Aurora tips Albee’s Balance delicately

EXTENDED THROUGH OCT. 23!
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Kimberly King (right) gives a stellar performance as Agnes in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company. Agnes’ world is upended by the arrival of best friends Edna (Anne Darragh, rear left) and Harry (Charles Dean) who are fleeing a nameless terror. Below: Ken Grantham (in bathrobe) is Tobias, patriarch of a challenging clan, which now includes Harry (Dean, right) and (rear, from left) Agnes (King), Julia (Carrie Paff), Claire (Jamie Jones) and Edna (Darragh). Photos by David Allen

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance only looks like a suburban comedy. It’s really an existential nightmare slightly more gussied up than your average slasher movie. Oh, blood flows in this eviscerating drama, but it’s of a more metaphorical variety than you’ll find in the Saw franchise. Between the ravages of time and the mighty pen of Albee, the family on stage has absolutely no chance at all.

And their demise is so very delicious. (Also delicious: Albee himself was in the audience for Thursday’s opening-night performance.)

A Delicate Balance opens Aurora’s 20th season, and as directed by Artistic Director Tom Ross, it’s a perfect example of why the Aurora is such a glorious part of the Bay Area theater scene. An intimate theater and a thrust stage so deep it’s practically in the round make the Aurora a crucible in which outstanding writing and superb performances combine and, with luck and a good director, ignite. To watch an actor lose herself or himself in an exquisitely crafted part is one of the greatest pleasures in the theater, and there’s no better vantage point for this than the Aurora.

Ross’ Balance is one of those wonderful Aurora experiences – a cracking good play with a strong director at the helm and intricate performances that blur the line between art and reality.

Chief among this production’s pleasures is a central performance by Kimberly King as Agnes. Hers is a performance so compelling it’s sometimes to hard to watch anybody else. From the play’s opening moments, as Agnes muses on the very real possibility that she’ll lose her mind, it’s clear that King will be the vital center of this story. Agnes is a fascinating character – strong, controlling, incredibly smart and hard to the point of impenetrability. But through Albee’s incisive writing and King’s dynamic performance, we also see the person Agnes once was – warm, funny, compassionate, nurturing – before life, and the choices she made to deal with that life, built up her defenses and made her more sour than sweet.

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Because the audience is on three sides of the stage, it’s impossible for actors to escape the careful inspection of audience members at all times. Ross, who has been with the Aurora since 1992, is adept at directing the most minute details. This means that wherever you look at any time during the play, you’ll see something revealing, especially if, like me, you’re compelled to watch King’s Agnes for the play’s three acts and nearly three hours.

Whether she’s lovingly manipulating her somewhat baffled husband, Tobias (Ken Grantham, fighting her alcoholic younger sister, Claire (Jamie Jones or dealing with the hysteria of her oft-divorced daughter, Julia (Carrie Paff), Agnes is a force of nature (“There’s no saner woman on Earth,” we’re told). She’s well spoken (indeed, she apologizes at one point for being articulate), and her words have powerful impact. She’s the fulcrum attempting to maintain the delicate balance of the title.

She rules her suburban roost (the gorgeous living room set is by Richard Olmstead and the lighting by Kurt Landisman) like a drill sergeant crossed with dowager empress with a hint of Margaret Thatcher. And yet she’s entirely likeable, even empathetic, and that’s largely due to the intricacies of King’s masterful performance.

Agnes gets even more interesting when her world starts to rock. Errant daughter Julia returns home after her fourth failed marriage on the same day that best friends Harry and Edna (Charles Dean and Anne Darragh) arrive with news that they have fled their home due to some unnamed terror. The monster of mortality is storming the neighborhood, like Godzilla touring Japan, and Agnes is just the warrior to ready her troops. As she and Tobias discuss early in the play, from their plateau of soul-numbing suburban domesticity, “we do what we can,” so of course they take in their creepily spooked friends and mentally unbalanced daughter. They don’t want to but they do.

There are so many good laughs in this production that it can feel like a rollicking comedy, but for every great laugh line, or accordion solo, there’s an equally searing observation about marriage, friendship, family and the ruinous nature of time. As when Claire, a self-described drunk rather than an alcoholic, asks for a refill on her cocktail: “Oh, come on. It’s only the first I’m not supposed to have.” The more you laugh, the closer you get to falling down the bottomless pit – “the dark sadness” as Albee describes it – at the center of the play. And that’s a theater experience to savor.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance continues an extended run through Oct. 23 at the Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $10-$48. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org

Gabe Marin exorcises Aurora’s devilish `Disciple’

One of the great things about Bay Area theater is watching local actors grow into greatness.

They may or may not strike off to find fortune and fame in New York or Los Angeles, or they may choose to stay here and continue doing as much good work as they can.

The Aurora Theatre Company’s next show, George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, is packed with the kind of actors who, if you care about local theater, you’ve been watching for years. Names such as Stacy Ross, Warren David Keith and Trish Mullholland pretty much make a show worth seeing if they’re involved.

Another name to add to that list is Gabriel Marin (seen at right with Devil’s co-star Stacy Ross, photos by David Allen).

Theatergoers probably don’t remember Marin’s local stage debut in American Conservatory Theater’s The Play’s the Thing in 1995. He was a 23-year-old spear carrier amid some Bay Area greats such as Ken Ruta, Dan Hiatt and Kimberly King. He was fresh out of college (Chicago’s DePaul University) and eager to put all his acting training to use.

But on stage at the Geary, Marin remembers thinking: “Damn, I should have paid more attention in voice class. All the things I thought were old school and used to roll my eyes at, turned out to be more useful than I thought. And there I was watching people do it to perfection. Made me feel inadequate and in awe.”

But Marin persisted, even as he married, started a family and moved to Los Angeles. When the marriage ended, Marin and his son, Max, headed back to the Bay Area, while his daughter, Morgan, stayed in L.A. with her mom.

Being a single parent, Marin found a day job that involved theater – marketing director for Walnut Creek’s Center Repertory Company – that still allowed him to pursue acting opportunities.

“There’s nothing, other than acting, that I could do and be happy with myself,” Marin says. “When I was in LA, supporting a family, theater was something I had to obviously set aside, and those years were soul-sucking to me. Now I embrace the poverty. I embrace being bereft of amenities. That’s why I say this is all I can do and be happy.”

In the last couple of years, Marin has really come into his own, delivering some stunning performances for SF Playhouse (Bug, Jesus Hopped the `A’ Train, Our Lady of 121st Street), Magic Theatre (The Rules of Charity), Marin Theatre Company (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Traveling Jewish Theatre/Thick Description (Dead Mother, Or Shirley Not All in Vain).

All the theater work has meant that Max, about to turn 13, has spent a lot of time backstage.

“I cannot thank my son enough,” Marin says. “He’s had to sit in a lot of green rooms. He’s the light of my life. What’s interesting, is when I bow, I make an `M’ with my hands, and if he’s in the green room, he’ll run out to the wings to see if I give him thanks. I couldn’t act if he wasn’t on board.”

The younger Marin is so on board, in fact, that he’s been expressing the desire to be an actor (when he doesn’t want to be a computer game programmer or airplane pilot).

“I’ll encourage him and help facilitate that,” Marin says. “But I’m very careful not to push that on him.”

Marin is returning to Berkeley’s Aurora, where he previously appeared in Gunplay, The Glass Menagerie and Shaw’s Saint Joan, directed by Aurora’s founding artistic director, Barbara Oliver, who is also helming The Devil’s Disciple.

This is the one Shaw play set in America (during the Revolutionary War, naturally), and it tends toward the melodramatic. Marin is playing Richard Dudgeon, the self-proclaimed “devil’s disciple” who pretends to be the local minister, who may be fitted with a hangman’s noose to demoralize the townspeople.

“Richard is awesome,” Marin says. “He’s kind of Han Solo meets Obi Wan Kenobi in a very Shavian way. He’s the rogue with a heart of gold, and he made me think of Obi Wan because he reminded me of Obi Wan saying to Darth Vader something like, `If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.'”

Marin’s girlfriend teases him that he’s finally playing a rogue instead of a loser with a heart of gold.

After Devil’s Disciple, Marin will be seen in John Guare’s Landscape of the Body at SF Playhouse in January and then Jack Goes Boating back at the Aurora next summer under the direction of Bay Area veteran Joy Carlin.

With such a non-stop schedule, Marin must be exhausted.

“I’m not exhausted,” he says. “I’m grateful.”

The Devil’s Disciple begins previews Friday, Oct. 31, opens Thursday, Nov. 6 and runs through Dec. 7 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $28 for previews, $40-$42 for regular performances. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org for information.

Kimberly King casts a shadow in `Doubt’


Kimberly King (with Cassidy Brown as Father Flynn) plays the stern Sister Aloysius in the TheatreWorks production of Doubt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by John Patrick Shanley. Photos by David Allen

For a while, Kimberly King and her husband, Ken Grantham, were sort of the first couple of Bay Area theater.

From their Berkeley base, they performed all over the place – Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Marin Shakespeare Festival, you name it. They acted, they directed.

Then, like so many great local actors, they moved to Los Angeles and then to New York. When that got old, they decided to head back to the West Coast, but instead of returning to the Bay Area, they made a surprising decision. They headed to Washington, but not to Seattle. Four years ago they settled in the Puget Sound area and run the Green Cat Guest House and Bed and Breakfast just outside of the tiny town of Poulsbo.

But they have not been so consumed by their careers as innkeepers that they have forsaken the stage. They’ve managed to work at the Intiman and A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, and they occasionally hit the road.

King made a memorable local appearance two years ago as Mary Tyrone in San Jose Repertory Theatre’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and she’s back to tackle the role of Sister Aloysius in TheatreWorks’ production of Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto.

“At first glance, Sister Aloysius can seem like kind of a stock character. We’ve seen terrifying nuns through the ages,” King says. “But the core of the sister, and the core of the play itself, is the central humanity of her character. Her belief is that she is doing good, trying to protect the children she deeply loves at her school, trying to make the world better. That’s what saves the character from being a stereotype. That’s also the place where we can hold up the mirror to ambition, human ideals, human conflict and, finally, human doubt. She may seem embedded in her belief system, but the playwright won’t let her stay there very long.”

Bay Area audiences had the chance to see Doubt two years ago when the Broadway tour, starring Cherry Jones in her Tony Award-winning role of Sister Aloysius, played the Golden Gate Theatre. King did not see that performance and so brings her own talent and background (she’s from Irish and Lutheran stock) to the role.

“Sister A is a woman to be admired and feared,” King says. “She is fiercely intelligent, passionate in her beliefs. Her guiding light is the care and nurturing, in her own way, of her flock, her children. She cares about them very deeply. Cares about the idea of education very deeply. Her strict and stringent guidelines remind me of maestros I’ve worked with. I’m not naming names, but they share a passionate belief they can affect a positive outlook in the world with standards that are important to adhere to. The question is whether those standards get in the way of other observations, other mindsets, let in other ways of being.”

In the play, Sister Aloysius must deal with a priest, Father Flynn, who may have abused one of the students. The incident, which also demonstrates a clash between the old ways and the new ways in the church in the early ’60s, around the time of Vatican II, shakes the Sister to her core.

“There’s a courtyard between the rectory and the convent, and as the Sister says, `It might as well be the Atlantic Ocean.'” King says. “That courtyard is an interesting symbol. Sister Aloysius is older than Father Flynn, maybe by about 20 years. She’s the old and he represents the new. Shanley doesn’t come down on either side. He holds up the prism that allows the facets of these people and the world outside to show. Part of the magnetism of the play is that the audience needs to decide, to have the discussion, formulate the views. There are no rights, no wrongs, no easy answers, no easy conclusions. Doubt is such a wonderful piece of writing. My respect for it grows every day.”

King is reveling being back in the Bay Area – one of her favorite places, she says – and says she and her husband moved to Puget Sound because, as Sister Aloysius says, “Life is perhaps longer than you think and the dictates of the soul more numerous.”

“Our souls dictated Puget Sound,” she says. “And they really do have 350 days of clouds and rain there. But I’m a California girl at heart. Some time, every day, we think about coming back here.”

For more with Kimberly King, please visit my Examiner.com theater page here.

TheatreWorks’ Doubt begins previews tonight (July 16), opens Saturday (July 19) and continues through Aug. 10 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.