Bill Cain opens a new book for Bible
Bill Cain's last two Bay Area outings, Equivocation and 9 Circles, both at Marin Theatre Company, were absolutely fantastic. So there's reason to be excited about the world premiere of his latest play, How to Write a New Book for the Bible at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. With great compassion, intelligence and humor, Cain writes about his parents and his older brother in a play that flips back and forth in time as Cain cares for his dying mother.
I talked to Cain about the play for an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
As usual, there wasn't enough space in the story to include all of Cain's interview, so I'd like to include a few more morsels here.
Laughs of a Lifetime in ACT’s season opener
American Conservatory Theater opens the season with a play that only American Conservatory Theater could do. And I mean really do – the way it should be done.
The play is George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime, a 1930 comedy that seems oh so very jaded about the new Gold Rush represented by the advent of talking pictures. What’s funny is that all the trashing of Hollywood types – dimwitted performers, egomaniacal studio heads, apoplectic directors, long-suffering writers – is so disdainful. But at the time of the play’s premiere on Broadway, The Jazz Singer, the first big hit movie with sound, was only three years old!
What’s more, all those stereotypes feel strangely current, as if absolutely nothing in the Hollywood world had changed, but instead of the frenzy over sound, we have frenzy over CGI and gazillion-dollar budgets and opening weekend grosses. Turns out has been a laughingstock, especially to legit stagefolk, for more than 80 years.
Once in a Lifetime is full of old-fashioned pleasures, and by old-fashioned I don’t mean quaint or sentimental.
Cal Shakes’ Shrew anything but tame
If you think you've seen The Taming of the Shrew, you might want to think again. Director Shana Cooper's production – the season-closer for the California Shakespeare Theater – is fresh, feisty and full of insight. Many a Shrew can make you cringe, but very few, like this one, can actually make you lose yourself in the comedy, the provocation and the genuine emotion underneath it all.
Cooper brings a sense of contemporary flash and fun to the production, from the bright yellow accents in Scott Dougan's double-decker set (backed by a colorful billboard-like ad for a product called "Tame") to the zippy song mash-ups in the sound design by Jake Rodriguez. The music is especially fun. You can hear strains of Madonna's "Material Girl" followed by a flash of the "Wonder Woman" theme song one minute and revel in almost an entire number ("Tom, Dick or Harry") from Kiss Me Kate, the next.
Marga Gomez: So old, so funny
Though hardly a senior citizen, Marga Gomez needs to talk about her age. That doesn't mean she'll tell you her age, but it does mean she'll regale you with her thoughts on the aging process for 80 minutes in her new solo theatrical venture, Not Getting Any Younger at The Marsh in San Francisco.
Probably best known as a stand-up comic, Gomez says she's considered a pioneer for being one of the first out lesbian comics. But she hates being called a pioneer because it makes her sound old – like she traveled to gigs in a covered wagon. But Gomez is a theatrical force as well. This is her ninth solo show, and if you've seen any of her previous theater work (especially the shows about her show-biz parents), you know how artfully she blends the high entertainment value of stand-up comedy with the more deeply felt levels of autobiographical storytelling.
Magic sends tingles through Chafee’s Body
"Once you start to ask," Eleanor says, "there are more questions than answers." Not a surprising statement in a play whose title, Why We Have a Body promises an answer to an implied question. And as Eleanor warns us, once those questions start forming, the answers, they keep multiplying.
Claire Chafee's wonderfully enigmatic play is back at the Magic Theatre to open its 45th anniversary season with a look backward before heading into a season of newer plays. Body is being called a "legacy revival" because it was a huge hit for the Magic in 1993, running for six months and winning a passel of awards. What a welcome return it is.
In the nearly two decades since the play's premiere, it has lost nothing in its sense of humor, sense of mystery and sense of, well, sensuality.
Chafee's is an intellectual world – people living in their heads, in their pasts (the phrase "when I was a child" crops up a lot), in a perpetual state of perplexity – but that world is sliced through by a sharp comedy derived from family fractures and psychological scars.
Aurora tips Albee's Balance delicately
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.
Lovely as ever, Rita Moreno tells her tale
She’s charming and gorgeous. Vivacious and soulful. In short, Rita Moreno is the perfect candidate for an autobiographical show.
Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup is not yet the perfect show for this legendary performer, but it provides a snazzy opening to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre season.
Written by Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Tony Taccone and directed by David Galligan,, the show is at its best when Moreno is taking us through the ups and mostly downs of her storied career. Act 1 is a chronological narrative, beginning with a 5-year-old Rosa Dolores Alverío boarding a ship in 1936 to take them from Puerto Rico to a new life in New York.
From her first meeting with Louis B. Mayer at age 16, Moreno was catapulted from life in the barrio to the world of hardscrabble glamour as a Hollywood starlet who, it’s interesting to note, could have chose the screen name Mitzi Margarita.
What’s so interesting about Moreno’s story is that throughout her career, she was fighting stereotype.
Gamers roll good theater in Dice and Men
Nerd-on-nerd love is something to behold.
It's sweet, it's smart, it's funny – at least it is in Cameron McNary's sharply etched play Of Dice and Men, receiving its Bay Area premiere courtesy of Berkeley's Impact Theatre. McNary boldly goes where no dramatist has gone before him (at least none I've ever seen). He takes his audiences into the world of Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game involving elves, fairies, wizards and the like – exactly the kind of game that gets kids beaten up in high school.
One of the wonderful things about McNary's play is that you don't have to know anything about D&D to enjoy it.
Country-fried Bear offers finger-lickin’-good comedy
Falling in love with a playwright whose work you're experiencing for the first time feels like Christmas morning at age 6 – giddy excitement, new toys, wonder and sugar high all wrapped up in a nice holiday package. That's what it felt like the other night at the Boxcar Playhouse watching Crowded Fire Theater Company's production of Exit, Pursued by a Bear, a new play by Lauren Gunderson, a Georgia native who now lives and works in San Francisco.
Taking her cue from the most famous stage direction in all of Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale, Act III, scene iii), Gunderson returns to the hills of Northern Georgia for a crispy revenge drama served up with salty laughs and the kind of clever attention to detail that signals the arrival of a writer to whom you should pay attention. When writers say they're going to tackle a serious subject from a comic angle, they're really just marketing a heavy drama that maybe has a laugh or two but really it just makes you want to kill yourself.
Gunderson really does just that.
Seven Guitars, ably played
Marin Theatre Company's beautiful production of August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the third I've seen, and it amazes me how similar and how different those productions have been. The first was in 1995 when American Conservatory Theater hosted the Broadway-bound version of the show as part of its season. The distinctive thing about that night of theater was the overwhelming wash of lyrical language that poured from the stage. For 3 ½ hours. I called it "indulgent" and "overly long" in my review for the Bay Area Reporter, but I also called the writing "lucid and full of gorgeous natural rhythms." Of Viola Davis' performance as Vera, of whom I wrote, "One of the play's best scenes occurs early in the first act when Vera gives Floyd every reason she can think of why she won't take him back. She does take him back, of course, but her aching, shattering litany – brilliantly delivered by Davis – is probably the truest torch song that was never sung on stage."
The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre produced Seven Guitars in 2003 under the direction of the late Stanley Williams, and by then the show had been trimmed to a more manageable three hours, and in my review for the Oakand Tribune, I commended the ensemble (seven characters, hence the title) when they were able to "revel in the beats and rhythms of Wilson's almost-musical writing."
And now Marin Theatre Company, tackling its first August Wilson play, enters the fray with special attention to the music.
Smile, you’re on Candida camera
A beautiful night at the Bruns Amphitheater is made even more so by something marvelous on stage.
That would be George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, a sharp early play (1894) that is concise, funny and, in this incisive production directed by California Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone, surprisingly moving.
Moscone’s six actors inhabit the levels of Shaw’s play with dexterity. The broad, satirical comedy generates some hearty laughs as we delve into the emotional heart of London parsonage, home of the Rev. James Morell and his wife, Candida.
Shaw has everyone, from the main characters to the lively supporting crew of assistants and family members, tripping over their attitudes toward one another and the world at large.
Tell 'em that it's human Nature
If only the actual apocalypse were going to be so enjoyable.
Hand it to playwright JC Lee for making the end of the world – and after – so lyrical, so funny and so, well, human. That's one of the things I loved about Into the Clear Blue Sky, Part Two of the This World and After trilogy, which kicked off almost exactly a year ago with This World Is Good. There may be monstrous things happening in the world, things that would require millions of dollars worth of CGI to represent on a screen, but Lee's focus is essentially human and relatable.
And that's only appropriate when the topic at hand is the very survival of the human race. In each of his three plays, Lee creates a stage full of seekers, and for his final chapter, they are seeking the future, which is in clear jeopardy. In The Nature Line, Part Three of the trilogy, neither sex nor any human contact of any kind is allowed anymore. Women's wombs have become unable to handle the stress of pregnancy, so that duty now belongs to scientists who help the process along. “Aren’t you relieved to see a corporate model can survive the apocalypse?” asks a crisply dressed fertility nurse.
Taking (Rosen)Stock of comic Tigers and musical Night
In a recent email chat with playwright Kim Rosenstock (see full interview below), I asked her what Bay Area theatergoers might learn about her if they see both of her shows now on local stages – Tigers Be Still at the SF Playhouse and the musical Fly By Night at TheatreWorks. Her response: "It's probably better that I don't know the answer to this question."
So I will take it upon myself to answer the question for her.
First the easy answer: Rosenstock is smart and funny, and she's a talented, quirky writer. Based on the two shows available – her first in the Bay Area – she is interested in the lives of women in crisis and making choices to climb out of that crisis.
M M M My Verona: Rockin’ at Cal Shakes
Let it be known that the world premiere of California Shakespeare Theater's The Verona Project is a hell of a lot more fun than The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Shakespeare play on which it's based. In fact, I can think of several Shakespeare plays I'd like to see turned into original rock concerts. Troilus and Cressida the Musical, anyone?
Amanda Dehnert has essentially reinvented Two Gents, which is thought to be Shakespeare's very first play, and actually made it interesting. She is the director, writer and composer of a high-concept show that takes elements of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, GrooveLily's Striking 12 and Berkeley Rep'sGirlfriend to become a presentational musical/rock concert with some story thrown in.
The result is a lovable, enjoyable if not always successful show whose rough patches actually add to the charm. There's nothing overly slick or polished about The Verona Project, and that's a good thing. The central idea is that a band called The Verona Project has created a concept album based on Two Gents and they're going to treat us to a concert performance of that album.
Mouse tales live again
About nine years ago, Trevor Allen lifted the veil on an operation so shrouded in secrecy and intrigue that the merest glimpse inside set people salivating. He revealed what it was actually like to be inside a costumed character in Disneyland.Oh, yes, This is deeply inside stuff. And sweaty. And hilarious. It's what you call a theatrical experience bursting with character.Allen's autobiographical solo show, Working for the Mouse, premiered at Berkeley's Impact Theatre in 2002 then transferred to San Francisco. Now Allen is reviving the show for Impact and his own Black Box Theatre at La Val's Subterranean.
A creature features in Aurora’s stunning Metamorphosis
You've heard that old trope about intense pressure turning a lump of coal into a diamond. Well what if that kind of pressure is applied to a human being? In Franz Kafka's opinion, the pressure of modern society will turn a person into, well, something horrific. Perhaps a cockroach or some other loathsome vermin, but a monster nonetheless. It's a sad and scary vision, one that is realized to its fullest potential in the Aurora Theatre Company production of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Director Mark Jackson is something of a name brand in the Bay Area. You know his shows are going to be original, compelling and rigorously produced. He's a writer/director (occasionally actor) whose work you simply do not miss. The world of Kafka would seem to be a playground for Jackson's mighty theatrical imagination, and it's true. Jackson's Metamorphosis is as unsettling as it is poignant, as beautifully performed as it is fun to watch.
Titus serves up revenge, blood rare and steaming hot
Director Joel Sass has such a strong, infectious sense of storytelling that he even makes Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, proclaimed to be the Bard’s bloodiest play, enjoyable.
It’s not that the play, which has a single issue on its gory mind – the futility and waste of revenge – isn’t interesting. It’s compelling and hideous at the same time.
But what Sass does for the California Shakespeare Theater’s season-opening production of Titus – the first in Cal Shakes’ 37-year history – is heighten the theatricality of the tale, elevate it to grand and glorious storytelling rather than an endlessly horrific parade of one bloody special effect after another.
This is a muscular production of a tough play, mean in spirit and humor. If Shakespeare’s goal is to illuminate the way ego-driven revenge turns life into a cesspit for everyone involved, he certainly succeeds.
Tiny but terrifying: Go ask Alice
The legend of Tiny Alice looms large. Edward Albee’s notorious 1964 follow-up to his monster Broadway smash Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf baffled critics and continued to cause kerfuffles for years to come (especially when William Ball, in the early days of American Conservatory Theater played fast and loose with the script).
This is not one of Albee’s frequently produced scripts, and after seeing Marin Theatre Company’s riveting production, it’s easy to see why. This play is a monster. It’s not like Albee hasn’t created monsters before (he loves to rile the beasts in many ways), but this one is especially weighty.
But this is a challenging play to say the least. Act 1 is familiar territory as Albee introduces his players, his zest for zingers and a juicy central mystery. In Act 2, the ground begins to wobble, and by Act 3, the ground has given way altogether. The monster, perhaps literally speaking, is loose.
Short sweet frolic on the PlayGround
In the spirit of PlayGround's annual 10-minute play festival, I'm going to attempt to write a 10-minute review.
The time is 10:40am. Start the clock.
The joy of a short play festival is the utter diversity in style, tone and voice. You can have what amounts to a sketch comedy bumping up against muscular drama, an intriguing fragment or a surprising burst of poetry. All of that happens and more in Best of Playground 15: A Festival of New Writers & New Plays at the Thick House. The seven plays presented represent the cream of the PlayGround playwriting process, which runs from October through March. A pool of 36 writers is given a topic and then asked to write a 10-minute play on a chosen theme. The best of those plays are given staged readings, and then the best of that bunch makes it to this festival.
Of the seven shows now on display, I can tell you my three clear favorites.
Feeling the Passion of Sarah Ruhl
What an interesting Sarah Ruhl moment we’re having.
Ruhl’s new version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is getting a moving and lovely production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. And her 2005 triptych Passion Play receives its local premiere courtesy of Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, a community theater producing shows in Berkeley since 1957.
Both productions allow Ruhl to explore, in her lyrical, passionate and quirky ways, what happens to people when dreams and reality, identity and illusion are at odds.