Sacred and profane: much to mull in Playhouse’s Christians

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Pastor Paul (Anthony Fusco) reveals an urgent change in his faith during a sermon at his mega-church in Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at San Francisco Playhouse. Below: The cast of The Christians includes (from left) Millie Brooks as Jenny, Lance Gardner as Assistant Pastor Joshua, Fusco as Pastor Paul, Stephanie Prentice as Elizabeth and Warren David Keith as Elder Jay. Photos by Jessica Palopoli

While the San Francisco Playhouse audience was delving into Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, a powerful, fraught examination of faith and organized religion, protestors were shutting down airports in demonstrations against the Trump administration’s ban on immigrants from countries whose religions posed a perceived threat to our nation. In other words, the spiritual and emotional chaos inside and outside the theater were well matched.

Questions of faith – why we believe what we believe, why we want or need to believe what we believe, how we choose to live in our faith – will never be answered because each human being contains a multitude of answers at any given moment. Faith is powerful, elusive and subject to influence by ego, fear, instability, anger, desperation, peer pressure, greed and joy. In only 90 concentrated minutes, Hnath (one of the country’s hottest playwrights) manages to touch on all of that and provoke some hefty, complicated and unresolvable responses.

The fact that church is already so much like theater is exploited in the set-up for Hnath’s play. For the SF Playhouse production that opened on Saturday, Jan. 28, director and set designer Bill English turns the theater into a sleek contemporary mega-church somewhere in America in the 21st century. It’s the kind of church, we’re told, that has a cafe and a bookshop in the lobby and a parking lot so big you’ll get lost if you’re not careful. Almost as prominent as the abstract stained-glass windows are the video monitors hovering above the choir (played here by members of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco). The setting feels so real that when Pastor Paul asks us to bow our heads in prayer, I looked around the audience half expecting audience member/congregants to do his bidding.

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As you might expect in a church of this size, the speakers use microphones, a detail that will come to complicate the play as it takes on more dimension. But at its start, The Christians is simply a re-creation of a Sunday church service. Pastor Paul (the always authentic and compelling Anthony Fusco invites us to a day of celebration: all debts incurred by the church in the building of its massive new home have been paid. He also drops a bombshell revelation: God has revealed to him that there is no such thing as hell – if anything, we are in hell now and striving, through Christ, to evolve heavenward.

Such a profound change in belief does not sit well with Assistant Pastor Joshua (Lance Gardner), who immediately engages Pastor Paul in a scripture-laden debate. From here, the straightforward sermon-as-play deviates, and Paul becomes our guide through the fallout form his revelation. Interestingly, Hnath never allows the play to change settings: all the ensuing scenes take place in the pulpit and with the characters holding the microphones as if they were still in front of the congregation. At times, as when Pastor Paul is in discussion with Elder Jay (Warren David Keith), a member of the church’s board of directors, or with his wife, Elizabeth (Stephanie Prentice), they are speaking face to face with microphones in hand as if performing a duet minus the music. It’s a bizarre visual and is somewhat detrimental to the emotional impact of the scenes, but the notion of these discussions and debates playing out in an amplified and public way has an unnerving effect. And then there are the tangles and and dangers of those microphone chords getting in the way – communication is never easy here.

If God can reveal to Paul that there is no hell, he can just as easily reveal to Joshua that there is. When a single mother congregant (Millie Brooks) express her conflicted feelings about both ways of thinking, Paul fails to provide compelling answers, and his church spirals into full schism. Hnath doesn’t go for clear heroes and villains here, and the public beliefs are allowed to show their personal roots. There’s nothing public here that isn’t also bound to deeply held beliefs from childhood or woven into our most intimate family relationships.

Faith is such a complex thing. It can elevate and buffer us from the challenges of life. It can even promise eternal life with other believers, all the while dividing and alienating us in this life. How we invest our faith is among life’s most challenging issues, and in this particular moment, it seems to be dividing the nation and, indeed, the world, as it has for seemingly ever. That’s one of the reasons Pastor Paul’s revelation is so divisive. It’s so simple and, in may ways, removes the intricate structure of organized religion from the heaven-hell-sinner-saint equation. “We create an insurmountable distance,” he says, “where there is no distance at all.” Amen.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Lucas Hnath’s The Christians continues through March 11 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Theater Dogs’ Best of 2016

Best of 2016

The theater event that shook my year and reverberated through it constantly didn’t happen on Bay Area stage. Like so many others, I was blown away by Hamilton on Broadway in May and then on repeat and shuffle with the original cast album (and, later in the year, the Hamilton Mix Tape) ever since. Every YouTube video, official or fan made, became part of my queue, and checking Lin-Manuel Miranda’s incredibly busy Twitter feed has become a daily ritual. Hamilton is everything they say it is and more. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, the score that continually reveals its brilliance and a bond with friends, family and other fans. In a year in which hope seemed to physically shrivel and evaporate, Hamilton keeps bolstering my faith in art, in theater, in musical theater, in theater artists and even in this messy country of ours. The show has yet to fail in delighting, surprising or moving me, and I plan to continue testing that limit.

Now that Hamilton is a bona fide phenomenon, the conquering expansion is under way. There’s a company wowing them in Chicago with another set for San Francisco (and later Los Angeles) next spring as part of the SHN season. If you don’t already have your tickets, good luck. I’ll be entering the ticket lottery daily because there’s no conceivable way I can get enough of this show.

Shifting focus back home, theater in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a marvel, which is really something given the hostile economic environment arts groups are facing around here. I saw less theater this year (while Theater Dogs celebrated its 10th anniversary in August) and took some time off to reevaluate my theater reviewing future. The upshot is I’m still here, still reviewing but on a more limited scale given the demands of my day job. I’ve been writing about Bay Area theater for 24 years (25th anniversary in September 2017!) and love it too much to stop, and that’s the truth. With so many extraordinary artists here and an ever-intriguing roster of visitors, who could stop trying to spread the good word?

With that in mind, here are some of my favorite Bay Area theatergoing experiences of 2016. (click on the show title to read the original review)

A good year for San Francisco Playhouse

Making notes about the most memorable shows I saw this year, one company kept coming up over and over: San Francisco Playhouse. Talk about hitting your stride! They kicked off 2016 with a mind-blowingly creepy show, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, a drama about virtual reality that blurred all kinds of lines between theater, audience, reality and fantasy. Thinking about this production, expertly directed by Bill English and designed by Nina Ball, still gives me the shivers. Two other shows made a powerful mark on the SF Playhouse stage as well: Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal, a blend of drama and dance in the service of exploring football and masculinity, and Theresa Rebeck’s Seared about a hot little restaurant and its chef and loyal staff. I could also add the Playhouse’s musicals, which continue to grow in stature and quality as seen in City of Angels and She Loves Me. But I’ll just give those honorable mention so that one theater doesn’t take up half of this list.

Local playwrights shine

Let’s hear it for our local scribes who continue to devise startlingly good shows. Each of these writers should inspire any prospective audience member to check out whatever they happen to be working on.

Christopher Chen has a brain that knows no boundaries. His Caught, part of Shotgun Players’ stunning repertory season, was like an intellectual amusement park park ride as fun as it was provocative and challenging. Chen had another new show this year, but on a different scale. His Home Invasion was given small productions in a series of people’s living rooms as part of 6NewPlays a consortium of six writers creating new work under the auspices of the Intersection for the Arts Incubator Program. Directed by M. Graham Smith the play is set in a series of living rooms (how appropriate), but its realm expands way beyond its setting. The concepts of multidimensionality that come up in the play truly are mind altering, and what an extraordinary experience to get to watch such amazing actors – Kathryn Zdan and Lisa Anne Porter among them – in such an intimate space.

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb also took us into a home with a new play this year, but this home was built primarily in the theatrical imagination (and in the wondrously impressionistic sets by Sean Riley). In A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry, Nachtrieb and his solo actor, the always-remarkable Danny Scheie, the audience got to play tourists as we moved from room to room in the most unique historical home tour imaginable. Commissioned by Z Space and written expressly for Scheie, this experience was so delectable we can only hope it will return for another tour of duty.

Not only is Lauren Gunderson a wonderful playwright, she also happens to be the most produced living playwright in the country this season. One of the reasons for that is the new play she wrote with Margot Melcon, Miss Bennett: Christmas at Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice that delivers a feel-good Christmas experience with snap rather than sap (especially in the top-notch Marin Theatre Company production). Gunderson’s love of science and literature combined with her grace, intelligence, good humor and prodigious dramatic talents should continue yielding marvelous results for years to come.

Big drama at Thick House

Two companies in residence at Thick House continually do fantastic things on its small stage. Crowded Fire hit two shows out of the proverbial ballpark this year: Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s I Call My Brothers. Both plays explore different aspects of race, religion and being an outsider in this country, and both were powerful in their of-the-moment relevance and dramatic impact. The other company in residence at Thick House that dazzled is Golden Thread Productions, whose Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat by Yussef El Guindi delivered action and depth in its exploration of what it means, among other things, to be Muslim in this country. It should be noted that a significant part of what made both I Call My Brothers and Our Enemies so good was the work of the marvelous actor Denmo Ibrahim.

A dazzling finale for Impact

This one makes me as sad as it does happy. As it wound down its work at LaVal’s Subterranean, Impact Theatre unleashed yet another brilliant Shakespeare reinvention. This time it was The Comedy of Errors meets Looney Tunes, and the results in director Melissa Hillman’s production were inventively hilarious and so spot-on it’s a wonder Yosemite Sam or Bugs Bunny didn’t make cameo appearances. Here’s hoping that Impact returns in some form or another sometime soon.

My favorite play this year

Let the record show that this year Berkeley Repertory Theatre was home to two of my least favorite theater experiences (a ponderous Macbeth starring Frances McDormand and a disoncertingly disappointing For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday) as well as my favorite local theater experience: Julia Cho’s Aubergine. Sensitively directed by Tony Taccone, this deeply moving play about families, loss and growing up was rich in quiet beauty and full of performances that allowed the understated to just be. Food and memory played a big part in the drama, but it really came down to who we are within the defining experiences of our parents and our own mortality. A gorgeous production of a gorgeous play that said as much in silence as it did in sound.

Holiday cheer in SF Playhouse’s sparkling She Loves Me

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Amalia Balash (Monqiue Hafen) and Georg Nowack (Jeffrey Brian Adams) find love in the streets of Budapest in front of Maraczek’s parfumerie in the musical She Loves Me, a San Francisco Playhouse production. Below: Shop clerk Ilona Ritter (Nanci Zoppi) is seduced by co-worker Steven Kodaly (Rodney Earl Jackson Jr.). Photos by Jessica Palopoli

The 1963 musical She Loves Me is just a little gem of a musical – full of melody and charm and camaraderie and romance. The recent Broadway revival made a case for the show as sturdy, funny showcase for actors who can perfectly balance realism and musical comedy in a way that makes the show feel intimate and lived in even while it traffics in song and dance.

Just in time for the holidays, San Francisco Playhouse polishes this gem to a sparkling shine. Director Susi Damilano and a fine ensemble of actors and musicians deliver the Playhouse’s most consistently rewarding musical yet.

Apparently Hungarian-born playwright Miklós László stumbled onto an irresistible storyline when he penned the play Parfumerie in 1937 about store clerks who loathe each other on sight without realizing they’ve already fallen in love through letters they’ve shared in a lonely hearts club. The play became the gold-standard 1940 Ernst Lubitsch movie The Shop Around the Corner starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, and just a few years later in 1949 it became the Judy Garland musical In the Good Old Summertime. Audiences apparently love being in the know about the protagonists long before they have any clue that fate and coincidence has mashed up their love lives and their work lives. (The 1998 Tom HanksMeg Ryan rom-com You’ve Got Mail is also a riff on the story, but…blech.)

Writer Joe Masteroff expertly adapted the original play for the Broadway stage with a perfectly calibrated score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (the duo that would have its biggest hit in Fiddler on the Roof) that features irresistible tunes. Just try to get the title song out of your head and “Will He Like Me?” is as emotionally honest a ballad as Broadway ever produced. The musical is so masterful (disarmingly so) it can make a sexual awakening at a library or the heart-expanding joy of vanilla ice cream into pure melodic joy.

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Damilano’s ebullient production features a wonderful five-piece band headed by music director David Aaron Brown that sounds much larger and fuller than it is, with rich violin, woodwinds, brass and accordion giving real warmth and vitality to the score. So from the moment the overture begins, the spell is cast, and Damilano and her actors never break it.

As the central lovers/fighters, Monique Hafen as Amalia and Jeffrey Brian Adams as Georg, have a nice chemistry that anchors the production and makes you care whether or not they end up together. They are both vocally assured, and the one-two punch of her “Vanilla Ice Cream” followed by his “She Loves Me” is sheer musical theater bliss.

For a small Budapest perfume shop, Maraczek’s employs a large number of clerks, but that’s good for the musical. MVP award goes to Joe Estlack as journeyman Ladislav Sipos, and also doubles as a wonderfully noodle-legged dancing waiter at the Café Imperial. And then there’s scene stealer Nanci Zoppi as Ilona Ritter, whose supposedly secret relationship with co-worker Steven Kodaly (Rodney Earl Jackson Jr.) leads her to heartbreak and then to glorious self-realization. Zoppi’s “I Resolve” and “A Trip to the Library” are stellar, and her duet with Hafen on “I Don’t Know His Name” is a beautiful moment of backroom bonding. Jackson is marvelously slinky on his two big numbers, the seductive “Ilona” and the FU to his coworkers, “Grand Knowing You.”

As the gruff but lovable Mr. Maraczek, Michael Gene Sullivan has a sweetly melancholic song (“Days Gone By”) and Nicholas J. Garland as young delivery boy Arpad is a constant bright spot, especially when he comes into his own on “Try Me.”

A jewel needs a showcase to really sparkle, and set designers Bill English and Jacquelyn Scott provide a marvelous world for these characters to inhabit. A Budapest street becomes the cosmetics-filled shop thanks to an efficient turntable, but further spins reveal a swanky nightclub (featuring a droll headwaiter played by Brian Herndon), and another portion of the set unfolds to reveal Amalia’s messy bedroom. It all looks great, assisted greatly by the lighting design of Thomas J. Munn.

Though it’s not a holiday show per se (it begins in the fall and ends on Christmas Eve), She Loves Me makes for ideal December/January entertainment. People squabble and suffer and ultimately come together in warmhearted ways, all the while singing charming songs. Sounds like a pretty ideal holiday to me.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
She Loves Me continues through Jan. 14 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $35-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Heat, sizzle fire up SF Playhouse’s Seared

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Chef Harry (Brian Dykstra, left) and server Rodney (Larry Powell) get ready for a big night at the restaurant in the world premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s Seared at San Francisco Playhouse. Below: Harry and Emily (Alex Sunderhaus), a consultant, argue over the future of the restaurant. Photos by Jessica Palopoli

I’m going to spoil something right off the bat about Theresa Rebeck’s fantastic new play Seared now receiving its world premiere from San Francisco Playhouse: there is no conventional romance. Just because the cast consists of one woman and three men does not mean there’s going to be a burgeoning love story or a sordid triangle or break-ups or make-ups. No, the central love story comes out of a friendship and business partnership between a chef and a money guy who open a small restaurant in Brooklyn.

This is a workplace story, and though it’s set entirely in the kitchen of the restaurant, it hits on big themes about that tricky intersection between artistic integrity and sustainable commercial success. The artist in this case is chef Harry (the superb and entirely believable Brian Dykstra), a genius behind the stove whose superb work fills the restaurant’s 16 settings every night and has started to garner the attention of the wider world. With a recent favorable mention in New York magazine, Harry’s partner, Mike (the ever-reliable and ever-wonderful Rod Gnapp) has brought in a consultant, Emily (a pitch-perfect Alex Sunderhaus), to save the little eatery from imminent demise.

Emily and Harry clash, but then again Harry clashes with just about everybody because that’s what he does. Everything is a fight with him except his interactions with the restaurant’s sole employee, server Rodney (an excellent Larry Powell), whose relaxed humor diffuses tension while masking his deep devotion to Harry and his own culinary skills.

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The world that Rebeck creates in the Playhouse commission is incredibly real, and not just because the fully functional set by Bill English is so convincing you half expect the dishes created up there to be passed around to salivating audience members. Rebeck’s world is fueled by ego and friendship and complicated interactions that are both volatile and tender, funny and deeply angry, and that’s a world that bears watching for more than two hours.

Rebeck’s play, flawlessly directed by Margarett Perry, is so involving that at a certain point in this darkly funny, deliciously detailed drama you expect an overheated audience member to stand up and shout something along the lines of, “Just cook the fucking scallops already!” While disruptive and inappropriate, that would also mark a triumph for Rebeck and her cast and creative team. Never has the creation of a seafood dish fueled such dramatic agony and tension. There’s really not much plot here – a struggling restaurant attempts to get into the black – but everything feels huge and important, a stovetop epic if you will, and it’s thrilling.

It’s that much easier to fall into this world because it is so perfectly and convincingly created. Of course English’s set helps (as do Robert Hand’s lights and Theodore J.J. Hulsker’s sound design), but Dykstra is thoroughly convincing has he chops and sautés and sauces with real knives and real flame. He has to act (powerfully) while not drawing blood or creating blisters or accidentally stabbing a costar. He does it all with such aplomb that our focus happily rests on the characters and their interactions.

When Dykstra’s Harry goes off on something (“No takers for the lamb – I hate the 21st century”), it’s like verbal fireworks. The thought of a $3 donut triggers one such speech, and to hear him talk about the wonder of butter is an epicurean/existential delight. He also rants about the artificiality of money (“the biggest lie ever perpetrated”) vs. the reality of food to great effect. But Harry’s not the only one with great moments. All the characters get them, even Emily, the seemingly slick consultant whose use of the words “amazing” and “impeccable” could inspire a drinking game. She goes off on Harry in an artist vs. asshole with talent rant that includes the zinger, “Every reasonably talented white man has been told he’s a genius.” Ouch. And hooray.

Seared turns out to be not unlike the dishes its chef creates: artfully made, crafted with the best possible ingredients and served with confident flair. That it’s so delicious and deeply satisfying makes it the haute cuisine of contemporary drama.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Theresa Rebeck’s Seared continues through Nov. 12 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Grins, gams and gumshoes in SF Playhouse Angels

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Private investigator Stone (Brandon Dahlquist, left) exclaims to mystery writer Stine (Jeffrey Brian Adams) that he would be nothing without him in the San Francisco Playhouse production of City of Angels. Below: Stine is seduced by movie studio secretary Donna (Monique Hafen). Photos by Jessica Palopoli

It’s real vs. reel in the San Francisco Playhouse summer musical, City of Angels, a delightfully jazzy take on film noir, greed the constant battle between commerce and art.

This 1989 Broadway hit, with a dazzling score by the great Cy Coleman (music) and David Zippel (lyrics) and a genuinely funny book by Larry Gelbart (whose credits include M*A*S*H and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) is a real treat, and it’s nice to see that SF Playhouse’s musicals just get stronger and stronger. Director Bill English marshals his resources effectively and also contributes a set that makes terrific use of rear wall projections (by Theodore J.H. Hulsker) and makes a convincing split between the slimy real world of 1940s Hollywood and the grimy black-and-white world of cinematic private detectives, missing daughters and murderous plots.

Musical director Dave Dobrusky heads an 11-piece band that handles the jazzy riffs of Coleman’s score well and add some nice shiny, brassy blasts to keep things lively. There are torch songs, comedy songs, vocalese numbers and a couple Broadway-style showstoppers, and Dobrusky’s band handles it all with period pizzazz.

At the center of the dueling stories are Stine, the writer (Jeffrey Brian Adams), and Stone (Brandon Dahlquist), the private detective and the creation of the writer. Stine is in Hollywood turning his hit novel into a screenplay for studio head Buddy Fiddler (a robust Ryan Drummond), who likes to put his stamp on everything, from the script to the script girls. Stine is learning the art of compromise in adapting his novel for the screen and watching everything that made the book interesting evaporate as the story transitions to the screen.

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Adams and Dahlquist are both excellent as conflicting aspects of the writer’s personality. Their big duet, “You’re Nothing Without Me,” concludes Act 1 in the bang-up way it should, though the reprise at show’s end doesn’t pack quite the same punch.

Director English tends to underplay the comedy aspect of this musical comedy, leaning more into the shadows of the film noir world instead. This is most apparent in the sterling comedy number “You Can Always Count on Me” sung by the actor playing secretaries to Buddy in the real world and to Stone in the film world. In this production, that falls to Monique Hafen, who performs the number with the brio of a Kit Kat girl wandered in from Cabaret. There’s pathos in the song to be sure, but the dramatic business undercuts the comedy.

The comedy MVP award goes to Nanci Zoppi who plays a wannabe widow in the movie and a studio head’s wife in the real world. It’s the latter role that gives her a chance to add some real comic zest to the show. It’s reassuring when the women take over the stage because, in true film noir and 1940s Hollywood fashion, they’re mostly reduced to sidekicks, bad choice makers, schemers and seductresses (and the choreography has a tendency, especially in Act 2, of sending them down to their knees).

At just over 2 1/2 hours, this City of Angels keeps up a peppy pace, and the set and the sharp performances clearly delineate the increasingly complicated relationships between reality and cinema while the hot band and strong voices give the movie world a nice Broadway bang.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
City of Angles continues through Sept. 17 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theater as contact sport in SF Playhouse’s dazzling Colossal

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The team prepares for a workout in Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal at San Francisco Playhouse: (actors, from left) Ed Berkeley, Brian Conway, Cameron Matthews, Thomas Gorrebeeck, Xander Ritchey and Brandon Hsieh. Below: Mike (Jason Stojanovski), in a wheelchair, and his younger self (Thomas Gorrebeeck) view playbacks of the play that changed his life. Photos by Jessica Palopoli

Colossal at San Francisco Playhouse is a (foot)balls-out theatrical experience that manages to provoke thought and elicit feeling all the while it dazzles with its aggressive stagecraft.

Andrew Hinderaker’s play sets up theater as a competitive sport, that is, this play is competing with itself by placing a large scoreboard-type timer above the stage and letting four quarters unfold in real time over an hour. Then there’s also the turf-covered playing field (set by Bill English), the bright Friday night-style lights (design by Kurt Landisman) and the ear-piercing whistles (sound design by Theodore J. H. Hulsker). This is more than a stage for a play: it’s a playing field ready for intense action.

And that’s what it gets for about an hour – there is football tossing and tackling like you’d see on any field. But then there’s a dance/choreography element as well as a fantastic marching drumline (Alex Hersler, Zach Smith and Andrew Humann) to punctuate nearly every beat of the drama. There are seven football players on stage, sometimes in full gear, sometimes not (and more times than you might imagine shirtless), and they begin their workout before the show begins to get the blood pumping. You can’t even address the topic of football unless you’re pumped up, and that’s part of the point.

Hinderaker’s play wants to match the energy and testosterone level of an actual football game, and he does that by combining character-driven drama with all the (literal) bells and whistles of a football game combined with the he-man-godlike players attempting to be the superheroes their coach (and the gridiron-crazed fans) expect them to be. In director Jon Tracy’s muscular production, the play is successful on all counts – manic energy matched with outsize performances and a whole lot of theatrical dazzle that turns America’s most brutal pastime into a disarming evening of theater.

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This is a taboo-busting play that wants nothing less than to look into the very nature of masculinity and why its exaggerated displays of force on the football field are so alluring both to players and to fans in spite of the toll this display takes on physical health and long-term well-being. Within the world of these players (and their coach, played by Dave Maier who is so realistic you’d do laps if he told you to), you see men reveling in the homoerotic (the butt slaps, the close physical contact, the stripped-down workouts) while decrying it at the same time. Any show of anything other than ultra-masculinity is cause for name-calling or physical violence.

When Mike (Thomas Gorrebeeck) dances onto the field, he literally dances. His form of rebellion is to play football in direct opposition to his father (Robert Parsons), an esteemed dancer and head of a famous company. Mike grew up as a dancer, which automatically makes him less than manly in the eyes of the other players. But he proves himself on the field (a well-executed pirouette can evade the most brutal of tackles) and ends up as team captain (I was never quite certain, but I feel like this team is a university team).

We see Mike’s story unfold from the point of view of Mike 10 months in the future, in a wheelchair after a devastating spinal injury on the field (“I was reckless instead of fearless,” he says). Older Mike (Jason Stojanovski) is going through rehab, and in what is perhaps the play’s weakest gimmick, his physical therapist (a game Wiley Naman Strasser) is putting a lot of emphasis on the “therapist” part of his job, coaxing from Mike all of his secrets.

The biggest secret has to do with Mike’s co-captain, Marcus (Cameron Matthews), who has disappeared from Mike’s life following his injury. Issues of sexuality do battle with notions of what makes a good football player (or a man, really), and Mike seems much more comfortable with who he is than Marcus does, at least before the accident. The theater as a sport element, with that clock ticking through each quarter, really comes into play in the fourth quarter – will the emotional denouement occur before the clock runs out? It’s a strange thing to watch theater on the clock, but it’s also strangely effective here.

The collision of football and dance, both in the story and the physical production, is fascinating. The players (Xander Ritchey, Brandon Leland, Ed Berkeley, Jacob Hsieh, Brian Conway and Travis Santell Rowland) do an admirable job blending the dance choreography by Keith Pinto and the football choreography (by coach Maier himself), and Gorrebeeck as Mike manages to be tough, vulnerable, graceful and charismatic through it all, while Stojanovski’s post-accident Mike is a mass of tension, regret, grief and, ultimately, strength.

There’s a lot going on in Colossal, a play unlike any I’ve ever seen, where form is content and the more traditional parts (like where old Mke and young Mike converse and work through their issues) are less persuasive than the more daring and physical elements. The physicality is so powerful that it’s likely the story could be told – by this cast anyway – simply through percussion, movement and the passion men have for football…and each other.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal continues through April 30 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$120. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Yay for Yee! Lauren Yee wins the Glickman Award

San Francisco native Lauren Yee has won the 2015 Glickman Award for the best play to have its world premiere in the Bay Area. She won for in a word, a drama about the aftermath of a child gone missing, which was produced as part of the “Sandbox Series” at San Francisco Playhouse. The award comes with a $4,000 check for the playwright and a certificate of recognition to the producing theater.

Lauren Yee

In an interesting and unusual twist, Yee was in competition for the award with…herself. Yee’s Hookman, produced by Encore Theatre Company, was also a finalist, along with Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters by Echo Brown and produced by The Marsh.

Read an excerpt of in a word here.

The Glickman Award, which will be presented at the Theatre Bay Area conference, is awarded annually by a committee comprising Bay Area critics. This year’s committee included Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Avila of povertyartsjournal.com, Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News/Bay Area News Group, Chad Jones of TheaterDogs.net and Sam Hurwitt of the Idiolect and the Marin Independent Journal.

Here’s a complete list of Glickman Award winners (the award is made in the year following the show’s premiere):

2015 The House that will not Stand, Marcus Gardley (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)
2014 Ideation, Aaron Loeb (San Francisco Playhouse)
2013 The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen (Crowded Fire/Playwrights Foundation)
2012 The North Pool, Rajiv Joseph (TheatreWorks)
2011 Oedipus el Rey, Luis Alfaro (Magic)
2010 In the Next Room, Sarah Ruhl (Berkeley Rep)
2009 Beowulf, Jason Craig (Shotgun Players)
2008 Tings Dey Happen, Dan Hoyle (Marsh)
2007 Hunter Gatherers, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb (Killing My Lobster)
2006 The People’s Temple, Leigh Fondakowski et al (Berkeley Rep)
2005 Dog Act, Liz Duffy Adams (Shotgun)
2004 Soul of a Whore, Denis Johnson (Campo Santo)
2003 Five Flights, Adam Bock (Encore)
2002 Dominant Looking Males, Brighde Mullins (Thick Description)
2001 Everything’s Ducky, Bill Russell & Jeffrey Hatcher (TheatreWorks)
2000 The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, Erin Cressida Wilson (Campo Santo)
1999 Combat!, John Fisher (Rhino)
1998 Civil Sex, Brian Freeman (Marsh)
1997 Hurricane/Mauvais Temps, Anne Galjour (Berkeley Rep)
1996 Medea, the Musical, John Fisher (Sassy Mouth)
1995 Rush Limbaugh in Night School, Charlie Varon (Marsh)
1994 Santos & Santos, Octavio Solis (Thick Description)
1993 Heroes and Saints, Cherrie Moraga (Brava)
1992 Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Tony Kushner (Eureka)
1991 Political Wife, Bill Talen (Life on the Water)
1990 Pick Up Ax, Anthony Clarvoe (Eureka)
1989 Yankee Dawg You Die, Philip Kan Gotanda (Berkeley Rep)
1988 Webster Street Blues, Warren Kubota (Asian American)
1987 Life of the Party, Doug Holsclaw (Rhino)
1986 Deer Rose, Tony Pelligrino (Theatre on the Square)
1985 The Couch, Lynne Kaufman (Magic)
1984 Private Scenes, Joel Homer (Magic)

Smart, creepy Nether wows at SF Playhouse

Nether 1
Iris (Carmen Steele) marvels over the Victorian world that Papa (Warren David Keith) has created in Jennifer Haley’s The Nether at San Francisco Playhouse. Below: Doyle (Louis Parnell, left) is questioned by Detective Morris (Ruibo Qian) about his dealings in the Nether, a futuristic version of the Internet where virtual reality is more than just a high-concept toy. Photos by Jessica Palopoli

There aren’t that many plays with the power to totally creep you out and entertain you mightily. Such is the power of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether at San Francisco Playhouse in a production that is stunning in all the right ways (director Bill English and set designer Nina Ball do yeomans work here).

The play is only 80 minutes, but it packs a mighty wallop. Here you have a play that is, ostensibly, about the rape and murder of children, but it’s not horrific. It’s nifty sci-fi trick is to set the action in the near future when virtual reality has become a big part of life. The Internet has evolved into something called the Nether, and, happy to say, there are still laws in the future, although how they govern (or don’t) the Nether and virtual reality is a big part of what the drama is about. So no actual children are harmed, but even in theory, seeing man holding an ax standing next to a little girl makes your skin crawl.

I reviewed The Nether for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s a peek:

Haley has crafted a piece of theatrical science fiction that works astonishingly well straddling two realities. Theater itself is already a kind of virtual reality, so it’s the perfect place for Haley’s futuristic tale of a world where trees barely exist anymore and more and more people (called “shades”) are living their lives inside a more evolved Internet known as “the nether,” where lifelike communities are formed and imaginations (and morals and laws) are unbound.
This is a tricky, provocative 80-minute drama that could outrage audiences except that it’s so intelligently crafted that fascination trumps shock in this story of authorities going after the creators of a virtual world in which adults, adhering to Victorian dress and custom, interact with children who are then sexually abused and murdered (only to be regenerated by the program in a never-ending cycle).
As sick as that sounds, keep in mind that none of it’s real — it’s consensual role playing among adults who pay to be there (or, in the case of the “children,” adults who are employed by the virtual reality creators).

Nether 2

You can read the review in its entirety here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Jennifer Haley’s The Nether continues through March 5 at the San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$120. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Bay Area theater 2015: some favorites

2015 illustration

One of the best things about the year-end exercise to round up favorite theatergoing memories of the preceding year is that it can be such a powerful reminder of how much good theater we have in the Bay Area and how many really extraordinary theater artists we have working here. Another element jumps out at me this year and that is how, in addition to great homegrown work, our area also attracts some of the best theater artists from around the world to come and share their work (at the behest of savvy local producers, of course).

So here are some thoughts on memorable work I saw this year – and I will add as a caveat, I didn’t see as much as I should have (or as much as I used to for that matter), and I must express some pride that as we head into 2016, this old Theater Dogs blog will celebrate its 10th anniversary, and that makes me mighty proud. This is a labor of love, and I want it to be that first and foremost, a way of celebrating and promoting the riches we have here.

• The Curran Theatre is reborn. For me, the theater event of the year was actually a series of events comprising Curran Under Construction, a reintroduction of the fabled theater by its owner, Carole Shorenstein Hays not simply as a stop for touring shows but as an important player in the theatrical culture of the city. While the theater undergoes renovation in its lobby and restrooms, Hays invited audiences to enter through the stage door and sit on stage to experience one after another shows of extraordinary power and diversity. She began with The Event, a horrifyingly relevant exploration of mass violence, grief and understanding, and moved on to the wildly different but equally thrilling The Object Lesson with Geoff Sobelle blending materialism and memories in a magical way. Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet offered whisky, haunting music and one of the year’s best, most immersive stage experiences. Steve Cuiffo is Lenny Bruce brought a favorite son back to San Francisco, and Stew and Heidi Rodewald put their own rock-blues spin on James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son. Every event at the Curran, including the speaker series hosted by the Curran’s resident literary star, Kevin Sessums, has been glorious and fascinating and involving. What more could you want from theater? (read the original posts here)

• Central Market gets a jewel of a theater in ACT’s The Strand. The Curran wasn’t the only re-birth this year. American Conservatory Theater spent a whole lot of time, money and effort bringing some class to the evolving Central Market area. The new Strand Theater is spectacular and should prove to be a key component in the cultural life of San Francisco. (read the original post here)

• Just Theater blows us away. Again. After A Maze last year, Just Theater became a company I wanted to pay attention to, and boy did that attention pay off. With Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 the company emerged as a producer of provocative, impactful work that should attract as big an audience as possible. This play within a play (within a rehearsal) tackled race, history and personal drama in ways that felt mind bending and heart racing.(read the original post here)

• We got to see Angela Lansbury live on stage. Even if she had just stood on stage and waved, that would have been something, but no, Dame Angela, the legend herself, gave a true and truly funny performance as Madame Arcati in the Broadway touring production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit as part of the SHN season. At 89, she defied any signs of age and offered pure magic. Extraordinary. (read the original post here)

Hookman splatters expectations. Playwright Lauren Yee offered abundant surprises in this “existential slasher comedy,” which is the best possible description of this electric one-act play from Encore Theatre. (read the original post here)

• Tuneful time travel in Triangle. The most heartfelt new musical I saw this year was Triangle at TheatreWorks, a time-twisting tale involving tragedy and romance. Curtis Moore and Thomas Mizer have crafted a smart, melodious show that feels original and scaled exactly right (the cast of six feels much bigger, as do the emotions). (read the original post here)

• There’s still life left in Scrooge after all. There’s absolutely no reason that the new musical Scrooge in Love should not become a holiday perennial. Creators Kellen Blair, Larry Grossman and Duane Poole have crafted an utterly charming musical sequel to A Christmas Carol with songs you actually want to hear and characters you root for. Of course having Jason Graae as Scrooge is a big Christmas bonus, so kudos to all at 42nd Street Moon for breaking away from the classic or forgotten musicals and presenting something fresh and fantastic. (read the original post here)

• Alice Munro should love Word for Word. There’s no better theater company than Word for Word and no better writer than Alice Munro, so…mic drop. This was sublime from beginning to end as director Joel Mullenix and a cast that included the wondrous Jeri Lynn Cohen, Susan Harloe and Howard Swain brought two Munro stories to life, one from 1968, one from 2012. There was humor, heart and exquisite writing. (read the original post here)

• Cathleen Riddley lays it bare in Tree. Riddley can always be counted on for a strong performance, but in this powerful Julie Hébert family drama at San Francisco Playhouse she was riveting and heartbreaking as an older woman losing touch with herself and her family. (read the original post here)

• And then the drama comes flooding in. My favorite set of the year was G.W. Skip Mercier’s design for Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Head of Passes at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Water played a big part in the design of a house in marshy Louisiana territory where the forks of the Mississippi meet. There was a storm, a leaky roof and then a deluge of biblical proportions. And boy was it fun to watch. (read the original post here)

• Hypocrites pummel Pirates perfectly. Probably the most fun you could have in a theater (and not mind getting beaned by a beach ball) was Chicago troupe The Hypocrites’ wild and wonderful take on Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Berkeley Rep had the smarts to introduce the Bay Area to this smart, enterprising company, and I hope we haven’t seen the last of their inventive, energetic take on interactive theater. (read the original post here)