High art, grim lives shaded in ambitious Tree City
Tree City Legends leaves you moved and somewhat perplexed. My experience with Dennis Kim's play as directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph was equal parts fascination and confusion.
There are so many creative partners on this project, it's no wonder the thing feels not only like an art installation but also like an entire museum unto itself. You have art, video, performance and music. You certainly can't fault the creative team for lack of imagination or multimedia ability. But you can fault the creative team...
Arresting cop drama keeps Steady in Marin
I can't imagine what it was like to see Keith Huff's A Steady Rain when it was on Broadway almost three years ago starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as two Chicago cops navigating a tricky moral and ethical path through their demanding jobs. Was it possible to say anything but the two mega-watt movie stars flattening vowels to the best of their pretend Midwestern abilities? Was Huff's taut two-man play even visible underneath the star power?
The answer is: probably not. And that's OK. The play, as seen in its West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre Company, is an engaging, sturdily built vehicle to showcase two contrasting actors.
ACT's Perloff aims Higher
This is the season for artistic directors sharing their writing with their audiences. Tony Taccone at Berkeley Repertory Theatre has actually done it twice this season with Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup and the current Ghost Light.
Now American Conservatory Theater's Carey Perloff is sharing her fourth full-length play as a special non-subscription production at the Theater at the Children's Creativity Museum (formerly Zeum). In both cases, the artistic directors are making bold moves to put their work out there -- a brave gesture, to say the least. And they've both wisely handed over the directorial reins to trusted cohorts. In Taccone's case it's Jonathan Moscone and in Perloff's case, it's ACT Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker.
Four hot bodies heat up Aurora’s Body Awareness
Drama in the small college town of Shirley, Vermont, is much like it is anywhere: small, intimate and, for the people involved, earth shattering.
Playwright Annie Baker, one of the theater world's most acclaimed and buzzed-about writers, has a particular skill in writing about the lives of ordinary people. She's acutely aware of the comic absurdity and the fissures of sadness and anger that clash continually and cause tremors, both minor and majorly damaging.
Baker is a humane and very funny writer, and the Bay Area is finally getting a taste of her talent in the Aurora Theatre Company's utterly delightful production of her Body Awareness. In true Aurora form, the production gives us a meaty play and performances by a quartet of Bay Area actors that defy you to find a false moment in this up-close and intimate space.
Dating sharp, funny, creepy Becky Shaw at SF Playhouse
The humor is in direct proportion to the discomfort in Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, now in its West Coast premiere at SF Playouse.
If David Mamet were good at anything other than provocation and crisp dialogue, he might write something as entertaining and as distressing as Becky Shaw, a smart, incisive and very funny play that, despite its lack of focus, makes for a beguiling evening of theater.
By lack of focus I mean that Gionfriddo doesn't delineate protagonist or antagonist. Even though the title of the play belongs to one character, the playwright's aim seems much broader – like how power works between family members, between men and women and between the seemingly weak and the seemingly strong. She's interested in highly functional dysfunctional people, which is to say, just about everybody.
Moscone, Taccone illuminate history in Ghost Light
Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone have found the courage to stay out of what they call "the suck drawer."
The phrase comes from Ghost Light, the play Moscone and Taccone conceived together and that Taccone wrote and Moscone directed and it has to do with the life of an artist – the life of anyone, really – and the effort to create work and, ultimately, a life that is true and uniquely individual.
I expected Ghost Light, a co-production of Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where Taccone is artistic director) and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the play had the first leg of its world premiere last summer, to be about grief and the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. It is about those things. How could it not be, seeing as how it deals primarily with the effect of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone's assassination in 1978, when his son Jon was 14 years old.
Making a musical Garden grow
The Secret Garden will always hold a special place in my heart. It was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. And because I was there with friends who had friends in high places, we got to go backstage afterward. On my first day in New York, just after my first Broadway show, I got to stand center stage of the St. James Theatre and stare out into the empty theater. Amazing experience.
We got to go backstage, where I met Alison Fraser and, almost by accident, Rebecca Luker. Also go to see Mandy Patinkin pitch a fit because he didn't want to meet people, dammit, between shows. That was interesting.
I'm thinking about The Secret Garden because I just saw TheatreWorks' second production of the show.
Oh do do the Xanadu that you do so well
When I called playwright Douglas Carter Beane to interview him for a San Francisco Chronicle story on Xanadu: The Musical at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, he happened to be taking a break from rehearsals for his latest Broadway show, Lysistrata Jones. That musical, a hip, funny adaptation of the Aristophanes classic, happens to rehearse in the same building as the Foxwoods Theatre, home to Broadway's notorious web slinger, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
With his ear pressed to his cell phone, Beane surveyed the crowded sidewalk and quipped. "I hope people don't think I'm buying tickets."
Adjusting to a Period of lighter Tennessee Williams
As a fading Southern belle in a Tennessee Williams play might say, "Well I do declare! What's a theatergoer to do with so many scrumptious Williams play from which to choose?"
The answer is: see all of them. As we come to the end of Williams' centenary year, it seems only appropriate to be reveling in the writer's work. Marin Theatre Company recently opened a lovely production of The Glass Menagerie (read my review here), and in January, Theatre Rhinoceros presents The Two-Character Play, which Williams claimed was his "most beautiful play since Streetcar."
There's no mistaking Williams' A Period of Adjustment, now at SF Playhouse, for one of his most beautiful plays. Nor is it even one of his most interesting. But it is fascinating for a number of reasons. Written in 1960, between Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana, Adjustment is Williams working in sitcom mode as if to prove that he's capable of something lighter.
Marin reveals crystaline Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams' first brilliant move was to let everyone off the hook – himself included. By alerting the audience that The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, he removes it from reality (or not) and lets the creative team and the audience make their own accommodations as to what is memory, what is fact and what is flight of artistic fancy. In other words, you can try to get away with just about anything because it's all a memory, right?
Marin Theatre Company's production of Menagerie doesn't stray too far from tradition, but director Jasson Minadakis definitely puts his own spin on the 1944 classic and gets some marvelous performances from his cast.
Stravinsky and the sadness of a puppet Soldier
As the weary soldier trudges down the road home, you see the weight of his exhaustion as well as his excitement to see his mother and fiancée in his every step. The remarkable thing is that this soldier – who goes by the name of Joseph – is a Bunraku-style puppet. All that extraordinary expression is coming from his puppeteer, Muriel Maffre, the San Francisco Ballet star who retired in 2007.
Along with Aurora Theatre Company artistic director Tom Ross, Maffre is the co-director of The Soldier's Story, a theatrical fusion of music, dance, puppetry and storytelling that carries a melancholy charm for its brief 75 minutes. Much of that charm comes from Maffre, who also dances the role of the King's daughter, who falls under Joseph's spell.
It's easy to succumb to this Tale.
Tip o’ the Hat to Yee's wacky theatrical fable
Talk about your unconventional love stories! Lauren Yee’s charming world-premiere play A Man, his Wife, and his Hat is a romance between an elderly hat maker and his favorite hat.
So where does this relationship leave the hat maker’s wife? Lonely and without a hat, that’s where. When she up and leaves, it’s hardly surprising. The only question was why was she with this chapeau-loving bozo in the first place?
There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense in this story, but that’s part of the point. Yee, working under commission from San Rafael’s AlterTheater has created a quirky fable with a decidedly Yiddish storytelling tilt. It doesn’t all hold together in director Robin Stanton’s enjoyable production, though there’s genuine humor and emotion in abundance.
Time gets Sticky in experimental show
I was enthralled by the form and baffled by the content. That, in a nutshell, is my reaction to the world premiere of Sticky Time, an experimental new work from writer/director Marilee Talkington. A co-production of Crowded Fire Theater Company and Talkington's own Vanguardian Productions, Sticky Time is a wild hour of theater.
I will not begin to pretend that I understood any of it. In plain fact, I did not. When I got home, I read the program, and the thoughts of dramaturg Laura Brueckner and science advisor Andrew Meisel were very interesting – all about the nature of time, which is an interesting blend of science and philosophy – but in the moment of the show, I strained to understand but failed.
Fuzzy no more: life after Disneyland
Last summer at Berkeley's Impact Theatre, Trevor Allen dusted off Working for the Mouse, his finely tuned one-man show about his years as Pluto, Mr. Smee, the Mad Hatter and others on the pavement at Disneyland.
I reviewed the show in June (read the review) and had a chance to interview Allen about the show as he prepared to re-open it at the EXIT Theatre. Read the feature in the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Oh, Maureen! Ms. McVerry revisits the Gershwins
In 1993, an ebullient comedienne with a head full of red curls, danced and sang her way across the stage of the Gershwin Theatre (aka the Presentation Theatre) as the bubbly title character in Oh, Kay! a giddy 1926 musical with a score by George and Ira Gershwin.
Maureen McVerry, long one of the Bay Area’s most reliable musical comedy stars, appeared to have a grand time playing a Jazz Age baby wriggling her way through Prohibition and attempting to win the affections of the handsome Jimmy Winter.
McVerry (seen in the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival production at right) made a memorable entrance with a boat on her back. “’Are you sure this is how Gertrude Lawrence got her start,’ I remember thinking,” McVerry says on the phone from her Potrero Hill home.
McVerry is back in the land of Oh, Kay!, this time as the director. She’s helming a slightly revised version for 42nd Street Moon, which begins previews today (Nov. 2) and opens this weekend.
David Mamet stages a Race to obfuscation
David Mamet never fails to fog me up.
He's never been one of my favorite playwrights because, although he's a wizard of compelling dialogue and unquestionable intelligence, his view of the world is just too bleak for me. Finding kindness and compassion and spirituality in his work is never as easy as finding brutality, ugliness and the absolute worst in mankind. I'm not saying he's wrong in his assessment, it's just that he makes me feel like Pollyanna in comparison. I don't need a steady stream of sunshine, flowers and unicorns.
Mamet's Race is making its West Coast debut in a compelling production from American Conservatory Theater. Director Irene Lewis isn't messing around.
Singing the blues in TheatreWorks' bumpy Clementine
In this week's edition of the Palo Alto Weekly I reviewed the world premiere of Clementine in the Lower 9 at TheatreWorks.You can read the review here.
Grace, God and family in Berkeley Rep's brilliant Bible
Sometimes you experience a work of art – for me that art is usually theater – and it connects you with something bigger and more powerful than your individual experience. You connect with the other audience members, the actors, the designers and, especially, the writer. When that connection is made, the communal heart of theater is so alive, so vast and so inexplicably moving that transcendence does, however temporary, seem a viable option.
Bill Cain’s How to Write a New Book for the Bible is one of those experiences. This world-premiere production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (a co-production with Seattle Repertory Theatre is the most moving and insightful new play since Margaret Edson’s Wit.
This is an extraordinary play, and it will affect everyone differently.
Shadows fall on suburbia in Yockey’s beguiling Bellwether
Audacious, entertaining and chilling, Steve Yockey’s world-premiere Bellwether at Marin Theatre Company goes where few plays dare to tread.
What starts out as a satiric look at suburban living – Bellwether is a nice neighborhood, we’re told over and over again, a gated community commuter distance from an unnamed big city – quickly becomes a potent family drama. A husband and wife (Gabriel Marin and Arwen Anderson) have hit some rocky ground as they and their about-to-turn-7 daughter try adjusting to suburban living.
The show becomes a crime thriller when little Amy disappears from her bed while her mom was downstairs with a neighbor and a bottle of wine. And then it turns into something Stephen King might dream up in a novel or short story. Yockey delves into the underworld of suburbia, a dark, dangerous place that balances the shiny, happy existence up top. That Yockey – MTC’s playwright in residence for the 2009-10 season – anchors the fantastical aspects of the story with his exploration of family life in the suburbs does him credit. He and director Ryan Rilette manage something very tricky here with a tone that shifts from satirical comedy to high drama to horror.
Lust, lies and addiction fuel Shotgun’s Phaedra
The sensational zing of the Phaedra myth has always come from the incestuous relationship at the story's heart: Phaedra is secretly in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. When that love becomes less of a secret, tragedy ensues.
Everyone loves a titillating love story, especially when there's a taboo to be wrestled to the ground. Euripides apparently wrote two plays involving Phaedra, but only one, Hippolytus, survives. Then, in the late 17th century, Racine wrote a version of Phaedra that has aroused audience interest for more than 300 years. Eugene O'Neill had fun with the Phaedra story in his pulpy Desire Under the Elms, and now Adam Bock, one of North America's most intriguing playwrights, puts his own stamp on the tale.
Bock reunites with Berkeley's Shotgun Players for the world premiere of his Phaedra, and though Bock has a long history with Shotgun (his Swimming in the Shallows will always be a Shotgun highlight for me), this new drama finds him working in mature playwright mode, with echoes of Pinter and Albee bouncing through the silences and percolating under the familial tension.