Sunday Streets, Pier 70, Shakespeare in the Park (9/14/08)

Sunday morning I spent some time biking around with a friend of mine at the Sunday Streets event. It was novel to casually bike down the Embarcadero without worrying about traffic, although in some ways Golden Gate Park provides a nicer Sunday car-free experience. The weather was great and it was pleasant to see a lot of families and a diverse SF crowd out enjoying the sun and getting some exercise. Overall it was a nice ride, but there didn’t seem to be a ton of activities that interested me enough to stop at them (in fairness, I hadn’t checked the website to see what was going on, either). I had stuff to do in the afternoon, so I took off before we got to Hunter’s Point and Bayview. Just before I did, we happened to come across a brief 15-minute walking tour of Pier 70.

(Aside: this blog is not going to become a blog about walking tours. I mean, I like them, but really. I need to start catching more shows to leaven out the mix a bit.)

The tour was put on by SF City Guides, an organization I’d like to get to know better one of these days. It was led by a man named Ralph Wilson, who is the author of the official unofficial site about Pier 70, pier70sf.org. For a 15-minute talk, I thought it was pretty great, covering a wide swath of historical time without going terribly in-depth in any one part, and finally touching on Proposition D, one of approximately 300 ballot measures in San Francisco’s upcoming election. The actual walking was pretty much limited to heading about fifty feet down a single street, which was fine. The “history” section of Mr. Wilson’s site probably covers about the same information we got on the talk. City Guides puts on a longer walking tour of this area and Dogpatch, which looks to be pretty interesting.

Later that afternoon I hopped on my trusty bike once again and headed up over Arguello into the Presidio to see Shakespeare in the Park’s current performance, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. I don’t have all that much to say about this; it’s one of the Bard’s least-beloved works and for good reason. It starts out with some incest and includes lots of scenes where Pericles’s daughter is only just able to talk herself out of being raped by various people; besides that, it’s chock full of deus ex machina of the old school, where the deus appears on stage and tells the protagonist what to do (the machina itself was thankfully missing in this production, however).

The decision by director Kenneth Kelleher to stage the whole thing as a sort of Wild West show was a peculiar one, since the narrative is heavily weighted with nautical voyages and one doesn’t often see sea journeys in cowboy movies. Still, it did work well enough to emphasize the frontier aspects of some of the many locations, I suppose. The most unfortunate thing about it was that many of the actors spoke in thick country aspects, which is fine but it made all the go to! and forsoothing seem a little, ah, anachronistic. I also felt that some of the comedy bits came uncomfortably close to mugging, but I often think that about Shakespeare, so it may just be a matter of my own taste.

Lead actor Michael C. Storm did an outstanding job as Pericles, and his performance was often the only thing about the play that kept me engaged in it. I also liked a lot of the staging, in particular during a storm at sea. And the play was logistically well-handled; I’d been afraid I wouldn’t be able to hear, but the actors were well-miced and the sound system was excellent. Overall it was nice to see a play outdoors on a nice day for free, it’s just a shame that this was the play it was.