Category Archives: David Westley Skillman

Undine undone or finding fabulous in Fabulation

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Fabulation

Margo Hall stars in Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation or The Re-Education of Undine, the season-ending production at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Below: Hall with Rudy Guerrero. Photos by Moanalani Jeffrey

Though unplanned, we have something of a Lynn Nottage festival happening in the Bay Area right now.

Berkeley Rep is showing Nottage’s most serious side with her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Ruined, a tale of hope amid brutality, and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre showcases a more lighthearted (though not exactly comic) side of Nottage with Fabulation, the story of a modern woman’s relationship to her roots.

The really good news here is the story of the Lorraine Hansberry itself. After losing both of its founders last year – the subsequent deaths of Stanley Williams and Quentin Easter is still difficult to fathom – the Hansberry could have foundered and disappeared. That would have meant a huge loss to Bay Area theater. How would you compensate for the loss of one of the nation’s most prominent African-American theater companies as it’s just about to celebrate its 30th anniversary? You couldn’t. And thankfully, we don’t have to.

Steven Anthony Jones, formerly a company member at American Conservatory Theater, has taken the reigns as artistic director, with Shirley Howard-Johnson as his general manager. I have every reason to believe this team will be exactly what the Hansberry needs to reinvent itself and honor its legacy. Fabulation is a terrific production, top to bottom, and it shows a team of dedicated theater professionals working at the top of their game.

And being a top-flight professional is, in many ways, what Fabulation or the Re-education of Undine is all about.

The redoubtable Margo Hall – an asset to any production – stars as Undine, a self-made star of New York’s PR world. She traffics in celebrities and the high life. She has a gorgeous Latin husband, her own successful business and the kind of Manhattan whirlwind life that kids in the nearby projects can only dream about.

We meet Undine on the day of her undoing. The fact that she can’t line up an A-list star (or even someone ghetto enough to cause a splash but not so ghetto as to cause a problem) becomes the least of her problems when she gets a visit from her accountant. It turns out her too-wonderful life has suddenly become too good to be true. That handsome husband has left her and taken all her money. I think “absconded” is the word the accountant uses.

This sends Undine on a downward spiral that will lead her back to the family she hasn’t seen in 14 years. In an act of fabulation (the act of creating fables or stories), she killed her family – at least she mentioned in the press that they were killed in a fire. Since then, the family – not to mention her real name, Sherona – has ceased to exist, at least in the “reality” of her Manhattan world.

It’s like Undine is being punished for success at the cost of the truth. None of her hoity-toity New York friends knows about her past in the projects or the mother and father and brother – all security guards of various types – still in that outer borough. But now that project apartment is the only place Undine has left to turn.

Fabulation 2

Once that spiral begins, of course, it just goes down and down. Cops, jail, narcotics anonymous – it all becomes part of Undine’s new world. Oh, and she also finds out she’s pregnant with the absconder’s baby.

Director Ellen Sebastian Chang mines a great deal of humor from Nottage’s script (which powers along mightily until the final quarter, when it runs out of imagination), and she has a superb cast at her disposal. Hall is just about perfect as Undine – brittle but deeply felt. When she addresses the audience, you adore her immediately, and in spite of her sharp edges, you really begin to feel for her.

The supporting players all play multiple parts – sometimes unrecognizably. Daveed Diggs makes a huge impression as Flow, Undine’s poet of a little brother. He’s got an Act 2 show stopper in the form of his own fabulation on the Br’er Rabbit stories. Rudy Guerrero pulls double duty as the scoundrel of a soon-to-be ex-husband and as a wannabe fireman Undine meets as part of her drug rehab program. Michael J. Asberry makes for a sympathetic father, and Britney Frazier is wonderful as Undine’s assistant (among others).

Halili Knox is a knockout as Undine’s mom, and she starts Act 2 with a gorgeous take Elton John’s “Border Song,” and Carla Punch just about steals the show as Undine’s grandmother, a woman with some surprises up her sleeve (literally). Rounding out the cast is David Westley Skillman, who never met a number cruncher he couldn’t make more interesting.

Fabulation is all about, as Oprah might put it, being your most authentic self, and it offers a lot of laughs as well as a few cringes along the way. It’s so gratifying to see the Lorraine Hansberry producing shows at this level. You might even say it’s fabulous.

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation continues through March 27 at the Southside Theater, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$40. Call 415-345-7575 or visit www.lhtsf.org for information.

The 2011-2012 Lorrain Hansberry season has been announced!

Two one-act plays: Almost Nothing by Marcos Barbosa and Days of Absence by Douglas Turner Ward; Oct. 11-Nov. 20

Rejoice! A musical retelling of the Christmas story; Dec. 11-31

Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall, a powerful British drama; Feb. 5, 2012-March 18, 2012

Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage offers music, culture and history of the Harlem Renaissance; April 1, 2012-May 12, 2012

Review: `avantGARDARAMA’

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Felicia Benefield is Mare in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Betting on the Dust Commander, one of three avant garde plays in The Cutting Ball Theatre’s avantGARDARAMA at the EXIT on Taylor. Photos by Rob Melrose.

Chan’s `Bone’ trumps Parks, Stein in evening of experimental plays
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I’ll come right out and say I’m not a fan of avant garde theater. It’s frequently pretentious, self-involved, inscrutable and not much fun.

Call me an unsophisticated hack – OK, you’re an unsophisticated hack! – but I like story. I like humanity. I like to see myself reflected on stage in some way, and I guess I’ve never remotely seen myself in an oddly theatrical, experimentally artistic, forward-thinking way. Poor me.

But let me say this: I don’t love aggressively avant garde theater, but I really like the work of The Cutting Ball Theatre, a group run by Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers. I don’t always love the plays they do, but I always like the way they do them.

Take, for example, Cutting Ball’s avantGARDARAMA! a collection of three short avant garde plays, which just happen to ascend from incomprehensible to wonderfully, imaginatively coherent.

The opening salvo, Accents in Alsace, comes from Gertrude Stein’s 1922 Geography and Plays and doesn’t really make much sense off the page. There’s a soldier (David Westley Skillman), a motherly/sisterly woman with a baby carriage (Felicia Benefield) and a narrator (Rogers).

I got that this had to do with World War I, but that’s about all I got. Rather than try and find a story, as is my wont, I enjoyed director Melrose’s staging, set designer Michael Locher’s metallic box of a set, Heather Basarab’s sharp lighting and Cliff Caruthers’ superb video projections and sound design.

The second piece, Suzan-Lori Parks’
Betting on the Dust Commander, is also strange, but it’s funny – and boy does that make a difference in my enjoyment level. Dust Commander won the 1970 Kentucky Derby, hence the title.

Benefield and Skillman play a married couple stuck in an endless loop of silliness. He bet 35 cents on Dust Commander way back when and won enough to buy them a house. He’s going back to the track to see the old horse run an anniversary race. But before he goes, he’s got to somehow uncross his wife’s eyes.

Parks has a whimsical way with language, and her use of repetition brings out the humor and music of her dialogue. It’s all beautifully executed by Benefield and Skillman, who manage to traffic in Parks’ rhythms while bringing out darker shades involving sex, dissatisfaction, boredom and outright craziness.

The real treat of the evening is the world-premiere of local writer Eugenie Chan’s
Bone to Pick. A commission by The Cutting Ball and Magic Theatre/Z Space New Works Initiative, this retelling of the Ariadne myth brings the heroine to the modern world and leaves her stranded in a diner at the end of the world.

In her once-pink, now filthy, blood-spattered uniform, Ria, impeccably played by Rogers (above), sips dirty water from her coffee pot and re-lives her life of passion, isolation and choice making. “Someone needs to treat me like a piece of meat. Know what I mean?” is Ria’s opening line.

The combination of Chan’s funny, often heartbreaking script with Rogers’ bravura performance is a potent one to say the least.

Rogers establishes such rapport with the audience – especially when she talks about food (this stranded woman is HUNGRY) – that she could take us to any dark corner of theatricality she chooses.

This particular journey goes deep into her relationship with Theo (Theseus), the soldier who used her then abandoned her at the end of the world. He comes back for food every once in a while, but he doesn’t stay (nor does he pay).

Ria, it seems, is doomed to keep repeating the betrayal of her half-brother, the Minotaur (“Oh, brother, oh, bull,” Ria keeps saying). In the current, desolate state of the war-torn world, the Minotaur is the last “rib-eye steak” on the planet, and Ria, despite herself, will lead Theo to him once again. Fire up the barbecue.

Rogers is so moving and Chan’s play so well constructed that the play hardly seems experimental. It just seems like an extraordinary play of depth and expansive feeling.

AvantGARDARAMA 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.