Dumping on Vera

I know, I know, I can be quoted as saying that I wouldn’t blog about this because my opinions are so negative but now that I’ve done some research I don’t want it to go to waste so, sorry, folks. Also, I apologize in advance to the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley, Calif. for my taking the time, while sinking to a new low, to say they shot themselves in the foot by their staging of Vera Wilde, a fairly new play-with-music by Chris Jeffries.

In 1880 Oscar Wilde wrote a play called Vera; or, The Nihilist which was based on the life, and trial, of Vera Zasulich who, in revolutionary zeal, had the temerity to shoot the chief of police of St. Petersburg, Russia (the one in Florida is safe). The play opened in 1881 and got decent reviews in London but closed quickly, ostensibly because in real life both Czar Alexander II and U.S. President Garfield were assassinated in a bit of bad timing for this type of melodrama. In 1883 Wilde made it to Broadway where Vera flopped miserably (the NY Times called it “valueless”) and Oscar slunk back to London and subsequently couldn’t get a dime novel published for ten years or so.

In 2002 Chris Jeffries thought it would be a good idea to combine the stories of Zasulich and Wilde, perhaps because both were involved in “trials of the century” (albeit for wildly divergent reasons) and both had been jailed for two years. This germ came to fruition in a production called Vera Wilde and has been produced at Seattle’s Empty Space Theater and now by Shotgun in Berkeley.

In 2008 I bought into the local hype and, unfortunately, some fairly decent reviews in the San Francisco Bay Area gazettes. I’m not trying to be some snobbish New Yorker here, really I’m not, but these critics really need to get out more.

The play, frankly, doesn’t work. Perhaps only Tom Stoppard can make this kind of thing sing, mixing history with music and modern ideas, as he has proven over and over. Mr. Jeffries is not up to the task and, even if he were, this production does him a disservice. The director should not be fired as much as being put in front of a firing squad. Even the set was confining and just, well, wrong…a bare stage with a few props would have been more serviceable. The acting was uneven; the singing more so, but that doesn’t mean anybody was actually any good; it was just different levels of amateurism.

As I said (see above) I apologize about writing anything at all but it was a very long evening in Palookaville for me and the pews used for seating became noticeably uncomfortable as the evening wore on and, well, my butt just needs some revenge. To be fair, some of the audience seemed to be enjoying themselves (occasionally too much so…hello, moms and dads) but, again, they too need to get a bit closer to off-off-off Broadway professionalism than this theater provides.

The highlight of the evening was the best shrimp and garlic pizza I’ve ever had (at Jupiter’s in downtown Berkeley). Oh, yeah, lest I forget, my little foursome had a great, and probably mean-spirited, time dumping on Vera Wilde on the drive home. That’s always fun to do, at the expense of others of course, and also hones the vocabulary.