Forbidden thoughts brought to S.F. stage
Word for Word marks 25 years with deep show
In Word for Word’s 25th anniversary show, human stream of consciousness doesn’t merely idle on tangents. Near pristine in its isolation, it’s always burrowed so deep in some wayward rabbit hole that you can’t imagine it finding its way back to planet Earth. And down in that warren lies a whole universe of pipe dreams and castles in the air. They’re silly and shameful, these whimsies, built on our pettiness, our prejudice, our privilege, our regrets. But they’re so vividly conjured, so singular in their construction, characters can’t help but indulge them, teleporting back to empirical reality only when forcibly tugged.
Such rich interior lives are usually the province of prose, not performance. But that’s precisely what makes Word for Word so special in the Bay Area theater scene. The company transcribes short stories to the stage without changing a word of them, keeping even every “he said” and “she said” intact. With “Anniversary! Stories by Tobias Wolff and George Saunders: ‘Deep Kiss’ and ‘Victory Lap,’ ” Word for Word dives even deeper than usual into the forbidden terrain of that which is thought but not uttered.
If the result is perhaps not as imaginative as the stories themselves are, the show, which opened at Z Space on Saturday, Aug. 11, nonetheless paints these imaginings lucidly. And hearing deviant words spoken aloud, as opposed to merely reading them, adds to the feeling of delicious transgression. You emerge from the theater feeling both more defensive of your own vagabond musings and perversely tempted to voice them and see what happens.
Wolff ’s “Deep Kiss,” directed by Joel Mullennix, follows a young love lost — a loss that seems to keep happening over and over again in the life of Joe (Adam Elder). In high school, for three months, he dates Mary Claude (Blythe de Ol-
iveira Foster), and their kissing chemistry is so electric that they’re “stitched together at the mouth,” as his mother (Susan Harloe) puts it.
But one day, on an errant impulse, he ignores her, which “ruined everything.” That loss bleeds into other, later losses — the sickness of Joe’s father (Paul Finocchiaro), his own children’s growing-up — turning up again and again as a road not taken, but one that seems just as real as his medical practice, as mowing the lawn on a sweaty summer day.
If Mullennix’s direction can feel more didactic than dramatic, illustrating scenes as if they’re pictures in a book instead of the live, urgently unfolding present, Elder’s unaffected, unhurried delivery gives Wolff ’s words just the right touch. He sets each new thought afloat as if he’s gently casting a paper boat out to sea.
Saunders’ “Victory Lap,” directed by Delia MacDougall, lets its characters’ reveries fly even farther afield. Cosseted high schooler Alison (Isabel Langen) sees herself as a benevolent princess, befriending woodland creatures, getting courted by suitors, feeding the world’s poor. In Langen’s uproarious rendering, Alison wafts through her charmed world as if always in a ballet recital or giving an acceptance speech, as if she carries a magic wand.
By contrast, her classmate and neighbor Kyle (Alexander Pannullo) is always doing subconscious battle with his parents’ recriminations. He can’t touch a toe on the floor of his own home without sullying it; even when Kyle’s alone after school, his father (Finocchiaro) is nonetheless so present that he’s liable to pop out of the woodwork. And then there’s an unnamed stranger (Mohammad Shehata), who refers to himself as “the king” while also painting himself as the flunky of other nogoodniks.
Saunders makes these three wild streams of consciousness intersect, jarring all of them out of the comforts of the mind’s eye. Though his plot mechanisms can veer sensationalized and lurid, the stuff of suburban worst nightmares, he ultimately reveals our mental bubbles, the fantasy lands we build for ourselves, as a precious treasure. Once we lose them, all we have left is reality or nightmare.