It’s shaping up to be a varied and busy next few weeks, so here’s a quick update on some activities where you can find me hanging out onstage, backstage, and in character…in a 75-seat black box…at the Berkeley Rep…and back in the Castro Theatre.

Lafee: This coming Sunday evening (May 25), I’ll be performing an excerpt of my (creeping-toward-the-finish-line) solo play The Disappearance of Alfred Lafee. The scenes (about 20 minutes in all) are different from those I performed in February at The Marsh and Stage Werx, though if you saw me at the Berkeley Marsh last year you will recognize them. The rest of the interesting lineup at Solo Sundays will be new, so take a break from the grill this weekend and come down and join the fun.

LGBT Movies: I’ve had a great time this spring working as Senior Programmer for Frameline, the upcoming 38th annual San Francisco International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Film Festival. We have curated a fabulous collection of 214 films from more than 30 countries. The festival runs June 19-29 – and the program is now online! Tickets go on sale Friday May 23 for members, next Friday (May 30) to the general public. I’ll post another blog entry with some personal favorites and observations, but start browsing the lineup now, it’s pretty hot! Of special pride and interest: a very timely and (I believe) necessary spotlight on new Russian features, documentaries and shorts  with LGBT subject matter, highlighting some especially brave filmmaking in this difficult moment for Russian LGBT artists and citizens.

If you visited my grandparents any Thursday morning at their house on Beaumont Avenue in San Francisco, you were likely to find my grandfather noisily slurping his coffee and munching on a piece of matza. Thursday was when you also might meet Mrs. Fujimoto on her weekly visit to their house. Mrs. Fujimoto – we never learned her first name, it was just Mrs. Fujimoto. Kind of like in that old TV series where the Japanese housekeeper was just called “Mrs. Livingston”—the nice lady who would call Bill Bixby “Mr. Eddie’s Father.” In our family, we already had a Mrs. Livingston —it was my grandmother. That was her name. Mrs. Fujimoto called her “Mrs. Livingston.”

In 1939, my grandparents had left behind their house on Viktoriastrasse, a leafy lane in the town of Elberfeld, where generations of German Jewish women like my grandmother had kept impeccably well maintained, intimidatingly scrubbed homes...Cleaning was something of a sub-religion, a new denomination in the ever- more-secular Jewish world of my grandmother. This was something she had in common with Mrs. Fujimoto, who, I should clarify, was not a German Jew. My grandmother went at housecleaning like a demon, and even in the Weimar years, when my grandfather’s ribbon factory in Elberfeld was doing well and they had the money to hire housemaids, my grandmother was loath to turn over the cleaning to anyone else. Oh, she had no qualms assigning the intimate task of breast-feeding my mom to a wet nurse, but polishing the silverware?--ach Du lieber, now that was personal.

My grandparents had left a lot behind in Germany—their language, which upon arrival in America they pretty much refused to speak, except unconsciously when counting out playing cards and totting up points in their weekly bridge games, or in the occasional nursery rhymes they would sing to my sister and me. Hoppa hoppa Reiter, wenn er fällt dann schreit er...

So they left behind their language, if not their accent. And their house on Viktoriastrasse, if not their cleaning habits. And they left behind their mothers. My grandfather had to make a bargain with the Kommandant at Dachau—said he already had visas to leave with his wife and children, just release him and they’ll get out on the first available ship to America, stop waiting for the mothers’ visas to come through.

No time for the bread to rise: my grandparents, like the Jews of Egypt, left in haste. They threw their clothes into suitcases, they hid my grandmother’s jewelry in the insulation of the icebox door, and they left their house and their mothers in Elberfeld. The icebox got out. Their mothers didn’t.

My grandparents’ house in San Francisco still felt to me like a piece of the Old World: there was a certain Prussian formality, tempered by very warm and generous surprises—a secret candy drawer...toys hidden in the piano bench...a foosball game in the closet. Reluctantly as she aged, my grandmother yielded more and more of the housework to Mrs. Fujimoto—a fellow San Franciscan who had her own family story of wrongful imprisonment. Her family too had left their homes in haste, spent the war in internment camps, and had returned to San Francisco simply to carry on their lives.

My grandmother loved Mrs. Fujimoto, respected her talents. She may have been the only housekeeper who actually exceeded my grandmother’s exacting standards. Before a Thursday morning visit, my grandmother would go around the house anxiously fluffing the pillows...tidying up for the housekeeper. And Thursday mornings were the only time that my grandmother allowed her husband—the man she had married at age 19 and with whom she would eventually spend 72 years— yes, Thursday mornings were his one weekly appointed time to eat his beloved breakfast treat: matza. You see, matza was simply too crumbly to risk being eaten on days when Mrs. Fujimoto was not on hand to vacuum away the offending shards.

I don’t know if my grandmother ever explained to Mrs. Fujimoto what the little cracker crumbs were that she vacuumed up every Thursday. But I can imagine how it might have sounded, the way my grandmother would say it as we gathered around the seder table:

“This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry come and eat.
Let all who are in need come and celebrate.
This year we are slaves: Next year may we all be free.”

--Peter L. Stein
April 2014
San Francisco
commissioned by and presented  at the City Winery's Downtown Seder, San Francisco, 4/9/14

My faithful blog readers have been inquiring when, oh when, will I be offering more glimpses of the solo play I have been developing (“The Disappearance of Alfred Lafee”). Never one to disappoint my fan base, I am pleased to tell both of you that this winter offers several chances to see excerpts. 

For those with short attention spans, this coming Saturday night Jan. 4 may be the perfect show: I’ll be participating in the fourth annual “100 Performances for the Hole” at the fabulous SOMArts Cultural Center (the hippest, going-est art/performance space in the city, just sayin’). “100 Performances for the Hole” is exactly that: starting at 6pm, watch a variety of mad, weird, beautiful, edgy, baffling performances emanating from the mysterious casting pit concealed in the floor of the old warehouse that now houses SOMArts.  Each artist gets 1 minute to set up, 2 minutes to perform, and 1 minute to clean up. NEXT! Come on the late side…I am performer #95…taking my 2 minutes around midnight!

If you are not a night owl but want to watch the proceedings anyway, you can see it streaming live on SF Commons.

The following night, Sunday Feb. 23, I’ll be part of the lineup at Solo Sundays at the Stage Werx Theatre, 7pm show. I’ll post more details about the rest of the bill as we get closer.

And I promise, not all of my 2014 blog entries will be relentless self-promotion. Just this one. And maybe one in February. And maybe the one....

(Happy New Year anyway!)

Scanning the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival lineup, I feel like a proud uncle. Back in the 1990s, I had the foresight to hire (and the pleasure to work with) three terrific documentary editors on the public television series Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco. Now all three editors are getting recognized as multi-talented filmmakers in their own right, and, in a kind of festival trifecta, all of them are featured this year as DIRECTORS of fascinating documentaries, which I urge you to catch next month in Mill Valley (or elsewhere on the festival circuit).

Dawn Logsdon—whose gifts with archival imagery and footage made her an ideal editor on The Castro—not only edited but also co-directed the exuberant profile Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton, an eye-opening portrait of the complex filmmaker/poet and quintessential Radical Faerie.  If you missed it at Frameline this year, the film is itself a big joy.

Seeing these three talented editors take wing in new roles is, of course, thrilling to me (I am after all the poster child of artist-wearing-many-hats), but also, I confess, dispiriting. I mean, why do they need to leave the pigeonhole that I have happily consigned them to? They are damned good documentary editors—a rare and ornery breed. Once they’ve flown the coop and started to soar into the rarefied air of directing, well, they may never come flying back into the dank editing suite. Some great documentary editors—Jeffrey Friedman, Yael Hersonski, Debbie Hoffmann—flew away and seem rarely tempted back.

Then again…documentary directing/producing is not exactly a paradise. Perhaps after a few miserable dawn-to-midnight shoots…or the 20th rejected funding proposal…or the 50th headache over uncleared music rights…perhaps the pure content focus of editing will lure them back to their chair.

That’s a long shot. Try as one might to pigeonhole these rare birds, the fact is, talent will out.  And with these three talents—not to mention a name like Gosling—they are bound to fly.

Nearly 10 years ago, my friend and colleague, the noted film scholar B. Ruby Rich, asked me to speak to a group of film lovers on a Sunday morning about a new Israeli drama she had programmed for them to see. It was a film that hadn't opened yet theatrically--Nir Bergman's Broken Wings--but I was excited to talk about it with others.
    "Is it a film class?" I asked.
    "Well, not exactly," said Ruby. "It's a club. We screen new movies and then talk about them, sometimes with guest speakers. You probably know some of the club members, there are about 150 film fans from around the Bay Area."
    Straightforward enough...but then Ruby added the twist: "Just don't tell anyone beforehand what the film is. The whole point is they don't know what movie they're seeing until they show up at the theater."

    That screening with Ruby turned out to be the beginning of a long relationship with San Francisco's chapter of The Cinema Club--a nine-city network--because the following year I joined Ruby as a co-moderator (I was later joined by my colleague from the San Francisco Film Society, Rod Armstrong). I've been co-moderating now for about eight years, and we've had the pleasure of early screenings of Slumdog Millionaire, The Artist, A Separation, Silver LInings Playbook, No, and Melancholia, among many others, programmed from the home office in Washington, DC, with input from several of us moderators. Sure there have been some clunkers along the way, but the conversations afterwards are invariably stimulating.

Why are there more working-class white characters in Woody Allen’s new movie than in the entire 415 area code?

And why do they all sound like they’re from Queens?


Like many San Franciscans, I was titillated last year when Woody Allen announced he would be returning—after an absence of more than 40 years—to shoot a new film in my hometown, his first local shoot since “Play it Again, Sam” in 1972. We had been feeling ignored.

But with “Blue Jasmine,” the prodigal Jewish son redeemed himself among local cinephiles. The weeks he was shooting last summer in the Bay Area ushered in a daily game of “Where’s Woody?” with rumored sightings of the famously reclusive director recorded in the local papers, along with online speculation about the nature of each scene (“a fancy party in Belvedere!” “a marital squabble in the Mission District!”); guesses on each actor’s role (“Bobby Canavale plays a car mechanic!”); and breathless reports from friends who scored precious slots as background players (a.k.a. “extras,” for those new to the glamour of the cinema).

So I attended the film eagerly to see how our city fares, encouraged by early word about Cate Blanchett’s performance. The latter is a complete knockout. As many of you will know by now, she plays a cross between Ruth Madoff and Blanche DuBois, creating a Xanax-popping, Chanel-jacketed, semi-delusional socialite, tightrope-walking on the edge of nervous collapse. Blanchett is amazing, and her character, Jasmine French, is as sharply observed a female role to emerge from Woody’s keyboard as any in “Hannah…” “Vicky…” or “Annie Hall.”

And there’s the rub. The full-blooded believability of Jasmine and her privileged world—including all the scenes in Manhattan and the Hamptons—is what makes it so frustrating to observe the cardboard inauthencity of most of the important “San Francisco” characters that Woody has peppered throughout the film. Who are these people? Bobby Canavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K…. never has San Francisco looked and sounded more like Queens. It’s as if Woody—and his usually impeccable casting director Juliet Taylor—plucked garden variety working-class characters from his stock repertoire and pasted them into a Bay Area setting without any sense of their actually belonging there, or giving them any backstory that made sense out of their living in the Mission (Canavale), the Outer Sunset (Clay), or Marin County (C.K.). As Jasmine’s struggling working-class sister,  “slumming it” at 14th and South Van Ness, Sally Hawkins fares a bit better, perhaps because she has the skills to transform her native English accent into something you’d actually hear in the Mission (note to Woody, though: that neighborhood has for years been a hotbed of rising rents, hipsters and Googleistas).

But more jarring than the accents, the San Francisco these characters inhabit includes virtually no Asians, no Latinos, and no gay people—at least none with any lines. It’s all white working class (a minority population in the 415 if there ever was one), and not an especially Bay Area version of that sub-group to boot. In one scene, Canavale’s buddies hang out watching boxing and eating pizza; how hard would it have been to get them to lose their Joisy accents and scarf some burritos during a 49er game…or better yet, a Raiders game?

So while I was delighted to see some odd corners of my city show up in a new Woody Allen movie, I left feeling that we hadn’t really been understood very well. It was a tourist’s-eye view of our town, written by someone using a slightly out-of-date guidebook and a very out-of-touch social map. Maybe the absence of 40 years took its toll on Woody the writer. I am not certain he could conjure up an authentic sense of a city he hadn’t really seen since Nixon was in office. Even “Play It Again, Sam” wasn’t exactly a documentary, but he got away with a nostalgic view of the city since his main character was (literally) haunted by a noir-era Bogart.

Traditionalists are often aghast when contemporary artists attempt to intervene into and transform iconic places—even temporarily. As a teenager, I remember the outcry in the Bay Area when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed to erect their “Running Fence”—a 25-mile long shimmering strand of veils that rippled across the Sonoma hills to the sea, and stood for only two weeks. People scoffed at the wasteful effort, ridiculing the artists’ attempt to comment on, let alone improve, what nature had, in its glory, already made perfect. And yet whenever I meander through the grassy coastal hills near Bodega Bay, the image of that fence remains vivid. The transformation of the landscape seems to have had a potent afterlife in my unconscious: I round a corner, wondering if I might still glimpse it; lines of white sheep scattered across the hills bring to mind the desultory rambling of that fence; and actual wooden fences seem stolid and heavy in comparison to the linen veil that lasted only a fortnight. The work permanently shifted how I see the landscape. And that of course was the point—a shift in perception.

And yet Turrell has created something magnificent inside Wright’s space that obliterates the memory of it even while paying homage to it. Walking into the rotunda, one enters not a rounded architectural volume, but an enormous light chamber. Looking up, one sees not the spherical solidity of a building atrium, but a numinous void…a series of concentric ellipses, slowly shifting in hue, now gray, now rose, now indigo, but always receding in intensity toward a glowing white center. There is no sound track (other than the constant, and sometimes annoying, burble of visitors); and since the second week of the installation, padded mats have been tossed onto the floor to accommodate the inevitable impulse to gaze, supine, into the void.

As I stared, transfixed, into the light-space, I found myself disoriented—was this really the Guggenheim rotunda, now misshapen into an oval? Was I actually staring up into five stories of space, or was this somehow a flat surface, a screen with projected colors that told some kind of abstract narrative? And I realized that this disorientation was precisely the idea of Turrell’s work—it made you take a step away, even if unconsciously, from the known, rationally perceived world into a more ambiguous, unsettling, mysterious place.

Some have carped about the installation—offended by the excess of a gold-plated institution throwing a lot of money at a brand-name artist. Others find the whole idea an exercise in gilding the lily. The Guggenheim rotunda is already a masterwork of light and volume, so why make it another such space? But as I keep turning my thoughts back to that glowing elliptical teleidoscope, I realize that, as with the Sonoma hills, I will likely never be able to experience the Guggenheim in the same way again…the memory of those ellipses will always be vibrating at the fringes of my perception. And that alone makes this artwork a phenomenal achievement.

(Do you have a favorite—or failed—example of an artistic transformation?  I. M. Pei’s Louvre pyramid? Something by Andy Goldsworthy? Feel free to add your own memory, comment or experience below!)   

Jhumpa Lahiri has made a well-deserved name for herself (and snagged a Pulitzer Prize) with her two collections of short stories, which are among the more sublime prose offerings of the last 20 years. Her most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, featured a set of interlocking stories in the second half that inched ever closer to being a novella rather than an independent trio of stories. So I am thrilled, but not surprised, that her forthcoming publication, The Lowland, is a full-fledged novel, her first since The Namesake, which many will remember from its film version. As with her previous work, The Lowland examines the lives and yearnings of families divided between India and the U.S.; her storytelling is at once intimate and powerful. The new novel has already been included in the long list for this year’s Booker Prize in the U.K. [Update Sept. 10: it's now one of six shortlist finalists!]

A funny, haunting, and at times mysterious vaudeville is on view at Berkeley Rep for the next few weeks, performed with remarkable subtlety by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Harold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land is a strange, rueful but always entertaining match of wills between two aging writers—the mischievous and needy poet Spooner (McKellen) and the patrician but vulnerable Hirst (Stewart)—who have recently met in a pub but who perhaps know each other already. Their encounter over the course of a night and a day’s conversations is a masterfully choreographed do-si-do of wit and despair.   

I was not previously familiar with this Pinter play, but the current production, directed by Sean Mathias, completely disarmed me. Though set entirely in a drawing room, watching it is like entering a farcical dream-space that is tinged with something dreadful just beyond the shadows. Nothing really happens, but everything seems at stake.

The two Sirs—titans of the screen though they may be—are enormously enjoyable to watch and listen to in vivo (ably seconded by Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley as Hirst's man-servants/ bodyguards), since the play’s dialogue is delicious and musical, and their plummy, Shakespeare-trained voices and exquisitely nuanced physical choices can be savored in the intimacy of the Roda Theatre. (In the preview performance I attended, even McKellen's occasional first-act slip-ups--calling for prompts with a subtly inserted "Yes" rather than the usually disruptive "Line?"--served to remind me of the high-wire thrill of watching artists performing in the moment.) The production is here for just a few weeks, en route to Broadway where the cast will perform it in repertory with Waiting for Godot.

I came home and immediately found that the original National Theatre (London) production with the legendary John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. Watching it didn’t diminish my appreciation for the current production at all, and in fact made me marvel at how fresh and mysterious the play continues to be nearly 40 years later. Catch it if you can.

Just as Frameline wraps up, it's time for my alma mater to rev up. This year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival lineup is enormous! Being the word nerd that I am, and having been an editor of the SFJFF catalog for eight years, I immediately noticed that nearly 1/4 of the program titles this year start with the letter "A." What does it all mean?

I was glad to get a head start on this year's SFJFF by pre-screening and providing some program notes for a few films (my former colleagues Jay Rosenblatt and Joshua Moore know me well enough to send me films they figured I would like).

Check out my early take on these titles:

• Aftermath
• American Jerusalem
• In the Shadow
• Out in the Dark

A few other titles I am eager to see at the upcoming festival:

• Alan Berliner's latest film, First Cousin Once Removed
• the documentary profile of Joseph Papp
• Margarethe von Trotta's drama about Hannah Arendt
• new episodes of the wonderful TV series Arab Labor

I can also recommend two more films I have had a chance to screen elsewhere: 50 Children and After Tiller, the latter an especially important doc about some very courageous abortion providers.

Finally, I hear from well-placed SFJFF officials who prefer to remain anonymous that the dramas The Attack and Aya are well worth seeking out. Or maybe it's just that they start with "A."