The Magic's Lily blooms!
There’s a lot of excitement burbling through the Bay Area theater community this spring. One of the reasons is the Magic Theatre’s The Lily’s Revenge, a ballsy five-hour play by Stockton native Taylor Mac.
With five acts performed in five different styles – musical theater, dance, puppets, Elizabethan-style drama – the show has a cast of nearly 40 (all local, by the way) musicians, actors, dancers, acrobats, drag queens, etc. There are actually six directors – one for each act plus one to direct the intermission events between each act. This is definitely the biggest, boldest theatrical event of the spring.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Mac and Magic Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the feature here.
As usual, I couldn’t fit all the good stuff into the story. Here’s more with Taylor Mac.
Magic Up Against some funny creeps
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.
2010 in the rearview mirror: My Top 10
I did two things I'm proud of this year. I worked for a great theater company and I stopped working for a great theater company. From June 2009 to September 2010, I was the communications manager for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and it was a fantastic experience. For a critic to jump the fence and experience a theater company from the inside was the education of a lifetime.
A job change in September allowed me to go back to writing and reviewing with a renewed vigor and appreciation for the art of theater.
And my timing couldn't have been better. All of a sudden, with the launch of the fall season, it seemed that the Bay Area was the epicenter of all good theater. With Compulsion at Berkeley Rep, Scapin at American Conservatory Theater and the opening of The Brother/Sister Plays at Marin Theatre Company, there was great theater everywhere you turned.
Herewith, a conventional Top 10 list for 2010 – starting at No. 10 and working toward No. 1.
A Magic proposal (in verse no less!)
This is one of the best stories to come out of a theater in many a moon.
Last week, after a performance of Liz Duffy Adams' Or, actress Maggie Mason was proposed to by her longtime boyfriend Matt Trainer. Maggie's co-stars, Natacha Roi and Ben Huber beat a hasty retreat after the curtain call and left Maggie alone on stage to be serenaded by Matt in verse he had written for the occasion.
Just watch the video and try not to tear up.
It's a farce Or, a hysterical – er – historical drama
With a wink and a nod to Shakespeare, playwright Liz Duffy Adams explains the title of her play Or, in a spiffily rhymed prologue. It's about love or lust. Danger or delight. Gay or straight. In other words, anything and everything is on the table for 90 minutes of theatrical enjoyment.
Adams, the linguistically inventive author of Dog Act, an award-winning hit for Shotgun Players in 2004, is once again indulging her love of language in Or, now having its West Coast premiere at the Magic Theatre directed by artistic director Loretta Greco. She dives into the wordplay of 17th-century England and splashes around happily.
Marcus, or how Sweet it is
We met him as a baby. Then we got to know a little bit more about his father. And now we get to watch Marcus Eshu make his first steps into manhood.
Tarell Alvin McCraney's Brother/Sister Plays cycle is extraordinary, if for no other reason than its admirable ambition. But this trilogy of plays is so much more than admirable – it's poetic, insightful, gripping and full of beauty. When the plays finally arrived in the Bay Area, they arrived in the form of a colossal collaboration of theater companies.
We were exposed to McCraney's talent in Marin Theatre Company's In the Red and Brown Water, a drama so full of wondrous movement and music and myth that in memory it seems more folklore than contemporary drama. Then the drama was scaled down to size, to The Brothers Size, at the Magic Theatre, and we felt the emotional heft of McCraney at his dramatic best.
The stretch between parts 2 and 3 was long, but the wait was worth it. American Conservatory Theater's Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet takes us back to the housing projects of the fictional San Pere along the Louisiana bayous. The play is yet another spin of McCraney's enormous talent. If Red and Brown Water was folklore, and Brothers Size was poetic drama, Marcus fills the slot in the coming-of-age category. This may be McCraney's most conventional play, but it's also his funniest and most endearing.
Size matters -- Magic's Brothers is a keeper
Comparing The Brothers Size, the second part of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays cycle, to In the Red and Brown Water, the first part, is inevitable but ultimately unnecessary.
These are two very different plays, both extraordinary and both extraordinarily well produced by, respectively, Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. Red and Brown opened first and gave us a broad view of McCraney’s world, a working-class Louisiana town where the mostly African-American inhabitants exist in a purely theatrical dimension between reality and poetry, between fact and folklore.
Cycle revs up in exquisite shades of Red and Brown
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Tarell Alvin McCraney's In the Red and Brown Water feels like ritual. It feels like a party. It feels like living, breathing poetry. And that's a hell of way to begin a prodigious three-play cycle involving three plays, three theaters and one playwright.
It fell to Marin Theatre Company to launch McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays, a trilogy produced in tandem with the Magic Theatre (up next with The Brothers Size) and American Conservatory Theater (wrapping things up with Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet). It's probably hardest to be first, but you wouldn't know it from the production that shimmered on stage in Mill Valley Tuesday night.
Making theater dance – an ode to collaboration
One of the most exciting things about the world premiere of American Conservatory Theater's The Tosca Project is that it shines a big old spotlight on the riches of the Bay Area.
Here is a revered local theater company venturing into risky territory – a play mostly without words told through dance and recorded music of all kinds – in collaboration with an artist from another revered local company. But get this, that other revered institution is not a theater company.
Yes, ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff has spent four years working with the San Francisco Ballet's Val Caniparoli to create The Tosca Project, a story inspired by – hold your hats again – a piece of San Francisco history. Are you getting all this local, local, local stuff? The legendary Tosca Cafe in North Beach is the subject, from its opening in 1919 by a trio of Italians to its current status as the royal court of Jeanette Etheredge and her literary and cinematic pals, and that history is related via dance, music (opera, jazz, standards, rock) and even some beat poetry.
Review: Octopus
Steve Yockey's Octopus is a thrilling, somewhat frustrating theatrical experience.
This inaugural co-production of the Magic Theatre and Encore Theatre Company delivers a first-rate production of a fascinating world-premiere play that ultimately comes up a little short only because Yockey sets the bar so high for himself at the outset.
What starts as another riff on gay romantic situation comedies quickly turns into something quite different then evolves into something else shortly after that.