Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Matt Weimer plays Dan, a gay man in the Bible Belt, who is forbidden from seeing his children after the death of his longtime partner in Jerry Metzker’s drama His Heart Belongs to Me. Photo by Grooviness Productions.

Hot-button issues pulse through engaging `Heart’
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Jerry Metzker’sHis Heart Belongs to Me does what does something that theater doesn’t do enough: it tackles current issues from a telling vantage point.

Too often, issue plays are dismissed as “just another made-for-cable, issue-of-the-week potboiler.” And that’s too bad because straightforward dramas with serious issues at their core have a place on stage. The live, interactive quality of theater engages people on a much more vital intellectual or emotional level than film ever could, and that’s why we need more of these so-called potboilers.

Metzker’s drama, now in the Theatre Rhinoceros’ basement studio, takes us outside the bubble of the Bay Area and into the Bible Belt, where living life as an out gay man and raising a family prove to be a tricky balancing act.

The tragedy gets piled pretty high as Dan (Matt Weimer) loses his Charlie, his firefighter partner of 14 years, and then systematically sees his two children basically taken away from him by their born-again mother (Susan Donnelly) and Charlie’s in-denial mother (Tamar Cohn). Charlie’s will is contested, and at the funeral, the preacher, who had never met Charlie, essentially denounces the dead hero for his sin of loving a man.

Helpless and hopeless, Dan unleashes a lengthy legal tangle, but at what emotional cost to himself and his young children, whom he’s forbidden from seeing? He tussles with Charlie’s snarky sister (Danielle Perata, right, with Cohn) and watches his Methodist pastor (Chrys-Anthony Booker) get shuffled out of town for supporting Dan, which fellow parishioners see as supporting a gay rights agenda.

Playwright Metzker, working with director Maureen Studer, trains his focus on the personal more than the political as we see Dan pulled ever deeper into an emotional downward spiral. His only support comes from his sister (Amanda J. Lee) and his somewhat flaky best friend (Norman Muñoz), both of whom have their own problems.

Aside from some choppiness in the scene structure and some character name confusion, Metzker’s play is provocative, involving and ultimately quite moving. The playwright has a clear point of view, but he doesn’t demonize his opponents. He imbues the people who want to deny Dan’s marriage and his parenthood with humanity, as impossible as that sounds.

The cast helps keep these people dimensional and, whenever they’re able, likeable. Weimer’s superb lead performance as Dan grounds the play and gives us a man we care about. We feel the weight of his problems and tense up at his inability to gain traction in his cause. How do you follow the arcane rules to rescue your children when the rules shut you out entirely?

That’s the big question, and there’s no easy answer, though Metzker refuses to leave his characters wallowing in misery. There’s a spark of hope, though it’s a dim light in a gloomy battle.

Even without the “No on 8″ signs in the lobby or the appeal to vote against the constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in California, the politics of Metzker’s play come through loud and clear. This is a country where some citizens matter more than others, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

However these stories are told, whether they’re movies of the week or effectively written and produced pieces of agitprop pieces of theater, they are necessary pieces of the larger conversation.

His Heart Belongs to Me continues through Nov. 8 at Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16^th St., San Francisco. Tickets are $12. Call 415-861-5079or visit www.therhino.org for information.

One of the great things about Bay Area theater is watching local actors grow into greatness.

They may or may not strike off to find fortune and fame in New York or Los Angeles, or they may choose to stay here and continue doing as much good work as they can.

The Aurora Theatre Company’s next show, George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, is packed with the kind of actors who, if you care about local theater, you’ve been watching for years. Names such as Stacy Ross, Warren David Keith and Trish Mullholland pretty much make a show worth seeing if they’re involved.

Another name to add to that list is Gabriel Marin (seen at right with Devil’s co-star Stacy Ross, photos by David Allen).

Theatergoers probably don’t remember Marin’s local stage debut in American Conservatory Theater’s The Play’s the Thing in 1995. He was a 23-year-old spear carrier amid some Bay Area greats such as Ken Ruta, Dan Hiatt and Kimberly King. He was fresh out of college (Chicago’s DePaul University) and eager to put all his acting training to use.

But on stage at the Geary, Marin remembers thinking: “Damn, I should have paid more attention in voice class. All the things I thought were old school and used to roll my eyes at, turned out to be more useful than I thought. And there I was watching people do it to perfection. Made me feel inadequate and in awe.”

But Marin persisted, even as he married, started a family and moved to Los Angeles. When the marriage ended, Marin and his son, Max, headed back to the Bay Area, while his daughter, Morgan, stayed in L.A. with her mom.

Being a single parent, Marin found a day job that involved theater – marketing director for Walnut Creek’s Center Repertory Company – that still allowed him to pursue acting opportunities.

“There’s nothing, other than acting, that I could do and be happy with myself,” Marin says. “When I was in LA, supporting a family, theater was something I had to obviously set aside, and those years were soul-sucking to me. Now I embrace the poverty. I embrace being bereft of amenities. That’s why I say this is all I can do and be happy.”

In the last couple of years, Marin has really come into his own, delivering some stunning performances for SF Playhouse (Bug, Jesus Hopped the `A’ Train, Our Lady of 121^st Street), Magic Theatre (The Rules of Charity), Marin Theatre Company (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Traveling Jewish Theatre/Thick Description (Dead Mother, Or Shirley Not All in Vain).

All the theater work has meant that Max, about to turn 13, has spent a lot of time backstage.

“I cannot thank my son enough,” Marin says. “He’s had to sit in a lot of green rooms. He’s the light of my life. What’s interesting, is when I bow, I make an `M’ with my hands, and if he’s in the green room, he’ll run out to the wings to see if I give him thanks. I couldn’t act if he wasn’t on board.”

The younger Marin is so on board, in fact, that he’s been expressing the desire to be an actor (when he doesn’t want to be a computer game programmer or airplane pilot).

“I’ll encourage him and help facilitate that,” Marin says. “But I’m very careful not to push that on him.”

Marin is returning to Berkeley’s Aurora, where he previously appeared in Gunplay, The Glass Menagerie and Shaw’s Saint Joan, directed by Aurora’s founding artistic director, Barbara Oliver, who is also helming The Devil’s Disciple.

This is the one Shaw play set in America (during the Revolutionary War, naturally), and it tends toward the melodramatic. Marin is playing Richard Dudgeon, the self-proclaimed “devil’s disciple” who pretends to be the local minister, who may be fitted with a hangman’s noose to demoralize the townspeople.

“Richard is awesome,” Marin says. “He’s kind of Han Solo meets Obi Wan Kenobi in a very Shavian way. He’s the rogue with a heart of gold, and he made me think of Obi Wan because he reminded me of Obi Wan saying to Darth Vader something like, `If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.’”

Marin’s girlfriend teases him that he’s finally playing a rogue instead of a loser with a heart of gold.

After Devil’s Disciple, Marin will be seen in John Guare’s Landscape of the Body at SF Playhouse in January and then Jack Goes Boating back at the Aurora next summer under the direction of Bay Area veteran Joy Carlin.

With such a non-stop schedule, Marin must be exhausted.

“I’m not exhausted,” he says. “I’m grateful.”

The Devil’s Disciple begins previews Friday, Oct. 31, opens Thursday, Nov. 6 and runs through Dec. 7 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $28 for previews, $40-$42 for regular performances. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org for information.

Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m old and have bad taste, but Disney’s High School Musical 3: Senior Year kept reminding of my favorite bad movie musical of all time: Grease 2.

You’ve got a story that goes nowhere, a primary romantic couple that hits a few road blocks but ends up together, a cap-tossing graduation scene and the must unrealistic school musical of all time (in Grease 2 it involves the wretchedly wonderful production number “Girl for All Seasons”). You’ve also got a leading man in a salvage yard (in Grease 2, Maxwell Caulfield is building the ultimate chick-magnet motorcycle) and a song that echoes one of the worst numbers ever: “Who’s That Guy?” (in HSM3 the line occurs during a paean to prom night called “A Night to Remember,” which also happens to be the name of a movie about the Titanic, but I digress).

Surely, HSM3 is far more accomplished than Grease 2, and the stable of Disney stars, now in their final round of HSM servitude, actually appear to be close to their characters’ age and not 35. Though all those fresh-faced kids should mightily try to avoid playing high school students in their ensuing projects.

I’ll say this about Senior Year — it’s not as good as HSM2, which just about gets the formula perfect, and it’s a heck of a lot more fun than the dreadful, soul-numbing movie version of Mamma Mia!.

Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens are as appealing as ever, though Efron’s charisma pretty much blows pretty Vanessa off the screen. Ashley Tisdale, with her sassy new nose, has fun with her ultra-bitchy character, Sharpay, though on the big screen it becomes quite apparent that Ms. Tisdale is not a great actress, nor does she have a whole lot of comic flair. Lucas Grabeel (right) as Sharpay’s, twin, Ryan, is mostly consigned to reaction shots as Sharpay flounces about, flipping her extensions and making the most of her cutie cute outfits. I’m a little sorry Ryan doesn’t get to fully come out of the closet and take a boy to prom. Instead he takes Kelsi(Olesya Rulin), the “composer” of the school shows. I’m not sure if that means Kelsi is a budding lesbian and the two recognize each other through the golden high school haze or Kelsi is doomed to a life of fag haggery. I’m hoping for the former. For the best analysis of HSM3 as gay metaphor, check out Prince Gomolvilas’ Bamboo Nation report here.

The songs in this final installment, well, they stall. There’s a sameness to them such that when there’s a reprise of “We’re All in This Together,” it’s like a fresh New Mexico breeze. Efron sounds like a boy band standby and Hudgens sounds more than a little electronic, which is strange.

Sharpay and Ryan’s Broadway-size duet, “I Want It All,” is fun, but the best all-around number is Efron’s duet with Corbin Bleu, “The Boys Are Back,” complete with a childhood flashback and an homage to Kevin Bacon in Footloose, the remake of which happens to be a future Efron project. Sure Efron’s got the goods, but Bleu matches him in the charisma department, and of all the HSM stable other than Efron, this is the guy to watch.

The ballads are boring, but because the budget is bigger this time out, we get boring ballads in the rain, in a rotating treehouse and on the Stanford campus. Oddly, many of the production numbers are performed on moving sets that appear to be stage ready — could it be director Kenny Ortega is just making it easier for the inevitable stage productions of HSM3 to replicate its “movie” magic?

The choreography — by Ortega, Chucky Klapow (sorry, credited onscreen as Charles Klapow) and Bonnie Story is actually a lot of fun. There’s a heavy Michael Jackson influence and a whole lot of irresistible energy. Watching the beefed-up cast dance to the lame title song (it took three tries to finally get a song called “High School Musical”?), it made me sad for Ortega — not that he needs my pity, but I lamented the missed opportunity known as Newsies, the early ’90s Disney musical helmed by Ortega that should have been great. If Ortega had only had anything approaching this budget (reported to be measly $13 million but still bigger than the TV versions), he might have made Newsies something more than a wonderfully awful little musical that has spawned gazillions of fans over the years.

This is innocuous movie musical making, and there’s surely a place for that (no one has quite revived the harmless spirit of the old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musicals quite as effectively). But I wanted this final installment, since it already has the attention of the world, to be a little bolder and fold some real life into the fantasy. There was a chance to be great or be fabulously bad — like Grease 2 — but that would have required taking a risk, and this money-minting Disney thoroughbred wasn’t about to do any such thing.

And now, just because I worked up an appetite for it, here’s Michelle Pfeiffer singing “Cool Rider” set to a montage of scenes from, yep, Grease 2.

Monica Cortes Viharo (right) plays Jackie O., a prostitute at a crossroads, in Charles Pike’s Ghost Train Coming, a Performers Under Stress production. Valerie Fachman plays The King, a sort of guardian angel to Jackie O. Photos by Scott Baker

Sometimes a Tiki Goddess ends up as a sex worker seeking salvation.

Monica Cortes Viharo has a perfectly respectable day job running a U.C. Berkeley Learning Center and even more respectable side gig as the Tiki Goddess, a hostess of sorts, at her husband Will “The Thrill” Viharo’s Thrillville monthly B-movie extravaganzas at the Cerrito Speakeasy Theatre in El Cerrito.

She has yet another side gig as a busy Bay Area actress, and in her next show, the world premiere of Charles Pike’s dark comedy Ghost Train Coming for Performers Under Stress, she plays Jackie O., a lady of the evening finding redemption with what might be the ghost of Elvis.

In short, you’d be hard pressed to find someone leading a more interesting life than Monica Cortes Viharo’s.

The Bay Area native – she was born in the Hayward/Union City area, where she says the most interesting thing was the drive-in – got her taste for theater the way so many other actors did: in an elementary production of The Wizard of Oz. She was the Wicked Witch of the West.

“It was a life-altering moment,” she says. “Everyone thought I was insane because I had the little voice going and they were all like, `It’s just a play in the cafeteria.’ I didn’t know then I was Method.”

And like so many actors, Cortes Viharo attempted to pursue other, more potentially lucrative, fields of study but was eventually sucked into the Theatre Department at U.C. Berkeley, though she didn’t abandon her political science interests entirely.

She won a major theater prize that came with some money – enough for a down payment on her first car, which she only got rid of a couple years ago – but reality intruded on her theater career, and she ended up getting into the world of education, which eventually led to her current gig running student tutoring and technology programs at Cal.

Theater could have gone completely by the wayside if her husband hadn’t forced the issue.

“He encouraged me to do what I love,” Cortes Viharo says. “I credit him with my career because he basically locked me in my bedroom and said today you’re addressing envelopes and sending headshots to agents. From that, I got an agent, who I’ve been with for eight years.”

Commercial work, including appearances on “Nash Bridges,” the Bay Area-shot Don Johnson cop show that local actors referred to as “jury duty” because they were called to action so frequently, gave her some experience and financial wherewithal to pursue theater, her “true love.”

Cortes Viharo recently received a grant of $2,500 from the Theatre Bay Area ATLAS program, which aims to train actors to approach their profession as a true business, complete with career maps and mentors. The program also allows its select participants a slot in the TBA general auditions, which is how Cortes Viharo hooked up with Scott Baker, director of Ghost Train Coming and a co-founder of Performers Under Stress, which was originally founded in Chicago.

Now the actress finds herself in a wild play, which begins performances Thursday, Oct. 30 at The Garage in San Francisco.

Playing Jackie O., a prostitute looking for a way out, has been interesting for Cortes Viharo (seen as Jackie O. at right with Vincent Fasso as Melvin Purple).

“Jackie is at a crossroads in her life,” she says. “She has a pimp named Doc who terrorizes her in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and she has to decide if she can get out or not. She’s really very complex, very poignant and very funny. I get to do a little of everything: fall in love, get sexually violated, shoot someone, get into a major fight. And then there’s the guardian angel, the Elvis figure, played by a woman, who listens to Jackie and helps prepare her for what’s to come.”

The actor’s goal of doing bigger, meatier roles is certainly coming true with Jackie O., and that’s just fine with Cortes Viharo.

“This is not easy stuff,” she says. “I have worked out so many muscles doing this show. I’ve been looking for roles that are challenging, that force me to suck sometimes and reevaluate my approach. Jackie is great that way because she’s a total triathlon.”

That’s quite different from Cortes Viharo’s recurring gig as the Tiki Goddess at the kitschy Thrillville, where her major role is to display a lot of cleavage, run a trivia contest and spin a prize wheel.

“We sort of live in this world we call Thrillville, which is all about B-movies, monsters, robots, tikis – you know, ’50s and ’60s Americana, which I’ve always been into,” Cortes Viharo says. “It’s a lot of fun, but I’m so not a movie person. When the movie starts, I usually cuddle up and fall asleep. I joke that I’ve seen the first 10 minutes of every bad movie ever made.”

There may be more school ahead for Cortes Viharo – perhaps a PhD – and maybe some teaching.

“I’ve always been interested in theater as intellectual work,” she says. “I’d love to be in a situation where I can teach theater as literature or as history.”

Ghost Train Coming runs Oct. 30-Nov. 22 at The Garage, 975 Howard St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15 (or $7 at the door plus a roll of two dice). Call 415-585-1221 or visit www.pustheatre.com or www.brownpapertickets.com.

EXTENDED AGAIN THROUGH DEC. 7

Keith Pinto (left) and Dan Wolf star in Wolf’s adaptation of the Adam Mansbach novel Angry Black White Boy at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. The dynamic production features live music, rap, dance and old-fashioned storytelling. Photos by Evan Loewy

Music, beats, movement make `Angry’ a joy
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For all of its form crunching and boundary pushing, Angry Black White Boy rises or falls on the strength of its storytelling.

For most of its two hours, Dan Wolf’s stage adaptation of Adam Mansbach’s novel tells a fierce, funny, fascinating story that cuts to the core of what we talk about when we talk about race in this country.

There’s satire and sincerity in ample supply, and this dynamic Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production, directed with sharp focus and experimental glee by Sean San José, is compelling as it is entertaining.

Mansbach’s narrative, which lacks only a satisfying ending, is augmented by fluid sound and movement that make the story feel like dance, poetry and music without ever detracting from the forward motion of the plot and the characters’ trajectory.

“The question is not how I got here but how you all didn’t,” says Macon Detornay (played by Wolf), a white Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs who has fully immersed himself, body and soul, in the world of hip-hop. He’s so outraged by the tacit level of racism in the U.S. that he begins to act out. A Columbia University student, Macon supports himself by driving a cab. And when a “typical white devil asshole” gets into the back of the taxi, Macon robs the man of his wallet and his dignity.

The vigilante robberies continue because all the victims report that the offending driver was black. After the inevitable arrest (when Macon insists that his latest victim note the actual color of his white skin), Macon becomes something of a folk hero and media darling/punching bag as he denounces white people’s institutional, economic and social privilege through something he calls the Race Traitor Project.

Like so many rise to fame stories, once the protagonist hits the peak of celebrity, things get less interesting. Aside from some excellent re-creations of talk show appearances, Macon’s story sort of implodes rather than explodes.

But the storytelling along the way crackles with energy that comes from the fusion of mostly live music (performed by Tommy Shepherd, Keith Pinto and Myers Clark, all of whom are also actors) – a blend of hip-hop, rap, beatbox, doo-wop, gorgeous harmonies — and incisive movement devised by Pinto, who is a joy to watch glide around the small Intersection for the Arts stage.

The story also takes some surprising turns. Part of Macon’s rage against white people stems from his heritage, namely his great grandfather, Cap Anson, the guy largely responsible for getting African-Americans banned from major league baseball. As a sort of attempt to make amends, Macon befriends the great-grandson of a black ball player who was one of the last to leave the league.

This historical detour – the baseball stuff is true – gives the enormously likable Shepherd the chance to play Moses “Fleet” Walker, the player who held on to his dignity to the very end, and to create a rich musical riff inspired by Fleet to the effect of “you can’t keep running away.”

There’s also a very funny late-night encounter with he People’s Cooperative Guerilla Theatre, who stage an impromptu version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House with a startled Macon “starring” as Nora, and an astute scene set in the classroom of a distinguished “academic gangsta” professor who happily apologizes for anything untoward in hip-hop.

As Macon’s friends Nique and Andre, Shepherd and Clark, respectively, offer sharply drawn performances full of humor and grounded realism. And as all of Macon’s victims, as well as a series of talk show hosts, Pinto is equally as effective but in a more stylized comic way.

The excellent quartet of actors fuses sound, movement and storytelling to create a uniquely theatrical experience. This is a true ensemble endeavor, and that’s the ultimate joy of Angry Black White Boy.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Angry Black White Boy continues through Nov. 30 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415-626-3311 or visit www.theintersection.org.

The National Endowment for the Arts – did you know that even existed anymore? – has handed out some $20,000 grants as part of a new NEA New Play Development Program.

And one of the recipients was Berkeley-based California Shakespeare Theater, which will spend 20 grand on early play development activities — read-throughs, public readings and workshop productions — for Pastures of Heaven, which is being written by San Francisco’s Octavio Solis (right), based on a collection of interlinking short stories by John Steinbeck. The piece is being developed with San Francisco’s Word for Word Performing Arts Company. 

“We are extraordinarily grateful to the NEA for selecting us for this prestigious program,” Cal Shakes artistic director Jonathan Moscone said in a statement. “Pastures of Heaven marks the first commissioned world premiere play for our Main Stage in our 35-year history.  I hope that our unique collaboration with Octavio, Word for Word and community members in the Salinas Valley and Bay Area will create a significant cultural impact on communities new to us, and perhaps to theater itself, as well as to the field at large.”

Pastures of Heaven is the third play to be developed under Cal Shakes’ New Works/New Communities program, which brings people of diverse backgrounds together around the creation of a new work of theater inspired by classic literature. Based upon Steinbeck’s little-known 1932 novel of interconnected short stories, the play will depict the destruction of dreams within a fragile farming community in Northern California’s Salinas Valley. The play is slated to premiere on Cal Shakes Main Stage in 2010, directed by Moscone.

“Every year the NEA supports about 135 new theatrical premieres, but the NEA New Play Development Program, in partnership with Arena Stage, is something special. It creates a small but superb national network to develop new works from across the country,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia.

 For more information about the NEA New Play Development Program, visit http://npdp.arenastage.org. For information about California Shakespeare Theater, visit www.calshakes.org.

WILLIS HEADS TO TEN CHIMNEYS

Eleven top regional theatre actors from around the country have been selected as the inaugural Lunt-Fontanne Fellows by Ten Chimneys Foundation, the National Historic Landmark estate of Broadway legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne – as part of The Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship Program, a national program to serve regional theatre actors and the future of American theatre.

Among the 11 fellows is Jack Willis(right, photo by DavdAllenStudios.com), a company member of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.

Each Lunt-Fontanne Fellow receives a cash fellowship and will participate in an intensive week-long master class and retreat at Ten Chimneys (in rural Wisconsin) with a respected master teacher.  Acclaimed actress Lynn Redgrave will be the very first master teacher in the Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship Program.  In addition to a prolific, award-winning career on Broadway, in London, and in film and television, Ms. Redgrave was named in honor of Lynn Fontanne – making her a particularly meaningful choice to launch this important program. 

Ten Chimneys is the home and retreat of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, widely considered the greatest acting couple in American theatre history.  (The estate is fully restored to its original glory.  With all of its contents and personal mementos in place, it looks just as it did in the 1930s and ’40s, when friends like Helen Hayes, Noël Coward, Katharine Hepburn, and countless others visited the Lunts summer after summer.)  For much of the 20^th century, Ten Chimneys was the center of the theatrical universe – an important place for the luckiest of artists to retreat, rejuvenate, and collaborate.  The Lunts were known for their dedication to the “next generation” of actors.  They reveled in mentoring young actors.  Legends such as Laurence Olivier, Uta Hagen, Montgomery Clift and Julie Harris proudly considered themselves protégés of the Lunts.  The Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship Program continues that tradition of mentorship – as Ten Chimneys reassumes its historic role as a powerful resource and inspiration for American theatre.

Here are Willis’ fellow fellows: Suzanne Bouchard, Seattle Repertory Theatre (Seattle); Dan Donohue, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, Ore.); Lee Ernst, Milwaukee Repertory Theater (Milwaukee); Mary Beth Fisher, Goodman Theatre (Chicago); Jon Gentry, Arizona Theatre Company (Phoenix and Tucson); Donald Griffin, Alliance Theatre (Atlanta); Naomi Jacobson, Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.); Kim Staunton, Denver Theatre Center (Denver); Todd Waite, Alley Theatre (Houston).

For information about Ten Chimneys, visit www.tenchimneys.org. For information about American Conservatory Theater, visit www.act-sf.org.

I’m always surprised when theater pops up in pop culture, more specifically, in popcorn movies.

Sitting at home, I was thoroughly enjoying Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a comedy written by and starring Jason Segel (of TV’s “How I Met Your Mother” – an admirable sitcom set in New York but none of the 20somethings ever goes to the theater!). Segel has something of a Jack Lemmon sad sack vibe that lends itself to poignant comedy. He’s also part of the Judd Apatow stable of actors, so his comedy is often taken in the vulgar, gross-out direction, and he’s good at that, too.

The surprising thing in Forgetting Sarah Marshall is that Segel’s character, the composer of tense music for a hit TV crime show, has been working for years on a “Dracula” musical. We hear bits and pieces of it throughout the show [SPOILER ALERT – stop reading because I'm going to discuss events at the end of the movie now] and at the end, Segel bursts out of his post-break-up depression by producing his Dracula musical…WITH PUPPETS!

Not only puppets, but puppets created by the Jim Henson Company, which technically makes them Muppets, which technically makes them awesome.

Real life and movie life intertwined here because it seems Segel actually had been working for years on a Dracula musical, and he also happened to be a huge Muppet fan in real life.

Though logic is in short supply in Hollywood, the folks at Disney took a meeting with Segel and figured out that he and Nick Stoller, the director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, were the right guys to reinvigorate the Muppet franchise, so they’re working on the next Muppet movie.

That’s all well and good, but what about a Muppet Broadway musical?

Avenue Q proved that audiences will happily watch humans interact with puppets while singing songs, and though the Muppets themselves created a Broadway show in the 1984 movie The Muppets Take Manhattan, we’ve never had the real thing. Those Disney people are supposed to be so savvy when it comes to marketing, but why haven’t the Muppets been on Broadway?

OK, so we’re one step closer to that with the development of the ultra-charming 1977 made-for-TV Muppet special “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” as a stage musical utilizing actors and puppets. The show has its world premiere Dec. 4 at Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut.

If the show is wonderful (and how could it not be with songs by Paul Williams, who’s beefing up the already terrific score), perhaps that will be the necessary step toward bringing the big Muppet stars – Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, etc. – to the stage at long last.

For those in need of a fresh Muppet fix, we’ll have to wait until Dec. 17 when NBC airs “A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa,” a special starring Broadway stage veterans Nathan Lane, Jane Krakowski, Jesse L. Martin, Whoopi Goldberg and Richard Griffiths. Williams is contributing songs.

Here’s a clip from the Broadway spectacular “Manhattan Melodies” at the Biltmore Theatre, the finale from “The Muppets Take Manhattan.”

Is Dan Wolf an angry black white boy? Or does he just play one on stage.

The answer to both questions is somewhat complicated.

Wolf (pictured above, left, with Tommy Shepherd) is an extraordinary actor, playwright, MC and rapper behind the live hip-hop group Felonious. He’s the father of a newborn, and he spends his days as program manager of The Hub, a group at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco that helps young people in their 20s and 30s connect with their Jewish identity through the arts, new ritual, social action and social networking.

In one of those life-altering moments, Wolf heard San Francisco author Adam Mansbach on the radio talking about his 2005 novel Angry Black White Boy or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay.

“It was just the right moment for me because I had all these questions about the future of Felonious and what it meant for a white kid from the suburbs teaching hip-hop to white kids,” Wolf says. “I ran out and bought the book, and it just cracked open all these questions in my mind, and passages just jumped off the page.”

Being a man of the theater, Wolf immediately began thinking about adapting the book in some way, but he quickly learned the book had already been optioned as a movie. In his work with the Jewish Community Center, Wolf actually crossed paths with Mansbach, the two talked about some sort of stage adaptation, and Wolf was off and running.

Through his association with Intersection for the Arts’ Hybrid Project and its resident theater company, Campo Santo, Wolf set to work and premiered a 15-minute version of Angry Black White Boy last year as part of the Grounded Festival of New Works.

Campo Santo co-founder Sean San José and the Intersection team liked what they saw and began developing a full-length show with Wolf as the title character working with fellow Felonious members Tommy Shepherd, an actor and soundscape musician, and actor and choreographer Keith Pinto.

Part theatrical storytelling, part poetry, rap, beatboxing, ballet and hip-hop dance, Angry Black White Boy previews this weekend and opens Monday, Oct. 27 at Intersection and continues through Nov. 16.

Directing the piece is San José, who is used to long developmental periods with a new show. Sitting around an Intersection conference table with Wolf and Shepherd, San José says this show demanded a faster and more experimental creation.

“We’ve always wanted to do something like this – a sound and movement piece where sound lives as text and dialogue and music and movement is text and storytelling,” San José says. “It’s sonic and movement and text all feeding into one another. The process has been really fun for all of us. The notion of adaptation has been less of a task.”

Wolf calls the process a “remix”: “We take words, story, movement and sound and use them the way you might take a sample from a song and bring in disparate instruments. You make something new out of something old – and what’s more hip-hop than that?”

Mansbach’s novel tackles issues of race in America through the character of Macon, a white boy obsessed with black culture to the point that he becomes a sort of vigilante celebrity and founder of The Race Traitor Project, which leads to a national Day of Apology and to an epic New York City riot.

“I can’t even imagine the book as a movie because the story is so sharp and complex,” San José says. “But it works as a play. It’s so nuts what we can do with it, how we can tell this story not just through text and sound but also dance. The talent of this team is so extraordinary they can tell a story without words and still keep the story moving forward. Sometimes, between the sound and the movement, which is leading which.”

Shepherd chimes in: “In Felonious we always say follow the follower.”

The book’s sharp, satirical tone initially put off both San José and Shepherd – both say they’re not sure they would have picked up the book, let alone finished it, had Wolf not been so insistent about the project.

But San José and Shepherd eventually fell into Mansbach’s narrative and his exploration of race in the U.S.

“Race is one of the three issues I think I’ll always be addressing in my work,” San José says. “Mansbach is basically saying we live in a racist society, and then we as artists have to decide how we fulfill that. There’s a lot of nastiness to present in the complexity, but Mansbach has done all the thinking for us, and that helps us not over-think it.”

Wolf says the process of bringing Angry Black White Boy to the stage has been all about pushing himself further than he ever has artistically and surprising himself.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time – work on a story and a character,” Wolf says. “I’ve had this strange desire for something more classically structured that allows me to use specific skills and create shades in a bigger picture. I’m hoping what we’re doing is more universal, less marginalized artistically. That’s the beauty of working at Intersection and working with these people. We’re allowed to dig deep into the thing and ask the tough questions. As we push ourselves to the next level, we try to do it as fully and completely as possible, and I’m blessed to work in this building with these people.”

Angry Black White Boy continues through Nov. 16 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415-626-3311 or visit www.theintersection.org.

If you haven’t spent a lot of time in New York or Southern California, chances are your view of JoBeth Williams is limited to what you’ve seen in movies (Poltergeist, The Big Chill) or on TV (“Frasier,” “Baby M”).

Williams is actually a veteran stage actor. The Houston, Texas native (and daughter of an opera singer), got started the usual way: in high school musicals. In college, she shied away from the theater because her high school counselors had said something to the effect of : “Oh, that’s lovely, dear, you want to be an actress. But what do you want to do in real life?” So, at Brown University, Williams aimed toward a psychology major.

The lure of the drama department, however, was strong. Shortly into her college career, she got sucked into a theater audition and that was that.

She became a member of Trinity Repertory Company, eventually moved to New York and just kept acting.

Movies eventually called – remember her fantastically awkward hallway nude scene in Kramer vs. Kramer, her film debut? – but she never fully gave up theater.

“I never though of theater as a stepping stone to movies or TV,” Williams says. “I have always said I wanted to keep doing theater because it’s what I love most.”

And so she has. Last year, Williams appeared at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in a new play written and directed by Jane Anderson, The Quality of Life, set in the remains of a burned Oakland hills home. Her co-stars included Laurie Metcalf (of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and TV’s “Roseanne”), Scott Bakula (“Quantum Leap”) and Dennis Boutsikaris.

That play, and most of that cast, has moved north to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Metcalf (below right with Williams, photo courtesy of Geffen Playhouse and Michael Lamont) and Boutsikaris play an East Bay couple dealing with major illness as well as the loss of their home. Williams and Stephen Culp, replacing Bakula, play Bill and Dinah, Midwestern relatives dealing with their own loss who come out West for a fraught family reunion.

Williams has appeared in San Francisco before – in the long-running The Vagina Monologues at the Alcazar Theatre, but this is her first major Bay Area drama.

Williams recalls the first time she read Anderson’s script that she immediately wanted to do it.

“I really empathized with my character and the loss she’s been through,” Williams says. “Maybe it’s because I’m from Texas and have cousins who are not born again but good Christian people, salt of the earth people. Her sense of hope and hopefulness moves me tremendously. Reading the play, there were times I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh or cry, so I did both.”

The rehearsal process, according to Williams, was painful.

“Because of the nature of the material, dealing on a daily basis with that kind of loss…it felt like someone had beaten me up by the end of the day,” Williams says. “At the same time it was exhilarating to get to practice your craft and go into deep places. When you can do it, when you’re well used, it’s cathartic. It was difficult but incredibly rewarding.”

If the ACT run goes well, Williams hints that The Quality of Life could be heading for New York.

Assessing her stage career up to this point, Williams calls her stint as Cleopatra in the Old Globe’s Antony and Cleopatra one of her favorites. She’s also fond of Body Awareness, a play she did earlier this year at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company.

“The play is by this young writer, Annie Baker, and I play a high school teacher in Vermont who has a son with Asperger syndrome and a girlfriend who’s a college professor,” Williams explains. “This straight man, a visiting artist, comes to stay with us and it’s just a very funny play about jealousy and relationships and the difficulty of dealing with people. It’s something I think should be seen in San Francisco.”

Based in Los Angeles with her husband, TV and film director John Pasquin, the 59-year-old Williams still works regularly in film and on TV.

One of her favorite roles came in the 1991 big-screen comedy Switch with Ellen Barkin.

“I got to play this rich bitch, a really mean sort of snotty woman who kills a man,” Williams says with glee. “It’ was so much fun to play that part. I’m mostly cast as a sweet, nice mommy, but that’s really not who I am. I’m really a raving bitch. It was nice to play something closer to home. That’s what’s fun.”

When Williams was doing The Quality of Life in Los Angeles, she was impressed by the devotion of co-star Bakula’s fans – called Leapers after his old sci-fi TV series – who would come to the play night after night and bring the actor flowers and fruit and such.

There would be people at the stage door with Poltergeist posters and such for Williams to sign as well, but her fans weren’t so organized. Perhaps they’ll get organized in the Bay Area. But what would such a group be called?

Williams ponders the question for a moment. “I don’t know, maybe Poltergeisters…or Big Chillis?”

The Quality of Life begins previews today (Friday, Oct. 24), opens Wednesday, Oct. 29 and continues through Nov. 23 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $14-$57 for previews and $17-$82 for regular performances. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org for information.

On a personal note, I happen to think Williams’ performance as a traumatized mother in Poltergeist ranks as one of THE great mother-in-distress performances on film. The fact that the performance is in a hit horror film means – for whatever reason – that Williams’ superb work has been criminally underrated. Watch the movie again – Williams isn’t in a horror movie. She’s in the most intense family drama imaginable. She’s extraordinary, and she grounds a nearly ungroundable film.

On the lighter side, follow this link to hear the charming Williams talk about her Kramer vs. Kramer nude scene:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid192878566/bclid1163333263/bctid1114968511

Being a small, ambitious theater company is tough enough in good times.

But in an economy as rough as this one, the challenge is even mightier.

Marin’s Alternative Theater Ensemble, aka AlterTheater, just might have found the formula for survival, and community is a big part of it.

In the wake of the dot-com bust, a small group of active Bay Area theater artists — Jeanette Harrison, Sharmila Devar, Tahzay Mikkael, Ken Sonkin and Michael Ray Wisely – decided two things were important to them: doing risky work that forced them outside of their comfort zones and not having to pay the exorbitant gas bills and bridge tolls that come with working outside of Marin County.

“It really was like guerilla theater,” says Harrison. “We knew we wanted to be a company that paid its artists. With so many companies, most of the money goes to paying for space, so we decided we’d try to get the space donated – landlords have enough money — and give the money to the artists.”

Now in its fourth season, AlterTheater has made this formula work by performing in storefronts all around San Rafael – art galleries, furniture stores, you name it. The current production, Justin Warner’s American Whup-Ass, performs in what used to be a sports club, and before that was the location of San Rafael City Hall.

“In many other companies, the first thing cut is actors and Equity contracts,” Harrison says. “The first thing we cut is the production budget. We do a lot of collaborative partnerships so that we can borrow or get donated most of the things we need for a show. One of our sponsors is Goodwill, which has been a wonderful relationship for us. We’re able to use what’s in their stock and return it at the end of the show. Also, when people donate items to us, we pass them on to Goodwill. In Moscow they have a theater position called `the procurer,’ who basically reads the script, determines what’s going to be toughest to find, then sets out to procure those items. That’s a little like what we do.”

The theater world can be tough on the environment. You build sets and props, use them, then destroy or store them. The Alter model, with the help of Goodwill, is based on use and re-use.

Though budget is always a concern – grants and donations help, of course – Harrison says Alter’s focus is primarily on the work and choosing the kinds of plays that tackle issues important to the community just outside the theater’s door.

Past plays have addressed alcoholism, acquaintance rape and elder care. The fourth season opener is a definite change in tone for Alter. American Whup-Ass, a world premiere by New York writer Warner, is about a once-celebrated Nevada senator attempting to redeem himself through a wrestling match on live TV. (American Whup-Ass is pictured at right with Paul Santiago atop Mick Mize. Photo by Ann Brooks)

“I was starting to feel like we needed to do a play in which nobody dies,” Harrison says. “I think it was something like three consecutive shows where people died. With American Whup-Ass, I love that we can poke fun at everything, laugh at ourselves and still explore serious issues.”

Plays are selected by the Alter ensemble, of which director and writer Ann Brebner is a part. She was not a fan of the American script to start.

“There’s a lot of old-boy humor in it, and I don’t respond to that very well,” says the soft-spoken Brebner. “But I love it now. On stage, with an audience, I have a terrific time watching it. I could see in rehearsals that it was taking on life, but it reaches full maturity with an audience. The audience changes the dimension of the humor, pulls it to another level. When I was reading it, my instinct was that I don’t want to go there. But the audience itself opens the door and you go there. The writer, Justin Warner, really understands that relationship.”

Looking into the future for AlterTheater, Harrison says she’d like to expand the season from two plays to three and envisions that finally happening next year. The group is also commissioning its first play – a major accomplishment for a small company.

“We’re at an interesting point in our growth, and we’re doing some strategic planning,” Harrison says. “We’re examining what we’ve done, where we want to go and what are our core values. We’re finding out what we as a group want our future to be.”

Brebner notes that AlterTheater is accomplishing its goal of becoming a vital part of the community in which it performs.

“We have an opportunity, now that we’re becoming more well known and more recognized, to better identify ourselves as a double fabric,” Brebner says. “We’re creative part of the community but also an innovative business. We’re part of that community in a very unorthodox way.”

AlterTheater’s American Whup-Ass continues through Nov. 9 at 1299 Fourth St. (at C Street), San Rafael. Tickets are $20-$25. Call 415-454-2787 or visit www.altertheater.org.