Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

A man of character, Trevor Allen decided to put his character life behind him.

Having detailed what it’s really like to work as a costumed character in Disneyland in his popular solo show Working for the Mouse, Allen made a conscious decision to focus on his burgeoning career as a playwright. Mouse, under the direction of Kent Nicholson, had a great run at Berkeley’s Impact Theatre (and a transfer to the EXIT in San Francisco), but the time had come to hang up the ears and write.

He had abundant projects, including one about Albert Einstein with found-object puppeteer Liebe Wetzel, another about artificial intelligence that the Magic Theatre picked up for its New Media Festival and yet another assignment to write something for Playground.

The resulting plays, One Stone, The Nutshell and Tenders in the Fog respectively, were all well received but only Tenders ended up being produced (by San Jose Stage Company). Then came Zoo Logic and Lolita Road Trip, two more projects that generated readings and interest but, so far, no actual productions.

Rather than do the writerly thing and revel in despondency, San Francisco resident Allen headed back to the Magic Kingdom. For just a few jam-packed performances in the summer of 2005, he resurrected Working for the Mouse at Bus Barn Theatre in Los Altos. For those few shows, he traveled back in time to age 17. He was an acting student at UCLA (studying with “The Brady Bunch’s” Robert Reed, no less) and worked at Disneyland, first as Pluto, then as Capt. Hook’s first mate, Mr. Smee, then as various characters including Eeyore (from Winnie the Pooh), Friar Tuck (from Robin Hood) and Gideon (the mute cat from Pinocchio). He graduated to “face work,” meaning he wasn’t enclosed in plastic and fur, with the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland and actually got to utilize his improvisational skills when interacting with park guests.

A friend of Allen’s from Los Angeles encouraged him to come do Mouse at a small North Hollywood theater. “It’d sell out!” the friend said.

And Allen wondered, if he took the show to LA, if that is exactly what he’d be doing: selling out.

“I had considered taking the show to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, then I had to think about LA, and then I thought, `Do I really want to be the guy who does funny voices and plays Pluto and the Mad Hatter?’” Allen says over lunch at, yes it’s true, Pluto’s.

That’s when Allen’s wife, Theatre Bay Area magazine editor Karen McKevitt, said it was time to do something serious about Working for the Mouse. She pointed out that when he talked about his four years as a character in Disneyland, he always had fresh stories to tell that never made their way into the show. She landed on a solution: Turn the stories into a book utilizing the factual but entertaining writing style known as creative nonfiction.

Allen is currently hard at work on that book. Until he finds a publisher brave enough to weather the Disney waters, that book-in-progress is also a blog: www.workingforthemouse.com. This is the 21^st century, after all.

“As a performer, you get immediate response from an audience,” Allen says. “You know when a story or a line works or doesn’t work. The same is true with the blog. You put it out there yourself – you don’t have to wait for someone to publish you. There’s no barrier between the artist and the audience anymore. I hear immediately from people, some who love Disney, some who hate it.”

The blog belies Allen’s theatrical roots because there’s a whole lot more available than chapters (called “mouse droppings”) of the upcoming book. There’s performance video and, to the author’s great delight, podcasts in which the actor gets to exercise his expertise with voice over narration.

“Now that I’m not writing for performance, I’m able to get into the heads of the other characters more,” he says. “Then turning that into audio is great fun.”

Working for the Mouse is, in many ways, Allen’s coming-of-age story. He was a 17-year-old San Jose native, somewhat naïve, getting a fast education about life in the real world. Backstage and after hours at Disneyland was sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but it was also more than that.

“It was a real education,” Allen says. “What I saw there, backstage and during work hours, was tragic, raw, funny and sad. From inside the costumes, you saw a parade of human tragedy going by in the guests. At a certain point after I had left the Disney bubble, it occurred to me, `Why is no one telling this story?’”

One answer is easy: because Disney will sue your pants off. They’ll cease and desist you so quickly you won’t know your Mickey from your Mouse.

“I’ve always thought that in the world of theater, the more controversial the better,” Allen says. “Freedom of speech is supposed to allow for that. But Big business has co-opted the place of religion and government in dictating what you can or can’t say. I’m of the school, as a playwright, a performer or a writer, you have to tell stories that haven’t been told, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

So far, response to the blog has been good. There’s even been some interest in reviving the one-man show, which Allen says he’d be happy to do, especially since working on the Mouse has given him new insights.

“This has been a process of rediscovery,” he says. “The arc of the show would likely remain unchanged, but I think I’m finding some other stories with some different resonance.”

Here’s a taste of Working for the Mouse, the show and the Web site:

Visit www.workingforthemouse.com

The cast of Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman at Impact Theatre includes (from left) Dennis Yen, Arthur Keng, Sung Min Park, Cindy Im and Lisa Kang. Photos by Cheshire Isaacs

Impact gets irreverent with Yee’s `Ching Chong’
(three stars)

NOTE: Dates added to the run: Monday, Oct. 6 and Wednesday, Oct. 8. The Monday show will be a cast & crew benefit: all proceeds from that evening’s admissions and donations will be split among the cast and crew, all of whom are struggling artists who have generously donated most of their time in the name of supporting great local small theatre.

Before we dive into Impact Theatre’s season-opening Ching Chong Chinaman, a word on Impact’s reboot of its performance space, LaVal’s Subterranean.

If you’re unfamiliar with this Berkeley performance spot, you probably don’t know that it’s actually the basement of LaVal’s Pizzeria at the north gate of the UC Berkeley campus. It’s not the most inviting of spaces – small, cramped, artistically challenging. But as teenagers across the country know, good things can happen in basements.

Despite the physical limitations, Impact, the theater’s resident company, usually manages to do good, imaginative work while audience members chomp on pizza slices and guzzle beer. Well, this summer, Impact upgraded the space in two major ways: the space now has a door to help cut down noise from the busy pie factory upstairs (the clomping on the floor above will always be with us) and there are all-new seats to give audience tushies a smooth ride through Impact’s dramatic adventures.

The seats help ease the crammed-in feeling and contribute to easing the sight-line issues, which is all the better to enjoy San Francisco playwright Lauren Yee’s
Ching Chong Chinaman, a gleefully irreverent, audaciously un-PC comedy about cultural identity.

Taking place almost entirely in the minty green Palo Alto kitchen of the Wong home (excellent set by Edward Ross, lit by Kelly Kunaniec), Yee quickly introduces us to a highly Americanized Chinese-American family.

Dad Ed (Dennis Yen) and mom Grace (Lisa Kang) have virtually no connection to their ancestry. One major concern of the family is to have their eyes “nice and wide open” for the annual photo Christmas card.

Their teenage children, Desdemona (Cindy Im) and Upton Sinclair Lewis (Arthur Keng), have even less cultural identity than their parents. Desdemona (Desi for short), desperate to get into Princeton, defies Asian stereotypes by not being good at math. Upton is a videogame addict specializing in “World of Warcraft,” and in order to win a tournament, he needs help doing his homework and chores.

Being a crafty guy, Upton buys an indentured servant from China in the form of Jin Qiang (Sung Min Park), whose name, as pronounced by members of the family, comes out sounding like “Ching Chong.” Though he speaks no English, it’s up to Jin to teach the Wongs how to use chopsticks.

One nice thing about Yee’s play, under the direction of Desdemona Chiang, is that it consistently defies sitcom rhythms and continually takes surprising turns. You don’t expect Jin to be an ambitious dancer who wants a spot on the reality series “America’s Next Top Dancer.” You don’t expect the action to shift to Mexico for a belated quinceañera, nor do you expect a Korean orphan (played by Pearl Wong, a deft comic actress essaying a number of small roles) to be pummeled by her altruistic American sponsor.

There are some great laughs in Ching Chong, but the play turns unexpectedly moving in its final moments when everything the Wongs thought they knew about culture and family is shaken and they’re forced to redefine life on their own terms.

Friday’s sold-out opening-night performance had some pacing issues early in Act 1, but the actors soon hit their stride, and the comedy and satire fired more assuredly.

Chiang’s cast rolls with the surprises in Yee’s script and finds humanity the comedy. Especially effective are Park as Jin, a stranger in a strange family, and Kang as Grace, a clueless mom who slowly gets a clue. Their scenes together are tender and even sexy.

Oh, and by the way, the seats – even in a hot basement on a sweltering late-summer night – couldn’t have been more comfortable.

P.S.

Impact artistic director Melissa Hillman made the funniest “turn off your phone” speech I’ve yet to hear in a theater. She said that if your phone goes off during the show, “I will swallow it and you can come back for it later.”

Ching Chong Chinaman continues through Oct. 10 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $10-$15 in advance and $10-$17 at the door. Call 510-464-4468 or visit www.impacttheatre.com.

Check out this short documentary, part of Christopher Coppola’s Project Access Hollywood film festival.

It’s about the demise of the wildly popular game Scrabulous, a version of online Scrabble, that was uncerimoniously yanked from Facebook by Hasbro, the (money)makers of Scrabble.

It features Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman and former East Bay Express theater critic Lisa Drostova. Highly enjoyable.

“We’re calling it our Bar Mitzvah season not just because the company is run by two Jews,” says Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman referring to herself and managing director Cheshire Isaacs. “This season we’re taking some large leaps forward. It really is a rite of passage for us.”

Yes, Impact Theatre, one of the Bay Area’s most youthfully invigorating theater companies (their motto is: “Theater that doesn’t suck”) opens its 13^th season next month with Lauren Yee’s irreverent new comedy Ching Chong Chinaman. The play won the 2007 Yale Playwrights Festival and made its debut at the New York Fringe Festival shortly after. Yee is a Bay Area native and is the founder and executive director of the San Francisco Young Playwright’s Festival.

Skewering every cliché about Asian-American identity, Yee’s play receives its West Coast premiere under the direction of former Impact associate artistic director Desdemona Chiang.

Next up, in November, is Melanie Marnich’s Tallgrass Gothic, a spare, haunting drama based on the Jaobean tragedy The Changeling. In this adaptation, the action takes place in the Great Plains, where Laura yearns to leave her hometown and escape her abusive husband. A lover appears to promise her a way out, but that path leads to a devastating climax.

Tallgrass was featured in the 2004 Humana Festival of New Plays, and Marnich’s works have been on some of the country’s major regional stages. But this production marks her Bay Area professional debut.

In February 2009, Hillman directs the company’s seventh “classic with a twist.” Previous outings have been heavy Shakespeare (Henry IV, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Measure for Measure). This time around, however, Hillman is in a lighter, brighter mood and will be directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her production, while retaining Shakespeare’s language, will be set in 1980s nightclubs.

The season concludes with the return of Impact Briefs in May 2009, an evening of original short plays on a theme, which this time around will be puberty.

“Impact may be growing up in many ways, but we’re still 13 years old,” Hillman says with a laugh. “I think puberty describes exactly where we are in our development. That said, no matter how old we get, we’re always going to have this streak in us.”

In addition to its roster of plays, the Impact season comes with some other news: audiences will enjoy new seats in LaVal’s Subterranean, the basement theater space under a Berkeley pizzeria. And the seats have fold out desks that promise to make the eating of pizza during the show that much easier.

Also, subscriptions are available for the first time – a full season commitment figures $13 per show. And the date for Impact’s popular poker night fundraiser, Full Houses, has been set for July 11, 2009.

Visit www.impacttheatre.com.

We here at Theater Dogs love the idea of blogs, obviously. We used to love newspapers, but now, not so much. They’re so…what’s the word?…pagebound. Sure there are good writers at newspapers (really good writers, actually), but on blogs, you can be sassy (snap!), you can be quick and you can add as many photos and videos and Web links as you want. Do that dumb ol’ pile of newsprint.

I just got back from a trip to the Midwest (and the dang airlines couldn’t get us back in time for the opening of High School Musical at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, so you’ll just have to go yourself and send me the review so I can share it with other Theater Dogs, or you’ll just have to re-read my interview with the delightful star of the show, Arielle Jacobs, from Half Moon Bay). Anyway, in the Great Midwest (Indianapolis, actually) I found myself with some time on my hands at a computer with a dial-up modem. That made blogging not such a possibility, but I did spend 12 hours looking at two Web sites (dial-up is slooooow). Kidding. I checked out a bunch of theater-related Web sites, some local some not, some blogs, some not, and wanted to make sure you knew about them as well.

The two big nationals I check all the time are Playbill.com and BroadwayWorld.com. They have a lot of the same news, but they also have a lot of original content and make a genuine effort to include news from outside New York. Other good ones include TheatreMania and Broadway.com.

A really cool site that gathers theater news from around the country is the Ohio-based Theatreforte.

A national site with really good local coverage with an excellent (and active) chat board is TalkinBroadway.com. The chat board is called All That Chat, and you want the West Coast edition.

One of my favorite local bloggers is San Francisco playwright Tim Bauer, whose Direct Address blog directly addresses local productions as well as the daily life of a — you guessed it — San Francisco playwright. Another is Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, whose I Will Dance for You is just a delight to read and will keep you up to date on the life and work of the Hunter Gatherers author. And speaking of local playwrights, Prince Gomolvilas used to be local, but he’s in the Bay Area a lot, so he qualifies. Check out his Bamboo Nation blog for a very good time.

Berkeley’s Impact Theatre maintains a pretty active blog called Impact Splatter. Check it out.

Foothill Music Theatre keeps up a terrific blog with great input on theatrical subjects of all kinds (especially FMT when there’s a show going). Check it out.

When the California Shakespeare Theater season gets rolling, they have excellent blogs — usually directors, actors, etc. checking in when the rehearsal process starts, right up through the production. Check it out here.

And then there are some of my favorite newspaper writers who maintain excellent blogs: Karen D’Souza at the San Jose Mercury News and Chloe Veltman at the SF Weekly.

I know that’s just the tip of the theatrical blogosphere iceberg, so to speak, so please let me know what I’ve missed. I’d love to include more.

Write me at chiatovich@gmail.com or post a comment.

On Saturday at San Francisco’s El Rio bar, where a giant cut-out of Carmen Miranda looks down on the back courtyard, Crowded Fire Theatre Company held a festive fundraising chili cook-off.

Here are the competitors, who each contributed three chilis — traditional, veggie and “anything goes”:

Impact Theatre

Fools Fury

Playwrights Foundation

Crowded Fire (actually this is just Mollena Williams, but her chili had the event’s best name)

Here are Crowded Fire artistic directors (and newlyweds) Kent Nicholson and Cassie Beck:

And here are the fine judges (Chloe Veltman of the SF Weekly, yours truly and Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News):

The overall winning chili was Playwrights Foundation’s traditional chili, “Fires in the Chili.”
Here are all the winners:

It was a great event. Everyone had a marvelous time, and with luck, funds were raised to keep all these artists in business.

Upcoming theater fundraisers are going to let you fire it up and throw ‘em down.

First up, this Saturday (Oct. 13), Crowded Fire Theatre Company is hosting a Chili Cookoff with foolsFury, Impact Theatre and the Playwrights Foundation.

Here’s the beauty part: in addition to a “fan favorite” chili, there will be a “critics choice” selected by a “celebrity” panel of judges comprising yours truly and the far more beautiful Chloe Veltman of the SF Weekly and Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News. Impact is already promising to burn our mouths.

New co-artistic director Kent Nicholson says: “We wanted to create an event that brought the Bay Area small theater community together. It’s more of a way to connect off stage with each other and our audience members than as a means for making money…though that’s an added bonus!”

The event, which will also feature bluegrass music by the Duck River Band, is from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the El Rio Bar, 3158 Mission St., San Francisco. Tickets are $1 each, and for one ticket, you get a chili “taster.” For three tickets you get a side dish, and for five tickets, you get a piping hot bowl of your favorite chili. All you can eat “gas passes” are $20 in advance and $30 at the door.

Purchase tickets at www.crowdedfire.org or at the door.

The mouth-burning folks at Impact are busy with a fundraiser of their very own. On Saturday, Oct. 20, the company hosts Full Houses: A Poker Tournament to Benefit Impact Theatre. Tickets are going fast (only 35 remain at this writing). Participants will play No-Limit Texas Hold-Em, with a massive prize pool up for grabs and pizza and desserts throughout the night.

Top prize is an 8GB Apple iPhone, and the runner-up prize is $200 in gift cards to Bloomingdales and Nordstrom. Anyone who gets a full house or better during the tournament, even if they don’t win the hand, gets one of the other prizes. And what are the other prizes you ask? Theater tickets, of course, to ACT, Berkeley Rep, Cal Shakes, Magic, Shotgun and other local companies. There are also gift cards of varying kinds, movie tickets, jazz concert tickets, an autographed “Simpsons” script. And more. Hey, even the first player out of the tournament gets a prize.

“We specialize in theater that’s relevant to our audience,” says Impact artistic director Melissa Hillman. “So naturally the kind of benefit we’d have is relevant to them, too. And of course, poker was meant to be played in a basement, and La Val’s Subterranean is the perfect basement for a benefit tournament like this. Best of all, you could be the worst poker player in the world and still win an awesome prize worth more than the buy-in just for getting a full house or better…or being the first one out.”

The tournament is limited to 54 players (must be 21 or older). The buy in for Full Houses is $50, with unlimited $25 re-buys for the first two hours of the tourney. Tickets are available at www.impacttheatre.com.

Opened Sept. 7, 2007

Impact scares up some horror in Sleepy
three stars Dark, bumpy night

Things go bump in the night during Impact Theatre’s Sleepy, and those bumping things are often dead bodies and audience expectations.

A collection of five short interconnected plays, Steven Yockey’s Sleepy keeps threatening to be one thing and then abruptly becomes something else.

The one thing it’s safe to say about the show is that it dwells somewhere close to “The Twilight Zone.” Director Dawn Monique Williams and her six actors — Gabriel A. Ross, Pamela Davis, Seth Thygesen, Marissa Keltie, John Terrell and Jessica Kiely – keep us on the verge of expecting the unexpected, which is a perfectly fine place to be for the show’s brisk 60 minutes.

The opening scene about a nightmare-plagued man and his unhappy, sleep-deprived wife reveals elements we’ll see in each of the short plays. One of these is physical: there’s a fancy new hotel in the neighborhood that we’ll end up seeing from different vantage points. One involves time: everything here happens in the wee hours of the night. And the other is more emotional: people want desperately to be listened to, as if being heard will somehow rescue them from the great yawning abyss.

The domestic drama of the first scene is angry and ugly. Then, boom! We’re in a whole different kind of play — one Rob Zombie might enjoy.

There are moments in the first scene and the second, about a traumatized young woman making some sort of confession on the phone, that recall audition scenes for drama school.

There’s something overwrought and familiar about the writing and the acting that weakens the drama. But then a corner is turned, and the scenes come alive. In the second scene, that corner involves projected video of jellyfish and a childhood recollection of murder that is truly horrifying.

Before the evening is out, we’ll be taken for a ride in one of the hotel’s creepy elevators and taken to the roof of the hotel, where a young woman’s crush on her best friend threatens to go in a violent direction.

The best piece of the lot is also the most overt ensemble piece. Each character mistakes another for someone else. At first, the scene is comical, but then, when a man is about to jump from a ledge high up on the hotel, the sense of identity confusion takes us to a most enjoyable mess-with-your-head place.

Lighting designer Stephanie Buchner keeps her lamps suitably low for these unsettling tales, and set designer Andrew Susskind conveys a sense of the claustrophobic night (granted, an easy thing to do in a basement theater) with a too-small hotel room and a refrigerator that turns out to be the most illuminating thing on stage.

By play’s end, everyone is seeing ghosts or feeling something sinister lurking unseen in the corners. And with that uneasy feeling, Impact and Sleepy send us happily into the real world of darkness outside the theater walls.

For information about Sleepy, visit www.impacttheatre.com.

Impact ratchets up vice, vitality in Measure for Measure
three stars Well measured

By all counts, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is a comedy — if you measure comedy not in the Will Ferrell sense but by the more classical definition that has all the major cast members alive at the end of the play.

Measure for Measure, which would have won the “Most Problematic Play of 1604” trophy had such an award existed, has always been an uncomfortable comedy. There’s really only one expressly funny character (Lucio, described in the text as a “fantastic,” which could also mean slacker, con-man, troublemaker), and the bulk of the play is twisted into moralistic knots.

Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, the group that works diligently to keep younger generations interested in live theater, makes a Shakespearean detour every season, and the results are always interesting.

Director Melissa Hillman’s Measure for Measure, now at LaVal’s Subterranean Theatre, makes some valiant attempts to loosen some of Shakespeare’s knots.

First, the play has been effectively trimmed (no constable Elbow or foolish Froth) to two acts and two-plus hours. Second, and most important, the notion of comedy — except for Jeremy Forbing’s spirited take on Lucio and Stacz Sadowski’s Barnardine, a condemned prisoner perpetually too drunk to hang — the notion of comedy is effectively banished.

This is, at heart, a serious play about faith, narrow-mindedness, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Nothing particularly comical about any of those issues, especially when a man’s life, a leader’s overweening power and a nun’s virtue are on the line.

The three central performances in Hillman’s production are rock solid.

Ted Barker is Duke Vincentio of Vienna, who pretends to go away and then disguises himself as a priest to take the true measure of his sin-infested city, which is depicted in images of red, white and chain link in William McBride’s set.

The Duke’s temporary replacement is Angelo, a staunch military man unwilling to deviate from the letter of the law. As played by Cole Alexander Smith, Angelo is a pill-popping moralist whose first brush with temptation turns him into a monster.

That temptation comes in the form of Isabella, a novice nun whose brother (Daniel Duque-Estrada) is to be executed for impregnating his girlfriend (Dana Lau). As Isabella, Marissa Keltie is not what you’d expect. This is an extremist nun with a fear of sex we — and probably she — never quite understand. Hardly shy or retiring, she’s as single-minded about chastity as Angelo is about law, so it makes sense when the two of them clash.

Angelo, flush with power and lust for the young nun, is willing to make a deal: He’ll save the brother if the sister will relinquish her virgin body and sleep with him. “My false overweighs your true,” he tells her when she threatens to expose his horrible behavior.

Of course the disguised Duke gets wind of all this but takes his sweet time putting everything right. The painfully extended denouement has long been a challenge for directors because in the midst of all this dark, twisted storytelling, we get conventional comedy writing shuttling us to the improbably, and frankly unwelcome, happy ending.

Hillman has a few tricks up her sleeve, and even if it means re-writing Shakespeare in the play’s final moments, let it be said that her inventions seem much more in tune with the violent, hot-tempered tone of the play.

For more information on Measure for Measure, visit www.impacttheatre.com.