Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

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…

To read the complete review, please visit my Examiner.com theater page here.

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.

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.