimble afoot and aface for such a dynamic production. Indeed, two of the seven members of the show’s creative team were the choreographer (Shelly Maywell) and the fight coordinator (Kev McCurdy). The opening shipwreck scene clearly demonstrates the serious circus training these actors needed to be able to pull off this play on this stage.

With a stage crew of 54 and a broadcast crew of 56, the Royal National’s profound production values are on fulsome display here. It’s easy to subscribe to the program on YouTube and each performance is backed up with tons of background video – enough for any serious theater student to acquire a virtual doctorate without paying one cent of tuition.

Next up for National Theater At Home the incredible two-faced “Frankenstein”

http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/ntlin4-frankenstein

Malvolia (Tamsin Greig) confronts Maria (Niky Wardley) as Sir Andrew waits

Malvolia (Tamsin Greig) enters in “yellow stockings with cross-garters”

Tear Down The Walls II

The Wall That Says It All: Bob Dylan’s “intimate club room” quote

Tear Down The Walls II:

continued photo essay on sudden 

shuttering of Armando’s Music Hall

by Jamie Jobb

Vince Martin and Fred Neil gained a bit of fame in the mid 1960s for “Tear Down The Walls”, their gentle anthem which became a campfire favorite among student protestors of the time. The “folk song” certainly was more akin to The Smothers Brothers than to say Stokely Carmichael. And by the end of the decade the sentiment of that tune had soured as the political landscape rumbled with campus violence. Now the song is so forgotten, Google finds a more current title unrelated to Martin and Neil and completely detached from American street politics one hundred years after the Civil War.

The photos that follow document the demise of a unique set of very colorful walls that once existed in Martinez California. The full story is found in the first installment “Armando’s Pulls the Plug”.

Roy Jeans behind the bar for the last time: no customers

The Musicians’ wish: Politely asking for silence in Spanish

Armando’s patio wall littered with campaign and street signs

View from The Booth: what the light-and-sound man saw of Armando’s

When you have more than enough paint for the canvas … 

A Sign of End Times: Deconstruction crew removes sign from the window

Cogito, ergo sum: a painting philosopher does the math

The Wall That Said It All: Post No Bills!

Stuck Inside of Mobile with Memphis Blues: ain’t gonna work on Armando’s Farm

View from an Empty Stage: Everywhere an Empty House

A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall: the quote musicians saw from stage

View out the front door: abandoned stage (right), empty bar (left)

View from behind the bar: everybody is eighty-sixed!

“Oh Mama, can this really be the end?”

“Dear Landlord: If you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you”

Armando's Pulls The Plug

The Essential Roy Jeans: tip jar, a microphone, a can of paint.

The quote above the wall:

“The best sound you can get is in an intimate club room

where you’ve got four walls and the sound just bounces.

That’s the way this music is meant to be heard.”

– Bob Dylan

 "Tear Down The Walls”

Armando’s Pulls The Plug

by Jamie Jobb

Since my high school days in 1960s Miami, I’ve been a very lucky guy as far as easy access to great live music is concerned. Back then, my friends and I had The Flick coffeehouse across from University of Miami, and The Gaslight South, funky southern brother to the original Gaslight Cafe of Greenwich Village. Folks like Fred Neil, Gamble Rogers, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian, Tom Rush, John Denver, Jimmy Buffett played those South Florida stages. We could watch them work up close, Neil was a marvel on his twelve-string.

Later, in school at Gainesville, I hung out with several local musicians who played the university’s rathskeller, not to mention front and back porches around town. We knew we were extending a fine Southern tradition of sonic hospitality in these home concerts.

After I left Florida for California in 1970s, I entered another world of live musical opportunity. In Marin County, I lived along a convenient cruise of over a dozen music halls spaced about a half mile apart – from the No Name Bar in Sausalito to Rancho Nicasio in West Marin. Then when I moved to the East Bay I had more great choice between Freight and Salvage in Berkeley and our local Musicians Coffeehouse up the hill from my home near Mount Diablo.

Bands born in San Francisco’s Summer of Love played together or in curious one-night stands any day of the week live on stages all over Marin and the East Bay in clubs that no longer exist: Knightsbridge, The Ark, The Barrel House, The Original Trident, The Lion's Share (or "The Share"), Euphoria, Charles Van Dame, River City, Uncle Charlie's, Ted's, Prince Charles Inn, Jean's Bit of Bohemia, The Blue Rock, Edgewater, The Cricket Club, Runway 5, San Rafael Union Hall, Black Oak, Old Mill Saloon.

After I moved to Martinez at the turn of the century, an odd storefront called “Mama’s Mercantile” slowly developed into the coolest night club I’d ever encountered. Mama’s certainly was the oddest business on the planet. It had no proprietor, but locals knew he could be found at the bar down on the corner, if you needed him. He sold only one thing: golf clubs. Used and unsorted.

These were displayed in large four-foot by four-foot cardboard boxes, stuffed there in no particular order. Thousands of golf clubs! You wondered if the owner hung out at driving ranges and collected all the tossed sticks of frustrated duffers leaving the facilities in disgust. Anyway, one day Mama’s was closed for good and something new started to sprout in its place.

Hard to tell what it was, though. In fact, the place seemed to change its looks every time we walked by with our dog. Was it an art gallery? A frame shop? An event and party space? Eventually the storefront got a name – for the grandfather of the proprietor – and a sign out front: Armando’s. The place remained a live house for musicians for over fifteen years.

I was so impressed by the shows coming out of the place that I produced a No Budget Film about it: “Quoting Roy Jeans”.

To make that motion picture, I vowed to spend no money – except for tickets and tip jar, as anyone would do to help the musicians remain working “professionals”. But we spent no money on travel or rooms or meals or any staff. We didn’t shoot on film. Used our own equipment. I got together with neighbors and we produced it all ourselves on YouTube. You may see the whole thing here, although the “documentary” currently is just the first four “takes”. A new fifth take will be added, which includes the last weekend’s performances and demolition of the venue’s walls …

We attempted to structure the project around the obvious visual clues that spoke to the spirit of the place. Roy Jeans, the emcee and a local legend, makes his living as a house painter. So, as he says, “I have a lot of paint.” Indeed, Armando’s was distinguished by the unique colorings found on every surface inside the club. So we broke down the interview into those obvious surfaces: the chairs, the door, the stage, the walls, the pole and the road. “The Road” is a local legend unto itself and that story is told in Take Four of the documentary.

Not every music hall has a “pole”. Armando’s put its to good use. Written on the side of the pole was this challenge to those on stage: “I’ll know my song well before I sing it” – a line lifted from the end of Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”.

Anyone who knows Roy knows where these colors originate. From cans of paint he collects after a hard day’s work. Many cans have only a little paint remaining and it’s best to use it than to lose it. So Roy paints all the time, after work. He is a true “painter” who knows art history.  

Author's mirror-selfie: Armando’s stage, the morning after the last performance

One Man's Ceiling

Is Another Man's Floor

An on-going dispute with the landlord was at the root of Roy’s decision to close Armondo’s. He had hoped to hold out until July, when his lease ran out. But the landlord, a son of the original landlord who entered the lease with Roy, lived upstairs and was constantly battling Jeans, so Roy called it quits on February 9 when The Sunday Paper, a rockNfunk band filled the house with raucous merriment before the place went silent.

Roy allowed me to join him on Monday morning, February 10 to record the House in situ before a demolition crew was to start deconstructing the place. The best of those photos follow this essay.

The demolition itself was an incredible process to capture in camera, with the walls deconstructed one poster at a time. Hundreds of posters had been added over the years, and Roy wanted each one saved. Indeed, he began Armando’s as an underground art spot with framing and house parties. Many of his posters dated from that time.

Demolishing Armando’s took over a week and involved several volunteers – among them were Harlan Bailey, Thomas O’Brien, Chris Bryan, Lynn Quinones, Steve Ricco Bono, Belinda Godin, Daryl Schawel, Den Belicco, Gary Cockrell, Karen Stiles, Beate Bruhl, Eric Akeson, Brad Vicnair, Robert Perry and Bryan Walker. A handful of others helped but did not autograph the signup sheets, so we don’t know who they may be.

Also, Roy said this morning that he expects to resurrect Armando’s soon on-line, after he works out details. He’s aiming for something in May featuring an East Bay duo. Jeans should announce his first digital concert, a backyard affair for a special invited audience of eight couples separated by proper social distancing.

Watch for updates on the Armando’s website which is still active: https://armandosmartinez.com/. 

* * *

The Morning After

a photo essay

10 February 2020

by Jamie Jobb

The Morning After: out of habit, Roy wipes down tables for last time

Mismatched multi-cultural chairs will never fill this floor again

Backstage at Armando’s: the Paint Department

The Chairs of Many Colors piled up: for removal from The House

The walls of Armando’s had eyes, ears, noses, throats and banjos with legs … 

The walls spoke backstage – with run-on quotations

Every day something new ended up on the walls of Armando’s

Paint brushes never cleaned: artworks among themselves?

No Show in the Window: Armando’s closing night reflects the end

The back door to the bathroom: not a pretty sight

* * *

15 April 2020
(more photos to follow)