Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Three of the actresses playing the Mitchell Sisters, the three main characters of the new musical Rivets, are (from left) Molly Lewis, Erica Maier (the understudy for Shawn Creighton) and Monica Lenk.  Rivets is performed on the SS Red Oak Victory in the former Kaiser Richmond Shipyards in the Rosie the Riveter National Park. Photos by Brett D’Ambrosio

 
There’s something about Rosie the Riveter – the collective name given to the women who joined the shipbuilding workforce while the men were fighting World War II – capturing our collective imagination. Maybe it’s the idea of sacrifice and dedication during a time of war, which is something we haven’t exactly been asked to do in the six years we’ve been at war in the Middle East.

There are no less than two musicals happening locally that celebrate the Rosie the Riveter workforce. One is in development: Marcus Gardley and Molly Holm’s
This World in a Woman’s Hands, which will debut in the early fall of 2009 as part of the Shotgun Players season.

And the other – Kathryn G. McCarty’s Rivets — has been in development for a decade and first saw the light of the stage earlier this year at Contra Costa College then again at the Lesher Center for the Arts.

McCarty’s show, which features her book and lyrics and a score by Mitchell Covington, is about to receive another production, but it won’t be on a stage. In true Rosie, fashion, this production is headed for the shipyards.

When Rivets opens on Thursday, Oct. 9, it will be onboard the SS Red Oak Victory, which is on the site of the historic Kaiser Richmond Shipyards in the Rosie the Riveter National Park. The Red Oak is the last surviving Victory ship built by Rosie the Riveter, Wendy the Welder and Dynamite Dorothy and launched in the Kaiser Richmond Shipyard.

“When we’re on the ship rehearsing in Hold 3, saying the lines and knowing the history, I just get goose bumps,” McCarty says.

A self-described Air Force brat who grew up with stories about World War II and her father’s 20 years in the military, McCarty began thinking about the Rosie the Riveter experience as a musical about 10 years ago.

“Because it all happened here in the Bay Area, I knew it was a story that needed to be told here,” says McCarty a Concord resident. “In doing the research, it’s one thing to memorize the numbers. But what was amazing to me is the way people dedicated themselves to the war effort. Americans truly came together for World War II. It’s amazing how much people gave when you think that 16 million men were gone. A whole generation of young women watched virtually all of the men leave. As a writer, you have to put yourself in their shoes and be in that time period. As Americans, we just don’t look at war the way they did.”

Watching the presidential debates with Obama and McCain claiming that ordinary people are doing extraordinary things, McCarty says she wonders if the country is slowly realizing the importance of choosing to be extraordinary by being part of something greater than themselves.”

“I think maybe we’re headed into some kind of consciousness of that,” she says. “As an artist, I do this work because I feel it needs to be done. The politician talks about it because they think it’s what we want to hear.”

McCarty, a veteran playwright of shows such as The Ladies Quintet and Bessie! The Life of Bessie Smith, created fictional characters based on real women. For this version of the show, she and director Clay David have done some major revisions and added six new songs.

She has a cast of 35 and a wide-ranging show that explores the personal and the historical.

“I’ve blended history with fiction,” she says. “We explore many aspects of 1940s America, including American industrialization, war propaganda, rationing and the changing roles between the sexes and the races. Doing research I repeatedly encountered stories of ordinary men and women, mostly unskilled and uneducated, doing extraordinary work that changed our entire history. Had the United States not stood together for one goal, we certainly would have lost World War II.”

Here’s a video sampling of Rivets:

Rivets continues through Oct. 26 onboard the SS Red Oak Victory, 1337 Canal Blvd., Berth 6A, Richmond. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $20 (free for Rosies, WWII veterans and uniformed soldiers). Call 925-676-5705 or visit www.galateanplayers.com.

• Tours of the SS Red Oak Victory are available before all Sunday performances. $5 donation requested.
• During Fleet Week, there will be a pancake breakfast onboard the sheep from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12. $6 – the views from the deck of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges are free.

Opened Sept. 19, 2008 at the Ashby Stage

Sean Owens (center) is Ocar Wilde in Shotgun Players’ production of Vera Wilde, a musical play by Chris Jeffries. Owens is flanked by (from left) Danielle Levin, Edward Brauer and Tyler Kent. Photos by Jessica Palopoli

Shotgun’s revolution in Russian, Irish, musical stripes

Oscar Wilde’s first play, you may be surprised to know, was not some clever, quippy piece of comic fluff. The aspiring young playwright tackled as his subject a young Russian woman named Vera Zasulich, who, in a fit of revolutionary pique, shot the St. Petersburg chief of police in protest of his treatment of her comrades in prison.

Vera freely admitted to the crime and wanted to go on trial to spread the word about why she committed an act of violence and raise awareness about the government’s shady dealings with outspoken citizens and the use of torture in prison.

The strategy worked. Vera’s case received national attention, and the jury acquitted her of the crime she actually committed.

Inspired by the young woman’s revolutionary verve, and holding the opinion that “agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent, (which is) why agitators are so absolutely necessary,” Wilde wrote a play called Vera; or, The Nihilists. Wilde biographer Richard Ellmann describes “Vera” as “a wretched play.”

The play’s London premiere in 1881 was ultimately canceled because a play about the attempted assassination of the Russian Czar (Wilde elevated Vera’s target from police chief to big cheese) was not looked upon favorably in view of two actual assassinations: of Czar Alexander II and of U.S. President Garfield.

Still, Wilde did manage to get the play produced in New York, with a woman named Marie Prescott in the title role. Several newspapers proclaimed the play’s brilliance while the New York Times stated Wilde was “very much of a charlatan and wholly an amateur” and called the play “valueless.”

And so ends the chapter of Vera Zasulich in the life of Oscar Wilde…until now.

In 2002 Chris Jeffries premiered, of all things, a musical about the intersection of Vera Zasulich and Oscar Wilde at Seattle’s Empty Space Theatre called Vera Wilde, and now Shotgun Players is producing this “musical play” for which Jeffries wrote book, music and lyrics.

Jeffries seems hesitant to call Vera Wilde a musical because the word “musical” indicates frivolity, silliness and lack of credibility for serious subject matter. But he shouldn’t be so wary. His musical is intelligent, clever and bold with an appealing score and some standout songs.

The notion of mining the intersection between Vera and Oscar is an intriguing one, though their parallels dissipate after Act 1, which goes to some lengths to depict how their various trials – hers for attempted murder, his for “gross indecency” with young men – were sensational and, in their own ways, revolutionary.

Some confusion arises in director Maya Gurantz’s production as Vera’s timeline proceeds forward (from notoriety to obscurity) and Wilde’s proceeds backward (from post-prison shame and disgrace to talk of the town). Seemingly, when the two intersect the play should find its nexus of power, but that is not the case. The play is at its best during the parallel trial scenes of Act 1 and loses focus in Act 2 as Vera, in exile, becomes a forgotten revolutionary who, if we are to believe Jeffries, was eclipsed by her lover, Lenin, while Wilde emerges as London’s newest Irish toy – push a button on his overstuffed vest and a print-worthy epigram pops out. “I am the future come to laugh at your pretensions,” he says at one point.

Jeffries’ score (beautifully orchestrated by musical director Dave Malloy) is played by a superb quartet: Brendan West on banjo, Andre Nigoghossian on guitar, Hillary Overberg on violin and Simon Hanes on bass. The sound runs from Hot Club jazz to Jesus Christ Superstar anthem with many stops in between.

Two of the show’s best songs are the Russian peasant lament “Midnight in Russia” and a show-stopping glimpse into the disastrous American premiere of Wilde’s “Vera” called “That’s How a Show Should Go” expertly performed by Danielle Levin and Edward Brauer, members of the hard-working, three-person supporting cast (which also includes sweet-voiced Tyler Kent).

Alexandra Creighton as Vera and Sean Owens as Oscar both have moments of connection—especially in their trial scenes — but they struggle with the score, and there were significant pitch problems at Friday’s opening-night performance.

Vera Wilde is a wild idea, and the issues of an oppressive government vilifying the outspoken and taking advantage of terrorist acts to create a fear-driven police state are certainly resonant. This Shotgun production just needs to sing in a stronger voice.

Vera Wilde continues through Oct. 26 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $17-$25. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org for information.

BONUS SHOTGUN NEWS: At opening night of Vera Wilde Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley released four of the five plays he’ll be doing in the 2009 season: Mark Jackson’s Faust Part 1 (May-June); Jon Tracy’s adaptation of Animal Farm (August-September in John Hinkel Park); Marcus Gardley’s musical play This World in a Woman’s Hands about the Richmond Shipyard “Rosie the Riveter” workforce (September-October); and Susannah Martin’s production of The Three Penny Opera (December-January 2010).

Opened Aug. 2 at John Hinkel Park, Berkeley

Dave Garrett is Pa Ubu (roughly translated as Father Turd) and Carla Pantoja is Ma Ubu in Shotgun Players’ rollicking summer production Ubu for President, a free play in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park.
 

Crude, hilarious and free! Shotgun’s `Ubu’ wins
««« ½

Aw, pschit!

Any discussion of an Ubu play has to begin thus. When Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi opened in 1896, the first word of the play was, “Merdre!” (loosely translated into, “Shittr!”). And the play has been notorious ever since.

Shotgun Players, never a troupe to shy away from notoriety, takes on Ubu as its free theater in the park production this summer. Writer Josh Costello has riffed on Jarry’s Ubu plays (there were three) to come up with Ubu for President, which had its premiere on a sunny, warm Saturday afternoon in Berkeley’s beautiful John Hinkel Park.

The political comedy – more comedy than politics, thankfully – is essentially about stupid people and even stupider politics. In other words, it’s incredibly timely.

Jarry set his tale in Poland, or, as he wrote, “which is to say, nowhere.” Costello takes the Jarry-rigged wit further by setting it in a place called Fugalle (forgive the spelling if incorrect), which means anything pertaining to that country can be described as “Fuggin” as in the “Fuggin people” or the “Fuggin president.” And you know what? Gets a laugh every time.

The idea is that not-so-good King Wenceslas and his family have been on the throne for too many generations and it’s time for the people to adopt democracy and choose their own president.

So the King (Gary Grossman) decides to run. So does Pa Ubu (Dave Garrett), a retired captain of the dragoons whose favorite expression is, “By my green candle” (often followed by a grabbing of his naughty bits). The other candidates are the king’s daughter, Princess Buggerless (the extraordinarly sharp and funny Casi Maggio, above), a trippy hippie named Ming Jamal Joaquin Wounded Knee Goldstein (a pitch-perfect Sung Min Park) and an ancient man named Lesczynski (Alf Pollard).

Ubu’s ambition is ignited by his aggressive wife, Ma Ubu (Carla Pantoja), with her extra-wide hips and her extra-tall pink beehive, and his candidacy is aided by one of the king’s former henchmen, Capt. MacNure (Ryan O’Donnell), whose name, as you might imagine, is often shortened.

The Ubus are delightfully vile, constantly swearing – “Pschittabugger and buggerapschitt!” By God’s third nipple!” “Rumpleshitskin!” – and fighting. “I’m going to rip open your gut basket!” Ubu shouts at his wife. On the campaign trail, Ubu not only kisses a baby, he makes out with it before tossing the babe on its wee head, and there’s a generous supply of farting and belching to be sure.

Director Patrick Dooley only barely contains the manic energy of his cast (which also includes Marlon Deleon, Mega Guzman, Raechel Lockhart and Jordan Winer), which is as it should be…

To read the complete review, please visit my Examiner.com site here.

Ubu for President continues through Sept. 2 at John Hinkel Park, Southampton Avenue off The Arlington in Berkeley. Shows are at 4 p.m. Admission is free but campaign contributions are gladly accepted. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.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.

A Shotgun Players production at the Ashby Stage, Berkeley, through June 22

Jason Craig, who also wrote the show, tackles the title role in Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, a Shotgun Players collaboration with Banana Bag & Bodice. Photos by Jessica Palopoli.

Shotgun collaborates, monstrous musical roars to raging life
«««« Hungry like the Beowulf!

Forget last year’s craptastic half-live/half-animated Beowulf movie that put a tail on Angelina Jolie. Heck, you may even want to forget about reading the book. If you want to experience Beowulf – really experience the 1,000-year-old epic poem, head to Berkeley’s Ashby Stage, where you’ll dive into one of the most interesting and exciting shows currently on a Bay Area stage.

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage is original, surprising and strangely moving. The world-premiere work marks a first collaboration between the Shotgun Players and the Banana Bag & Bodice, a group familiar to San Francisco Fringe Festival audiences. Also in the creation mix are Magic Theatre/Z Space and the New Works Initiative, and the show will be further developed when it moves to the Henry Street Playhouse in Manhattan a little less than a year from now.

So how do you approach Beowulf, a monumental epic, with a cast of seven? You make it a rousing musical, of course. The original aim of composer Dave Malloy was to create an opera, but what he and writer Jason Craig ended up with is something more interesting: a hurdy-gurdy rock musical that lives just on the other side of a Brecht-Weill beer hall. Malloy’s engaging score is, like the show itself, both funny and serious. And unlike so many new musicals, it features music you actively want to listen to. Just check out the composition of Malloy’s orchestra: Malloy himself is on piano and accordion (he also plays King Hrothgar); Jen Baker is on trombone; Chris Broderick is on bass clarinet and clarinet; Dan Bruno goes to town on percussion; Andy Strain slides the trombone; and Andre Nigoghossian plays guitar and – get this – the saw.

You get roiling anthems like the opening “Heorot” and angry heart-rippers such as “Bring It” sung by a rampaging Grendel’s Mother (who, strangely, has never been named after all these years). There are sweet harmonies (provided mainly by dancing soldiers Anna Ishida and Shaye Troha) that recall 1940s swing, and then you get a duet called “What Kind of a Face” sung between the warrior Beowulf (Craig) and King Hrothgar that sounds a little like Johnny Cash and June Carter flirting over the microphone.

Directed with verve by Rod Hipskind, Beowulf isn’t even two hours, but it never feels rushed. There are a few songs here and there that could be tightened, but the brisk pace and the constantly changing palate (played out on a set designed by Banana Bag & Bodice and lit by Miranda Hardy) make those two hours as full as they could be.

Craig has devised a smart narrative device to help put his story in both a historical and a modern context that also happens to skewer the academic world that Beowulf seems to live in these days. The show begins with three academics (Cameron Galloway, Jessica Jelliffe and Christopher Kuckenbaker) sitting behind microphones and preparing to lead us through a seminar on the epic story poem. Before too long, the academics have broken the bonds of their brains and jumped into the action of the play. Kuckenbaker becomes Grendel, the murderous monster man and Jelliffe becomes Grendel’s mom, who lives with her outcast son at the bottom of a lake. The mother-son relationship is especially strong, and once Beowulf severs Grendel’s arm, and the beast dies in his mother’s arms, there’s more than a pang of sadness in the number “Grendel’s Death.”

Galloway, who is just priceless in her timid academic suit and neckwear (the smart, funny, just-right costumes are by Kaibrina Buck), doesn’t break out until toward the end, during the last chapter of Beowulf’s life (when he dies battling a dragon) when she sings part of the tale in the original Olde English.

Craig makes for an ambivalent hero. When asked by Grendel’s mother why he murdered her son, the warrior can’t come up with a great answer. “It started with his action against. So, revenge I guess.” Beowulf, it seems, is not such a thoughtful guy. He can’t even come up with a definition of “good” when asked. Instead of thought, he lives in a world ruled by the all-too-common school of thought: “It is better to retaliate than to mourn.”

Part of what makes Beowulf so exciting is that it feels contemporary without straining itself to be hip. The aim seems to be the telling of a story and not the marketing of a performance art rock musical and all the wondrous personalities within it. There’s a natural ferocity, humor and thoughtfulness in this show, and that’s truly what makes this Beowulf howl.

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage continues through June 22 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $17-$25. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org for information. Find out more about Banana Bag & Bodice at www.bananabagandbodice.org.

Berkeley’s Shotgun Players have received a challenge grant opportunity from the East Bay Community Foundation’s Fund for Artists to keep their tradition of free in-the-park summer theater. If the company raises $5,000 by June 30, that amount will be matched with a grant for their production of Ubu for President, a new play adapted by Josh Costello from Ubu Roi an absurdist 1896 comedy by Alfred Jarry. Artistic director Patrick Dooley directs the production, slated for July 26 through Sept. 7 at John Hinkel Park.

To make a donation, stop by here and cast your vote for free political theater in the park.

The arrival of a new Adam Bock play is always an event.

Even though the Canadian playwright decided to forgo the pleasures of life in the Bay Area for the rigors of a New York writer’s existence, we still love him. And as long as he sends us a play every now and then (like The Shaker Chair, a Shotgun Players/Encore Theatre Company production from last year), we’re happy.

Last week, Bock’s latest, The Drunken City, opened at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York. Christopher Isherwood, writing in the New York Times, called it a “flimsy but sweet comedy” but generally liked the tale of a bride-to-be and her three bridesmaids out on the town just before the wedding, drinking quite a lot, fraternizing with men who aren’t their husbands or fiances and coming to some realizations about love and marriage.

The production marks the New York debut of Cassie Beck (above), a uniquely charming Bay Area actress who, with her husband, Kent Nicholson, is co-artistic director of Crowded Fire Theatre Company. Isherwood had this to say about Beck, who plays Marnie, the bride-to-be: “Ms. Beck, making her New York debut, brings an understated sweetness to her role as Marnie, whose inebriation gradually subsides as she discloses the real dissatisfaction fueling the evening’s folly.”

Also in the cast are Maria Dizzia, who was so devastatingly good as the title character of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Barrett Foa, who did his best to charm in the disco drudgery of TheatreWorks’ world-premiere musical Kept.

Writing in the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz called Bock’s play “a playful and hopeful comedy in which everybody’s tipsy and everyone’s shaken and stirred after one long, liquor-filled night.” He has this to say about our local star: “Beck, in her New York debut, is fantastic and turns the moment into something deeply touching. Her five castmates are as equally appealing, adorable and top-shelf.”

All good news. So when’s our next Adam Bock play? We have yet to see The Receptionist or The Thugs in these parts, and it sounds like The Drunken City, complete with Beck in the lead, was just made for San Francisco.

Opened March 21, 2008, Ashby Playhouse, Berkeley

Trish Mulholland as Mrs. Warren, Emily Jordan as Vivie. Photos by Howard Gerstein

Shotgun Players do bang up work on Shaw’s Profession
three 1/2 stars Zesty Shaw

“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.” So says a character in George Bernard Shaw’s secret-filled comedy Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a play banned in England in the 1890s due to “lascivious content.”

Of course there’s no better way to grab attention than to call something dirty, so Shaw’s play about women’s liberation, fashionable morality and widespread cultural hypocrisy eventually made it onto the stage in 1925.

Only Shaw’s third play, Mrs. Warren is incredibly sharp and funny. It gets preachy, as Shaw is wont to do, toward the end, but there’s still plenty of zing.

Shotgun Players’ production, directed with a firm hand by Susannah Martin, is polished and full of the right kind of energy, which is to say it has sass, playfulness and satiric edge.

The only thing clunky about the two-hour, 20-minute production is the set (by Steve Decker), which looks great, but the scene changes in the cramped space involve stagehands clearing and rolling and turning and hauling. We’re so spoiled in this day of cinematic quick cuts — even in the theater — that an old-fashioned set change can seem laborious.

But it’s what’s happening on the set that matters more. Emily Jordan is delightful as Vivie Warren, the bright, well-educated daughter of Mrs. Warren (Trish Mulholland), an international success with businesses in Brussels, Vienna and other European capitals.

Vivie, raised in boarding school, hardly knows her mother, so when Kitty Warren pays a visit to her daughter’s small country cottage, certain facts are sure to come into play, facts such as this: Mrs. Warren went into the prostitution business with her sister when they were young, poor and struggling. Now they’ve mastered the immoral business world and have all the power and money they could ever want. The sister retired to a cathedral town, but Mrs. Warren, who has a great talent for managing all her “private hotels,” loves the work.

At first, when Vivie learns of her mother’s profession, she’s horrified. Then she realizes that bright, aspiring women have little choice in the business world, so she comes ’round to admire her mother’s business acumen.

But success in such a questionable business — a business that is still thriving — carries a whole lot of emotional and cultural baggage. Vivie has to decide just how involved she wants to be in her mother’s enterprise. The young woman has, after all, been the beneficiary of ill-gotten gains her entire life.

Mulholland, a Shotgun staple, always brings vivacity to the stage, but in Mrs. Warren, she has found new performance levels. She’s tough, tender, sexy, funny and extremely grounded in the reality of her character. Her scenes with Jordan are the play’s highlights because there’s so much emotion.

Martin’s entire cast is strong, with nary a weak spot in the bunch. John Mercer is suitably creepy as filthy rich aristocrat Crofts, who proposes marriage to Vivie as part blackmail, part business proposition. Her refusal of him is Shaw at his most vituperous.

Nick Sholley is Praed, a possible suitor for Vivie, and Joseph O’Malley (above with Jordan) is Frank, a country friend of Vivie’s who has his designs on her mother’s money. Both men are pitch perfect. Sholley is a compassionate prude and O’Malley is a likable scoundrel who berates his ineffectual rector father (a very funny, fuzzled Rick T. Williams) every chance he gets.

It’s not enough for Shaw to use prostitution as a pulpit for scolding an economic system that rewards immorality at every turn. He also has to throw incest into the mix. No wonder the Lord Chamberlain got his knickers in a twist when the play first appeared.

But there’s far more here than sensation. Mrs. Warren has a great line toward the end when she and Vivie are having it out: “You think that the way you were taught at school to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it’s not. it’s all only a pretense, to keep the cowardly, slavish, common run of people quiet. The big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think as I think.”

There’s no denying the power of knowing how the system works and working it for all it’s worth. But Shaw asks, and it’s still the question we need to ask every day: At what cost?

Mrs. Warren’s Profession continues through April 27 at the Ashby Playhouse, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $17-$25. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org for information.

You’re forgiven if you didn’t know quite how amazing Margo Hall is.

If you’re a regular Bay Area theatergoer, you already know that Hall is an extraordinary actor. Last year, for instance, she reprised the character Fe in Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts’ Fe in the Desert and gave one of the year’s best performances.

But Hall is also an accomplished director. She was one of the creative collaborators and one of the performers in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s award-winning docudrama The People’s Temple, and last year she co-directed Shotgun Players’ excellent Bulrusher at the Ashby Stage.

Surprisingly, Hall says she prefers directing to acting.

“I say that when I’m directing,” Hall says. “I do love acting, but there’s something so fun, so freeing about directing.”

And one of Hall’s favorite directing gigs is for Word for Word, the San Francisco company that does amazing work turning short works of fiction into fully staged theater pieces without changing a word of the original text.

With Word for Word, Hall has been both performer (Langston Hughes’ The Blues I’m Playing, Barbara Kingsolver’s Rose-Johnny, Zora Neale Hurston’s The Gilded Six Bits) and director (Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth, Greg Sarris’ Joy Ride).

She finds herself back in the Word for Word director’s chair for James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, which opens tonight at San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.

Baldwin’s story, published in 1957 and collected in the 1965 book, Going to Meet the Man, follows two brothers in 1950s Harlem. One is a schoolteacher and family man. The other is a jazz pianist with a troubled past.

Hall, who grew up in Detroit and now lives in Oakland with her husband, the actor L. Peter Callender, and their 12-year-old son, reread the story and responded to it immediately.

“Visualizing the piece wasn’t difficult,” Hall says on the phone from her home. “Ever since I’ve worked with Word for Word I can’t read a story without visualizing it. I didn’t visualize the story’s opening moment right away — that took some time. But I clearly saw other parts.”
The story’s jazz milieu was a natural for Hall, whose stepfather was a jazz musician.

“I was exposed to Sonny Rollins and a whole lot of other jazz cats,” Hall says. “I was familiar with the world of be-bop. My dad’s 15-piece band rehearsed in our basement. When I was rereading the story, this music, these people — Charlie Parker, Bird – I just knew it. It was familiar. I could hear the music and everything. It was really exciting.”

With jazz music so prominent in the story, Hall had to decide how to handle music in the production. Should there be live music? Should the actors play instruments themselves? At first, Hall considered casting her friend, the actor and beat-boxer Tommy Shepherd, but then she decided to go for the full jazz sound.

She approached her friend and previous collaborator Marcus Shelby, a prominent Bay Area jazz musician.

“I knew Marcus would know this story, this world,” Hall says. “The more we talked about the show and the score, the more I talked about the sounds in the show — the traffic, the subway — all being created by instruments in a very stylized way.”

Ideally, Shelby and his band would be playing live for each performance, but Hall says that would have required more time in an already crowded rehearsal schedule, so the score is recorded. But on Feb. 15, after the performance, Shelby will perform the music live at a gala reception.

One of the most extraordinary (and most consistent) things about Word for Word is the company’s skill at making literature come to life in surprising ways that enhance the story. The experience of seeing a Word for Word show is often as rich as reading and as thrilling as live theater because the show is, quite literally, both.

For Hall, the key to a good adaptation is transformation.

“It’s easy to put the story up, make it narrative and let the audience enjoy the beautiful language,” she says. “But capture the essence of the story is hard. We as the creative team have to go so deep that the audience can see the transformation and get a true, honest sense of what the story is when they leave.”

The more narration in a story, the harder it is to stage. Not surprisingly, if a story has a lot of dialogue, it’s fairly easy. Sonny’s Blues lands more on the narration-heavy end of that scale.

When Hall directed Friend of My Youth, another narrative-heavy story, she elected to direct her actors away from talking directly to the audience.

“This time, I went, `No, I’m gonna do it.’ The actors should definitely address the audience,” Hall explains. “This story is so universal — it’s about relationships and siblings. One is this conservative guy who went to school and became a teacher. Most of the audience will relate to him. Let’s have him talk to the audience, then get back into the scenes. This gives me as a director the opportunity to make bold choices.”

Next up for Hall: directing a solo show by Ariel Lucky, Free Land, about his family’s pioneer history and interactions with American Indians. She’s also continuing to teach at Chabot College (“I love my kids…they lift me up with their zaniness”) and being a mom.

“My son is a computer genius,” she says. “He has his own computer business and Web site. He fixes computers. He loves reading Shakespeare, but he wants to be a CEO.”

Sonny’s Blues continues through March 2 at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 620 Sutter St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $22-$36. Call 415-474-8800 or visit www.lhtsf.org or www.zspace.org.

There are some theater treats heading our way in 2008. Here’s a mere sampling.

The show I’m most excited about also seems the furthest away. The national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening is slated to start sometime in the second half of the year, courtesy of SHN/Best of Broadway. Spring Awakening was the best thing I saw on Broadway last year, and I eagerly anticipate the tour and the chance to hear the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater score performed by exciting young singer/actors.

A close second on the old excitement meter is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical solo show coming to Berkeley Rep in February.

At SF Playhouse, Theresa Rebeck, a hot-hot playwright at the moment, arrives with the West Coast premiere of her The Scene starring “Melrose Place” alum (and Berkeley native) Daphne Zuniga. The show opens later this month.

At American Conservatory Theater, the most intriguing offering this spring is ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy about a brother and sister who fall in love…with each other. The show begins performances in June.

TheatreWorks in Mountain View ushers in the new year with Wendy Wasserstein’s final play, Third, which begins performances next week. But the real excitement comes in April when the company mounts Caroline, or Change, the astonishing Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical.

At Berkeley’s Shotgun Players, the summer show will be Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, but the big excitement comes at the end of the year when director Mark Jackson (Death of Meyerhold) returns to take a whack at Macbeth in December.

This summer, California Shakespeare Theater gives us some really good reasons to head into the Orinda hills: Jonathan Moscone directs Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (July) and Timothy Near is directing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (August).

And this one is a little iffy, but should the fates conspire, Thick Description will bring back former Bay Area actor Colman Domingo (fresh from his Broadway turn in the musical Passing Strange) in his autobiographical solo show A Boy and His Soul. Proposed show run is July. Keep your fingers crossed.