REVIEWS 2000 - "Salvidor Dali Talks to the Animals in the Heaven on top of Heaven"

The Oddest Fish in Our Pond of Experimental Theater: Dan Carbone (center) with Erica Blue and John Baumann in Dali.

Facial Hair

Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals & The Beard
By Michael Scott Moore
Originally Published May 10, 2000

Steve Winn's amusingly ill-informed article last month on fringe theater in the city suggested that the '60s, '70s, and even the '80s were more adventurous times for playgoing here than the '90s. That might well be true. But how would he know? The Chronicle critic makes a point of missing most local experimental stuff. (He held up Teatro ZinZanni as a "deconstruction," but he doesn't seem to have heard of Art Street, Unconditional Theater, or Kaliyuga Arts.) Fortunately -- and by accident -- the Exit Theater is testing Winn's proposition this month with a pair of plays, one old and one new, in its Absurdist Season.

Michael McClure's beat classic The Beard was one of San Francisco's cultural scandals when it premiered in 1965. Cops shut down its fifth performance and arrested the cast on obscenity charges. Almost two weeks later it opened again in Berkeley; again the police turned up; this time a noisy audience drove them away. The ACLU got involved in the subsequent trial, and after five months the obscenity charges went away, too…

Was the play worth the trouble? The Beard imagines what might happen if Jean Harlow met Billy the Kid in heaven. It's short, repetitive, pseudo-religious, and obscene. Norman Mailer's assessment that it "serves almost as subway stops on that electric trip a man and a woman make if they move from the mind to the flesh" now seems, like so much of Mailer, flatulent… It's worth reviving only as a measure of how much has changed since 1965, because any cop attempting to close the show now would be laughed all the way down Eddy Street.

Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals also concerns a cultural icon with eccentric facial hair. Its Dan Carbone's first full-length play, as far as I know -- developed especially for the Absurdist Series -- and Carbone has got to be the oddest fish in our pond of experimental theater. Shaped like a turnip, with a greedy boyish smile and a furze of gray hair, he looks nothing at all like Salvador Dali, but that doesn't restrain him. The play's first half shows the ghost of the old Spaniard in heaven, fielding talk-show questions from a cultured cow. Carbone plays Dali in a white robe, with towering mustaches. The illusion is barely convincing until the second act, though, when scenes from Dali's lifelong affair with Gala Eduard play out in semirealistic fast-forward.

Carbone made a local name for himself at the '98 Fringe Festival with Up From the Ground, an elegant short piece about a Southern family perplexed by a giant, beautiful flower growing in its cornfield. The story itself had a bizarre sad beauty, and the snatches of comic surrealism Carbone performed as companion skits were among the funniest things I've ever seen onstage. In one scene he compared a reverent but tacky portrait of Christ with a photo of a smiling horrible monkey wearing a pretty bow. ("Jungle Belle.") Jesus and Jungle Belle both reappear in Dali. Their portraits are oddly similar, and remembering them from Up From the Ground nearly made me fall out of my seat.

By itself, though, Dali isn't as funny. The homage to a great surrealist runs on the idea of surrealism rather than surrealism itself. In Act 1, after the talk show, Dali's ghost does a sitcom (I Love Dali), goes on a tiger hunt, and appears as the Easter Bunny in the scatological dream of a cow as scripted by the writers of a children's program. My God, is it weird. Some parts are even funny. But the work as a whole feels like a vaguely self-conscious jumble of goofy ideas; the show has no coherence -- logical or otherwise -- until the second half, when Dali rejects his TV family for Earthly memories of Gala.

The discipline of realism is good for Carbone, and his impressions of Dali at various stages of life -- young and in love, middle-aged and successful, decrepit and cuckolded -- improve with John Sowle's costumes. Unreal scenes still erupt into the story (Dali's art-crit slide show, for example), but the events of his life need no embellishment by the end. The best scenes show Gala cruising for boys in the back of her limousine, and flirting with the lead of Jesus Christ Superstar, Jeff Fenholt. (True story.) Of course Fenholt looks like Jesus. And when they join the king and queen of Spain -- the queen with a brace for her arm, so she can wave -- who out-foul-mouth a couple of hip '60s art types, it's clear that Carbone has found his way into a new kind of strangeness.

The show is uneven but fertile, exuberant. Erica Blue plays an icily enigmatic Gala, Marin Van Young is ideal as Twinkle Ann, Paul Gerrior is strong in all his roles, and Vince Camillo makes a good hippie. Director John Sowle has done a valiant job in stringing it all together. Dali, furthermore, beats The Beard at its own game. And although our '90s scene could be larger, the evidence from this pair of shows suggests that experimental theater is doing just fine.

Hello Dali!
Dan Carbone gets mighty surreal as Salvador.
By Brad Rosenstein
Published in the SF Bay Guardian May 10, 2000

FOR ANYONE WHO saw his brilliant solo piece Up from the Ground, it would take little inducement to join Dan Carbone on another expedition into the netherworlds of his imagination. His latest work, Salvador Dalí Talks to the Animals in the Heaven on Top of Heaven, is now premiering at Exit Theatre as part of its Absurdist Season. It unites Carbone with a cast of seven actors and designer-director John Sowle in a surrealistic meditation on Dalí's life and work. Given the kind of direct access Carbone has to his unconscious, this would seem like a match made in the heaven on top of heaven. Linear narrative clearly will not do for a subject like Dalí, and Carbone is in his element conjoining images from the 20th century's preeminent subverter of logic and his own compelling dreamworld. Dalí's dripping clocks and incongruously placed shellfish seem natural companions to Carbone's iconic cows and windup toys. But initially the meeting of surrealist and surrealist is a bit too much for the piece to handle. After an inspired opening sequence in which sycophantic talk show host Zachary Strayhorn (Paul Gerrior) summons up the spirit of Dalí, back from the dead with some new paintings, the show loses itself in random sitcom and children's show parodies. These troubled metaphors for Dalí's ironic pursuit of bourgeois innocence
don't come off, and it's only with the beautifully surreal introduction of Dalí's bitch-goddess muse Gala (Erica Blue), a lobster blossoming from her genitals, that the piece finds its heart and its spine.

The second half is considerably better, as Carbone skips nimbly across Dalí's tortured relationship with Gala – a strange, funny, and touching partnership that offers no shortage of surrealistic drama. As with Dalí's finest "dream photographs," Carbone is at his best when his wonderfully unfettered imagination is grounded in recognizable realities, rendered fresh by unexpected conjunctions and nightmarish precision. The piece also has an acute understanding of Dalí's carefully cultivated eccentric public
persona as both distinct from and inextricably linked to his work; it subtly reveals how the artist simultaneously profited from and became the victim of his own joke.

The cast is excellent, particularly Blue as the superbly fiendish Gala, and Carbone with his blustery, randomly accented Dalí. Gerrior is sharply comic, and Vince Camillo is hilarious as the
apotheosis of a hippie Jesus. Sowle gets the evening's madcap but mournful tone just right, his versatile sets creating dreamlike transformations with minimal means, and Nina Barlow's marvelous masks and prognathous Dalian mustaches add to the show's zippy texture. Carbone is one of the Bay Area's most original voices, and at its best this show takes you places you've never been. With some rethinking it could become astonishing, a "paranoiac-critical hallucination" to rival Dalí's own.

More articles and photos on the Kaliyuga Arts Production Company page: http://www.kaliyuga.com/DaliPg.htm