“The Jewelry Box” Streaming from SF Playhouse
When the pandemic first hit and everything began to shut down, I was often asked this question: “Are you planning to watch any of the streaming content the theaters are talking about putting out?” For the most part, my answer was “no.” My feeling was, and generally still is, that there is so much excellent content created specifically for the flat, rectangular environment of television that I planned to save my theatrical experiences for when restrictions were lifted and we could once again sit together in the dark and breathe in the same air as the performers on stage and share in the laughter (or tears) of our fellow audience members. Live theatre is something special and unique, and I was afraid that in the transference to streaming that it would lose what made it so.
For the most part, I have stuck to that commitment. I did spend an enjoyable evening watching a marvelous production of The Government Inspector by Red Bull Theatre that was a re-imagination of their 2017 production of Gogol’s satire, with each member of the cast sitting at home in front of their computers. Michael Urie was brilliant, and director Jesse Berger made the most of the format, even using its limitations to marvelous comic effect. I also revisited a staging of Pirates of Penzance by the Ross Valley Players, almost entirely to watch Norman Hall strut again as the very model of a modern major general.
But after many months of abstaining from what felt to me like faux theatre, I decided to give a streaming theatrical another shot, and signed up for SF Playhouse’s production of Brian Copeland’s solo Christmas show (originally developed at The Marsh), The Jewelry Box. For the most part, I’m glad I did. For despite the limitations of streaming theatre, The Jewelry Box is a touching, bittersweet story of generosity, loss, and recovery.
When Brian Copeland was small, he and his mother and siblings moved several times, in part to escape a ne’er-do-well man who wasn’t much of a husband and even less of a father. By the age of six, they (and Brian’s maternal grandmother) had settled into an apartment in a sketchy neighborhood of Oakland, hoping to fashion a new life. Though Brian missed snow at Christmas, the season still enchanted him, as it does most children.
On a family shopping trip to White Front (a west coast chain of discount stores that went bankrupt in 1975), Brian is enraptured by a jewelry box of fake mahogany, lined with cheap velvet that he knew was just the thing to make his mother smile on Christmas morning, her own jewelry box having been lost (or pawned?) during one of the family’s many moves. But to make this dream come true, he needs $11.97 he does not currently have. So, being the ambitious young thing he is, Brian sets out to earn the money before Christmas Eve rolls around.
In its 65 minutes, The Jewelry Box takes us on Brian’s journey as his precocious six-year old self struggles to find a way to achieve his goal. He checks the classifieds’ job listing. And, for the younger people in the audience, tells them that “classifieds were like Craigslist you could hold in your hand.” He hits up the neighbors for chores he could do, and even finds a way to offer a service to a couple of the local tipplers who hang out in front of the neighborhood convenience store.
The story moves along swiftly, and it’s easy to like both the adult Brian Copeland and his adorable, striving six-year old self. Copeland’s voice slides easily between his own rather flat (yet still lively), nasal tone to the squeaks of his younger self and his siblings, the authoritarian sass of his grandmother and the basso posturings of the older men who generally stand in the way of his goal. The piece is filled with nostalgia, with references to The Banana Splits (a Saturday morning kid’s show of the period, Orange Crush, Tab and Fresca. (Although a reference to Michael Vick and dogs seemed a bit creaky, rather the opposite of a joke that is told “too soon.”
The performance, however, is staged far too simply. Director David Ford gives Copeland only a bare stage, minimal lighting, and sadly failed to talk him out of wearing a baggy sweater with unflattering horizontal stripes that pulls focus from Copeland’s expressively rubbery face. His story would also have benefitted greatly from a few well-chosen props or set elements to help establish the scene.
But the biggest problem with this production of The Jewelry Box (or any streamed version of live theatre) is the format itself. Without an audience to play to, Copeland’s keenly-honed sense of comic timing feels a bit off. Even more important, without an audience for we viewers to share the show with, we miss a key element of live theatre: what others bring with them to the darkened space we share. It’s not simply the joy of laughing along with our fellow audience members that we miss, it’s how we can begin to better understand their unique experiences by what they laugh at, what they cry at, what they gasp in amazement or horror at.
I hope soon that collective experience will be available to us all again.
The Jewelry Box is streaming through December 25. Tickets are $15-$100 and are available at www.sfplayhouse.org.
