Category Archives: Magic Theatre

The Magic’s Lily blooms!

Posted on by
Reply

Taylor Mac 1b
Taylor Mac as Lily. Photo by Jose A. Guzman Colon

There’s a lot of excitement burbling through the Bay Area theater community this spring. One of the reasons is the Magic Theatre’s The Lily’s Revenge, a ballsy five-hour play by Stockton native Taylor Mac.

With five acts performed in five different styles – musical theater, dance, puppets, Elizabethan-style drama – the show has a cast of nearly 40 (all local, by the way) musicians, actors, dancers, acrobats, drag queens, etc. There are actually six directors – one for each act plus one to direct the intermission events between each act. This is definitely the biggest, boldest theatrical event of the spring.

Check out this extraordinary roster of directors:

Meredith McDonough, director of New Works at TheatreWorks
Marissa Wolf, artistic director of Crowded Fire Theater
Erika Chong Shuch, choreographer and director of Erika Chong Shuch Project
Erin Gilley, founding artistic director of Elastic Future
Jessica Holt, director at Berkeley Playhouse, Magic Theatre, Shotgun Players and more
Jessica Heidt, artistic director of Climate Theater

Among the enormous cast are Julia Brothers, Jeri Lynn Cohen, Carlos Aguirre and Tobie Windham.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mac and Magic Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the feature here.

As usual, I couldn’t fit all the good stuff into the story. Here’s more with Taylor Mac.

Asking audience members to commit to a five-hour experience is a lot. Mac understands this and asks you to consider the following: “You go to the office for eight hours a day, sit at a desk and do things. Here you have an opportunity to hang out for five hours at what is essentially a party. You get to think about themes that are essential to the way we’re living our lives. You’ll see adults dressed up like flowers in the most amazing costumes you’ll ever see. You’ll experience a theatrical play you’ll never forget. Or you can go to the office for five hours and forget almost everything about your day.”

Mac says five hours is really nothing in our lives, “especially if it’s an experience you’ll remember the rest of your life. Five hours is nothing.”

After having done The Lily’s Revenge to much acclaim at New York’s HERE Art Center, Mac says he’s in love with the long form because long shows are events, not the usual thing.

“The audience makes an investment and comes with different expectations,” he says. “When you give people what they think they want, you end up with High School Musical, which they don’t actually want. They may think they do, but they don’t actually want what they already know. I get that. I see them at these shows getting what they said they want. They’re bored out of their minds, but they stand up at the end. They don’t look bored at my shows because they’re constantly trying to figure it out.”

Mac’s drag persona is, as some drag personae tend to be, larger than life and outrageously wonderful. Still, people ask Mac, who happens to be adorable in his civilian get-up, why he has to channel his talents through the exaggerated makeup and wild costumes.

“In some ways, when people say that, it’s like they’re saying, ‘You don’t have to do drag. You don’t have to be gay.’ Ugh. I feel like my ddrag is what I look like on the inside,” Mac says. “I’m not hiding in drag, not hiding behind the costume. I’m exposing something. When I dress in jeans and a T-shirt, that’s when I’m hiding because I blend in with everybody else. When I’m on stage, my responsibility is to expose something about myself I wouldn’t normally. Even with the Lily costume, it’s may saying what I look like on the inside: ugly, beautiful, chaotic, specific, polished, rough, feminine, masculine. All at the same time. This is the full range of who I am. When I try to find an aesthetc or look that expresses what I feel like on the inside, it turns out to be a kind of freak drag.”

Having grown up in Stockton, Mac rebels against homogeneity, the surburan code of things having to be a certain way.

“I keep going back to that: how can I not be just one thing?” he says. “I want to show the range of who I am. It’s this anti-relativism that is so prevalent in so much of our culture that says there is only good and only evil. That couldn’t possibly be true. If it were, the pope would have to be wholly evil, and he’s not wholly evil. He’s not wholly good either. We know that. Obviously there is some gray there.”

Mac’s work comes from a queer perspective, but for him, the word “queer” isn’t a gay/straight issue. “My friend Penny Arcade says queer means you were ostracized by society as a young person to such a degree that you could now never ostracize anyone else,” Mac explains. “I agree wholeheartedly. The kind of work I’m doing is actually traditional. Theater used to be theatrical. The Greeks wore platform heels and did cross-gender characters. Realism has only been here for 100 years or so, which makes realism the real avant garde. A David Mamet play – that’s some serious avant garde. That’s the weird stuff. Theatrical stuff like I’m doing is traditional. I’m doing it from a queer person’s perspective, a counter-culture person’s perspective, but it’s still definitely traditional.

[bonus video: The Lily’s Revenge trailer]

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge runs April 21 through May 22 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $30-$75. Call 415-441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org for info.

Magic Up Against some funny creeps

Posted on by
Reply

What We're 1
Pamela Gaye Walker (left) is Janice and Sarah Nealis is Eliza in Theresa Rebeck’s incendiary workplace comedy What We’re Up Against at the Magic Theatre. Below: Rod Gnapp (left) is Ben and James Wagner is Weber. Photos by Jennifer Reiley

Playwright Theresa Rebeck, a master of barbed contemporary dialogue, conducts an interesting experiment in the Magic Theatre’s world premiere of What We’re Up Against.

Her Petri dish is a big-city architectural firm – all glass and metal in Skip Mercier’s sleek, mostly black, white and gray set. Her chosen bacteria: the architects, all of whom turn out to be antiseptic assholes.

To stir the chemical reactions, Rebeck introduces elements commonly found in the workplace: power plays, raging sexism, vaulting ambition, moronic behavior and that ever-powerful agent, greed.

The architects at this particular firm are mostly isolated from the outside world. We hear about some client interaction, but the focus of their activity is internal. There’s not talk of spouses, significant others, children, parents, pets, groceries or dry cleaning. This nearly two-hour, two-act drama (with some hearty if stinging comedy) has a sharp focus and that is unpleasant behavior from unpleasant people.

“This is no one’s finest or most shining hour,” one architect says toward the end, and that’s so true. But it’s fascinating to watch people being ruthless in everyday, creepily corporate ways.

From the first scene, between Warren David Keith as Stu, a boozy senior architect and Rod Gnapp as Ben, a less senior but vitally important architect, we get hammered by Rebeck’s sharp dialogue.

What We're 2

You can hear Mamet-like rhythms in the chatter – as when speakers interrupt themselves mid-sentence – but Rebeck’s dialogue is more engaging, less slick. Stu, who is enormously threatened by women in the workplace, talks a lot about his balls (especially about them being cut off) and about systems and rules. Both men say things like “What I’m saying” or “I’m telling you” or “Listen!” They desperately want to be heard (and acknowledged or, better yet, praised) but say the same thing over and over.

There’s discord at the firm because a hotshot young architect, Eliza (Sarah Nealis) is going against the corporate grain and not keeping her mouth shut. It’s not that she doesn’t have enough to do –she doesn’t have anything to do. With too much time on her hands and her abundant talent going untapped, she stirs up trouble.

The other woman in the firm, Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker), makes a feeble attempt to comfort the distraught younger woman, but she makes abundantly clear that just because they’re both women, they are not allies.

The one sort of superfluous character here is Weber (James Wagner), a golden boy who’s been at the firm a shorter time than Eliza. He talks a good game, like when discussing strip malls: “The human heart meets the void in these places and shops anyway.” And he can keep up with the scotch-swilling other boys, but he’s a dolt. “History is a fiction,” he says. “But it’s a sustainable fiction.” He serves his purpose in the plot, then he disappears.

Director Loretta Greco, the Magic’s artistic director, keeps the pace swift and the action intensely focused. She gets a superb performance from Nealis as the complex Eliza, who, you get the impression, would behave less horrifically if she were given the respect she deserves.

The amazing Gnapp goes on a verbal rampage in Act 2 about something central to the plot – air ducts in a mall remodel – and almost chokes himself on his words before observing, “It’s a relentless metaphor for why we can’t breathe.”

It’s interesting that the sexual element of the male-female dynamic in this workplace is barely addressed – perhaps that’s because Rebeck’s experiment is too focused. Sex is messy and real, and these people, in their slickly casual but expertly fitted clothing (by Alex Jaeger) are removed from the reality outside Rebeck’s microscopic lens.

This laboratory yields compelling results, but the experiment seems unfinished. The play ends, but the bad cells, you can feel, just keep multiplying.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Theresa Rebeck’s What We’re Up Against continues through March 6 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $44-$60. Call 415-441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org.

2010 in the rearview mirror: My Top 10

Posted on by
2

girlfriendtop10

Ryder Bach (left) and Jason Hite in Girlfriend my favorite show of the year (oops, spoiler alert!). Photo courtesy of www.kevinberne.com 

I did two things I’m proud of this year. I worked for a great theater company and I stopped working for a great theater company. From June 2009 to September 2010, I was the communications manager for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and it was a fantastic experience. For a critic to jump the fence and experience a theater company from the inside was the education of a lifetime.

A job change in September allowed me to go back to writing and reviewing with a renewed vigor and appreciation for the art of theater.

And my timing couldn’t have been better. top 10All of a sudden, with the launch of the fall season, it seemed that the Bay Area was the epicenter of all good theater. With Compulsion at Berkeley Rep, Scapin at American Conservatory Theater and the opening of The Brother/Sister Plays at Marin Theatre Company, there was great theater everywhere you turned.

Herewith, a conventional Top 10 list for 2010 – starting at No. 10 and working toward No. 1.

10. … and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi ̶ Marcus Gardley’s gorgeous tone poem of a play featured music, humor and history swirled into an extraordinary production courtesy of Cutting Ball Theater and the Playwrights Foundation.

9. Superior Donuts – The joys of a well-made play were incredibly evident in this wonderfully sturdy, amply entertaining drama from Tracy Letts and TheatreWorks. What lingers in memory, aside from the sweet, sitcom-ish world the play inhabits is Lance Gardner’s star-making performance as Franco Wicks.

8. Much Ado About Nothing – The joys of California Shakespeare Theater’s warm, autumn-tinged production were many, but chief among the pleasures was Danny Scheie in dual roles as Don John and Dogberry. What Scheie did with the latter, the word-mangling constable was nothing short of miraculous. He turned a one-note comic character into a richly shaded human being.

7. Palomino – David Cale was the only person in his solo show, but the Aurora Theatre Company stage was brimming with extraordinary characters. This is how one-man shows should go – and best of all, it seemed like an actual play and not an indulgent autobiography.

6. Rabbit Hole – I have yet to see the Nicole Kidman movie version of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. But the version that will be forever etched into my brain came from the Palo Alto Players onstage at the Lucie Stern Theatre. Director Marilyn Langbhen’s production hit all the right emotional notes, and though the play is filled with grief, it left the audience full of cathartic hope.

5. Scapin – This production will go down in history as the one in which star Bill Irwin got upstaged by one of his co-stars. Part of the genius of this rollicking ACT production was that Irwin, who directed as well as starred, happily shared his ample spotlight with the rest of the cast. And the one who emerged as the evening’s true star? Jud Williford, one of ACT’s own.

4. Compulsion – On paper, this seemed like an iffy proposition: puppets and humans bring to life a thinly disguised true-life tale of a man obsessed with Anne Frank’s diary. But on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, and under Oskar Eustis’ astute direction, this play was about as compelling as theater gets – especially with the masterful marionettes interacting with three fantastic actors: Mandy Patinkin, Hannah Cabell and Matte Osian.

3. The Brother/Sister Plays – Beginning at Marin Theatre Company then spreading to the Magic Theatre and then to ACT, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy allowed three Bay Area theaters to collaborate in a way that made audiences giddy with delight. Each production, from Marin’s In the Red and Brown Water to the Magic’s The Brothers Size to ACT’s Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet, made the entire experience that much richer. I think my favorite, because it was so emotionally astute, was the Octavio Solis-directed Brothers at the Magic.

2. 9 Circles – Thinking about Bill Cain’s Iraq War drama still gives me chills. Craig Marker’s central performance in this Kent Nicholson-directed three hander was mind blowing. He inhabited the role of soldier Daniel Edward Reeves so powerfully that even the phenomenal work of co-star James Carpenter was a little overshadowed. And that was OK because this was Daniel’s story – the story of what war can do to the mind of a young soldier. People should have been in lines around the block to get into this Marin Theatre Company production, but alas, the show didn’t even extend.

1. Girlfriend – I can’t even begin to name all the reasons why I loved this Berkeley Repertory Theatre musical so much. I didn’t review it because I was working at the theater company at the time, but not only is it my favorite show of the year, it’s probably my favorite Berkeley Rep show of the last two decades. Director Les Waters’ production was the perfect embodiment of Todd Almond’s script and Matthew Sweet’s music. Choreographer Joe Goode made a non-dance show move in just the right ways, and stars Jason Hite and Ryder Bach were sweet and recognizable and full of heart. And the all-girl bend led by Julie Wolf kicked some serious ass.

A Magic proposal (in verse no less!)

Posted on by
Reply

Maggie Mason (crop)

This is one of the best stories to come out of a theater in many a moon.

Last week, after a performance of Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, at the Magic Theatre, actress Maggie Mason (seen above, photo by Jennifer Reilley) was proposed to by her longtime boyfriend Matt Trainer. Maggie’s co-stars, Natacha Roi and Ben Huber beat a hasty retreat after the curtain call and left Maggie alone on stage to be serenaded by Matt in verse he had written for the occasion.

Just watch the video and try not to tear up.

Congratulations to Maggie and Matt!

Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, continues through Dec. 5 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $45-$60. Call 415 441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org for information.

It’s a farce Or, a hysterical – er – historical drama

Posted on by
1

OR 1

Natcha Roi as Aphra Behn and Ben Huber as King Charles II star in Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, at the Magic Theatre. Below: Maggie Mason as celebrated actress Nell Gwynne. Photos by Jennifer Reiley.

 

With a wink and a nod to Shakespeare, playwright Liz Duffy Adams explains the title of her play Or, in a spiffily rhymed prologue. It’s about love or lust. Danger or delight. Gay or straight. In other words, anything and everything is on the table for 90 minutes of theatrical enjoyment.

Adams, the linguistically inventive author of Dog Act, an award-winning hit for Shotgun Players in 2004, is once again indulging her love of language in Or, now having its West Coast premiere at the Magic Theatre directed by artistic director Loretta Greco. She dives into the wordplay of 17th-century England and splashes around happily.

“The Puritans have had their day. Now it’s our turn,” says one character. And there’s more than an echo of throwing off the Bush years for a taste of Obama-style hope. There’s also a whiff of the swinging ’60s as characters roll in and out of bed with one another and women are tasting the surge of power that equality could bring.

Like Virginia Woolf before her, Adams is letting “flowers fall on the grave of Aphra Behn,” but hers is not an entirely reverent portrait of the somewhat mysterious woman who was the first of her gender to make a living as a playwright. Adams’ vision of Behn is playful but slightly melancholy. We meet Aphra while she’s still in debtor’s prison because her boss – King Charles II – has not paid her what she’s owed.

OR 2

But once a dashing, masked stranger enters her cell, the play takes off. The stranger, it turns out, is Charles himself, and once all Aphra’s debts are paid, she’s ensconced in a much more appropriate dwelling where she can write plays, cavort with the king and carry on with Nell Gwynne, the leading actress of her day. This core triangle, with the gorgeous Natacha Roi as Aphra, the hilarious Maggie Mason as Nell and Ben Huber as the philandering monarch, turns into a parallelogram with Huber doubling as William Scott, a fellow spy and possible assassin, and Mason playing the crotchety maid and Lady Davenant, a pioneering lady producer who helped get Aphra’s plays on stage.

Director Greco takes full advantage of the farcical possibilities here, especially as she makes use of a giant wardrobe on Michael Locher’s rustically elegant set. Huber enters the closet as the king, then re-emerges as a drunken Scott. The same is true of Mason’s quick changes as she saunters off stage as the foul-mouthed Gwynne and is back momentarily as the regally attired Davenant (the sumptuous period costumes are by Alex Jaeger). Every time Mason takes the stage, but especially as Lady Davenant and Maria the maid, she can’t help but be the funniest thing going.

In all this rushing around, Charles and Nell find themselves drawn to each other, and neither figure apparently ever met a warm body they couldn’t seduce. So while they’re off trysting in Aphra’s bed, that allows plenty of time for their other characters to take the stage.

There are plenty of jokes at theater’s expense, and amid all the mayhem, Roi’s Aphra remains the picture of seething creativity and abundant intelligence as Aphra, a true artist, puts her days of espionage and adventure behind her as she finds her voice as a poet of the theater.

You laugh and you savor Adams’ skillful blend of 17th-century and contemporary language, but there are shadows and undercurrents to make you think. Comedy and tragedy. Frivolity and substance. It’s definitely not an either Or, situation.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, continues through Dec. 5 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $45-$60. Call 415 441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org for information.

Marcus, or how Sweet it is

Posted on by
Reply

Marcus 1

Richard Prioleau, Omoze Idehenre (center) and Shinelle Azoroh play best friends in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet. Below: Prioleau (center) fantasizes about schoolmates played by Tobie L. Windham (left) and Jared McNeill. Photos by Kevin Berne

We met him as a baby. Then we got to know a little bit more about his father. And now we get to watch Marcus Eshu make his first steps into manhood.

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays cycle is extraordinary, if for no other reason than its admirable ambition. But this trilogy of plays is so much more than admirable – it’s poetic, insightful, gripping and full of beauty. When the plays finally arrived in the Bay Area, they arrived in the form of a colossal collaboration of theater companies.

We were exposed to McCraney’s talent in Marin Theatre Company’s In the Red and Brown Water, a drama so full of wondrous movement and music and myth that in memory it seems more folklore than contemporary drama. Then the drama was scaled down to size, to The Brothers Size, at the Magic Theatre, and we felt the emotional heft of McCraney at his dramatic best.

The stretch between parts 2 and 3 was long, but the wait was worth it. American Conservatory Theater’s Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet takes us back to the housing projects of the fictional San Pere along the Louisiana bayous. The play is yet another spin of McCraney’s enormous talent. If Red and Brown Water was folklore, and Brothers Size was poetic drama, Marcus fills the slot in the coming-of-age category. This may be McCraney’s most conventional play, but it’s also his funniest and most endearing.

That said, the play also feels less fully formed than its predecessors. There are rich rewards in the humor and the performances here, but McCraney leans heavily into some sitcom-ish characters and beats an incessant drum for the impending storm (which may or may not be Hurricane Katrina), and that pounding gets old without ever adding up to much.

As much as I liked Richard Prioleau in the central role of Marcus (whom we met as a babe in arms in Red and Brown Water), it took a tremendous suspension of disbelief to accept him as a 16-year-old. If you can get over the fact that Marcus appears to be a strapping lad in his mid-20s, it’s fascinating to watch Prioleau inhabit the body of this young man, who demonstrates so much insecurity, along with flashes of strength and rebellion, in his tightly held body.

This is a young man of tremendous feeling who wants to hide those feelings at any cost. His whole world calls him “sweet” – the local vernacular for gay – but he thinks he might be able to sneak by without anyone actually knowing the truth. But the truth, as they say, will out. Marcus’ dad, Elegba (so charming in the first play, so sinister in the second), has just died, leaving his son with a whole lot of questions nobody will answer.

It seems Marcus’ dad was sweet too, but Marcus’ mom, Oba (Margo Hall), will definitely not be having that conversation. Funny old Aunt Elegua (Hall again) is more willing to talk, but when she hears Marcus is having dreams about a storm – dreams like Marcus’ dad used to have – she loses it.

Marcus 2

The best parts of the play involve Marcus and his two best girlfriends, Shaunta Iyun (Omozé Idehenre) and Osha (Shinelle Azoroh). Shaunta doesn’t take any crap, not even from Marcus. She knows the truth and she’s willing to talk about it. Osha is in love with Marcus, so she sees only what she wants to see. Idehenre pretty much steals every scene she’s in because she’s able to play the comedy, fill the giant stage and somehow keep her performance grounded in reality.

The only real guidance Marcus has comes from Ogun Size (Gregory Wallace), a man we’ve come to know a little better in each play. Ogun’s story picks up almost directly from the end of Brothers Size after he has sent his little brother, Oshoosi, off to Mexico to escape the long arm of the law. Wallace gives us a brittle, barely standing Ogun, but his interaction with Marcus is poignant. Still, I have to say I craved the solid man-of-the-earth practicality of Joshua Elijah Reese, who played Ogun in The Brothers Size.

Happily, the wonderful Tobie L. Windham reprises his Size role as Oshoosi, and he provides the evening’s most dramatic through line. It turns out that Marcus’ coming out and coming to terms isn’t the real story here. It’s much more about Marcus’ dreams and how Oshoosi figures into them. But there’s something I don’t understand: why does Oshoosi interact with the audience the way he does? He keeps promising us he’ll stop using the “n word.” But if this is Marcus’ dream, why does he care what we think about his language?

Director Mark Rucker attempts to make the giant ACT Theater more intimate by augmenting the simple set by Loy Arcenas (a few moving panels, a platform that raises and lowers) with a stage-wide screen full of Alexander V. Nichols’ projections. There are some gorgeous images, but as the other two productions did, we need the drama and the beauty to come primarily from the actors and the writing.

Family secrets, inescapable legacies and garden variety teen angst all come into play here with varying degrees of success. Marcus is entertaining for much of its nearly two hours, but it doesn’t have the impact of the previous two plays. But as the third part of a trilogy, there’s something bigger at work here.

The pleasures of the individual plays were many, but the real triumph came in the collaboration between ACT, Marin Theatre Company and the Magic. The Brother/Sister Plays turned out to be this fall’s theatrical World Series win. There won’t be a ticker-tape parade down Market Street for all the artists involved, but there really should be.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet
continues through Nov. 21 at 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $22-$82. Call 415 749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Size matters — Magic’s Brothers is a keeper

Posted on by
Reply

Brothers 7

Tobie Windham (left) is Oshoosi Size and Joshua Elijah Reese is Ogun Size in the Magic Theatre’s The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Below: Alex Ubokudom is Elegba. Photos by Jennifer Reiley.

Comparing The Brothers Size, the second part of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays cycle, to In the Red and Brown Water, the first part, is inevitable but ultimately unnecessary.

These are two very different plays, both extraordinary and both extraordinarily well produced by, respectively, Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. Red and Brown opened first and gave us a broad view of McCraney’s world, a working-class Louisiana town where the mostly African-American inhabitants exist in a purely theatrical dimension between reality and poetry, between fact and folklore.

Marin’s Red and Brown, with its musical soundscape and large cast, gave us a wide view. Magic’s The Brothers Size scales things down to a wonderfully intimate, emotionally powerful level. You don’t have to have seen the first part to enjoy the second, but it will provide a richer experience (and the reverse is probably true as well).

In director Octavio Solis, the renowned playwright, the McCraney’s drama has found a deeply insightful guide into a tight brotherly bond challenged by bad behavior and unfortunate circumstances. With only three men in the cast and a mostly bare stage (Sarah Sidman designed the lights and created the set, such as it is with its piles of tires and metal drums, with James Faerron), Solis evokes an entire community through acutely observed details in his actors’ performances.

Joshua Elijah Reese is older brother Ogun Size. We met the character (played by another actor) in In the Red and Brown Water and learned that he’s a hard worker, a self-made man who runs his own car shop. Tobie Windham (a recent graduate of American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program) is younger brother Oshoosi Size, fresh out of the penitentiary and not very excited about finding his way in the world, especially not as his brother’s employee.

Brothers 3

Basically on their own since the death of their mother when they were young, the brothers are fiercely bonded. Their relationship is also fiery, especially since Oshoosi’s return from prison and the heightened contrast between Ogun’s mature and grounded responsibility and Oshoosi’s more profligate ways.

Ogun, as he has done most of his life, is trying to be a steady, guiding figure to his younger brother, but the world and its pleasures are too enticing. Oshoosi is an outsize (pun intended) personality. He’s a pure charmer (and you should see Windham flirt with the audience – shameless and mighty powerful) who has captured the affections of Elegba, a character we met in Part One, played here by Alex Ubokudom.

The two men became close in prison. They were, in Elegba’s careful words, “brothers in need.” Now their relationship is intensely complicated, and Elegba, whose nature is passionate and mischievous, will lead Oshoosi in a dangerous direction.

The plot of The Brothers Size is fairly straightforward as Oshoosi attempts, unsuccessfully in so many ways, to walk the proverbial straight and narrow. But the intensity and the depth of the relationships are incredibly rich and complicated.

McCraney still employs a certain narrative distance, especially when he has his characters recite their own stage directions. But there’s very little emotional distance here (as there is in Red and Brown) because the superb acting provides so many openings into so much conflict and humor and profound human connection.

These brothers love each other with everything they have – but what they have is so very different. When they’re hanging out together listening to Otis Redding, being brothers and having fun, it’s like real life in a discreet theatrical frame. The communication with the audience is so direct and so thrilling it’s impossible not to be sucked into the heart of the story.

With the extraordinary momentum created by In the Red and Brown Water and now The Brothers Size, it’s a shame we have to wait until November for the concluding chapter, Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet at ACT. But good things, as they say, come to those who wait.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size continues through October 17 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street. Tickets are $45-$60. Visit www.magictheatre.org. For information about The Brother/Sister Plays cycle visit www.brothersisterplays.org.

Cycle revs up in exquisite shades of Red and Brown

Posted on by
3

EXTENDED THROUGH OCT. 10!

 Red Brown 1

Lakisha May as Oya flirts with danger in the form Isaiah Johnson as Shango in Marin Theatre Company’s In the Red and Brown Water. Below are members of the ensemble (from left) Ryan Vincent Anderson, Jared McNeill, Dawn L. Troupe, May and Daveed Diggs. Photos courtesy of www.kevinberne.com

 

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water feels like ritual. It feels like a party. It feels like living, breathing poetry. And that’s a hell of way to begin a prodigious three-play cycle involving three plays, three theaters and one playwright.

It fell to Marin Theatre Company to launch McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays, a trilogy produced in tandem with the Magic Theatre (up next with The Brothers Size) and American Conservatory Theater (wrapping things up with Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet). It’s probably hardest to be first, but you wouldn’t know it from the production that shimmered on stage in Mill Valley Tuesday night.

Director Ryan Rilette’s In the Red and Brown Water couldn’t be a more auspicious beginning. This is a play so full of powerfully beautiful language and fluid storytelling that you don’t want to get in its way. Rilette wisely lets set and lighting designer York Kennedy work his magic on a seemingly empty stage that quickly becomes populated by the people, places and dreams of San Pere, Louisiana.

In the center of the stage is a raised platform. Poles stacked with lights line the sides of the stage, and there’s a small set of risers against the back wall. That’s it, but nothing more is needed. Lydia Tanji’s costumes are simple and contemporary but evoke character through fabric colors and the amount of skin allowed to show under the clothes. You know a certain character is trouble when he enters in a skin-tight tank top brandishing a bandana as if it were a weapon of sexual destruction.

Red Brown 2

Combining myths and characters from the Yoruba (West Africa) and Santeria (Cuba by way of the Yoruba, Spanish Catholic and Native American traditions) cultures, McCraney tells the sad story of Oya (Lakisha May), the goddess of change, transition and chaos. In this tale, she’s a talented young high-school track star who turns down a full-ride college scholarship so she can stay home with her ailing mother (Nicol Foster as Mama Moja, among other roles). A bright light in her community, Oya falls under the spell of the sultry Shango (Isaiah Johnson), whose folkloric roots are in male fertility. Oya finds herself torn between the brute masculinity of Shango and the more stable and loving Ogun (Ryan Vincent Anderson).

McCraney’s language is full of narrative, which the characters use to describe their own feelings as well as their entrances and exits. This has a distancing effect for the most part but can be used with humor (when the line is given certain attitude) or with poignancy, as when Ogun exits saying, “Ogun leaves his heart behind.”

A great deal of the poetry comes from the character Elegba (Jared McNeill), a randy young man who dreams portentous dreams and unleashes a steady stream of mischief. And a lot of the humor bubbles out of Aunt Elegua (Dawn L. Troupe), a busybody with a taste for younger men and speaking her mind.

The narrative threads are strong – we care about Oya and her increasingly troubled journey – though the second of the show’s two hours loses some momentum as Oya’s story forces her to become old before her time. But the graceful power of Rilette’s staging and the unfailing excellence of his cast (which also includes Jalene Goodwin, Josh Schell and Daveed Diggs) always keeps the play compelling.

The rhythms are all right here. The play begins with breathing and voices joined in music making. Later in the play, rhythm is re-established by breathing and drumming. And there’s a lot of singing, gorgeous, soulful singing. McCraney provided the words (and pulls in some traditional spirituals), and the cast came up with the music and arrangements (with an assist from music supervisor Zane Mark).

McCraney says in a program note that he wants to create something “distant yet present, something else.” And that’s exactly what he’s done. This is exquisitely beautiful theater, vital and contemporary yet steeped in tradition. Everything old is once again new.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Marin Theatre Company’s In the Red and Brown Water continues an extended run through Oct. 10 at 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $33-$53. Call 415 388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org. To learn more about the Brother/Sister Plays cycle visit www.brothersisterplays.org.

Making theater dance – an ode to collaboration

Posted on by
1

One of the most exciting things about the world premiere of American Conservatory Theater’s The Tosca Project is that it shines a big old spotlight on the riches of the Bay Area.
tosca_19_web

Here is a revered local theater company venturing into risky territory – a play mostly without words told through dance and recorded music of all kinds – in collaboration with an artist from another revered local company. But get this, that other revered institution is not a theater company.

Yes, ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff has spent four years working with the San Francisco Ballet’s Val Caniparoli to create The Tosca Project, a story inspired by – hold your hats again – a piece of San Francisco history. Are you getting all this local, local, local stuff? The legendary Tosca Cafe in North Beach is the subject, from its opening in 1919 by a trio of Italians to its current status as the royal court of Jeanette Etheredge and her literary and cinematic pals, and that history is related via dance, music (opera, jazz, standards, rock) and even some beat poetry.

There are thrilling, beautiful moments in this 90-minute piece, and the stage pictures – created by Robert Wierzel’s lighting, Douglas W. Schmidt’s warm, inviting set and Caniparoli and Perloff’s staging – are often stunning in their visual poetry.

This “Project” should be the start of many such projects that take full advantage of the extraordinary resources we have in the Bay Area. Think about the history we have yet to explore in dramatic and musical ways. “The Tosca Project” focuses on one bar in one neighborhood. The city, as they say, is full of a million stories. Let’s hear more of them. And let them be told by local arts groups of all kinds working together.

I know it’s naive to think that arts groups can just join together and create. There are little hurdles like budgets (or lack thereof)and grants (or lack thereof). But the biggest hindrance seems to be the silos everyone works in. ACT, Marin Theatre Company and the Magic Theatre are busting out of their silos to present Tarell Alvin McCraney’s
The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy next season. Why are there so few of these inter-Bay Area collaborations? With any luck, such fruitful teamwork may be an inspired byproduct of this horrendous economy.

California Shakespeare Theater has collaborated brilliantly with Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts as well as with Word for Word. Think of what they could do with a little help from San Francisco Opera. Or the Oakland East Bay Symphony. Or Oakland’s flammably adventurous The Crucible. Think what might happen if Beach Blanket Babylon and Killing My Lobster decided to join forces. Or Thrillpeddlers and Lamplighters. The mind fairly boggles.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

ACT’s The Tosca Project continues through June 27 at 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10 to $89. Call 415 749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Above photo: The Bartender (Jack Willis) dances with the memory of his long-lost love (Sabina Alleman) in ACT’s world premiere of The Tosca Project. Photo by Kevin Berne.

Theater review: `Mauritius’

Posted on by
3

Extended through June 28

Mauritius1

Zoë Winters (left) is Jackie, James Wagner (center) is Dennis and Warren David Keith is Philip in the Magic Theatre’s season-ending production of Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck. Photos by davidallenstudio.com

Director Greco leaves dramatic stamp on sticky `Mauritius’
«««

Two little tiny pieces of paper cause a whole lot of trouble for the five characters in Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a drama about – if you can believe it – stamp collecting.

Except the play isn’t really about stamp collecting. It’s about greed and ownership and, to a lesser degree, about family responsibility and the art of the grudge.

As she did in her hit play The Scene (seen in the Bay Area at SF Playhouse last season), Rebeck demonstrates a flair for vivid dialogue, with definite nods in the fragmented direction of David Mamet and Harold Pinter.

But Rebeck has more flair for comedy than either of those writers, which she amply displays in Mauritius, receiving its local premiere as the season-ender for the Magic Theatre.

By infusing her con-artist drama with some genuine emotion, Rebeck invites laughs and gives the game playing a comic edge that ultimately makes her more Coen Brothers than Mamet (thank the merciful heavens – one Mamet is quite enough).

Mauritius2

With the quick movement of some furniture and the sliding of some panels, James Faerron’s nicely designed set flips us between the play’s two locations. The first is a stamp collector’s shop run by Philip (Warren David Keith) and inhabited by Dennis (James Wagner), a philatelist always on the con, and Sterling (Rod Gnapp), a stamp-loving gangster type (you can tell he’s a bad guy because he wears black and has ugly gold buckles on his shoes).

The second location is the cluttered home, where Jackie (Zoë Winters) lived until very recently with her cancer-stricken mother. With her mother gone, Jackie is sorting through the remaining personal effects with the not very helpful assistance of her older half-sister, Mary (Arwen Anderson, above left with Winters).

Conflict arises in the stamp shop and the home because of two little stamps worth millions of dollars. They’re referred to as the “one- and two-cent post office” issued by the British government on the tropical Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. They’re said to be the “crown jewels of philately” and it just so happens that Jackie has found both stamps in album that belonged to her late mother.

Mary (you can tell she’s a prig because she wears an ankle-length skirt and speaks to everyone as if she were the teacher addressing second graders) claims the stamps belong to her because they were her grandfather’s, and he was like a father to her.

Jackie has her own plans for the stamps and, with the dubious help of Dennis, sets off a series of events that lead to Sterling’s involvement and Philip’s interference. It seems there’s a years-old grudge between Sterling and Philip that involved an actual woman rather than stamps.

Mauritius3

Beautifully played by Gnapp (right, with Winters), Sterling is a goon with intellect. He’s a gutter mouth and a soft touch where the Mauritius stamps are concerned. But Philip (believably drawn by Keith), is no patsy, and he will not see his status as King of the Stamp Nerds threatened.

At the middle of the melee is Jackie, embodied with wounded passion and vulnerable strength by Winters. This is a young woman who has been treated badly by life. Her home life was a disaster, her mother’s death was messy and her older sister is a creep. She sees the stamps as her ticket to a new life – wash the slate clean and start over again.

But that would be too easy. Everybody’s got a con (whether they know it or not), so Rebeck’s play keeps unfolding in surprising ways.

The first act of director Loretta Greco’s production is frustratingly slow — partly because Rebeck doesn’t do the Mamet-staccato dialogue all that well and partly because it’s hard to like anybody on stage — but things perk up dramatically in Act 2, though Rebeck disappoints in the end by too clearly delineating the villains who had previously shown more depth of character and had reasonable motivations.

Greco’s ensemble makes smart choices, especially when it comes to knowing how to play the drama and the tension against the laughs. Winters is especially adept at this particular game.

This has been a rocky season for the Magic, but it’s nice to see the season ending on such a solid note with a provocative, well-produced drama.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Magic Theatre’s Mauritius continues through June 28 at the Fort Mason Center, Building D, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street. Tickets are $40-$45. Rush tickets for people younger than 30, students, seniors and educations: $10 half-hour prior to performance, subject to availability. Call 800-595-4849 or visit www.magictheatre.org for information.