Berkeley Rep champions Emotional girl power
I'm going to paraphrase the title song of Eve Ensler's Emotional Creature, now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Don't tell them not to cry or to calm it down or be so extreme or be reasonable. They are emotional creatures. It's how the world got made. After all, you don't tell the Atlantic Ocean how to behave.
It's a rousing number at the end of a compelling show, and it makes you want to scream and shout and, well, be an emotional creature yourself.
After her all her international success with The Vagina Monologues and the related V-Day events raising millions of dollars to combat violence against women around the world. After all her books and shows and personal struggles and triumphs, Ensler is still turning to theater as a means to agitate, to stir hearts and to make people want to scream and shout.
Don't wanna see no more American Idiot
The inevitable homecoming is upon us. The Broadway musical version of Green Day's American Idiot, which had its world premiere in 2009 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has returned to the Bay Area as part of the SHN season.
As an employee of Berkeley Rep at the time of the show's premiere, I was deeply immersed in the world of Green Day, big Broadway producers and a world of expectations riding on the shoulders of this 90-minute rock 'n' roll extravaganza. It was a blast to have an inside seat for the creation of such an exciting show. But my vantage point also prevented me from really seeing the show with fresh eyes.
There were things I liked about it and things I didn't. The Green Day score, especially as orchestrated, arranged and supervised by Tom Kitt, was by far the best part. Kitt succeeded masterfully in capturing the rock pulse of the music and then finding ways to infuse it with range and emotion it didn't have on record.
I had trouble connecting to the bare-bones story of three 20something friends battling their apathy in the suburbs...
The dark art of violence and abuse
Dael Orlandersmith's Black n Blue Boys / Broken Men is a brutal experience. How could it not be? Its 90-plus minutes are all about the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of young men and how such violence affects them into adulthood. These fictional stories are harrowing, graphic and shattering, which is to say this is not an evening of light entertainment.
Orlandersmith wrote and performs these stories, and she doesn't pull any punches as she plays six men/boys of varying ages and ethnicities. Under the direction of Chay Yew, Orlandersmith is such a graceful, powerful performer that you can't take your eyes off of her, even when the material makes you flinch.
Berkeley Rep’s pulsating Red
You've heard that insulting phrase, "As exciting as watching paint dry." Well in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Red, you do watch paint dry, and it's surprisingly exciting.
This is one of those new American dramas that arrives at the local regional level lauded with awards and high expectations. John Logan's drama won a passel of Tony Awards, including Best Play, so it wouldn't be surprising if audience members showed up with minds made up one way or the other – oh, this is going to be good because the people in New York (and London) say it is; or, oh, there's no way this can actually be good because it has received too much praise.
It's the kind of artistic situation about which painter Mark Rothko, the subject of Logan's play, would have a definite, probably loud, opinion.
Writing a play about a volcanic talent like Rothko can't help but tame him in some ways.
Berkeley Rep's Doctor is in... and out of his mind
Maybe it's a simple case of the winter blahs, but early 2012 has been kind of a drag. There have been high points to be sure, but people seem to be struggling and fighting and dragging around more than usual. Or maybe it's just me.
Whatever, the blahs were relieved for a blissful 90 minutes thanks to Molière, or at least an utterly revamped, absolutely hysterical, bawdy as all get out adaptation of Molière by Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Epp, as you may recall, was part of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, which, sadly, no longer exists, and he made fairly regular visits to Berkeley Rep, with the most memorable probably being in The Miser.
He's back, not only as co-adaptor, but as the star of A Doctor in Spite of Himself, a minor Molière play that offers major entertainment value in this new version, expertly directed (and carefully calibrated) by Bayes.
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.
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.
Berkeley Rep's wildly wonderful Bride
Such joy. Such wicked, delicious, heart-pounding joy.
That's what it feels like at the end of The Wild Bride, the dark fairy tale come to life on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda stage. This is, without question, the great treat of the holiday theater season (though it's not really for kids younger than about 13, what with the mutilations, the sex and the devilish nature of the show).
Here comes the Bride indeed – in the most unexpectedly charming and poignant fashion you can imagine. Director/adaptor Emma Rice and Kneehigh, the quirky troupe from Cornwall, England, are blessedly back in the Bay Area, where they previously triumphed with their dynamic adaptation of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter at American Conservatory Theater a couple seasons back. May they keep coming back. And back.
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.
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.
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.
Anna Deavere Smith: Easy to love
In the last year or so, Berkeley Repertory Theatre has offered an instructive survey of the solo show. Last summer, as part of the Fireworks festival, local favorite Dan Hoyle offered two of his pieces, both recounting his transformative travels. In that same festival, John Leguizamo went back to the well of autobiography for a high-energy, primarily comic show that ended up on Broadway.
Earlier this year, Mike Daisey, whom many would deem the reigning master of the monologue, offered two of his trenchant, highly charged pieces of theatrical journalism/activism.
And now we have Anna Deavere Smith returning after a too-long absence from Bay Area stages. More than any of these other solo performers, Smith raises the form to a fine art. She has the instincts and drive of a journalist, the performance style of a skilled thespian and the soul of a poet striving for grace.
Vodka, misery and beauty: family time with Three Sisters
Time aches in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s elegiac Three Sisters. The past is where true happiness lived (in Moscow), and the future holds the promise of reviving that happiness (in Moscow). But the present (not in Moscow) is just a painful stretch to be endured and lamented.
That Anton Chekhov was a harvester of human souls, and the crop he tended was ripe with sorrow, loss and, perhaps worst of all, indifference. This is readily apparent in director Les Waters’ production of Three Sisters on the intimate Thrust Stage.
There’s warmth and humor emanating from the stage as we meet the soldiers, staff and sisters in a well-appointed country home, but once we get to know the characters a little bit, it’s one big stream of thwarted desire, boredom, frustration and self-delusion.
It sounds like misery, but between Chekhov and Waters, we’re treated to an exquisitely staged, deeply compassionate exploration of mostly unhappy people.
Ruined but resilient, horrifying but beautiful
The evil that men do – and have done and continue to do – certainly does live after them. Shakespeare was so right about that. It lives and festers and poisons and leads to more evil.
This is incredibly apparent in Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play now on stage at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre.
Acts of unspeakable, incomprehensible violence occur, but it’s the echoes of those acts that ring most loudly in this compelling, ultimately shattering theatrical experience. There’s a war depicted on stage, but it’s not the chaotic, constantly shifting free-for-all of militias and government forces in East Africa. Rather, it’s the war waged on the bodies of thousands of that region’s women.
More ecstasy than agony in Daisey's Steve Jobs
It’s interesting that Mike Daisey chooses not to talk about current events in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the second of two monologues running in repertory on Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage.
The very title of the show implies that Jobs will factor largely in the two-hour, intermission-free show. But Daisey never mentions that on Jan. 17, Apple announced that Jobs has taken medical leave from the company. Following other health issues – pancreatic cancer in 2004, a liver transplant in 2009 – the departure isn’t a huge surprise, but it’s a very big deal in the world of Apple and, consequently, in the world of technology.
Daisey wrote about Jobs’ leave on his blog: “It is almost impossible to imagine Apple without him, and there's a palpable sense of loss and change as the tech industry struggles to know what this will mean for its future.”
Taken in by the Cult of Mike Daisey
I’ve seen Mike Daisey before on the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage. The country’s foremost monologist has entertained and captivated me on several occasions.
But at Wednesday’s opening of The Last Cargo Cult, I felt like I really got to see Mike Daisey. His story has to do, among many other things, with a live volcano, and that’s what he’s like on stage. He erupts in ways that are frightening and so dazzling you just can’t turn away.
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.
A Wishful toast to Fisher's Drinking
The force is strong with this one. Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, her one-woman stage autobiography, continues its wild ride.The Bay Area saw the show twice at Berkeley Repertory Theatre before it landed on Broadway. The book with the same name was a New York Times bestseller. And now Wishful Drinking is an HBO documentary.The show has its broadcast debut at 9pm Sunday, Dec. 12 and repeats through Dec. 28 (on HBO) and Dec. 29 (on HBO 2).
This Composer really is dead
There’s a moment of absolute magic in the world premiere of Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
We’ve just been subjected to a rather dispiriting film (more on that in a minute), a sort of theatrical appetizer, and we’re making the transition into the main course. The curtain on the Roda Theatre rises to reveal an absolutely magnificent set that looks like a life-size Victorian paper theater.
There’s an orchestra full of puppets – each personality-infused face affixed to a representation of an instrument – and Geoff Hoyle (the only human in the show) as the Inspector in a fantastic plaid suit preparing to solve the crime of who murdered the world’s greatest, formerly living composer.
The reveal of the set in all its glory is by far the best part of this strangely moribund evening. The show, including the movie, is just over an hour, and yet it seems much longer.
Tracking big Game: Delving into Afghanistan at Berkeley Rep
Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, gazes over a map of Afghanistan and says to Abdur Rahman, the country's Amir, "Your country is in the wrong place."
That imagined pronouncement could have occurred in 1893, when Ron Hutchinson's play Durand's Line, takes place. Or it could be an echo that reverberates through much of Afghanistan's complex and troubled history – at least the chunks of history we experience in The Great Game: Afghanistan, an extraordinary theater event now in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre.
A hit for London's Tricycle Theatre, a company known for connecting audiences with plays of political and historical import, The Great Game is now touring the U.S. with a three-part cycle of 12 one-act plays (and assorted interstitial monologues), all about Afghanistan from the 1800s to present day. Tricycle Artistic Director Nicolas Kent felt that all the attention was going Iraq and the war raging there with not enough focus on Afghanistan and the war raging there. So he commissioned a bunch of playwrights to write about the country, and this powerfully involving theatrical marathon is the result.
Berkeley Rep is presenting Part One, 1842-1930, Invasions & Independence on Wednesdays; Part Two, 1979-1996, Communism, the Mujahideen & the Taliban on Thursdays; and Part Three, 1996-2010, Enduring Freedom on Fridays. Then all three parts are presented in marathon viewings on Saturdays and Sundays. For opening day last Friday, we were able to see all three parts. We started at 11:30am and finished shortly after 10:30pm. Box meals are available in the theater lobby so patrons can keep their strength up, and a number of local restaurants offer prix-fixe menus to ensure that patrons enjoy a hearty meal and get back to the theater in time.
This really is a staggering event, and you have to get your head in the right place to enjoy it.