Category Archives: Marcus Gardley

Aside from dancing, Berkeley Rep Square is far from paradise

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Paradise 1
(front row, l to r) Hailee Kaleem Wright (Ensemble), Karen Burthwright (Ensemble), and Sidney Dupont (William Henry Lane); (back row, l to r) Chloé Davis (Ensemble), Sir Brock Warren (Ensemble), Jamal Christopher Douglas (Ensemble), and Jacobi Hall (Ensemble) in the world premiere of Paradise Square: A New Musical at Berkeley Rep. Photo courtesy of Alessandra Mello/Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Below: (l to r) Jason Oremus (Ensemble) and Jacobi Hall (Ensemble), and the company of Paradise Square. Photo courtesy of Kevin Berne/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

There are actually two competing musicals in Paradise Square: A New Musical now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. One of them is much better than the other.

Incredibly ambitious and overstuffed, Paradise Square wants to create excitement about a particular moment in American history with a wonderfully diverse cast and a score that blends show music, traditional music and contemporary sounds (sound familiar? can’t blame producers for not wanting to throw away their shot). But this show, many years in the making, is still fuzzy, unfocused and only intermittently interesting.

In telling the story of the Five Points, a 19th-century New York slum inhabited primarily by Irish immigrants and African Americans, Paradise Square complicates its storytelling by weaving in the life of composer Stephen Foster, whose music provides a base for the score crafted by Jason Howland and Larry Kirwan (the guy who had the idea to create this show in the first place) with lyrics by Nathan Tysen. Foster’s music became synonymous with minstrelsy, so putting his beautiful melodies in service of a story about, as they call it in the show, “race mixing,” is in theory an interesting idea. But in fact, those melodies are obliterated, blasted and torqued beyond recognition much of the time. When we finally get to a straightforward “Beautiful Dreamer,” it’s like we’ve arrived at a clearing full of light after slogging through a dense, dark forest.

Rather than giving us one central story to care about, book writers Kirwan, Craig Lucas and Marcus Gardley give us a handful, none of which are terribly compelling. They also give us dance-offs. In a story that should be rife with tension – racial tension, labor tension, political tension, Civil War draft tension, runaway slave tension, violent mob tension – the greatest intensity and satisfaction comes from three primary dance contests. The first is between a newly arrived Irish immigrant (A.J. Shively as Owen) and a fugitive slave (Sidney Dupont as Will Henry). Owen is doing Irish step dancing and Will Henry is doing Juba-style dancing. Both are electrifying. In Act 2, we get an official dance contest in a neighborhood bar, with the cash prize enough to buy your way out of the draft ($300). The contest begins and ends, but wait! We need a do-over, so Will Henry and Owen can compete head to head once again (and for a solo dance contest, they sure do a lot of singing and dancing with their squads).

Paradise 2

The dancing throughout the 2 1/2-plus hours of Paradise Square is routinely fascinating, often thrilling, which is exactly what you’d expect from choreographer Bill T. Jones. The problem is that the sharply etched choreography feels like it’s for a different, much more sophisticated show. If Paradise Square wanted only to dance, that would be just fine.

Director Moisés Kaufman simply cannot pull it all together. There are some powerful vocal performances from his nearly 30-member cast, but too often the acting is hammy and melodramatic (mostly the fault of the wobbly book). Actors feel like they’re creating tableaux more than they are playing actual people.

The show’s ending is a complete cop-out as the historical trappings fall away and the actors address the audience directly so they can tell us what happened to the characters after the chaos of the story comes to its conclusion. One of the things they mention is that the “race mixing” of the Five Points, primarily between Irish immigrants and African Americans, resulted in a new dance form called tap dancing. Why, oh why is this not part of this show, which just happens to be a musical wherein the best thing about it is the dancing? We see and hear tap dancing only once in the show, and it’s during a flashback to slaves being whipped on a plantation. Talk about a missed opportunity.

The presence of Foster as a character (appealingly played by Jacob Fishel) and as the basis for the show’s score should be more interesting than it is. He was coopting black music and turning it into popular song, which was in turn coopted by the racially repugnant minstrel circuit. One of the black characters gets to go on a tirade about how much she hates Stephen Foster to Stephen Foster, and it just feels irrelevant when the city is just about to explode into the deadly Draft Riots (oh, but wait, can the riots hold on a sec because we also need to do the big dance contest!).

Musicals are beastly contraptions that go wrong far more than they go right. In Paradise Square we’re told there was a time when people lived briefly in a time and place where race mattered less than character, but even the evidence we see of that seems fraught and far from idyllic. So the loss of this brief flash of semi-harmony – what we’re told was a glimpse of the future that has yet to come – doesn’t feel like much of a loss. As a result, Paradise Square doesn’t really feel like much of a show. Not yet anyway.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Paradise Square: A New Musical continues an extended run through March 3 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $40-$115 (subject to change). Call 510-647-2949 or visit berkeleyrep.org.

2017 theater in review: Reflections on a powerful year

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Best of 2017 (inside)

If you’re a theater fan, 2017 was a very good year. If you’re an American, depending on your point of view, 2017 was a terrifying year. Quite often, it seemed, the theatrical stage and the national stage were in direct conversation.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the year was dominated by the juggernaut known as Hamilton, the musical that signaled new hope in diversity, inclusion and making new conversations and new rules even while the country regressed in unfathomable ways. The first touring production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer- and Tony-award winning musical kicked off at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season and played to packed houses for five months before heading down to Los Angeles. The show itself was as thrilling and important and satisfying and moving as everyone said, and we couldn’t enter the ticket lottery often enough (let alone win the ticket lottery). [Read my Hamilton review]

It’s hard to compete with the sheer magnitude of Hamilton, but local stages held their own, especially when it came to conversations about race.

My two favorite local productions of 2017 both happened to be directed by Eric Ting, the artistic director of the California Shakespeare Theater, and both happened to attack the issue of race in American in totally different and quite unconventional ways. An Octoroon at Berkeley Repertory Theatre saw playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins take an old play and blow it to smithereens as a way to illustrate just how poorly we have dealt with the ramifications of slavery in this country. The play, under Ting’s expert direction, was funny and disturbing and confusing and startling and altogether extraordinary. [Ready my review of An Octoroon]

On his own Cal Shakes turf, Ting turned to Oakland native Marcus Gardley for black odyssey for the year’s most moving theatrical experience. This loose adaptation of Homer translates the “soldier returns” story to the African-American experience and moves through time and history and mortals and gods with poetic ease and powerful impact. Music and dance elevate the emotional level, and the super cast made it all soar. The show was a wonder and needs to be shared, somehow, from coast to coast. Happily, Cal Shakes will remount black odyssey next season (Sept. 25-Oct. 7). Don’t miss it. [Read my review of black odyssey]

On a smaller scale, but with no less emotion, humor and inventiveness, two other local productions told stories of what it means to be black in America. Shotgun Players produced Kimber Lee’s drama brownsville song (b-side for trey), a play that deals with the emotional aftermath of violence and the defiance of hope. [Read my review of brownsville song (b-side for trey)]

And San Francisco Playhouse sparked a blaze in the fall with Robert O’Hara’s wild Barbecue, a play that literally flips race on its ear and has a splendid time doing so (special shout-out to director Margo Hall, who also dazzled as an actor in black odyssey and also managed to stand out in the cast of this production as well). [Read my review of Barbecue]

Another hot topic that received some astute theatrical attention this year is immigration. Crowded Fire Theater and TheatreWorks both tackled the topic with energy and imagination. Crowded Fire’s production of You for Me for Youby Mia Chung blended elements of Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole to illuminate the different experiences of North Korean sisters, one who is stuck in the country and the other who makes it to America. The fantastical and the devastating lived side by side in director M. Graham Smith’s memorable production. [Read my review of You for Me for You]

At TheatreWorks, The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga saw local composer Min Kahng turn Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s 1931 comic The Four Immigrants Manga into an irresistible musical that, for all its exuberance, still managed to convey the darkness and weight of the immigrant experience. [Read my review of The Four Immigrants]

It was interesting this year that two theaters emerged in San Francisco as homes to a compelling variety of work and became the kind of theater spaces where you pretty much want to check out whatever comes to their stages no matter what you might (or might not) know about the shows themselves. American Conservatory Theater’s The Strand Theatre on Market Street hosted two of my favorite shows of the year – small shows that ACT could never have done so successfully in the much larger Geary Theater. In March, Annie Baker’s fascinating John blended domestic drama and ghost stories into three gloriously offbeat hours with a cast headed by the sublime Georgia Engel. [Read my review of John]

And later in the year at the Strand, another quiet show, Small Mouth Sounds dove underneath the New Age calm to see what drama lies beneath. Comedy ensued in this mostly wordless play by Bess Wohl. [Read my review of Small Mouth Sounds]

Then there’s the Curran Theatre, which used to be a stopping place for Broadway tours but is now, under the stewardship of Carole Shorenstein Hays, something more – a carefully curated collection of extraordinary theatrical experiences. There are the Broadway tours, like the sublime musical perfection of Fun Home [Read my review of Fun Home] but also the experiences you won’t find anywhere else, like Taylor Mac’s overwhelming and gobsmacking and deliriously delightful 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

That’s a pretty dynamic year right there, but I would be remiss not to mention the roaring good time (amid imperfections) of the Broadway-bound Ain’t Too Proud, the Temptations musical at Berkeley Rep [read my review]; Peter Brook’s elegiac and stunning Battlefield at ACT [read my review]; and the deeply moving revival of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz at the Magic Theatre. [read my review]

Amid so much that is disturbing in our world, I am heartened by the ever-reliable level of theatrical art-making here in the Bay Area. There’s challenge as well as comfort, belly laughs and punches to the gut (metaphorically speaking of course) and perhaps best of all, real engagement. Not every time, certainly, but often enough that it’s clear our local artists are paying close attention and doing what they can to make change while they entertain.

Joy, power of stories in Cal Shakes black odyssey

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Black Odyssey 1
The cast of California Shakespeare Theater’s black odyssey by Marcus Gardley includes (from left) Lamont Thompson (Super Fly Tireseas), J. Alphonse Nicholson (Ulysses Lincoln), Safiya Fredericks (Benevolence Nausicca Sabine), Dawn L. Troupe (Caribdiss), and Aldo Billingslea (Great Grand Paw Sidin). Below: J. Alphonse Nicholson as Ulysses Lincoln, Margo Hall as Calypso and Safiya Fredericks as Benevolence Nausicca Sabine. Photos by Kevin Berne

Just when it seems the news can’t get any worse, it gets worse. This weekend in Virginia we saw some of the worst of humanity, with terror, death, hatred and ignorance all on full display. At such times, it can be hard not to give in to that helpless, hopeless feeling of things ever getting better, of our species ever giving over to our better natures rather than constantly reveling in our worst.

Then there’s art. In a quirk of timing for which I will be forever grateful, California Shakespeare Theater opened a new production Saturday night at the Bruns Amphitheater amid the full chilly summer glory of the Orinda Hills. It wasn’t just any production, but one so suited to our troubled times that it seems we should find some way to broadcast it nationally over and over. The play is black odyssey by Oakland-born playwright Marcus Gardley, one of the finest poetic/dramatic voices in the country. It’s a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, but its power is unmistakable as it reaches deep into the human experience to grapple with storytelling as a fundamental means of connecting our lives and our experiences with those of our ancestors – a profound way to find meaning in our time on earth (and perhaps beyond it). More specifically, he’s using Homer’s lost soldier template to tell stories of the African-American experience, to share pain and injustice and triumph and perseverance and love. There is a lot of love in this play, which makes for a deeply moving experience.

In the face of horrific news stemming from horrific behavior, it is…”reassuring” or “inspiring” seem too small here…of paramount importance to note that there are artists like Gardley and director Eric Ting (now in his second season as Cal Shakes’ artistic director) and these designers and these actors who are working against the wretchedness simply by doing their jobs, and doing them with compassion, intelligence and a beautiful mix of humor and passion.

black odyssey (its lower-case appearance belies its ALL CAPS impact) serves as a fascinating bookend to another play Ting directed recently, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (read my review here). That mind-bending play also deals with the African-American experience and is also highly and wonderfully theatrical. But while Octoroon hits the brain (and funny bone), black odyssey aims more for the heart.

I can’t say I’ve ever been moved by The Odyssey in any form, but Gardley’s ambitious, ferocious re-telling earns its emotions, even while it challenges audiences to just go with it while modern-day ancient gods play a game of chess, both literal and figurative, that affects the fate of mortals below and sends our hero, Ulysses Lincoln, back and forth in time and space. In the real world, he’s a 21-year-old from Oakland who has been in love with the same girl, Nella Pell (or “Nella P” as he calls her) since they met in a group home at age 13. The two get married and are expecting a baby when Ulysses enlists during peacetime, thinking that’s the best way to ensure his college education. But then 9/11 happens, and he’s deployed to Afghanistan, where he inspires the wrath of the god of the sea, known here as Great Grand Paw Sidin.

On his way back to the U.S., Ulysses is swept from the deck of his boat and given up for dead. His 16-year journey back home takes him all kinds of bizarre places, all of which are meant to help him become less lost in every sense of the word. To find home, he must connect with his own personal past, his cultural past and connect with his ancestors.

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Back home in Oakland’s Acorn housing project (Gardley loves to name drop his hometown), Nella is visited by the goddess Athena, in the guise of a long, lost relative, and ends up trading her immortality for life on earth helping Nella raise her son, Malachi, all the while trying to keep the hope of Ulysses’ return alive.

The Oakland scenes offer a gritty reality (not unlike another recent lower-case play, Shotgun Players’ production of brownsville song (b-side for tray) by Kimber Lee – read my review here), while Ulysses is in a time-warp fever dream that kept calling to mind a modern-day The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder in the way it creates an irreverent apocalyptic epic that never loses its human scale.

Ulysses, played by the charismatic J. Alphonse Nicholson, encounters all kinds of people and places in his journey, most notably a family living on the roof of their Louisiana home desperately trying to survive 40 days and 40 days of flooding as the end of days approaches. Ulysses is washed onto their roof by Hurricane Katrina, and from their soon-to-be-submerged perch, they can see in the distance Emmet Till dangling from a tree but not yet dead. In another direction they see the Scottsboro Boys, waiting in vain for justice, and the Birmingham Four, the little girls killed in a church bombing. It’s a grim place, and the parents (Michael Gene Sullivan and Dawn L. Troupe) reluctantly send their 10-year-old daughter, Benevolence (Safiya Fredericks), off with Ulysses for her best chance of survival.

To keep his young charge entertained, Ulysses tells her stories of his journey, including his time in Circe’s undersea den, which happens to be in the middle of the Middle Passage. You can’t get to your destination from there unless you have a past. Until Ulysses figures out his own, he is royally wined and dined by his hostess (played with jazzy verve by Troupe), who nearly steals the entire show with her lusty prayer before digging into the fantasy meal of all fantasy meals.

Another stop on his route involves a stylishly suited blind man atop a rolling Cadillac – Super Fly Tireseas (Lamont Thompson, who also plays the Zeus-like Daddy Deus) – who helps him navigate past Scylla- and Charybdis- like monsters who take the form of Diana Ross, Tina Turner and James Brown.

The most moving part of Ulysses’ journey takes him to slave quarters, where he is tended to with the utmost love and care by his great grandmother, played be the ever-extraordinary and surprising Margo Hall, who also plays Athena (aka Great Aunt Tina). This scene has incredible power and beauty, and the set by Michael Locher helps create one of the most incredible stage pictures in recent memory.

While all of this is going on, we also keep focus on the domestic drama of Nella (the invaluable Omozé Idehenre), rebellious teen Malachi (Michael Curry) and Aunt T. As if life weren’t difficult enough for them, a disguised Paw Sidin (Aldo Billingslea, simultaneously hilarious and menacing) is attempting to complicate their struggles even further by meddling with Nella’s affections and her desperation to do right by her son.

It’s a lot to deal with in 2 1/2 hours, but Gardley and Ting and this phenomenal cast keep it all rolling along. One of the great advantages of this production is its frequent use of choral music, which amplifies the heart and soul of the story. Credit Linda Tillery and Molly Holm for raising these voices to such a glorious place full of spirituals and blues and jazz and pop and an original song at the end that may just crack your heart wide open.

There’s so much beauty in this production – choreography by Latanya D. Tigner, stunning costumes by Dede M. Ayite – and so much pain in the story. Gardley’s words have poetry and pathos and power along with humor and defiance. And, as I said before, a love that lingers like a light in the dark.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Marcus Gardley’s black odyssey continues through Sept. 3 in a California Shakespeare Theater production at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Shakespeare Festival Way, Orinda. Free shuttles between Orinda BART and the theater. Tickets are $20-$92. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

Gardley gets a Glickman

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Marcus Gardley

Oakland playwright Marcus Gardley (right, photo by Jared Oates) is the winner of the Will Glickman Award for the best new play to have its premiere in the Bay Area in 2014. The play is The House that will not Stand, loosely based on Federico Garcìa Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, which had its premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in February of 2014. Read my review of the show here.

The award, administered by Theatre Bay Area comes with a $4,000 cash award for the writer and a plaque for the producing theater. Gardley told TBA: ““I’m thrilled to be accepting this award. I’m extremely proud of The House that will not Stand’s world premiere at Berkeley Rep and eternally grateful to have participated in The Ground Floor, which provided the creative space and artistic support to develop the play. The play has been enthusiastically received at Yale Rep and Tricycle Theatre in London. But this recognition from the Bay Area theatre community where I have deep roots is truly an honor.”​

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This year’s winner was chosen by a judging panel comprising Bay Area theater critics Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Avila of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News, Chad Jones of TheaterDogs.net and Sam Hurwitt of KQED Arts and the Marin Independent Journal. The Glickman Award-winning play is usually published each year in the July/August issue of Theatre Bay Area magazine.

This year’s judges cited three other strong local premieres as runners-up: Hir by Taylor Mac (Magic Theatre); Hundred Days by Abigail Bengson, Shaun Bengson and Kate E. Ryan (Z Space) and The Scion by Brian Copeland (The Marsh).

Gardley and Berkeley Rep will receive their awards at Theatre Bay Area’s Annual Conference on April 13, which happens to be taking place at Berkeley Rep.

Photo above: Petronia Paley (as Marie Josephine) and Harriett D. Foy (as Makeda, background), starred in Berkeley Rep’s world premiere of Marcus Gardley’s The House that will not Stand, a comedic drama about free women of color in 1836 New Orleans. Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com

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

2014 Ideation, Aaron Loeb (San Francisco Playhouse)
2013 The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen (Crowded Fire/Playwrights Foundation)
2012 The North Pool, Rajiv Joseph (TheatreWorks)
2011 Oedipus el Rey, Luis Alfaro (Magic)
2010 In the Next Room, Sarah Ruhl (Berkeley Rep)
2009 Beowulf, Jason Craig (Shotgun Players)
2008 Tings Dey Happen, Dan Hoyle (Marsh)
2007 Hunter Gatherers, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb (Killing My Lobster)
2006 The People’s Temple, Leigh Fondakowski et al (Berkeley Rep)
2005 Dog Act, Liz Duffy Adams (Shotgun)
2004 Soul of a Whore, Denis Johnson (Campo Santo)
2003 Five Flights, Adam Bock (Encore)
2002 Dominant Looking Males, Brighde Mullins (Thick Description)
2001 Everything’s Ducky, Bill Russell & Jeffrey Hatcher (TheatreWorks)
2000 The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, Erin Cressida Wilson (Campo Santo)
1999 Combat!, John Fisher (Rhino)
1998 Civil Sex, Brian Freeman (Marsh)
1997 Hurricane/Mauvais Temps, Anne Galjour (Berkeley Rep)
1996 Medea, the Musical, John Fisher (Sassy Mouth)
1995 Rush Limbaugh in Night School, Charlie Varon (Marsh)
1994 Santos & Santos, Octavio Solis (Thick Description)
1993 Heroes and Saints, Cherrie Moraga (Brava)
1992 Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Tony Kushner (Eureka)
1991 Political Wife, Bill Talen (Life on the Water)
1990 Pick Up Ax, Anthony Clarvoe (Eureka)
1989 Yankee Dawg You Die, Philip Kan Gotanda (Berkeley Rep)
1988 Webster Street Blues, Warren Kubota (Asian American)
1987 Life of the Party, Doug Holsclaw (Rhino)
1986 Deer Rose, Tony Pelligrino (Theatre on the Square)
1985 The Couch, Lynne Kaufman (Magic)
1984 Private Scenes, Joel Homer (Magic)

Gardley’s House stands best when it sings

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EXTENDED THROUGH MARCH 23!
House Stand 1
The cast of Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s world premiere of The House that will not Stand by Marcus Gardley includes (from left) Joniece Abbott-Pratt as Odette, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart as Agnès and Lizan Mitchell as Beartrice. Below: Stewart (front), Flor De Liz Perez (center) and Abbott-Pratt play sisters in a multi-racial family in 19th-century New Orleans. Photos by kevinberne.com

Music is so ingrained in New Orleans culture that it’s no surprise when a play set in the area turns out to be full of wonderful choral singing, voodoo chanting and other musical surprises. But what’s interesting about Marcus Gardley’s The House that will not Stand, now receiving its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is that music elevates the show in ways the plot and characters do not.

This play about a mixed-race family in New Orleans circa 1836 really wants to be a musical.

As we’ve seen in other plays by Oakland native Gardley (including the superior …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi), the writing is strong, poetic and suffused with a powerful beauty. In other words, his writing fairly sings.

There’s already a heightened sense of reality in this House, what with ghosts and conjurings and deadly whispers, but the play is most alive when there’s music. When three grieving women come home from church – daughters of a white business owner and his African-American mistress – they enter singing a gorgeous prayer for their very recently deceased father. It’s a stunningly beautiful introduction to these young women, just as the Act 2 opening involving the house slave, Makeda (the glorious Harriett D. Foy), singing while she makes a gumbo, is a high point of the entire show. In fact, Foy’s Makeda is the musical heart of this production. She’s actually in a musical. It just may take a while for everybody else to catch up.

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Gardley’s story, set in the waning days of plaçage, a cultural system in which free women of color (many mixed race) were essentially sold or “placed” by their families into marriage with a white man who would likely also have a white wife and family. Set 18 years after the Louisiana Purchase, when the heathen Americans are ruining everything about New Orleans, including plaçage, House focuses on the house of Lazare (Ray Reinhardt), a fur trader who lives with his black mistress of many years, Beartrice (Lizan Mitchell), and their three daughters: Agnès (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), Maude Lynn (Flor De Liz Perez) and Odette (Joniece Abbott-Pratt). Lazare’s corpse is laid out in the drawing room, and there’s some suggestion that he was killed by Beartrice on the day of the ball in which her daughters, especially Agnès, might be “placed.”

Family squabbles between mother and daughters and between sisters bump up against an old rivalry between Beartrice and La Veuve (Petronia Paley). Paley also plays Beartrice’s sister, Marie Josephine, who has been locked in the house for years. Presiding over all of this is Makeda, who is hoping that her master’s death will mean her freedom at long last.

Now that’s a lot of drama to cram into two hours and 25 minutes. You might even say it was drama at an operatic level, and it is. Director Patricia McGregor establishes a tone that easily wavers from comic to tragic to pulpy melodrama (you’ve seen “Dallas” and “Dynasty” – now see “New Orleans”!). When the music comes in (sound design and original music by Keith Townsend Obadike) or when there’s some stirring choreography by Paloma McGregor, it’s not at all jarring. And as I’ve already said, I wish there were more of both.

The performances balance ferocity and grace in equal measure, but Foy really steals the show as Makeda. She’s smart, feisty and loving – a real member of the family, but one who is not there of her own free will. Her urge toward freedom is where the drama’s truest emotion lies, and it’s not by accident that Foy does much of the show’s singing and performs it with vitality and a stirring depth passion. (Foy is also responsible for the vocal arrangements and some of the original compositions.)

There’s an opera/musical in here to be sure, but not on this set. Antje Ellermann’s split-level antebellum mansion construction is pretty, but it crowds the action and doesn’t give the actors much room to move. This set (and this story) seem more suited to the spaciousness of the Roda Theatre, not the confines of the Thrust Stage.

There’s a fascinating story here populated with powerful, compelling women. The story also illuminates an aspect of American history that we don’t know enough about, but this House is still building a frame that will let these voices not only stand but soar.

[bonus interview]
I talked to playwright Marcus Gardley for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Marcus Gardley’s The House that will not Stand continues an extended run through March 23 on Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $29-$59. CAll 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

Jesus and his extraordinary Mississippi moonwalk

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EXTENDED THROUGH APRIL 25!
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Above: Nicole C. Julien is Miss Ssippi in The Cutting Ball Theater/Playwrights Foundation production of Marcus Gardley’s …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi. Below: David Westley Skillman is The Great Tree/Jesus and Aldo Billingslea is Damascus. Photos by Rob Melrose.

 

Quilts and buttons are stars and stories in Marcus Gardley’s deeply lyrical, undeniably beautiful …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, now at the EXIT on Taylor in a co-production of The Cutting Ball Theater and Playwrights Foundation.

On the theatrical spectrum, this is the exact opposite of the sitcom-ready Sunset and Margaritas now at TheatreWorks (read my review of that play in the Palo Alto Weekly here), which is to say this is challenging, thought-provoking material given the kind of sharply etched production that inspires curiosity and wonder. There’s nothing easy about Moonwalks, and that’s a good thing. Gardley, working with director Amy Mueller, weaves myth, folklore, American Civil War history, personal family history and musings on race in this country.

That’s a lot to fold into a nearly 2 1/2-hour production, but Gardley and Mueller do it with the assistance of a fantastic set (by Michael Locher) that represents the night sky with buttons and plants an ominous hangman’s tree in the planks of the floor. The small but versatile stage (beautifully lit by Heather Basarab) is a battlefield after the siege of Vicksburg, a shattered Louisiana plantation and, most amazingly, the soul of the mighty Mississippi River.

Nicole C. Julien plays Miss Ssippi, the embodiment of the river that wends its way more than 2,300 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. She sings like a soulful angel (with sterling backup by her chorus, Rebecca Frank, Halili Knox and Erica Richardson), and she refuses to take sides in the divisive war raging around her. But like a goddess in the Greek tradition, she does take an interest in human lives and isn’t afraid to lend a helping hand (wave?) and assist in leading folks to their fate.

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In Gardley’s story, a freed slave named Damascus (a riveting Aldo Billingslea) is searching for his beloved, a slave named Poem (pronounced po-EMM). But Damascus is captured by Confederate soldiers and hanged from that terrifying tree. Jesus (in the form of David Westley Skillman, who occasionally tries to moonwalk to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”) decides to resurrect Damascus so he can continue his quest, but now the strapping man will be a woman named Demeter (echoes of the Demeter-Persephone myth here), and she has an extremely limited time to find Poem before death comes calling for real this time.

Damascus/Demeter is led to the ramshackle Verse plantation, where Cadence Marie Verse (a fierce Jeanette Harrison) is attempting to keep her daughters (Erika A. McCrary and Sarah Mitchell) and home together even though all her slaves have fled except for house servant Brer Bit (Martin F. Grizzell Jr.), who has a grand plan of his own (and it’s not good for his mistress).

There’s a tangled tale of romance and betrayal coursing through this plantation, so it’s hardly surprising that Damascus/Demeter’s fate lands her at this particular front door, where a Confederate roamer (David Sinaiko) and a shamed Yankee soldier (Zac Schuman) enter the fray.

It’s the story that compels, but it’s Gardley’s writing that fascinates. Interspersed amid some gorgeous spirituals, Gardley pours poetry over the drama and lets it cascade like water down a fall. The rhymes and images are so plentiful it would take a second viewing to appreciate them all.

Powerful, mesmerizing and complete with bolts of humor and tragedy, …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi is an intimate epic that pulses with power and beauty.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

…and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi continues an extended run through April 25 at the EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$30. Call 800 838-3006 or visit www.cuttingball.com.

 

Tip-top ten

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Happy holidays, Theater Dogs!

Thanks for reading the blog in 2006. I’ll try to make it bigger, better, funnier and fresher in 2007.

Below you’ll find my Top 10 list of favorite theater experiences in 2006. I’d love for you all to share some of your favorites as well, so use the comment feature liberally.

1.The Clean House,TheatreWorks

Sarah Ruhl’s immaculate play — is it a comic drama or a dramatic comedy? — reveals a writer so attuned to the human heart that her work may actually be beneficial to your health. This production, helmed by Juliette Carrillo, sure was. Love is a mess, Ruhl tells us. It’s dirty (like a good joke), messy and, at its best, like really good homemade chocolate ice cream.

2. The Glass Menagerie, Berkeley Repertory Theatre

The news that Rita Moreno, the Bay Area’s resident living legend, would tackle the role of Amanda in this Tennessee Williams classic was intriguing. Could Moreno handle it? Anyone who doubted Moreno’s chops was quickly proven wrong by her powerhouse portrayal of a mother desperate to see her children succeed in a harsh world. Director Les Waters gave us such a fresh approach to the play that it almost seemed newly minted.

3. Love Is a Dream House in Lorin, Shotgun Players

Playwright Marcus Gardley did a magnificent thing with this world-premiere play: He turned a neighborhood into art, and in doing so made the specific universal. Gardley immersed himself in the history of Berkeley’s Lorin District — from the recent past clear back to Native American days — and, with the help of director Aaron Davidman, managed to capture something significant about each era leading up to the present. The cast of more than 30 professionals and nonprofessionals found the heart of the piece and showed us over and over again that without community, we’re not much.

4. Hunter Gatherers, Killing My Lobster

Of all this year’s comedies, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s world premiere for sketch troupe Killing My Lobster was the meatiest. Maybe it had something to do with the onstage slaughter of a lamb at the play’s start. Or maybe it was the huge chunk of roasted meat that factors into the play’s bloody end. Whatever, this was an aggressively funny play about our primal, cave-man impulses, man’s need to hump (or kill) everything in sight and woman’s need for chocolate.

5. 4 Adverbs, Word for Word

San Francisco’s Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) ended his “Series of Unfortunate Events” books this year, but not before releasing a book under his own name. Four chapters of that book (Adverbs) became the basis for a typically wondrous production by Word for Word, the company that translates short fiction to the stage without changing a word of the original text. Kind of makes you glad Lemony Snicket is taking a break.

6. Dessa Rose, TheatreWorks

A musical about slavery sounds like a glum proposition, but in the hands of composers Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, glum turns into serious, which turns into transcendent. Based on the novel by Sherley Anne Williams, the story of an escaped slave and the slave owner she reluctantly befriends bears the weight of history and the healing power of music.

7. In On It, Encore Theatre Company

Canadian playwright/director Daniel MacIvor’s work isn’t that well-known south of our northern border, but based on this dynamic, beautifully directed and performed piece,
MacIvor should be in demand. Actors Ian Scott McGregor and Glenn Peters broke the fourth wall, bent time and concealed key details as they told us the story of actors who used to be lovers working on a play about their relationship. Or were they?

8. Gem of the Ocean, American Conservatory Theater

The late August Wilson received a beautiful valedictory production of his second-to-last play from ACT and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The electric jolt of Wilson’s language — “So, live!” are the play’s final words — coursed through the nearly three-hour show, but the sturdy cast, headed by Michele Shay as Aunt Ester, made it very much alive.

9. Restoration Comedy, California Shakespeare Theater
San Francisco writer Amy Freed’s effervescent comedy is based on two 17th-century comedies that wished they could have been this fresh and funny. Special mention must be made of the hilarious Danny Scheie, who played Sir Novelty Fashion who later becomes Lord Foppington, the star of the show-stopping Act 2 fashion show (Anna R. Oliver provided the costumes).

10. Permanent Collection, Aurora Theatre Company

This serious drama about race relations by Thomas Gibbons veered into polemics, but before it did, the battle between a black man and a white man over a collection of art is humane, disturbing and, best of all, thought provoking.

The best shows that didn’t necessarily originate here (or were on their way somewhere else — like Broadway) include: Jersey Boys (Best of Broadway/SHN); A Chorus Line (Best of Broadway/SHN); The Miser (Berkeley Repertory Theatre/Theatre de la Jeune Lune); The Light in the Piazza (Best of Broadway/SHN); The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Stone, Nederlander, Barrington Stage Company et al); Swan Lake (Best of Broadway/SHN).

For more 2006 highlights, check out Jones for Theater.

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