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Bernard Weiner.<\/p>\nIn a meant-to-be fusion of timing and chutzpah, Bernie Weiner launched his influential run as the San Francisco Chronicle\u2019s theatre critic in 1974. Originally hired in 1971 to work the 4:30 p.m.-1 a.m. copy desk shift at what was then the thriving \u201cVoice of the West,\u201d Bernie began filing unassigned movie and theatre reviews that editors with a big copy hole to fill were grateful to have. With enough bylines to make his case, Bernie was poised to seize the critic\u2019s chair when Paine Knickerbocker, the aptly named reviewer from the school the courtly, coat-and-tie school of newspaper reviewers, retired. The tide, to put it mildly, was turning. Bernie was there to ride the fresh currents.<\/p>\n
Bernard Weiner.<\/p>\n
Raised in Miami and educated at the University of Miami and Claremont College, where he received a political science PhD in 1966, Bernie set out to be a teacher. But feeling the wave of countercultural change, he reversed course, landing in 1968 at The Northwest Passage, a left-wing alternative paper in Bellingham, Washington, where he worked as an editor and writer.<\/p>\n
With his academic background and activist leanings, Bernie was ideally equipped to help \u201cshape and articulate the cultural explosions\u201d in the Bay Area, as he put it himself in a 2020 memoir, Little Man Clapping. (The title invokes the Chronicle\u2019s ideogram method<\/a> of rating shows.) Whether he was reviewing the overtly political agitprop of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, abstract, semi-sculptural works by SOON 3, or the delicate, puppet-centric plays of Winston Tong, Bernie consistently sought to explore how theatre spoke to and mattered in a larger social context. The opening line of a 1978 Tong review put his defining critical approach succinctly: \u201cGreat art is a secret universe that goes public.\u201d Bernie aimed to understand and document that transmutation.<\/p>\n \u201cI think about an artistic identity that was formed in the \u201960s and gone by the \u201990s,\u201d said Larry Eilenberg, former artistic director of the Magic Theatre and longtime theatre professor at San Francisco State University. \u201cBernie was in the thick of that as a champion and advocate. Maybe that wasn\u2019t the purest critical stance to take. But he was more than a critic. He was part of a community trying to find its coherence.\u201d<\/p>\n Writing in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, his colleague and friend, the late Misha Berson<\/a>, noted that during his tenure Weiner \u201cencouraged an explosion of new fringe theatre activity\u201d in the San Francisco Bay Area.<\/p>\n There was no disguising his enthusiasm and excitement when he wrote about shows such as Snake Theater\u2019s 1979 Auto, which was staged in a vacant Sausalito gas station, or Nightfire Theater\u2019s 1980 Surface Tension, mounted by the Bay Area Playwrights Festival en route to a statewide tour of swimming pools. Although he covered plenty of it, traditional, proscenium-framed realism was not his strong suit.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to suggest that Bernie was just a shill for anything off the mainstream track. Not everything on the edge received his approbation. And he wasn\u2019t afraid to acknowledge confusion, perplexity, even incomprehension of what a theatremaker was up to. He did so in a way that opened a space where many compelling theatre experiences take place: by submitting to an experience without trying to pin it down.<\/p>\n In a 1987 column about Actual Sho, an abstract new wave opera by the visually inventive George Coates Performance Works, Bernie described a telling exchange he had with a frustrated companion after a performance.<\/p>\n \u201cBut what does it mean?\u201d he reported his seatmate asking.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you mean by mean?\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n This Socratic dialogue went on (probably too long), touching on everything from Alan Watts to Dolly Parton, and was left pointedly unresolved. After asking rhetorically what Monet\u2019s lily pads or Frank Stella\u2019s colored squares signified beyond themselves, Bernie played his strongest card. \u201cWhy,\u201d he asked, \u201ccan\u2019t you celebrate the fact that an artist hasn\u2019t laid it all out for you, that he\u2019s left it up to you to figure out a meaning for yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n As a critic and Sunday feature writer, I worked with Bernie for nine years, until his retirement in 1990, when he sensed (correctly) that the experimental scene was starting to fade. \u201cIt\u2019s truly a turnover in generations,\u201d he told the Los Angeles Times.<\/p>\n Somewhat owlish, with a salt-and-pepper beard, receding hairline and metal frame glasses, Bernie spoke softly, in level tones. His smiles tended to be wry, his laughter in the office muted. \u201cHe had a twinkle,\u201d said Eilenberg.<\/p>\n Attending shows, the twinkle could turn into a sunburst. More than once he reported laughing so hard the tears ran down his cheeks. There were also tears when something moved him. His reviews occasionally took on a peculiar wrinkle that could prove memorable. \u201cMiss it at your aesthetic peril,\u201d he cautioned in one rave. Vaudeville Nouveau, a 1980s physical comedy troupe, didn\u2019t wait long to mount a new show entitled Aesthetic Peril.<\/p>\n Confessing burnout, Bernie retired from the Chronicle at 50 to spend more time with his family and concentrate on writing poetry and plays. In 2002, he and a friend established and wrote for The Crisis Papers, a progressive online site that remained active until Trump\u2019s first election. In a way he had come full circle, writing about the political dynamic that had been a throughline from his teenage and graduate school days through his Chronicle years and on to The Crisis Papers.<\/p>\n While the experimental foment of the 1970s and \u201980s is past, the kind of striving Bernie heralded remains alive here in companies like We Players<\/a>, which has mounted shows in parks, at a decommissioned fort, and on Alcatraz. If Bernie were still on the theatre beat, he would have been there for all of them.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Steven Winn was on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1980 to 2008. He reviews for Musical America, Opera and San Francisco Classical Voice.<\/p>\n