My Grandmother

Beth Custer Ensemble in Performance

Presented at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco

Special Admission: $12

The Castro Theatre is located at 429 Castro Street. (415) 621-6120. www.thecastrotheatre.com

Noted for its anarchic stylistics such as stop-motion, puppetry, animation, exaggerated camera angles, and wild slapstick, My Grandmother has met its match in the bold but playful musicianship of Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Beth Custer. A founding member of Club Foot Orchestra, Custer has also worked with Trance Mission, Eighty Mile Beach, and the Vinculum Symphony. In this score, commissioned by PFA, she has composed for a range of woodwinds, percussion, and bass.

(Moya babushka). Mikaberidze's scathing satire of Soviet bureaucracy is a genuine piece of grotesquerie, a Georgian version of the antic experiments of FEKS (the Factory of the Eccentric Actor). My Grandmother's most memorable character is a wide-eyed, wild-haired bureaucrat's wife who is caught up in a frenzy of bourgeois living. Her equally comic husband, modeled after Harold Lloyd, personifies the indolence and irrelevance of a State system that resembles nothing so much as a roundtable defended by benighted stooges. When he loses his job, he learns the value of a "grandmother" - a slang term for the boodle that moves the table round. Forgotten for half a century, this irreverent blast, complete with Constructivist sets and deconstructivist slapstick, has lost none of its bite.

My Grandmother is repeated at the Castro on Saturday, November 16.

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