Stage

But it ends abruptly. When the irate father of a 15-year-old model locks himself with two hostages in an office at HPP, and gets arrested by cops who don't even seem interested in the idea that a 15-year-old girl might have been posing for Larry Flynt, you start to believe the story is going somewhere; but the narrative trickles out and never rounds back to the job interview. This makes the whole thing feel as arbitrary as the title. Apparently Mendelssohn has done a version of this show before; two years ago it was called I, Caramba, after his written autobiography. Why "Buckley" and not "Caramba"? Why anything? Well, it's funny, at least, even if it feels like the author gave up on his story four-fifths of the way through.

-- Michael Scott Moore

Go to Work
Working Women Festival. By various artists. At the 450 Geary Studio, 450 Geary (at Mason), March 7-29. Call 567-6088.

A random sampling of plays from the fourth annual Working Women Festival last month turned up an equal share of cliches and excellent work, sometimes within the same show. One example was the West Coast premiere of Donald Margulies' July 7, 1994, which presented a day in the life of a doctor in an urban clinic, suffering through everyone else's pain while her Ph.D.-student husband stays home with their baby. The concept alone is already a cliche-of-the-decade, but some of the scenes had real feeling. Michele Groves brilliantly played an AIDS patient who first couldn't listen to the news that her drug treatments weren't working and then got mad at the doctor, Kate, who unfortunately could only ply her with advice that sounded like dialogue from a public service announcement. ("I'm just saying that maybe we should think about the future" -- euphemistic advice to a dying woman.) And Ian Hirsch was good as a wheedling, churlish, jittery sexist who flirted with Kate and eventually pulled down his pants so she could look at his penis. (Kate's disappointing dialogue: "Do you have any idea how inappropriate your behavior is?" -- duh -- and, "Mr. Caridi, have you been taking your lithium?") Other scenes, like a racially charged conversation about O.J. Simpson, felt rote and tired; but the show was saved by a simple and nicely felt coda showing Kate reacting to her day.

More earnest and less honest was a short drama called No Exile, about a family in Nazi Germany. Ingeborg Weinmann apparently interviewed her own relatives to write a portrait of bigotry and denial under Hitler, but an understandable reflex to apologize for her family's past sentimentalized what could have been a stirring show. Miriam Babin played an excellent grandmother, a doughty old German with sharp things to say about her goose-stepping husband and homeland; during the play you learned that this charming woman was also an ugly conformist under the Nazi regime. This was powerful, but the songs Weinmann wrote and sang for the story were not, and the piece crumbled into something that tried very hard to be stark. I'm also descended from ordinary Germans who conformed under Hitler, so I know something about dealing with this past, and I think emotionally correct sentiment becomes the easiest barrier to cold-eyed, painful honesty.

Then there was Innocent Heat, a campy staging of a pulp novel with the same title by Seattle's Pulp Vixens. The story followed Doris and Midge from their first sweaty high school lesbian gropings to a stormy relationship in New York after college. It was pure cliche, but that was the point: Jennifer Jasper and Mia Levine clownishly played out the story while Shawn Yates, as a primly curious woman named Catherine, read aloud from the book. Doris became a publishing executive after college; Midge dropped out to become an elevator operator, coming home every night sick to death of "riding up and down that greasy shaft all day." The show was witty, hysterical, over-the-top, and shamefully underattended. It ended with a smarmy lounge song by Catherine, who entered her own pulp novel and went to jail with the characters, coming out (in every sense) transformed.

-- Michael Scott Moore

Wim and Vigor
Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told. Choreographed and performed by Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez. At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard (at Third Street), March 25-29. Call 392-4400.

It's steeped in superstition, but Wim Vandekeybus' evening-length dance Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told feels most like a fantastical and terrifying trip through the surreal realm of the subconscious. The Belgian choreographer wove this wildly theatrical work together in seven overlapping sections, based on an Irish rhyme: "One for sorrow, two for joy/ Three for a girl, four for a boy/ Five for silver, six for gold/ Seven for a secret never to be told." It's about the fortune you get based on how many magpies you see; Vandekeybus uses the rhyme to explore how people try to maintain control, over themselves and others, and over things they really can't control.

The magpies are tricksters and ringmasters, enigmas and hit men; they set the action in motion and then watch it spiral into chaos. Tension underscores the most abandoned dancing in the same way that lingering fears pervade otherwise rational thinking. The first bird, danced weightlessly by Carlo de Haro Flores, pecks at a woman lying in a dimly lit clearing. Dancer John Campbell rushes in shouting and clapping his hands to scare the bird away, but succumbs to his own curiosity and begins questioning the wary animal, keeping just enough distance not to frighten it away. This section is "sorrow," and its pace picks up quickly, with dancers creeping onstage back-first as bird, man, and woman go flying across the stage in an intense struggle for power. "Sorrow" bleeds into "joy" after a tense moment when the magpie climbs into a giant wooden box, and, after the roar of what sounds like an incinerator, emerges as two birds. The choreographer's vision of joy is one part seedy French cabaret, another part Beatrix Potter: The birds, armed with a microphone and an entertainer's spiel about making people happy and helping them change, lock one dancer after another in the box to the unnerving hissing of a fire. One dancer re-emerges as a nattily dressed frog, the next as a giant sausage. When Campbell's turn comes, he steps into the box and steps out as ... himself, with no visible changes. It is simultaneously anticlimactic and reassuring.