War, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely something if you are a playwright with John Fisher's sense of familial glow and a camp preference geared more toward a swaggering John Wayne or bombastic Charlton Heston than Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Theatre Rhino's artistic director has written plays to bookend its new season with a battlefield rapture born of a rare common denominator in his family.
The Battle of Midway! Live! Onstage! begins the season on Nov. 14 at ACT's Costume Shop, and Timon! The Musical!, a battle-enhanced loose interpretation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, will conclude the season in May in an outdoor production at Yerba Buena Gardens. These productions follow such other wartime Fisher originals as Combat!, Special Forces, and Fighting Mac!
Why this attraction to armed theatricals? "I grew up in a very fractious family," Fisher said. "I don't think we always heard each other, but there was one point of common interest, and that was old World War II movies. We enjoyed the excitement of them together, and my father would enjoy talking about what it was like to live at that time. I've grown up to be a pacifist, but I'm sort of stuck with this warm glow around something I shouldn't like."
Fisher wrote, directs, and has a prominent role in The Battle of Midway! Live! Onstage!, which contains nine songs by composer Don Seaver set to Fisher's lyrics. Despite the camp and satire that the production will bring to the story, Fisher said, "It's all there, the actual history, even if we're telling the story in our own thoroughly obnoxious way."
While the game of battleship plays out with one eye toward history, Fisher has more in mind than the strategic maneuverings of both sides in combat. "The play's also about queer theory, arts funding in San Francisco, and the battle for audiences in the changing contemporary landscape," Fisher said. "I think you know from my work that I feel hamstrung if I'm stuck in just one historical period."
The nine-member cast is also a mash-up of gender and race. "In this production, it's men versus women, so it's a battle of the sexes, and the women play the Japanese, and the men play the Americans. The Americans do win the battle, but in the show I think you see that nobody really wins in war."
Fisher began writing Midway after seeing Peter and the Starcatcher, a play that created an elaborate backstory for the character Peter Pan. "I was, like, wow, they really decided to do something they were obsessed with, and I thought, 'What am I obsessed with to that extent, and how would that manifest itself?' In a way, it's a show about my obsessions, some old obsessions and a lot of them new ones."
Following a New Year's Eve performance of Shopping: The Musical, Rhino's season will continue with The Anarchist, David Mamet's most recent Broadway play, which begins performances at the Eureka Theatre on Jan. 2. The play took a critical drubbing when it opened in New York two years ago, and closed in short order. Fisher thinks that Mamet may be out of fashion now because of his noisy rightward political shift, and Fisher wonders if Mamet's decision to direct his own play may have been a mistake. "I think we're kind of lucky that it got such a stinky response," Fisher said, "otherwise ACT or one of the other big theaters might have grabbed it."
The two-woman play is about a war-of-wills between a convict and the warden who has the power to free her after 35 years for killing two police officers while a member of a radical movement. "I think it's a challenging play about strong personalities," Fisher said. "The woman who has been incarcerated her whole life has found that she can express herself as a lesbian in jail, whereas her warden has been sexually repressed all her life. It's sort of like, who's really in prison?"
Opening in March, Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code looks at the illustrious career of British mathematician, cryptologist, and computer pioneer Alan Turing, who helped turn the course of WWII when he broke the Nazi's Enigma code. When he was in arrested in 1952 for homosexual behavior under Britain's "gross indecency" laws, he accepted chemical castration over prison, and died a probable suicide two years later.
Whitemore's play hasn't been seen in San Francisco since a 1988 production at the Magic Theatre, two years after its London debut. "It's a beautifully constructed play," Fisher said, "but for a long time I don't think people understood what Turing had accomplished and what would happen to him, and now he's getting the recognition." That recognition includes the television docudrama Codebreaker, the upcoming feature film The Imitation Game, and even a sidewalk plaque on Castro's new Rainbow Honor Walk.
The Rhino season concludes in May with Timon! The Musical! at Yerba Buena Gardens, where Fisher's Titus! had a sprawling production in 1998. As with Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens is one of the lesser-regarded plays in Shakespeare's canon, which makes it ripe for toss-the-script reinvention.
"I see it as a play about arts patronage, and what that does to people," Fisher said. "Timon helps a lot of what today would be non-profits and artists, but they betray him, and he ends up alone. I think the play has a lot of similarities to what's going on in San Francisco right now, but it's really a jumping-off point for what I'll just call my usual kind of shenanigans."
The Battle of Midway! Live! Onstage! will run Nov. 14-30 at ACT's Costume Shop. Tickets are $15-$20. Season tickets are also on sale. Call 552-4100 or go to therhino.org.