Category Archives: Marissa Keltie

2013: The year’s best Bay Area theater

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2013 (third try)

If you’re looking for the year’s best, you can shorten your search by heading directly to Word for Word, that ever-amazing group that turns short works of fiction into some of the most captivating theater we see around here. This year, we were graced with two outstanding Word for Word productions.

You Know When the Men Are Gone – Word for Word’s first show of the year was based on two excellent stories by Siobhan Fallon. We are a country at war, and as such, we can never be reminded too often about the sacrificed made not only by the men and women serving in harm’s way but also the families and friends they leave behind. These connected stories, masterfully directed by Joel Mullenix and Amy Kossow, created a direct, emotional through line into the heart of an experience we need to know more about. Read my review here.

In Friendship – A few months later, Word for Word returned to celebrate its 20th anniversary by casting the nine founding women in several stories by Zona Gale about small-town, Midwestern life. It was pleasure from start to finish, with the added emotional tug of watching the founders of this extraordinary company acting together for the first time. Read my review here.

Campo Santo, Intersection for the Arts and California Shakespeare Theater collaborated this year on an intimate epic about the Golden State we call home comprising three plays, art projects, symposia and all kinds of assorted projects. This kind of collaboration among companies is exactly the kind of thing we need to infuse the art form with new energy and perspectives. The best of the three theatrical offerings was the first.

The River – Playwright Richard Montoya authored the first two plays in this collaboration, and though the Cal Shakes-produced American Night was wild and enjoyable, Montoya’s The River, directed by Sean San José had the irresistible pull of a fast-moving current. A truly original work, the play was part comedy, part romance, part spiritual exploration. Read my review here.

Ideation – My favorite new play of the year is from local scribe Aaron Loeb because it was fresh, funny and a thriller that actually has some thrills. Part of San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series for new play development, Ideation is still in search of the perfect ending, but you can expect to hear much more about this taut drama of corporate intrigue and interpersonal nightmares. Read my review here.

The Pianist of Willesden Lane – The combination of heartbreaking personal history and heart-expanding piano music made this Berkeley Repertory Theatre presentation the year’s best solo show. Mona Golabek tells the story of her mother’s exit from Germany as part of the Kindertransport includes all the horror and sadness you’d expect from a Holocaust story, but her telling of it is underscored by her exquisite piano playing. Read my review here.

Other Desert Cities – TheatreWorks demonstrated the eternal appeal of a well-told family drama with this Jon Robin Baitz play about Palm Springs Republicans, their lefty-liberal children and the secrets they all keep. This one also happens to have the most beautiful set of the year as well (by Alexander Dodge). Read my review here.

The Fourth Messenger – Tanya Shaffer and Vienna Tang created a beguiling new musical (no easy feat) about Buddha (absolutely no easy feat). The show’s world premiere wasn’t perfect, but it was damn good. Expect big things from this show as it continues to grow into its greatness. Read my review here.

Good People – Any play starring Amy Resnick has a good chance of ending up on my year’s best list, but Resnick was beyond great in this David Lindsay Abaire drama at Marin Theatre Company. Her Margie was the complex center of this shifting, surprising story of old friends whose lives went in very different directions, only to reconnect at a key moment. Read my review here.

The Taming – One of the year’s smartest, slyest, most enjoyable evenings came from Crowded Fire Theatre and busy, busy local playwright Lauren Gunderson. This spin (inspired by The Taming of the Shrew) was madcap with a sharp, satiric edge and featured delicious comic performances by Kathryn Zdan, Marilee Talkington and Marilet Martinez. Read my review here.

Terminus – Oh so dark and oh so very strange, Mark O’Rowe’s return to the Magic Theatre found him exploring theatrical storytelling that encompassed everyday lie, mythic monsters and rhymed dialogue. Director Jon Tracy and his remarkable trio of actors (Stacy Ross, Marissa Keltie and Carl Lumbly) grabbed our attention and didn’t let it go for nearly two hours. Read my review here.

No Man’s Land – Seems a little unfair to include this production here if only because the can’t-miss team of Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart would likely be a year’s best no matter where they were performing or what they were doing. In this case, they were headed to Broadway but stopped at Berkeley Rep to work on Harold Pinter’s enigmatic comic drama. Their work (along with that of Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley) provided laughs and insight and complexity where you didn’t know any was possible. Pure master class from start to finish. Read my review here.

Breakout star of the year: Megan Trout. It was impossible not to be transfixed by Megan Trout not once but twice this year. She illuminated the stage as Bonnie Parker in the Mark Jackson-directed Bonnie and Clyde at Shotgun Players and then stole the show in the Aurora Theatre Company’s A Bright New Boise as a shy big-box store employee who is mightily intrigued by the new guy who also happens to have been involved with a now-defunct cult. Trout has that magnetic ability to compel attention and then deliver something utterly real and constantly surprising.

Magic reaches a dark, rhythmic Terminus

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MagicTerminus1

Marissa Keltie (left), Carl Lumbly and Stacy Ross play nameless characters facing a dark Dublin night in the first American production of Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus at Magic Theatre. Below: Ross plays a former school teacher now working with a volunteer crisis hotline who takes a personal interest in one of her callers. Photos by Jennifer Reiley

Safe to say you’re not going to see anything like Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus, the aptly named conclusion to Magic Theatre’s 46th season. If you saw O’Rowe’s last show at the Magic, the extraordinary Howie the Rookie 13 years ago, you’ll know to expect vivid, visceral language delivered in monologues. That seems to be O’Rowe’s specialty, along with depicting the rougher edges of Dublin with a strange sort of compassion and a gift for elemental storytelling that grabs hold and won’t let go.

While Howie operated in a familiar street thug/crime world setting, Terminus is something altogether different. Like one of his three characters in the play, O’Rowe pushes himself out on a precarious limb and leaps. There’s a distinct criminal element here as well, along with descriptions of violence that are somehow more vivid and horrific than if we were actually seeing them, but there’s also a supernatural, even spiritual, aspect to the play that is remarkably moving – if, that is, you’re willing to make the leap with O’Rowe and his brave actors and accept that one of the characters is falling in love with a demon from hell who takes corporeal form consisting entirely of wriggling worms.

This is brave, bold storytelling, and director Jon Tracy and his three actors, Stacy Ross, Marissa Keltie and Carl Lumbly, are wholly up to the challenge (Irish accents notwithstanding) of holding our attention for nearly two hours without intermission. When Ross begins her first monologue, it quickly becomes apparent that O’Rowe has crafted a play in verse – not with a strict meter but with a lilting internal, natural rhyme scheme that gives the storytelling a distinctly musical feel along with a hyper-theatrical remove from reality that only intensifies the twists and turns of the plot.

This is a dark, dark story, so it’s entirely appropriate that Robert Brill’s set is an exercise in blackness. The actors stand on what looks like a mound of shredded tire rubber. Or coal. Or something equally black and dirty. Gabe Maxson’s lights are stark bolts of illumination slicing through the thick stage smoke. Literally and figuratively there’s not a lot of light in this tale, but what you see is sharply in focus.

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How the actors memorized their great blocks of rhyming text and then managed to infuse them with deep, flawed humanity is staggering to think about. All three make real connections with their characters, whose stories do link in eventual, surprising ways, and each has at least a moment or two of shiver-inducing horror or beauty. Pretty much every minute of Ross’s monologues is a sterling example of a skilled actor losing herself in her character but always keeping the audience with her. Her story is the most immediately moving, and the supernatural twist benefits her most. Ross is simply astonishing. How is it even possible that this great Bay Area actors gets better and better?

Keltie goes from damaged young woman fighting with life to a being in transformation with surprising charm and subtle intensity. And Lumbly gives us a man we think we know who then reveals himself to be someone else entirely. The ease with which he inhabits such a dis-eased character is astonishing and serves the story in powerful ways.

As good as the actors are, as strong as Tracy’s production is, Terminus is still a play of interwoven monologues. The fact that the three people on stage don’t ever engage in dialogue for nearly two hours is frustrating. O’Rowe’s approach to storytelling is clear, as are his reasons for keeping the stories separate. But even though I was fully engaged in the show, I crave interaction between actors on stage.

Still, Terminus is a play that lingers well after you’ve left the fog of the theater. The intricacies of the plot, the intensity of the characters and the sense of something larger guiding their trajectories continues to fascinate.

[bonus interview]

I talked to Terminus playwright Mark O’Rowe for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here. (subscription may be required)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus continues through June 16 a Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $22-$62. Call 415-441-88722 or visit www.magictheatre.org.

Annie Baker’s brilliant, reflective Circle Mirror

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EXTENDED THROUGH SEPT. 2
Theater Games 2
Theresa (Arwen Anderson) and James (L. Peter Callender), standing, play an improvisational theater game involving the words “goulash” and “akmok” while Lauren (Marissa Keltie), Marty (Julia Brothers) and Schultz (Robert Parsons) watch in the Bay Area Premiere of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, now playing at Marin Theatre Company, in co-production with Encore Theatre Company. Below: The cast plays a more active theater game involving sounds and movements. Photos by Kevin Berne

At once the antithesis of drama (nothing’s happening!) and a complete exposure of the theater’s guts and bones, Annie Baker’s has a particular genius for creating simplicity of the most complex variety.

Earlier this year, the Aurora Theatre Company got the unofficial Annie Baker Bay Area Festival off to a strong start with her Body Awareness about sexual politics in the small university town of Shirley, Vermont. Then SF Playhouse dazzled with the low-key but brilliant The Aliens, also set in the fictional Shirley, about three unlikely friends, music, death and growing up.

Now Marin Theatre Company in a co-production with Encore Theatre Company conclude the Bay-ker Area Fest with what has become her most popular play, Circle Mirror Transformation. Even more than the previous two Baker plays we’ve seen so far, this one feels even less like a play and more like an actual experience – something carefully captured in the real world and observed within the artful frame of a proscenium stage.

Verisimilitude is the name of the game here. Everything has to feel real and alive or the play buckles. Happily, under the direction of Kip Fagan, This Circle Mirror is an astutely performed exploration of human connection at its most troublesome and at its most wondrous.

Andrew Boyce’s set is the first indication of just how real this is all going to be. He has created a slice-of-life community center rec room (in Shirley, naturally) down to the last water stain in the ceiling tile. You can even see the faint, dirty outline where something used to hang on the wall but has since been removed. Even the fluorescent lighting (skillfully designed by Gabe Maxson) feels exactly right.

The class taking place in this community center is Adult Creative Drama, and that’s what the play is: six weeks of once-a-week classes conveyed in two hours with no intermission but lots of short scenes and blackouts.

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If you’ve ever played theater games, you know just how awful and just how thrilling they can be. Making a fool out of yourself, pushing yourself well out of your comfort zone, being forced to interact in fairly intimate ways with virtual strangers – it’s all slightly terrifying. But once you get into it, there’s a sense of play and excitement and being in the moment that is invaluable.

That’s what the four students discover with the help of Marty, their teacher, played by the always-remarkable Julia Brothers. Everybody transforms in some way by the end of the six weeks, and what’s extraordinary about Baker’s play is the way the audience becomes as involved as the students in the class. The last few weeks of class, when the exercises begin to break into some powerful emotional places, are hilarious and moving. And there’s a sense of momentum and monumental conclusion even though it’s a little class and the monumental feeling is actually scaled down to human size. To paraphrase Kander and Ebb, it’s a quiet thing. There aren’t crashing cymbals and tooting trumpets to signal the end and all it encompasses, but big things happen in small, vitally important ways.

The fact that Circle Mirror feels more like an observed experience than a play is a testament to Fagan’s precision direction and to the staggering talent of his five-member ensemble. The difficulty inherent in these seemingly simple and spontaneous exercises cannot be over-emphasized. In one recurring game, all five actors lie on the floor. The goal is to count to 10 without any prearranged speaking order. If two people speak at the same time, the game reverts back to one and they start again. Memorizing lines is one thing, but memorizing counting and counting mistakes is quite another.

These kind of nuanced, completely grounded demands are nonstop in this play, and the actors are exquisite. Brothers is at the top of the heap as Marty, the slightly over-enthusiastic teacher who can’t quite handle the psychological bonanza her exercises unleash. L. Peter Callender (fresh from his fantastic turn in California Shakespeare Theater’s Spunk) is James, Marty’s husband, taking the class as a show of support for his wife, but perhaps there are other reasons. Watching Callender play a gibberish word game with Arwen Anderson, a once-aspiring New York actress, is one of many mind-blowing moments in the show when what’s happening on stage seems astonishingly, even electrifyingly real.

Robert Parsons is Schutlz, the group’s recently divorced sad sack. He provides a lot of the play’s humor as well as a lot of its heart. He seems the least likely kind of guy who’d take a theater class but then seems like he has the most to gain. The game in which he explodes like an atomic bomb (he’s literally pretending to be a bomb) is like poetry and dance and comedy in a glorious few seconds.

As the resident withdrawn teen, Marissa Keltie hides behind her bangs and withdraws into her hooded sweatshirt for much of the play. But when Lauren, her character, begins to connect with herself and her classmates, the stereotypical teen stuff drops away and a real person emerges. Of all the transformations, hers is the most heartening.

Is Circle Mirror Transformation real life as art or art as real life? Probably both, but what does it matter when what’s on stage is so original yet so familiar, so profound yet so ordinary? Baker has spoken about how much she admires Chekhov, and she clearly shares that great dramatist’s penchant for the complexity of real life over plot machinations, But Baker makes me think of Thornton Wilder. He and Baker are both awed by people and the very experience of life, all its wretched mistakes and dizzy delights, and how theater can give it a temporary frame. What comes through in Circle Mirror Transformation is the everyday human experience of unfathomable pain and unrelenting beauty.

[bonus interview]
I interviewed Annie Baker last spring. Read more here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation continues an extended run through Sept. 2 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $36-$52. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.