This summer, I got to be in the same room with Peter S. Beagle.

It was WorldCon, and we were celebrating The Last Unicorn, which will soon be reissued, with Beagle’s notes.

I love both the book and the movie (Angela Lansbury as a hag? Yes, please!). Not only did I watch the hell out of my VHS copy when I was young, but I’m sure I damaged it by spending a whole afternoon pausing, rewinding, and re-playing each song so I could write out the song lyrics by hand.

Here are a few things Beagle let us in on at WorldCon:

Christopher Lee, when agreeing to be the aging King in the film, said he wanted to do it because it was the closest he would get to playing Lear.

The butterfly’s ramblings contain a reference to Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil by Stuart Walker.

The butterfly is Beagle’s “self portrait.”

Molly and Schmendrick weren’t in the first draft at all, which Beagle says is especially surprising since “Molly is the heart of the book.”

I’m looking forward to learning more when the special edition comes out.

Until then, I’m just gonna keep watching this cover of theme song by Ninja Sex Party.

The first time I saw Fight Club, when it came out in 1999, I said, “I am going to teach the fuck out of this.”

And I have.

It’s a beautifully constructed film (dir. David Fincher), based on a powerful novel by Chuck Palahniuk.

It also strikes a chord with those of us who want to understand and who fear toxic masculinity.

(Sadly, it also appeals to those who are toxic. I have had a few young male students misunderstand the film, seeing it as an endorsement of Tyler Durden’s worldview, instead of as a critique of it.)

I most recently taught it in an advanced composition class as part of a zeitgeist assignment.

Fight Club set now would be a very different movie.

A 2019 Fight Club would still critique consumer culture and its role in what’s bothering our straight middle class white men–Susan Faludi explained in 1999 that contemporary Western men feel adrift–they are no longer respected simply for being men; they struggle to financially support themselves and their families. Faludi noted that they were actually in a position close to women in the 1950s–encouraged to find satisfaction by looking good (hitting the gym and using product) and buying the right things. Faludi called this the culture of ornament.

The protagonist in the film isn’t satisfied in ornamental culture. Divorced from real connections with people, he attempts to find happiness in self-help groups and then in a hyper-masculine paramilitary terrorist organization.

Notably, he doesn’t ever try helping another person or finding an honest connection with others.

Our protagonist would still have the same choices before him if he were having his crisis in 2019. More might be made of escaping with drugs, though. In the film, he asks for sleeping pills–his doctor refuses because the narrator needs real sleep. It’s likely he would have gotten his hands on pills some other way–and perhaps pain killers–if the movie were set now. (One can also imagine an epidemic of opiate use in the Fight Club members–there are so many emergency room visits–so many broken bones.)

A 2019 movie would likely show the men to be even more misogynistic than they were in 1999. Tyler explains that they were raised by women and abandoned by their fathers–he questions whether they need women. But it’s likely those same men now would also be incels–the whiny, insecure men who think they are owed sex, that women shouldn’t get to turn them down. Tyler famously said: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” Inherent in the promise of being a millionaire movie/rock star is the promise of women chasing you. Not having easy access to sex is part of why weak men are very, very pissed off now.

And incels are a growing problem in domestic terrorism.

Speaking of domestic terrorists, Fight Club‘s world is overwhelmingly white. Would today’s Tyler be resorting to racism and a fear of immigrants to make his army? Probably.

Watching Fight Club in the #metoo era is interesting. Project mayhem isn’t just attacking corporations and chain coffee places–one of the headlines we see is “Performance Artist Molested.” One shudders to imagine what they did.

But the biggest change when watching this movie now is the intense discomfort when the protagonist threatens to commit a mass-shooting at work. We hadn’t had as many of those incidences in 1999–not enough for the manager to fire him and call the cops, which is what I’m assuming would happen now.

The protagonist makes a clear threat after his boss asks him about the Fight Club flier in the copy machine:

“Well, I gotta tell you: I’d be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who wrote that… is dangerous. And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you’ve known for years. Someone very, very close to you.”

He then notes these words are Tyler’s.

How does anyone watch this now and think Tyler’s ideas are good ones?

Update: McSweeney’s also played around with how we should understand Fight Club 20 years later here. It’s awesome.

Second update: When I taught this in Winter 2020, one of my students said it looked like a pretty Republican world, because he saw so many American flags. I then had to explain that back in the 1990s, flying or wearing a flag had nothing to do with political party. It’s only after the 2000 election and 9/11 that Republicans somehow co-opted it. (Notably, that’s the election that invented the idea of “red” and “blue” states.)

In 2016, I mentioned that I had the pleasure of seeing John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons at Berkeley Rep.

You can now have the pleasure of watching it too–it’s on Netflix.

Leguizamo’s shows are amazing–he’s funny and high energy and always dances for us (he’s a great dancer), but more importantly, they are poignant.

This is my favorite of them all.

Leguizamo’s son is getting bullied and is stymied by his history project, which asks about heros–who are the heroes from his culture? They certainly aren’t in his history books.

Leguizamo realizes that he knows nothing about his culture’s heroes either. But he did a lot of research. Here, weaved into his family’s story, we get the highlights. You’ll learn, you’ll laugh, you’ll cringe. This is a master writer, actor, and comedian at work.

Watch this with your friends and family. And then make sure you watch it again next year for Thanksgiving, as we balance our thankfulness for family with our mourning for our colonial past and our admiration for the Latinx heroes in this nation, like John Leguizamo.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to see Lynn Nottage’s Sweat at CapStage. Sweat won the 2017 Pulitzer, and Michael Stevenson’s production is the Sacramento Premiere.

We start with a functional if imperfect community–generations have been employed by the local mill–there’s time for a drink with friends after a long day on the line.

But then the company wants to take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, using the threat of closing to hurt their workers and destroy their union.

Unfortunately, this pits worker against worker, as they try to survive.

I don’t come from a mill town, but this story is still familiar. In the South, we don’t have unions–people have been able to stoke racial prejudice to keep it from happening. “It’s not that we’re exploiting you,” the rich company says. “The blacks/hispanics/immigrants that are the reason you’re poor and poorly treated.” Even when I worked full-time for a major research university there, I didn’t get benefits.

UC Davis lured me here easily, with the promise of health insurance. The union had demanded it. Right now, my union is fighting with the university for me, but the threat of us turning on each other is there.

It’s easy to see why this play won a Pulitzer–it captures us. That’s why it fits so well in CapStage’s season, #SearchingforAmerica.

It’s a heartwrenching/heartwarming story, with just enough moments of humor to help us look into the mirror it holds up to us.

The staging is simple and effective, and the acting is so beautifully done, the characters so realistic, that you half expect to see them on the line at the mill the next day.

Sweat runs through November 19th–don’t miss it.

The Wolves is an ensemble play by Sarah DeLappe. I was excited to learn it would premiere at CapStage after it won an Obie and was shortlisted for the 2017 Pulitzer.

It’s the first play in their new season–#SearchingforAmerica.

What director Nancy Carlin gives us is indeed a piece of America.

The Wolves consists of us watching a series of warm-ups that the Wolves, a high school soccer team, do before games. It’s done in a naturalistic style.

Naturalism is related to realism, but is actually more realistic. In extreme naturalism, if people are supposed to be cooking, they would be cooking for real. If something were supposed to smell bad, the audience would smell it too. Naturalism is called “slice of life” theatre.

In this case, it means that sometimes a few characters have their backs to us–and that when these girls talk, we are experiencing what it sounds like to overhear many girls–overlapping conversations, half thoughts, and cuss words.

If this play were done in a realistic style, I probably wouldn’t like it, but the naturalism works.

We see what we see–nothing gets solved. No story gets fully told. There is no happy ending, because there isn’t an ending. The majority of the girls are juniors, so they’re not even reaching the end of senior year at the end of the play–we just get these practices–to see this tiny slice of their lives (and all the hints at more). There are colds and crushes, small deals and big ones.

The slices are familiar–what I heard as I was leaving was people remembering their own clubs in high school, their competitions, having to go to their daughters’ practices.

The play is a tight 90 minutes–and the actors are surely exhausted by the end–they’re basically playing soccer for a standard game time, after all.

This is the kind of play that really works in the intimacy of CapStage’s theatre–you’re always just a few feet away from the actors, so you’re beside them when they accidentally insult each other, when they apologize, when a fight almost breaks out over one girl leaving the other vulnerable to an older boy pressuring her for sex. We are right there with them.

We are the wolves.

Eighth Grade, written and directed by Bo Burnham, is brilliant.

Translation: it’s so true, so good at capturing that awkward, horrible age, that it’s hard to watch.

But you still have to watch it.

The film follows Kayla during her last week of eighth grade–Burnham makes an innovative choice here–we just see this week–no flashbacks, no explanations for how this young woman came to be–just a stark picture of how she is.

Two things have followed me after sitting with this movie for a week.

First, there is a scene in a car with an older boy. I have been in that car, many times, trying to get away.

I heard myself, when I was in ninth grade, say to my first “boyfriend”: I don’t know why you want to sleep with me. I don’t even think you like me, considering how you treat me.

That was me, young and naive, pleading for my boyfriend to try to pretend he liked me.

(The other thing about this film that I keep thinking about is Kayla’s dad–and how I wish I had had one like him. Kayla gets to come home and scream and cry after being in that car.

I would usually come home to discover that my stepfather had forgotten I was gone and locked me out.)

Elsie Fisher is amazing as Kayla–at times, this felt like a documentary, due to the realism in her performance. Her father, played by Josh Hamilton, is perfect in capturing the ways in which parents are befuddled by their offspring at this age.

At this point in life, I watched this movie identifying both with Kayla and her father. I have been the trainwreck, and I have also been the parent who sees the wreck about to happen and who can do absolutely nothing to stop it.

There is just no way to protect our children from being thirteen.

The Thanksgiving Play at CapStage closes on July 22nd.

See it before then, please.

I was able to see it last night. I loved this play, but what struck me most was the audience’s laughter. I have never heard more hearty, desperately-trying-to-catch-a-breath belly laughs in a theatre before.

(Was the spelling of “theatre” correct there? It’s a big debate, but I’ll have to explain it later.)

The humor comes from many angles, intersecting in a strongly directed piece, with great comic timing, about race, gender, theatre, voice, agency, shopping habits, eating habits, stress, simplicity, collaborative theatre (insert shudder of recognition from my acting days), education, selfies, and performativity.

The Thanksgiving Play is about a school drama teacher trying to construct a culturally relevant play about Thanksgiving in a way that will both appeal to our post-post racial, #metoo time and honor Native Americans.

Except they don’t have any Native Americans.

This is a beautiful, biting, clever satire. You’re watching a cast of white actors (playing a cast of white actors) talk about the problem of the invisibility of Native Americans, as they try to construct a play about Thanksgiving with no Native Americans. If this weren’t meta and weren’t written by a Native American playwright, we would be in trouble.

But it is and it is, so laugh away.

If I had more time this month, I’d see it again.

Author: Larissa FastHorse

Director: Michael Stevenson

The awesome cast: Gabby Battista, Cassidy Brown, Jouni Kirjola (we’re probably related, in the way that all Finnish Americans are), Jennifer Le Blanc.

I loved Marjorie Prime.

I went into it as a blank slate, and it’s probably best if you do the same, so this review with be brief and with as few spoilers as possible.

Marjorie Prime was written by Jordan Harrison, and is directed here in a co-production with American Stage by Stephanie Gularte.

It’s a brief, powerful play with wonderful acting and a gorgeous set.

In an attempt to avoid plot, let me pose some questions:

If you could interact with someone you lost, what age would they be?

If you could change your memories, what would you rewrite? What would you forget completely?

What if Alexa were programmed to be your grief counselor?

Do you want to see a play you’ll be thinking about for weeks?

Marjorie Prime runs through June 3rd at CapStage.

Go see it.

Last Saturday, I saw Office Hour at Berkeley Rep (it runs through 3/25).

Office Hour is about a writing teacher who tries to reach a student so disturbed that other teachers are afraid he’ll shoot up the school.

Guns and gunshots are involved.

I was with Melissa, another writing teacher, and Marcus, a teacher at a middle school, where three students have been expelled in the last two weeks for threatening to kill their teachers and peers.

In other words, it’s timely.

The script is by Julia Cho (I’d seen another play, Aubergine, by her before). Lisa Peterson directs.

It was thought provoking, provoking-provoking (a woman seated behind us gasped loudly several times), and very well done overall.

There were a few things that bugged me, though–that have been bugging me since I left the theatre.

One is that one of the teachers complains about intellectual freedom. In the play, intellectual freedom is presented as something that restricts the teachers from telling a disturbed student that he can’t write about violent rape and murder in a way that is triggering the other students.

Teachers can tell students what they’re allowed to write about for an assignment. Intellectual freedom protects teachers–we can bring in the works we want, make the assignments we want for a class, even if some of the students don’t like them.

In other words, teachers don’t complain about intellectual freedom.

The second issue we had was with a particular moment. A teacher is afraid of a student–concerned that he may be a shooter. He goes to leave her office. She yells at him that he has to stay.

Um, what?

I can’t imagine anyone yelling at a student to stay in an office hour. Much less one you’re afraid of. When you’re alone.

There’s also a new character added in the last few minutes–confusingly & distractedly.

Finally, the two main characters of Cho’s script are Asian-American. At one point, another character says one character should be able to “reach” the other because they share that race. The audience cringed. But later, it seemed to be true. So what was the message?

Berkeley Rep is a great theatre–I have season tickets.

I do recommend this play. I’m still thinking about it, after all.