Imaginary discomfort rules at Berkeley Rep

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The cast of Berkeley Rep’s world-premiere play Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit includes (from left)Sharon Lockwood as Mrs. Gold, Marilee Talkington as Naomi, Danny Scheie as the Ghost, Susan Lynskey as Sarah Gold and Cassidy Brown as Michael. Below: Talkington (left) and Lynskey star in the new play by San Francisco writer Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket. Photos courtesy of Kevin Berne/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

The first time I heard the title for the new play by Daniel Handler, the San Francisco writer behind the popular Lemony Snicket books, I was confused. Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit is the title, and it wasn’t the Snickety-y subtitle that perplexed me. It was the notion that comfort could be imaginary. Isn’t comfort comforting no matter where it comes from? You can receive comfort from an external source (a parent, a pet, a narcotic) or you can just imagine comfort (memory, dream, hallucination), but as long as you are comforted, job done…at least for a little while, right?

Surely seeing the play would help me understand the title, but no such luck. Imaginary Comforts opened Thursday at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Peet’s Theatre in a slick world-premiere production directed by Tony Taccone and featuring a cast that boasts some of the best actors the Bay Area has to offer. The play itself seems confused about its comedy, its sincerity, its theatricality. It’s kind of like an imaginary play that may one day find its reason for being – and at one point a character questions the notion of imaginary comfort, which made me want to stand up and shout, “Yes! That!”

Fractured time and narrative make the play something of a puzzle, which is nicely reflected in the hyperkinetic set by Todd Rosenthal. A speedy turntable repositions moving walls and doorways that are framed with strips of light, thus creating the effect of a living comic strip whose pieces quickly fall into and out of place. The central discussion amid all the movement involves death and ghosts and stories, but nothing is really moving or scary or, to be quite honest, terribly engaging.

But it is fairly entertaining for about 90 minutes partly because Taccone knows how to move things along and his actors know how to wring everything they can from Handler’s script. Somehow the premise of an inept rabbi engaging with a grieving family over the course of several years never fully comes to life, in spite of all the spinning, brightly lit walls.

At the heart of the play, and, indeed, in the lumpiest part of the title, is a story told by a father to a young daughter about a childless couple that made a deal with a rabbit to take one of its many children in exchange for keeping the entire rabbit brood safe. The rabbit child turns into a human child, and when it comes time to offer comfort, care and safety to the rabbit family, the human parent kills the rabbit parent and serves it for dinner. The ghost of the rabbit then haunts the humans, reminding them of their unfulfilled promises. This story emerges as important when its teller, the father, has died, and his adult daughter offers it to the rabbi who will be leading the funeral service.

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There are two problems with this. First, the rabbi, Naomi, has no idea what to do with the story or a way to discern what it tells her about the deceased that she might be able to share with the congregation. The second is that the story, as fables go, just isn’t compelling. Even when the view of the fable shifts to an entirely different take on it, there doesn’t seem to be much there there – certainly not enough upon which to build a play.

As Rabbi Naomi, the always-appealing Marilee Talkington has the daunting task of making her a believable character. She’s highly self-aware in that she knows what a bad rabbi she is. Her entire rabbinical career seems to have been undermined and irretrievably damaged by the upending of a bottle of kosher wine at a key moment in her training. As a result, she bumbles through her job, bemoaning how bad she is at it and how she occupies the lowest rung of rabbi service even though there’s supposedly no hierarchy among rabbis. But all that self-awareness doesn’t make her any less inept. If anything, it makes her worse.

We meet her in the throes of a blind date with a self-described “psychic adviser” (the enigmatic Michael Goorjian) who is not Jewish, though he said he was in his computer dating profile, and she is perturbed that he thought her job was “rabbit” due to either her typo or his misreading. Either way, it’s a terrible date, though it allows Naomi to let us know (the first of many times) what a bad rabbi she is. Then we get to see her ineptitude in action when she meets the Gold family. Marcus Gold (Julian López -Morillas seen in flashbacks) has died. His widow (a funny but under-used Sharon Lockwood) can only moan and cry. His best friend (Jarion Monroe) seethes with anger, and his daughter (a wry Susan Lynskey) is lost in the chaos of death and gets no comfort from her husband (Cassidy Brown).

In a forced bit of coincidence, Naomi’s blind date has a connection to the grieving family, one that involves that odd rabbit fable and an actor (the sublime Danny Scheie) hired to actually play the ghost of the rabbit. Even as time passes and bits of plot and character are revealed, the play never comes fully into focus, and the recurring motifs – the story of the Jews, “the phrase I would use is…,” sucking at your job, being haunted by old stories, the whole rabbit fable – become less impactful and more annoying.

But there are flashes of light in the writing, like a potent delineation between “nonsense” and “bullshit” made by one of the characters. And the frazzled Naomi gets off a good laugh with her response to the rabbit fable. Upon hearing that the humans ate the rabbit, she sputters, “Rabbit isn’t even kosher! They’re for gentiles and Easter. Jesus.” She also has the gall to say, during a moment of tension amid the grieving Golds, “This is a difficult time for all of us,” which is kind of hilarious.

It is a difficult time for all of us, Naomi. Would that there was some comfort – imaginary or otherwise – in this jumble of play.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Daniel Handler’s Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit continues through Nov. 19 in a Berkeley Repertory Theatre production at the Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $30-$97. Call 510-647-2900 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

Freedom, dreams clash in Aurora’s Safe House

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Cobbler Addison Pedigrew (David Everett Moore, standing on chair) tells his brother, Frank (Lance Gardner), and his Aunt Dorcas (Dawn L. Troupe) about his encounter with the local sheriff in Keith Josef Adkins’ Safe House at Aurora Theatre Company. Below: The Pedigrews argue about what to do with fugitive slave Roxie (Jamella Cross, rear). Photos by David Allen

There are several ways to interpret the title of Keith Josef Adkins’ Safe House now at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company. One way sees cobbler Addison Pedigrew, a free man of color in Kentucky, aiming for his version of the American dream: a thriving shoe making/repairing business run out of his home to support his Aunt Dorcas and his brother, Frank, so that they can be truly free to thrive and expand their families. The other way, according to Frank and Dorcas, is to provide shelter and assistance to fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Both co-exist, but not easily in this 2014 drama, which takes much of its first act to really get going.

The first half of the plays two-plus hours is spent establishing the family dynamic in the Pedigrew household and the culture in which they live circa 1843. Having been caught helping a fugitive slave, they have spent the last two years under the thumb of the local sheriff, with their movements severely limited – shopping allowed only every three months, all doors of their home and barn must remain open, no swimming in the local creek even on the hottest day, and Addison’s cobbler business requires him to go door to door rather than working out of his home. The two years of severely curtailed freedom is almost over, and Addison has big plans.

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As played by David Everett Moore, Addison is an energetic dreamer, a hard worker and a planner. His vision of the American dream is having a successful business and being respected by his customers, which, if all goes well, will include the sheriff and Kentucky’s big-footed governor. The only thing threatening his plans is his brother Frank (an intense and powerful Lance Gardner), whose idea of freedom involves actual freedom: doing what he wants, helping whom he wants, loving whom he wants and not sucking up to the white man or succeeding on their terms instead of his own. Aunt Dorcas (Dawn L. Troupe) provides some stability to the yin and the yang of Addison and Frank, although her heart seems to reside in a place of service, of providing safe haven to the runaway slaves.

Playwright Adkins throws in an under-baked love triangle with Clarissa (Dezi Solèy), a free woman of color who is supposed to marry Addison but is actually in love with Frank. There’s another sort-of love story between Dorcas and Bracken (Cassidy Brown), one of the sheriff’s henchman, but throwing an interracial attraction at us (born in their shared childhoods) late in the play robs the story and characters of depth. If we had known about their back story earlier, perhaps Bracken wouldn’t come across as simply the representative of authoritarian white power, the henchman of the sheriff, whom we never meet.

There is a huge surprise in Act 2, one that makes the audience gasp, and it’s only then that Safe House really catches dramatic fire. Even the fiery performance of Jamella Cross as runaway slave Roxie can’t quite raise the dramatic level the play seems to be aiming for, but that plot twist really does because it cuts right to the heart of the conflict in how brothers Addison and Frank view what it means to be free.

Having appeared frequently on the Aurora stage (among many other local stages) as an actor, L. Peter Callender sits in the director’s chair for Safe House, and perhaps the most surprising thing about his direction is that he has failed to create a show that benefits from the Aurora’s incredible intimacy. The performances, while strong, are not as finely tuned or detailed as they might be, and certain moments – as when one character spits in another’s face – feel major but barely register.

Safe House ends up feeling like a powerful play that hasn’t found its power.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Keith Josef Adkins’ Safe House continues through Dec. 4 at Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $32-$56. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org.

TheatreWorks delights with devilish Angels

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Rebecca Dines is Jane and Sarah Overman is Julia, best friends whose marriages are boring them to tears. In Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, a TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, the bored wives get up to some drunken mischief. Photos by Kevin Berne

Boredom, desire and champagne make for a potent cocktail in Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, now receiving a lively production from TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.

Director Robert Kelley delivers an elegant outing for this zesty comedy that keeps its focus on two live wire ladies – Jane and Julia, best friends since grammar school. Living the easy life with their lackluster husbands is taking its toll on their vivacity, and when left to their own devices, they manage to stir up a whole lot of excitement with the help of a man from their past (a cameo by the ever-dashing Aldo Billingslea.

I reviewed the production for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s an excerpt:

If Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz had been born into London’s upper crust, they might have resembled Julia and Jane, besties since childhood and now five years into their respective marriages to wealthy ninnies. Julia (Sarah Overman) is frank with her husband, Fred (Mark Anderson Phillips), over breakfast: “We’re not in love a bit,” she says. Ever-sensible Fred replies that they’re in love in a different way, a way full of affection and “good comradeship.”
Jane (Rebecca Dines) has a similar conversation with her Willy (Cassidy Brown); and when the two men go off for a short golf holiday, the women decide to inject some much needed passion and excitement into their lives. “To put it mildly, dear,” Jane says, “we’re both ripe for a lapse.”

Read the full review here.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels continues through June 28 in a TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $19-$74. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

Taking Steps toward a lively evening

EXTENDED THROUGH FEB. 20!
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The stellar cast of TheatreWorks’ The 39 Steps comprises (from left) Rebecca Dines, Mark Anderson Phillips, Dan Hiatt and Cassidy Brown. Below: Dines and Phillips take a step closer to romance. Photos by Mark Kitaoka

Whatever will we do when the British have thoroughly unstuffed themselves? That stiff-upper-lip stuff and famous British reserve have long been targets for comedy – especially by the British themselves.

We love to lampoon the stalwart Brit character – the rigid veneer that provided such fodder for Kneehigh Theatre Company’s brilliant adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, which we saw here at American Conservatory Theater. British frigidity was practically its own character in that show, which threw two placid lovers – a doctor and a housewife – into an ocean of romantic emotion and took incredible glee in the destruction of their noble facades.

I couldn’t help thinking about Brief Encounter during The 39 Steps, the rollicking stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film of the same name.

Both Coward and Hitchcock (working on an adaptation of the 1915 John Buchan novel) enjoy throwing prim-and-proper Brits into tumultuous events and watching their reserve knock against passion and danger.

Stage adaptor Patrick Barlow goes Hitchcock one better. He turns the tumult into a farcical fracas that allows four adept actors to play 140 different characters.

A hit on London’s West End in 2006, the play became Broadway’s longest-running comedy two years later. The touring production played San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in December of 2009, and now Mountain View’s TheatreWorks has cast it with a quartet of local favorites.

Under the direction of Artistic Director Robert Kelley, it’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable evening of mystery mayhem and slapstick espionage. Kelley has cast an irresistible quartet of actors to create the whirlwind, and the result is two hours of constant laughs.

39 Steps 2Mark Anderson Phillips is Richard Hannay, a Canadian visiting London. Bored, he craves something mindless and trivial, so he goes to the theater. Naturally. There he meets a classic femme fatale, a German named Annabella Schmidt played by Rebecca Dines with an accent think as strudel.

When Annabella comes home with Richard and ends up with a knife in her back, the adventure begins. In true Hitchcock style, Richard becomes an innocent man on the run, and his journey takes him to Scotland, where invaluable comedians Dan Hiatt and Cassidy Brown chew the accent as if it were haggis-flavored taffy.

Joe Ragey’s set creates a pretty but second-rate theater complete with elevated box seats on the sides, and the actors seem to be playing the theater’s company actors. Phillips is the vain leading man (the narration keeps emphasizing how handsome Richard is, what with his wavy brown hair and pencil moustache) and Dines is the beleaguered leading lady. Hiatt and Cassidy are the hammy scene-stealers who can’t help playing the show as if it were their own vaudevillian showcase.

The costumes by B. Modern add fuel to the comic fire, especially when Brown does drag. His buxom Scottish hotelier is hilarious, while Hiatt’s villainous Professor sports an impressive two-tone pompadour that wouldn’t be out of place in a band like Josie and the Pussycats.

Act 2 of The 39 Steps loses some steam, especially in a long hotel room sequence, but most of the show is filled with deft physical comedy and cute allusions to other Hitchcock films (the Psycho reference is particularly funny).

What’s especially rewarding about a show like this is how spectacularly theatrical it is. With cargo trunks, ladders and a lot of stage smoke, four skilled actors create a world that sucks you in despite the inanity of it all. You’re laughing at the farce of it all, but the story exerts a certain pull because the characters are distinct, the locations are effectively evoked and you’re having a grand time enjoying it on a number of levels.

The 39 Steps isn’t exactly a stairway to paradise, but it’s definitely more than three dozen steps in the right direction.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

TheatreWorks’ The 39 Steps continues an extended run through Feb. 20 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $24-$79. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

Theater review: `Distracted’

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Rebecca Dines is a harried mother desperately trying to figure out how to help her 9-year-old son, who may have Attention Deficit Disorder, in Lisa Loomer’s Distracted, a TheatreWorks production. Photo by Mark Kitaoka

Script’s lack of depth distracts in otherwise enjoyable `Distracted’
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Say this for the TheatreWorks production of Distracted by Lisa Loomer: it gets the brain-pinching chaos of modern life exactly right.

It’s all there — the constantly ringing cell phones, the call waiting, the Internet information overload, the remote control ruling the roost with hundreds of channels and any kind of music merely a click away. No wonder the kids we bring into this world are distracted.

Loomer’s play finds itself in a hot spot. There was a fantastic production in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s black box theater. And Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon just starred in the high-profile New York production.

This TheatreWorks outing reunites director Armando Molina and star Rebecca Dines, who worked together in TheatreWorks’ 2004 production of Loomer’s Living Out, a stronger, more artfully shaped play.

In Distracted, we get an unnamed mother (Dines) whose frantic life is dominated by her troubled 9-year-old son, Jesse (Gabriel Hoffman, mostly a loud offstage voice with a penchant for dropping F-bombs). Jesse’s days are frenzied leaps from energetic highs (he loves to invent hors d’oeuvres) to despairing lows (he loathes putting on his pajamas). Sensitive, intelligent and uncontrolled, he has trouble in school and makes life difficult for his teacher (Elizabeth Carter) and his classmates.

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Mom devotes herself to figuring out what’s wrong with Jesse, and after consulting with a raft of professionals – all played by Carter, Dena Martinez and Cassidy Brown – it turns out he has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. Mom and Dad (Robert Yacko making the most of an underwritten role) spar over whether or not to put their child on medication. Dad is adamantly against it and says that Jesse is a perfectly normal boy. “Is childhood a disorder now?” he asks. Mom is loathe to risk turning her vibrant son into a zombie: “He’s the most interesting person I know,” she says.

With Mom shuttling between doctors, she pauses occasionally to interact with her quirky neighbors (are there any other kind in these sitcom-y issue plays?). There’s the Jewish mom (Tara Blau) whose daughter (a superb Jayne Deely) is dealing with cutting and bipolar disorder and there’s the deadpan Prozac mom (Suzanne Grodner, finding humor and empathy in the role) whose kid is on a whole raft of medications for his ADHD.

Dines anchors the play with more comedy than drama. She never quite connects as a compassionate, nurturing mom, but she does keep pace with the constant motion and barrage of information that play throws at her. Her best scenes are with Deely, the troubled teen she has watched grow up and turn into an emotional mess.

In the supporting cast, Brown sinks his comic chops into a series of doctors, and he seems to relish breaking the fourth wall as an actor who feels compelled to put in a good word for Ritalin.

The pace of the play is, understandably, frantic. Molina’s production zips right along, with Melpomene Katakalos’ set and Jason H. Thompson’s video projections helping speed things considerably. When Mom goes onto the Internet, the walls of the set are filled with Web sites. When it’s time to watch TV or see things explode in an action movie, the set is awash in images.

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By the end of Act 1, the feeling of exhaustion weighs heavy. A lot of information – visual and auditory — has been dumped on us, and the question arises: Is this entertainment or a lecture demonstration?

Act 2 of this one-hour, 40-minute show slows just enough to allow in some real emotion and connect with rather than beat down the audience. Distracted would probably be stronger as a 90-minute one-act play. For too long, Loomer skims across the top of issues and never delves. The comic pacing belies the seriousness of the plot. It’s like there’s a fear that if the play slows down and the images stop assaulting us we’ll notice just how thin this play is – a brochure more than a work of art.

Getting to the emotional core of the play almost comes too late, but Loomer has a few tricks to make her audience happier, even if she does leave them hanging.

TheatreWorks’ Distracted continues through April 26 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $23-$61. Call (650) 903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.