Bay Area’s best theater bets

The summer season is starting to, pardon the expression, heat up, though anyone who has been through a Bay Area summer knows that summer does not necessarily mean heat around here.


– Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my! The first outdoor show of the year opened last week on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin: The Mountain Play’s The Wizard of Oz runs weekends through June 15. All shows are at 1 p.m. The views are spectacular, and the show’s probably pretty good, too. Tickets are $25-$39. Call 415-383-1100 or visit www.mountainplay.org for information.


Franz Kafka’s Love Life, Letters and Hallucinations in Short Scenes with Live Actors at the Berkeley City Club. Photo by Marty Sohl

Brookside Repertory Theatre in Berkeley presents Franz Kafka’s Love Life, Letters and Hallucinations in Short Scenes with Live Actors (whew!) by Mae Ziglin Meidav. Written by Brookside’s artistic director, this comic biography delves into the hallucinations that fed Kafka’s creativity. The show continues through June 29 at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $16-$34. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.brooksiderep.org for information.

– Check out Marga Gomez’s work-in-progress Long Island Iced Latina at The Marsh, which will have its premiere at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub in New York. Another in her series of comedic memoirs, the new show is about Gomez’s awkward adolescence (is there any other kind?) in Massapequa, Long Island, where life was equal parts cultural confusion, chronic virginity, mother-daughter instability and polyester fashion.
The show opens today (May 28) and continues through May 31 at The Marsh Studio Theater, 1074 Valencia St., San Francisco. The bill also includes an excerpt from Samantha Chase’s Lydia’s Funeral Video.
Tickets are $15-$35 on a sliding scale. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.themarsh.org for information.

California Shakespeare Theater opens its 2008 season with Pericles, a wacky Shakespeare play involving incest, shipwrecks, tournaments, magicians bringing the dead back to life and, of course, pirates! Minneapolis-based director Joel Sass makes his West Coast directing debut with a highly theatrical re-telling of this odd tale with eight actors playing 50 roles. Previews begin tonight (May 28) and opening is Saturday, May 30. The show continues through June 22 at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda (good news for your gas tank: there’s a free shuttle between Orinda BART and the theater). Tickets are $40-$62. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org for information.
You might also want to check out Cal Shakes’ blogs here.

Review: `Squeeze Box’

At The Marsh in San Francisco through June 29

 

Ann Randolph wrote and stars in Squeeze Box at The Marsh. The solo show is about her loss and rediscovery of faith.

Superb solo show squeezes out laughs, drama
«««1/2 Extraordinary characters

 

There are certain people who, when they recommend a show, I snap to attention and see the show. One of those people is Anne Bancroft, the late great actress who will never stop delighting me with her talent. Bancroft had this to say about Ann Randolph’s solo show Squeeze Box: “When I first saw [Squeeze Box], I was deeply moved. Ann Randolph’s amazing work, both as a writer and fellow performer, touched my heart and my mind so profoundly that I felt it belonged on the New York stage.”

Bancroft and her husband, Mel Brooks, became producers of Randolph’s show and gave it a successful off-Broadway run in 2004. Since then, Randolph has been doing Squeeze Box around the world while she has continued to develop new work. That’s what brings her to The Marsh in San Francisco. Randolph does her show two nights a week, works on new characters and new monologues and conducts workshops in developing solo shows.

Lucky us.

There’s something so incredibly theatrical about a one-person show. We have two excellent examples in the Bay Area right now – Randolph’s show and Nilaja Sun’s No Child… at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (now extended through June 11) – in which women, on a mostly bare stage, become a cast of characters that we willingly and enthusiastically see beyond the shape and size of the amazing actress creating them.

Randolph’s autobiographical story is really one of faith. When we first meet the likeable, slightly goofy Ann, she’s working a minimum-wage job at a shelter for mentally ill homeless women in Santa Monica. The job is wearing on her, and she’s beginning to feel like no matter how hard she works or how much she cares, she is not really helping the women. Her life, she concludes, has ceased to progress. She has failed to move forward and, as a result, has lost the faith that once made her want to become a saint and provide “encouragement, hope and love to those most easily forgotten.”

One of the ways Ann hopes to get some life back into her life is through a personal ad on Match.com. She’s hoping to find a rugged man with a love for Brahms. The rugged look, it seems, really turns her on. “Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to homeless men,” she says.

The man she finds is Harold, a musician and weekend hiker who speaks (and feels) in a monotone. But when Ann finds out what instrument Harold plays, it’s very nearly a deal breaker. He plays the accordion, the squeeze box and the soundtrack to many a beery oompah-pah Saturday night.

Nothing in Randolph’s tale is quite what you expect. There’s a whole lot of frank sex talk (especially from Brandy, the paranoid schizophrenic crack-head whore who lives in the shelter), and Ann’s downward spiral is quite dramatic (though the 75-minute show has loads of humor). The characters come and go, with some making more of an impression than others. The hippie-ish Shoshanna is there to represent liberal hypocrisy, while Julie, the shelter counselor just arrived from Christ the King Salvation Center, is a Bible thumper in the worst possible sense and couldn’t be more insensitive to the world around her.

Though the character of Irene, a new resident at the shelter, only makes a brief appearance, she has tremendous impact. Randolph pulls her hair up into a crude bun, twists her malleable face into something akin to a pain mask and strums the guitar while Irene sings of her marital woe. It’s a funny song that turns incredibly poignant. Irene, like Ann, has lost her faith in a big way.

But unlike Irene, Ann is able to rediscover faith through Harold, and in particular, a concert performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Randolph brings the show full circle and allows her audience to taste what she experienced in that concert hall: the redemptive power of art.

As a bonus for San Francisco audiences, Randolph is doing excerpts of new work after performances of Squeeze Box. On the night I saw the show, she showed a short film called Disaster Relief that she directed and stars in. She read pieces of a monologue then costumed herself as a demented crack whore and let herself get full into the foul-mouthed, interesting character. From there she assumed the character of Carol Diddle, a landlady in Santa Monica who loathes the impoverished artists who live in her building and can’t pay their rent. Carol is a disturbing character – far more so than the crack whore. Scary.

Squeeze Box continues through June 29 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Shows are at 5 p.m. Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $15-$35 on a sliding scale. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.themarsh.org.

Visit Ann Randolph’s Web site here: www.annrandolph.com.

Playing with `Dolls’

Michael Phillis is one of those young actors who makes you excited you took a chance and saw a young actor.

His debut solo show, D*FACE, at the New Conservatory Theatre Center could have been just another autobiographical solo show/therapy session. But Phillis proved himself to be an engaging performer and intelligent writer. Exiting the theater you made a mental note: keep an eye out for what this one does next.

Well, Phillis is offering a sneak peek at his new solo show, Dolls, at 7:30 tonight (Monday, May 12) and Monday, May 19 at The Marsh in San Francisco. What the show is about exactly isn’t clear except that it really is about dolls.

Phillis, who is also a graphic artist and author of an ongoing online comic saga, has developed a rather involved Web site devoted to Dolls. Check it out here and plan to stay for a while. One area I enjoyed was the dolls’ rules. Here are a couple:

1. Never let them see you move.
2. Never let them hear you speak.
3. Always end up where they left you.

The sneak peek of Dolls is part of a Monday Night Marsh showcase evening that will also feature new work from Allison Landa, Patti Trimble, and Marga Gomez. Tickets are $7. The Marsh is at 1062 Valencia St. (near 22nd), San Francisco. Call 415-826-5750 or visit www.themarsh.org for information.

Dan Hoyle’s Glickman Award

Dan Hoyle knows how to liven up a party.

On Sunday afternoon, Theatre Bay Area hosted the Glickman New Play Award reception at the home of Nancy Quinn (a TBA board member) and Tom Driscoll (purveyor of a stunning wine cellar). All the usual award-event elements were in place: the honoree (Dan Hoyle, writer and performer of Tings Dey Happen), his associates (Stephanie Weisman, founder and artistic director of The Marsh, where Tings was born, and director Charlie Varon, himself a Glickman award winner for Rush Limbaugh in Night School).

Hoyle’s parents, Mary and Geoff (as in beloved Bay Area actor Geoff Hoyle, currently in ACT’s The Government Inspector), were in attendance, as was his girlfriend.


(above from left) Charlie Varon, director of Tings Dey Happen, Stephanie Weisman, artistic/executive director of The Marsh and Glickman Award-winner Dan Hoyle, author and performer of Tings.

After hors d’oeuvres and visits to the cool, inviting environs of the wine cellar, TBA’s executive director, Brad Erickson presented Hoyle with the plaque and a check for $4,000. Weisman, as producer of the show, also received a plaque. The five members of the Glickman committee — theater critics all — said nice things about Hoyle’s show and why they thought it was the best play to have its premiere in the Bay Area last year.

Then Hoyle said a few words and got all choked up when he tried to thank his parents. He shook off the tears and, much to the delight of the crowd, he performed a scene from Tings, which happens to be running at The Marsh through April 19. Click here for information.

Hoyle’s performance was, not surprisingly, the highlight of the evening — even better than the wine cellar. Go see him in action at The Marsh and learn a thing or two about Nigerian oil politics and about the wonder of theatrical storytelling.

And finally, here’s the winner with the critics — one of those rare, once-a-year meetings of artist and critic.


From left: Robert Avila of the SF Bay Guardian, Chloe Veltman of the SF Weekly, Chad Jones of Theater Dogs (go bloggers!), Glickman Award-winner Dan Hoyle, Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle and Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News.