Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

It’s worth reporting SF Playhouse’s 2008-09 season just for the name of the second show of the season. Check it out:

Shining City by Conor McPherson (Oct. 1-Nov. 22) - Wonderful Irish playwright’s modern-day ghost story.

Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party by Aaron Loeb (Dec. 3-Jan. 17) -This new comedy by local scribe Loeb tracks the happenings surrounding the outing of Abe Lincoln by a fourth grader at a Christmas pageant.

Landscape of the Body by John Guare (Jan. 28-March 7) - Long overdue Bay Area premiere of Guare’s part-play, part-musical.

The Story by Tracey Scott Wilson (March 18-April 25) - Drama based on the true story of a New York Times reporter fabricating a story. A co-production with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.

TBA (May 6-June 13)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and Dale Wasserman (June 24-Sept. 5) - Nurse Ratched, oil up your sneer. It’s time to head back to the asylum.

For information visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

I can always tell whether a theater year has been good or not so good when I sit down to hammer out my Top 10 list. If I can summon five or more shows simply from memory, it’s a good year. This year’s entire list came almost entirely from memory (which is a feat in itself as the old noggin’ ain’t what it used to be), so it was a good year indeed.

Here’s the countdown leading to my No. 1 pick of the year.

10. Anna Bella Eema, Crowded Fire Theatre Company — Three fantastic actresses, Cassie Beck, Danielle Levin and Julie Kurtz, brought Lisa D’Amour’s tone poem of a play to thrilling life.

9. First Person Shooter, SF Playhouse and Playground – What a good year for SF Playhouse. This original play by local writer Aaron Loeb brought some powerhouse drama to its examination of violent video games and school violence.

8. Bulrusher, Shotgun Players – Berkeley’s own Eisa Davis’ eloquent play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, turned the Northern California dialect of Boontling into poetic drama as it told the story of an outcast young woman finding her place in the world.

7. Avenue Q, Best of Broadway/SHN – Hilarious and irreverent, this puppet-filled musical by Jeff Marx, Robert Lopez and Jeff Whitty made you believe in friendship, life after college and the joys of puppet sex.

6. Jesus Hopped the `A’ Train, SF Playhouse – It took a while for Stephen Adly Guirgis’ intense drama to make it to the Bay Area, but the wait was worth it, if only for Berkeley resident Carl Lumbly in the central role of a murderer who may have seen the error of his ways. And note: This is the second SF Playhouse show on the list.

5. Emma, TheatreWorks _ Paul Gordon’s sumptuous, funny and, of course, romantic adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel came marvelously to life as a musical, with a star-making performance by Pleasanton native Lianne Marie Dobbs.

4. Argonautika, Berkeley Repertory Theatre _ Mary Zimmerman’s athletic retelling of the Jason and the Argonauts myth fused beauty and muscle and impeccable storytelling into a grand evening of theater.

3. Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People, Word for Word – Actually, the second half of Strangers We Know, this stage adaptation of Lorrie Moore’s short story was brilliantly directed by Joel Mullenix and performed by Patricia Silver and Sheila Balter.

2. Man and Superman, California Shakespeare Theater _ This unbelievably vivid version of George Bernard Shaw’s massive existentialist comedy benefited from superior direction by Jonathan Moscone and an impeccable cast headed by Elijah Alexander and Susannah Livingston.

1. The Crowd You’re in With, Magic Theatre _ The team of playwright Rebecca Gilman and director Amy Glazer fused into brilliance with this slice-of-life meditation on why we make the choices we make in our lives. Local luminaries Lorri Holt and Charles Shaw Robinson brought incredible humor and tenderness to their roles, and T. Edward Webster in the lead managed to make ambivalence compelling.

Now it’s your turn. Please post your favorite theater moments of 2007 — no geographical limitations, just good theater.

Opened May 5, 2007 at SF Playhouse

SF Playhouse’s sharp `Shooter’ targets violence, video games
three [1/2] stars Current, vital

We love tidiness in our news. The worse the news, it seems, the less we want to think about it, so we welcome a hasty generalization here, a rush to place blame there. Stories become so simplified so quickly we often lose sight of certain things — like the human cost of whatever horrible event has transpired.

Taking his cue from the Columbine tragedy (Virginia Tech happened well after the play was finished), Berkeley playwright Aaron Loeb invents a school shooting that might have been inspired by a violent video game and then lets the jagged, messy pieces fall into a dramatic pile that is anything but tidy.

And that’s a good thing.

Loeb’s First Person Shooter opened Saturday in a world-premiere production at SF Playhouse. The play was commissioned by PlayGround, the group that presents short plays by local writers on a monthly basis.

Loeb, who has won multiple awards in the short-play format, expands to full length with relative ease and reveals himself to be a writer of distinct skill. Much of the play is set in the offices of a hip, geeky video game company, and Loeb’s ear for contemporary rhythms and dialogue is unerring.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Loeb’s day job is as COO of a San Francisco video game company.

But more than that, Loeb is able to cut through the frenzy — of money-hungry gamesters, of lawsuits, of media madness — and find the heart of tragedy.

This is not a play about whether or not video game violence (or violence in movies or in rap music for that matter) causes real-life violence. Rather, Loeb uses his dramatic muscle to wrest the story out of the sound byte realm and back into the world of three-dimensional human beings dealing with grief, confusion, fear and a need to place blame.

“We need to hold some of the people accountable for some of the evil in this world,” says one character.

That sentiment covers a lot of ground here. In the wake of an Illinois high school shooting _ two teen shooters killed 14 classmates, including the only African-American student in the school _ makers of a violent, gun-based online video game called “Megaton” are pulled into the glare of the national spotlight.

Prior to the killings, one of the shooters left a message on the game’s Web site essentially saying “thanks for the practice.”

The lawyers then converge on the rural Illinois town with statistics claiming that video games alter brain chemistry and that “it’s only a matter of time before boys try to live out the game.” Their goal is to recruit as many grieving parents as possible for a lawsuit against the video game company.

Clearly, coming from the video game industry, Loeb has a distinct point of view when it comes to whether or not video games are responsible for real-life violence. But that’s not what interests him here.

He deflects that issue by focusing on the game’s primary creator, Kerry Davis (an intense Craig Marker, above), a damaged man still suffering his wife’s violent rape/murder.

There are distinct correlations between this particular video game and this particular killing spree, and the connection dredges up issues of racism, vengeance and accountability.
If anything, there’s too much packed into Loeb’s two-hour drama. Action shifts back and forth from the video game company’s offices to an Illinois farm.

At the office, Kerry deals with co-workers who are sympathetic (Kate Del Castillo as Tamar), jerky (Chad Deverman as Tommy) and terrified (Sung Min Park as Wilson). And on the farm, we meet the father of a murdered student (Adrian Roberts as Daniel) and his second wife (Susi Damilano, left with Roberts, as Rose).

The play comes into clear focus when the two grief-stricken men _ Kerry and Daniel _ are forced together in a TV news interview (an extraordinary scene) and later when they attempt to relate one-on-one as men suffering unthinkable loss.

Director Jon Tracy’s production is lean and powerful (video projections by Brian Degan Scott, Nick Bruty and Kevin Wright put us inside the video game), though he doesn’t seem to trust the drama of the play enough. He continually has his actors pounding and slamming furniture between scenes as if to remind us this drama has impact.

He needn’t worry. Loeb’s play is that rarity in theater: an insightful examination of current events that seems at once relevant and timeless.

For information about First Person Shooter visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Playwright Aaron Loeb is what you might call multitasking. He has a 16-month-old daughter, Talitha Jane; he just moved from Oakland to Berkeley; he’s readying his play First Person Shooter for its world premiere Saturday at the SF Playhouse; he has a short play in the Best of PlayGround festival coming up; and he’s just finished another commissioned play, Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party!

“It’s a lot, I know,” Loeb says with a laugh. “It’s really kind of silly.”

Foremost on Loeb’s mind is Shooter, a play that deals with issues of violence and video games in the wake of a Columbine-like incident.

Loeb actually works in the video game industry –_ he’s the COO of Planet Moon Studios, developer of video games — and he remembers after Columbine, the rush to blame violence in games and movies.

“Looking back, it’s terrible that that’s what we were talking about at the time,” Loeb says. “Nobody was talking about the parents or the kids except in basic terms. We as a culture try to nail down a simple, easy explanation of something so unexplainable, so unspeakable.”

What Loeb wanted to accomplish with First Person Shooter (the title refers to the type of video game in which you see the action through the shooter’s eyes, gun in hands and all) was to explore both sides of the violence in video games debate: those who say the games ruin children and those who say they don’t.

“I also wanted to humanize both sides and explore the need for human connection in the face of tragedy rather than finding the easy sound byte that makes it easier for us all to look away.”
We’ve heard similar types of conversations recently in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech. That gunman did not play video games, but there are still commonalities.

“There’s a similarly dehumanizing national conversation we’re having,” Loeb says. “I’ve seen it in the reaction of the parents: Please stop showing (the shooter) every 30 seconds and talk about my kid!

“I can’t imagine what it must be like for them. And we as a nation want to get through it quickly so we can go back to talking about Anna Nicole.”

First Person Shooter Saturday, May 5 at the SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. The show continues through June 9. Tickets are $36. Call (415) 677-9596 or visit www.ticketweb.com.