Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Manoel Felciano, a San Francisco native who used to work at Recycled Records on Haight Street, plays Jan, the central character in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, an ACT production. Photo by Ashley Forrette Photography

With all this buzz about, there must be a new theater season about to start.

First up is news from American Conservatory Theater. Casting is complete for its season-opener, the West Coast premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award-winning Rock ‘n’ Roll, which begins performances Sept. 11 and continues through Oct. 12.

Artistic director Carey Perloff, something of a Stoppard expert, is directing a cast that includes San Francisco native Manoel Felciano (Toby in the recent revival of Sweeney Todd on Broadway) makes his Bay Area professional debut as Jan, the rock ‘n’ roll-obsessed Czech graduate student at the center of the play. The cast also includes ACT company members Rene Augesen, Anthony Fusco, Jud Williford and Jack Willis. The cast is rounded out by James Carpenter, Delia MacDougall, Marcia Pizzo, Summer Serafin and ACT MFA third-year students Nicholas Pelczar and Natalie Hegg.

Previews begin Sept. 11 and opening night is Sept. 17. Tickets are $17-$62 for previews, $20-$73 for regular performances. Call 415-749-2228or visit www.act-sf.org for information.

In other ACT news, the company will partner for the first time with Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Perloff will direct Racine’s Phèdre in a new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker, who previously provided scripts for Perloff’s Hecuba and Antigone.

The production, which will bow in the 2009-10 season, will star 17-year Stratford veteran Seana McKenna in the title role.

“We are thrilled to be producing Racine for the first time in ACT’s history,” Perloff said in a statement. “Timberlake’s extraordinary and fresh translation pays homage to the gorgeous poetry of the original while sustaining this play’s explosive heat and visceral sexuality. I have admired Stratford’s work for many years an am excited to work at the theater, where Heather Kitchen, my partner at ACT, started her career.”

(opened Feb. 1, 2007)

Actors sizzle, plot fizzles in Aurora’s `Birthday Party’
two and 1/2 stars A well-made muddle

There’s an old saw about a tree falling in the woods, and if there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a noise — you know the one.

Well, what happens when a play falls into a pit of murky inscrutability and there are plenty of people around to hear it? Does the noise even matter?

That’s the question surrounding Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which opened Thursday at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company. Artistic director Tom Ross, who has found success with such signature Pinter works as The Homecoming and Betrayal, now tries his hand at Pinter’s first produced work.

Since the play’s first London performance in 1958, which was not well received, Pinter has gone on to become, well, Pinter — one of contemporary drama’s most revered playwrights. He won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature and has influenced generations of writers.
But what to make of this first effort, which, though entertaining, may be too obtuse for its own good.

In this nearly 2 1/2-hour drama, Pinter deliberately withholds details to the most basic dramatic questions, which is sort of a cheat when it comes to creating dramatic tension. Then he makes us question the details we’re given, so there’s absolutely no point in trying to make sense of any of it.

So without plot or characters to trust, what is there?

In Ross’ sturdy production, we get some menace, some horror and, best of all, some marvelous Bay Area actors doing interesting things, even if they’re all ultimately just spinning their well-trained wheels.

The story, such as it is, takes place in a dingy boardinghouse on the English seaside (Richard Olmsted’s highly wall-papered set is perfect). Meg (Phoebe Moyer) and Petey (Chris Ayles) run the place, though to call it a boarding house is a stretch because for at least the past year, they’ve only had one tenant.

His name is Stanley, and when he makes his entrance down the steep staircase, he gets a laugh. As played by the masterful James Carpenter(above), Stanley is so run down and cranky, his woebegone appearance is a few bedrags below bedraggled.

Amid the normal morning chatter about sour milk and news of the day, two men in suits arrive: Goldberg (Julian Lopez-Morillas) and McCann (Michael Ray Wisely(below left), possessor of the best bushy eyebrows in three counties).

We don’t know why they’re their, but we know it’s mysterious and it has something to do with Stanley, who probably isn’t the concert pianist he says he is.

Apparently there’s been a “betrayal of the organization,” which leads the men to put Stanley through a bizarre interrogation (complete with hyper-dramatic lighting by Christopher Studley). But that’s not as bizarre as the actual birthday party thrown by Meg for Stanley (who, true to form, swears it’s not his birthday).

A game of blind man’s bluff, with special guest Lulu (Emily Jordan), ends with the lights out, violence and sexual mayhem.

There are non-sequiturs everywhere. For example, Goldberg, who makes much of being Jewish but has probably stolen his identity from someone else, invites Lulu, whom he calls “a big, bouncy girl,” to sit on his lap. She says, in her nonstop flirtatious way, “Can I tell you something? I trust you.” To which Goldberg replies, “Gesundheit.”

There’s a lot of sly humor in The Birthday Party, and that’s something that comes through in this production. Moyer is especially adept at pulling laughs from Meg’s cluelessness.

But around about Act 3, and after the second intermission, the fun of this Party begins to wane, and the weirdness takes over. The plot becomes a water balloon bumbling its way through a pinball machine, and Pinter’s notions of power and abuse and the horror of conformity as a measure of success only go so far before we lose track of the darkness and are left with absurdity instead.

For information about Aurora’s The Birthday Party, visit www.auroratheatre.org.

You know it’s a new world of technology when they start doing plays in podcast form.

Trevor Allen’s Black Box Theatre Company is celebrating Halloween in a big way. On Monday night, which you might call Halloween Eve, Allen gathers a top-notch cast of Bay Area actors for The Creature, his own version of the Frankenstein story, this time told from the creature’s point of view.

Kent Nicholson directs a cast that includes James Carpenter as the creature, Andrew Hurteau as Capt. Walton and Paul Silverman as Victor Frankenstein.

The production will be performed before a live audience and recorded for broadcast in podcast form on Oct. 31 via www.blackboxtheatre.com.

“There are two sides to every tale,” Allen says. “This is the creature’s story.”
Director Nicholson adds: “By telling the story from the creature’s point of view, we not only explore the ethical and scientific issues in the original story but it also becomes a story about alienation and the effect of being outcast as an `other’ in society.”

The event is at 8 p.m. Oct. 30 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. Visit www.blackboxtheatre.com or call (415) 731-4922 for information.