Mastrosimone Views Life’s Easy Bleeders

What’s a shivaree?

For starters, it’s the title of a play by William Mastrosimone (“Extremities,” “Nanawatai,” “Tamer of Horses”) opening Saturday at Theatre 40. “It’s an Americanization of a French word, chivari ,” said the Enumclaw, Wash.-based playwright. “It means a noisy demonstration or celebration, like a mock serenade to a couple on their wedding night. Here, it’s also a proper name: The belly dancer’s name is Shivaree.

“Actually, belly dancers like to be called Oriental dancers,” he added. “The dance originated in Egypt, derived and performed by women, for women, at the Temple of Isis--the goddess of vegetation and life. Pregnant women were brought to the temple to give birth; other women would gather around and imitate the birth movement.

“From there, the sacred rite moved to a nightclub. So you can see how out of place the dance really is. It’s made up of three parts: Celebrating the courtship between a man and woman, the sexual union and childbirth. Of course, the world has mostly focused on the second part. And a lot of dancers, when they’re learning, don’t really know what they’re doing. All they know is ‘This part’s slow; this part’s fast; this part’s sexy.’ But they don’t know where it came from.”

The source of his own knowledge? “I’m just interested,” he said with a chuckle. “A curious person.”

The impetus for the play was his meeting seven years ago with a hemophiliac, who was the same age as Mastrosimone (then 33) and living with his cab-driver mother. “The kid lived in a gold cage,” the playwright marveled. “In his whole life, he’d left that room maybe two dozen times. This kid was utterly brilliant: He knew everything, had read everything--but emotionally he was 12 years old. I started to wonder what he did with his passion, what form it took.”

Returning to his hotel afterward, Mastrosimone found the usually staid afternoon entertainment to be a belly dancer.

“Of course, I’d seen it before. Like most Americans, I thought it was just a cheap sexual thrill. But this time it really stopped me in my tracks. I thought, ‘What would that kid think if he saw this?’ And I started to do research, go to belly dance places, talk to women, read books. But I didn’t want to write a disease play. This is about the easy bleeders--all of us who limit our lives because we’re afraid to take a risk. It’s about someone who unlearns his fear of the world.”

A revival of Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 satirical comedy, “The Suicide,” opens Friday at Friends and Artists Theatre.

“It’s about an unemployed Everyman in 1920s Russia who’s contemplating suicide,” said artistic director Sal Romeo. “Then he’s besieged by different groups that have heard he’s going to commit suicide and ask him to do it for them--as a gesture on their behalf. A beautiful woman wants him to do it to make her boyfriend jealous, the butchers because business is bad, the artists because the arts aren’t being supported, the intelligentsia because they’re feeling disconnected after the Revolution.”

The 31-actor production, which is being staged by Czech director Florinel Fatulescu (his pianist wife, Rodica, served as translator and composed much of the score), is most influenced by the East-European performance style--and length. “We’re in the process of getting this down from almost four hours to about 2 hours, 40 minutes,” admitted Romeo. “My theory is that if audiences are in and out in under three hours, it’s OK.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: With a cast of 17, Jeff Goldsmith’s “McCarthy” recently opened at the Odyssey Theatre.

Said The Times’ Robert Koehler: “The beauty of Frank Condon’s production is that telling this amazing American chapter looks like no problem at all. And in light of recent congressional hearings . . . ‘McCarthy’ hardly strikes us as amazing. Which is perhaps the scariest message of all.”

From Richard Stayton in the Herald Examiner: “We expect and hope the play’s message to be: It did happen here; it can happen again; the price of freedom is constant vigilance. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s blind ambition and Condon’s artistic ambition rarely connect on the Odyssey stage. Despite prodigious research, an ensemble of superior performers and a dynamic subject, ‘McCarthy’ never ignites.”

Said Drama-Logue’s T.H. McCulloh: “The production is beautifully staged by Condon and, though his work cannot completely gloss over the thinness of the script, he makes it into an involving picture of the times and gives enough of the shape of McCarthy’s role in those times to cause a quick glance around our own day for similar symptoms.”

From the Outlook’s Willard Manus: “Condon has shaped the production skillfully, giving it a vitality and excitement that jumps and crackles from beginning to end like a live wire. Condon uses a ‘March of Time’ voice-over, slides and titles in ‘living newspaper’ to enhance the drama, but for the most part his style of presentation is cinematic.”

Lastly, from Steve Mikulan in the L.A. Weekly: “ (Victor) Brandt’s portrayal of a self-pitying, half-serious opportunist is good enough to take on the road as a one-man show, which, considering Goldsmith’s script, might not be a bad idea. . . . Condon’s unimaginative direction of a reedy-voiced ensemble only underscores the shortcomings of Goldsmith’s meat-and-potatoes approach.”