Dark Knight Recap: January 2011

They’ve said the big earthquake is on its way, and now they say the flood is coming as well. What if they were to happen on the same day? Would they cancel each other out? Would the rains lubricate the restless tectonic plates as the resounding vibrations of the earth’s crust stun the approaching storm clouds?  Or will it just be one catastrophic clusterfuck? Two days ago I drove by a billboard reminding me that Judgement day is May 21, 2011—and if that’s true, by the same scripture, the end of the world will come five months after, on October 21, three days after my 30th birthday.

Project Artaud, home of Z Space

And yet, 2011 has turned out pretty well so far! A.C.T.’s Clybourne Park is a huge success! (But I’ve already written about that.) Our students and faculty just spent 3 weeks producing 13 mind-blowing projects they were ridiculously passionate about! (But I’ve already written about that—twice, and the third post should drop on the A.C.T. blog this week). But I haven’t gotten around to writing about Mark Jackson’s Companion Piece, which I saw on opening night at Z Space. Nor will I write about it in any depth. Why? Because this was literally the first show I’ve seen that I can unreservedly define as performance art, and I don’t know that I have the vocabulary to talk about it. It affected me somewhere on the longitude between theater and dance. Which is great! I loved it! I just don’t know how to talk about it. I’m more comfortable talkingabout Z Space’s space, Project Artaud—a converted warehouse at 450 Florida Street in SF—which is a mad awesome space that everyone needs to visit and/or produce work in. And, really, you should visit it for this show. You know what, go read Chad Jones’s thoughts on it. He says a lot of smart stuff.

Jake Rodriguez in Companion Piece

Another amazing space is the Ashby Stage in Berkeley, the home of Shotgun Players. One regret for January is that I didn’t get it together to write about Shotgun’s Of the Earth while it was still playing. It was spectacular. Of the Earth is Part II of Jon Tracy’s Salt Plays. Part I, In the Wound, is his adaptation of The Iliad; Part II, The Odyssey. It helped to have seen Part I. It also helped to have a working knowledge of Homer’s works and the traditional roles of the Greek gods. During

intermission, the woman sitting next to me asked if I had any idea what was going on, and I gave her a five-minute summation of the two epics. After the play she thanked me: Act II was much clearer, but she had enjoyed Act I just as much. That’s because Tracy’s adaptation does a lot of work. It’s not a simple retelling; it uses both myths to examine our own politics and our own relationship with our gods. What I found most striking—other than the staging itself—was the idea that the gods themselves might be dissatisfied with the world as they found it and the world as they create it. “We can be better than this,” they mourned, “if the system would just let us be better than this.”

I like any play that leaves me feeling sorry for a god.

All this is to say, despite the ominous warnings from scientists and scripture alike, theater in the Bay Area is leaving me feeling optimistic about this year.

 

Shotgun's Of the Earth (L to R) Elena Wright, Charisse Loriaux, Dan Bruno, Rami Margron, Emily Rosenthal. Photo by Pak Han

Denmark is a Prison: Hamlet on Alcatraz Island

Yesterday, I took a ferry to Elsinore, and watched a young prince’s world unravel in the rain. Denmark is a prison—that prison is The Rock. Having friends in high places in the theater community, I was invited to see the long-sold-out We Players production of Hamlet on Alcatraz. It was awe-inspiring. Every time I see Hamlet, I hear something I hadn’t heard before. I have actually been to Alcatraz before, took the guided audio tour, and was captivated (hehe) by the island and prison’s history; We Players, though, gained access to parts of the 22 acre island that weren’t on the tour, notably to the prison’s eerie hospital ward and the back side of the island, which started us in a gorgeous warehouse like space and then opened up onto a path that gave us nighted views of San Francisco and Golden Gate Bridge while poor Yorick’s skull is exhumed.

Andrus Nichols and Misti Boettiger rehearse in the prison hospital.

They are calling their production site-specific, but Hamlet does not literally take place in a prison, especially not Alcatraz. It is more true to say that it is a found-space production, yes? And yet, as we had our “conversation with the elements” (as the AD called it after curtain call) it was nearly impossible not to let a mental shift transport you from the courtyard of Alcatraz to the courtyard of King Hamlet’s castle.

My shoes and jacket and sweater and the notebook that was in my bag are still drying from watching Hamlet unprotected from the elements in a small island in the middle of the Bay, but I was grinning the whole time. What an unforgettable experience.

For more images and information about We Players and Hamlet, join their facebook page and check out their blog.

 

A Great Time to See Bay Area Theater (not that there’s a bad time!)

The fate of many shows in the Bay Area is determined by a little man and his little chair—and that little man’s relationship to his little chair. Amidst a culture of blogiewers (blog + reviewer? Yes? No? Did I coin a phrase or create the verbal equivalent of the jackalope?) and cost-cutting measures from down-and-out newspapers (resulting in theater reviews by reporters who aren’t necessarily theater-savvy), Rob Hurwitt, theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is probably the most respected theater opinion published in the Bay Area. Like everyone, I have disagreed with Hurwitt in the past and I have agreed with him; most of his reviews are insightful and well-written, while a few made me wonder if he even saw the show. Regardless of my own personal internal dialogue with the man, in times of economic difficulty and shortened runs, patrons rely even more heavily on reviews. They don’t have money—or time—to waste, and they look to the Chronicle‘s little man for advice.

I am not going to get into whether or not a 2-dimensional little man deserves to be the Bay Area theater czar. Nor am I going to ponder his personal life (Does he have a little woman? Why doesn’t she come to the theater with him? Does he ever bring his little kids?). All I am here to say is that the little man has been jumping out of his seat a lot lately! And I have been jumping with him.

He jumped out of his chair for Marin’s In the Red and Brown Water and the Magic’s The Brothers Size—parts 1 and 2 of The Brother/Sister Plays. A.C.T. is up next with part 3, Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet, and our two partner-theaters have set the bar high! In preparation for our program articles and Words on Plays, I’ve studied 29-year-old Tarell Alvin McCraney’s breakout cycle (and I should be cleaning up my 2-hour interview with him as I write this . . . whoops!), but even I was caught off-guard by the power of these productions. Comparisons are inevitable, and my preference is definitely with Ryan Rilette’s elegant Red and Brown, a very loose adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma set in the Louisiana projects; and I am only comfortable sharing so strong a bias because people I respect and trust disagree with me wholeheartedly and were emotionally destroyed by Octavio Solis’s muscular Brothers Size, a smaller, tighter play that focuses on the relationship between two brothers. We start rehearsals on Tuesday for Marcus, which goes into previews on October 29. The amazing energy that has resulted from this three-theater collaboration requires its own post.

Hyacinth (A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program student Ashley Wickett) is angry that Scapin (Bill Irwin, right) and Sylvestre (A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program graduate Jud Williford) can never remember her name. Photo by Kevin Berne.

The little man fell out of his chair, laughing uncontrollably, for our production of Scapin (“The funniest show of the year!”), which opened last Tuesday and has now been extended. This show also, strangely, caught me off-guard. I’ve been living with Molière’s comedy for a couple months now, and I had sat in on some of the rehearsals, but I wasn’t able to make it over to the theater for any of the previews. Opening night was a revelation: a living, breathing example of the raw power of comedy for comedy’s sake. When we think of plays as timely, we think of them as exploring issues that society is conversing about; Scapin is timely because it distracts us from those issues at a time when we desperately need distraction. And Bill Irwin being Bill Irwin, he slips some fantastic contemporary zingers in there too.

The little man also loved Shotgun’s In the Wound, Jon Tracy’s dramatization of the entire Trojan War. I have tickets for their closing performance, which is next Sunday, October 3! And, also, Berkeley Rep’s production of Compulsion, starring Mandy Patinkin and directed by Oskar Eustis, who came to speak to our students a couple weeks ago.

I am sure there are many other amazing shows going on right now that the little man has jumped for, but suffice it to say that the 2010–11 season has gotten off to an explosive start! See them all!