Complex, human look at gun violence in Berkeley Rep Hours

Office Hour 1
Jeremy Kahn (left) is David, a professor; Daniel Chung (center) is Dennis, a troubled, possibly dangerous student; and Jackie Chung is Gina, a compassionate professor in Julia Cho’s Office Hour at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Below: Gina attempts to connect with Daniel. Photos courtesy of Kevin Berne/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Julia Cho is exactly the kind of playwright I crave. She’s thoughtful, adventurous and fanciful in a way that relates directly to reality (she’s not a fantasist – her flights mean something in the day to day). She cares about people and their messes, both internal and external. Her Aubergine at Berkeley Repertory Theatre was a revelation (read my review here) and has become one of my favorite plays in recent memory.

Her play Office Hour, now at Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, is a thorny piece of work. It’s about gun violence, but it’s an intimate exploration of the subject with a teacher attempting to connect with a troubled student who could turn out to be the kind of campus shooter we’ve seen way too much of in recent years.

There’s something contrived-feeling about this play, and that surprised me, until after I thought about it on the way home. This is not a slice of realism, a documentary, an editorial on the heartache of unrestrained gun violence in our bullet-happy nation. It’s a writer using writing to pick apart something painful and complex. The play is about writers and revels in the notion of writing as an equation through which we work out the mathematics, geometry and physics of existence, but with grammar, deep thought and agony.

I continue to be impressed by the intelligence and straightforward sensibility of director Lisa Peterson, Berkeley Rep’s artistic associate. You know when she’s at the helm of a show, she’ll provide a conduit into the heart of the play itself and not her gloss on it. She’ll bring to bear whatever the play requires without the kind of directorial flourish that wants to push aside author, actors and designers to reveal the director as the true maestro of the stage. Peterson is the kind of director you can count on to reveal rather than obfuscate.

Even though this is quite a serious play, I appreciated the moments of humor when they pop through. I especially liked one character’s take on the pitfalls of marrying someone whom you claim is your best friend: “If you marry your best friend, you have one less important person in your life than you should.” Perhaps a full-blown comedy could be in Cho’s future? I hope so. But I’m there for whatever comes next, laughs or not.

I reviewed Office Hour for Theatermania.com. Here’s an excerpt:

The parallels Cho forces her characters to face boil down to the simple desire to connect. A writer, even a strange one like Dennis, wants to be noticed, wants the work to be appreciated in some way. His “terrorist” act isn’t an attempt to hide, as Gina points out, but a costume to make him noticed. So writers and a potential “classic shooter,” as Dennis is described, have something in common: They want connection.

Read the full review here.

Office Hour 2

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Julia Cho’s Office Hour continues through March 25 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $30-$97. Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

Glickman prize forJulia Cho’s Aubergine

Julia Cho
Julia Cho (Photo by Jennie Warren)

Julia Cho’s Aubergine is the winner of the 2016 Glickman Award for the best new play to make its world premiere in the Bay Area. Aubergine was developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’ Ground Floor, Center for the Creation and Development of New Work. The drama about a terminally ill father and his chef son opened in February at Berkeley Rep and was the first production in the newly refurbished and renamed Peet’s Theatre.

Aubergine received a warm critical welcome, including from me. Read my review here. The show also landed at the top of my 2016 list of most memorable theatrical experiences (read that story here).

The Glickman Award is awarded annually by a committee comprising Bay Area critics. This year’s committee included Jean Schiffman of the San Francisco Examiner Robert Avila of povertyartsjournal.com, Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News/Bay Area News Group, Chad Jones of TheaterDogs.net and Sam Hurwitt of the Bay Area Newsgroup and the Marin Independent Journal.

The award, which comes with a $4,000 cash prize for the playwright and a certificate for the producing company, will be presented at the Theatre Bay Area annual conference on March 13.

Honorable mention goes to the two runners-up that comprise the top three contenders in this year’s batch of local world premieres: Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry at Z Space (read my review here) and Theresa Rebeca’s Seared at San Francisco Playhouse (read my review here). It was a strong year for new plays.

Here’s a complete list of Glickman Award winners (the award is made in the year following the show’s premiere):

2016 in a word, Lauren Yee (San Francisco Playhouse)
2015 The House that will not Stand, Marcus Gardley (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)
2014 Ideation, Aaron Loeb (San Francisco Playhouse)
2013 The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen (Crowded Fire/Playwrights Foundation)
2012 The North Pool, Rajiv Joseph (TheatreWorks)
2011 Oedipus el Rey, Luis Alfaro (Magic)
2010 In the Next Room, Sarah Ruhl (Berkeley Rep)
2009 Beowulf, Jason Craig (Shotgun Players)
2008 Tings Dey Happen, Dan Hoyle (Marsh)
2007 Hunter Gatherers, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb (Killing My Lobster)
2006 The People’s Temple, Leigh Fondakowski et al (Berkeley Rep)
2005 Dog Act, Liz Duffy Adams (Shotgun)
2004 Soul of a Whore, Denis Johnson (Campo Santo)
2003 Five Flights, Adam Bock (Encore)
2002 Dominant Looking Males, Brighde Mullins (Thick Description)
2001 Everything’s Ducky, Bill Russell & Jeffrey Hatcher (TheatreWorks)
2000 The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, Erin Cressida Wilson (Campo Santo)
1999 Combat!, John Fisher (Rhino)
1998 Civil Sex, Brian Freeman (Marsh)
1997 Hurricane/Mauvais Temps, Anne Galjour (Berkeley Rep)
1996 Medea, the Musical, John Fisher (Sassy Mouth)
1995 Rush Limbaugh in Night School, Charlie Varon (Marsh)
1994 Santos & Santos, Octavio Solis (Thick Description)
1993 Heroes and Saints, Cherrie Moraga (Brava)
1992 Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Tony Kushner (Eureka)
1991 Political Wife, Bill Talen (Life on the Water)
1990 Pick Up Ax, Anthony Clarvoe (Eureka)
1989 Yankee Dawg You Die, Philip Kan Gotanda (Berkeley Rep)
1988 Webster Street Blues, Warren Kubota (Asian American)
1987 Life of the Party, Doug Holsclaw (Rhino)
1986 Deer Rose, Tony Pelligrino (Theatre on the Square)
1985 The Couch, Lynne Kaufman (Magic)
1984 Private Scenes, Joel Homer (Magic)

Theater Dogs’ Best of 2016

Best of 2016

The theater event that shook my year and reverberated through it constantly didn’t happen on Bay Area stage. Like so many others, I was blown away by Hamilton on Broadway in May and then on repeat and shuffle with the original cast album (and, later in the year, the Hamilton Mix Tape) ever since. Every YouTube video, official or fan made, became part of my queue, and checking Lin-Manuel Miranda’s incredibly busy Twitter feed has become a daily ritual. Hamilton is everything they say it is and more. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, the score that continually reveals its brilliance and a bond with friends, family and other fans. In a year in which hope seemed to physically shrivel and evaporate, Hamilton keeps bolstering my faith in art, in theater, in musical theater, in theater artists and even in this messy country of ours. The show has yet to fail in delighting, surprising or moving me, and I plan to continue testing that limit.

Now that Hamilton is a bona fide phenomenon, the conquering expansion is under way. There’s a company wowing them in Chicago with another set for San Francisco (and later Los Angeles) next spring as part of the SHN season. If you don’t already have your tickets, good luck. I’ll be entering the ticket lottery daily because there’s no conceivable way I can get enough of this show.

Shifting focus back home, theater in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a marvel, which is really something given the hostile economic environment arts groups are facing around here. I saw less theater this year (while Theater Dogs celebrated its 10th anniversary in August) and took some time off to reevaluate my theater reviewing future. The upshot is I’m still here, still reviewing but on a more limited scale given the demands of my day job. I’ve been writing about Bay Area theater for 24 years (25th anniversary in September 2017!) and love it too much to stop, and that’s the truth. With so many extraordinary artists here and an ever-intriguing roster of visitors, who could stop trying to spread the good word?

With that in mind, here are some of my favorite Bay Area theatergoing experiences of 2016. (click on the show title to read the original review)

A good year for San Francisco Playhouse

Making notes about the most memorable shows I saw this year, one company kept coming up over and over: San Francisco Playhouse. Talk about hitting your stride! They kicked off 2016 with a mind-blowingly creepy show, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, a drama about virtual reality that blurred all kinds of lines between theater, audience, reality and fantasy. Thinking about this production, expertly directed by Bill English and designed by Nina Ball, still gives me the shivers. Two other shows made a powerful mark on the SF Playhouse stage as well: Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal, a blend of drama and dance in the service of exploring football and masculinity, and Theresa Rebeck’s Seared about a hot little restaurant and its chef and loyal staff. I could also add the Playhouse’s musicals, which continue to grow in stature and quality as seen in City of Angels and She Loves Me. But I’ll just give those honorable mention so that one theater doesn’t take up half of this list.

Local playwrights shine

Let’s hear it for our local scribes who continue to devise startlingly good shows. Each of these writers should inspire any prospective audience member to check out whatever they happen to be working on.

Christopher Chen has a brain that knows no boundaries. His Caught, part of Shotgun Players’ stunning repertory season, was like an intellectual amusement park park ride as fun as it was provocative and challenging. Chen had another new show this year, but on a different scale. His Home Invasion was given small productions in a series of people’s living rooms as part of 6NewPlays a consortium of six writers creating new work under the auspices of the Intersection for the Arts Incubator Program. Directed by M. Graham Smith the play is set in a series of living rooms (how appropriate), but its realm expands way beyond its setting. The concepts of multidimensionality that come up in the play truly are mind altering, and what an extraordinary experience to get to watch such amazing actors – Kathryn Zdan and Lisa Anne Porter among them – in such an intimate space.

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb also took us into a home with a new play this year, but this home was built primarily in the theatrical imagination (and in the wondrously impressionistic sets by Sean Riley). In A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry, Nachtrieb and his solo actor, the always-remarkable Danny Scheie, the audience got to play tourists as we moved from room to room in the most unique historical home tour imaginable. Commissioned by Z Space and written expressly for Scheie, this experience was so delectable we can only hope it will return for another tour of duty.

Not only is Lauren Gunderson a wonderful playwright, she also happens to be the most produced living playwright in the country this season. One of the reasons for that is the new play she wrote with Margot Melcon, Miss Bennett: Christmas at Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice that delivers a feel-good Christmas experience with snap rather than sap (especially in the top-notch Marin Theatre Company production). Gunderson’s love of science and literature combined with her grace, intelligence, good humor and prodigious dramatic talents should continue yielding marvelous results for years to come.

Big drama at Thick House

Two companies in residence at Thick House continually do fantastic things on its small stage. Crowded Fire hit two shows out of the proverbial ballpark this year: Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s I Call My Brothers. Both plays explore different aspects of race, religion and being an outsider in this country, and both were powerful in their of-the-moment relevance and dramatic impact. The other company in residence at Thick House that dazzled is Golden Thread Productions, whose Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat by Yussef El Guindi delivered action and depth in its exploration of what it means, among other things, to be Muslim in this country. It should be noted that a significant part of what made both I Call My Brothers and Our Enemies so good was the work of the marvelous actor Denmo Ibrahim.

A dazzling finale for Impact

This one makes me as sad as it does happy. As it wound down its work at LaVal’s Subterranean, Impact Theatre unleashed yet another brilliant Shakespeare reinvention. This time it was The Comedy of Errors meets Looney Tunes, and the results in director Melissa Hillman’s production were inventively hilarious and so spot-on it’s a wonder Yosemite Sam or Bugs Bunny didn’t make cameo appearances. Here’s hoping that Impact returns in some form or another sometime soon.

My favorite play this year

Let the record show that this year Berkeley Repertory Theatre was home to two of my least favorite theater experiences (a ponderous Macbeth starring Frances McDormand and a disoncertingly disappointing For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday) as well as my favorite local theater experience: Julia Cho’s Aubergine. Sensitively directed by Tony Taccone, this deeply moving play about families, loss and growing up was rich in quiet beauty and full of performances that allowed the understated to just be. Food and memory played a big part in the drama, but it really came down to who we are within the defining experiences of our parents and our own mortality. A gorgeous production of a gorgeous play that said as much in silence as it did in sound.

Quiet beauty, deep feeling in Berkeley Rep’s Aubergine

Aubergine 1
Sab Shimono (in bed) is Ray’s father and Tim Kang is Ray in the world premiere of Julia Cho’s Aubergine at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s newly renovated Peet’s Theatre. Below: Tyrone Mitchell Henderson (seated) is Lucien, a caregiver helping Kang’s Ray with his ailing father. Photos courtesy of kevinberne.com

Setting aside taxes for the moment, there are two certainties in life: we will eat food (and perhaps have a complicated relationship with food) and we will die (and perhaps have a complicated relationship with death). Food and death. Elemental.

In Julia Cho’s Aubergine, now receiving its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s newly renovated and renamed Peet’s Theatre (formerly the Thrust Stage), those elements – food and death – are being addressed with the utmost compassion, grace and quiet dignity. The play is sad, funny, insightful and deeply moving. It’s a beautiful piece of writing that has become a powerful theatrical experience directed with a strong, sensitive hand by Tony Taccone and performed by a cast that seems to fully appreciate the play’s quiet impact.

The rhythms of Aubergine are different than those we might be used to in a more conventional tale of losing a parent and wrestling with our own mortality. Within the quiet spaces is a lot of introspection, which may seem unusual to audiences that want things spoken about more explicitly. But that’s part of what makes the play so rich and rewarding – there’s space for us to bring our experiences. Cho may be writing a very specific story about a Korean-American family, but she’s really writing about all of us. Commissioned by Berkeley Rep and developed through the Ground Floor: Berkley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work, Aubergine skillfully fuses food, memory and mortality into a story about all children and all parents.

The child here is Ray (masterfully played by Tim Kang), a 38-year-old chef who has never quite grown up. When he wants to buy a $2,000 knife, he charges it on his father’s card without bothering to tell his father (played by Sab Shimono), who has lived his life frugally.

Aubergine 2

Fights about money or the fact that Ray’s dad never cared about the food Ray cooked are moot now because Ray’s dad is now in hospice care, with a big hospital bed moved into his dining room, while Ray stands uncomfortably by, watching his dad slowly fade. There’s assistance from a hospice worker, Lucien (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson), who doles out compassion along with sturdy doses of reality. At one point, Ray apologizes for not handling things well and says Lucien must think he’s stupid. “I don’t think of anyone as stupid,” he says “But it is strange to me how so few of you see it coming. There’s nothing for miles around, it is the only thing walking towards you and yet, you still can’t see it coming. You turn your heads away.”

Ray’s only friend, it seems, is Cornelia (Jennifer Lim), and even that is complicated. She’s a waitress at the restaurant where he was a chef. They began dating, but then Ray disappeared. She’s hurt and angry but willing to help. Ray speaks no Korean, but she does, so she has to reach out to the estranged brother of Ray’s father in Korea with the sad news of an impending death.

The cultural divide between generations adds fascinating texture to the relationships and is illuminated by stories of food, some of which are told entirely in Korean with English surtitles. Food, it seems, isn’t just what we eat. It’s who we are or who we choose to be.

Food is also magic. Listening to characters talk about transcendent food moments is thrilling, and people who provide those moments – a parent, a chef, a surprising source – have a gift that goes beyond simple description. Ray is one of those people, but he doesn’t quite know it, but coming to terms with his dad and where he is in his life will bring him closer to that realization.

Taccone’s production builds slowly, and the way scenes flow into one another through the simple (and astonishingly quiet) but strikingly beautiful set by Wilson Chin immerses us in the world completely. We go from hospital to home to diner, from present to past, from the U.S. to Korea with graceful efficiency. The same is true of Jiyoun Chang’s lights – there’s such intimacy and clarity in all the settings.

The superb cast also includes strong turns from Safiya Fredericks as a woman for whom food has come to mean some powerful things, and Joseph Steven Yang the uncle from Korea whose lack of English leads him to communicate with Ray in an entirely endearing form of pantomime.

Aubergine is a quietly stunning experience. It is as heartbreaking as it is life affirming, an exquisite meal prepared with superior skill and served with love.

[bonus interview]
I talked to playwright Julia Cho and director Tony Taccone about Aubergine for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Julia Cho’s Aubergine continues through March 20 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Peet’s Theatre. Tickets are $29 to $89 (subject to change). Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.