Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Opened May 11, 2009 at The Boxcar Playhouse

Laura Jane Coles offers a sponge bath to a young man she found on the beach played by Eric Kerr in Caridad Svich’s Wreckage, a Crowded Fire Theater Company production at The Boxcar Playhouse in San Francisco. Photos by Bryan Wolf

Sex, power, poetry adrift in compelling `Wreckage’
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The endless cycle of innocence lost, power gained and cynicism born receives an intriguingly poetic treatment in the world premiere of Caridad Svich’s Wreckage, the latest production from Crowded Fire Theatre Company.

Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Lost Highway” sets the mournful tone as lights come up on two boys entangled in the sand of beach. With smatterings of blood on their bodies and makeup adorning their eyes, the boys awake to distant memories of a previous existence while a faceless newscaster drones on about the dead bodies of boys found on a beach.

After kissing and agreeing that they are connected in some way, the boys part ways. The older (Eric Kerr) is drawn to the sleek beach house occupied by an elegant woman (Laura Jane Coles) and her husband (David Sinaiko). The younger (Detroit Dunwood), having been abandoned by the older, ends up in the “care” of a pimpish voyeur called “Nurse” (Lawrence Radecker), who promptly dresses the boy in women’s clothing and sells his services on the boardwalk.

The plot, if you can call it that, tracks the parallel lives of the boys. The older is called “daughter” and used as a plaything by the older woman, who uses the boy to taunt and titillate her husband. The younger learns the ways of the world to survive on the lowest level of “civilized” life.

And it’s all a framework on which director Erin Gilley builds an attractive production that features some moody, well-produced video projections (by Wesley Cabral) and an appropriately versatile set by Evren Odcikin that contrasts the modernity of the beach house, the grittiness of the sandy beach and the vandalism-scarred boardwalk. Tim Szostek’s lights, especially in the beach house, capture the fleetingly hot and cold sexual tension roiling inside.

Marc Blinder’s sound design adds another layer of lyricism to the proceedings, especially when playwright Svich allows her characters to break into song – one from the underworld of the piers and the other from the erotically charged beach house.

Svich’s dialogue, with its neo-Shakespearean rhythms, is stylish and appealing. A beautiful turn of phrase lands often enough to keep the audience aware of the playwright as poet, which also creates a certain distance from the action, which remains at a cool remove for most of the play’s 75 minutes.

And that’s my only problem with Wreckage – it’s a visually appealing exercise in poetic drama that uses fancy language to keep from getting too specific. We hover in a pseudo-reality of archetypes and emotional shadows. Our world is recognizable, but we’re never allowed to fully engage, even though the actors handle the dialogue well and generate some human heat within the chill of this lovely Wreckage.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Crowded Fire’s Wreckage by Caridad Svich continues through June 6 at The Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma St. (between Sixth and Seventh streets). Tickets are $15-$25. Visit www.crowdedfire.org for information.

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While most theater companies hunker down and attempt to get through this recession as best they can, others are taking bold steps.

Crowded Fire has announced that for its next production, Wreckage by Caridad Svich, running May 9 through June 6, there will be free tickets for the unemployed.

The tickets will be distributed before select shows (May 9-17, excluding opening night, May 11), and patrons need to show a current unemployment record or check stub.

The decision to offer these comps came out of a conversation with a local playwright and colleague who had just received a pink slip. “It is important to us that anyone who wants to see our work has the opportunity to do so, no matter where they stand financially. At Crowded Fire we wish to create community around and through our work. In the current economic climate, we felt that we needed to extend access beyond our typical Pay-What-You-Can preview performances,” said managing director Tiffany Cothran.

Wreckage is described as “a haunting tale in which two boys emerge from the sea and become engulfed in a world of savage longing. A Woman, Husband, and male Nurse find and care for the boys, who experience sexual awakening amidst a landscape of blurred roles, where a mother may be a lover, a boy may be a girl, and power and sex are one. Svich’s stylized, poetic language weaves together moments of disconcerting beauty and pain as the boys search for a home amidst a culture of brutality.”

Full price tickets range from $15 to $25 dollars with half price tickets offered via Theatre Bay Area’s Half Price Ticket booth. The show is performed at The Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma St. (between 6th and 7th streets) San Francisco. Visit www.crowdedfire.org for information.

Here’s the trailer for Wreckage:

Wreckage Trailer from Crowded Fire on Vimeo.

New Crowded Fire artistic director Marissa Wolf announced Saturday that Monday’s opening of My Name Is Vera Cupido by Stephanie Fleischmann has been cancelled, as has the entire run of the play, because of a “property rights dispute.”

No further details have been released.

For information visit www.crowdedfire.org.

Seems like just yesterday that Crowded Fire Theatre Company announced the departure of founding artistic director Rebecca Novick and the ascension of co-artistic directors (and husband-and-wife) Cassie Beck and Kent Nicholson. Actually, it was more like a year ago.

Today the company announced that Beck and Nicholson have “decided to pursue their careers at a national level,” and Marissa Wolf will succeed them as artistic director.

Wolf, 26, recently directed Crowded Fire’s Gone by Charles Mee and has also worked with FoolsFURY Theater, Fury Factory, Playwrights Foundation and Cutting Ball Theater. She held the Bret C. Harte Directing Internship at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for two years, where she assisted artistic director Tony Taccone, associate artistic director Les Waters and visiting directors Lisa Peterson, Frank Galati and Mary Zimmerman. She was the assistant director for the world premiere of Passing Strange. She has a degree in drama from Vassar College and received additional training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Beck, a longtime Crowded Fire company member, will be performing at a number of theaters, among them Playwrights Horizons, The Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Nicholson, who continues as director of new works with TheatreWorks and as a freelance director, will shift to Crowded Fire’s board of directors.

Next up for Crowded Fire is the world premiere of Stephanie Fleischmann’s My Name Is Vera Cupido, running Oct. 4-Nov. 2 at the Thick House in San Francisco.

Visit www.crowdedfire.org for information.

Is it hot in here or is it just the animals?

Crowded Fire Theater Company is holding a fundraiser, and it’s of the hot and steamy variety. Sort of.

Playwright Trevor Allen has been working on a play, Zoo Logic, about his experiences as an employee of the San Francisco Zoo. As part of his research, he interviewed Jane Tollini, a former Zoo employee who became famous for her Valentine’s Day sex tour.

Somehow, during their discussion of hot-and-bothered animal love, Crowded Fire came up.

And now Tollini is giving an hour-long virtual sex tour as part of Crowded Fire’s summer fundraiser, Summer Lovin’: A Sex Tour with Jane Tollini. And the beauty part is you don’t even have to go to the zoo.

Press materials state that the presentation is “not for the weak of heart…Her factual, yet entertaining, take on the birds and the bees manages to shock even San Francisco’s unshockable audience!”

The event is at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 2 at the Magic Theatre (Southside), Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the door or $25 if you buy them in the lobby at Crowded Fire’s current production, The Listener, at Traveling Jewish Theatre.

Money raised from the event will help support the September workshop of Allen’s Zoo Logic.

For more info: Visit www.crowdedfire.org

Four years ago, Cutting Ball Theater continued its search for the edge that cuts with the first Avant GardARAMA!, a festival of short, experimental plays.

The quest for cutting-edge theater never ends, so Cutting Ball is reviving the festival, which opens Friday, July 18 and continues through Aug. 16 at the EXIT on Taylor. The roster of playwrights includes some heavy hitters such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Gertrude Stein. And there’s also a local name: Eugenie Chan.

Sandwiched in between Parks’ Betting on the Dust Commander and Stein’s Accents in Alsace is Chan’s world-premiere Bone to Pick, a new take on the Ariadne myth.

In the original story (or one of them), Ariadne falls in love with Theseus and helps him slay her brother, the Minotaur, and also helps him conquer the Minotaur’s maze. But then, as so often happens in these stories, Theseus cast Ariadne aside, and she was rescued by Dionysus.

In Chan’s take on the story, developed for a single actress, Ariadne is Ria, a waitress who has been slinging hash for 3,000 years in an island diner at the end of the world. Theseus, called Theo, has abandoned her, and she has done her best to serve all the nations who have visited her diner. But it’s the end of the world as we know it.

“Ria’s diner is demolished, she’s stuck in this wasteland, alone, trying to figure out her life,” Chan explains. “She addresses Theso, her lover boy, and her old boss, Kingman. And she thinks about when she had her lover, had her juice, and she sacrificed a family member. Now she’s at the end of the line, in isolation. She has to confront her role in her own abandonment. She’s a waitress with no more food to serve. She’s kind a sad, kinda mad.”

The idea to do this adaptation came from Cutting Ball artistic director Rob Melrose, with whom Chan worked at Marin Academy.

“Rob has long been fascinated by the idea of the labyrinth – purposeful wandering to somewhere you don’t know,” Chan says. “We talked about the myth, and I was all over the place about it. I have an opinion about Ariadne and Theseus. She was wronged. I know she’s saved in the original story – Dionysus turns her into a star, but I became fixated on that other relationship.”

The solo show concept was based in practicality. Melrose, who is directing all three Avant GardARAMA pieces, wanted a piece that he could take on the road to experimental theater festivals. When the official commission came, Chan says she was thrilled.

“But I didn’t realize how hard it would be,” she says. “It was a lesson in hubris, which is always good. I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of other characters, but it turns out multi-character plays are much more natural for me. A solo show is like ice water in the face. But I love the challenge – any writer does. Otherwise you retreat into your old tricks.”

A Bay Area native, Chan is finding her work more in demand around the country. She’s in the midst of a seven-year residency at New Dramatists in New York and she’s working with Seattle-based composer Byron Au Yong on an opera project called Kidnapped Water. He’s basing the piece on the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and he’s given eight writers eight of the hexagram for which to create mini-libretti.

“I’m not quite clear on the concept,” Chan says. “But it was inspired by bottled water, and it goes up in places all around Seattle this summer.”

Given that her writing career is percolating, why does Chan stay in the Bay Area?

“I get a lot of my creativity just living here,” she says. “My family has a big history here. I feel rooted. And I love the theaters here, especially the smaller, younger theaters like Cutting Ball, Shotgun Players, Crowed Fire and Thick Description. Would that their kind of theater could flourish even more.”

Avant GardARAMA opens July 18 and continues through Aug. 16 at EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$30. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.cuttingball.com for information.

Opened July 14, 2008 at Traveling Jewish Theater (show moves to the Ashby Stage Aug. 15-31)

Juliet Tanner plays the title character in The Listener, a world-premiere play by Liz Duffy Adams and presented by Crowded Fire Theater Company. Photos by Melpomene Katakalos

`Listener’ spins junk into a sci-fi jumble
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Liz Duffy Adams’ world-premiere play The Listener could very easily take place in the same landscape as the hit summer film WALL-E. Both imagine a post-apocalyptic Earth destroyed by the human need to acquire stuff without any sense of responsibility toward the planet.

Both the play and the movie create a bleak landscape of garbage towers and a world so uninhabitable that humans have had to flee to other parts of the universe for survival.

Instead of a cute little robot left to pick up the mess, playwright Adams creates a race of savages — those left behind to forge a life where there should be no life, while the so-called “civilized” humans have learned to make the moon hospitable to human life and dubbed the once-barren satellite Nearth, or New Earth.

This is the third collaboration between Crowded Fire Theatre Company and Adams following The Train Play in 2003 and the fantastic musical One Big Lie in 2005, and it’s probably the least interesting. It bears some resemblance to Adams’ award-winning Dog Act, which Shotgun Players produced in 2004, in that it takes place after the apocalypse and uses malapropisms and jumbled cultural references to demonstrate the evolution – or devolution as the case may be – of language in a world without order.

Duffy’s use of language is less complex here. The characters who use her poetic slang the most are rag-tag “finders,” low-level scavengers who search through the piles of garbage that comprise Junk City to find anything useful or mysterious. Smak (Michael Moran) and Jelly (Rami Margron), when they’re not “frugging” each other silly, take their treasures to Namer (Lawrence Radecker), a sort of spiritual leader who holds the story of their ravaged world’s “creation,” and shares his knowledge by naming the junk. An old board, for instance, is named “lumbar,” and an old battery is called a “juice box.”

The other person of power in Junk City is Listener (Juliet Tanner), who operates a radio and regularly transmits messages to “others” she hopes might be listening. Hers is a position passed down through the six generations since the apocalypse, and all she does is sit in her junk house operating the radio.

Into the junk pile one day comes a man from the moon, a lunatic or looney as the Finders call him. He’s part of a liberal faction that regrets having left anyone on the poisoned earth and has come back to engineer their rescue. “We’re sorry we left you,” he says. “Some of us are.”

The visitor, John (Cole Alexander Smith, above center with Margron and Moran), is captured by the Finders and treated like a dog. Namer doesn’t believe the man’s story and instead tells his own version of what happened to the planet. This is one of the play’s highlights as he spins out a tale of Sam (as in Uncle Sam) and his giant mall. “In the beginning there was Tech,” Namer says.

Listener is intrigued by the visitor and gives him safe haven in the hope that he might boost the signal of her radio even though inventing new tech is strictly forbidden in Junk City. So begins the love story aspect of the play.

My problem with science fiction in the theater is that a stage, especially a small one like the Traveling Jewish Theater stage, can’t contain a large enough world to satisfy our curiosity about this new and different world. The limits of the stage, especially in a literal tale such as this one, limit the story…

Set designer Melpomene Katakalos gives us a stage heaped with junk – some of it beautiful like the stained-glass window made of soda bottle bottoms in Namer’s house — but in many ways, it looks like the set for Cats. Midnight, not a sound from the pavement and all that. One theatrical junk heap looks very much like another.

Where does the electricity for Namer’s machine come from? Where does the food come from and the water? We hear it rain and are told about greenery taking over the junk piles, but we see little evidence of natural life outside the junk heap. Are there animals in this world? And just who are the Jimmys we keep hearing about? And why are there only two Finders?

When John lands in his spaceship, he only brings more questions. If he, like most of the people on the moon, believe the Earth to be a toxic, cancer-causing heap populated by a dwindling race of savages, why did he come alone and unarmed? And in the near future, when traveling through space to a hostile environment, is a traditional gas mask really the best technology available?

Director Kent Nicholson’s cast finds levels of humor in the message-laden sci-fi, but some of them can’t help but come across as silly because Duffy’s play lays it on so thick. Hearing the Finders talk about the “demagogues” such as Okrah (the god of wisdom and bounty), Thump (the god of building who shoots fire as in “You’re fired”) and My Donna (as in “Like a Virgin”) and Elvisto the Christo is cringe-inducing.

The Listener, which aims to unearth hope in the bleakness through the character of Listener (played with enigmatic, understated power by Tanner), delves into melodramatic violence to reach its inevitable conclusion and leaves the stories of Namer, Jelly and Smak dangling in space.

The Listener continues through Aug. 3 at Traveling Jewish Theater, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25. The show moves to the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley, Aug. 15-31. Call 415-433-1235 or visit www.crowdedfire.org for information.

Cassie Beck, local actress and co-artistic director of San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theatre Company went off to New York to be in Adam Bock’s Drunken City. And what do you know? She won a Theatre World Award for her New York debut!

Beck first worked on Bock’s play when it was part TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival (the play was developed as part of the company New Works Initiative). Beck was also featured in TheatreWorks’ production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, directed by Beck’s husband (and Crowded Fire co-artistic director) Kent Nicholson.

This year’s Theatre World Award winners include:
de’Adre Aziza, Passing Strange
Cassie Beck, Drunken City
Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange
Ben Daniels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Deanna Dunagan, August: Osage County
Hoon Lee, Yellow Face
Alli Mauzey, Cry-Baby
Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park with George
Mark Rylance, Boeing-Boeing
Loretta Ables Sayre, South Pacific
Jimmi Simpson, The Farnsworth Invention
Paulo Szot, South Pacific

The Theatre World Awards ceremony will be held in Manhattan June 10 at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre.

The arrival of a new Adam Bock play is always an event.

Even though the Canadian playwright decided to forgo the pleasures of life in the Bay Area for the rigors of a New York writer’s existence, we still love him. And as long as he sends us a play every now and then (like The Shaker Chair, a Shotgun Players/Encore Theatre Company production from last year), we’re happy.

Last week, Bock’s latest, The Drunken City, opened at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York. Christopher Isherwood, writing in the New York Times, called it a “flimsy but sweet comedy” but generally liked the tale of a bride-to-be and her three bridesmaids out on the town just before the wedding, drinking quite a lot, fraternizing with men who aren’t their husbands or fiances and coming to some realizations about love and marriage.

The production marks the New York debut of Cassie Beck (above), a uniquely charming Bay Area actress who, with her husband, Kent Nicholson, is co-artistic director of Crowded Fire Theatre Company. Isherwood had this to say about Beck, who plays Marnie, the bride-to-be: “Ms. Beck, making her New York debut, brings an understated sweetness to her role as Marnie, whose inebriation gradually subsides as she discloses the real dissatisfaction fueling the evening’s folly.”

Also in the cast are Maria Dizzia, who was so devastatingly good as the title character of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Barrett Foa, who did his best to charm in the disco drudgery of TheatreWorks’ world-premiere musical Kept.

Writing in the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz called Bock’s play “a playful and hopeful comedy in which everybody’s tipsy and everyone’s shaken and stirred after one long, liquor-filled night.” He has this to say about our local star: “Beck, in her New York debut, is fantastic and turns the moment into something deeply touching. Her five castmates are as equally appealing, adorable and top-shelf.”

All good news. So when’s our next Adam Bock play? We have yet to see The Receptionist or The Thugs in these parts, and it sounds like The Drunken City, complete with Beck in the lead, was just made for San Francisco.

Opened Feb. 11, 2008 at SF Playhouse Stage II

Mee’s melancholy Gone goes down easy
Three stars (Sad beauty)

No man was ever born
but he must suffer.
He buries his children and gets others in their place;
then dies himself. — Sophocles

Those words open Charles L. Mee’s grief-stricken but strangely joyous Gone, having its Bay Area premeire from Crowded Fire Theatre Company at SF Playhouse’s Stage II in San Francisco.

The ever-entertaining Mee (Big Love, “Fetes de la Nuit’’ at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Wintertime at San Jose Repertory Theatre, Summertime at the Magic Theatre) always takes an unusual approach to his plays. He borrows liberally from any source that happens to interest him. There’s almost always good music (also mostly borrowed), and the final creation is often an enjoyable theatrical collage.

Gone is what Mee calls a “fragment’’ play. And that’s as good a description as any. He takes chunks of Sophocles, Proust, Ginsberg, Updike, Alphonse Daudet and Philip Larkin – not to mention the New York Times obituary page and random blogs. Oh, and Mee has included pieces from some of his own plays as well.

With such a variety of sources and no plot or consistent characters, the task before director Marissa Wolf is to create not a play so much as a tone, a feeling, an experience. When other writers attempt this fragment thing, the results tend to be pretentious and boring. Mee values humor and music, two combatants against boredom, so Wolf already is at an advantage.

Rod Hipskind’s set consists of doors – some useable, some leaned up against the wall of the small black-box theater. In the center of the performance space is a sort of sandbox filled with dark soil – not unlike a fresh grave.

The set also consists of many and varied lamps, which play an important role in Jarrod Fischer’s lighting design, which often consists solely of a single lamp being held by an actor. This is a dark evening, figuratively and literally.

The text, as intoned by Shoresh Alaudini, Kalli Jonsson, Marilee Talkington (above) and Mollena Williams, is dominated by themes of loss. You’ve got your death, your love loss, your wiped-out civilizations.

It’s moody to be sure, but not grim. Part of that has to do with the music. For Odetta’s “Another Man Done Gone,’’ for instance, the cast is doing sort of a spiritual dance in the sandbox. For Montgomery Gentry’s country-fried “Gone,’’ Jonsson lip synchs, and the other cast members provide back-up (choreography throughout the show is by Humu Yansane).

Between the country songs and spirituals, we get a healthy dose of Proust’s madeleine moment from Swann’s Way, a musing on the tragic, love- and pleasure-filled lives of cicadas and some insight into the world of Ruth M. Siems, inventor of Stove Top stuffing on the occasion of her death.

It’s all rich and compelling and beautifully performed, but I must admit, after about an hour, I found myself longing for character and story. Some elements, such as Proust and Sophocles, make repeat appearances, but the fragment nature of the show couldn’t overcome my need for narrative.

There’s pleasure, fleeting (as in life) to be sure, amid the pain and loss, and that’s the triumph of Mee’s show and Wolf’s production: that we seize on the joy when it arises. But then we head back to Sophocles, who leaves us in, as he puts it, “Egyptian blackness’’ with, “Time makes all things dark and brings them to oblivion.’’

Gone continues through March 2 at SF Playhouse Stage II, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $15 to $25. Call 415-433-1235 or visit www.crowdedfire.org.