The heart surrenders everything to the moment.
The mind judges and holds back. ― Ram Dass
By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — The Vantage Theatre, co-directed by Robert Salerno and Dori Salois, offers “theatre from a different vantage point” and their current 2 course meal fits the bill.
The first is a return engagement of a one-man show, Be Here Now: The Journey of Ram Dass written by Lynne Kaufman and skillfully told by Warren David Keith. The second, So Small A Thing, is a kind of sequel to Euripides’ Medea written by the directors’ daughter, Dominique Salerno.
Hippie guru Ram Dass was originally Richard Alpert. His family had him bar mitzvahed, but he was otherwise secular and his life was spiritually lacking. He was a Harvard psychologist until he and Timothy Leary were fired for mixing acid trips into their curricula. Nixon called Leary “the most dangerous man in America” and he was eulogized by the Moody Blues years before he was actually dead.
On impulse, Alpert followed a hippie acquaintance –known only as “Laguna Beach”- all the way to India and into the mountains. Laguna Beach was in a great hurry to see his guru, the Maharajji. On seeing him, he rushed to caress the Maharajji’s feet with his face.
The Maharajji renamed Richard Ram Dass meaning “servant of God.” When he returned to the West, he soon had a following of tripping hippies of his own.
Warren David Keith is an engaging story teller who guides us along the journey in which we are ever present. Do psychedelic acid trips really bring spiritual enlightenment? I’m not keen to find out. But I can’t argue with the spirit of Tikkun Olam (restoring the world) behind his Seva Foundation, which “supports programs designed to help wipe out curable blindness in India and Nepal, restore the agricultural life in Guatemala, assist in primary health care for American Indians, and to bring attention to the issues of homelessness and environmental degradation…” (www.ramdass.org/bio)
In the second half of the evening, we are trapped in an elevator with Jason and Medea of Greek mythology. They continue their existence in the afterlife, adapting to modernity with wristwatches and i-pods. For millennia, they have been nursing old grudges and carrying old torches.
Dominique Salerno was inspired by a particular line of Euripides: “Is love so small a pain, do you think, to a woman?”
If you don’t know the story, Jason was the leader of the Argonauts, a group of adventurers seeking the Golden Fleece. He was saved from certain death more than once by Medea, a princess and sorceress, who ran away from home to elope with him. They settled down in a new kingdom and had two boys. But then Jason, in a mid-life crisis, decided to leave his family, marry a younger woman and have his sons exiled. Medea sent the young bride a poisoned gown, then slit her own sons’ throats rather than hand them over to the authorities.
Now they are stuck in an elevator.
The chemistry between Jason (John Anderson) and Medea (Jennie Olson-Six) is palpable as they fight. Vantage took ancient, larger-than-life Greek myths and gave us middle aged divorcees stewing in old pain.
And these are just two items in a much larger buffet. If you have a palate for the new and the out-there, for theatre, dance and puppetry, check out the 2015 San Diego Fringe Festival. www.sdfringe.org
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Tauber is a freelance writer who specializes in coverage of the arts. You may comment to him at eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com