Frédérik Sisa

As I watched my first ever episode of Hell’s Kitchen, I was reminded of something Mike Daisey said during his monologue, How Theater Failed America. While describing the tail end of his life’s darkest year, he wondered why theatre festivals couldn’t just be festivals. Oh no, these have to be fights to the death where the winners are crowned with glory and the losers see their sets burned down and actors killed. Watching the highly competitive environment of Hell’s Kitchen, I could only think: there’s the problem in a nutshell.

Like that other quirky out-of-left-field indie hit with “Sunshine” in its title, “Sunshine Cleaning” is a film haunted by the spectre of suicide. A key difference is that where Steve Carell’s Proust scholar survives the attempt and is but one facet of his family’s loss of life direction, the past-tense suicide in “Sunshine Cleaning” is a scarring and defining event. But neither film is specifically preoccupied with the pathology of suicide, in the way “Revolutionary Road” or “The Hours” might be, although there are enough similarities between the two films to view “Sunshine Cleaning” as a thematic follow-up and extension of “Little Miss Sunshine.” Shared producers and Alan Arkin’s near-typecast part as a loveable but gruff father-figure are only the most obvious.

So there I was, a willing participant in the standing ovation, thinking, “Yeah, this is what theatre’s all about.” (After an evening of eloquent, profanity-laced monologuing, what I actually was thinking had a little more pepper to it. But you get the idea.) I would offer another theory as to how theatre “failed” America, and that little devil voice was trying mighty hard to make itself heard above the clapping and cheering. Still: Mike Daisey’s monologue How Theater Failed America, presented as part of the Kirk Douglas Theatre’s extra-curricular DouglasPlus series, is what theatre’s all about. And you only have until Saturday March 21st to catch this excellent micro-run production.

Just to get it out of the way, I’m not going to compare the Center Theatre Group’s production of Frost/Nixon to the film directed by Ron Howard. Mostly, it’s because I haven’t seen the film. And I haven’t seen the film mostly because there’s more art out there than this art critic has time for, and trailers featuring Frank Langella portraying Nixon with a bag of marbles in his mouth don’t quite offer much of an incentive. With that in mind, I’m pleased to say that irrespective of the movie, Frost/Nixon, the stage production, is outstanding.

So I’ve been on the lookout for a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan. After comparing what the major and not-so-major carriers have to offer, I’ve come to realize that I’m actually looking for something a little more fundamental and also more profound: The spirit of honest commerce.

In watching the oral arguments put forth to the California Supreme Court in regards to Prop. 8, I could understand how the ancient Greeks might have felt like flinging Sophists off the nearest cliffs. But we have to go through the exercise, especially with so much at stake. The irony is that those of us who reject Prop. 8 are, in a way, fighting for the right to “discriminate” – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I have no objection, in principle, to adapting stories from one medium to another, and no particular prejudice towards source materials whether they’re comics, video games or amusement park rides. Although the empirical evidence is a bit on the rare side, good ideas are good ideas and different mediums can, in theory, offer different, equally valuable lenses through which story ideas can be explored.

It may not have much by way of character psychology, and Mack the Knife’s troubles with women and rivals among Victorian society’s downtrodden offers only a thin thread of plot, but the satirical, borderline-polemic window into the brutish lives of the poor certainly draws blood.

I was watching Richard Dawkins’ documentary/polemic on religion, “Root of All Evil?” the other night when I was struck by an interview with a young man who converted to a zealous Islam from a loose Judaism. The hatred that animated him – a hatred for atheists (of course), a hatred for infidels, a prediction that one day Islam would spread across the globe – was terrifying. It was even more terrifying given a context in which Israelis pursue their interests with a singular moral blindness and Christians struggle with a history of crusades and imperialism. This led me to think of a solution for the problem of who should have Jerusalem. Hint: It involves applying some rather twisted Solomonic wisdom.

The recent shooting death of a chimpanzee gone viciously wild has certainly struck a nerve – yet another story of an individual caring for an animal thought to be domesticated, only to suddenly turn aggressive. Just the other day, Ron Reagan was discussing with callers whether or not non-domesticated animals should even be allowed as pets. My answer: Let’s abolish all pet ownership.