Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

There’s bad news aplenty in the world, so it’s always nice to discover some bright spots of good news, especially in the theater world.

San Francisco playwright Trevor Allen, who had a sizable hit last fall with his adaptation of Frankenstein, received a walloping dose of good news the other day. PlayGround’s New Play Production Fund chose his play Lolita Roadtrip to receive a $15,000 grant for production at San Jose Stage Company next season.

“I am extremely grateful for this opportunity,” Allen said. “Jim Kleinmann and PlayGround have made a unique commitment with this new grant. By awarding the money directly to San Jose Stage Company to produce my play, they have insured that my work will actually have a life. In the past I have been the fortunate recipient of a few commissioning grants, which have allowed me the much needed time and support to create new plays. Of course, I wish there were more such opportunities for local playwrights because there are some amazing writers here who are truly deserving of recognition. But a play just sitting there on a laptop is like a blueprint for a house, it may look good on the page but the real test is to actually build it and then have a family move in and live in it for a while. Then you have a home. That’s what this production grant means to me. It has given my play a home.”

Here’s more from the folks at PlayGround:

Allen’s Lolita Roadtrip was originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround last season as part of the 2009 Best of PlayGround Festival. This darkly comic play follows Julia (a rebellious Stanford graduate student researching her thesis) and Danny (a hitchhiking teenaged runaway she picks up) as together they retrace novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s actual 1941 roadtrip from New York to Stanford. A series of cross country adventures ensues bringing them closer to Julia’s climactic confrontation with Professor Drake (the man who stole her innocence and plagiarized her journal). Nabokov’s spirit visits them and somewhere between the Grand Canyon and Los Vegas they confront their own dark pasts and discover what really causes a chrysalis to transform into a butterfly. Lolita Roadtrip will mark Trevor’s second world premiere with San Jose Stage Company, following the 2005 hit Tenders in the Fog, originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround. He is currently working on a third PlayGround commission, Golden Gate Fair (set in the Bay Area), which will receive a staged reading on Sunday, May 30 as part of the 2010 Best of PlayGround Festival at Thick House.

Allen said his experience working on Tenders in the Fog revealed San Jose Stage to be “wonderfully supportive of my work.” The new production is another homecoming for the San Jose native. “Besides a brief stint at UCLA for theatre I spent half my life there, and most of my family lives there. Now having spent the better part of two decades living and working in San Francisco, it is interesting to return as a playwright and have my words come to life there.”

Also receiving a PlayGround New Play Production grant (for $5,000) is Just Theater, which will produce Erin Marie Bregmann’s Nightmare Play at the Berkeley City Club.

Keep up with PlayGround at playground-sf.org.

Keep up with Trevor Allen at his excellent site, Working for the Mouse.

If you want a big, dramatic scene involving John Rosenberg smashing things on his way out the door, you better look elsewhere.

About three years ago, along with Tore Ingersoll-Thorp and Damian Lanahan Kalish, Rosenberg founded Sleepwalkers Theatre, a group committed to producing new work by new authors. The trio had been in what they considered to be the worst production of Hamlet ever (at an undisclosed location in the East Bay), and after commiserating backstage, joined together to create their own company.

That first season, Sleepwalkers produced one of Rosenberg’s plays, Use Both Hands, about strangers meeting and connecting in the keno lounge of the Circus Circus casino in Reno, Nev. But last year, Rosenberg decided to branch out and do his own thing.

He created his own theater company and decided to call it Hella Fresh Theatre because, well, it’s apparently hella fresh theater.

The parting of ways with old friends Ingersoll-Thorp and Kalish seems to be quite amicable.

“I had an incredible experience with Sleepwalkers,” Rosenberg says. “I loved working with them. As we geared up for the second season, we all realized we wanted to take things in different directions. I wanted to create plays and have control over them. I decided to move in a different direction. It wasn’t like there were screaming fights. I’m in my early 30s. At some point you have to stand up and make your own stuff.”

For their part, the Sleepwalker guys seem OK with the parting. On their Web site they write of Rosenberg’s departure: “John left the group to form another, and more cutting edge theatre will be coming from it soon. If this process were to repeat itself with other members, we couldn’t be happier. We need more exciting small theatre companies, and we think everyone should start one.”

Jericho Road Improvement Association, the first production from Hella Fresh Theatre begins performances Thursday, June 4 at San Francisco’s Phoenix Theatre, and it should come as no surprise that the play is written and directed by Rosenberg. (Pictured above: Jericho Road Improvement Association cast members Sam Leichter, left, and Abel Habtegeorgis)

Set in the neighborhood where, in April of 1968, Oakland police clashed with the Black Panthers and ended up killing Little Bobby Hutton, Rosenberg writes about a veteran police officer who was part of that clash 30 years ago attempting to atone for himself and make positive change the neighborhood.

Inspiration for the play came from two places. After attending the University of California, Berkeley “back in the 20^th century,” as Rosenberg puts it, he lived in North Oakland near the site of the famous clash.

“That idea, that history has taken place all around you stuck with me,” Rosenberg says.

The second factor came in the form of playwright August Wilson and his famous cycle of plays documenting African American life in each decade of the 20^th century.

“Something about his work really touched me,” Rosenberg says. “I’m very interested in race in America, and I became more and more interested in creating a work that reflected a local piece of history, that tackled the problem of race and law enforcement in Oakland and that told a personal story. I think in some ways, since Obama was elected, people thing we’re in a post-racial America, but while I was writing this, BART police killed Oscar Grant on New Year’s Eve and four Oakland police officers were murdered a couple months after that.”

Rosenberg’s day job as a bookkeeper for a Berkeley nonprofit gives him some flexibility to write and produce plays in his spare time, which he does entirely on his own, without the aid of grants or corporate sponsors. His mom, who happens to be a drama teacher, serves as an editor, and the people in his life – his girlfriend, his sister, his friends – all offer opinions and, when he needs it, extra funds. This is theater created on a budget – mostly Rosenberg’s.

“It’s definitely an interesting time to be starting a new company,” Rosenberg says. “But it’s definitely possible to do it. It’s exciting and challenging to do it on your own. I’m not trying to make money off of this. It’s just great to put new work out there. As long as I have my job and people who love me, I think we’ll be OK.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Hella Fresh Theatre presents Jericho Road Improvement Association by John Rosenberg, through June 27 at the Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10. Call 510-292-6403 or visit www.hellafreshtheatre.com for information.

A man of character, Trevor Allen decided to put his character life behind him.

Having detailed what it’s really like to work as a costumed character in Disneyland in his popular solo show Working for the Mouse, Allen made a conscious decision to focus on his burgeoning career as a playwright. Mouse, under the direction of Kent Nicholson, had a great run at Berkeley’s Impact Theatre (and a transfer to the EXIT in San Francisco), but the time had come to hang up the ears and write.

He had abundant projects, including one about Albert Einstein with found-object puppeteer Liebe Wetzel, another about artificial intelligence that the Magic Theatre picked up for its New Media Festival and yet another assignment to write something for Playground.

The resulting plays, One Stone, The Nutshell and Tenders in the Fog respectively, were all well received but only Tenders ended up being produced (by San Jose Stage Company). Then came Zoo Logic and Lolita Road Trip, two more projects that generated readings and interest but, so far, no actual productions.

Rather than do the writerly thing and revel in despondency, San Francisco resident Allen headed back to the Magic Kingdom. For just a few jam-packed performances in the summer of 2005, he resurrected Working for the Mouse at Bus Barn Theatre in Los Altos. For those few shows, he traveled back in time to age 17. He was an acting student at UCLA (studying with “The Brady Bunch’s” Robert Reed, no less) and worked at Disneyland, first as Pluto, then as Capt. Hook’s first mate, Mr. Smee, then as various characters including Eeyore (from Winnie the Pooh), Friar Tuck (from Robin Hood) and Gideon (the mute cat from Pinocchio). He graduated to “face work,” meaning he wasn’t enclosed in plastic and fur, with the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland and actually got to utilize his improvisational skills when interacting with park guests.

A friend of Allen’s from Los Angeles encouraged him to come do Mouse at a small North Hollywood theater. “It’d sell out!” the friend said.

And Allen wondered, if he took the show to LA, if that is exactly what he’d be doing: selling out.

“I had considered taking the show to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, then I had to think about LA, and then I thought, `Do I really want to be the guy who does funny voices and plays Pluto and the Mad Hatter?’” Allen says over lunch at, yes it’s true, Pluto’s.

That’s when Allen’s wife, Theatre Bay Area magazine editor Karen McKevitt, said it was time to do something serious about Working for the Mouse. She pointed out that when he talked about his four years as a character in Disneyland, he always had fresh stories to tell that never made their way into the show. She landed on a solution: Turn the stories into a book utilizing the factual but entertaining writing style known as creative nonfiction.

Allen is currently hard at work on that book. Until he finds a publisher brave enough to weather the Disney waters, that book-in-progress is also a blog: www.workingforthemouse.com. This is the 21^st century, after all.

“As a performer, you get immediate response from an audience,” Allen says. “You know when a story or a line works or doesn’t work. The same is true with the blog. You put it out there yourself – you don’t have to wait for someone to publish you. There’s no barrier between the artist and the audience anymore. I hear immediately from people, some who love Disney, some who hate it.”

The blog belies Allen’s theatrical roots because there’s a whole lot more available than chapters (called “mouse droppings”) of the upcoming book. There’s performance video and, to the author’s great delight, podcasts in which the actor gets to exercise his expertise with voice over narration.

“Now that I’m not writing for performance, I’m able to get into the heads of the other characters more,” he says. “Then turning that into audio is great fun.”

Working for the Mouse is, in many ways, Allen’s coming-of-age story. He was a 17-year-old San Jose native, somewhat naïve, getting a fast education about life in the real world. Backstage and after hours at Disneyland was sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but it was also more than that.

“It was a real education,” Allen says. “What I saw there, backstage and during work hours, was tragic, raw, funny and sad. From inside the costumes, you saw a parade of human tragedy going by in the guests. At a certain point after I had left the Disney bubble, it occurred to me, `Why is no one telling this story?’”

One answer is easy: because Disney will sue your pants off. They’ll cease and desist you so quickly you won’t know your Mickey from your Mouse.

“I’ve always thought that in the world of theater, the more controversial the better,” Allen says. “Freedom of speech is supposed to allow for that. But Big business has co-opted the place of religion and government in dictating what you can or can’t say. I’m of the school, as a playwright, a performer or a writer, you have to tell stories that haven’t been told, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

So far, response to the blog has been good. There’s even been some interest in reviving the one-man show, which Allen says he’d be happy to do, especially since working on the Mouse has given him new insights.

“This has been a process of rediscovery,” he says. “The arc of the show would likely remain unchanged, but I think I’m finding some other stories with some different resonance.”

Here’s a taste of Working for the Mouse, the show and the Web site:

Visit www.workingforthemouse.com

Writing about his high school experience proved therapeutic for playwright Itamar Moses, a Berkeley native whose Yellowjackets has its world premiere this week at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

The 30-year-old writer headed back to the year 1994 to dramatically reconstruct his junior year at Berkeley High School, when he was editor of the school newspaper, The Jacket, and racial tensions were dividing the student body.

“High school is a potent time,” Moses says one morning before a rehearsal. “I try to examine why that is on this canvas. I was able to work out specific feelings here, and it’s amazing to me to discover that I did have a different perspective. I had such firm beliefs at the time, but I could actually see a more complex, multiplicity of viewpoints I didn’t have at the time. Things seemed so obvious to me as a student who was feeling threatened or getting messed with. I always hoped I’d see a larger perspective. I’m amazed I actually did.”

Moses, who now lives in Brooklyn’s Park Slope area, says that even though he was re-creating experiences of 14 years ago, he could hear the voices clearly.

“I feel like I still talk like I did in high school,” Moses says and laughs. “The other voices in the play, the ones that aren’t mine, I’ve been hearing for years. As opposed to just crafting dialogue, I tried to hear it. I have voices in there” – he points to his head – “not in a mental health way, but in a historical way.”

Some of those voices belong to African-American and Latino characters, which required Moses to write outside his race.

“Sure, there was an element of fear of fraudulence,” he says. “I did feel an internal hurdle. Am I entitled to do this? Is this OK? Solution was to remind myself that my choices were to do it or not write about Berkeley High at all. Usually that’s how to get yourself to do something difficult: get to the point where there’s no alternative. I guess I have the same feeling about writing female characters. In a weird way, you let go of the idea you’re writing from the outside in. Characters have to come from the inside out or they’ll play that way on stage. Every character is a fragment of your psyche, no matter the race or gender.”

Like most writers who are writing about a specific time in their lives, Moses takes the fictional route. For instance, he says he’s most like Avi, the new editor of the newspaper who is dealing with a faculty boycotting his paper. But he’s also like Trevor, the newspaper staff member who is getting bullied in a pretty serious way.

“I wanted to get both experiences in there,” Moses says. “But neither character is fully me. The question of what’s autobiographical and what’s not is complicated. There are elements of truth in the fiction.”

Moses (in a photo from his high school yearbook at right, not the Jacket T-shirt) joined the school newspaper staff in his freshman year and has been writing since (he was also a humor columnist for the Yale Daily News in his college years). But the writer says he’s still not sure if writing is “his thing.”

“When I was 9 or 10, I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy. It was an obsession. I thought I’d write that. My initial plan was to be Piers Anthony or Susan Cooper or whoever. I got to Berkeley High, and I don’t know why, but I was attracted to the newspaper. I can’t remember how I made that decision. I liked it a lot. I knew it was my big high school extracurricular activity. Never planned to be a journalist.”

Then, in college, theater became his extracurricular activity, and now he’s a playwright in demand (his biggest hit, Bach at Leipzig, recently had its area premiere at Shakespeare Santa Cruz).

Working on Yellowjackets for the last two years, Moses was approached by a TV network – he says it shall remain nameless – about turning the play into a TV series. Unlike the play, which allows the young actors to play the adults as well as the students, the TV geniuses wanted to focus primarily on the adults.

“To me, the play is interesting because it focuses on the kids,” Moses says. “That’s what makes it a microcosm. For the purposes of TV, they may be right. But on stage, kids playing adults was the obvious choice.”

More than a decade away from his high school experience, Moses says maturity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“If anything, I feel less clarity and less direct passion and less vibrating sense of the electricity of possibility of the world than I did when I was a teenager,” he says. “When I was in graduate school, Tony Kushner spoke to us, and the thing he said that I remember most vividly was that maturity in our culture is defined as the ability not to feel too strongly about anything. If you buy into that, especially as an artist, you’re screwed because it means you’re deadened. As writers, he said, be careful not to be embarrassed by the extremities of feeling. Certainly how much you want that in your life and relationships is a question, but you definitely want in your work. In Yellowjackets, taking the kids seriously, focusing on them was a way to do that…to write about characters whose id is louder than their superego.”

Moses will take part in a free “Page to Stage” talk on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage at 7 p.m. Sept. 22.

Yellowjackets continues through Oct. 12 at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $33-$71. Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

Four years ago, Cutting Ball Theater continued its search for the edge that cuts with the first Avant GardARAMA!, a festival of short, experimental plays.

The quest for cutting-edge theater never ends, so Cutting Ball is reviving the festival, which opens Friday, July 18 and continues through Aug. 16 at the EXIT on Taylor. The roster of playwrights includes some heavy hitters such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Gertrude Stein. And there’s also a local name: Eugenie Chan.

Sandwiched in between Parks’ Betting on the Dust Commander and Stein’s Accents in Alsace is Chan’s world-premiere Bone to Pick, a new take on the Ariadne myth.

In the original story (or one of them), Ariadne falls in love with Theseus and helps him slay her brother, the Minotaur, and also helps him conquer the Minotaur’s maze. But then, as so often happens in these stories, Theseus cast Ariadne aside, and she was rescued by Dionysus.

In Chan’s take on the story, developed for a single actress, Ariadne is Ria, a waitress who has been slinging hash for 3,000 years in an island diner at the end of the world. Theseus, called Theo, has abandoned her, and she has done her best to serve all the nations who have visited her diner. But it’s the end of the world as we know it.

“Ria’s diner is demolished, she’s stuck in this wasteland, alone, trying to figure out her life,” Chan explains. “She addresses Theso, her lover boy, and her old boss, Kingman. And she thinks about when she had her lover, had her juice, and she sacrificed a family member. Now she’s at the end of the line, in isolation. She has to confront her role in her own abandonment. She’s a waitress with no more food to serve. She’s kind a sad, kinda mad.”

The idea to do this adaptation came from Cutting Ball artistic director Rob Melrose, with whom Chan worked at Marin Academy.

“Rob has long been fascinated by the idea of the labyrinth – purposeful wandering to somewhere you don’t know,” Chan says. “We talked about the myth, and I was all over the place about it. I have an opinion about Ariadne and Theseus. She was wronged. I know she’s saved in the original story – Dionysus turns her into a star, but I became fixated on that other relationship.”

The solo show concept was based in practicality. Melrose, who is directing all three Avant GardARAMA pieces, wanted a piece that he could take on the road to experimental theater festivals. When the official commission came, Chan says she was thrilled.

“But I didn’t realize how hard it would be,” she says. “It was a lesson in hubris, which is always good. I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of other characters, but it turns out multi-character plays are much more natural for me. A solo show is like ice water in the face. But I love the challenge – any writer does. Otherwise you retreat into your old tricks.”

A Bay Area native, Chan is finding her work more in demand around the country. She’s in the midst of a seven-year residency at New Dramatists in New York and she’s working with Seattle-based composer Byron Au Yong on an opera project called Kidnapped Water. He’s basing the piece on the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and he’s given eight writers eight of the hexagram for which to create mini-libretti.

“I’m not quite clear on the concept,” Chan says. “But it was inspired by bottled water, and it goes up in places all around Seattle this summer.”

Given that her writing career is percolating, why does Chan stay in the Bay Area?

“I get a lot of my creativity just living here,” she says. “My family has a big history here. I feel rooted. And I love the theaters here, especially the smaller, younger theaters like Cutting Ball, Shotgun Players, Crowed Fire and Thick Description. Would that their kind of theater could flourish even more.”

Avant GardARAMA opens July 18 and continues through Aug. 16 at EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$30. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.cuttingball.com for information.

Here’s an intriguing subtitle: “A found-object puppetry play inside the mind of Albert Einstein.”

That subtitle is attached to One Stone: Einstein, a work-in-progress from two of the Bay Area’s leading theatrical lights: playwright Trevor Allen and puppeteer Liebe Wetzel (along with her Lunatique Fantastique puppeteers).

The play, which involves found text, found-object puppets and David Sinaiko as Albert Einstein, receives two readings: 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 19 at Stanford University and 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 20 at Traveling Jewish Theatre (470 Florida St., San Francisco). These are free “in the rough” presentations presented by the Playwrights Foundation.

You can RSVP by e-mailing rsvp@playwrightsfoundation.org or by calling 415-626-0453, ext. 105.

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) has named six finalists in its annual playwriting competition, supported by generous funding from the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, which recognizes plays that premiered outside New York City.

The top honoree in the Steinberg /ATCA New Play Awards will receive $25,000 — the largest prize for a national playwriting award. Two additional playwrights will receive $7,500 each.

The winners will be announced at a March 29, 2008 ceremony at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Louisville, Ky.

The six finalists:

The Crowd You’re in With, by Rebecca Gilman, debuted at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in November. The play examines three couples at a backyard barbecue who reveal vastly different attitudes toward having children in the 21st century.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, bowed at Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in June. The quirky comedy examines the fallout when a lonely woman takes the cell phone from the body of dead man she discovers sitting next to her in a café and begins answering his calls.

End Days, by Deborah Zoe Laufer, premiered in October at Florida Stage in Manalapan. Sometimes comic, sometimes moving, the play studies the challenge of maintaining faith in a world dominated by science and fear. A Jewish family copes with the aftermath of 9/11 as the mother, now a born-again Christian, tries to convert the family before the rapture arrives — on Wednesday.

The English Channel, by Robert Brustein, debuted in September at Suffolk University and then the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. The noted critic and founder of the American Repertory Theatre penned a droll comedy centering on creativity, inspiration and plagiarism, in which the young Shakespeare, the ghost of Marlowe and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets collide in a tavern.

Strike-Slip, by Naomi Iizuka, opened last spring at the Humana Festival. The playwright presents a cinematic look at the interconnected nature of seemingly disconnected lives in the diverse, multi-cultural Los Angeles basin. One judge praised it as a 21st Century O. Henry story.

33 Variations, by Moises Kaufman, debuted in September at Washington’s Arena Stage. Kaufman offers a fictional imagining of Beethoven’s creation of 33 brilliant variations on a prosaic waltz. His obsessive pursuit of perfection parallels a modern tale of a terminally-ill musicologist struggling with her own obsession to unearth the source of Beethoven’s.

These finalists were selected from 28 eligible scripts submitted by ATCA
members. As the competition requires, none had productions in New York City in
2007. They were evaluated by a committee of 12 theater critics from around the
U.S. headed by chairman Wm. F. Hirschman of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and vice-chair George Hatza of the Reading Eagle.

“The amazing range of work — dramas, fantasies, musicals, farces, melodramas –
was uplifting confirmation that theater remains a vital and evolving art form
that can speak to every generation,” Hirschman said.

Since the inception of ATCA’s New Play Award in 1977, honorees have included
Lanford Wilson, Marsha Norman, August Wilson, Jane Martin, Arthur Miller, Mac
Wellman, Adrienne Kennedy, Donald Margulies, Lee Blessing, Lynn Nottage, Horton
Foote and Craig Lucas. Last year’s winner was San Francisco’s own Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Hunter Gatherers.

The awards are supported by an annual grant of $40,000 from the Harold and Mimi
Steinberg Charitable Trust, created in 1986 by Harold Steinberg on behalf of
himself and his late wife. The primary mission of the Steinberg Charitable Trust
to support the American theater. The trust has provided grants totaling millions
of dollars to support new productions of American plays and educational programs
for those who may not ordinarily experience live theater.

It’s been 10 years since Danny Hoch jolted the Bay Area theater scene with Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, his dynamic solo show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Since then, he has worked diligently to make hip-hop theater more than just a passing phase. He founded the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, now in its eighth year of presenting a new generation of theater artists in the Bay Area, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Hoch’s native New York.

While Hoch has gone on to create other solo shows — Pot Melting, Some People — he has also dabbled in movies. You’ve seen his tough-guy mug in American Splendor, Blackhawk Down, War of the Worlds and the recent We Own the Night, among others.

The last year was particularly busy for the 37-year-old theater artist. He directed Representa, written by and starring Paul Flores, as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. He wrote and directed his first multicharacter play, Til the Break of Dawn, last September, and he’s been developing his latest solo show, Taking Over, now having its world premiere at Berkeley Rep.

“The last few years I’ve been trying to do some different things,” Hoch says from Berkeley on his way to rehearsal. “It’s been a while since I had a new solo show. Had to get talked into it. I did solo shows for such a long time and took them on the road. And it’s just you. It’s lonely, honestly, a lonely experience.”

But now Hoch is back and working with Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone to put the finishing touches on Taking Over, which Hoch workshopped last fall in Minnesota and Washington, D.C.

“The work I’ve done the last few years has been fruitful in many ways,” he says. “Now that I’m back on stage, I’m getting my old chops back.”

The new show has been simmering, he says, for 20 years and is based on Hoch’s Brooklyn neighborhood, which has been undergoing a whole lot of changes. Some would call it gentrification.

Hoch says it’s more akin to colonialization. He has a whole, complex theory about how the rich fleeing cities for the suburbs then clamoring to get back into the cities is akin to a Medieval feudal society.

“Why neighborhoods become more expensive and why people from all over the country flock into cities, not for economic reasons but for luxury reasons and for creative and artistic reasons, is complicated and heavy,” Hoch says. “One of the things I like to say is gentrification is an excuse not to say the word `colonialization.’ People think that once a place has been colonized, it can’t be colonized again. But it can — again and again. That’s what’s happening.”

At readings of the play, whether in Berkeley or in the nation’s capital, audiences are responding and sticking around for the post-show discussion.

“Last March in Berkeley, I couldn’t leave the theater because people kept telling me about this happening in Oakland and San Francisco and parts of Berkeley. There’s a major economic and demographic shift happening, and it’s creating movement and displacement — it affects everybody.”

The topic is so relevant, in fact, that Hoch says he’s only telling part of the story.
“It became clear as I was making the show, which is all true, that there’s so much I may have to do Part 2 and Part 3.”

Here are some random Hoch thoughts on his art and his life.

On directing his multi-character play Till the Break of Dawn: “Since I wasn’t performing in it, I thought it would be less work. Ha! It was 50,000 times the work because I was writing and directing, which was not my intention in the first place. Don’t know if I’ll do that again soon. It was not a mistake, but it was just an incredible amount of work and demand on my mental capacity. Then I thought, `Now I can go do a solo show. That’ll be easy.’ Now I’m finding it’s 50,000 times the amount of work of writing and directing. I have a new appreciation for directors and the alleviation of all the pressure not to have to think about certain things.”

On working with director Tony Taccone: “He’s really, really smart and sharp. We yell at each other. We’re just New Yorkers. Yelling is just conversation. We’re old-school New Yorkers.”

On the final result of Til the Break of Dawn: I think I did OK as a director and pretty good as a playwright. Could have done better in both. I’m really hard on myself. I also think that I achieved something pretty amazing. That was proven by the reaction of the incredible audiences that came to the show. Again, I managed to bring a young, diverse audience into a theater that was completely moved and really inspired by the play.”

On the evolution of hip-hop theater: “Hip-hop is such a loaded word, loaded with the wrong cultural references because of mainstream commercial culture. A lot of times, hip-hop theater is perceived by regional or nonprofit or for-profit theater world as a novelty. Or as music. People expect breakdancers to come out. It’s unfortunate because what’s happening in the meantime is that this entire dialogue, this language and canon from the hip-hop generation is being ignored. My fear is that the stories of the hip-hop generation — forget the breakdancers and rappers — is not going to be popular until 500 years from now. That’s unfortunate because these stories are immediate and urgent and necessary. When the stories are embraced, they’re embraced as a novelty or a one-shot deal, not as a movement, a genre or a generational niche or aesthetic. They fill the color slot for the season. Or this is the show to write the grant to get the young audience in. It’s that black and white. It really is.”

On the necessity of researching a play: “No research. I don’t like to read. I carry around a stack of articles, but I didn’t read all of them. They reinforce what I’m already doing.”

On mounting another solo show 10 years after the highly successful Jails, Hospitals & Hip-hop: “Am I 10 years smarter? I’d like to think so. My effectiveness at distilling monologues is a lot faster. It takes less time for me to think about how to distill the many ideas I have for a character into a monologue, which is a good thing. On the downside, it takes a lot longer to memorize the script. And yeah, it’s physically demanding. I don’t remember it being this physically demanding in rehearsal. I remember it in performance and in an eight-show week. But not before the show opens. I’m exhausted.”

Hoch’s Taking Over continues through Feb. 10 on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $33 to $69. Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

Here’s Hoch reading his 9/11 poem “Corner Talk” on “Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam” on HBO. Language is R-rated, so watch or don’t at your discretion.

Here’s another “Def Poetry Jam” clip, with Hoch defining what hip-hop is (or isn’t) in the poem PSA.

American Conservatory Theater artistic director Carey Perloff didn’t mince words when introducing playwright Tom Stoppard Saturday morning at a Koret Visiting Artist Series event. She called him the “greatest writer in the English-speaking language.”

Indeed the 70-year-old Stoppard, outfitted in light-brown slacks and jacket with vibrant red socks, has an extraordinary body of dramatic work, stretching back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1967 to his latest Broadway hit, Rock ‘n’ Roll, which follows closely on the heels of last year’s New York triumph, the Tony-winning, three-part epic The Coast of Utopia.

Much of Saturday’s discussion, in front of a full house, centered on Rock ‘n’ Roll, which takes Stoppard back to his native Czechoslovakia. Here are some highlights.

On writing Rock ‘n’ Roll, which goes from Prague Spring in 1968 to the fall of Communism in 1990: “A play writes itself, but you give it a lot of help. The play tells you what it wants to be about and which way it wants to go. Rock ‘n’ Roll is largely about Czechoslovakia, but threaded through is a love story, which is actually out of sight too long, That’s what it’s really about. I intended to push the plot forward to 1997, but by the time the love story is played out in 1990, the play had no interest in going beyond that.”

On his favorite thing written about Rock ‘n’ Roll during its London run: “A journalist wrote that after the play, she cried all the way home. That’s what you want a play about politics to do.”

On the art of dramatic storytelling: “Almost every story is two stories enfolded. You have the play going on, which is transient, ephemeral. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, when the play begins, it’s 1968 and the Soviet Empire is a fact of life. It looks permanent, but it’s not. Then there’s the other story that has entirely to do with human behavior and the way of being human. That’s why the love story made it impossible for the political story to have any juice left.”

On the writing process: “The older I get, the more I sense that you really have to be brave enough to know less than what you think you need to know to write the play. If you start telling it, you end up with something brittle. I’ve written work like that. I know I have. The difference between a good play and a bad play or a good production and a bad production is that the good ones get better as they age and the not-so-good ones get worse. Plays that are true to themselves are never quite ready, but they get more ready the more you do them.”

On going back to Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism: “I had never been back to my birthplace. My mother had died five years earlier, and her death released me, gave me permission to go. While she lived she didn’t want to look back. There’s so much I didn’t know about her and her family. It was ignorance I was happy to live in. I didn’t care to invigilate my mother.”

While in Czechoslovakia: “My father was a doctor, and as Hitler was getting closer, the chief doctor got all the Jewish doctors out of the country. We ended up in Singapore, just before Pearl Harbor. Ten years ago, when I was back in Czechoslovakia, I met with the chief doctor’s daughter. When she was five, she put her hand through a glass pane, and apparently all the children asked for my father. He sewed up her cut, and she showed me the scar. The scar on this lady’s hand is the only thing I’d got from my dead father…There’s real life handing me a superb novelistic or dramatic trick.”

On consistent threads through his work: “I now see I identify this mania for cross-reference in a given play. That seems to be something I find deeply attractive dramatically. My plays are full of shuttle-and-loom back and forth.”

Perloff reminded Stoppard that he once answered an ACT MFA student’s question, “What do you most value in an actor?” with “Clarity of utterance.” Stoppard elaborates: “That ought to be a given but seldom is. Actors, on principle, refer to say “if” at the beginning of a sentence. They think they say it, but they never do. If fuzzy logic has its place in the world, I supposed fuzzy dialogue has its place.”
Perloff: “But not in your plays.”
Stoppard: “No.”

On working on an adaptation of Chekhov’s Ivanov: “I love doing it, searching for the utterance – how to say it. It’s an immensely difficult thing. I don’t read Russian and work from a literal translation. I know this work has a deep significance, but I’m not exactly sure why. I sit at my desk (I tend to work at night) putting the literal translation into exactly right English. I go to bed thinking, `That went well. As good as I can get it. Chekhov would be delighted.’ Come back in the morning, and it’s as if the Polish au pair girl had re-written it. I can only do this work for a couple of hours at a stretch or I lose contact with the English language. You’re either too close to it or too far away.

On something strange happening while working on the Chekhov: “I’m interested in the aside. Ten years ago, adapting The Seagull, Dorn (the doctor) is alone on stage talking. I worried about whom he was talking to. Do you look the audience in the eye or just say the speech? I found that breaking the fourth wall doesn’t break the play. The play carries on undeterred, and that goes against logic.”

I can always tell whether a theater year has been good or not so good when I sit down to hammer out my Top 10 list. If I can summon five or more shows simply from memory, it’s a good year. This year’s entire list came almost entirely from memory (which is a feat in itself as the old noggin’ ain’t what it used to be), so it was a good year indeed.

Here’s the countdown leading to my No. 1 pick of the year.

10. Anna Bella Eema, Crowded Fire Theatre Company — Three fantastic actresses, Cassie Beck, Danielle Levin and Julie Kurtz, brought Lisa D’Amour’s tone poem of a play to thrilling life.

9. First Person Shooter, SF Playhouse and Playground – What a good year for SF Playhouse. This original play by local writer Aaron Loeb brought some powerhouse drama to its examination of violent video games and school violence.

8. Bulrusher, Shotgun Players – Berkeley’s own Eisa Davis’ eloquent play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, turned the Northern California dialect of Boontling into poetic drama as it told the story of an outcast young woman finding her place in the world.

7. Avenue Q, Best of Broadway/SHN – Hilarious and irreverent, this puppet-filled musical by Jeff Marx, Robert Lopez and Jeff Whitty made you believe in friendship, life after college and the joys of puppet sex.

6. Jesus Hopped the `A’ Train, SF Playhouse – It took a while for Stephen Adly Guirgis’ intense drama to make it to the Bay Area, but the wait was worth it, if only for Berkeley resident Carl Lumbly in the central role of a murderer who may have seen the error of his ways. And note: This is the second SF Playhouse show on the list.

5. Emma, TheatreWorks _ Paul Gordon’s sumptuous, funny and, of course, romantic adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel came marvelously to life as a musical, with a star-making performance by Pleasanton native Lianne Marie Dobbs.

4. Argonautika, Berkeley Repertory Theatre _ Mary Zimmerman’s athletic retelling of the Jason and the Argonauts myth fused beauty and muscle and impeccable storytelling into a grand evening of theater.

3. Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People, Word for Word – Actually, the second half of Strangers We Know, this stage adaptation of Lorrie Moore’s short story was brilliantly directed by Joel Mullenix and performed by Patricia Silver and Sheila Balter.

2. Man and Superman, California Shakespeare Theater _ This unbelievably vivid version of George Bernard Shaw’s massive existentialist comedy benefited from superior direction by Jonathan Moscone and an impeccable cast headed by Elijah Alexander and Susannah Livingston.

1. The Crowd You’re in With, Magic Theatre _ The team of playwright Rebecca Gilman and director Amy Glazer fused into brilliance with this slice-of-life meditation on why we make the choices we make in our lives. Local luminaries Lorri Holt and Charles Shaw Robinson brought incredible humor and tenderness to their roles, and T. Edward Webster in the lead managed to make ambivalence compelling.

Now it’s your turn. Please post your favorite theater moments of 2007 — no geographical limitations, just good theater.