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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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

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

The cast of Marin Theatre Company’s Equivocation includes, from left, Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker and Lance Gardner. Photos by Kevin Berne.

Now heading into the final weekend of a well-deserved extended run, Marin Theatre Company’s Equivocation is enormously enjoyable theater.

I liked Bill Cain’s play last summer when I saw it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and I still like its muscular, hugely entertaining theatricality. The Marin production, directed by Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, is more intimate but just as rewarding.

The cast boasts some of the Bay Area’s finest – Anna Bullard (the lone woman in the cast), Lance Gardner, Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker, Andy Murray, and Charles Shaw Robinson – as they crawl around J.B. Wilson’s scaffolding set that reminds of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Where else would you want to set a story of William Shakespeare, or Shagspeare as he’s called in the play?

As Cain’s play imagines Will attempting to write a piece of propaganda theater for bonny King James (and his henchman, Sir Robert Cecil) and discovering that what he writes has to be the truth or nothing, something very interesting happens. Cain’s immense knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays and British history coalesce into a drama that feels recognizably human yet epic in its scope and more than just a little bit contemporary.

It’s so easy to forget that Shakespeare’s plays came from a human being, albeit a phenomenally talented human being (and for the sake of argument, let’s deny the Shakespeare deniers). Like Tom Stoppard did in Shakespeare in Love, Cain wants to remind us that Will Shakespeare was a son, a husband, a philanderer, a father and a successful artist. Whereas Stoppard’s movie was comic and romantic, Cain’s play is more intellectual and of the theater. But both makes us care anew about Shakespeare and stop to consider what it might have been like for him to actually create plays like Macbeth or King Lear. Something similar happened with Amadeus – we were asked to consider that Mozart was a brilliant composer and flawed human being and that his work wasn’t always “classical music.” At a certain point, it was fresh and new and surprising. We’ve turned his music into an institution, just as we have Shakespeare’s plays, and it’s refreshing when artists like Bill Cain come along to toy with our notions of why something great is actually great.

In Equivocation, Shakespeare is commissioned by the king to create a play about the Gunpowder Plot, a thwarted attempt to blow up the king and Parliament. But Will can’t muster any enthusiasm for the “powder plot” because, in dramatic terms, there’s no plot. The more he investigates, the more he discovers about a royal cover-up and dastardly deeds done by the overly ambitious Cecil.

Robinson (seen at right with Hurteau) is Will, an earnest if ego-conflicted playwright and mediocre father two his two daughters (we only meet Judith, an underwritten role played with aplomb by Bullard). He and Cecil (a brilliant Hurteau) loathe each other, but Will has a theater troupe to feed, so he accepts the king’s commission to write a play about current events. Will’s research leads him to the prison cells of the accused traitors, the most fascinating of which is Father Henry Garnet (Murray), whose theory about equivocation is that it allows you to tell the truth under difficult circumstances. You don’t have to compromise your morals if you learn to answer the answer really being asked of you – the question under the question.

And this is where Cain’s play gets really interesting – what’s the play under the play? Could it be about U.S. politics? Of course it could. But it’s also so wonderfully theatrical that, at its best, this play crackles with energy. Like most of the actors, Marker plays a member of Shakespeare’s troupe and several other roles – traitors, royals or whatever’s necessary. This role shifting provides some stellar moments for the actors, as when Marker gets to be an actor in a play and the king watching the play at the same time.

Theater about theater can come across as so much navel gazing in a spotlight, but Equivocation gazes into all the right places, questioning everything and putting on a hell of a good show.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Equivocation closes May 2 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $34-$54. Call 415 388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org for information.

You can read the review here. The show has been extended through July 5.

Stacy Ross is Mrs. Prentice and Andy Murray is Dr. Rance in the Marin Theatre Company production of What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton. Photo by Ed Smith

The cast of Marin Theatre Company’s Lydia includes, from left, Gloria Garayua as Ceci, Adriana Gavria as Lydia, David Pintado as Misha and Elias Escobedo as Alvaro. Photos by Ed Smith

Power, passion course through Solis’ startling `Lydia’
««« ½

There’s a reason critics across the country have compared San Francisco playwright Octavio Solis’ Lydia to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Both are vivisections of distinctly American families. For Miller, the Lomans suffered mid-century secrets and pressures within their family unit. For Solis, the Flores family picks up some 20 years later in a different place and time with secrets and pressures both similar and distinctly their own.

Solis is such an exciting writer that the Miller comparison is not lightly made. Miller had American tales to tell, and so does Solis. With Lydia, Solis takes a leap with the kind of family drama so rich, so surprising that it redefines what you think family dramas can do. Just when you think you’ve seen every variation with, mom, pop, the kids, their troubles and a sofa in the middle of the set, along comes Solis to shake it up and think again.

Receiving its local premiere at Marin Theater Company in a production helmed by artistic director Jason Minadakis, Lydia is an evening that will linger in the memory for a long time.

Solis is unafraid to throw a whole lot into the mix here: sexuality, faith, violence, betrayal, romance, hope, death and poetry. It might be too much, but the only time you feel the weight of the playwright trying to balance too heavy a load is in Act 2 when the play seems to end multiple times before landing on a final scene that is bold, shocking and exactly what it needs to be.

You might say that Lydia is a riff on Mary Poppins – a caretaker arrives, shakes things up, inexorably alters the family then moves on. But then again, Ms. Poppins wasn’t dealing with immigration officers, a brain-damaged teenager, domestic violence or soul-damaging secrets.

The Flores family — short-order cook dad Claudio (Luis Saguar), mom Rosa (Wilma Bonet) returning to the workforce, high school student Misha (David Pintado), rebel older son Rene (Lakin Valdez) and severely injured daughter Ceci (Gloria Garayua above right) – is staking its claim on the American dream. Claudio and Rosa crossed the border from Mexico to create a life and a family in El Paso. That things didn’t turn out so great in the land of promise weighs heavily on Claudio, who works nights, sleeps days and spends most of his free time drinking beer and listening to his headphones from the Barcalounger.

The night two years before that Ceci was brain damaged in a car accident is one of the play’s motivating mysteries. It was just a few days before her quincenera, and whatever happened in the Pontiac only the people who were there know: Ceci, who is now unable to speak, her brother Rene and their cousin Alvaro (Elias Escobedo, below right with Garayua).

The play’s poetic soul belongs to Ceci, who rouses from her stupor to share her internal monologues with the audience. Even in her mostly vegetative state, she’s like the family sponge, absorbing all of their pain and unable to do anything about it. If asked, family members would say Ceci’s injury is the source of much of that pain, but in truth – and Ceci prefers the truth – that pain was already there.

When Rosa decides to go back to work, she hires a newly arrived Mexican immigrant to be the family maid and caretaker to Ceci. Lydia (Adriana Gaviria, above with Garayua) is sensitive the way Ceci is sensitive. The two young woman find a way to communicate beyond language, and soon Lydia begins unlocking those painful secrets and forcing the family out of its habitual denial.

Some of the play’s surprises aren’t all that surprising, but what connects in Solis’ play and in Minadakis’ production is the walloping emotion that pours from character to character. What could have been stock melodrama is instead invested with genuine feeling and lots of it. Garayua as Ceci is extraordinary, both as the vital, lovesick teenager who pours her heart out to us and as the twitching, moaning woman on the mattress in the middle of the living room floor (the slightly surreal ranch house set is by Robert Mark Morgan and lit with a fondness for moonlight by Kurt Landisman).

Pintado makes for a believable high schooler with a big crush on the new family maid, and Gaviria as Lydia is practically perfect in every way, which is to say she has an electric presence that convincingly leaves change in its wake.

The entire cast rises to the challenge of Solis’ outstanding script, which makes you rethink the term “family entertainment” as something as dark and dangerous as it is deeply felt.

Marin Theatre Company’s Lydia continues through April 12 at 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $20-$51. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org for information.