...lower case pretension

I can be just as pre-tentious as the next guy (oh, real-ly?). Nonetheless, I am uncomfortable with pretension and artifice when forced into close proximity to it, especially with the high expectations of its creator looking me in the eye, daring me not to understand it. (Well, look at that sentence would you; talk about pretension.) Anyway, with close family members who mostly forgive me my pretensions, last week I saw a production of …after the quake at the prestigious Berkeley Repertory Theatre. This paragon of artifice originated at the equally prestigious Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and was conceived and directed by the prestigiously portentous Frank Galati. The work is based on the work of Japan’s Haruki Murakami and takes the form of a writer spinning a fantastic tale to a small child to help her sleep after she has been traumatized by an earthquake.

Being a child of California I have personally experienced a major earthquake or two and know the total helplessness that overcomes you when riding it out, not only while it’s happening, but for months afterwards. Dread is the word and dread is the emotion that can engulf you and prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep, if any sleep at all. A child in Fresno, California in the late ‘50’s (I can’t pin the year down exactly) must have the same problems as a child in Kobe, Japan in 1995.

So I was looking forward to Mr. Galati’s interpretation of, and my reaction to, this piece of prestigious literature by Mr. Murakami. Maybe I wanted to recapture the dread, I really don’t know. What I got, instead of deep emotion, was disillusion and disappointment. No doubt this play (fashioned from another medium) is artistic; but, to me, it reeks of, well, here it is: pretension. Maybe its basic foreign-ness, inscrutable and stylized, were beyond my level of understand-ing. Maybe it was because I just didn’t get the symbolism of the set or the meaning of the musical accompaniment. I certainly recognized some ersatz Shubert and definitely an oriental version of The Beattle’s Norwegian Wood, played live on a cello and a koto (a Japanese percussive instrument). Luckily I didn’t pick up on You Light up My Life, which my theater companions perceived.

What I did perceive is that, with a couple of exceptions, the acting wasn’t all that great and consequently, along with my incomprehen-sion of what was going on, it made for one long 90 minutes of theater. You did notice, did you not, that …after the quake, dots and all, are in lower case? Say what?