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REVIEWS 2012

THE WOUNDED STAG
&
Other Cloven Footed Tales of Enchantment

Occupy Fringe Theatre 2012: The Good, the Bad, and the Glowy

By Lily Janiak
Published in the SF Weekly 9-10-12

The dark, sui generis humor of Dan Carbone is childish in every sense of the word. All his stories on this "journey to the far side of the room," are from his twisted 1960s childhood, and he tells them using dolls, dioramas, and kids' songs with lyrics like "Mommy loves the baby with Beelzebub in her brain" or "General Tommy, the astronaut/his mother's womb is his favorite spot."  His show is manna for overgrown but still fucked-up kids everywhere -- which is to say, for all of us.

Occupy Fringe Theatre 2012

By Christopher Bernard
Published in Synchronized Chaos 10-1-12

A kind of nightclub butoh spazzed with satirical relish and a craziness that dares you to look away. About mid-way through the show there was an extraordinarily powerful sequence in which a seemingly innocuous mask combined with a darkly demented text and a maze of slow, wild contortions, becomes the very face of evil. A voodoo of death dancing with obsessive and joyless glee across the world. It was unforgettable and the sign of a formidable talent.

"FATHER PANIC!"

The Performant: Strangers in a strange land
Dan Carbone resculpts old terrain  
By Nicole Gluckstern
Published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian 02.02.12

From the dark corner of the stage throbs the low rhythm of a skin-clad, Celtic-style drum and the strum of acoustic guitar, while in the light a man clad in a white dress shirt sways in hypnotic time, eyes shut tight, arms flung wide. “Sleeping, sleeping,” he croons softly, “I’m only sleeping.” Still swaying, he begins to tell the tale from the beginning, about a little baby boy whose “brain is knitting itself in an unusual way.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking in this first moment that the man is speaking of his own infancy, after all, brains don’t come knit much more unusually than that of East Bay-based avant-gardian Dan Carbone. But the infant’s name is not Dan’s, and though his brief and tragic backstory reverberates through much of the rest of the play, the infant soon yields the spotlight to his younger brother, the creator of the piece, “Father Panic,” which made its stage debut at the Garage on Friday.

 Although “Father Panic,” is indubitably Carbone’s most autobiographical work, a fretful monologue about a precocious childhood both hideously warped yet strangely innocent, familiarly eccentric, flourishes abound throughout. Puppets, poltergeists, twisted songs that expose the tortured inner monologues of the characters to the surface, a live video installation curated by Philip Bonner (a.k.a. Bulk Foodveyor) of childhood detritus and memory bank fodder.

Catherine Debon takes a turn as television-land language teacher, who translates self-loathing lyrics such as “maybe we can hate ourselves together,” into mellifluous French. And instrumentation is handily provided by swampabilly guitarist Andrew Goldfarb, who comprises, with Carbone, the performative music duo Kingdom of Not. But the unacknowledged star of the show is probably Carbone’s mother, who gradually takes over the piece, a raw bundle of outré obsessions and an embattled nature, the very embodiment of a stranger in a strange land — like a Raëlian without a cause, or an aquatic African frog in a solitary tank.

*** 

Father Panic! Resurrects Childhood Horrors With Humor

By Lily Janiak
Published in SF Weekly, Feb. 2 2012 ​

Father Panic!, Dan Carbone's new solo show now at the Garage, makes a compelling case for giving theater artists the freedom (and the resources) to experiment.

The show, a multimedia exploration of Carbone's childhood, was developed as part of the Garage's RAW (resident artists' workshop) program, which offers free rehearsal space and a 12-week residency to create a new work of art. After three months, the work premieres, whether, in the words of artistic director Joe Landini, it's "sink or swim."

Carbone is definitely a swimmer. His piece, under the direction of Joseph Graham, weaves together character sketches and anecdotes from what must have been an awful childhood in reality -- he attended Catholic school and had a brother in a 20-year coma -- but that, on stage, Carbone renders with shrewd observations and offbeat humor.

The opening scene, when Carbone relives his toddler self, is one of the show's strongest. At this stage all he wants to do is watch puppets on TV, but televised French lessons are often all that's on. To illustrate this horror, Catherine Debon appears as the teacher, repeating benign sentences such as "Where is the library?" in ponderous monotone, stretching her lips and her tongue to show just how one ought to enunciate. She is live, seated at a desk before the audience, and also on video projection, captured on a nearby screen by the live filming of Philip Bonner, a.k.a. Bulk Foodveyor, who is also onstage.

Carbone starts to interact with the projected image, using shadow puppets to give the teacher glasses, pick her nose, and then, with real puppets, enact a scene in cartoon gibberish. His puppet language and the French lesson create a surprisingly musical call-and-response of incomprehensibility, so much so that at first you don't notice that the sample French sentences have shifted surreally to "I hate myself. Do you hate yourself, too?"

More often, the screen functions as a portal into Carbone's memory, showing scenes staged in dioramas with figurines (at all times we can choose to look either at the projected image or at Bonner as he manipulates the miniature sets), pages from his mother's compulsive note-taking, or other documents from his past (including a TV Guide from the early 1960s showing just how many French lessons might air in a single day), all of which lend the proceedings the gravitas that only nonfiction can provide.

But the real success of the production is the specificity with which Carbone renders the characters of his early life: the way his mother tried to preserve his childhood drawings by covering each individual line with a piece of scotch tape, or, drawing on her belief in reincarnation and her own psychic powers, told him, with a witchy cackle, that in a later life he'd have "lumps"; the way his father taught his sister to drive by only allowing her to drive in reverse in circles around her school, the two of them "living in their very own parallel universe."

The Garage has shown is how exciting it can be to be a part of the creative process.

REVIEWS 2010 
"THE DARK ROOM SERIES"

Underground and Proud
Dan Carbone evokes the most unconventional of worlds -- and does it his way

By Nicole Gluckstern
Published in the SF Bay Guardian, Feb 25th 2010

It's difficult enough to want to perform in San Francisco without the added hardship of not quite fitting into someone else's concept of "performance." And the unclassifiable Dan Carbone must surely be one of the hardest acts to shoehorn into a hapless festival curator's vision.

As a performer who regularly skirts the way-out edge between the surreal and the downright schizophrenic, he's had the dubious honor of being shut out of the comedy club circuit, kicked off the stage at San Francisco's now-defunct Dadafest, and not selling out the house of numerous local and national "standard" venues. But Carbone's ability to evoke the most unconventional of worlds — beginning with his classic one-act Up From the Ground, involving a mysterious giant flower in a Southern cornfield, and most recently with his "one man space opera" Kingdom of Not — has been discomfiting and astonishing audiences and critics on for more than 10 years, and he has the accolades, if not the ticket sales to prove it.

"The SF theater world has no idea what I'm about," Carbone confesses via e-mail. "They don't know what to do with me." Originally an experimental filmmaker, Carbone's off-kilter performance aesthetic and penchant for dream logic meshes more readily with his silver screen collaborators (including the inimitable Kuchar brothers) than with his more traditionally linear solo show peers. So what's a decidedly noncommercial, genre-shredding, avant-gardian to do to widen the scope of his influence? Start his own damn performance series, of course.

To kick start this series with a serious bang, Carbone is hosting professional provocateur-comedian Rick Shapiro in his second San Francisco appearance. A former drug addict and homeless rent boy, Shapiro's own slow rise (literally, up from the ground) serves as ample fodder for his mercurial rants against the status quo, and his unstructured, stream-of-consciousness performance style once earned him the moniker "the James Joyce of comedy." Or as Carbone puts it, "He's the only guy on the circuit who not only tells dick jokes but also riffs on Sartre and Kierkegaard — and does so simultaneously."

Their shared inability to write for the mainstream, which has precipitated this joining of forces, will test the theory that art is at its best when designed to suit its creators — not its curators. March 6, Carbone performs his two most celebrated solo shows, Up from the Ground and Here be Monsters, and premiere a show of works April 3 (both at the Dark Room Theater; check Web site for details). But his ultimate goal is collaboration. "The lesson," he concludes, "is I need to start my own scene."

Dan Carbone and Rick Shapiro Sat/27, 10 p.m., $8 Dark Room Theater 2263 Mission, SF (415) 401-7987

***

You Have Not Seen It All
 
By Hiya Swanhuyser  
Published in the SF Weekly March 6th, 2010

He's kind of the Daniel Johnston of performance art: Local entertainer Dan Carbone possesses an epic dedication to his art, which could be defined as "being super weird." Plenty of people (art school druggies, mostly) dabble in being super weird, but they don't have the stamina, the locked-jaw commitment, the self-knowledge, or the skill of Carbone.

He's lauded by other estimable oddballs; George Kuchar says, among other things, that "his mind is a bridge where wisdom and infantilization cross deep waters." Critics, bless their hearts, do their best: SF Weekly's own former theater critic, Michael Scott Moore, said of one of tonight's offerings, There Be Monsters!, that it "almost made me fall out of my chair."

The companion piece on the evening's roster is Up from the Ground, which concerns the South, an intense plant, and family issues.

***

There be more
Dan Carbone reclaims the Dark Room's late-night stage with wild fits of storytelling and subconscious reverie

By Robert Alvia
Published in the SF Bay Guardian, Feb 25th 2010

I don't know from reclaiming rituals, but when I saw the gangling guy in the deer mask and beige unitard prancing around the stage once more, I knew the vernal equinox could not be far behind. Herald of this new season is none other than writer-performer Dan Carbone, a long-cherished and uniquely committed Bay Area talent who remarkably has eluded actually being committed.

Back on March 6, Carbone was keeping it surreal in the Mission with a revival of two gems, Up from the Ground and There Be Monsters! (the latter featuring the aforementioned deer-man, among its varied and unexpected menagerie).

Carbone's upcoming single-evening production lays these two works to bed while promising new dreams directly ahead. He returns to the Dark Room with entirely new material, including the premiere of something called Ol' Blue Balls, pertaining to an encounter between Frank Sinatra and a little girl in the Eisenhower era, according to a press release, as well as a cross-cultural encounter called The Koreans and the piquantly titled Debbie and the Demons.

For those still woefully unfamiliar with Carbone's idiosyncratic oeuvre, the March 6 evening proceeded by quiet but wild fits of storytelling and subconscious reverie into a genially demented and devilishly clever assemblage of monologue, nursery rhyme, and Dada dreamscape. Ideas rushed out of Carbone's head amid a fit of logorrhea as bright and delighting as the silver tinsel yanked from the felt-lined anus of the well-soiled stuffed doggy in Monsters!

Befitting the late-night format, there were even some special guests. No less than Richard Chamberlain, ladies and gentlemen, was called out of the audience and onto the stage. And sure enough, bounding up with an aging, nearly forgotten celeb's practiced modesty and eager step was a guy who looked at least not utterly unlike Chamberlain, the star of TV's indelible Shogun miniseries, who let go a spiel too airily bizarre to recount here without much more coffee, its edge tempered by a vague mixture of nostalgia, regret, and that period ennui Jimmy Carter dubbed America's malaise. Giddy days those might have seemed too from the vantage of today's doom-clouded depravity, were it not for the growing suspicion that this guy isn't Richard Chamberlain at all and probably insane.

The late-show slot at the Dark Room is altogether apt. Carbone's stage occupies a space somewhere between Pee Wee's Playhouse and Night Gallery. It's such stuff as vaguely inappropriate dreams are made on.

In so far as the Dark Room shows — which began in February with Carbone opening for Rick Shapiro — stand to be a regular thing, Satan and audiences willing, we can all rest uneasier.


REVIEWS 2006 
"KINGDOM OF NOT"

Kingdom of Not  at the Cherry Lane Theatre

By Lisa Ferber
Published in NYTheatre.com, November 2006

"Kingdom of Not" is a one-man show in which the dedicated performer Dan Carbone takes us on a surreal trip. He appears on the cozy, warm set looking like an innocent small-town fellow in a pair of red suspenders over a white shirt and beige pants. What ensues is a wild rant in which Carbone inhabits the character of one Anita Humm, a zany woman from Turkey Bluff who discovers a special baby boy and becomes his caretaker.

Anita introduces Randall to a variety of people and non-people in her life, including the creatures inside her rug. Anita reads the baby a note from the creatures in which they declare, 'We are trying to jump the bones of the creatures and create more creatures.'

This show is not so much about the strange things that happen to Anita while she takes refuge with the boy in her crumbling old house, but about Carbone's performance. First of all, watching a grown man spending an hour and 15 minutes playing a woman without any attempt at drag creates a dissonance that keeps the mind awake. Add to that the strangeness of watching him also act out a baby, a talking rat, a gossipy librarian, and various other characters, and you've got yourself something to watch.

Anita tells the audience, 'This whole story is the truth! And I ain't so hardly ever lied! Hardly ever!' By the time she says this, one feels certain that while our narrator wouldn't deliberately lie, her command of reality might not be that sharp, as we also see her yell at some dogs, 'We have a reason to live and you do not!'

At one point during the monologue—which, really is hardly a monologue as there are so many characters; it's more like a one-man play—Carbone is an ant, saying, 'I'm young, spry, and reasonably well-adjusted considering what the world has done to me. Actually, I'm a little neurotic, but it works for me.'

Carbone periodically sings in strange voices, as when he croons in the persona of an ant, 'Eeeeeee aaaaayahhhh ohhhhh,' and then says, 'That's my first name.' He can somehow get away with having characters say lines that seem deeply philosophical at first even if on further inspection don't make that much sense: 'Sometimes I feel as if I'm pressed up against a balloon and the thing I'm trying to see is on the other side of the balloon. I'm trying to see it. I'm trying to make it all fit together.'

It somehow does all fit together, though it's hard to say why or how. At the end I didn't feel like I'd gotten to the real end of a story, but that's not what this show is about. We are just taken on Anita's journey with her baby and the strange creatures of their world.

Now, this show is not for everyone: If you only like feel-goods or plays with a strong throughline and do not have a taste for the bizarre, this won't be for you. If you are, however, willing to go along on someone's ride, it's certainly worth taking this chance. Watching Kingdom of Not is like being in a car with someone who zigzags left and right and makes you periodically unclear where you're going to end up; but then you do end up somewhere, and while it might not be exactly familiar, you're never sorry you went."

***

Kingdom of Not

by Linda Ayres-Frederick
Published in San Francisco Bay Times, Sept. 14, 2006

The most brilliant and imaginatively creative mind inhabits one Dan Carbone, who conjures his sorcery in the premiere of his latest solo performance titled Kingdom of Not. This is one of those rare Fringe shows that you should RUN, not walk, to see. Carbone is one of those geniuses who only gets better with age. And lucky are we to see his work as it has grown.

With only a baby carriage and white rocking chair, the quirky Carbone creates an entire world and a world of characters, each with a unique noise and distinct physical characteristics (including the old house they inhabit) that have you, between tears of amazement and tears of laughter, on the edge of your psyche. Buh, buh, buh Baby Randall, whose “father was a train whistle and mother was …more complex,” comes to life along with Anita Hummmmmm, who adopts him as her own after her sister Bonnie shot herself in the head.

This is one instance where meandering sidesteps — including the incredibly extant two-year, one-billion-ant mile voyage of the sugar ant scout across the floor, up the wall, along the sink, up to the cabinet, and into the blissful ecstasy of the crystalline white stuff — always magnify the central journey of his characters.

All of Dan’s pieces fit so exquisitely together that by the end, one feels as blissed out as that ant by the perfection of it all. And we are thankful to have “borne witness” to the one who sometimes “feels pressed up against a huge balloon …just holding onto the edges trying to see it and see things coming together.” They come together all right. While all hell is breaking loose right there in “Turkey Bluff with biggest town gossip Rebecca Nagle, who looks like a “marshmallow Easter Peep,” all the creatures in the rug are calling to Randall who is banging his head on the wall at the spot he later manages to crawl through to get to the other side!

If all this sounds bizarre, it is and yet, it all makes sense by the end. Heading for a run at NYC’s Cherry Lane Theatre after its Fringe performances, Carbone’s Kingdom of Not will probably take NYC by surreal storm. See him here first where he started out! Kingdom of Not is a MUST SEE!”

REVIEWS 2005

"THERE BE MONSTERS!" 

Happy Haunting

by Robert Avila
Published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian October 26, 2005

“The Exit Theater Café is haunted at the moment, by the frankly strange intensity of Dan Carbone, and a trunk full of inanimate objects possessed by his fervid imagination. Performer-playwright Carbone has been offering admittance to his modest little universe since 1995, and there's no denying the carefully crafted nature of these quietly outlandish vignettes (directed with loving attention by Joseph Graham), or the fiercely offbeat talent behind their secret stories, private little songs that must be sung, pussyfooting choreography, slide projections, and (with Malcolm Sherwood and Eliza Perkins) choice sound cues.

Most of the promised menagerie in There Be Monsters! either gets drawn from the mysterious trunk at the foot of the stage (Wolf Baby, for instance), or walks through the door, like special guests Cow Man (John Bauman) – a surprisingly expressive figure in a plastic novelty head and flesh-colored unitard – and the doughy-faced life-size doll named Lori Ann (Jennifer Gwirtz) who, as the song has it, "has got a demon in her head."

Carbone's unchained subconscious delivers up these fondled toys and decorative items with an undiminished relish, like a do-it-yourself pagan's mystical communion with the hall closet, or a stylized version of some OCD-driven creativity spied in the studio apartment across the street.

If There Be Monsters! can also create its own special monotony, there come fairly regularly and full-bore some gloriously off-key moments that match words and images in a heightened, koan-like banality – reminiscent, to me anyway, of something off a Nib Geebles wall calendar (but Google for yourself).”

*** 

Anti Establishment Meets the Hip

by Karen McKevitt 
published in the SFist : October, 2005

Wow, it's been too long since San Francisco's seen a Dan Carbone piece. Well, maybe it's been a year or two--but that's still too long. You think your life is more than a little surreal? You think you're a freak? You think you've seen some rad, edgy theater? Then you haven't seen a Carbone show. He's been called the Billy Bob Thornton of San Francisco (courtesy of former SF Weekly critic Michael Scott Moore, to give credit where credit's due), and his latest offering features mechanical creatures like a monkey astronaut, a sleeping pig and a dead Elvis. Who cares about plot? He's got a mechanical dead Elvis! Dude, our heads are spinning.

After a little foray into the land of multi-actor productions, Carbone returns to his solo performance roots with this little trip into the logic of dreams and the nature of childhood perceptions. The use of controlled substances may intensify this effect.

***  

There Be Monsters!
(A malfunctioning windup toy of a show, meant for adults but good for kids.)

By Chole Veltman
Review Published in SF Weekly Nov 2, 2005

“Dan Carbone's solo play is a malfunctioning little windup toy of a show. As assorted fluffy bunnies, stuffed Humpty Dumptys, and plastic astronaut monkeys fly around the minuscule Exit Cafe stage, Carbone half-sings, half-talks (or Sprechgesangs) his way through warped tales and ditties that aren't quite what you'd expect to hear on Sesame Street. A cross between Dr. Seuss and Freddy Krueger -- with a touch of Lewis Carroll thrown in for good measure -- Carbone is a big, bald man-child exorcising inner demons with a goofy grin and an old-fashioned trunk.

The performance's eccentricities wear a bit thin after 30 minutes; even so, the beautifully orchestrated lighting, sound, and movement cues create an engrossing aura that makes you feel like you're in the middle of a waking dream.

The production is meant for an adult audience, but I think There Be Monsters would appeal to kids -- and to those of us who spent our formative years ripping the heads off Barbie dolls or constructing My Little Pony abattoirs.

***

Staged Readings
“Pick of the Weekend”

By Karen McKevitt
Published in SFist October 2005
And the winner this week is There Be Monsters at Exit Cafe. Why? Because it's Dan Carbone! I've already pushed this show over at SFist a couple of weeks ago (actually, almost a month ago!), but it's still playing, so go see it already! You've got until November 19. Carbone is a trip, a genius freaky trip.

***

There Be Monsters - Dan Carbone Shares His Morphine

By Ed Brownson
Published in the SF Bay Times October 20, 2005

Ever had a shot of morphine? Truly one of life’s odder experiences. There you are, pinned to the hospital bed, watching. You can do nothing, interact with nothing, make sense of nothing: you’re just passive ectoplasm gaping at a demented universe unfolding around you. Welcome to Dan Carbone’s universe. There Be Monsters, indeed.

This almost-one-man show, at the EXIT Café Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 19, is near impossible to describe, but I’ll give it a go: There’s this middle-aged guy, see? And he speaks in a squeaky voice except when he doesn’t; and he song-and-dances and plays with these dolls and stuffed animals which may or may not be “important” and then Cow Man appears and has to choose between Jesus and Jungle-Belle then stuff happens and Cow Man turns into a buffalo and more stuff happens and… isn’t that Elvis? And then… Jesus… Elvis…?

I’m getting a little agitated here… Ooooohhh… more drips down the morphine tube… happy now…

There Be Monsters feels like the Fringe show it is. Prowling a festival, our minds jarred loose from “expectation,” we happily oscillate from one odd and ridiculous “event” to the next hoping for a jewel. Monsters would be a refreshing find at a Fringe: something truly unique. No mistaking, there are wonders here. The most arresting is Laurie Ann—but I can’t say a word about her without spoiling the trompe l’oeil. The monkey-in-space story, which somehow manages to circle and reprise, is hilarious.

Carbone’s Elvis is one of the better you’ll see—definitely a morphine-drip Elvis—a decomposing icon of an expiring culture. John Baumann and Jennifer Gwirtz ably assist on stage.

Half way in—the show barely lasts an hour— the curtain closes on Carbone and his muppets. Meanwhile, sounds from behind the curtain suggest Carbone is deconstructing the Eiffel Tower. When the curtain finally reopens, we find absolutely nothing has changed. WTF????

In the end, a bit of narrative, a sprinkle of cohesion, would vastly improve it without damaging its waggish creativity. Ok… we done now? A little more morphine down the tube, please… Ooooohhh…

***

REVIEWS 2004

"AN IMPERSONATION OF ANGELS"
or
"THE ENIGMA OF DESIRE" 


An Impersonation of Angels, or The Enigma of Desire

By Michael Scott Moore Review
published by SF Weekly 3-10-2004

“An Impersonation of Angels started four years ago as Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals -- Dan Carbone's teeming life of Dali, performed in the manner of a surreal painting. Audience members who have already seen the new version may not believe me when I say it's more coherent than the old one, but it is.

Impersonation follows Dali through life and death, as he learns to be an artist and ages into a melancholy self-caricature. He's pursued by someone we meet in the first scene, "Dead Baby Salvador in Limbo" -- a baby in frilly pajamas played by the bearded, stentorian-voiced Paul Gerrior. It seems Dali's mother miscarried a child named "Salvador Dali" before the great painter was born. This Baby Salvador haunts the artist with questions of life, death, and identity.

The play has flashes of pure brilliance: When Carbone is good, he's both hilarious and sublime. Christian Cagigel stands out in the cast as Federico García Lorca, giving an eloquent speech about poetic inspiration, or duende; later he dies with harrowing musicality as a bull, stabbed in the back with colorful red picas, his masked head resting on a silver platter while Dali talks to his treacherous wife Gala about evil and love and a maternal woman chirps like a bird in a tree. These rhythmic, musical, choreographed scenes are the strongest: They have duende.

***

REVIEWS 2002 

"UP FROM THE GROUND" 

San Francisco Magazine: November Theatre Picks
"One of the funniest shows you'll ever see!"
Hysterics

By Michael Scott Moore
Published in SF Weekly Nov. 2002

If Dan Carbone is our local Billy Bob Thornton, then Up From The Ground (his half of an event called 'Hysterics') is his Sling Blade -- a twisted show about Southerners, written and performed by Carbone himself. His hilarious caricatures of a farmer, his wife, and their son and neighbors are like nothing else currently onstage in this city; they seem to come from another world, like the flower that grows in the field behind their farm. ("It don't seem like nothin' Jesus would leave," growls the farmer.)

Up From The Ground premiered at the 1998 Fringe Fest, and Kaliyuga Arts is giving it a new production here in an evening of two solo pieces.

***

Talkin’ Broadway: Regional Review/ West Coast

By Richard Connema
Published in Backstage West Nov. 2002

"A thought-provoking drama. Clever and biting ... Up From The Ground premiered at the 1998 Fringe Fest and is given a new production here. Carbone takes the role of all the characters and he is hysterical and heartbreaking -- a combination of Buck Owens, Billy Bob Thornton and Jonathan Winters. An enthralling evening of intellectual theater!"

*** 

REVIEWS 2001
"THE PILGRIM PROJECT"

San Francisco Bay Area Critic’s Circle Award for “Best Original Script”

"Outstanding! ... A bizarre account of the Pilgrims' arrival on the Mayflower and their colonization of the new land, written by absurdist Dan Carbone. A paper turkey burns and a Native American speaks in a proper British accent in this fusion of humor and stark truth." — Karen McKevitt, SF Weekly

***

"Wildly theatrical! ... A great sense of language and physicality (and a powerhouse cast of nine)." — Adam Sandel, SF Examiner

***

"Hysterical! ... A raucously comic yet brutally honest history lesson that dishes the real dirt on just how expatriate English Pilgrims 'settled' wild America." —Dennis Harvey, digitalcity "Inventive! ... Alternately funny, confusing, and intriguing." —Jean Schiffman, Back Stage West

***
REVIEWS 2000

"SALVADOR DALI TALKS TO THE ANIMALS"

The Oddest Fish in Our Pond of Experimental Theater: Dan Carbone
Facial Hair:  Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals & The Beard

By Michael Scott Moore
Originally Published May 10, 2000

Steve Winn's amusingly ill-informed article last month on fringe theater in the city suggested that the '60s, '70s, and even the '80s were more adventurous times for playgoing here than the '90s. That might well be true. But how would he know? The Chronicle critic makes a point of missing most local experimental stuff. (He held up Teatro ZinZanni as a "deconstruction," but he doesn't seem to have heard of Art Street, Unconditional Theater, or Kaliyuga Arts.)

Fortunately -- and by accident -- the Exit Theater is testing Winn's proposition this month with a pair of plays, one old and one new, in its Absurdist Season.

Michael McClure's beat classic The Beard was one of San Francisco's cultural scandals when it premiered in 1965. Cops shut down its fifth performance and arrested the cast on obscenity charges. Almost two weeks later it opened again in Berkeley; again the police turned up; this time a noisy audience drove them away. The ACLU got involved in the subsequent trial, and after five months the obscenity charges went away, too… Was the play worth the trouble? The Beard imagines what might happen if Jean Harlow met Billy the Kid in heaven.

It's short, repetitive, pseudo-religious, and obscene. Norman Mailer's assessment that it "serves almost as subway stops on that electric trip a man and a woman make if they move from the mind to the flesh" now seems, like so much of Mailer, flatulent… It's worth reviving only as a measure of how much has changed since 1965, because any cop attempting to close the show now would be laughed all the way down Eddy Street.

Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals also concerns a cultural icon with eccentric facial hair. Its Dan Carbone's first full-length play, as far as I know -- developed especially for the Absurdist Series -- and Carbone has got to be the oddest fish in our pond of experimental theater. Shaped like a turnip, with a greedy boyish smile and a furze of gray hair, he looks nothing at all like Salvador Dali, but that doesn't restrain him.

The play's first half shows the ghost of the old Spaniard in heaven, fielding talk-show questions from a cultured cow. Carbone plays Dali in a white robe, with towering mustaches. The illusion is barely convincing until the second act, though, when scenes from Dali's lifelong affair with Gala Eduard play out in semirealistic fast-forward.

Carbone made a local name for himself at the '98 Fringe Festival with Up From the Ground, an elegant short piece about a Southern family perplexed by a giant, beautiful flower growing in its cornfield. The story itself had a bizarre sad beauty, and the snatches of comic surrealism Carbone performed as companion skits were among the funniest things I've ever seen onstage. In one scene he compared a reverent but tacky portrait of Christ with a photo of a smiling horrible monkey wearing a pretty bow. ("Jungle Belle.") Jesus and Jungle Belle both reappear in Dali. Their portraits are oddly similar, and remembering them from Up From the Ground nearly made me fall out of my seat.

By itself, though, Dali isn't as funny. The homage to a great surrealist runs on the idea of surrealism rather than surrealism itself. In Act 1, after the talk show, Dali's ghost does a sitcom (I Love Dali), goes on a tiger hunt, and appears as the Easter Bunny in the scatological dream of a cow as scripted by the writers of a children's program. My God, is it weird. Some parts are even funny.

But the work as a whole feels like a vaguely self-conscious jumble of goofy ideas; the show has no coherence -- logical or otherwise -- until the second half, when Dali rejects his TV family for Earthly memories of Gala. The discipline of realism is good for Carbone, and his impressions of Dali at various stages of life -- young and in love, middle-aged and successful, decrepit and cuckolded -- improve with John Sowle's costumes.

Unreal scenes still erupt into the story (Dali's art-crit slide show, for example), but the events of his life need no embellishment by the end. The best scenes show Gala cruising for boys in the back of her limousine, and flirting with the lead of Jesus Christ Superstar, Jeff Fenholt. (True story.) Of course Fenholt looks like Jesus. And when they join the king and queen of Spain -- the queen with a brace for her arm, so she can wave -- who out-foul-mouth a couple of hip '60s art types, it's clear that Carbone has found his way into a new kind of strangeness.

The show is uneven but fertile, exuberant. Erica Blue plays an icily enigmatic Gala, Marin Van Young is ideal as Twinkle Ann, Paul Gerrior is strong in all his roles, and Vince Camillo makes a good hippie. Director John Sowle has done a valiant job in stringing it all together. Dali, furthermore, beats The Beard at its own game. And although our '90s scene could be larger, the evidence from this pair of shows suggests that experimental theater is doing just fine.

***

Hello Dali!
Dan Carbone gets mighty surreal as Salvador.

By Brad Rosenstein
Published in the SF Bay Guardian May 10, 2000

FOR ANYONE WHO saw his brilliant solo piece Up from the Ground, it would take little inducement to join Dan Carbone on another expedition into the netherworlds of his imagination. His latest work, Salvador Dalí Talks to the Animals in the Heaven on Top of Heaven, is now premiering at Exit Theatre as part of its Absurdist Season. It unites Carbone with a cast of seven actors and designer-director John Sowle in a surrealistic meditation on Dalí's life and work.

Given the kind of direct access Carbone has to his unconscious, this would seem like a match made in the heaven on top of heaven. Linear narrative clearly will not do for a subject like Dalí, and Carbone is in his element conjoining images from the 20th century's preeminent subverter of logic and his own compelling dreamworld. Dalí's dripping clocks and incongruously placed shellfish seem natural companions to Carbone's iconic cows and windup toys. But initially the meeting of surrealist and surrealist is a bit too much for the piece to handle. After an inspired opening sequence in which sycophantic talk show host Zachary Strayhorn (Paul Gerrior) summons up the spirit of Dalí, back from the dead with some new paintings, the show loses itself in random sitcom and children's show parodies. These troubled metaphors for Dalí's ironic pursuit of bourgeois innocencedon't come off, and it's only with the beautifully surreal introduction of Dalí's bitch-goddess muse Gala (Erica Blue), a lobster blossoming from her genitals, that the piece finds its heart and its spine.

The second half is considerably better, as Carbone skips nimbly across Dalí's tortured relationship with Gala – a strange, funny, and touching partnership that offers no shortage of surrealistic drama. As with Dalí's finest "dream photographs," Carbone is at his best when his wonderfully unfettered imagination is grounded in recognizable realities, rendered fresh by unexpected conjunctions and nightmarish precision.

The piece also has an acute understanding of Dalí's carefully cultivated eccentric public persona as both distinct from and inextricably linked to his work; it subtly reveals how the artist simultaneously profited from and became the victim of his own joke.

The cast is excellent, particularly Blue as the superbly fiendish Gala, and Carbone with his blustery, randomly accented Dalí. Gerrior is sharply comic, and Vince Camillo is hilarious as the apotheosis of a hippie Jesus. Sowle gets the evening's madcap but mournful tone just right, his versatile sets creating dreamlike transformations with minimal means, and Nina Barlow's marvelous masks and prognathous Dalian mustaches add to the show's zippy texture.

Carbone is one of the Bay Area's most original voices, and at its best this show takes you places you've never been. With some rethinking it could become astonishing, a "paranoiac-critical hallucination" to rival Dalí's own.

***
REVIEWS 1998
"UP FROM THE GROUND/ THERE BE MONSTERS!"

Dan Carbone: SF Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Theatre

By Brad Rosenstein
Originally published in the SF Bay Guardian Sept 22.1999

“In a town where every conceivable wrinkle in solo theater seems to have been ironed out long ago, Dan Carbone crept out from under the bed and lit the mattress on fire. His show at last year's Fringe Festival, Up from the Ground, was a strikingly original, funny, and touching exploration down some seriously skewed mental pathways. Whether depicting a little boy's strange encounter in a cabbage patch or a space monkey poignantly shuffling off to another galaxy, Carbone created indelible moments from random brain detritus: Jonathan Winters meets Cocteau.

"I either have all the right influences or all the wrong influences," says Carbone, who acknowledges the formative impact of everyone from Firesign Theatre to Luis Buñuel. As an NYU film school grad, Carbone had originally hoped to commit his bizarre visions to film but was met with a predictably baffled response in Hollywood. He decided to convey his ideas directly to an audience, and he worked with San Francisco solo performance mavens Anne Galjour and Grace Walcott to hone his material.

Trying bits out in small venues, Carbone was amazed to find that "the further out I got, the more abstract it became, the more people got it and were there with you."

 Carbone lets his ideas gestate for long periods of time, drawing heavily on dreams and developing pieces that are more like music or stream-of-consciousness doodles than linear narratives. Naturally, the unclassifiable nature of his work has been a challenge to getting it more widely seen. But Carbone is undeterred, forging ahead with a new piece about Salvador Dali ("He's back from the grave with some new paintings," he laughs), and is considering a more serious (and marketable) screenplay about the artist.

He also continues to scan his dreams for the seedlings that can grow into a piece. "I love creating other realms," he says, "but you have to be very true to the original source, and then be really brave enough to present it."

***  

Fringe Festival

By Michael Scott Moore
Published in SF Weekly October 1998

“Up From The Ground is a one-man collection of surreal characters, including a monkey astronaut, a dead Elvis waiting on the Highway of Eternity in a limousine, and Jesus, paired with a hallucinatory, evil monkey named Jungle Belle. The title piece is about a vivid Southern Family entranced and terrified by some holy flower-like thing growing in their cornfield. It’s hilarious and elegant and really, really weird.

Dan Carbone has rare gifts as an actor and writer; even his oddest noises, chants, and stories seem logical, which is exactly the sort of weirdness you hope to see at a Fringe Festival.”

***

The Fringe That Was
 
By Gene Price
Published in SF Bay Times, October 1, 1998

Local actor/writer Dan Carbone’s brilliant, UP FROM THE GROUND, was an eerie, chilling fairy tale in which this very funny performer played a farmer, his wife, a small boy, a monkey astronaut, a cow, a pig, and Elvis stalled on the Highway to Heaven. All breathlessly delivered with a unique genius reminiscent of Jonathan Winters.

***

Fringe Fest

By Brad Rosenstein
Published in SF Bay Guardian, September 23, 1998

The San Francisco Fringe Festival concluded its seventh annual incarnation last week. Perhaps the nicest surprise was Dan Carbone’s brilliantly demented solo that searched for the numinous in the most absurd places: a space monkey poignantly shuffles off to another galaxy; a cow accepts Jesus as his personal savior. Carbone isn’t just in touch with his inner child; he’s locked with it in a furious battle on the playground of his mind. The resulting spectacle made for one of the strangest, funniest, and most oddly touching performances at this year’s Fringe.

***

Metro Guide San Francisco – A Biased Guide To The Fortnight’s Ten Best Upcoming Events: UP FROM THE GROUND

By Kerry Reid
Published in SF Metropolitan, December 10, 1998  

"...The beauty of Carbone’s work lies not so much in its innate weirdness, but in how he’s able to project that weirdness with a childlike ease and grace, with none of the nauseating attempts at faux street jive that passes for “edgy” performance these days.”

***

Curtain Call – The Rosenstein Upstage/Downstage Awards: FINEST HOURS: “THE BEST REASON TO LOOK FORWARD TO THE FUTURE OF SOLO PERFORMANCE” Dan Carbone – Up From the Ground

By Brad Rosenstein
Published in the SF Bay Guardian, December 30, 1998

Dan Carbone’s brilliantly demented solos ranged from a little boy’s strange encounter in a cabbage patch to Elvis’s free fall into an eternal traffic jam. Running rampant on his inner-playground, Carbone created indelible moments from the most random brain detritus. I would never have believed that I would cherish the admonition that “the pig is sleeping!” or, that months later, still feel the pathos of a windup space monkey shuffling off to the outer reaches of the galaxy but I do, I do.”

***

Dan Carbone: Actor “99 People to Watch in 99”

By Kerry Reid
Originally published in SF Metropolitan December 21, 1998 “Dan Carbone is a delightful oddity among local solo performers--his off-kilter perspective on reality and its illusions creates a strange, funny and disturbing-in-a-good-way hybrid of Flannery O'Connor, The Twilight Zone, Mister Rogers and Jonathan Winters. A mild-mannered eccentric with a mind as big as Texas and a face like Silly Putty, Carbone caught the attention of many this year with his show Up From the Ground, which won raves and a "Best of the Fest" nod at this year's Fringe Festival, and he's just completed an encore run at the EXIT Theater.”

***
 REVIEWS 1997

"There Be Monsters!"
Goodin Worsted’s Video Ventures
Originally published in 1997 by Big Empire.com

There Be Monsters (1997) A performance art piece by Dan Carbone

 My Rating: 9 out of 10 stars

The most amazing, pretense-shattering performance I've ever seen. Bitable Bytes: "I wish more people could view this!" "Ten minutes of brilliance!" "Dada clowning!" "The pig is thinkin'!"

What to do while watching: Go ahead and laugh.
What to eat while watching: It's only 10 minutes--geez! are you starving to death?!

I wish so much for more people to view these ten minutes of brilliance that I will offer to screen it for you if you ever have a chance to visit me. I make this promise, and I don't even own a copy. But if you are in the neighborhood, or can make the pilgrimage, I will borrow the tape from my friend who owns it and show it to you.

Dan Carbone was a performance artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. His day job was in some service industry, and he was nothing like the black-clad, beret-wearing artistes that dominate the performing arts in this locale. I say "was" because I don't know where Dan is now.

 Despite lip service to rugged individualism, 95% of performance art follows the formula of wry theatrics just cryptic enough to veil a heavy message, delivered in small, funky spaces for bright, enthusiastic and malleable audiences. Carbone, on the other hand, comes onto the stage in khaki slacks and a loose-fitting shirt. He is balding, 40ish, with a paunch and a rubbery face. And he delivers a piece so unlike anything one typically sees in San Francisco theaters that the audience is likely to have a reaction of complete flabbergastation. Discomfort is a by-product of this. The piece may end to sympathy applause with Carbone distraught that yet another audience has failed to play with him. On the other hand, put just one person into the audience who is loose enough to laugh at a man being silly (what else are we supposed to do in this situation?) and the laughter becomes infectious. Carbone is clearly doing something funny. The awkwardness of his body and motions achieves a certain child-like grace, like when kids flop around on a playground: their motions may be sloppy, but each gesture has a full commitment. No hesitation, full confidence. That's what I call grace.

And when all of this is over, the audience has either laughed or not. But having caught a copy on video, my friend Terence has enabled me to view it repeatedly and find a very heavy and universal motif beneath the dada clowning. Carbone is doing a piece about the loss of innocence, to put it very generally and gracelessly. I can't get much further into it than that without diving into a full dissertation. I'd like to discuss how Carbone's meta-monologue parallels the moment when a child suddenly looks at the swing-set and thinks, "this isn't for me anymore."