Playhouse, Hansberry join for powerful [hieroglyph]

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Davis (Jamella Cross, left) explains herself to Ms. T. (Safiya Fredericks) after an altercation in the classroom in [hieroglyph], a co-production of San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre streaming through April 3. Below: Davis explains the meaning of her artwork to her father Ernest (Khary L. Moye). Photos by Jessica Palopoli


No play can address all the ills of society, but a well-told family story that digs into the lives and psyches of human beings doing their best to get from day to day can reveal a whole lot about where we’ve gone wrong or (occasionally) where we get something right.

Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s [hieroglyph], about a Black family navigating intense trauma, is one of those plays that feels small – only four characters – but grows into something epic on an emotional level. This streaming co-production of the San Francisco Playhouse and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, and directed by the Hansberry’s new artistic director, revered Bay Area actor/director Margo Hall, is one of the most effective pandemic productions I’ve seen. It also carries on the Playhouse’s remarkable effort to continue staging productions (safely) and sharing them online.

On a revolving set by Bill English, beautifully lit by Kevin Myrick and with projections by Teddy Hulsker, the world of the characters is clear, and so as the play reveals itself, is their damage. And their strength, individually and collectively, and their hearts.

Davis is an extremely bright 13-year-old. Her family lost everything in Hurricane Katrina, and after having been relocated temporarily to the nightmare of the Superdome, she and her father have been relocated to Chicago. Amid all that drama, her mother and father have separated, she’s starting a new school mid-term in a city and culture that couldn’t be more different from New Orleans and she’s bearing the weight of something she cannot talk about.

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But she can express some of her inner turmoil through her art, and her new art teacher is one of those extraordinary educators who makes a difference in the lives of her students in a number of ways. Ms. T (Safiya Fredericks) is a sharply intelligent, complex and fascinating woman attempting to live her life kaleidoscopically rather than monochromatically. She wants to pass that multifarious approach on to her students through their study and practice of art (notably, in the play, through the work by Black artist Ernest Crichlow and his dimensional approach to depicting Black women). It’s not difficult to extrapolate here that playwright Dickerson-Despenza values art (paintings, plays, etc.) as a means through which we can understand life and each other more fully and more honestly.

Ms. T, whose own past trauma still reverberates through her life, connects with Davis (an extraordinary Jamella Cross), and though that connection is a lifeline, Davis is barely coping. Her father, Ernest (Khary L. Moye), has found work as a custodian in a museum and is doing his best to be there for his daughter. But he has issues of his own, not the least of which is a ruptured marriage and the traps of his own upbringing. Davis makes a friend in classmate Leah (Anna Maria Sharpe), a spirited young woman who attempts to provide an education in the subject of teenagers on Chicago’s West Side.

Even though difficult things grow more difficult in this world, Dickerson-Despenza still makes room for currents of love and moments of happiness to course through the drama, whether it’s Davis and Ernest acting out a playful father-daughter ritual or Davis and Leah practicing their dance moves before heading to a juke party. But this is a heavy story – how could it not be when its characters are facing natural and man-made disasters, sexual assault, displacement, PTSD and fractured relationships? There are no easy answers or conclusions here, just various forms of injury, strength, coping and confrontation.

At only about 90 minutes, [hieroglyph] (which refers to an actual symbol that surfaces in Davis’ artwork) is intense and demanding. Even though this is a well-filmed play, it still feels very much like a play, with the scene changes included rather than edited out, and that makes it even more satisfying. Hall and her excellent cast find depth and warmth and genuine emotion in these characters, which makes their pain all the more impactful on the audience. There aren’t superlatives big enough for the work done here by Cross as Davis and Fredericks as Ms. T.

If it seems that spending any amount of time – even 90 minutes – exploring pain, trauma and crisis is a lot to deal with on top of a world situation involving pain, trauma and crisis, consider this: Dickerson-Despenza is a talented playwright who infuses poetry into her drama. She is compassionate toward her characters, even when she’s brutally honest. And she’s shining a light – made all the brighter when you care about the people it touches, as you do here – on important aspects of history as it really happened (no matter what the people in charge say), on what life in this country is really like for Black people and on the roots of horrible crimes terrorizing Black girls and women that must be examined and obliterated. [hieroglyph] has the undeniable power of truth experienced through the prism of inspired art.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s [hieroglyph] streams through April 13. Tickets are $15-$100 from Lorraine Hansberry Theatre at lhtsf.org or from San Francisco Playhouse at sfplayhouse.org or by calling 415-677-9596.

Riveting drama in Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew

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Christian Thompson (left) is Dez, Margo Hall is Faye (center) and Lance Gardner is Reggie in the Marin Theatre Company/TheatreWorks Silicon Valley co-production of Skeleton Crew by Dominique Morisseau. Photo by Kevin Berne

What an incredible talent to balance the dark weight of tragedy and the electrifying light of hope. That’s what playwright Dominique Morisseau does in Skeleton Crew, a powerful play now at Marin Theatre Company (in a co-production with TheatreWorks Silicon Valley). It’s a workplace drama set in a Detroit auto plant, so that pretty much tells you how bleak it is. But the four characters we meet here are not hopeless, nor are they whiny pits of despair.

The extraordinary Margo Hall heads a strong cast, and the show is definitely worth seeing. I reviewed it for TheatreMania.com. Here’s a taste.

For the play’s two riveting hours, director Jade King Carroll brings out humor and heartache in almost equal measure and works in concert with Morisseau to push the drama as far as it can go without tipping into melodrama. When a story deals with life and death, rage and resignation, the threat of violence and the spark of young love, things could easily slip into soap opera territory. But that never happens here. Carroll, Morisseau, and a quartet of fine actors focus instead on reality and dignity.

Read the full review here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a co-production of Marin Theatre Company and TheatreWorks of Silicon Valley, continues through Feb. 18 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $22-$60. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org. TheatreWorks presents the show March 7-April 1 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $40-$100. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

2017 theater in review: Reflections on a powerful year

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.

SF Playhouse’s Barbecue sizzles

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The cast of Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue at San Francisco Playhouse includes (from left) Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe as Adlean, Adrian Roberts as James T, Kehinde Koyejo as Marie and Halili Knox as Lillie Anne. Below: The clever, twisty play also includes cast members (from left) Teri Whipple as Marie, Clive Worsley as James T, Anne Darragh as Lillie Anne and Jennie Brick as Adlean. Photos by Ken Levin

Robert O’Hara is one of those playwright/directors who, when his name is attached to a project in any way, you pay attention. He’s smart, funny and has a keen eye for theatrical disruption. His Insurrection: Holding History may have played at American Conservatory Theater almost 20 years ago, but it remains one of the wildest, most wonderful things I’ve seen from that company.

O’Hara – the playwright – is back in town with Barbecue, the first show in San Francisco Playhouse’s 15th season, and here’s what’s on the grill: American families, race in America and recovery porn. This is comedy with deadly serious aim or drama with some really big laughs. Whatever it is, it’s almost indescribable, and that’s a good thing.

The one thing I will tell you, even though it would be better if you went into the play knowing nothing other than it was impeccably directed by Margo Hall and might elicit strong reactions from you on a number of fronts, is that O’Hara turns theater into a wacky mirror, almost literally. The subject is the O’Mallery family’s five (of seven) surviving siblings in a Midwestern city. They are a family plagued with addiction issues (alcohol, painkillers, marijuana, crack, control) and bad attitiudes. They don’t like each other much, but they love each other, and when sister Barbara needs an intervention to get her into rehab, the family rallies. Just like they’ve seen on TV reality shows, they stage a “barbecue party” in a local park in an attempt to lure her in.

But here’s the first of several twists you will encounter over the course of the play’s two hours: we see the O’Mallery’s as a white family in one scene and then as a black family in the next. Same characters, same situation, two sets of actors. When are we afforded the chance to challenge ourselves and our notions of how family and race and class are related? What does it say about me that I found the white family whiny and annoying while the black family was more interesting and likable and much funnier and more vivacious? (Perhaps the white family hit too close to home.)

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If the whole play had only been ricocheting between the alternate families, that would have been fine by me, but O’Hara has more in mind here. These families are alternating reflections, but what exactly are they reflecting? That’s the real question, and O’Hara does provide answers. And twists. And a lot more fun and some quite serious thoughts on rehab and recovery and the language and culture we have built around that process.

There are some wild tonal shifts here, but director Hall has everything firmly in hand, with an excellent design team including Bill English (the superb outdoor park setting complete with restrooms that you know are on the verge of disgusting), Wen-Ling Lao (perfect lighting alteration to accommodate the play’s twists) and Brooke Jennings (pitch-perfect costumes on the cusp of reality/comedy). Usually when Hall is in the director’s chair, the only downside is that it means she won’t be on stage. But that’s not a problem with Barbecue. She is part of the excellent cast and all but ignites the second half alongside the also excellent Susi Damilano. The black/white scene flips, in addition to being culturally, comically and dramatically fascinating, offer a wonderful opportunity to see talented actors tackling the same roles at the same time.

The entire cast is tremendous, but it’s especially instructive to see the dramatic work of Anne Darragh and Halili Knox as Lillie Anne, the controlling sister who is attempting to pull off this intervention and get her difficult (and addled) siblings on board with her. They approach the character differently and offer different levels of empathy, and it’s extraordinary. On a more comic level, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe and Jennie Brick as Adlean are both hilarious and, again, so different in the way they get laughs. One is more obnoxious and one is more lovable. The same is true of Clive Worsley and Adrian Roberts as brother James T and Teri Whipple and Kehinde Koyejo as Jack Daniels-swilling sister Marie.

If all of O’Hara’s twists don’t have the same potency, this cast pulls off this whole audacious enterprise beautifully and keeps the flames of Barbecue high and hot.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue continues through Nov. 11 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Joy, power of stories in Cal Shakes black odyssey

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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 Leeread 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.

Sad, hopeful elegy in Shotgun’s brownsville song

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Davied Morales is Tray and Cathleen Riddley is Lena in the Shotgun Players production of brownsville song (b-side for tray) by Kimber Lee. Below: Morales’ Tray has an uncomfortable meeting with someone from his past (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart as Merrell). Photos by Cheshire Isaacs

The desperate craziness of our times has desensitized us to the reality behind the headlines that bombard us from every screen and feed and page. The level of injustice, death and willful cruelty reported on a daily basis, if you try to take a step back and really look at it, is staggering. Our desensitization is a survival tactic to be sure – could we spend every waking hour enraged or in tears? Absolutely! – but there’s a cost when we lose sight of the individuals whose lives are told in fragments on the news. We are removed from their lives and our connection to them, and news is just news (most of it bad to awful to grotesque) and not filled with actual human beings.

Playwright Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray) offers a poignant reminder that our grim news feeds are built from lives, not just of victims and perpetrators and garbage politicians. There are the lives of the people whose names are in the news as well as the lives connected to those lives and the ripples that overlap with ripples that overlap with ripples.

First developed in San Francisco by the Playwrights Foundation, brownsville went on to productions at the Humana Festival and Lincoln Center. Now the play is back in the Bay Area courtesy of Shotgun Players with a production beautifully and sensitively directed by Margo Hall, whose work behind the scenes is proving to be as powerful as her onstage work as an actor, which is saying quite a lot.

Time is fluid in brownsville, named for the rough Brooklyn neighborhood in which it takes place. We begin after the tragedy. A promising young man, Tray, has been gunned down on the street. He was not part of a gang or a crew. He wasn’t involved in illegal activities. He had overcome numerous obstacles in his 18 years – an absent mother, a father murdered on the streets, a stepmother who abandoned him and his little sister, scuffles with the law when he was younger. But with the ferocious support of his grandmother, he had pulled his life together. He was doing well in school, he was disciplined about his boxing, and he was full of love (and sass) for his family.

He was also in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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The first voice of the play comes from Lena, Tray’s paternal grandmother. Played by Cathleen Riddley, she is impossible not to love and admire (and fear just a little bit). She tells us not to start the story with her. She’s not the beginning, she’s the end, and Tray was not just another story. He’s not just another victim you may or may not hear about on the news or a faceless statistic about gun violence in this country. He was simply himself, and you can feel through Riddley’s quiet, undeniably powerful performance, just how profound his loss is.

Through a series of flashbacks, we meet Tray who was, as his grandmother puts it, “semi-reliable about everything but his little sister and boxing.” Played the charismatic Davied Morales, Tray is a light. He’s not a saint but a believable teenager – intelligent, rebellious, bursting with energy – who does well in school, holds down a job at Starbucks, helps out with Devine, his little sister, and trains and competes in an amateur boxing circuit. Like Riddley, Morales is a powerful presence as Tray. He and Riddley are the motor and the fuel of this 90-minute play. Together, they are the cycle of hope and grief and hope that makes this experience so potent. Tray was fighting to not just be another hard-luck story of a kid from violent street, and we have every reason to believe he would continue shining brighter and brighter.

Playwright Lee can tend toward the cliché in her writing, but director Hall and her strong cast tend to circumvent any mawkishness and head for something more honest. Erin Mei-Ling Stuart is a believably complex person from Tray’s past who, after her own difficulties, is attempting to make better choices, and 11-year-old Mimia Ousilas is Tray’s little sister. There’s a lot she could be sad about, and she is, but she also supplies some of the play’s lightest moments when she fails to blend into the background as a weeping willow in her dance class production of Swan Lake. William Hartfield as Junior, a neighborhood friend of Tray’s, at first seems to be trouble, but a later scene between him and Lena reveals layers and history and emotion that renders the character in a different light.

And therein lies the power of brownsville. Here, in flesh and blood, is a reminder to look and think and feel beyond headlines and statistics, as hard as that may be. This poetic, sometimes elegiac play – with straightforward, effective design by Randy Wong-Westbrooke (set), Allen Willner (lights), Joel Gimbell II (sound) – cuts right to the heart of why the life of someone you don’t know matters and how our unjust, violent, crazily complicated culture can encourage us to think we’re disconnected from one another when exactly the opposite is true.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray) continues through July 9 in a Shotgun Players production at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $25-$40. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org.

Wonderful women in Word for Word’s Aunt Hagar

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The cast of Word for Word’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones includes (from left) Kehinde Koyejo, Jia Taylor, Khary L. Moye, Sheila Balter and Margo Hall. Below: The Young Man’s (Khary L. Moye) elders (Margo Hall, left, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, seated, and Velina Brown) ask an urgent favor. Photos by Julie Schuchard

What you remember from Word for Word’s production of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a full theatrical adaptation of the short story by Edward P. Jones, are the women. Such women. They make an impression on the audience the way they make an impression the story’s narrator, a nameless young man who returned to his native Washington, D.C., nine months ago after serving in the Korean War.

The young man is in a transitional phase, working a file clerk-type job until he can join a war buddy in Alaska and strike gold, but mostly he’s giving himself license to celebrate (i.e. drink) and dream of a life beyond what he already knows. As he puts it: “And I, a veteran hearing Alaska singing, didn’t want to ask any big questions and didn’t want anybody asking me any big questions. I was twenty-four and just starting to dance away on the easy side—a little soft-shoe here, a little soft-shoe there.”

Living a quiet, alcohol-soaked life isn’t quite panning out for the young man. Drama finds him in the form of a strange incident involving a Jewish woman who practically dies in his arms on the street, muttering an enigmatic Yiddish phrase with her final breath. And in the form of a murder that he reluctantly agrees to help and solve.

With that latter, Jones’ story falls into some familiar, noir-ish rhythms, although the young man, who worked as a military policeman in Korea, is not at all a detective. What his investigation does is let him cross paths with some extraordinarily interesting women, and that’s where the heart of the story lies.

As in all Word for Word productions, the company has not changed a word of Jones’ story, which originally appeared in the New Yorker in 2003 and then served as the title story in a collection of his short stories in 2006. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his novel The Known World, Jones delivers an unusually told story that is both intimate and epic, a short story that feels crammed with incident and history and interpersonal connections. It’s one man’s story that is continually taken over by the women he encounters, some of whom are close family members, others he barely knows and still others who are strangers on the street.

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Director Stephanie Hunt (working with co-director Margo Hall, who is also a standout in the uniformly strong cast) has the disadvantage of working on the cavernous main stage at Z Space rather than the more intimate Z Below in the basement. Set designer Sean Riley creates a striking image of brick buildings in a northwest Washington neighborhood, but most of the action is confined to a much smaller platform plagued with door frames whose logic is not always observed by the actors. There’s a lot of time spent bringing furniture on and off this platform, which tends to slow the action.

And if there’s one thing plaguing this 100-minute one-act production it’s pacing and a tendency to be too literal in the interpretation of Jones’ prose. The writing is evocative enough without having to see every little thing (especially at the end with a striking image that is probably best left to the imagination rather than being rather clumsily realized).

Khary L. Moye makes for an arresting narrator who is at once charming in his assessment of his life and surroundings and confounded by the same. Except for Joel Mullennix in a series of smaller roles (a nefarious bad guy from the past, the young man’s lawyer boss), the other six members of the cast play all the wonderful women our narrator encounters in his quest to solve a mystery and discover the meaning behind the words uttered to him by the dead white woman he tried to help.

Velina Brown is piercingly funny and moving as the young man’s mother, a stern, sharp-tongued woman with a deep love for her children and her two best friends from childhood (Hall as Aunt Penny and Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe as Miss Agatha), with whom she suffered some significant trauma as little girls in Alabama. The ghost of that trauma haunts the present (1950s) narrative in a most intriguing way.

Sheila Balter plays both of the Jewish women who factor into the young man’s intrigue: the woman who dies on the street and the woman who connects him to the dead woman’s final words. Just as the connection with his mother’s past weighs on the young man, so does his post-World War II interactions with these two very different Jewish women. Nothing is overly explicit in Jones’ writing here – it all adds to the emotional, cultural and even historical complexity of the young man’s experience.

Many of the other woman are those who assist in the murder investigation in some way. Hall is hilarious as Minnie, a neighbor of the murder victim who’s skill at flirtation is almost as pronounced as her talking bird’s ability to surprise with bizarre exhortations (“I’m only flesh and blood” or “There’s more to come, somebitch!). Kehinde Koyejo memorably plays the bird.

Jia Taylor plays the romantic interest from whom the young man is uncomfortably trying extricate himself as well as one half of a duo (Koyejo plays the other) who help the budding detective the trajectory of his investigation (he hasn’t quite figured out that he should visit the scene of the crime even though it happened some two years ago).

Storytelling is important to characters in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, just as their stories themselves are powerful in the telling. One character says of her father, “He used to tell me stories when the world got too much. Comforting, you know. Keeping the world away.” Jones’ has that effect while also bringing the world in closer for a better, more intriguing view.

[bonus story]
You can read Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children on the New Yorker website here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children continues through Dec. 11 in a Word for Word production at Z Space, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $33-$58. Call 866-811-4111 or visit www.zspace.org.

Racism, history and drama in SF Playhouse’s plush Velvet

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Ira Aldridge (Carl Lumbly, right) discusses his opening-night performance with a servant, Connie (Britney Frazier), after becoming the first black actor to play Othello on a British stage in Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet at San Francisco Playhouse. Below: Company members at Covent Garden (from left, Richard Louis James, Devin O’Brien, Tim Kniffin and Susi Damilano) react to the reviews of their production of Othello. Photos by Ken Levin

Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet opens an intriguing window on an age-old issue that shows no signs of diminishing. The racism that Chakrabarti writes about is specific to a time and place – London in 1833, a year after the massacre of more than 500 slaves and public outcry led to the Slavery Abolition Act was passed – but feels like it could be happening here and now. How sad and dispiriting that is.

A first-time playwright when Red Velvet debuted in 2012 at London’s Tricycle Theatre, Chakrabarti takes a significant but little-known moment in history when American actor Ira Aldridge becomes the first black man to perform on the British stage. Stepping in for an ailing Edmund Kean, Aldridge played the title role in Othello, and if you think the Brits were any more enlightened on the subject of racial equality than their American counterparts, this drama, an affecting confluence of history and theater, will disprove that notion.

In its West Coast premiere production at San Francisco Playhouse, Red Velvet provides a plum starring role for the great Carl Lumbly, who tackles the role of Aldridge with depth and gravity. This is a serious actor playing a serious actor whose concern is more for getting the role right than playing into the bile being spewed in his general direction for daring to be a black man playing a black man in the ultra-white world of the theater. From the beginning, when we meet a weary Aldridge 34 years later when he’s playing King Lear on tour in Poland, Lumbly is captivating. The gimmick of Aldridge having to deal with a nosy Polish journalist is a pretty weak way to launch into the story of his controversial British stage debut, but this 1867 sequence turns out to be a powerful bookend for the show.

The bulk of the play is taken up with Aldridge taking on the Moor thanks to the enterprising producer – Patrick Russell as Pierre LaPorte – of the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. LaPorte doesn’t exactly prepare his cast well for Aldridge’s arrival, so their reactions to him are varied. Leading lady Ellen Tree (Susi Damilano), who will be Aldridge’s Desdemona, turns out to be more excited and open-minded than her co-stars, one of whom, Charles Kean (Tim Kniffin), son of the great Edmund, refuses to step on stage with Aldridge. There are rants and diatribes about the dangers of letting people of color on the stage – what will be next, actual half-wits playing Caliban? – using much the same logic that was trotted out when women were finally allowed to perform.

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It’s ugly, but the actors, including Devin O’Brien as Henry Forester, Elena Wright as Betty Lovell and Richard Louis James as Bernard Wade, make the best of it. The resulting performance, of which we see an enticing snippet, seems thrilling. Ellen can’t wait to discuss it afterward with Aldridge and do some rehearsal to make the following night’s performance even better. She’s completely taken with Aldridge’s more method way of performing, as opposed to the “teapot” acting of her fellow Brits, where they pose and intone, one hand on hip and the other arm up. She’s a real actor energized by something new and substantial. For her, it stops being about race and starts being about craft. Damilano’s performance captures all of this beautifully, and when Ellen is hustled off the stage by Charles, her fiancée, it’s a real shame we don’t get to see or hear from her again, especially when her name is used to further sully Aldridge’s reputation.

The press eviscerates Aldridge and the theater company for having the audacity to hire him, and even his friend and defender LaPorte turns on him. The only other black person in the room is maid Connie (Britney Frazier) who is also made at him, but not because he’s black but because she doesn’t like the murderous way Othello behaves.

Director Margo Hall’s production is firing on multiple, powerful cylinders for much of the show’s nearly 2 1/2 hours. There’s a certain repetition to the points Chakrabarti is making, but Hall powers through with a strong cast and superb physical production that features a gorgeous theater set (and immersive, non-distracting projections on the back wall) by Gary English, rich lighting by Kurt Landisman and lustrous costumes by Abra Berman. All the period details are there, but the vitriol and stupidity is entirely of the moment. Evolution, it seems, takes even longer than we thought.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet continues through June 25 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$120. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Trekking gently through O’Neill’s nostalgic Wilderness

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Sid Davis (Dan Hiatt, pictured in orange suit) indulges the Miller family with food gags at the dinner table in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, at ACT’s Geary Theater through Nov. 8. Below: Left to right) Lily Miller (Margo Hall), Mildred Miller (Christina Liang) and Arthur Miller (Michael McIntire) do what the Millers do: hang out in the living room. Photos by Kevin Berne

Can we agree that Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! is warm and wonderful…and weird? The sepia-tinted 1933 play is a rare light work from tragedian O’Neill, though its fantasy elements – the family O’Neill wished he had growing up rather than the more nightmarish version he depicted in Long Day’s Journey Into Night – lend it a rather sad underpinning.

It’s almost as if O’Neill strayed into Kaufman and Hart territory long enough to write the four-act play about a loving family dealing lovingly with each other and their minor crises but couldn’t quite escape the shadows long enough to completely avoid the shadows of alcoholism and devastating heartbreak.

So what feels like the prototype sitcom, all gentle rebellion, lessons learned and a fortifying hug, sends roots into the cultural ground, which decades later sprouts variations like “Family Ties” and “The Brady Bunch.” Can we really credit O’Neill for the story of a man named Brady who was busy with three boys of his own? Maybe, maybe not, but there is some shared DNA, especially in how utterly false but how utterly delightful it all feels.

American Conservatory Theater’s production of Ah, Wilderness! is a lively, lovely way to spend a little more than 2 1/2 hours in a theater. Nine of the 14 members of the cast are still students in ACT’s Master of Fine Arts Program (Class of 2016), are all solid, and it’s exciting to see them working on the big stage, especially Thomas Stagnitta as budding rebel socialist literary hound Richard Miller, who’s like a bolt of electricity on stage – believably young, believably brilliant, endearingly caught up in himself and the drama of his romance with the girl next door.

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There is some real-life drama attached to this production, which was supposed to have been directed by ACT Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker. His untimely death in August was a devastating loss to the theater community, but, as they say, the show must go on. ACT has dedicated the entire season to his memory, and Casey Stangl, who last worked with ACT on the inaugural production at the Strand Theater, Love and Information in June.

The nostalgic tone of Stangl’s production comes through in a gauzy, dreamlike set by Ralph Funicello that renders the Connecticut home of the Miller family (as well as a seedy bar and a moon-swept beach) in the dreamy impressionism of see-through walls and only hints of reality. This is where the Millers fuss and fret. Dad (Anthony Fusco) runs the town newspaper, and he’s wise (like Mike Brady wise). Mom (Rachel Ticotin) is a fussbudget with a big heart. Uncle Sid (Dan Hiatt) is a lovable but self-loathing lush and spinster Aunt Lily (Margo Hall) had her heart broken by Uncle Sid years ago and keeps forgiving him and keeps putting her heart out there to be broken.

There are assorted other Millers – little Tommy (Brandon Francis Osborne), daughter Mildred (Christina Liang) and pretentious Yalie older brother Arthur (Michael McIntire) – but they don’t have a whole lot to do but be kid-like. Arthur gets to sing (off stage) some lovely turn-of-the-century tunes, but otherwise they come across as pretty well-adjusted young people and, frankly, aren’t that interesting.

Richard gets all the complication (and the bulk of the parental attention). He reads Wilde and Ibsen and Shaw and the The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, so he’s just overflowing with pithy quotes and potent ideas. He’s a big boy mentally and a little boy emotionally, and it’s fun to watch those two parts of him battle, especially when it comes to standing up to his dad or nervously waiting to be grounded by him.

The laughs in Ah, Wilderness are pretty gentle, and the real heat from this production comes from watching pros like Fusco, Hiatt and Hall really work to make something emotionally real happen on stage. The final burst of romance feels pretty by the numbers – that’s when the show feels most like a familiar TV show – but there’s also some sweetness that could turn cloying if the play didn’t end shortly thereafter.

Modern viewers might keep waiting for the shoe to drop – for disaster to strike, for real life to actually intervene, for the cynicism or irony we expect from our art to finally infiltrate. But none of that happens. Everybody’s happy (or reasonably not too sad), and you finally have to say, well good for them.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! continues in an American Conservatory Theater production through Nov. 8 at the Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$100. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Women rock the Night at Cal Shakes season opener

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Lisa Anne Porter (right) plays separated twins Viola and Sebastian in the California Shakesperae Theater season-opening production of Twelfth Night. The female-led cast also includes (from left) Rami Margron as Orsino, Julie Eccles as Olivia, Margo Hall as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Catherine Castellanos as Sir Toby Belch and Domenique Loazno as Maria. Below: Stacy Ross (left) as Malvolio is under the mistaken impression that his mistress has the hots for him, a ruse concocted by Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. Photos by Kevin Berne

Last year, California Shakespeare Theater offered an off-season touring production of Twelfth Night that featured an all-women cast and made stops in prisons, homeless shelters, senior communities and the like. It was a stripped-down, wonderful production, and apparently its impact was strong enough that outgoing artistic director Jonathan Moscone (he bids adieu in August after he directs The Mystery of Irma Vep) decided to pull the play into the company’s 41st season.

With a different director (Christopher Liam Moore), this is a very different Twelfth Night but with two key returning players and one overriding concept. The actors reprising their roles are Rami Margron as Duke Orsino (she also played scheming lady in waiting Maria last year) and the invaluable Catherine Castellanos making an even deeper impression as boozy wastrel Sir Toby Belch. This is not an all-female production, but it is what you might call female led. Of the eight cast members, seven are women, and – the irony is not subtle here – the only man, Ted Deasy, plays Feste, the fool (and other roles including a sea captain, a priest, a police constable, Antonio and a member of Orsino’s court).

Director Moore’s production is so sure footed and satisfying that the whole idea of a gender-bending cast populating an already gender-bending play quickly becomes less of a gimmick and more about some really good storytelling. It’s great that companies like Cal Shakes are shifting the balance away from male domination of Shakespeare, but it’s even better that the company is giving the stage to some incredibly talented actors to tell a sad, romantic, occasionally very funny tale.

Deasy begins the show by climbing out of a coffin sitting center stage. If that sounds grim – this is a play largely about grief, after all – not to worry. In full court jester garb (costumes by Meg Neville, who mercifully makes this jester bell-less), he whips out his iPhone and samples a playlist to indicate a storm is brewing: “Riders on the Storm,” “It’s Raining Men,” “Stormy Weather” and one other that’s too fun to spoil.” We’ll see iPhones throughout the 2 1/2-hour play, mostly for cuing up music (Air Supply, Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin make appearances) but also for photo taking and the inevitable selfie.

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This is the 150th time Cal Shakes has done Twelfth Night (actually the eighth counting last year’s tour), and every time it feels like a slightly different play. Moore is having fun to be sure, but with that coffin never leaving the stage, the specter is ever present. The coffin represents several deaths affecting various characters. The twins Viola and Sebastian (both played by the marvelous Lisa Anne Porter) each think the other perished in a shipwreck. And the Lady Olivia (Julie Eccles, whose transformation from grief to love addled is spectacular) lost her father and brother in a short space of time and is drowning in her loss. But that coffin, being front and center in Nina Ball’s simple set, which resembles either a mausoleum or an elegant resort, also finds itself being used as various pieces of furniture, an ice chest for beer and as a dark, dank prison for the most notoriously wronged Malvolio.

Speaking of Malvolio, the righteous prig who brings out the bully in Sir Toby and his cohorts, Maria (Dominique Lozano) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Margo Hall), a word on the broad comic performances in this production. As Malvolio, Stacy Ross so fully inhabits the character that it’s as easy to hate him (and understand why he gets so viciously pranked) as it is to love him (when the prank goes way too far). Ross is funny, especially taking smiling lessons from the audience or gingerly navigating a set of stairs, but she’s also heartbreaking as the character is humiliated, taunted and bereft of the love he thought he had won.

With Castellanos’ turn as Sir Toby, there is broad hilarity (the costume conjures a Depptonian Capt. Jack Sparrow feel) but also a beating heart under all the liquor and brio and bullying. You get the sense that Toby is performing for Maria, whom he loves, and for Sir Andrew (Hall is quite funny as the blundering idiot), his sycophantic money bags of a sidekick. He’s got a (squalid) reputation to protect, but it really registers when even he admits the Malvolio prank has gone too far.

The happy ending, when the separated twins reunite, is handled deftly, and Porter, who has delineated her male and female (and female pretending to be male) characters beautifully, comes as close as a single actor could to making that scene poignant and a little heartbreaking (Viola gets her brother back from the void, but that hope does not exist for Olivia’s brother).

That this production can be rambunctious (Feste’s songs have a delightful country-western lilt) and funny, romantic and lyrical, sad and shadowy is its ultimate triumph.

FOR MORE INFORMAITON
California Shakespeare Theater’s Twelfth Night continues through June 21 at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way. Tickets are $20-$72. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.