A Day Devoted to the Goddess

The goddess scendan, that is. Went to Livermore today, arrived at about noon meaning to have lunch but wasn't that hungry so hung out at Peet's instead, then walked over to the Bankhead Theater (named after Tallula?) and picked up my ticket for Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues which was a benefit for, and performed by members and friends of the Tri-Valley Haven. My seat was B1, which was in the second row, in the stage right section (across the aisle from the primo orchestra center seats). My to my pleasant surprise, after a few minutes B2 was occupied by iamradar, who had arrived with a friend.

The show was excellent. Done on a mostly bare stage with a few chairs and a bench or two and a lectern, 11 women dressed mostly in black and/or red delivered their lines either singly, in pairs or trios. It was clear Director Eleisa (Lisa) Cambra focused on hitting your mark, picking up cues, learning your lines. For a cast who mostly had never been on stage before, they did a near-perfect job, as did the light board operator. One of the down sides of a tightly run show is often lines get lost when the cast doesn't wait for the laughs. There were many laughs, and with a packed house they were very loud as well. As the show progressed the cast got better at their comic timing.

I personally did not like when they split the monologues between three people - it felt like a three-way ping-pong match and defeated the whole purpose of monologue. The actors did very well with a difficult assignment, but it was no surprise that the most applause went to the 1-person routines.

Interspersed between the monologues were factoids about abuse issues, most of them apparently drawn from research, a couple anecdotal, one of which was wrong. Unfortunately the reason it was wrong ( hidden for TMI )

 Blame the author for the factoid mistake.

After the show, I joined _oy_ and scendan and Cherisse (sp? whose LJ name I do not know) at a bar across the street from the theater for a cast party, but after the handing out of flowers to the cast members, we split due to noise level and price level, and eventually we were joined by two more friends of the Goddess for dinner at Sansar. Good food, somewhat confused service, excellent conversation.