Monthly Archives: March 2011

ACT’s MFA students frolic in kiddie Litter

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ACT’s Master of Fine Arts Program members, all 12 of them, star in the world premiere of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Litter at Zeum Theater. Below: the Framingham Dodecatuplets confer on an important family matter. Photos by Alessandra Mello

It’s a busy late winter for San Francisco playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, and the busy-ness has a lot to do with unusual births.

Later this month at the Humana Festival of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Nachtrieb will premiere BOB, an “epic journey in just five acts” about a man born in a White Castle bathroom.

Closer to home, Nachtrieb is upping the baby ante but in only one act. Litter: The Story of the Framingham Dodecatuplets was written for the 12 students of American Conservatory Theater’s Master of Fine Arts Program Class of 2011. The comedy, complete with original songs, had its world premiere over the weekend at the Zeum Theater.

If you know Nachtrieb from his plays boom or Hunter Gatherers, you know that he is, in a word, hilarious. His comedy has edge and it can be heartfelt. He can slice you up and make it seem like the nicest possible thing to do.

Any opportunity to see a new Nachtrieb work is well worth taking, even when the results, like Litter are still the embryonic stage.

For most of its 90 minutes, Litter, as directed by Mark Rucker, ACT’s new associate artistic director, is a heck of a lot of fun. On a set that looks like it was borrowed from a ‘70s variety show (design by Liliana Duque-Pineiro), we find the Framingham Dodecatuplets in performance at the Concord Senior Center.

Once celebrated for being a happy, singing-and-dancing brood of 12, the dodecatuplets have fallen on hard times. We learn that their mother died during their birth. In fact, we learn she insisted on it. They once had hit records but have now hit hard times.

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Now in their early ‘20s, the Framinghams are all different shapes, colors and sizes. Their lifetime sponsorship by Minute Maid fruit juices means they’ll always have some sort of nutrition in their lives, but lately, that’s about all they have.

They don’t have names but rather numbers, and they wear plush velour track suits (costumes by Callie Floor), further obscuring their identities and their adulthood. They harbor a lot of hostility toward one another, and their collective future is questionable, to say the least.

As a showpiece for the MFA dozen, Litter certainly does the trick. Each actor gets to highlight a custom-made Framingham quirk. For instance, Patrick Lane as 9 plays the violin and tells fart jokes. Ashley Wickett as 1 is the Type-A overachiever de facto leader. And Brian Clark Jansen is the webcam-loving horndog of the group.

The actors attack their roles with enviable energy, and they seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. I was most impressed by Dan Clegg as 8, the dodecatuplet with the enigmatic British accent. His character is probably the most interesting because he’s the most rebellious. Also impressive are Marisa Duchowny as 6, the one in the middle who (like Jan Brady before her) suffers from invisible child syndrome (but then kicks some serious ass as a leather-clad journalist), and Richardson Jones as 2, the quippy, fashion-loving gay one. His every line, even when it’s not a punch line, is funny.

As much fun as the play is, the plot runs out of stem in the final third, and by the end, Nachtrieb seems to just give up on trying to find anything but the most ordinary ending. Any sense of the Framingham’s as faded celebrities or having any sort of pop-culture cachet has vanished. While erstwhile Bradys and Partridges, Osmonds and New Kids on the Block can’t escape their fame or notoriety, but, seemingly, the Framinghams can.

Nachtrieb breaks up the family group and sends its individual members out into the harsh world to make in on their own, but we never hear about them bumping up against their once sparkling celebrity. There’s a reunion at the end, and the fact that it’s not televised on VH-1 makes it seem like an event from a parallel universe.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Litter: The Story of the Framingham Dodecatuplets continues through March 19 at Zeum Theater in Yerba Buena Gardens, Fourth and Howard streets, San Francisco. Tickets are $10-$15. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Ruined but resilient, horrifying but beautiful

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Oberon K.A. Adjepong (left) and Tonye Patano star in Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. Below: Carla Duren is restrained by Kola Ogundiran (left) and Okierete Onaodowan. Photos courtesy of www.kevinberne.com

The evil that men do – and have done and continue to do – certainly does live after them. Shakespeare was so right about that. It lives and festers and poisons and leads to more evil.

This is incredibly apparent in Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play now on stage at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre.

Acts of unspeakable, incomprehensible violence occur, but it’s the echoes of those acts that ring most loudly in this compelling, ultimately shattering theatrical experience. There’s a war depicted on stage, but it’s not the chaotic, constantly shifting free-for-all of militias and government forces in East Africa. Rather, it’s the war waged on the bodies of thousands of that region’s women.

A part of a campaign of terror (and due in no small part to the centuries-old tradition of men in packs behaving like savages) soldiers of all stripes brutally rape and torture the women in their perceived purview.

Taking inspiration from Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, another tale of a resourceful woman surviving in wartime, Nottage gives us the morally ambiguous Mama Nadi (Tonye Patano), proprietor of a jungle whorehouse, where the beer and the orange Fanta sodas are cold and the women are…well, ruined.

To be ruined in this culture is to have been with a man other than your husband – even if that man abducted and raped you. These women, victims as much of their culture as the violence of men, become refugees, and Mama Nadi offers them something of a safe haven.

They get food and a place to sleep. In exchange, they pleasure miners and militiamen, rebel leaders and fast-talking traders. It’s a living – one level of hell traded for another.

Act 1 of director Liesl Tommy’s powerful production is slow to start. The plot doesn’t really kick in until the more emotionally gripping second act, but we get a strong sense of place from Clint Ramos’ set, with the encroaching jungle creeping into the rustic interior of Mama Nadi’s establishment.

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With nine men in the cast overpowering the four women, we immediately feel the precarious nature of the world these women inhabit. On an average night at Mama Nadi’s they are handled like useful garbage, roughly pawed and groped in the better moments and taken offstage for the worst moments. We may not see what happens, but we feel it.

That’s the power of Ruined. Nottage takes her time telling the story – primarily of Mama Nadi and two newly arrived girls, Salima (Pascale Armand) and Sophie (Carla Duren). Each of these women has an unfolding story of violence and resilience, and each of these formidable actors brings the depth and compassion these stories deserve. And boy do we feel the pushing and pulling of their lives

There are scenes and stories in this 2 ½-hour play (a co-production of Berkeley Rep, Huntington Theatre Company and La Jolla Playhouse) that are hard to watch. But then you think about how Nottage traveled to Uganda to interview Congolese refugees and how sharing their stories, as wrenching as it may be to watch them, is nothing, nothing compared to living them.

Such horrors are nothing new in the shameful history of mankind, but these atrocities are happening on our watch. Experiences like Ruined aren’t about instilling guilt in Western audiences as much as they are about raising awareness and inciting compassion.

The wonder of Ruined emerges in moments of beauty – whether in a song performed by Sophie (backed by musicians Adesoji Odukogbe and Alvin Terry), an athletic dance performed by the male patrons of Mama Nadi’s (choreographed by Randy Duncan) or a flash of brave compassion from a surprising source.

In the face of mankind at its worst, there can be sparks of beauty and enlightenment, of fleeting joy amid horror. Those sparks – much like extraordinary pieces of theater – are what we aim for.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Ruined continues through April 10 in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $34-$73. Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org for information.

Dammit, Janet. Let’s rock!

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The touring cast of Rock of Ages passes along this public service announcement: don’t stop believin’. The show is coming to the Curran Theatre. Photo by Winslow Townson

Janet Billig Rich would like you to cum on and feel the noize. And girls? Why don’t you rock your boys. And maybe we’ll all get wild, wild, wild.

Billig Rich extends the above invitation as a bona fide rocker, as a Long Island native and, most importantly, as one of two dozen producers of the surprise Broadway smash Rock of Ages.

The most successful juke-box musical this side of Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages takes guilty-pleasure rock songs from 1980s hair bands like Journey, Night Ranger, Twisted Sister, Whitesnake and Poison, and turns them into a funny, feel-good slice of musical theater nostalgia. The touring production of this Tony-nominated Broadway hit rocks and rolls into San Francisco’s Curran Theatre March 8 as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway series.

Janet Billig RichBillig Rich (right) comes to the world of theatrical producing from years of managing rock bands such as Nirvana, Hole, White Zombie and the Smashing Pumpkins. She was also the youngest senior executive at Atlantic Records back when working for a major record label actually meant something.

These days, she and her husband are living in Los Angeles raising twins. She describes herself as a soccer mom, but when you’ve survived Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, you’re never just a soccer mom.

Indeed, Billig Rich became a working producer (not simply an investor which is what so many “producers” these days actually are), applying her expertise in managing clients and catalogs to start securing rights to all the songs used in Rock of Ages.

“Every single song has its own story,” Billig Rich says on the phone from L.A. “Getting the rights to all the songs took about three years. Initially, when we didn’t have anything going on, the show didn’t look so good on paper. An ‘80s rock musical? That made pitching the rights holders tough. Everyone took massaging and babysitting.”

But then there were workshops, when rights holders and band members could see the show on its feet and hear songs like “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” and “Wanted Dead or Alive” in the context of a story about musicians and managers on L.A.’s Sunset Strip circa 1987.

“Securing righrts was a lot of heavy lifting,” Billig Rich says. “I’m happy to be on the other side. Sometimes when I’m watching the show, I get a little panicky twinge and think, ‘Oh, my God. Did we get the rights for that one?’”

When producer Matt Weaver first described Rock of Ages to Billig Rich more than eight years ago, he asked her to envision the actors on stage and the audience all singing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the end of the show.

“I thought about it, and that song does everything, says everything,” she recalls. “And remember, this was long before Glee. The song has a great message and it’s a curious beast of a song because it doesn’t follow the usual verse/chorus/hook pattern. The chorus doesn’t even come until 2 ½ minutes in. But it’s a song that just makes you happy. You could put it at the end of August: Osage County and people would still be standing in the aisles singing.”

Sure the songs are fun, but do they really work in the theater?

“People used to ask me all the time if bands like Whitesnake or Poison were theatrical?” Billig Rich says. “Honestly, so many of their songs are an inch of their lives away from being a show tune. That’s one of the reasons the show came together so easily.”

You might expect, given the show’s title, to hear Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages,” but you won’t.

[BONUS VIDEO: The Road to Rock]

“Titles aren’t copyrighted,” Billig Rich says with a laugh. “So screw them. It was just one of those things. The manager couldn’t even get us to the band. He just said, no, no, no. Just a few months ago, Def Leppard came to the show and loved it. They were so mad they weren’t in it. I said, ‘Dude, you should have said that two years ago.’ I called them two weeks before we opened on Broadway. Reviews for the off-Broadway run were great. We had raised millions of dollars. The time was right. Oh well. They want to be in it now, but you can’t change a hit show on the whim of some rock star.”

A lot has been said about Rock of Ages being “Mamma Mia! for dudes,” and Billig Rich heartily agrees, having just invited all of her kids’ soccer coaches to see the show during the tour’s recent stop there. The coaches went wild and kept coming back with their buddies.

“Dudes love this show!” Billig Rich says. “The music is total dude rock, and the show is full of hot girls and hot guys. One of the slogans we thought up but never used was “Big hair, big dreams,” which I love. We also thought up but never used “Hairspray is back but now the dudes are wearing it.”

Soon to be a movie starring Tom Cruise (he recently inked his contract) and directed by Adam Shankman (of Hairspray and So You Think You Can Dance fame), Rock of Ages just keeps rockin’ on.

The secret of the show’s success, according to Billig Rich, is that the music is “fantastic with fun arrangements that give us different takes on songs we know and love from the ‘80s.”

But that’s not all.

“What makes the show special is the characters,” Billig Rich continues. “Chris D’Arienzo, who wrote the show, created characters you care about, that you want to know more about. People relate to the people on stage, and then there’s this great music. That makes a show.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Rock of Ages runs March 8 through April 9 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets start at $30. Call 888-746-1799 or visit www.shnsf.com for information.

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