Always Darkest Before Election Day MTC in Red and Brown for Season Opener

Nothing’s looking up in Ross Valley Players’ November White House. President Charles H. P. “Chucky” Smith has no chance of being re-elected; he’ll be lucky to make it to January. “What is it about me that people don’t like?” he asks his attorney, and the answer comes back, “That you’re still here.”

Already Smith’s calls are being put on hold, his speechwriter’s drafting his concession, and worse– there’s only $4000 in his Presidential Library Fund. The only source of financing on the horizon is the contribution that will come from The Representative of the National Association of Turkey and Turkey Products Manufacturers when Pres. Smith pardons the Thanksgiving turkey. Traditionally, that will be only $50,000. But if the price of turkey can be recalculated according to the number of holiday consumers, Smith proclaims that the number will be “so high even the dogs can’t hear it.”

Of course, the Representative resists that assessment, so Chucky takes a new tack. Maybe the whole idea of Thanksgiving is wrong. “After all, slavery was wrong. And disco.” So who needs turkey? Aha! A new source of revenue surfaces.

These machinations and others take place in the Oval Office. (Great set by Ken Rowland.) With Abe Lincoln’s portrait looking down from the wall, The President of the United States commits every verbal offense known to modern society. He slams the Chinese, foreign adoptions, homosexuals, Native Americans, illegal immigrants, and drops the “f-bomb” multiple times per paragraph. The audience laughs uneasily. There’s something familiar about Chucky. He reminds us of someone with beady eyes and big hair, Blagosomething. . .

David Mamet, author of tonight’s play, November, also comes from Chicago. His most famous play, Glengarry Glen Ross, explores back-room deal making in a real estate office, but many of his other works explore the con man at work. Is Mamet saying that the whole idea of elected government is a con? Is this play really that cynical?

Its director, James Dunn, insists that it is not, and he quotes from the playwright’s 2008 interview in New York magazine, the year November opened on Broadway. Reading from the play’s speechwriter’s lines, Mamet said then, “. . . The only country that is not divided is totalitarian . . . They figured this out in 1787 and drew up a few sheets of paper that have kept the country in line. It’s a great place to live.”

In the role of President Smith, Buzz Halsing has a huge load of script to carry, but he brings the part off with villainous vigor and duplicitous conviction. His attorney Archer Brown, played by Stephen Dietz, is suitably dry and defeated, while the Turkey Rep, Tom Reilly, shows pride in his work and paternal concern for the welfare of his birds. LeAnn Rumbel in the only female role as speechwriter Clarice Bernstein, portrays a dedicated government employee working doggedly through a distressingly realistic cold. In contrast to those around her, Bernstein’s idealism never vanishes, but it adapts to some skills she’s learned on the job. Romulo Torres, in the small, but essential role of Dwight Grackle, provides a surprise ending and yet another opportunity for the insatiable Smith.

The play’s lesson comes through clearly: to keep this country great, know who you’re voting for.

David Mamet’s November, opening RVP’s 81st season, will be at The Barn Theatre in Ross to October 17. Shows run Thursday, Friday, Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. For a full schedule, including Neighborhood Night on Oct. 1, see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com or call the box office, 456-9555.

From the amount of his advance publicity, young playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney seems to be hotter than Tabasco with a side of Pickapeppa sauce. Not yet thirty, McCraney has been writing and producing plays since 2006, when he was discovered by Marin Theatre Company’s Producing Director, Ryan Rilette, and wrote a play about Hurricane Katrina for Southern Rep Theatre in New Orleans. Since then, his work has been produced in the UK, Atlanta, New Jersey, New York and Chicago, but only New York and Chicago have staged the entire trilogy of McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays that have now come to the Bay Area.

The first in the series, In the Red and Brown Water, has opened at MTC, directed by Ryan Rilette. In his program notes, Rilette describes the play as “simultaneously old and new, familiar yet distant.” Its characters live in a fictional Bayou housing project in which “dreamers are prophets.” Nine actors play twelve parts, but the action centers around young Oya, played by Lakisha May. Oya’s story is accompanied by a Greek chorus-soundscape of the other actors, who open the play by singing a dirge-like chant over her prostrate body.

Oya’s not dead, however, and she’s soon joined by a mischievous neighborhood kid, Elegba, who’s come to beg candy from Oya’s ill mother, Mama Moja. Though Oya refuses him, Elegba lingers to tell her his dream. (Here’s where the play’s title comes from.)

Two men are interested in this girl: Ogun, a good-hearted, stuttering auto mechanic, and Shango, a handsome devil who arouses Mama Moja’s suspicions. “Don’t play with trash,” she warns her daughter. “Some of the nastiest things come wrapped like that.” It’s obvious that Oya will ignore this advice.

Oya’s gift is her ability to run fast. We see her running at school, being cheered, being offered a scholarship to State, and then refusing for her mother’s sake. For the rest of the play, she seems almost to be running in place.

All the actors’ stage directions are read aloud, but Elegba’s are given special flourishes. “Elegba exits like a full moon in the morning,” or “Elegba sneaks in like the moon.” And here’s where some of the “familiar, but distant” aspects of In the Red and Brown Water show up.

Program notes explain that all these characters are named for orishas, “spirits bridging the relationship between Man and God,” in the Yoruba faith. So Elegba is not just a rascally kid, he’s the assigned trickster and the messenger. Oya (Lakisha May) is the god of wind and the gatekeeper of the cemetery. Dashing Shango is the god of thunder and lightning; Dependable Ogun (Ryan Vincent Anderson) is the god of iron, while two other women, Aunt Elegua, the guardian of the crossroads, and Oshun, ruler of love and sexual passion, set up a contrast with Oya.

The acting is superb, and when the mythology steps aside, some delightful surprises come through. Elegba (Jared McNeill) sings only a little, but he leaves the audience waiting for an encore. Shango’s (Isaiah Johnson) re-enactment of what happened in church, with all its characters and testimony, seems as if it had been videotaped that morning. Aunt Elegua’s (Dawn L. Troupe) swaggering sensuality is barely disturbed by what’s happening onstage. Drop a blonde wig on her, and she’s Mae West.

Nicol Foster, Jalene Goodwin, Josh Schell and Daveed Diggs enact the story that follows Oya downhill. (Diggs should have a bigger part.)

But gods and goddesses, angels and orishas, will always remain distant, and that’s a disappointment. If Tarrell Alvin McCraney could drop the mask and write a close-up story about real people he knows, he could blow the roof off the establishment.

In the Red and Brown Water will play at the Marin Theatre Company through October 10. Because the other two parts of the trilogy will play at the Magic and at ACT in San Francisco, subscribers at any of these theaters will have access to $40 tickets at the other two. For more information about the trilogy, see www.brothersisterplays.org. For additional theater information or to reserve tickets, see www.marintheatre.org. or call 388-5208.