theater

Word for Word in literal Holiday High Jinx

Holiday High Jinx

Bums, Broads and Broadway

Word for Word performs a beautifully choreographed program with three short stories at Z Below this holiday season. And when I say choreographed I mean that in every sense of the word.

The group works from a fairly radical idea of what theater is: they perform short stories, word for word. Sounds like a dramatic reading, no? No. These short stories are enacted. The characters stand before us in full costume and full persona. But oddly, there is no dialog, or no dialog such as we have heard before. The characters describe their actions as they perform them. Most characters saying what they say while introducing what they say in third person. For instance, Dancing Dan turns to the Speakeasy Guy and says, “So Dancing Dan turned to the Speakeasy Regular and said ‘The old doll is 93’.” Or something like that.

Sound stiff and awkward? Not at all. The brilliance of it is that these actors are so profoundly capable of inhabiting a character that they could recite third-person narratives all day long and you’d leave thinking they had told you their life stories. And that the objects in the room they described had also participated in a lively conversation with you about their life stories.

As a close to the 2015 season, the company members headed up by co-Artistic Director Susan Harloe and directed by Sheila Balter present three stories set in the chilly winters of the Depression in New York City.

To open the performance the cast cavorted about the stage, a speakeasy interior designed Jeff Rowlings, in a series of vintage dances, accompanied with some live and tasty poundings on the keyboard by Paul Finocchiaro. Just to get us in the mood of seasonal joy and to help cast off the darkness of the weather. Opening up the program was the wry and surprising story by Damon Runyon, “Dancing Dan’s Christmas”.

Three ne’er-do-wells are hanging at the local speakeasy drinking Tom and Jerrys concocted with pharmaceutical rye, when their buddy Ooky (Finocchiaro), dressed in full Santa Claus regalia, staggers in to collapse from his job entertaining the gift fantasies of little kids. Exhausted, he immediately sinks into a deep sleep. The more-than-a-little larcenous Dancing Dan (Rotimi Agbabiaka) wants to try on Ooky’s Santa suit, and the three start to dismantle Ooky’s Christmas robes. Finally, the Speakeasy Regular (Jackson Davis) and the bartender Charlie (Søren Oliver) set off with the Santa be-costumed Dan to spread a little Christmas joy to Dan’s girlfriend’s ancient grandmother, who every year sets out a stocking only to receive a pitiful little gift from her granddaughter. Why isn’t Santa Claus more generous? she asks every Christmas. Indeed. The three good-natured low-lifes set out to right this dreadful cosmic lapse of holiday good will.

Now imagine all that in the language of Damon Runyon – in which all women are “dolls” and everyone talks like dis. Lisa Hori-Garcia and Stephanie Hunt play the dolls, in their various guises from 19 to 90.

It’s a total delight. And the twists of plot and story are equally gorgeous.

The other two stories are “The Cave Dwellers,” a 1938 journalistic narrative about two old people driven mad by poverty, and “Christmas and Relative Pronouns,” a tongue-in-cheek portrait of a Scrooge-like character with a passion for grammar. The former story by New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, the latter by E.B. White.

This is a stylish and wonderfully executed set of stories. Go see it, it will light the star atop your Christmas tree, spin your dreidel and kiss your mistletoe.

– Jaime Robles 

 

Holiday High Jinx: Bums, Broads, and Broadway continues at Z Below, 470 Florida Street, San Francisco, through December 24. For information and tickets, visit www.zspace.org or call 866-811-4111.

Photo: Dancing Dan (Rotimi Agbabiaka, center) and his pals, Speakeasy Regular (Jackson Davis, left) and Charlie Bernstein (Søren Oliver), plan a Christmas event in Word for Word’s performance of Damon Runyon’s short story “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” in their Holiday High Jinx at Z Below. Photo by Julie Schuchard.