Aurora finds rapture in Boise
For a second time this fall theater season, a play is dealing with the Rapture, that moment when believers will ascend and everyone else...doesn't. First it was the young gay actor in the San Jose Repertory Theatre production of Geoffrey Nauffts' Next Fall (read my review here). He worried that as a believer, he would spend eternity without the comfort of his boyfriend, a non-believer, and the boyfriend kind of rolled his eyes and dismissed the whole Rapture thing as nonsense.
Now we have Samuel D. Hunter's A Bright New Boise at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company in which a staunch believer has his faith shaken by a terrible event at his northern Idaho church enclave (cult?) and attempts to make a fresh start in the bustling metropolis of Boise.
Personal is political in Aurora’s fiery Revolution
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company opens its 22nd season with Amy Herzog's smart, moving drama After the Revolution, an ambitious play that juggles American history, the cost of political idealism and how one generation affects another – for good and ill – in a tight-knit family.
This is the same Herzog whose 4000 Miles was so good at American Conservatory Theater earlier this year (read my review here), and this play, which predates 4000 Miles, also features the character of Vera Joseph (who is based on Herzog's own grandmother).
Feeling the heat at Aurora’s Arsonists
My first encounter with Swiss playwright Max Frisch was in college when my Drama as Literature class read his Biedermann and the Firebugs, a 1953 radio play that was expanded into a stage play in 1958. The subtitle of that version was the clunky "a learning-play without a lesson." Alistair Beaton delivered a new translation to London's Royal Court Theatre in 2007 with the much zippier title – The Arsonists – and a subtitle: "a moral play without a moral." Happily, that's the version now on stage at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company under the customarily energetic direction of Mark Jackson.
The time is now, and Frisch's take on the wishy-washy morals of the privileged middle class is as astute as ever.
Aurora's Heaven falls well short
There's a lot to like in the world premiere of Anthony Clarvoe's family drama Our Practical Heaven at Aurora Theatre Company. Laughs come frequently, the production itself – full of light and space – is lovely and the six women in the cast are all quite interesting.
If only there were more snap, both dark and comic, in Clarvoe's play.
2012 flasback: 10 to remember
One of the things I love about Bay Area theater is that picking a Top 10 list is usually a breeze. My surefire test of a great show is one I can remember without having to look at anything to remind me about it. The entire list below was composed in about five minutes, then I had to go look through my reviews to make sure they were all really this year. They were, and it was a really good year.
Thornton, a Wilder and crazy (wonderful) guy
Of the four short Thornton Wilder plays that comprise Aurora Theatre Company's Wilder Times, one is grating, one is darkly funny, one is poignant and one is so brilliant, so moving it almost erases the memory of the other three.
To begin with, these four one-acts were not written to be performed together, but director Barbara Oliver and her Aurora crew saw links between the first two, "Infancy" and "Childhood," written in 1962, and "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden" and "The Long Christmas Dinner," both written in 1931. Together, they form a sort of piquant portrait of human lives, beginning to end, with special attention given to family dynamics. It's interesting that the plays more concerned with death and time were written first, and the plays dealing with our most formative years were written 30 years later.
Aurora scores a smackdown with Chad Deity
In professional wrestling, we're told, you can't kick a guy's ass without the help of the guy whose ass you're kicking. Talk about a democracy! Perhaps there's more to learn from the gaudy world of professional wrestling than we thought.
Playwright Kristoffer Diaz, a self-confessed fan of the fake-out body slams and outsize characters of the pro-wrestling world, seems to think there's an allegorical relationship between that world and the United States, especially when it comes to racism and the exploitation of labor in the name of almighty capitalism. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity opens the Aurora Theatre Company's 21st season.
There's certainly truth in advertising with this play – it's incredibly elaborate, and director Jon Tracy's production is enormous.
Just Wilde over Aurora’s Salomania
If only a 94-year-old scandal were sensational in ways we no longer understood, we could look back and wonder what all the fuss was about and why the media underestimated the taste of the general public and why the general public was so content to be constantly underestimated.
Alas, not much has changed since the early 20th century criminal libel suit that American dancer Maud Allan brought against British newspaper publisher Noel Pemberton-Billing after he described the interest in her dance piece Vision of Salomé as the "cult of the clitoris." That was the headline he used in his paper, the Vigilante, to describe the moral reprobates who were attracted to Allan's version of the play by Oscar Wilde, which had been banned since Wilde's very public downfall.
What we learn in Mark Jackson's fascinating and at moments electrifying new play Salomania is that the media, though their aims may be occasionally true, are a pawn in larger political games and panderers to public taste, which they help shape.
The Annie Baker dead poets society
So far, playwright Annie Baker is two for two in the Bay Area. It took a while for the country's hottest young playwright to make her mark locally, but she has done it now. Twice. And a third is yet to come later in the summer.
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company was the first to produce Baker locally with Body Awareness (read my review here). Then SF Playhouse did The Aliens (running through May 5, read my review here). The Baker trilogy concludes (at least for now) in August when Marin Theatre Company and Encore Theatre Company partner on Circle Mirror Transformation.
There's always a danger when a new playwright sizzles into popular consciousness...
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.
2011 in the rearview mirror: the best of Bay Area stages
Let's just get right to it. 2011 was another year full of fantastic local theater (and some nice imports). Somehow, most of our theater companies has managed thus far to weather the bruising economy. May the new year find audiences clamoring for more great theater.
1. How to Write a New Book for the Bible by Bill Cain
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Directed by Kent Nicholson
Only a few days ago I was telling someone about this play – my favorite new play of 2011 and the most moving theatrical experience I've had in a long time – and it happened again. I got choked up. That happens every time I try to describe Cain's deeply beautiful ode to his family and to the spirituality that family creates (or maybe that's vice-versa). Nicholson's production, from the excellent actors to the simple, elegant design, let the play emerge in all its glory.
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.
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.
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.
Of pleasures and Eccentricities
Oh, Alma Winemiller. If you had been able to shuck off the burden of having an insane mother and a stern Episcopalian priest for a father, you might have become the woman you were meant to be: Lady Gaga.
OK, that's an exaggeration, but poor Alma is just a heap of talent and emotion and expression aching for release in Tennessee Williams' Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a play with a convoluted history in the Tennessee Williams canon. The Aurora Theatre Company production of the play, directed with finesse and warmth by Artistic Director Tom Ross, makes a case for the play being if not alongside siblings like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, then at least in an honorable spot somewhere just below.
Nostalgic for The Homecoming at a different home
The absolute power of live theater, when it's done superbly well, is undeniable. The connection the playwright, the director, the actors and designers forge with the audience – and vice-versa – can be incredibly powerful.
That's a wonderful thing and leave a lasting impression. Sometimes, perhaps, too lasting.
Last week I saw Carey Perloff's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming for American Conservatory Theater. It's a bizarre, tormentingly fascinating play by a master playwright at the height of his game-playing dramatic powers. And though the production is fine, all I could think about was the Aurora Theatre Company production staged by Tom Ross at the Berkeley City Club in April of 2000.
Aurora premiere bridges gap between comedy and Collapse
Sometimes things collapse. Sometimes buildings and bridges, things that are built to physically support us. And sometimes marriages and families, things that are meant to sustain and bolster us, crumble as well.
Both kinds of ruin are examined – sometimes to hilarious comic effect – in Allison Moore's Collapse, a rolling world premiere at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. The concept of a rolling premiere is essentially a collaboration, in this case with the National New Play Network and Curious Theatre in Denver and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas.
Director Jessica Heidt's sharp, wildly entertaining production begins on rather a sly note. She has pitched her actors to an extreme level of discomfort, yet their goal is to appear perfectly normal and happy. It's a total sitcom situation – living room set and all – as David (Gabriel Marin) attempts to inject the posterior of his wife, Hannah (Carrie Paff), with fertility drugs. Their chipper anxiety about the fertility process is masking something else. We don't know what, but we sense it's serious. He's drinking too much, she's worried about being laid off from her legal firm and there's a shadow looming over their relationship.
2010 in the rearview mirror: My Top 10
I did two things I'm proud of this year. I worked for a great theater company and I stopped working for a great theater company. From June 2009 to September 2010, I was the communications manager for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and it was a fantastic experience. For a critic to jump the fence and experience a theater company from the inside was the education of a lifetime.
A job change in September allowed me to go back to writing and reviewing with a renewed vigor and appreciation for the art of theater.
And my timing couldn't have been better. All of a sudden, with the launch of the fall season, it seemed that the Bay Area was the epicenter of all good theater. With Compulsion at Berkeley Rep, Scapin at American Conservatory Theater and the opening of The Brother/Sister Plays at Marin Theatre Company, there was great theater everywhere you turned.
Herewith, a conventional Top 10 list for 2010 – starting at No. 10 and working toward No. 1.
Astride a sexy beast in Aurora’s Palomino
David Cale is a perfectly attractive human being – he’s got great posture, a receding hairline and a beautifully expressive face. But once you fall under his spell as a storyteller – and you will fall under his spell – he becomes vivid, physically varied characters without doing much more than manipulating his mellifluous voice and holding his lean body differently.
Over the course of 95 minutes in the beguiling Palomino now at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company, Cale becomes, among others, a sexy Irish horse-drawn carriage driver in his early 30s, an Australian widow in late middle age and a super-sexy blonde British babe.
And he’s utterly believable as all of them.
Be mindful of Aurora’s Trouble
If only playwright Alice Childress could see Margo Hall's performance in her 1955 play Trouble in Mind now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company.
Hall has long been one of those Bay Area actors you go out of your way to see, whether she's directing, acting or writing. Somewhat unbelievably, Hall is only just getting around to making her Aurora debut, but what a debut! Hall plays Wiletta Mayer, a successful African-American actress on the Broadway stage. Wiletta isn't biter exactly, but she's learned how to play the race game in order to succeed in her chosen field. She's hardened, and this is especially evident when she's instructing a Broadway novice (Jon Joseph Gentry as John) before they begin rehearsals on a new play with a mostly black cast that's bound to court controversy because it's an anti-lynching screed.