Category Archives: Rod Gnapp

Cal Shakes’ Shrew anything but tame

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Kissed and cursed: Erica Sullivan is Katherine and Slate Holmgren is Petruchio in the California Shakespeare Theater production of The Taming of the Shrew. Below: The excellent supporting cast includes (from left) Liam Vincent, Dan Clegg, Danny Scheie and Nicholas Pelczar as suitors to the lovely Bianca. Photos by Kevin Berne.Photos by Kevin Berne

If you think you’ve seen The Taming of the Shrew, you might want to think again. Director Shana Cooper’s production – the season-closer for the California Shakespeare Theater – is fresh, feisty and full of insight. Many a Shrew can make you cringe, but very few, like this one, can actually make you lose yourself in the comedy, the provocation and the genuine emotion underneath it all.

Cooper brings a sense of contemporary flash and fun to the production, from the bright yellow accents in Scott Dougan’s double-decker set (backed by a colorful billboard-like ad for a product called “Tame”) to the zippy song mash-ups in the sound design by Jake Rodriguez. The music is especially fun. You can hear strains of Madonna’s “Material Girl” followed by a flash of the “Wonder Woman” theme song one minute and revel in almost an entire number (“Tom, Dick or Harry”) from Kiss Me Kate, the next. In this tale of love that is purchased, battled over and maybe even deeply felt, the song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” takes on intriguing textures, both comic and dramatic. Even the lighting by York Kennedy has a crystal-clear energy all its own.

The real miracle of Cooper’s production is that there are interesting characters in it other than feral lovers Kate (Erica Sullivan) and Petruchio (Slate Holmgren). Credit this to successful direction and a superb cast full of some of the Bay Area’s most versatile comedians. Of particular note are the suitors to Kate’s beauty queen little sister, Bianca (Alexandra Henrikson): the tailor Gremio (Danny Scheie), dapper dan Hortensio (Liam Vincent) and intellectual Lucentio (Nicholas Pelczar). When the action shifts away from the central taming story, it doesn’t feel like we’re just biding time until we get back. Even the servants – Dan Clegg as Tranio, Dan Hiatt as Grumio, Joan Mankin in a trio of nicely etched roles – feel richer than usual. Rod Gnapp in the thankless role of Kate and Bianca’s father, even emerges more fully fleshed out than usual.

Scheie, as usual, gets away with comic murder. Even the way he says the name of his beloved, Bee-ANK-uh, gets a laugh to say nothing of what he does with the phrase “turkey cushions.” Pelczar, Clegg and Theo Black as Biondello have an inspired bit of shtick in the first act involving the exchange of hats. The Marx Brothers would be proud. Almost as good is the timing of Clegg and Pelczar exchanging clothes, undressed to their matching skivvies for the line beginning, “In brief…”

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There are so many wonderful details in this production that its 2 1/2 hours zip by. When Petruchio is late for his wedding, a description of his wild attire precedes his arrival, building up certain expectations that costumer Katherine O’Neill more than meets when he actually steps on stage. The outfit should be savored as a surprise, but let’s just say that amid the Saran Wrap there’s a starring role for Holmgren’s left butt cheek. Hilarious.

There is particular satisfaction in the richness of the Kate and Petruchio scenes. Their first scene together, which received a well-earned round of applause at Saturday’s autumnally temperate opening-night performance, is a prolonged seduction as much as it is an intense fight. Cooper, with the help of movement coach Erika Chong Shuch and fight director Dave Maier, turns it into a memorably acrobatic dance that infuses every line of dialogue with meaning. And it’s sexy as hell, thanks to Sullivan and Holmgren’s expert execution.

The trajectory of Kate and Petruchio’s love story – and that’s really what it is here – is clear from the first time they see each other, and each, almost in spite of themselves, likes what they see. Sullivan and Holmgren have red-hot chemistry from the very first, and they’re so good together you really do want them together. Kate’s got emotional troubles and Petruchio’s actually terrified by her, a state incompatible with his alpha-male bravado. But they both dive in, each a little crazed and carried away until they reach an understanding about how deeply they are willing to invest in their union and in each other. The taming here is mutual, and in the end it isn’t taming so much as maturing. Theirs will not be a shallow marriage of arrangement, though that’s how it begins. Unlike Bianca’s meet-cute relationship with her groom, Kate and Petruchio will likely still love on another tomorrow.

[bonus interview]
I interviewed director Shana Cooper and Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
California Shakespeare Theater’s The Taming of the Shrew continues through Oct. 16 at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda (one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel on Highway 24). Free shuttle to and from the Orinda BART station and the theater. Tickets are $35-$66. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

Tiny but terrifying: Go ask Alice

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Rod Gnapp and Carrie Paff work out some kinks in their relationship in the Marin Theatre Company production of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice. Below: Andrew Hurteau as Brother Julian. Photos by Kevin Berne

The legend of Tiny Alice looms large. Edward Albee’s notorious 1964 follow-up to his monster Broadway smash Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf baffled critics and continued to cause kerfuffles for years to come (especially when William Ball, in the early days of American Conservatory Theater played fast and loose with the script).

This is not one of Albee’s frequently produced scripts, and after seeing Marin Theatre Company’s riveting production, it’s easy to see why. This play is a monster. It’s not like Albee hasn’t created monsters before (he loves to rile the beasts in many ways), but this one is especially weighty.

Notions of God, faith, corruption and the supernatural all bear down for three acts and three solid hours, which means a serious evening of theater. It’s not that there aren’t laughs – how could there not be, the Catholic Church is involved (cheap shot, sorry)? – Albee is such a sharp writer and this cast is so astute that chuckles and outright laughs are frequent (and that can make the difference between endurance and enjoyment).

But this is a challenging play to say the least. Act 1 is familiar territory as Albee introduces his players, his zest for zingers and a juicy central mystery. In Act 2, the ground begins to wobble, and by Act 3, the ground has given way altogether. The monster, perhaps literally speaking, is loose.

Directing this play has been a decades-long obsession for MTC Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, and his production clearly demonstrates the guiding hand of someone to whom the play’s mysteries are, if not clear, at least illuminated.

Minadakis has said he couldn’t do the play until he had just the right actors, and it’s good thing he waited as long as he did. The quintet at work on stage here is doing some mighty powerful work.

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Andrew Hurteau is the emotionally and spiritually conflicted center of the play as Brother Julian, a lay brother whose crisis of faith – seemingly in his past but powerful enough to institutionalize him for a number of years – makes him especially vulnerable to the machinations of those whose motives may not be pure.

The motives of the Cardinal (Richard Farrell) are quite clear. The Church has been promised $20 billion dollars from the estate of a young woman who, working through her lawyer, wants to spend time with a representative of the Church. That turns out to be Brother Julian. If Alice takes a shine to him, the Cardinal is a hero, and the Church is billions of dollars richer.
From their first, bizarre meeting, Julian and Alice create a bond. It would be hard not to be intrigued by Alice, especially as played by the beguiling Carrie Paff (looking gorgeous in elegant costumes by Fumiko Bielefeldt).

The power dynamic between Paff and Hurteau, sometimes charged with sadistic thrill (Alice) and sometimes with wrenching heartbreak (Julian), never ceases to fascinate.

Alice also works a strange dynamic with her lawyer, played with aggressive intelligence and chilling malice by Rod Gnapp. They have a sexual relationship, but they’re in each other’s heads to a dangerous degree.

Alice’s trusty butler is always on hand to provide a quirky line or a bit of comfort – and Mark Anderson Phillips is a comfort indeed. He makes Butler (yes, that’s the butler’s name) as fascinating as everyone else, even though he functions on the periphery of the action. He, like Julian, seems a little more human than the devils conspiring to win the lay brother’s soul for reasons they won’t divulge until it’s too late (for Julian).

J.B. Wilson’s set (lit beautifully by Kurt Landisman actually becomes another character in the show. As Julian becomes more and more immersed in Alice’s world, he gets to know her mansion and the miniature replica of it that dominates the main drawing room.

I won’t say I understand where Albee is going with Tiny Alice, but I will say I enjoyed the ride. Asking questions about the nature of God and man’s relationship to spirituality is fascinating, especially in the hands of a compelling writer. Brother Julian, so fiercely and compassionately played by the astonishing Hurteau, has a tenuous relationship with God at best. The world of hallucination and reality are not comfortably defined for him, nor are they for us.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice continues through June 26 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $32-$53. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org for information.

Magic Up Against some funny creeps

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Pamela Gaye Walker (left) is Janice and Sarah Nealis is Eliza in Theresa Rebeck’s incendiary workplace comedy What We’re Up Against at the Magic Theatre. Below: Rod Gnapp (left) is Ben and James Wagner is Weber. Photos by Jennifer Reiley

Playwright Theresa Rebeck, a master of barbed contemporary dialogue, conducts an interesting experiment in the Magic Theatre’s world premiere of What We’re Up Against.

Her Petri dish is a big-city architectural firm – all glass and metal in Skip Mercier’s sleek, mostly black, white and gray set. Her chosen bacteria: the architects, all of whom turn out to be antiseptic assholes.

To stir the chemical reactions, Rebeck introduces elements commonly found in the workplace: power plays, raging sexism, vaulting ambition, moronic behavior and that ever-powerful agent, greed.

The architects at this particular firm are mostly isolated from the outside world. We hear about some client interaction, but the focus of their activity is internal. There’s not talk of spouses, significant others, children, parents, pets, groceries or dry cleaning. This nearly two-hour, two-act drama (with some hearty if stinging comedy) has a sharp focus and that is unpleasant behavior from unpleasant people.

“This is no one’s finest or most shining hour,” one architect says toward the end, and that’s so true. But it’s fascinating to watch people being ruthless in everyday, creepily corporate ways.

From the first scene, between Warren David Keith as Stu, a boozy senior architect and Rod Gnapp as Ben, a less senior but vitally important architect, we get hammered by Rebeck’s sharp dialogue.

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You can hear Mamet-like rhythms in the chatter – as when speakers interrupt themselves mid-sentence – but Rebeck’s dialogue is more engaging, less slick. Stu, who is enormously threatened by women in the workplace, talks a lot about his balls (especially about them being cut off) and about systems and rules. Both men say things like “What I’m saying” or “I’m telling you” or “Listen!” They desperately want to be heard (and acknowledged or, better yet, praised) but say the same thing over and over.

There’s discord at the firm because a hotshot young architect, Eliza (Sarah Nealis) is going against the corporate grain and not keeping her mouth shut. It’s not that she doesn’t have enough to do –she doesn’t have anything to do. With too much time on her hands and her abundant talent going untapped, she stirs up trouble.

The other woman in the firm, Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker), makes a feeble attempt to comfort the distraught younger woman, but she makes abundantly clear that just because they’re both women, they are not allies.

The one sort of superfluous character here is Weber (James Wagner), a golden boy who’s been at the firm a shorter time than Eliza. He talks a good game, like when discussing strip malls: “The human heart meets the void in these places and shops anyway.” And he can keep up with the scotch-swilling other boys, but he’s a dolt. “History is a fiction,” he says. “But it’s a sustainable fiction.” He serves his purpose in the plot, then he disappears.

Director Loretta Greco, the Magic’s artistic director, keeps the pace swift and the action intensely focused. She gets a superb performance from Nealis as the complex Eliza, who, you get the impression, would behave less horrifically if she were given the respect she deserves.

The amazing Gnapp goes on a verbal rampage in Act 2 about something central to the plot – air ducts in a mall remodel – and almost chokes himself on his words before observing, “It’s a relentless metaphor for why we can’t breathe.”

It’s interesting that the sexual element of the male-female dynamic in this workplace is barely addressed – perhaps that’s because Rebeck’s experiment is too focused. Sex is messy and real, and these people, in their slickly casual but expertly fitted clothing (by Alex Jaeger) are removed from the reality outside Rebeck’s microscopic lens.

This laboratory yields compelling results, but the experiment seems unfinished. The play ends, but the bad cells, you can feel, just keep multiplying.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Theresa Rebeck’s What We’re Up Against continues through March 6 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $44-$60. Call 415-441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org.

Entering heavenly Pastures

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The ensemble of Cal Shakes and Word for Word’s The Pastures of Heaven, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck book by Octavio Solis. Photos by Kevin Berne

 

Spectacular things are happening at the Bruns Amphitheater – on stage and off.

At long last, California Shakespeare Theater is getting a performance venue worthy of its status as one of the Bay Area’s foremost theater companies. Improvements to the Bruns include a new box office, new landscaping and, most importantly, a beautiful new 7,850-square-foot building to house its food operations and some spectacular bathrooms (if you ever used the bathrooms in the old endlessly “temporary” facility, you’ll appreciate just how spectacular these new facilities really are).

The improvements aren’t quite done yet, but they’re already upping the ante on the Cal Shakes experience – and just in time for Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone’s 10-year anniversary with the company.

So many things to celebrate ̶ not the least of which is the world-premiere production on the Bruns stage.

There’s a palpable sense of the new at Cal Shakes, and that extends to Octavio Solis’ adaptation of the 1932 John Steinbeck novel The Pastures of Heaven, which is the first world premiere to take place at the Bruns. In translating this book for the stage, Cal Shakes turned to the one of the nation’s greatest literary and theatrical resources, which just happens to be across the bay in San Francisco: Word for Word Performing Arts Company. There’s no better company when it comes to adapting fiction for the stage.

But in keeping with the whole idea of making things new, Word for Word’s collaboration with Cal Shakes involves, for the first time, a playwright. Usually, the wizards at Word for Word adapt short works of fiction for the stage without changing a word of the author’s original text. That’s why they’re every writer’s favorite theater company. This time out, they’re working with a playwright, and it’s inevitable that the playwright will place his own literary and theatrical stamp on Steinbeck’s work.

So you end up with an extraordinary quartet of collaborators: Cal Shakes, Word for Word, celebrated San Francisco playwright Octavio Solis and a silent but very present John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck’s Heaven, published when the author was only 30, is a novel told in 10 thematically linked short stories (with a prologue and epilogue), and Solis’ adaptation more or less follows the structure of the book with some dramatic rearrangement. The result is a play that feels more like a complete novel than the actual novel does. A deeply human story of dreams and destiny, of flaws, foibles and failure, Pastures of Heaven, both on the page and on the stage, is a compelling and beautiful story shot through with the sadness of fantasy clashing with reality.

Directed with the emotional acuity and elegance we’ve come to expect from Moscone, these Pastures are rich with nearly three hours’ worth of fascinating stories and characters enlivened by a marvelous cast of blended Word for Word company members, Cal Shakes company members and newcomers.
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Set in a picturesque valley outside of Salinas, Las Pasturas del Cielo (“pastures of heaven”) was settled by a disenchanted 49er fleeing gold greed seeking an ideal home for many future generations, and though his vast family never quite materialized (he and his wife had only one son, and that son only had one son), the area grew into a thriving little farming community.

And where there’s community there’s drama, as we find out in Steinbeck’s pithy portraits of the valley’s inhabitants. There are so many vivid moments in this production that it’s impossible to catalogue them without simply reprinting Solis’ script. But some of the stand-outs include Rod Gnapp (seen at right with Charles Shaw Robinson) as Shark Wicks, a financial whiz with a big secret whose world collapses just as his wife’s world (so insightfully illuminated by Joanne Winter) expands into bold new emotional places. It’s also impossible to forget Amy Kossow’s portrayal of Hilda Van Deventer, a terrifying child whose mother (the invaluable Julie Eccles) has an unfortunate penchant for grief and endurance.

Madness and mental challenges play a surprisingly large role in the stories Steinbeck chooses to tell. Tobie Windham plays Tularecito, a somewhat deformed young man whose mental grasp of the world is tenuous but whose artistic talent is undeniable. The young man is forced to go to school, but his teacher (an animated Emily Kitchens) reveals an unbridled enthusiasm for the boy’s artwork and his grasp of the more supernatural elements of valley nights.
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Amid much serious subjects that includes curses, ghosts, religious fervor, death by snakebites, filicide, financial ruin, and the depression of dashed dreams, the play takes a break for a chapter told completely in song. With music by Obadiah Eaves and musical direction by Julie Wolf, actors Winter and Catherine Castellanos (seen at right) play the Lopez sisters, who fail at farming and at running a diner. They finally find success in a centuries-old profession, and they do it singing and dancing (movement by Erika Chong Shuch) all the way.

Aside from wonderful guitar playing at the top of Act 2 by Richard Theiriot, there are no more musical interludes, alas. But we continue to delve into the stories of people – among them are those played by Dan Hiatt, Andy Murray and Charles Shaw Robinson – coming to California with a dream and inevitably having to reconfigure their lives when too much reality interferes.

This is an ambitious, abundantly rewarding new work that combines delicious theatricality (just watch the way 11 actors populate an entire valley and the way Annie Smart’s amazingly precise dollhouse set gives them room to do just that) with a literary pedigree that fuses Steinbeck’s muscular yet poetic prose with Solis’ lyrical, humor-tinged script.

The Pastures of Heaven tills fertile ground. Notions of destiny and legacy weigh heavily in these stories, but so do undercurrents of hope, community and determination. And this powerhouse collaboration yields a new dramatic work that should grow into a long, distinguished life on stage.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Cal Shakes/Word for Word’s The Pastures of Heaven continues through June 27 at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel in Orinda. Tickets are $34 to $70. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org for information.

Theater review: `Mauritius’

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Extended through June 28

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Zoë Winters (left) is Jackie, James Wagner (center) is Dennis and Warren David Keith is Philip in the Magic Theatre’s season-ending production of Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck. Photos by davidallenstudio.com

Director Greco leaves dramatic stamp on sticky `Mauritius’
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Two little tiny pieces of paper cause a whole lot of trouble for the five characters in Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a drama about – if you can believe it – stamp collecting.

Except the play isn’t really about stamp collecting. It’s about greed and ownership and, to a lesser degree, about family responsibility and the art of the grudge.

As she did in her hit play The Scene (seen in the Bay Area at SF Playhouse last season), Rebeck demonstrates a flair for vivid dialogue, with definite nods in the fragmented direction of David Mamet and Harold Pinter.

But Rebeck has more flair for comedy than either of those writers, which she amply displays in Mauritius, receiving its local premiere as the season-ender for the Magic Theatre.

By infusing her con-artist drama with some genuine emotion, Rebeck invites laughs and gives the game playing a comic edge that ultimately makes her more Coen Brothers than Mamet (thank the merciful heavens – one Mamet is quite enough).

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With the quick movement of some furniture and the sliding of some panels, James Faerron’s nicely designed set flips us between the play’s two locations. The first is a stamp collector’s shop run by Philip (Warren David Keith) and inhabited by Dennis (James Wagner), a philatelist always on the con, and Sterling (Rod Gnapp), a stamp-loving gangster type (you can tell he’s a bad guy because he wears black and has ugly gold buckles on his shoes).

The second location is the cluttered home, where Jackie (Zoë Winters) lived until very recently with her cancer-stricken mother. With her mother gone, Jackie is sorting through the remaining personal effects with the not very helpful assistance of her older half-sister, Mary (Arwen Anderson, above left with Winters).

Conflict arises in the stamp shop and the home because of two little stamps worth millions of dollars. They’re referred to as the “one- and two-cent post office” issued by the British government on the tropical Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. They’re said to be the “crown jewels of philately” and it just so happens that Jackie has found both stamps in album that belonged to her late mother.

Mary (you can tell she’s a prig because she wears an ankle-length skirt and speaks to everyone as if she were the teacher addressing second graders) claims the stamps belong to her because they were her grandfather’s, and he was like a father to her.

Jackie has her own plans for the stamps and, with the dubious help of Dennis, sets off a series of events that lead to Sterling’s involvement and Philip’s interference. It seems there’s a years-old grudge between Sterling and Philip that involved an actual woman rather than stamps.

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Beautifully played by Gnapp (right, with Winters), Sterling is a goon with intellect. He’s a gutter mouth and a soft touch where the Mauritius stamps are concerned. But Philip (believably drawn by Keith), is no patsy, and he will not see his status as King of the Stamp Nerds threatened.

At the middle of the melee is Jackie, embodied with wounded passion and vulnerable strength by Winters. This is a young woman who has been treated badly by life. Her home life was a disaster, her mother’s death was messy and her older sister is a creep. She sees the stamps as her ticket to a new life – wash the slate clean and start over again.

But that would be too easy. Everybody’s got a con (whether they know it or not), so Rebeck’s play keeps unfolding in surprising ways.

The first act of director Loretta Greco’s production is frustratingly slow — partly because Rebeck doesn’t do the Mamet-staccato dialogue all that well and partly because it’s hard to like anybody on stage — but things perk up dramatically in Act 2, though Rebeck disappoints in the end by too clearly delineating the villains who had previously shown more depth of character and had reasonable motivations.

Greco’s ensemble makes smart choices, especially when it comes to knowing how to play the drama and the tension against the laughs. Winters is especially adept at this particular game.

This has been a rocky season for the Magic, but it’s nice to see the season ending on such a solid note with a provocative, well-produced drama.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Magic Theatre’s Mauritius continues through June 28 at the Fort Mason Center, Building D, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street. Tickets are $40-$45. Rush tickets for people younger than 30, students, seniors and educations: $10 half-hour prior to performance, subject to availability. Call 800-595-4849 or visit www.magictheatre.org for information.