Category Archives: Aldo Billingslea

Joy, power of stories in Cal Shakes black odyssey

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The cast of California Shakespeare Theater’s black odyssey by Marcus Gardley includes (from left) Lamont Thompson (Super Fly Tireseas), J. Alphonse Nicholson (Ulysses Lincoln), Safiya Fredericks (Benevolence Nausicca Sabine), Dawn L. Troupe (Caribdiss), and Aldo Billingslea (Great Grand Paw Sidin). Below: J. Alphonse Nicholson as Ulysses Lincoln, Margo Hall as Calypso and Safiya Fredericks as Benevolence Nausicca Sabine. Photos by Kevin Berne

Just when it seems the news can’t get any worse, it gets worse. This weekend in Virginia we saw some of the worst of humanity, with terror, death, hatred and ignorance all on full display. At such times, it can be hard not to give in to that helpless, hopeless feeling of things ever getting better, of our species ever giving over to our better natures rather than constantly reveling in our worst.

Then there’s art. In a quirk of timing for which I will be forever grateful, California Shakespeare Theater opened a new production Saturday night at the Bruns Amphitheater amid the full chilly summer glory of the Orinda Hills. It wasn’t just any production, but one so suited to our troubled times that it seems we should find some way to broadcast it nationally over and over. The play is black odyssey by Oakland-born playwright Marcus Gardley, one of the finest poetic/dramatic voices in the country. It’s a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, but its power is unmistakable as it reaches deep into the human experience to grapple with storytelling as a fundamental means of connecting our lives and our experiences with those of our ancestors – a profound way to find meaning in our time on earth (and perhaps beyond it). More specifically, he’s using Homer’s lost soldier template to tell stories of the African-American experience, to share pain and injustice and triumph and perseverance and love. There is a lot of love in this play, which makes for a deeply moving experience.

In the face of horrific news stemming from horrific behavior, it is…”reassuring” or “inspiring” seem too small here…of paramount importance to note that there are artists like Gardley and director Eric Ting (now in his second season as Cal Shakes’ artistic director) and these designers and these actors who are working against the wretchedness simply by doing their jobs, and doing them with compassion, intelligence and a beautiful mix of humor and passion.

black odyssey (its lower-case appearance belies its ALL CAPS impact) serves as a fascinating bookend to another play Ting directed recently, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (read my review here). That mind-bending play also deals with the African-American experience and is also highly and wonderfully theatrical. But while Octoroon hits the brain (and funny bone), black odyssey aims more for the heart.

I can’t say I’ve ever been moved by The Odyssey in any form, but Gardley’s ambitious, ferocious re-telling earns its emotions, even while it challenges audiences to just go with it while modern-day ancient gods play a game of chess, both literal and figurative, that affects the fate of mortals below and sends our hero, Ulysses Lincoln, back and forth in time and space. In the real world, he’s a 21-year-old from Oakland who has been in love with the same girl, Nella Pell (or “Nella P” as he calls her) since they met in a group home at age 13. The two get married and are expecting a baby when Ulysses enlists during peacetime, thinking that’s the best way to ensure his college education. But then 9/11 happens, and he’s deployed to Afghanistan, where he inspires the wrath of the god of the sea, known here as Great Grand Paw Sidin.

On his way back to the U.S., Ulysses is swept from the deck of his boat and given up for dead. His 16-year journey back home takes him all kinds of bizarre places, all of which are meant to help him become less lost in every sense of the word. To find home, he must connect with his own personal past, his cultural past and connect with his ancestors.

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Back home in Oakland’s Acorn housing project (Gardley loves to name drop his hometown), Nella is visited by the goddess Athena, in the guise of a long, lost relative, and ends up trading her immortality for life on earth helping Nella raise her son, Malachi, all the while trying to keep the hope of Ulysses’ return alive.

The Oakland scenes offer a gritty reality (not unlike another recent lower-case play, Shotgun Players’ production of brownsville song (b-side for tray) by Kimber Lee – read my review here), while Ulysses is in a time-warp fever dream that kept calling to mind a modern-day The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder in the way it creates an irreverent apocalyptic epic that never loses its human scale.

Ulysses, played by the charismatic J. Alphonse Nicholson, encounters all kinds of people and places in his journey, most notably a family living on the roof of their Louisiana home desperately trying to survive 40 days and 40 days of flooding as the end of days approaches. Ulysses is washed onto their roof by Hurricane Katrina, and from their soon-to-be-submerged perch, they can see in the distance Emmet Till dangling from a tree but not yet dead. In another direction they see the Scottsboro Boys, waiting in vain for justice, and the Birmingham Four, the little girls killed in a church bombing. It’s a grim place, and the parents (Michael Gene Sullivan and Dawn L. Troupe) reluctantly send their 10-year-old daughter, Benevolence (Safiya Fredericks), off with Ulysses for her best chance of survival.

To keep his young charge entertained, Ulysses tells her stories of his journey, including his time in Circe’s undersea den, which happens to be in the middle of the Middle Passage. You can’t get to your destination from there unless you have a past. Until Ulysses figures out his own, he is royally wined and dined by his hostess (played with jazzy verve by Troupe), who nearly steals the entire show with her lusty prayer before digging into the fantasy meal of all fantasy meals.

Another stop on his route involves a stylishly suited blind man atop a rolling Cadillac – Super Fly Tireseas (Lamont Thompson, who also plays the Zeus-like Daddy Deus) – who helps him navigate past Scylla- and Charybdis- like monsters who take the form of Diana Ross, Tina Turner and James Brown.

The most moving part of Ulysses’ journey takes him to slave quarters, where he is tended to with the utmost love and care by his great grandmother, played be the ever-extraordinary and surprising Margo Hall, who also plays Athena (aka Great Aunt Tina). This scene has incredible power and beauty, and the set by Michael Locher helps create one of the most incredible stage pictures in recent memory.

While all of this is going on, we also keep focus on the domestic drama of Nella (the invaluable Omozé Idehenre), rebellious teen Malachi (Michael Curry) and Aunt T. As if life weren’t difficult enough for them, a disguised Paw Sidin (Aldo Billingslea, simultaneously hilarious and menacing) is attempting to complicate their struggles even further by meddling with Nella’s affections and her desperation to do right by her son.

It’s a lot to deal with in 2 1/2 hours, but Gardley and Ting and this phenomenal cast keep it all rolling along. One of the great advantages of this production is its frequent use of choral music, which amplifies the heart and soul of the story. Credit Linda Tillery and Molly Holm for raising these voices to such a glorious place full of spirituals and blues and jazz and pop and an original song at the end that may just crack your heart wide open.

There’s so much beauty in this production – choreography by Latanya D. Tigner, stunning costumes by Dede M. Ayite – and so much pain in the story. Gardley’s words have poetry and pathos and power along with humor and defiance. And, as I said before, a love that lingers like a light in the dark.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Marcus Gardley’s black odyssey continues through Sept. 3 in a California Shakespeare Theater production at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Shakespeare Festival Way, Orinda. Free shuttles between Orinda BART and the theater. Tickets are $20-$92. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

Cal Shakes closes with apocalyptic King Lear

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Kjerstine Rose Anderson is The Fool and Anthony Heald is Lear in California Shakespeare Theater’s season-ending production of King Lear directed by Amanda Dehnert. Below: Heald rages as Lear. Photos by Kevin Berne

When California Shakespeare Theater ended the 2007 season with a heavy, industrial-looking King Lear, opening night was a cold one in the Bruns Amphitheater (read my review here). Eight years later, Cal Shakes once again ends the season with another heavy, industrial-looking Lear, but opening night was one of the rare ones when you could have worn short sleeves throughout (most of) the 2 1/2-hour tragedy. There’s just something delicious about a warm, late summer night for watching the unraveling of the world.

More than any other Lear I’ve seen, this one feels apocalyptic. Perhaps I’ve been watching too many zombie shows on TV, but the play felt like the perfect recipe for end times: take a whole lot of hubris (and the ego, power, lust, greed and general wretchedness that comes with it), throw in the decay of actual madness to blur all the lines and then watch the cracks in the foundations followed by nihilistic chaos and the abundant flow of blood. If that’s not end times, what is?

At the top of the show, director Amanda Dehnert tips her psychological hand by having Kjerstine Rose Anderson sweetly sing a song (borrowed from Twelfth Night) that tells us about a man whose youngest daughter was “wise but he called her his fool.” Anderson will go on to play Cordelia, Lear’s youngest daughter, the one who is banished when she refuses to kiss his royal ass when asked to do so in exchange for a third of the kingdom, and then she will reappear as the Fool. In this production, the Fool will be a sort of nefarious Snuffaluffagus, a figment of Lear’s fevered imagination that gives him tough love, taunts him and fuels his encroaching madness.

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Anderson is terrific in both roles, and she has crackling good chemistry with the marvelous Anthony Heald as Lear. The most poignant moment of the entire production comes when Lear, navigating the fog of his mind, recognizes Cordelia, home from her banishment to care for him.

Dehnert allows Heald to rage memorably from high atop the moving metal-and-glass boxes that comprise Daniel Ostling’s set. Stagehands connect, break apart, reconfigure and spin the boxes, and during Lear’s stormy night (mentally and literally), he finds himself high atop the boxes screaming at the sky and the hills of the Siesta Valley. It’s a beautiful, powerful image.

Another striking visual comes in the torture of Gloucester (Charles Shaw Robinson, whose clarity of language and thought make you wish he were in every Shakespeare play) by Regan (El Beh) and her husband, Cornwall (Craig Marker). First they strap him into a chainlink enclosure, electrify the metal and force him against it. Then, the box spins, and through shadows on the glass, we see them gouging out his eye.

The lighting of the play, by Christopher Akerlind, is distinct, with many large lights (like you used to see on movie soundstages) on stage and moved around to highlight different scenes. Depending on where you’re sitting, this can be like driving into the sunlight, but it also creates a stark landscape on stage and helps isolate action in a large space.

Along with Heald, Andreson and Robinson, the strength of this production comes from Aldo Billingslea as Kent, who even manages to dignify the silly get-up (complete with red mohawk) he wears when the banished Kent returns in disguise and from Dan Clegg as Edmund the cartoonish bastard of a bad guy who seizes on the moment of royal upheaval to destroy his own family and shred the country even more. Clegg takes such delight in Edmund’s dirty deeds he might as well be twirling his mustache, but he’s fun, even if his dirty deeds seem more cartoonish than evil.

Director Dehnert leans too heavily on comic relief from Patrick Alparone’s Malvolio-ish Oswald, footman to Goneril, and his death toward play’s end (though he’s perhaps playing a different soldier character, I wasn’t quite sure) elicits laughs that feel out of place in view of what’s to come.

As Cinderella’s stepsisters, er, sorry, Lear’s older daughters, Beh as Regan and Arwen Anderson as Goneril are fire and ice respectively and not much more. They come across as more cartoonish than human, and their deaths don’t register much more than the inevitable erasing of cartoon baddies.

There’s unevenness in tone to this Lear, but that doesn’t necessarily feel out of place when it seems everything is crumbling. While Heald’s Lear is center stage, there’s a pounding pulse to the production and you feel the real cost of our idiocy when it comes to the little things – like running the world, navigating family and dealing with other human beings.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
California Shakespeare Theater’s King Lear continues through Oct. 11 at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda. Tickets are $20-$72. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org. Free shuttles to and from the the theater and Orinda BART.

TheatreWorks delights with devilish Angels

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Rebecca Dines is Jane and Sarah Overman is Julia, best friends whose marriages are boring them to tears. In Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, a TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, the bored wives get up to some drunken mischief. Photos by Kevin Berne

Boredom, desire and champagne make for a potent cocktail in Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, now receiving a lively production from TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.

Director Robert Kelley delivers an elegant outing for this zesty comedy that keeps its focus on two live wire ladies – Jane and Julia, best friends since grammar school. Living the easy life with their lackluster husbands is taking its toll on their vivacity, and when left to their own devices, they manage to stir up a whole lot of excitement with the help of a man from their past (a cameo by the ever-dashing Aldo Billingslea.

I reviewed the production for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s an excerpt:

If Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz had been born into London’s upper crust, they might have resembled Julia and Jane, besties since childhood and now five years into their respective marriages to wealthy ninnies. Julia (Sarah Overman) is frank with her husband, Fred (Mark Anderson Phillips), over breakfast: “We’re not in love a bit,” she says. Ever-sensible Fred replies that they’re in love in a different way, a way full of affection and “good comradeship.”
Jane (Rebecca Dines) has a similar conversation with her Willy (Cassidy Brown); and when the two men go off for a short golf holiday, the women decide to inject some much needed passion and excitement into their lives. “To put it mildly, dear,” Jane says, “we’re both ripe for a lapse.”

Read the full review here.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels continues through June 28 in a TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $19-$74. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

Cal Shakes’ lukewarm take on Winter’s Tale

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L. Peter Callender (far left), Tyee Tilghman, Margo Hall (center), and Christopher Michael Rivera deal with unexplained jealousy in Cal Shakes’ production of A Winter’s Tale, directed by Patricia McGregor. Below: (from left) Tristan Cunningham, Callender, Aldo Billingslea and Hall celebrate spring in Bohemia. Photos by mellopix.com.

On a refreshingly brisk autumn night, California Shakespeare Theater’s A Winter’s Tale aimed to tell a sad story with a happy ending. “A sad story is best for winter,” or so we’re told by a young boy not long for this earth.

Even by Shakespearean standards, this is a strange play, with its jarring shifts in tone, unexplained fits of jealousy, interference by the gods and living statuary. In other words, it’s a director’s dream – here’s a wacky play that needs lots of interpretation and massaging to make it work for a modern audience.

Cal Shakes previously closed the season with A Winter’s Tale in 2002 with a massive production in which the audience moved around to accommodate the shift in action from Sicilia to Bohemia. Director Lisa Peterson hauled out screaming teenagers, a school bus and an all-out rave before audience members headed back into the theater proper for the moving, if fantastical, finale.

This time around, we get a wildly different Tale directed by Patricia McGregor, who returns after the triumph of last season’s Spunk, and her production is only fitfully successful. There’s a half-baked concept here that the story is told by a troupe of traveling actors, but this approach – so beautifully realized in Cal Shakes’ 2008 Pericles – makes little sense when there’s a towering, rotating set piece (by Michael Locher) standing center stage. This troupe certainly doesn’t travel light. The concept really seems more of an excuse to use nine actors to tell this complex story, which only reminds us of the “storytelling” concept before and after intermission and toward the end when there’s a nearly disastrous abridgment of the play that is rapped for our “enjoyment.” And there’s one awkward scene where Tyee Tilghman playing Camillo and Florizel has to be both characters in the same scene, so one of them stays conveniently out of view behind a small travel trailer, while other actors pretend to see him or interact with him.

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Attempts at audience interaction are well intentioned but don’t add much to the experience. At Wednesday night’s performance a lumberjack-looking fellow was pulled out of the audience to stand by the maypole while actors and ribbons whirled around him. Can’t imagine that was a theatergoing highlight for Mr. Bunyan. And pre-show plate spinning and cavorting also lacked the necessary pizzazz, as did the attempt at a sing-along in Act 2, which bombed primarily because the song (with lyrics on a handy program insert) is hard to sing and not remotely catchy.

Two things about this production work well: Shakespeare and McGregor’s cast. This may be a weird and wacky play, but Shakespeare knew what he was doing. The master of set up and denouement, Shakespeare spins a lot of plates (more effectively than the actors in the pre-show) but knows just how and when to take each plate down. There’s a certain satisfaction in the storytelling here, even though McGregor’s attempt to speed things up toward the end bleeds any emotion out of the ending, and that’s all Shakespeare.

When you need someone to play an intense king, who swings from wild, unfounded jealousy to soul-deep repentance within just a few scenes, you hire L. Peter Callender, an actor who can make emotional sense out of just about anything (and in a nice twist, he played Polixines in the 2002 production, so he has true insight into the pain his current character is causing). The reasons for King Leontes’ jealousy are never clear – he just decides that his Queen Hermione (Omozé Idehenre) is having an affair (and a child) with visiting King Polixenes (Aldo Billingslea) of Bohemia. After trying to kill Polixenes and then imprisoning his pregnant wife, Leontes is smacked down by a message from the oracle saying he’s a tyrant and has done his wife and friend a horrible wrong. To watch Callender navigate this steep emotional terrain is to watch an actor in full command. We don’t understand Leontes, but we absolutley believe him.

The same is true of Idehenre as Hermione, a regal monarch and loving mother who finds herself the victim of her husband’s temporary insanity. Shackled in a courtroom, pleading (with dignity) for her life, Idehenre’s Hermione is a vision of grace and strength coming from deep pain.

In supporting roles, Billingslea and Margo Hall provide exactly the kind of support you want here – serious when it needs to be (Billingslea’s wronged Polixenes, Hall as the protective Paulina) and lighter when called for (Hall as a Bohemian clown, Billingslea as the famous exiting bear).

While this production focuses on the more tragic parts of the play in its first half, all’s well that begins well. The actors are excellent and the story theater gimmick is kept at bay. Once the story zips forward 16 years and shifts to Bohemia, the tone wobbles and director McGregor loses control of the emotional through line, in spite of her actors’ best efforts. Here is a Winter’s Tale that chills, heats up and then more or less melts.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
California Shakespeare Theater’s A Winter’s Tale continues through Oct. 20 at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda (free shuttle to and from Orinda BART station). Tickets are $20 to $72. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

Looking at the stars: Cal Shakes fans flames of Wilde’s Winderemere

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The central trio of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan includes (from left) Mrs. Erlynne (Stacy Ross), Lord Windermere (Aldo Billingslea) and Lady Windermere (Emily Kitchens). The California Shakespeare Theater production is directed by Christopher Liam Moore. Below: Kitchens and Billingslea work through the first big challenge of the Windermeres’ two-year marriage. Photos by Kevin Berne

If you want, as Oscar Wilde did, to make cogent and funny points about men and women, husbands and wives and the notion of good people vs. bad people, what better way to do that than by putting Danny Scheie in a dress and letting him unleash his inner Dame Maggie Smith?

Scheie’s performance as the Duchess of Berwick in the California Shakespeare Theater’s production Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde’s first major theatrical it, is one of many pleasures in director Christopher Liam Moore’s beguiling production. The play itself remains fascinating and relevant, but oh the visual delights of a period piece!

Set designer Annie Smart has fashioned a spacious London townhouse complete with crystal chandeliers on a terrace with draperies blowing in the cool breezes of Saturday’s beautiful opening-night performance. York Kennedy’s lights add elegance and shadows when appropriate to suit the melodrama. And costumer Meg Neville brings a sly sense of humor to the Victorian costumes, especially for leading lady Emily Kitchens as the young, self-righteous Lady Windermere. Neville makes her look like various slices of cake, with floppy bows and layers of plush stuffing. She’s a little like a little girl playing dress-up, which seems only appropriate given that the play takes her from naive, entitled girl to more worldly woman of experience. For the scandal-plagued Mrs. Erlynne (Stacy Ross), Neville cleverly puts in her in a gorgeous black-and-white gown to underscore the extreme ways the character is perceived — no gray area where she’s concerned.

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And then there’s Scheie, doing a captivating riff on Wilde’s Lady Bracknell as the society matron who pronounces all women good and all men bad. Scheie conquers that tricky territory of high comedy and more serious intent that Wilde explores in Windermere. He lets the audience in on the joke, allows the laughs to come in regular waves but never relinquishes the satirical barbs and their sharp, wounding points.

At this point in the 21st century, Wilde’s late 19th-century play seems so clearly to be about the folly of conservatism, which is really nothing more than closed-mindedness (willful or naturally occurring) or utter denial of human beings’ capacity for complexity and inability to fit neatly into boxes like “good” or “bad.” It makes for delicious theater as Wilde sets up Lady Windermere to believe her husband (the stalwart Aldo Billingslea) is having an affair with the much-gossiped-about Mrs. Erlynne. The whole of London society is buzzing about the seemingly flagrant affair Winderemere and Erlynne are conducting, but appearances are rarely what they seem.

The one complication in Wilde’s formula is that the Lord and his supposed mistress are completely oblivious that their interactions might be construed as adulterous by gossip-minded outside observers. That doesn’t seem quite plausible for two such intelligent characters, but then again, if they’d taken pains to conceal their interactions, we wouldn’t have much of a melodrama, and the melodrama here is such juicy fun.

But again, the fun is constantly tempered by something real. One Wildean character can toss off an aphorism like, “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” But later comes an observation like, “There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely — or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” And sometimes the wit and the sting come packaged neatly together: “Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”

There are many levels on which to enjoy Moore’s sturdy production, and the performances allow insight into all of them. Kitchens is a slightly annoying Lady Windermere, a young mother so impressed by her righteousness that she all but collapses when she’s exposed to the real world outside the walls of her comfy cozy ideals. But Ross is a revelation as Mrs. Erlynne, a hardened, bitter woman who discovers she has a heart after all (and she doesn’t like it: “Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old,” she says).

Lady Windermere’s Fan has a lot to say to a country divided by politics, religion and combinations thereof. “Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.”

How nice it is to see badness of such goodness on the Cal Shakes stage.

[bonus interview]
I talked to director Christopher Liam Moore for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan continues through Sept. 8 at California Shakespeare Theater’s Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda. Tickets are $20-$72 (subject to change). Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org. Cal Shakes runs a free shuttle to and from the Oridna BART station and the theater.

Gettin’ to the git in Cal Shakes’ glorious Spunk

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The cast of Spunk at Cal Shakes shakes it up. Below: Omozé Idehenre and Aldo Billingslea in the final story of the trilogy, “The Gilded Six Bits.” Photos by www.kevinberne.com

Zora Neale Hurston writes with zest and zeal. She can move from joy to anguish in a second and still find her way back to hope. All of this is readily apparent in California Shakespeare Company’s production of Spunk at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. Sharp and spirited and brimming with talent, these three Hurston stories, adapted for the stage by George C. Wolfe, are poetry and drama, blues and jubilation and as much stirring music as you’re likely to hear in 90 minutes in the foggy Orinda Hills.

Wolfe honors Hurston by making sure the audience knows these are short stories – not plays – being brought to life so that we, as a group, can appreciate Hurston’s rich, beautiful and musical language. Each of the three stories includes narration of some kind, so the evening never strays from its literary roots. But this is no storytime theater. This is theater that moves. And sings. Boy, does it sing.

Before the show even begins, musician Tru warms up the audience with a call-and-response song to “stir up some ancestors.” What starts as sort of a lark, ends up being surprisingly beautiful. There are pockets of such delightful surprises all through this sharply executed production directed by Patricia McGregor in her Cal Shakes debut.

The cast of six, expertly accompanied by Tru on guitar (mostly), does a lot of singing, but the golden voice of the bunch belongs to Dawn L. Troupe as Blues Speak Woman. Whether she’s singing the narration and vocal punctuation to a story of abuse and eventual triumph (the original score is by Chic Street Man)or singing an up tempo version of “Unforgettable,” Troupe is the shine on this production, and Tru is its pulse.

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Though we’re aware that we’re being told stories, director McGregor allows these tales to move as much as they sing. Thanks to choreographer Paloma McGregor (the director’s sister), there’s never a static moment. There are full-on musical numbers, but there’s also poetry of movement going on, especially in the middle chapter, “Story in Harlem Slang,” where two zoot-suited hustlers, playing the cool game and desperate to hit up ladies with cash so they can get a hot meal, try to come across as the hippest things in Harlem. They strike poses – early voguing, no doubt – and many of them involve bodies at a diagonal. Outfitted in dazzlingly bright suits (costumes by Callie Floor), L. Peter Callender, Aldo Billingslea and Tyee Tilghman are all angles and slants in jazzy colors. Their speech is nothing short of Shakespearean in its colorful way with words, and while their hustle is masterfully deflated by Omozé Idehenre, their “dance of the desperate pimps” makes for dazzling entertainment.

In the opening story, “Sweat,” Margo Hall is Delia, a hardworking, God-loving woman with a snake for a husband. Callender gleefully plays the devilish Sykes (such a Dickensian name for evil), though his violence is far from cartoonish. With fanciful touches, like a puppet horse and a puppet old coot on a porch, this story goes to some dark places – it’s practically biblical in its use of serpents – and emerges in something like the light of triumph.

The same is true for the final chapter, “The Gilded Six Bits,” in which the ever-charming Billingslea and a powerful Idehenre play a blissfully wed young couple that hits a gold-covered rough patch in their marriage. There’s a lot of room in this story for melodrama, but Hurston seems more interested in complicated human emotions and lets time and true love take their course.

Everything about this production, from the set by Michael Locher, which looks like a down-home art installation, to York Kennedy’s lights, which only add to the colorful glow of the stories, is pitch perfect. The lights come up after 90 minutes and you’re just not ready to leave Hurston’s world. When I saw the show Friday night, the audience didn’t have to leave – they were invited on stage to learn dance moves from the Harlem Renaissance and to revel in a dance party. The stage was crowded with dancers, proving that Spunk, when delivered in just the right way, is contagious. And irresistible.

[bonus interviews]
I interviewed Spunk director Patricia McGregor and choreographer Paloma McGregor for the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the feature here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Spunk continues through July 29 at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda. Tickets are $35-$71. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

Othello: not a fan but a grudging admirer

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Craig Marker (left) is Iago and Aldo Billingslea is Othello in the Marin Theatre Company production of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice. Below: Billingslea with Mairin Lee as Desdemona. Photos by David Allen.

When faced with the prospect of seeing another production of Othello, I usually gird my loins, wipe my nose with a strawberry-embroidered hanky and settle in for a show I know I’m not going to like much. As a theater critic, I suppose I’m not supposed to have a bias for or against certain plays, but that’s really nonsensical when you think about it, especially plays you’ve seen over and over and over again. I’ve been doing the theatrical criticism thing for almost 20 years now, and I’ve seen Desdemona choked (and choked and choked again) a number of times, in good productions and bad. And I’ve never really been moved by the play. Certain performances made an impact, but more on an intellectual than emotional level.

Perhaps I should have skipped the latest Othello at Marin Theatre Company, but the prospect of seeing two actors I admire greatly, Aldo Billingslea and Craig Marker as Othello and Iago respectively, was too much to resist. I have to say I’m glad I saw the production because these two formidable local talents do not disappoint. Watching Billingslea transform from noble warrior to blushing groom to murderous, jealousy-enraged monster is captivating. And Marker’s boyish earnestness somehow makes Iago even more coldhearted than usual. Even from behind a scruffy beard, Marker can’t escape a look of innocence that contrasts sharply with the evil spewing from his lips.

Billingslea and Marker perform a beautifully calibrated duet of provocation and victimization that erupts into a finale can’t help but satisfy when Othello realizes what a tool he’s been and Iago is exposed for the inveterate villain he really is.

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What gets me about Othello is that until that final section when all the plot machinations start to take hold and the bodies start to drop, I really couldn’t care less about any of it. The motivations, the exposition, the supposed justifications for the coming blood bath – it’s all just so much rumbling to me, and none of it really adds to the final act, which would still have a visceral impact without any of it.

So while I’m slogging through the first two-plus hours of the nearly three-hour MTC production directed by artistic director Jasson Minadakis, I have time to notice the set by J.B. Wilson. It’s two towers of a battlement connected by a wooden walkway with half of a big stone sphere visible between the two towers. The more I looked at the set, the more I realized what it reminded me of: Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the sphere is like that giant boulder that nearly steamrollers over Indy in the opening sequence. And the lighting by Kurt Landisman is distinctive as well – very dark and shadowy like Shakespeare noir…or a really moody new restaurant in a hip Cypress neighborhood.

Fight director Dave Maier gets some vigorous sword fighting out of the cast, who hold swords in one hand and mini-shields in the other, so there’s lots of satisfying clanging going on. Speaking of the cast, the supporting players who impressed me most were Liz Sklar as Aemilia, Desdemona’s lady in waiting. Aemilia is such an impressive woman – so powerful, loyal and forthright. You have to wonder what she’s doing with a slime bag like Iago. Anyway, also good in the supporting cast are Nicholas Pelczar as Rodorigo and an underused Dan Hiatt as Desdemona’s pissed-off father. The other players were uneven and often seemed out of their depth with the Shakespearean language.

In spite of all the good things, this is still Othello, a play that tests my patience. In the end, this Othello left me wanting, as so many other productions have, wanting ever so much (you should pardon the expression) Moor.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Shakespeare’s Othello continues through April 22 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $34-$50. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.

Aurora premiere bridges gap between comedy and Collapse

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Amy Resnick as Susan does an upward facing dog during a conversation with Gabriel Marin as David and Carrie Paff as Hannah in Allison Moore’s Collapse at the Aurora Theatre Company. Below: Aldo Billingslea is the enigmatic Ted, a stranger who gets to know Paff’s Hannah. Photos by David Allen

 

Sometimes things collapse. Sometimes buildings and bridges, things that are built to physically support us. And sometimes marriages and families, things that are meant to sustain and bolster us, crumble as well.

Both kinds of ruin are examined – sometimes to hilarious comic effect – in Allison Moore’s Collapse, a rolling world premiere at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company. The concept of a rolling premiere is essentially a collaboration, in this case with the National New Play Network and Curious Theatre in Denver and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas.

Director Jessica Heidt’s sharp, wildly entertaining production begins on rather a sly note. She has pitched her actors to an extreme level of discomfort, yet their goal is to appear perfectly normal and happy. It’s a total sitcom situation – living room set and all – as David (Gabriel Marin) attempts to inject the posterior of his wife, Hannah (Carrie Paff), with fertility drugs. Their chipper anxiety about the fertility process is masking something else. We don’t know what, but we sense it’s serious. He’s drinking too much, she’s worried about being laid off from her legal firm and there’s a shadow looming over their relationship.

The sitcom rhythms continue with the arrival of Hannah’s kooky sister from California, Susan (Amy Resnick) – why do all the kooks have to be from California? Sure enough, this one almost immediately announces her life as crumbled, so she’s moving back home to Minneapolis and will crash with her sister and brother-in-law for the foreseeable future. Then she starts doing yoga.

There’s nothing wrong with sitcom rhythms when they’re done well – and this trio of actors is superb. But there’s more to Moore’s play than what first appears. This is a rollicking comedy with decidedly serious undertones, and before too long, it feels like a drama – a beautifully written and produced drama – more than it does a sitcom. And that’s a wonderful thing.

The shadow looming over Hannah and David is actually, physically looming over them in Melpomene Katakalos’ set design. In addition to the spare settings for a living room, a diner or a support group, the intimate Aurora space is filled with pieces of a bridge – Minneapolis’ I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River, to be exact, the one that collapsed in August of 2007 and killed 13 and injured 145.

That horrific accident affected Hannah and David personally, and they have spent the last year and a half (the play is set in 2009) confronting and avoiding the issue, but mostly suffering through their own personal and matrimonial hell.

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Hannah is so on edge that when she meets the enigmatic Ted (Aldo Billingslea) at a support group meeting, she immediately falls under this Southerner’s spell. Is he a nice guy or a master manipulator? It’s hard to tell, and Billingslea’s smoothly sexy performance makes it almost impossible to know for sure. Listen to him croon, “Oh, I will be your bulldog” and you’ll gain a whole new appreciation for people from Georgia.

It’s amazing that from under the rubble of a collapsed bridge, a collapsed economy and collapsing relationships that Moore can find any laughs, but there are plenty in this brisk but fully satisfying 80-minute one-act. There’s silliness skittering over some serious darkness, but the play never feels frivolous. Those sitcom stereotypes that we see at the start of the show, deepen into richer characters than we might expect. Even Susan, the kook, whose every laugh is mined by the brilliant Resnick, earns our sympathy. Her West Coast spiritual facade is a kind of armor she wears to combat the constant string of failures in her life. She means well and will likely continue stumbling through the years, opening herself to the “universal flow.”

And Paff and Marin show us the real pain stabbing Hannah and David, and the real affection that brought them together in the first place. There’s a good marriage between good people at stake here, and you feel that acutely by play’s end. Things may collapse, but they can also be rebuilt.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Allison Moore’s Collapse continues through March 6 at the Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $34-$45. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org for information.

Jesus and his extraordinary Mississippi moonwalk

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EXTENDED THROUGH APRIL 25!
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Above: Nicole C. Julien is Miss Ssippi in The Cutting Ball Theater/Playwrights Foundation production of Marcus Gardley’s …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi. Below: David Westley Skillman is The Great Tree/Jesus and Aldo Billingslea is Damascus. Photos by Rob Melrose.

 

Quilts and buttons are stars and stories in Marcus Gardley’s deeply lyrical, undeniably beautiful …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, now at the EXIT on Taylor in a co-production of The Cutting Ball Theater and Playwrights Foundation.

On the theatrical spectrum, this is the exact opposite of the sitcom-ready Sunset and Margaritas now at TheatreWorks (read my review of that play in the Palo Alto Weekly here), which is to say this is challenging, thought-provoking material given the kind of sharply etched production that inspires curiosity and wonder. There’s nothing easy about Moonwalks, and that’s a good thing. Gardley, working with director Amy Mueller, weaves myth, folklore, American Civil War history, personal family history and musings on race in this country.

That’s a lot to fold into a nearly 2 1/2-hour production, but Gardley and Mueller do it with the assistance of a fantastic set (by Michael Locher) that represents the night sky with buttons and plants an ominous hangman’s tree in the planks of the floor. The small but versatile stage (beautifully lit by Heather Basarab) is a battlefield after the siege of Vicksburg, a shattered Louisiana plantation and, most amazingly, the soul of the mighty Mississippi River.

Nicole C. Julien plays Miss Ssippi, the embodiment of the river that wends its way more than 2,300 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. She sings like a soulful angel (with sterling backup by her chorus, Rebecca Frank, Halili Knox and Erica Richardson), and she refuses to take sides in the divisive war raging around her. But like a goddess in the Greek tradition, she does take an interest in human lives and isn’t afraid to lend a helping hand (wave?) and assist in leading folks to their fate.

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In Gardley’s story, a freed slave named Damascus (a riveting Aldo Billingslea) is searching for his beloved, a slave named Poem (pronounced po-EMM). But Damascus is captured by Confederate soldiers and hanged from that terrifying tree. Jesus (in the form of David Westley Skillman, who occasionally tries to moonwalk to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”) decides to resurrect Damascus so he can continue his quest, but now the strapping man will be a woman named Demeter (echoes of the Demeter-Persephone myth here), and she has an extremely limited time to find Poem before death comes calling for real this time.

Damascus/Demeter is led to the ramshackle Verse plantation, where Cadence Marie Verse (a fierce Jeanette Harrison) is attempting to keep her daughters (Erika A. McCrary and Sarah Mitchell) and home together even though all her slaves have fled except for house servant Brer Bit (Martin F. Grizzell Jr.), who has a grand plan of his own (and it’s not good for his mistress).

There’s a tangled tale of romance and betrayal coursing through this plantation, so it’s hardly surprising that Damascus/Demeter’s fate lands her at this particular front door, where a Confederate roamer (David Sinaiko) and a shamed Yankee soldier (Zac Schuman) enter the fray.

It’s the story that compels, but it’s Gardley’s writing that fascinates. Interspersed amid some gorgeous spirituals, Gardley pours poetry over the drama and lets it cascade like water down a fall. The rhymes and images are so plentiful it would take a second viewing to appreciate them all.

Powerful, mesmerizing and complete with bolts of humor and tragedy, …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi is an intimate epic that pulses with power and beauty.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

…and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi continues an extended run through April 25 at the EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$30. Call 800 838-3006 or visit www.cuttingball.com.

 

Review: `Radio Golf’

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Aldo Billingslea (left) is Harmond Wilks, C. Kelly Wright (center) is Harmond’s wife, Mame, and Anthony J. Haney is Harmond’s business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, in August Wilson’s Radio Golf at TheatreWorks in Mountain View. Photos by Mark Kitacka.

 

Superb cast tunes up Wilson’s `Radio’ at TheatreWorks
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Even the prodigious talents of August Wilson have a hard time making the ’90s interesting.

Radio Golf, Wilson’s final play and the last piece of his extraordinary cycle of plays documenting African-American life in each decade of the 20th century, receives its Bay Area premiere in a tightly focused, incredibly well acted production from TheatreWorks in Mountain View.

Perhaps because we have the least distance from the ’90s, as opposed to other plays in Wilson’s cycle (such as “Fences” in the ’50s or “The Piano Lesson” in the ’30s), it’s difficult to feel the dramatic weight of a decade that is best remembered for e-mail, the Internet and little else.

Curiously, there’s not a computer to be seen on Erik Flatmo’s set – a “raggedy,” as one character calls it, office space in Pittsburgh’s Hill District that was once the height of elegance with its embossed tin ceiling. The year is 1997, and the space is being used as home base for the Bedford Hills Redevelopment Project, an ambitious attempt to obliterate the blight of the black district’s poverty and hard times and introduce apartment complexes, a Starbucks, a Barnes and Noble and, of course, a Whole Foods.

The project is spearheaded by old college chums Harmond Wilks (Aldo Billingslea, right), owner of a successful real estate agency, and Roosevelt Hicks (Anthony J. Haney), a banker. This redevelopment is just the beginning, especially for Harmond, who grew up in the Hill District and wants to take the energy of this project and turn it into a bid to become Pittsburgh’s first African-American mayor.

There’s a lot of business talk in Radio Golf – maybe that’s another reason the ’90s are hard to enliven because the decade was all business – but with all the exposition of Act 1 out of the way, we get to the heart of what Wilson seems to be after here.

As time rolls on, and as “progress” pushes forward, we tend to want to deny – or at least ignore – the past rather than deal with it. But without the past, how do we know what our success really is? And without a clear view of where or who we’ve been, how do we know we’re aiming for success for the right reasons?

These are the issues faced by Harmond, a straight-laced, follow-the-plan kind of guy. His gorgeous, successful wife, Mame (C. Kelly Wright), has helped formulate the plan to get him into the mayor’s office, and together they are going to head all the way to the Senate.

But just as the plan is kicking into gear, the past shows up in the form of two men. One, Old Joe (the superb Charles Branklyn), is slightly crazy and has questionable motives, but he is deeply rooted in the past of the Hill District and even more rooted in Harmond’s past than he knows.

The other is Sterling Johnson (L. Peter Callender), a self-educated, hard-working man who brings a big dose of reality with him wherever he goes. Wilson, in a rather lazy narrative approach, makes him read from the newspaper a few too many times, but Sterling has the kind of integrity that makes businessmen and politicians nervous.

Director Harry J. Elam Jr. has a hard time kicking the long first act into gear, but in Act 2, the play and the actors catch fire because Wilson is focusing less on plot and much more on character.

With his open, honest face, Billingslea is superb as Harmond. There are dark currents coursing through this ambitious man who adopts as his election slogan: “Hold Me to It.” Faced with compromise and injustice, Harmond has to find some sort of balance between his ambition and his integrity.

Billingslea has an incredible scene with Wright, who never makes a misstep as the supremely well put together Mame. The couple watches their goals and their dreams of a perfect life in politics crumble around them. And in this one scene, they have to determine their future as a couple and what their past measures up to in the present.

There’s another extraordinary scene in the second act, this one between Haney’s Roosevelt and Callender’s Sterling. The two men – from opposite ends of the African-American male spectrum – clash in a profound way, each calling the other names and attempting to define one another through blame and accusation. It’s a difficult, chilling scene, and through it, Wilson cuts right to the heart of why race in this country has been for more than a century, and will continue to be, such a complex, polarizing issue.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Radio Golf continues through Nov. 2 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $23-$61. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.