'Reno: Rebel Without a Pause'
Rubble rouser

THAT WAS SERIOUS peacenik troubadour Joan Baez miming bunny ears behind Reno's back on the Castro Theatre's stage a few weeks back. We figure that by now, Reno has recovered from her raucous evening of schizophrenia and folk music. After all, it took only a matter of months for Reno to bounce back from the shock and horror of having her Tribeca neighborhood wrapped in yellow police tape after the World Trade Center went down, and tell her story on off-Broadway stages. "Tell her story" is an understatement. The show – a comic rant and tender ode from a native New Yorker woken up from her regular late sleep by urgent phone callers on Sept. 11, 2001 – flings itself back and forth between contradictory emotions with a politically visionary through-line offset by Reno's warm Manhattan street sensibility. One minute the cops she's slandered her whole life are her new best friends, the next she realizes they didn't really get her joke. Her grenades hit all of the usual suspects and then some, including her upscale nomadic neighbors battling displacement from Tribecastan. Veteran New York-born filmmaker Nancy Savoca was there to get the show on tape, and a typical "performance video" this isn't. Capturing Reno's act in New York City during a year when wounds had not even begun to heal, Savoca records the moment with this film – playing this week at the Roxie Cinema – and lets us in on Reno's bravery in confronting it. See Rep Clock for show times. (Susan Gerhard)