A.C.T. Stages a Great Irish Play

Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock is one of the greatest of all Irish plays and it has moved and delighted audiences since its first overwhelming success at Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre in 1924.

Part of O'Casey's Dublin trilogy (with The Plough and the Stars and The Shadow of a Gunman), Juno and the Paycock (peacock) is the first of his plays ever to be staged by San Francisco's A.C.T. American Conservatory Theater. It is directed by Giles Havergal from the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, who directed A.C.T.'s 1997 hit production of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt.

O'Casey was the last of 13 children, eight of whom died in infancy. Growing up in the wretchedly crowded Dublin slums, he taught himself to read and relish the great English poets and to write, while he worked as a common laborer and became involved in Irish trades unionist movements. Juno is set in l922, a year of terrible warfare over the terms of Irish independence, civil war rather than uprisings against the British and all the more bitter and bloody because people like those in O'Casey's tenements feared being shot at from both sides.

Out of strife and grinding poverty, O'Casey created one of the richest human comedies ever written, and it has been staged with agility and imagination by Giles Havergal. It is about the Boyle family: "Captain" Jack the paycock, whose strutting gift of gab generally gets him out of doing a day's work and into the local "snug" for a few drinks, well played by Charles Dean who makes him a believable individual rather than a stereotypical ne'er-do-well drunk, and his long-suffering wife Juno, sharp-tongued and big-hearted, who keeps the family together. Robin Pearson Rose is outstanding as Juno, who has the same seemingly unbreakable strength as the mother in My Left Foot.

Her bête noir is Joxer Daly, Captain Jack's drinking buddy, played by Geoff Hoyle who does the classic singing-dancing-tippling "darlin' " Irishman wonderfully. The difficult role of son Johnny Boyle, shot and crippled in the fighting and full of fears, is brought vividly to life by Bryan Close. Daughter Mary, played with sensitivity by Kathleen Kaefer, wants to educate herself and improve her station. She falls for a smooth-talking stranger who brings the family news of an inheritance. And thereby hangs the hilarious and finally tragic tale.

This is one of he best A.C.T. shows I've seen and sure to be a big popular success, as it has been for more than 70 years, so make every effort to get to the Geary.

Juno runs only through Sunday, February 7. Single tickets from the Geary Theater Box Office, on Geary near Mason, by phone at 749-2228, online at www.act-sfbay.org, and at all BASS outlets. Groups of 15 or more are eligible for discounts; please call Linda Graham at 346-7805. Fulltime students and teachers with ID eligible for half-price tickets at the door 90 minutes before curtain, depending on availability.

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Chancellor's Concert -Thursday, January 28

This week's program in the increasingly popular Chancellor's Concert series headlines baritone Hermann le Roux, with Timothy Bach at the piano, in a varied selection of songs.

M. Mussorgsky (1938-1881)    The Nursery

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)    Oliver Cromwell and
                                                       Foggy Dew

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)    I bought me a cat

Folk Songs from Africa

Hermann le Roux is Chairman of the SF Conservatory of Music Voice Department and director of its Cantata Singers. He gives master classes and performs extensively in Europe, the Philippines, Japan, South Africa, and Israel. He is a founding member of the Pacific Voice Foundation and has received eight awards for his contributions to vocal teaching.

Timothy Bach is also on the faculty of the SF Conservatory as Chairman, Piano Accompanying; Chair, Ensembles, Music Literature, Chamber Music. He has been official accompanist at the music Academy of the West and the Carmel Bach Festival and has assisted many artists including Yo Yo Ma, Peter Pears, and Gerard Souzay, in master classes.

Free Chancellor's Concerts every Thursday in Cole Hall. Doors open at 12 noon for seating and brown bag lunch. Music from 12.15 to 12.45.

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Return of the Chinese Jades

When the Asian Arts Museum was opened in l966, industrialist and former International Olympic Committee Chairman Avery Brundage bestowed upon it his fabulous collection of over 1200 objects of precious Chinese jade, together with many other treasures. For years scholars and visitors came from every land and marveled at the jades, and then owing to space limitations the jade gallery exhibits were, to use a museum term, de-installed.

Now some 200 glorious jade artworks are back, beautifully installed in the two luminous galleries facing the Japanese tea garden and pavilion. Instead of presenting the ojects in chronological order, the exhibit is structured around nine central themes: ritual and burial works; archaic forms; human forms; ornaments; vessels, animals, plants; scholarly objects, and objects portraying rebuses, symbols of auspices such as longevity and good fortune.

In Chinese culture jade has always been given religious, philosophical, and political attributes. It was usually found among boulders in streams near mountains and hauled for months and years over thousands of miles to the skilled artisans at the court in Beijing.

On the exhibition walls are illustrations of the infinitely long, exacting and precise labor required to fashion objects of jade, too hard a stone to carve with chisels so it must be worked by painstaking sawing, drilling, and polishing with special abrasive sand.

The objects are of both nephrite and jadeite stone, whose colors range from translucent white, such as an incense burner with ten little musicians on it through all shades of gray and brown to black, and from the palest to the deepest green. There are also lovely works in jadelike stone such as lapis, rose quartz, and chalcedony. The exhibits range in size from a tiny turtle made in 206 BCE to the green nephrite figure of Shakyamuni in meditation from the early 1900s, and a pair of large vessels from the same period in the form of lifesize owls.

These jades will remain on display indefinitely at the Asian in Golden Gate Park, and the collection is to be given its own gallery at the entrance to the Chinese Court in the new Asian Art Museum in Civic Center, expected to open in 2001.

This jade show could be the goal of a rewarding lunchhour visit from the nearby UCSF Parnassus campus. Asian Art Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday 9.30 to 5, and to 8.45 on the first Wednesday of each month. Information 379-8801. Weekend parking available for $3 at the UCSF garage. 

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