Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Above photo: Ashkon Davaran (left) and Casey Jackson in Den of Thieves at SF Playhouse. Photo by Jessica Palopoli. Photo below: Tommy A. Gomez and Lucinda Serrano in Sunsets and Margaritas, a TheatreWorks production at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. Photo by Mark Kitaoka

How strange it is to see two wildly different comedies at two different theaters and find they have something in common: plot twists that involve the restraining of characters by tying them down with duct tape.

Since when did that become an element of slapstick? Has someone alerted Abbott and Costello?

At the SF Playhouse, more than half the cast spends the second act bound to chairs with duct tape and plastic wrap (with extra cling, no doubt) in Stephen Adley Guirgis’ Den of Thieves. And down in Palo Alto at the Lucie Stern Theatre, the TheatreWorks production of Sunsets and Margaritas by José Cruz González also hauls out the sturdy gray multi-use tape to restrain a major character. One more instance of this and we’d have ourselves a trend (apparently a trend only requires a trio of appearances).

Perhaps the Guirgis use of severe restraint should be less surprising, given the writer’s time on the writing staffs of shows like The Sopranos and NYPD Blue. In his comedy (one of his earlier, slighter efforts that lacks the heft of later shows like Our Lady of 121st Street or Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train), desperate characters, none of whom are terribly bright, embark on a too-easy-to be-true heist and end up paying for their lack of proper research.

Director Susi Damilano grounds the comedy in realism, and she’s helped immensely by Bill English’s superb set, which turns a grimy New York apartment into a sinister disco basement during an impressive Act 2 scene change. The stage looks like the real world, and that makes the characters seem truer and more recognizable. That helps the comedy a lot and gives this Sopranos-lite script a greater sense of fun and comic adventure.

Damilano also gets some delicious performances from her cast. Casey Jackson is superb as Paul a young man who never met an addiction or obsession he couldn’t conquer through a handy 12-step program. Such groups receive a hearty amount of ridicule here, but there’s also an underlying respect for the powerful potential for change these programs can offer. As the adopted son of a Jewish family, Paul has a family legacy in the form a grandfather who worked as a skilled safe cracker with a group known as the Den of Thieves. The Den would pull heists then give all the money to local charities. Paul thinks he can do the same when he gets mixed up with a small-time hood named Flaco.

Flaco (an astute, very funny Chad Deverman) is a wannabe Latino gang-banger who hatches the easy-peezy scheme that goes awry. He’s still pining for his ex, Maggie (Kathryn Tkel), who’s working through her own pick-pocketing, kleptomania, compulsive over-eating issues. But being a ladies’ man, Flaco isn’t letting his broken heart get in the way of dating a stripper named Boochie (Corinne Proctor tickles every conceivable laugh from this familiar role). The comedy ramps up a few notches with the arrival of Ashkon Davaran as Little Tuna, a mobster with what appears to be a fully functioning human heart. His cohorts, Sal (Peter Ruoco) and Big Tuna (Joe Madero), are straight from gangland central casting.

Things get really interesting in Act 2 when the comedy gives way to actual drama, and the characters begin showing a little depth. Duct-taped and plastic-wrapped to their chairs, the would-be criminals are forced to decide amongst themselves which of them should be sacrificed as a mob hit. This is where we see the more soulful and searing Guirgis of the later plays, and Damilano and her actors do a terrific job hijacking the comedy by inserting from heartfelt drama. Den of Thieves steals plenty of laughs but cracks the safe only to find drama in the vault.

Down at TheatreWorks’ Sunsets and Margaritas, the duct tape comes in handy when a wily older gentleman becomes too much for his family to handle. On the anniversary of his wife’s death and facing possible imprisonment in a senior home, Candelario Serrano has chosen to lose his mind. After crashing his car through the wall of his restaurant and terrorizing the town with a gun (and with glimpses of him in his boxer shots), Candy has been captured by his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren and taped to a dolly.

It would certainly be easier to wheel the old man into the home while he’s taped up, but playwright González isn’t after heavy drama or even light drama. He’s after laughs, and that’s mostly what he gets in this affable comedy that feels mere inches away from being a weekly half-hour installment on Fox. Working with director Amy Gonzalez (no relation), he and a likeable cast do a sort of Latino version of Neil Simon. Instead of neurotic New Yorkers we get a middle-age son dealing with his much-macho father, his kids (a clothing designer son in a souped-up electric wheelchair and a lesbian Republican daughter) and his world-weary but loving wife.

Tommy A. Gomez as Gregorio, the son, keeps doing the equivalent of smacking his forehead and muttering, “Ay, dios mio!” by breathing into a paper bag and hallucinating that he’s seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe (a very funny and frisky Lucinda Serrano).

Just how the familial farce ends up with grandpa bound in duct tape is somewhat mysterious. But you know, there’s a lesson here. When life spins out of control, reach for the duct tape.

In comedy, apparently, nothing captures attention more than characters restrained by duct tape. It’s practically a trend. You heard it here first, folks.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

SF Playhouse’s Den of Thieves continues through April 17 at 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $40. Call 415 677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

TheatreWorks’ Sunsets and Margaritas continues through April 4 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $24-$62. Call 650 463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

EXTENDED THROUGH MARCH 27!

The last major magic show to hit the Bay Area theater scene involved Siegfried and Roy giving their stamp of magical approval to a kid who sang show tunes while doing fairly lame tricks. It’s no wonder that magic gets such a bad rap for being such a cheeseball staple of the Las Vegas showroom.

But when magic is done well, it’s tremendous. Free of schmaltz and full of ingenuity, genuine theatrical magic is a joy, and that’s what you’ll find in Christian Cagigal’sNow and at the Hour now at the EXIT Stage Left. After a successful run in New York followed by a well-received San Francisco run, the magical Cagigal has revived the show, much to the delight of his adoring audience.

Cagigal doesn’t waste a lot of time with the usual flash-and-flair gimcrackery. He doesn’t need to impress us with empty gesturing and phony-baloney showmanship because he has plenty of genuine wonder at his disposal, and if that fails to make an impression, then magic is simply not for you.

Part autobiographical solo show, part mind-reading festival, Cagigal’s show is a spellbinding hour that puts a fresh spin theatrical magic. He enters the theater and sets up his stage. He turns over an hourglass and sets a metronome in motion. He checks his pocket watch and he wonders aloud, “Did you ever get the feeling that everything has happened before and it will all happen again?” He attempts to prove the notion of time travel – or at the very least, time bending – during the next hour, and he makes a pretty good case.

Whatever his methods, be they manipulation, trickery, suggestion or genuine magic, Cagigal elicits gasps of amazement from his audience as he quite effectively reads people’s minds. There’s quite a lot of audience participation in this show, but not to worry – it’s not obnoxious in the least. Cagigal is not only a genial host but also unfailingly polite to his volunteers. If some detail he intuits turns out to be too personal, he won’t share it with the crowd, but he’ll make sure you know he knows what’s going on in your dirty mind.

Holding a stereoscope (usually used to view old-fashioned 3-D postcards), Cagigal stares at blank cards that volunteers have supposedly filled with visions from their memories. He then describes what he sees with seemingly remarkable acuity. He does card tricks and even, for one trick, makes the audience the magician.

In between tricks, he tells us stories from his childhood and what it was like growing up in San Francisco with a father whose mental balance was upset by a stint in Vietnam. His father’s presence looms large in the show because as the elder Cagigal battled his demons, the younger retreated into a world of magic as a means of escape. The power of memory and the passage of time fuel the smoke and mirrors of the show and raises it far above the sort of parlor tricks that can sometimes pass for theatrical magic.

How many shows are both astonishing and moving? Cagigal’s Now and at the Hour is both. Cagigal engages the heart and the imagination, making him a magician to watch with a show to see sooner rather than later.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Christian Cagigal’s Now and at the Hour continues an extended run through March 27 at the EXIT Stage Left, 156 Eddy St., San Francisco Tickets are $15-$25. Visit www.theexit.org for information.

Curtains, the final collaboration of legendary John Kander and Fred Ebb (Rupert Holmes came in to finish the show after Ebb’s death), is finally taking a Bay Area bow.

Diablo Theatre Company (formerly Diablo Light Opera Company) opens the show tonight (Feb. 12) at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, where it runs through Feb. 28.

A combination backstage musical meets murder mystery, Curtains won a Tony Award for its Broadway leading man, David Hyde Pierce, who played Lieutenant Frank Cioffi, a Boston homicide detective investigating the death of a musical theater diva.

Here comes the judge

In the DTC production, Oakland’s Tom Reardon plays Cioffi, and that right-side-of-the-law sleuth isn’t too far removed from Reardon’s actual day job: he’s an Alameda County Superior Court judge.

Reardon (right) has performed with a number of Bay Area companies, including Contra Costa Civic Theatre. He previously appeared in DTC productions of Peter Pan (he was Captain Hook in 2007), and last year he was Henry Higgins in the Lamplighters production of My Fair Lady.

So how did the Hon. Tom Reardon make the leap to song-and-dance man?

“For many years I have sung with a small group of friends for charitable events.” Reardon explains. “We sing the Broadway songbook and call ourselves the Broadway Babies. But, it wasn’t until four years ago that I first had a stage role. A friend was in need of men for the ensemble of Anything Goes. I turned up to help him out and somehow was given the lead in the show. And the rest is East Bay community theater history.”

Reardon adds that he’s been “fortunate to have played some great roles in a short time.”

Super conductor

Former member of the Grammy-winning ensemble Chanticleer, Chad Runyon (left) is playing several roles in DTC’s Curtains. He’s conducting the orchestra and he’s playing Sasha, the Russian conductor for the show-within-the-show, Robin Hood.

And he does it all without leaving the orchestra pit.

Runyon, a Danville resident, spent 10 years exploring some of the greatest choral music ever written with Chanticleer. Since he left the group, he has continued recording and also teaches, conducts and has been vocal director for DTC since the company’s production of Thoroughly Modern Millie three years ago.

For Curtains, Runyon has had to brush up his Russian accent.

“I have the added challenge of keeping the ball rolling in the actual show,” he says, “working with our wonderful pit instrumentalists and singing actors. It will be a fun challenge, and the show will be lots of fun for the audience. Sort of a blend of Oklahoma!, Sherlock Holmes and Mel Brooks.”

Here’s the trailer for the show:

“Curtains” Trailer from Diablo Theatre Company on Vimeo.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Diablo Theatre Company Diablo Theatre Company’s Curtains runs Feb. 12-28 at the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Tickets are $29 to $42. Call 925-943-7469 or visit www.lesherartscener.org or www.diablotheatre.org.

Consider the last couple years in the life of local director Mike Ward. He received a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award nomination for best director and he was nominated for the prestigious Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway. Oh, and he almost died several times.

Ward says he had a “white light” experience during what he calls his “Year of Living/Dying Dangerously.”

“I didn’t realize it was one because I would have never lit or costumed the scene that way!” Ward says, his sense of humor still clearly intact.

While continuing to work in theater, Ward has fought a number of cancers, and this past fall, he had major surgery described as “curative” for his surgically targeted cancers. Ward is still living with hepatocelluar carcinoma, but the disease has been in remission for more than two years. He continues to work as a mentor to actors and writers and is creating what he’s calling an “absurd tragicomedy” that deals with his adventures with cancer. The project, as he puts it, is “more comedy, less tragi.”

The Ockrent nomination, named for British director Mike Ockrent, who died in 1993 from leukemia, was a big deal for Ward.

“The nomination allowed me to take a good look at what being in the theater means to me,” he says. “The process of the Ockrent Fellowship involves an essay, and I was able to review what I’ve done and where I am. It helped me realize that this is my time and that there is much ahead for me. Being engaged in the act of creation is life-renewing, life-affirming, and it helped pull me through a very harrowing year.”

An accomplished writer, director and choreographer, Ward has worked at the Magic Theatre and TheatreWorks among other theaters, and Ward he had his own company with San Francisco playwright Tom W. Kelly called Isis Arts Collective.

Ward recently found out that he was not selected for the Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway, which would have put him to work on the Broadway revival of Promises Promises. But he says he’s grateful for the process.

“It allowed me to sit with what theatre means to me, where I belong in it and where I’m looking at going,” he says. “It made me realize how vital theater is to my life.”

George Furth, a mentor and friend to Ward, would frequently remind him, “It’s not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for having talent, and you have that.”

While Ward ponders what Furth means by that, the director is satisfied with his journey of late, even with all its ups and downs. “The Ockrent Fellowship and the BATCC let me know that I’m where I should be,” he says, “and I’m heading toward the next place I’m going to.”

Above: Kara Emry and William McMichael get Shanghaied in Pearls Over Shanghai.
Below: Eric Wertz and Steven Satyricon dream of “un bel di.”Photos by David Wilson

Mash up Beach Blanket Babylon with Miss Saigon, throw in every bad Oriental exotica movie ever made, season with Ziggy Stardust and The Rocky Horror Show then sprinkle liberally with Cockettes. The result will be Pearls Over Shanghai, San Francisco’s most unlikely hit musical. It’s so hip John Waters even came to see it.

Forty years after it premiered, Pearls was revived last June by director Russell Blackwood and his Thrillpeddlers theater company at The Hypnodrome, their funky SOMA headquarters. And the show is still going strong. Not even a busted water main and an ensuing flood could rain on this pearly parade.

Pearls Over Shanghai has been extended through April 24, making it practically a San Francisco institution this side of Rice-a-Roni and just as phony (in the best possible way). Dirty, salty, nasty, slinky, sweet and sour are mere glints of the jewel that is Pearl.

Directed by Blackwood and featuring a cast of more than 20, this extravaganza features a score by original Cockette composer Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn, who is still tickling the ivories (and the occasional funny bone) in a curly Ilsa She Nazi wig. The book and lyrics by Link Martin have more exotic flavors than an order of house chow fun and drag us into the underbelly of Shanghai circa 1937.

Three “Yankee Imperial tourists” wander down the wrong alley – imagine the Andrews Sisters falling into white slavery – and that’s the primary plot, though there is a fairly significant ode to Madame Butterfly with an American captain and his Shanghai peasant love. But who needs plot when you’ve got so much delightful decadence done up in so much glittery makeup and so many snazzily salacious costumes (by Kara Emry, Louise Jarmilowicz and Tahara)?

Blackwood is Mother Fu (Fu Manchu’s mother no less), sort of the opium den mother, and he presides over a stage full of familiar faces (Michael Phillis as the glitter-nippled Red Dragon, Veronica Klaus as Russian spy Petrushka, Kim Larsen as Madam Gin Sling) and some faces so garishly glittered they could be classically trained Kabuki actors. And in true San Francisco fashion, you see a whole lot more than just faces.

During intermission, audience volunteers are welcomed on stage, put on all fours and roundly spanked by Lottie Wu (Kara Emry), a dominatrix courtesan. And Act 2 of this two-hour camp delight gets down and dirty flirty with scanty costumes sometimes disappearing altogether. Call it Flower Bum Song. The second act also features some truly extraordinary black-light effects that take flight during an opium nightmare sequence.

With so much glittery carnality and Oriental kitsch filling the stage, just what does this Shanghai express? Sex, drugs and campy fun are the true San Francisco treat.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Pearls Over Shanghai continues an extended run through April 24 at The Hypnodrome, 575 10^th St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8pm Fridays and Saturdays and 7pm Sundays. Tickets are $30 (or $69 for the special “Shock Boxes”). Call 800 838-3006 or visit www.thrillpeddlerscom or www.brownpapertickets.com.

Two extraordinary shows are lighting up Bay Area stages, and in each of them, the specter of death hovers in the shadows.

In Trevor Allen’s intelligent, compassionate adaptation of Frankenstein at the Thick House, Victor Frankenstein defies death by creating life from dead parts and cowering from the unexpected results.

Over at Intersection for the Arts, Campo Santo and the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project ponder the death of a goldfish and, through engaging text and movement, ruminate on the nature of life and breath in The Future Project: Sunday Will Come.

Both pieces, while they couldn’t be more different from one another, are completely compelling and find grace amid seriously dark subject matter.

In Sunday, a whole troupe of people, led by performers Erika Chong Shuch and Sean San José, have created a simple, hour-long three-hander about a seemingly small matter – a man and woman (Shuch and Sean José) contemplate the illness and imminent death of their goldfish. They act out the creature’s fight for breath through some extraordinary movement on a small but sturdy table, and their discussion of this aquatic mortality resonates in larger waves.

Troubadour Denizen Kane weaves in and out of the central action, lending the tale his soulful voice and songs that give the show a soothing pulse and a throbbing heart.

There’s none of the pretension that can come from a hybrid dance-theater-music-spoken word piece because the performers are so incredibly focused, so funny and so intensely emotional. They seem to live partly in the world of boring, normal people and partly in the world of extraordinarily talented artists who sing and move and speak on an entirely different, entirely dazzling plane.

Allen’s The Creature is equally dazzling but in entirely different ways. His adaptation rescues Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the domain of creature features and returns it to the domain of gut-punching drama, where it belongs.

Taking his cure from the 1818 novel, Allen gives his stage over to three narrators: Captain Walton (Garth Petal), who is searching for a sail-able passage through the North Pole; Victor Frankenstein (Gabriel Marin), a scientist with a gift for reanimating dead matter; and the Creature (James Carpenter), who had the bad luck to be created by a scientist unable to bear the responsibility of his great work.

Time bends as we hurtle back and forth between past and present as the tale of Frankenstein’s creation takes shape and we, along with the scientist, begin to comprehend the scope of what he has done in creating a man from disparate dead parts. The sea captain makes for a sympathetic ear, but what really makes the story land is hearing from the Creature himself.

While Petal and Marin are grounded, intense and wonderful, Carpenter’s Creature is simply astonishing. This is the kind of performance – brave, complex and utterly devastating – that lingers for days, if not years afterward. Often crouched on a table and cast in shadows by Stephanie Buchner’s lights, Carpenter creates a vision of a misunderstood giant with minimal makeup and virtually no gimmickry. Props to Boris Karloff and his makeup team, but Carpenter is the real Creature – not a grunting monster (or one that warbles “Puttin’ on the Ritz” for that matter), but an eloquent soul touched with self-sustaining genius and afflicted by shattering loneliness.

Carpenter, under the direction of the always-astute Rob Melrose (of the Cutting Ball Theater), is giving the can’t-miss performance of the season. He already has the reputation of being one of the very best actors in the Bay Area. His work in The Creature allows us to see something he hasn’t really shown us before. And it is, in short, magnificent.
(PHOTO CREDIT: James Carpenter in The Creature by Allesandra Mello)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Future Project: Sunday Will Come continues through Nov. 7 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415 626-2787 or visit www.theintersection.org

The Creature continues through Nov. 7 at the Thick House, 1695 18^th St.,San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$30 on a sliding scale. Call 415 401-8081 or visit www.thickhouse.org or www.blackboxtheatre.com

Listen to Black Box Theatre’s podcast of The Creature featuring James Carpenter here.
 

TOP: Ralph and Myron (l-r, Patrick Russell and Charles Dean) have a father-and-son talk as Moe (back, Rod Gnapp) listens in Aurora Theatre Company’s production of Awake and Sing! Photo by David Allen
BOTTOM: Playwright D.H.H. (Pun Bandhu, left) takes a lesson on the American dream from his father, H.Y.H. (Francis Jue, right) in the Bay Area premiere of Yellow Face at TheatreWorks. Photo by Mark Kitaoka

As long as there have been fathers and sons, one has wanted to please the other and often encountered difficulty in doing so.

Two very different plays opened in the Bay Area last weekend, and each has, at its center, a touching father-son story.

In the Aurora Theatre Company’s Awake and Sing!, Clifford Odets’ 1934 slice-of-Depression-life family drama, the son Ralph (Patrick Russell) is constantly being brow beaten toward the life of a successful capitalist –not by his father but by his domineering mother, Bessie, played with ferocity by Ellen Ratner. Ralph’s father, Myron, is the epitome of meekness. Though he means well, Myron (the ever-compelling Charles Dean) can’t help but be his wife’s best ally, even when she’s lying and scheming and doing what she thinks – in her sometimes warped way – is best for her family.

Ralph can’t turn to his father for a role model. Instead he turns to his soulful grandfather, Jacob (Ray Reinhardt), who knows that in spite of Bessie’s ranting about the importance of money, life can’t be printed on dollar bills. But Jacob, like Myron, can’t really stand up to Bessie, who admits to her children that she had to be both father and mother to them.

There’s a fascinating friction between the generations in director Joy Carlin’s production. We see Jacob’s generation, which has found meaning in struggle and ideas that actually mean something in the life pursuit. Then we have Bessie’s generation reacting against that – grabbing for money and security no matter what the spiritual cost. And then there’s Ralph’s generation, seeking something beyond the struggle, beyond the financial fixation.

No one’s really happy, but everyone’s up against it. There’s a sadly sweet scene toward the end of the play when Myron, who has gone to bed after much emotional unrest in the family, returns for an apple. He has no way of knowing that his children, Ralph and daughter Hennie (Rebecca White), have undergone seismic emotional shifts that will affect the course of their lives.

No, Myron, chomps on his apple and heads back to bed and to the all-consuming Bessie.

Meanwhile, down at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, TheatreWorks is traversing a more contemporary father-son relationship in David Henry Hwang’s mockumentary Yellow Face.

Hwang makes himself the central character in this true/false account of racial uproar in the theatrical community and beyond. There’s farce and there’s dramatic/political heft here as Hwang (played by doppelganger Pun Bandhu) recounts his adventures trying to prevent Jonathan Pryce, a Caucasian Welsh actor from playing a half-Asian pimp in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. But then, in creating a follow-up play to his Tony-winning M. Butterfly, Hwang writes a racial farce and accidentally casts a Caucasian man (Thomas Azar) in the role of an Asian man pretending to be Caucasian to get a role in a play.

Hwang plays fast and loose with the facts as the theatrical brouhaha becomes overshadowed by systematic racism perpetrated by the American government on Asian Americans in the 1990s.

Amid the farcical chaos of director Robert Kelley’s production, one relationship emerges with emotional depth. That relationship is between Hwang and his father, Henry Y. Hwang, who founded the first Asian-American-owned, federally chartered bank in the U.S. Francis Jue, a longtime Bay Area favorite, plays the elder Hwang (among many other roles) and reveals just why the role won him an Obie when he performed it off Broadway at the Public Theater.

Jue, playing well beyond his actual age, makes Henry a fascinating man – a self-made Chinese immigrant who always idolized Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper and who ended up a wealthy man. Henry is funny, especially when trying to get tickets to Miss Saigon through his son, but when things turn serious in the second act, Jue keeps pace with the jagged turns of the script and imbues the character – indeed the play – with heart.

Hwang has clearly been deeply affected by his relationship with his father, and in many ways, in spite of the tornado of issues swirling through the play, Yellow Face seems in many ways to be a simple tribute to the elder Hwang, a man the playwright missed and wanted (or needed) to conjure.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Aurora Theatre Company’s Awake and Sing continues through Sept. 27. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org for information.

TheatreWorks’ Yellow Face continues through Sept. 20. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

Patty Gallagher is a gun-toting Winnie in the Cal Shakes production of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. Photo by Kevin Berne

In the world of live theater, you never know from where the drama will come.

For California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone and his production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, there was already a certain amount of drama in the choice of the play – the first time Moscone had tackled Beckett and the first time Beckett would be performed in all the outdoor glory of the Bruns Amphitheater.

As a way to counteract the risk of doing an essentially one person play (one person who, by the way, is stuck in a mound of muck for the entire play), Moscone cast Oscar-nominee Marsha Mason, one of those comforting and familiar actors we’ve watched, admired and enjoyed for years. Add a little celebrity pizzazz to a play potential patrons might not know much about and you have a theatrical event.

But oh, the drama. Deep into the rehearsal period, Mason had to exit the production for, as the theater company put it, “personal reasons.” Suddenly the event is now back to the red zone of risk.

In steps Patty Gallagher, an associate professor of theater arts at UC Santa Cruz. Where patrons might have said, “Marsha Mason, how wonderful,” they now say, “Patty who?”

Well Patty Gallagher is a hero for stepping into a difficult role in a difficult play (a role she’d done before and a play she teaches) and even more of a hero for a performance that is full of life and a kind of joy you don’t expect in a Beckett musing on mortality. The valiant effort is applause-worthy enough. But what she does with the role goes beyond heroic. She’s a revelation.

Moscone and his company embraced the drama in a way that actually enhances the experience of watching the play. More specifically, Moscone began blogging about directing the show, about Mason’s departure and about working with Gallagher and her co-star, Dan Hiatt, who appears intermittently but is essential to the power of the play. In a frank and open way, Moscone exposes the stress of the experience but also the support he received and the depth he was able to reach with Gallagher and Hiatt. Here’s a sample of Moscone writing on Aug. 3 in an entry titled “I’m nervous but I’m in love”:

“Have frankly been quite exhausted, physically that is, not mentally or spiritually, from this week’s work. But I have to say, I am in a place I thought I’d never be. I cherish this project in a way that surpasses any other piece I have worked on in my life. Partly it’s the events of the week that make me feel more connected to this piece than perhaps to other plays that haven’t seen themselves through a real crisis-turned-opportunity. And a great part is this play. Patty (Gallagher) makes me love this work and have a deep emotional connection to Beckett, something I thought would never happen.”

Knowing what went on behind the scenes adds an extra layer of excitement to the play, and that layer underscores what Beckett already seems to be driving at: amid all the garbage, mud, dirt and pain of life, we can choose to view all of it with gratitude, through our connection to others and with the simple joy of being alive. That’s what I took away from Gallagher’s ebullient Winnie, a formally dressed woman stuck up to her waist in a dirt mound (Todd Rosenthal’s set pours right off the Bruns stage and into the audience).

Winnie wakes in the morning at the sound of a piercing bell, performs the routine that sustains her, attempts to chat with her husband, Willie, who lives in another part of the dirt mound, and tries valiantly to find things to be cheerful about, whether it’s memories, a mumbled word from Wilie or the pleasure of language itself. She is quite literally being buried alive (in Act 2 she’s buried up to her neck) but she is more alive than many of the people we know.

I have often found Beckett intimidating – the gnawing sense of not getting it tends to destroy my ability to enjoy the play. But several Beckett productions stick in my mind as having helped me relax enough to really listen and experience Beckett – one was Cutting Ball Theatre’s Krapp’s Last Tape earlier this year. The other was years and years ago, in a small theater at the Central YMCA in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Hiatt co-starred as Lucky in Waiting for Godot, and he was brilliant. Dennis Moyer directed the production for Fine Arts Repertory Theatre, and it starred Joe Bellan and John Robb.

That hugely enjoyable production was the first time I realized that Beckett could be equal parts brilliance and boredom, entertainment and brain-stretching philosophy. That’s what Happy Days is, and it also feels like therapy for our world at this particular moment in history. May we all be as lucky or as resilient, as resourceful or as valiant as Winnie and, like her, go down singing.

Backstage drama, onstage drama – it’s all the same thing when it feeds the audience and gives us more to muse upon. There’s a happy ending for this production of Happy Days, but the ending of the play itself is a miraculous blend of the shattering, the beautiful and the inspirational. There’s no such thing as happiness as a destination – only moments, here and gone.

And can I add, one great moment of happiness in this production came from the intermission music mix. While the audience milled about the Bruns, an instrumental version of the theme song from the TV show “Happy Days” played, and I could think of nothing more appropriate.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Cal Shakes’ Happy Days continues through Sept. 6 at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. Call 510 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org for information.

Peter Pan (Brandy Collazo) outwits Captain Hook (Gabriel Grilli) in the Peter Pan, The musical, a Berkeley Playhouse production playing through Aug. 23 at Ashby Stage. Photo by Ralph Granich

A trip to Neverland this weekend refreshed my hope for the future – not just the future of theater, but the future of the arts and the future of this country.

It’s easy, in these disproportionately bizarre times, to lose hope. With every conceivable arts program being cut or trimmed into oblivion, those of us who value the act of creativity have reason to despair. Kids are not getting the exposure to the arts they need, and though steadfast arts groups are doing everything they can to try and fill the void, the fact is that kids who might be ignited or thrilled or even saved by the arts are slipping through the cracks.

I say this as one who was saved – repeatedly – by the arts, specifically theater, as a child and as a teen. I went to a public high school that actually had a drama program, though even then it was in the process of being whittled down, while the athletic programs – as beneficial to certain students as the arts programs are to others – was continually beefed up.

I’ve never understood why the arts have to be continually fought for. Are we really that shortsighted as a society that we fail to remember that great works of art, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Van Gogh, are among our most prized artifacts of the past? And if we continue down the underfunded road we’re on, what artifacts are we leaving to future generations?

I have complete faith that great art will continue to emerge no matter what economic suppression is at hand. But I worry that the kind of art salvation I found as a young person – that gave me a community and a sense of self-worth – is missing from the lives of too many kids who could use a little salvation.

I know that great work with young people is done at theaters around the Bay Area. From my desk at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, I can see down into a rehearsal hall where the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre holds its summer intensive classes. If I were in high school or younger, those are exactly the classes I’d beg to be attending. Other such programs exist, from Cal Shakes to SF Shakes to ACT and many others, and hooray for that.

We can only hope it’s enough for now and that the parents whose children benefit from these theater classes make enough noise and keep their checkbooks open long enough to keep the programs alive so that they can expand to fill the need.

This weekend I headed over to the Ashby Stage, where Berkeley Playhouse is performing Peter Pan, The Musical. I have to say that my experiences with Berkeley Playhouse have been incredibly heartening. Artistic director Elizabeth McKoy has aimed to create a thriving theater company that creates entertainment that can be enjoyed both by children and adults – genuine family entertainment that doesn’t talk down to kids or bore adults.

Like other productions I’ve seen, including Seussical the Musical and The BFG, Peter Pan, The Musical (directed by McKoy with music direction by Phil Gorman) is captivating and more than meet’s McKoy’s institutional goals. The house as packed, and though there were many kids on laps and kids eager to fill up the first few actor-interactive rows, there were also adults there without kids in tow, adults who simply wanted to see a live, local version of a show that is most famous for turning Mary Martin into the boy who won’t grow up. In more recent years, former Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby donned the green tights of Peter Pan and dazzled audiences with some of the most sophisticated flying ever seen in a theater.

I knew McKoy and her creative team would deliver a production blending child actors and grown-up professionals, but I did wonder how they’d handle the challenges of flying. I needn’t have worried. Technical director Alf Pollard, aerial/fight choreographer Mathew Graham Smith and flying operator Raymond Christy managed the trick quite handily. Aside from pixie dust, their secret is making the flying athletic, fun and completely obvious. There’s no attempt to hide the ropes on which the actors swing around, but that doesn’t lessen the fun at all. While young people might be quite used to seamless CGI special effects in movies, they seemed completely enthralled with the ropes-and-pulleys effects on the Ashby stage.

The willing suspension of disbelief, and the vicarious thrill of flying, no matter how obvious the rope, combine to make this Peter Pan soar.

It’s no wonder that McKoy’s ambition and hard work is paying off. Next season, Berkeley Playhouse will take up residence at the Julia Morgan Center with a season that includes The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain and Oliver!

And while the shows on stage are fantastic, there are music theater conservatory classes for ages 2 to 102 (as McKoy puts it). Berkeley Playhouse is filling a niche, and filling it with skill and integrity. McKoy is creating a successful model, and with any luck, in spite of these pinched, art-unfriendly times, she will inspire others to do their part in bringing theater – and the arts in general – to an ever-growing group of young people who have the misfortune to be young in a shrinking world.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Berkeley Playhouse’s Peter Pan, The Musical continues through Aug. 23 at the Ashby Stage. For ticket information or to find out more about classes and the coming season, visit www.berkeleyplayhouse.org.

Opened June 10, 2990 at American Conservatory Theater

René Augesen is Ann and Anthony Fusco is Peter in the “Homelife” half of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, the final show of the American Conservatory Theater season. Photos by www.kevinberne.com

Human beasts, growl, purr, bark in Albee’s revised `Home/Zoo’
«««« (four stars for Act 1) ««« (three stars for Act 2)

There are two Edward Albees on display in American Conservatory Theater’s season-ending At Home at the Zoo. We have the 30-year-old writer staking his first major dramatic claim in a one-act play called The Zoo Story, written in 1958 and produced the following year in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Clearly the play marked the introduction of a major voice in American drama.

The other Albee on view here is the 76-year-old, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner with one of the most consistently surprising and long-lived careers on the American stage.

Guess which one trumps the other?

Albee’s The Zoo Story gained a companion play in 2004 at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut. Homelife took us into the private life of Peter, a publisher of, as he describes it, important but boring textbooks. He interacts with his wife, Ann, and after we delve into some sensitive marital waters, Zoo Story unfolds as we follow Peter to Central Park, where he encounters a somewhat off-balance younger man named Jerry.

The complete evening, heretofore called Peter and Jerry, was renamed last year as At Home at the Zoo because Albee reportedly thought the other title conjured Ben & Jerry’s ice cream more than it did a drama about the difficulties inherent in living life to the fullest.

Director Rebecca Bayla Thompson’s production is beautifully directed, performed and designed. Set designer Robert Brill keeps the focus on the humans in Peter and Ann’s pristine beige apartment and then opens the stage up for the second-act move to Central Park, where Stephen Strawbridge’s lights cast a green hue on the back wall of the stage and sound designer Jake Rodriguez delicately weaves in the presence of man (cars, hubbub) and nature (birdsong).

Both acts, in their different ways, address one of Albee’s favorite topics: the monster that terrorizes and devours so many of us, which is to say the fear of life itself. And this is how the older Albee bests his younger self.

In the Zoo Story half, Albee gives us a study in contrasts with Peter (Anthony Fusco), the somewhat priggish, reasonably well-to-do executive interacting with the “permanent transient” Jerry (Manoel Felciano), a rooming house boarder with a desperate need to connect with a stranger. There’s a lot of talk, mostly by Jerry, in this 50-minute encounter about animals – a landlady’s aggressive hound, the caged animals in the zoo – and it’s clear that the beats somehow represent the life that we want to tame and cage.

This is Albee writing in large, metaphorical ways, and it’s fascinating, especially when you consider that this young writer was just beginning to unleash his talent. But the piece, even with certain updates, is dated. Jerry uses expressions (”hither and thither”?) that, safe to say, very few modern 30somethings would use. And are there really still rooming houses on New York’s Upper West Side?

The drama, though full of interesting writing and ideas, is grand and somewhat self-important. It’s interesting to watch expert actors like Fusco and Felciano grapple with the piece. Fusco mostly has to listen, but Felciano treads a delicate balance between Jerry’s compelling intellect and his threatening aggressiveness. He does so with a gathering sense of momentum that helps ground the play in something resembling reality even though it belongs more to the world of theatrical construction.

That’s definitely not true of Homelife, which opens the evening. Fusco, playing opposite René Augesen as Ann, gets to reveal depths to Peter that we would never even guess at if we were only seeing the Zoo Story part of him. And Augesen gets to do some of her best work since last fall’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. The two actors find a natural, impeccable rhythm that makes it easy to relate to these middle-age marrieds who tacitly agreed at some point to a “smooth voyage on a safe ship.”

But now Ann is restless and dissatisfied – with her husband, with life, with herself – and has deep yearnings and misgivings. In the space of an extraordinary hour, she gets her husband to put down his book and engage in conversation with her that conjures that monster – the dark places we go in the small hours of the night. Husband and wife break through the politeness and habit of long-time marriage and hit on some sensitive, troublesome territory.

This is, in the best sense, theater for grown-ups.

Director Taichman orchestrates the body language and movement of the two actors with tremendous emphasis but virtually no artificiality. You can feel the audience hanging on every word, and it’s thrilling to experience dialogue that feels like action. The action of Act 2’s Zoo is more boisterous and dramatic, but you leave the theater still buzzing from the current generated in Act 1’s Home.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo continues through July 5 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $17-$82. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org for information.