Stage

Fringing
The 1997 San Francisco Fringe Festival. Various artists, various venues, Sept. 4-14. Call 673-3847.

The best part of the San Francisco Fringe Festival was the near-impossibility of planning for it. Between canceled shows, my own dallying (you are not allowed to be late to a Fringe performance), and last-minute rumors of brilliance, I saw maybe half of the shows I set out to see, meaning the others were a complete surprise. Accidental Dialogue was the best example -- it was a weirdly compelling set of five movement pieces by Kiro Kopulos and his Kiroga Theater group. I'm not usually susceptible to narrative-free "movement theater," especially with no words, ambient music, and unusual props like a gas mask and a laser beam; but the slow and torturous dancelike movements that Kopulos performed had substance and discipline, and shape, so you sensed that each piece was moving forward even when you weren't sure why.

Another happy accident was Elisa DeCarlo's Cervix With a Smile, a nasty one-woman gallery of songs and characters. Her 10 skits ran a little long and heavy on risque themes (virgin hand jobs, stained furniture, man-okapi sex, and dominatrix homemaking), but the characters were strong, and DeCarlo could stop being prurient often enough to show a spark of humanity.

The most misleadingly advertised show was the Electra Theater Company's Flesh and Blood. It had nothing to do with the blood-smeared naked female in its publicity photo; instead it followed a homeless woman who still doted, in her mind, over a baby she'd given up for adoption 27 years before. The hapless daughter (Stephanie Keating) was taken in by an overbearing stepmother (Jane Aquilina) who decked herself and her stroller in gold lame, and sang like Ethel Merman. The show was affecting and funny but unevenly played by the rest of the cast. Two pallid masks in Flesh and Blood were made by Nina Barlow, who did a one-woman Fringe show of her own, mostly not involving masks. I thought Barlow's supporting characters in Rings and Weasels were better than the lead role, Barlow herself. The Umbrella Guy and Nina-as-a-Girl were funny because they lacked the stagy, self-conscious earnestness of the adult "Nina Barlow."

The Gusto Players performed a short commedia dell'arte piece called L'Imago, about the adulterous complications of a misplaced picture, to an undeservedly small audience. Director Pietro Calogero designed the set, made the masks, and did a spryly entertaining job as the motley servant Arlecchino, tumbling like an acrobat and striking stiff amusing poses. And the other underattended prize was I Left My Heart in Weaverville, a one-man show by Randy Rutherford about the rigors of being a pipsqueak freshman at the high school of a rural California town. Rutherford acted and sang poignantly on the topic of his mother's truck-driving, drunkard boyfriend, who abused her and liked to roller skate.

-- Michael Scott Moore

The Tortured Audience
The Curse of Funston Munley. Written and directed by Patrick Longo. Starring Longo, Gary Arzberger, and Melissa Merkel. Presented by Upaya Productions at the Next Stage Theater, 1668 Bush (at Franklin), Aug. 22-31. Call 339-8460.

In the 1987 film Withnail & I, Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann play unemployed actors. They're in that position ostensibly by the lack of worthy stage parts, but the fact is that they're lazy, drunk losers. Boiling a cup of tea is an ordeal, a trip to the countryside a disaster. The film is hysterical because it makes fun of the self-absorbed artist. Patrick Longo's playwriting debut, The Curse of Funston Munley, would be better if it took a few cues from Withnail & I and laughed at itself and its title character more often.

Munley is a painter with a bad case of perfectionism. He can't put a stroke of acrylic on the canvas without paroxysms of terror, and his quest to make Mom's spaghetti and meatballs is marked with similar convulsions. Unleashed on the supermarkets of San Francisco, he berates checkout girls and terrorizes a nerdy woman trying to buy basil. Munley's temper tantrums bring together strangers subjected to his rage. (As all urbanites know, laughing at lunatics is a great social icebreaker.) The play is passingly charming when Munley's torment produces a pizza date instead of a work of art, but there isn't enough of this humor to suggest that Curse is deliberately toying with frustrated artist stereotypes.

If The Curse of Funston Munley is taking itself too seriously -- which the suicidal finish would indicate -- it also loiters too near tawdry melodrama. When lead actor Gary Arzberger runs offstage after 2 1/2 hours of kvetching, the gunshot comes as no surprise -- if a guy can't make meatballs because of existential paralysis, what does he have to live for? It gets worse: The "surprise" is that the actor is supposed to have killed himself, not the character. In the program, the actor credited with playing Munley is Sydney Griselbachshtunworth and we are asked to believe that Mr. Griselbachshtunworth has become so consumed with playing Munley that his own identity collapses under the artistic burden. But Mr. G is a character too, listed at the bottom of the credits as played by Gary Arzberger. Deep, hmmm? Character within self-absorbed character and they're no more suspenseful than Russian nesting dolls. Hubris is the true "curse" of Funston Munley; if you think you're the center of the universe, you'll behave like an ass. Sadly, writer/director/actor/composer Patrick Longo (who strings credits on himself like Boy Scout badges) falls victim to the curse himself. He's tried hard to create a theatrical masterpiece, but as center of his creative universe, Longo loses perspective on what's tragic and what's not.