Rosine Reynolds reviews

Oh, the Times! Oh, the (Very Bad) Manners!

2012-01-26T15:46:00.000-08:00

We like to think of the Eighteenth Century as a time of ponderous civility and powdered wigs, but these are city images. If an impudent playwright of that time had wanted to satirize country society, he might have created the ancestor of the sitcom and become an instant success. That’s exactly what happened to Oliver Goldsmith.

Goldsmith’s 1773 hit, “She Stoops to Conquer,” broke all the theatrical rules of the day. At that time, comedies were sentimental entertainments, designed to evoke genteel smiles and even tears. Laughter was revolutionary! But “She Stoops” gets a tight squeeze on the country upper class and never lets go.

Mrs. Hardcastle, lady of the manse, complains to her husband about the limitations of country life. Their old mansion looks like an inn, she says, and they never see anybody. Her oafish son from a previous marriage, Tony Lumpkin, excuses himself from staying with his elders; he’s expected at the “3 Pidgeons,” his favorite tavern, where he will soon make mischief for his stepfather.

Mr. Hardcastle tells his daughter Kate that he has selected a husband for her, and the young man will be coming to dinner tonight. Mrs. Hardcastle declares her intention to arrange a marriage between her adored Tony and his cousin Constance, who also lives in the house. (The two detest each other.) And all of this happens in the first few minutes of the play.
Additional complications follow when the suitors – Marlow for Kate and George for Constance – lose their way in the dark and are directed by someone at the tavern (who?) to an “inn,” which turns out to be the Hardcastles’ home. Mr. Hardcastle welcomes them heartily, but since the gentlemen believe they are paying guests at an inn, they ignore their host, insist on conferring with the cook about dinner and lounging in Mr. Hardcastle’s favorite chair.

Hearing that Kate Hardcastle has just arrived to meet him, Marlow freezes up, stammers and stares at the floor. Kate is determined to bring him out, saying he’s just exceedingly modest, but her father suspects the young man of “old-fashioned impudence.” She devises a plan to put Marlow more at his ease by stooping to disguise herself as a maid.

This play’s political incorrectness is part of what makes it funny, but British director Judy Holmes has also provided this 1773 comedy with tight action and a well-matched cast. The Barn’s opening night audience fully enjoyed Goldsmith’s 239-year-old script.

According to the biographers of his time, the playwright was unattractive, careless, intemperate, improvident and ill-mannered. In his youth, he had raised money to emigrate to America, but the ship sailed while he was at a party. He lost everything he earned to gambling and died ill and broke at age 46. Yet before he died, he numbered among his friends such achievers as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick.

Judy Holmes and The Ross Valley Players have assembled some fine actors for “She Stoops to Conquer.”Alex Ross and Maureen O’Donoghue are the well-matched Hardcastles. (One delight is the wordless scene when Mr. Hardcastle is trying to keep his temper.) Sean Mirkovich is excellent as the bashful Marlow, with Jocelyn Roddie as Kate. Kushi Beauchamp plays cousin Constance, and Adam Roy is her sweetheart, George Hastings, Josh Garcia-Cotter portrays the troublesome Tony Lumpkin. Ross Valley regular, John Anthony Nolan, doubles as Diggory, the servant, and as Marlow’s father, Sir Charles. Sandi Rubay and Noah Benet complete the household staff.

“She Stoops to Conquer” will play at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center through Feb. 19, Thursdays through Sunday afternoons. Ticket prices range from $17 to $25. For complete information or reservations, call 456-9555 or see www.rossvalleyplayers.com

World Premiere at AlterTheater

2011-11-23T15:49:00.000-08:00

First, let’s explain that Lauren D. Yee’s play, “A Man, His Wife, and His Hat” has nothing to do with Oliver Sachs’ book, “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.” Yee’s work, described as “a quirky comedy,” was commissioned for San Rafael’s AlterTheater Ensemble and developed in workshops with them. It’s being presented in a different storefront on Fourth Street in San Rafael, this time at 1414.

“A Man, His Wife, and His Hat” begins with a clarinet in the klezmer style and a man who appears to be chasing his hat in the wind. Once he catches the hat and puts it on, the music becomes lively, and he dances to it. (The audience enjoys this part.)

Then the man, known only as Hetchman, sinks into a wide chair with his TV remote and a can of nuts. A screen on the wall – Wall is one of the characters -- says, “Next Day.” He’s still there. “Next Day” is repeated twice more. Then Hetchman summons his wife, “Hey, wife!” to show her the hat’s gone. They bicker about it briefly; after which Hetchman goes back to the chair. The Wall says, “Still Missing” and repeats that for an additional five days.

Now it becomes clear that Wife is also missing. Fifteen years pass, and Hetchman is still watching TV and eating nuts. The audience now understands that this is theatre of the absurd, and anything can happen.

Whatever it is, it won’t be soon. Wall notes that thirty years go by before Hetchman realizes “Wife” has gone. Meckel, an old friend and kindly neighbor, says that if Hetchman will just give her a call, she’ll come back with the hat, but Hetchman has no idea what her name is.

To this point, all the characters, Wall included, speak with middle-European accents, and the humans dress in Old World clothing. But an abrupt change into modern time brings in two modern characters, a man and a woman making wedding plans. However, the young man feels “floaty,” which means his fiancee’s love is not properly anchoring him to the ground. She admits it. Guiding messages in the form of wadded-up notes are tossed in from offstage.

Next, a large and hairy golem appears. The golem, a figure associated with Jewish folklore, does not speak, but roars and grunts a lot. (The audience enjoys the golem.) Hetchman plans to train him to clean the house in place of Wife, who is traveling on a train, searching for a hatmaker to make a copy of her husband’s beloved hat, so she can have one for herself.

AlterTheater performs in the empty storefronts, and the audience sits on folding chairs in a U around the room, close to the actors. At this close-and-personal distance, talent shows up clearly. Patricia Silver as Hetchman’s wife and Ed Holmes as Meckel seem entirely at ease with their rather static characters. Jeff Garrett as Hetchman is required to doze in a chair much of the time, but later, when he’s reciting a list of old memories found in a jar, he shows how much more he can do. Jeanette Harrison, as Voice and the fiancée, also does not have much of a part to work with, and that’s unfortunate. Hugo E. Carbajal as the unloved Gabe, does a little better with his attempts to stay “grounded” without his fiancee’s affection. The Golem, Jonathan Deline, uses his mobile facial expressions to overcome a lack of dialogue. And Wall, spoken by Nakissa Eternad, is the only one besides Golem to evoke humor. Robin Stanton directed this premiere production.

Inside “A Man, his Wife, and his Hat” is a sweet love story trying to get out, and Lauren Yee should quit messing around and make it happen. Until that happens, this show is playful, but it’s not yet a play.

“A Man, his Wife, and his Hat” will be in residence at 1414 Fourth Street in San Rafael through December 4. For complete information, call 454-2787 or see www.altertheater.org.

"Mockingbird" Still Soaring

2011-11-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

Large-cast stage productions that aren’t musicals are rare indeed. Casting and moving around more than a half dozen players can be daunting, but for James Dunn, it’s all in a day’s work. Dunn has been directing for fifty years and has handled the Hollywood-sized Mountain Play for twenty-nine of them. A cast of seventeen would not keep him from presenting “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In program notes, the Director writes that he read Harper Lee’s classic while recovering from the flu in 1961, the same year Lee received a Pulitzer for this heartfelt story from her childhood in Monroeville, Alabama. “I’ll never forget how moved I was,” says Dunn.

Lee, known as Scout in the play, lives with her brother Jem and her father, Atticus in a town where neighbors – for good or ill -- keep watch on each other. Serious conversations take place in the front yard, away from the hearing of children and the household help. In tribute to Harper Lee, Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is revived and presented every year in Monroeville.

Sergel’s stage adaptation introduces the grownup Scout, Jean Louise Finch, who takes the audience back to the summer and fall of 1935 in the fictional Maycomb. Here a townsman brings a bag of hickory nuts in payment for Atticus’ legal services, and a visiting new kid, Dill, is warned about two of the neighbors, mean Mrs. Dubose across the street and the spooky Radleys, where Mr. Radley’s childlike grown son Boo lives, but is never seen. Odd tokens are left in the hollow tree, possibly from Boo. The children devise schemes to get him outside, but Atticus advises his children to “stand in Boo’s shoes” and leave him alone. At this point, the children, especially his adolescent son Jem, don’t have much respect for their father because Atticus doesn’t hunt, fish or play poker. This was, recalls Jean Louise, “a time of happy ignorance.”

A yard conversation changes all that. Judge Taylor asks Atticus Finch to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who has been charged with rape of a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. This charge leads Atticus to stand guard in the jail late at night, where he quietly confronts his fellow townsmen, intent on a lynching. The children, who’ve evaded their housekeeper, Calpurnia, see all this, and their innocence plays a part in cooling the heated crowd. Mary Ann Rodgers plays Jean Louise with loving nostalgia.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” offers strong scenes for both directors and actors. Steve Price as Atticus is deliberate and solid, a country lawyer in the best tradition. (Note: Steve Price grew up in Belvedere; he attended Redwood High and is the son of Ark writer, Jeanne Price.) The role of Scout is double-cast. We saw ten-year-old Brigid O’Brien, who seemed so natural in the part, she didn’t appear to be acting. As Scout’s big brother, Jem, Gerrit deBlaauw was protective with his sister, defensive with his dad.

In smaller roles, Alex Ross as the cigar-chomping judge, Melissa W. Bailey as the bedraggled and pitiful Mayella, Sumi Narendran as no-nonsense Calpurnia brought life to the script. (But can that nasty Mrs.Dubose really be Tiburon’s gracious Ann Ripley?)

Wendell Wilson plays the earnest Tom Robinson, aware of his danger, and young Layne Ulrich portrays Dill, the summer visitor. (In Harper Lee’s childhood, Dill was Truman Capote, a lifelong friend.)

Townspeople, including the mysterious Boo, are played by Jeffrey Taylor, Mark Toepfer, Ray Martin, Tom Hudgens, and Newton Harband. In court, Wood Lockhart portrays Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor, Ray Martin is Heck Tate, and Frederick Lein is Mayella’s brutish father, Bob Ewell.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” will play at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center through December 11, Thursdays through Sundays at 2 p.m. No performance on Thanksgiving. Ticket prices range from $17 to $25.

For complete information see www.rossvalleyplayers.com , and for reservations, please call 456-9555.

Early Halloween at MTC

2011-10-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

In a brilliant stroke of showmanship, Marin Theatre Company opened its new play “Bellwether” under a full moon during Halloween season. Steve Yockey’s anticipated “spine-tingling fairy tale for adults,” is having its world premiere at MTC, where it’s been under construction since Yockey was playwright in residence there in 2009. In program notes, he is described as “a storyteller . . . writing retellings of mythical stories set against the backdrop of today’s morally complicated culture.” Both Marin Theatre Company and the play’s director, Ryan Rilette, have launched “Bellwether” with a full complement of stagecraft.

It begins with a handsome, two-level set (Giulio Cesare Perrone’s design) where a child’s jumbled bed appears to teeter precariously near the edge of the upper level. The home itself seems a standardized pleasant place, contrasted with an oddly agitated soundtrack. (Chris Houston.) The neighbors who stroll onstage, greeting one another and members of the audience, speak in positive terms about their gated community, security systems, street lights and soccer teams, summarizing, “Bad things just don’t happen here.” But then they do. Amy, the little girl who occupies the bed upstairs, vanishes, and the only clues are some drawings she did of a man in a dark coat.

Media reps descend on Bellwether, more intrusive and numerous than the police.
Neighbors begin to avoid the parents, to speculate. After four days, focus of the investigation turns to the family. And what is causing that booming noise? How can that be only “a suburban thing?”

This playwright is indeed an accomplished storyteller. However, by the second act, some prototypes begin to take shape. Here are remnants of the Pied Piper, of Hansel and Gretel. Here are memories of “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” and an ancient invocation against “things that go bump in the night.” Here’s a reminder of “Our Town” as if written by Stephen King and a clown that could induce coulrophobia in Barnum and Bailey. In the spirit of maintaining suspense, two fine actors – Kathryn Zdan and Jessica Lynn Carroll – must go without further description for now.

Rounding out the cast, Arwen Anderson plays Jackie Draft, besieged and sometimes besotted mother of the missing Amy, with Gabriel Marin as the child’s hapless Father, Alan. Rachel Harker is their neighbor Maddy, newly-divorced and not entirely accepted. The neighbors, detectives and reporters who perform in double roles are all Actor’s Equity professionals: Liz Sklar, Marissa Keltie, Mollie Stickney, Danny Wolohan and Patrick Jones.

York Kennedy’s eerie lighting and Fumiko Bielefeldt’s costumes add to the spooky mood. MTC has done everything right to ensure creepiness. All that’s left is for the audience to sit around a campfire in a dark wood. But once we start asking ourselves, “What kind of town would name itself ‘entity that seems to presage future happenings?’” or, “Is Draft a real surname?” or begin to recognize ghosts of other ghost stories, then our spine begins to tickle more than tingle.

Steve Yockey’s “Bellwether” will be performed through October 30, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Wednesdays at 7:30 and Sundays at 7:00.
Matinees are Thursday, Oct. 20 at 1:00 pm, Saturday, Oct. 29 and every Sunday at 2:00 pm. Ticket prices range from $15 (one hour before the show) to $55. For details or reservations, please see www.marintheatre.org or call the box office, 388-5208.

French "Dinner" Served at The Barn

2011-09-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

A news release for Ross Valley Players’ “Don’t Dress for Dinner” asks, “What could possibly go wrong when Bernard plans a weekend . . . gourmet dinner with his Parisian mistress in a French farmhouse?” That question is leading with its chin. Almost everything can go wrong in a comedy that depends on whip-fast miscues and misdirection.

“Don’t Dress for Dinner” by French playwright Marc Camoletti was an automatic hit when it opened in Paris, a sequel to his 1962 success, “Boeing Boeing.” “Dinner” continued the misadventures of the womanizing Bernard, who had been pursuing three airline stewardesses in “Boeing” and has since married one of them, Jacqueline. Robert, best man at their wedding, is now Jacqueline’s secret lover. Further complications arise with the arrival of Suzette, the chef who’s come to cater Bernard’s private dinner, and then Suzanne, his actress-model mistress. Throw in a luscious Chanel coat that keeps changing owners, add Suzette’s jealous husband, and the table is set for a lot of action.

First, Bernard has to get his wife out of the house -- easily accomplished because she’s going to go visit her mother. But when she learns that her lover Robert is coming, she calls Mom and begs off. Chef Suzette arrives with a uniform and a menu, but agrees to play Robert’s girlfriend in order to deceive Jacqueline. (This is considered a 200 franc “extra” on the bill; there will be others, with all of the loot tucked into Suzette’s enlarging bosom.)

When Suzanne, the real mistress, arrives to a full, nervous house, she is drafted to go cook dinner, while the real chef continues pretending to be an actress and model. Characters vanish and reappear in the rooms of Bernard’s country home, a converted barn with three sleeping quarters: the hayloft, the cowshed and the piggery. Dinner -- if it can be called that -- will be served in the henhouse.

Director Richard Ryan says Camoletti’s play is “all about sex,” but each move in that direction is thwarted by the delicacies of balancing a tower of falsehoods. Ryan wisely has not required French accents from all the actors. Only one speaks with an accent, and it works. He’s also orchestrated some cleverly timed “asides” from each character and some robust physical humor.

But the play’s mischief-makers suffer from a shortage of savoir faire. They make too many trips to the bar. They have too many sit-downs for explanations. They attack each other awkwardly with domestic implements. They stamp imaginary cockroaches with floor-bruising vigor. More serious, though, they don’t look like wily conspirators or even contemporaries.

David Kester, a veteran of 130 stage productions, plays the duplicitous Bernard, while Tavis Kammet, who’s been acting in the Bay Area for ten years, plays his former best man, Robert. Sondra Putnam is Jacqueline, Bernard’s wife and Robert’s secret lover. (There’s some clever stage business as Jacqueline and Bernard alternate rearranging the sofa cushions.) Melissa Claire is the opportunistic chef, Suzette, with Casey Blair making a late arrival as Suzette’s possibly-dangerous husband, George. The cast surprise here is Marianne Shine as Bernard’s seductive mistress, Suzanne. Shine is the only member to speak with a French accent, but she adds the nuances, body language and humor to make it all seem natural.

On opening night, even though the cast had not yet become an ensemble, it must be said that much of the audience was laughing throughout.

Michael A. Berg designed the time-appropriate costumes, including a break-away maid’s uniform, and Stephen Dietz, with the help of Maurice Chevalier, set up the musical scene breaks.

“Don’t Dress for Dinner” will be at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art and Garden Center through Oct. 16. Thursday shows are at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturdays’ are at 8 p.m. and Sunday matinees are at 2:00 p.m. Ticket prices range from $17 to $25.
For additional information or reservations, call 456-9555 or see www.rossvalleyplayers.com

"Guitars" in a Minor Key

2011-08-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

“Seven Guitars” is not a musical. It’s a mystery play with dancing, singing and one guitar in the pawn shop. But August Wilson’s 1995 drama is a harmony of voices remembered from his old neighborhood, the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where all the voices have migrated from the south.

It’s the opening work in Marin Theatre Company’s 45th season, part of the playwright’s Century Cycle, and a Wilson first for MTC. Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis says he wants to produce all ten of the Century plays, but began with this one because it “branches out to the other plays in myriad ways.”

Its set (by J.B. Wilson) recalls August Wilson’s childhood home and the brick-walled inner yard of an apartment building with its rickety fence in the center and a steep, Thiebaud -like hill rising behind. At first, the stage is dim, the actors dressed in black. They’ve just come from Floyd’s funeral. Vera insists that angels were Floyd’s pallbearers, and nobody argues with her. She’s the most bereaved. The crow of a rooster signals a return to Floyd’s past, and blackout intervals of the blues play through scene changes.

Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton (he insists upon using his street name) is back in town after serving ninety days for vagrancy, an injustice he feels every hour of his existence. But Floyd is also elated, trying to reconnect with his sweetheart Vera and get her to come with him to Chicago. Floyd made a record before he went to jail, and now Savoy Records there wants him to make another. And Muddy Waters is in Chicago!

Vera’s still smarting from Floyd’s previous fling with Pearl Brown, but Floyd is charming, and she’s beginning to weaken. Her upstairs neighbor, Louise, “forty-eight, goin’ on sixty,” says she knows just what to do with a man who’s leaving. Louise is a nonstop smoker who uses a cigarette to punctuate her conversation. She’s expecting her niece, Ruby, to arrive any minute.

Hedley, a street preacher, chicken farmer and cigarette dealer, peppers his own conversation with Biblical predictions and fantasies about the plantation he’s going to buy someday; his dead father will return and bring him the money, he says. Floyd’s old friend Canewell has heard Floyd’s back in town, and he drops by, as does Red. The three talk about reviving the band and improvise a blues trio there in the yard. Then Hedley returns to the yard, bringing another instrument that puts a stop to everything.

However, the whole neighborhood unites around the Joe Louis fight that night. They string lights, gather close to the broadcast, follow every blow, and break into dancing when Louis wins.

“Seven Guitars” New York director, Kent Gash, understands movement, and he plays the stage like an instrument. Its most satisfying sequences move. Its least satisfying talk too much. The playwright was in love with these voices and with his mother’s culture -- she was black; his father was white -- but much of the dialogue is excessive and slows the play’s momentum. Two delightful exceptions are the scenes in which the women discuss the men, and the men discuss their weapons.

Marin Theatre Company has assembled an all- professional cast for its opening production. Tobie Windham portrays the hopeful and desperate Floyd, with Omoze Idehenre as the reluctant Vera. Floyd’s buddies, Red Carter and Canewell, are played by L. Peter Callender and Marc Damon Johnson. Sinelle Azoroh shows up late in the first act as Ruby, who arrives bringing a secret. Margo Hall plays Louise with well-seasoned sassiness. Charles Branklyn has the large, demanding role of half-demented Hadley.

August Wilson’s characters don’t grow or change, though, and that’s a disappointment.

“Seven Guitars”can be seen at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley through September 4. Performances are every day but Monday, and ticket prices range from $34 to $55. Discounts are available for youth, seniors and group sales.

For complete information, call the box office at 388-5208 or see the website, marintheatre.org.

"History" Stands in for Shakespeare

2011-08-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

My fellow American, did you know that the same letters that spell “George Washington” can be rearranged to read “gaggin’ on wet horse?” Or that the Story of the First People should be told through the Dance of the Antelope’s Intestine? No? All that’s about to change because if you’re here to see “The Complete History of America (abridged)” you’ll hear Ben Franklin’s quote rearranged to say, “History is written by the winners – but tonight, it’s our turn.”

Marin Shakespeare Company, now in its twenty-second year, has delighted audiences with “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)” four times in the past. “Complete Works,” says Director Robert Currier, originated at the old Black Point Renaissance Faire thirty years ago and is “by far the most successful theatre piece ever to come out of Marin County.” At that time, three Berkeley grads, Adam Long, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichenor condensed all of Shakespeare into two hours. Subsequent condensations took on the Bible, Sports, Great Literature, and now its younger “Complete” cousin, American History.

This show begins with the National Anthem, entirely rephrased. (Do not try to sing along!) It includes a timeline – a long, long timeline – that stretches far out into the audience and whose history is punctuated with one-liners, silly business and damp volleys from a battery of onstage squirt gun.

“America’s” three cast members, Darren Bridgett, Cassidy Brown and Mick Mize carry on the lunatic tradition with a combination of manic zeal and professional cool. They are ready for anything. When a nearby car alarm goes off early in the show, they improvise a line or two and incorporate it into the show. Later, when Bridgett takes an unscripted fall down one of the trapdoors, he carries on as if it were part of the act. (An orange traffic cone, however, covers the offending door in the second act.) And they know what to do with hecklers!

There is politics in this show, but that’s to be expected. There is also some raunchy humor from time to time. The only problem with this script (and the show acknowledges this) is that many parts of history just don’t adapt to humor. For instance, “Civil War: the Slideshow” is funny, but Lincoln’s assassination just isn’t, nor is the comparison with Kennedy; they’re familiar, but not funny. Battlefield jokes in the trenches get laughs, but the Cold War doesn’t. And so it goes.

But “The Complete History of America (abridged)” is fast, creative, and a zesty filling for Marin Shakespeare Company’s summer sandwich, playing in repertory between “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” through Sunday afternoon, Sept. 25.

All shows are in the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University in San Rafael. Ticket prices range from $20 to $35, with discounts available for special events and season ticket holders. An additional discount, “Pay Your Age” is also offered for adults from 21 to 34. Picnics and box lunches are welcome, and parking is free. Please bring jackets, hats, even lap blankets for evening performances.

For complete information or reservations, call the box office at 499-4488, or see www.marinshakespeare.org.

Minding Our "Manners"

2011-07-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

Here's this family's rule: unyielding gentility. They are all together for the first time since Christmas, and never mind that this is creating some strain. They’ll sort it all out. Sarah will see to it.

Sarah and her husband Reg are here for the weekend to relieve Annie, Reg’s younger sister and caretaker for their invalid mother, who lives upstairs and “hasn’t been down for weeks.” They’ve agreed to look after the old lady while Annie goes away for the weekend, hopefully with Tom. Tom is the community’s mild veterinarian, and he looks after their cat. A weekend with Tom, says Sarah, would be “very sensible.” But Annie has made other plans, and now Norman, their scapegrace brother-in-law, has been seen on the premises. Could this possibly be Annie’s weekend companion -- her sister Ruth’s husband? Sarah will have none of it. She summons Ruth to the house.

But all these extra people plus Tom, who comes by to look in on the cat, make six for dinner, and there’s not enough food, wine or chairs to go around. Still, dinner must go on, and they rise to their respective duties. Annie compiles a “sloppy stew” of all the canned goods in the house and fills that out with leftover salad. (“This lettuce leaf is all mine, then, is it?”) Tom will take the short chair the cat sleeps on, and Norman will “dress for dinner,” in an old suit that had belonged to his taller late father-in-law. Sarah’s seating assignments and the family’s compliance with them reveals playwright Alan Ayckbourn at his artfully snarky best.

Ayckbourn’s people are hysterically tragic or tragically comic, and always emotionally chaotic. The playwright has produced seventy-five full-length plays. This one, “Table Manners,” was the thirteenth, and the first in his “Norman Conquests” series. It has been playing in one location or another almost constantly since its premiere in 1973. In 2009, the Old Vic Company in London brought the “Norman Conquests” to Broadway, where they captured a Tony for Best Revival. (Norman conquers by promising happiness. It works every time.)

Ross Valley Players’ director, Robert Wilson, understands Ayckbourn’s pacing. The table-seating scene – though originally performed in the round – works beautifully with two of the players unconventionally having their backs turned to the audience. The actors’ accents are entirely unforced, for which Wilson credits his Associate Director, Judy Holmes, and her “British sensibilities.”

Joseph Hoeber, now of Tiburon and recently of New York, has the plum role of Norman. Hoeber’s Norman is unkempt and demanding, drinks too much, apologizes for drinking too much, and is altogether as irritating as a mosquito in the bedroom. Reg, Ruth’s brother (Robin Schild) confides that he does like Norman, but thinks most women don’t. However, Reg is not entirely observant and has been known to forget his own children’s names.

Monique Sims, another Tiburon talent, plays the duty-bound Annie, carrying on even though Sarah lets her know that her hair “looks like a gorse bush.” Robyn Wiley is the unflappable Ruth, a hard-pressed, but short-sighted professional. Christopher Hammond portrays Tom, the dedicated veterinarian and possible hero, with Pamela Ciochetti as Sarah, who maintains order, but still gets “relapses of nervous trouble” whenever she’s been in the house.

David Apple’s country dining room is exactly right, but also slightly askew, and Bruce Viera’s sound intervals are almost as much fun as the show.

“Table Manners” will play at The Barn Theatre in Ross through August 14. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. For reservations, call 456-9555, and for complete information see www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Less Isn't More if It's "Tiny"

2011-06-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

In the Cardinal’s garden, there are two chairs, one for His Eminence and the other for his visitor, the Lawyer. They’ve known each other since school, agree that they’d always detested each other, and banter about each other’s flaws until the Lawyer gets down to business.

His fabulously wealthy client, Miss Alice, will give the Church one billion a year for twenty years, but the Cardinal must send his secretary to finalize the arrangements. Their crisp, arch dialogue suggests they’ve had this conversation before, that there is something ritualistic about it. Muted lighting and gloomy music between scene changes reinforce the impression of foreboding.

The Cardinal’s secretary is Brother Julian, a lay brother and an innocent, who arrives at Miss Alice’s mansion in his long brown cassock and meets both Miss Alice (who is not at all as she was described) and Butler. He’s also introduced to Tiny Alice, which is either a large replica or a model of the building they’re in. Everyone at the mansion is respectful of Tiny Alice. Everyone is also curious about the six blank years in Brother Julian’s resume, which he explains as a loss of faith that sent him to seek help in a mental home. He’d had hallucinations, he says. He had also met a woman there who thought she was the Virgin Mary, but whose pregnancy was really advanced cancer.

After the Lawyer and Miss Alice confer together, the first of two intermissions occurs. Some in the audience leave their seats making wisecracks about needing Cliff Notes. By the second intermission, they’re less forgiving, and by the end, a woman seated nearby was murmuring, “Die, die.” A good pair of scissors could improve this script, but the playwright, Edward Albee, allows no changes in his prose, as A.C.T. found out to its distress in 1975, when he sued them.

Albee wrote the play in 1963, when he was 35 and fresh from his recent success with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Since then, “Tiny Alice” has had a spotty production history, but it now reappears as the closing work in Marin Theatre Company’s 2010 – 2011 season.
Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis states in his program notes that seeing “Tiny Alice” eleven years ago in New York “turned a deep interest in the play into an obsession.” He has directed the MTC production himself and has supplied it with an all-Equity cast, all of them familiar to Bay Area theatergoers.

Andrew Hurteau portrays the hapless, sacrificial Julian, and Rod Gnapp is the menacing Lawyer. Richard Farrell has the part of the complicit Cardinal who, when pleased, forgets to refer to himself as “we.” Carrie Paff plays Miss Alice with seductive and deadly purpose. Mark Anderson Phillips as Butler knows the game, is bored with it, but plays it anyway. Fumiko Bielefeldt costumes this group; Kurt Landisman provides the murky lighting; Chris Houston designs the sound. Scenic designer J.B. Wilson contributes both the set and the Tiny Alice temple.

Marin Theatre Company’s closing play, “Tiny Alice,” will be performed until June 26, every day but Monday. Performance times vary with the days of the week, and ticket prices range from $32 to $53. For complete information, see the website, www.marintheatre.org or call the box office at 388-5208.

Local Talent Shines in "Laramie"

2011-06-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

A little gem of a play opened in Larkspur this month, and Tiburon’s Karen Leland has eleven parts in it. The play, “The Laramie Project,” examines the murder of a gay young man, Matthew Shepard, in a Wyoming town in 1998. All its dialogue is authentic.

It was assembled in real time by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project. The group collected interviews from townspeople, law enforcement, bartenders, a bicyclist, academics, clerics, gay residents of Laramie, and family members of both Shepard and his killers. But the Tectonic Theater interviewers have speaking parts too, describing their six trips to Wyoming and the progress of their search. As their collected information begin to build, writers and dramaturges within the group collaborate on creating this play.

Larkspur’s Theatre-at-Large production is a bare-bones presentation in which eight actors face the audience and tell their stories with the aid of minimal props. The story that binds them is this: in Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, is beaten, tied to a fence outside of town and left for dead. His brain injuries are so severe, he’s taken to a hospital in Colorado where there’s a neurological unit. He doesn’t die right away, but as this hate crime becomes known, the town’s rosy picture of itself begins to darken and fractures appear. As one resident says, Laramie, like Waco, will become synonymous with violence. The death of a young Highway Patrol officer is barely noticed. And of the three faiths established in town – Baptist, Unitarian and Catholic – only the Catholic priest offers a vigil. Eventually, however, justice will take its ponderous course, and recovery will begin, both for the town and for the researchers of Tectonic Theater.

“The Laramie Project” has a large cast: eight actors and eighty-three speaking parts. Every cast member in the current production has extensive theatrical experience, but that’s a lot to put together. How did director James Hurwitz manage it? “The director chose the cast,” says Karen Leland. They were people he’d worked with before, and they formed a natural ensemble.
Karen herself says she’s been acting all her life and majored in musical theater at college in Southern California. She found the play both “challenging and rewarding for the same reason. These are real words that people have spoken. They’re not from a playwright.” When not onstage or in rehearsal, Karen Leland is a best-selling author of business books. She also works as a marketing and social media consultant.

“The Laramie Project” will be presented only through next Saturday, June 18. Performances will be Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the American Legion Hall, 500 Magnolia Avenue, in downtown Larkspur. Tickets are $15 for students and seniors, $20 for general seating. For reservations or additional information, call 827-1373.

"Hole" Truth Presented in Ross

2011-05-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Every family needs an Izzy, a warm-hearted nut case in flashy pants who is not above a fist fight and is “just so Jerry Springer.” Izzy can chatter on and on as her sister Becca takes laundry out of the basket, meticulously folding and stacking. We are getting some good laughs out of Izzy until we realize that these are all little clothes, a child’s clothes. They belonged to Becca’s little boy Danny, killed in an accident eight months before. And part of Izzy’s chatter is the news that she’s pregnant. “Pretend to be happy,” she says. Becca pretends, then worries immediately about what kind of mother wacky Izzy will be. (And why, in all this time, hasn’t her best friend Debbie called?)

This is the landscape of “Rabbit Hole,” David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2006 emotionally-charged play about six characters devastated by the loss of a child. It was generated by a teacher’s challenge when the playwright was a student at Julliard: write about the thing you fear most. Later, after Lindsay-Abaire married and had a son, he “understood fear in a profound way.”
And so Becca folds her son’s clothes away, gives his dog to her mother and takes his art work off the refrigerator door. But Howie, Danny’s father, watches an old tape of his child, worries about the dog gaining weight, wants to maintain Danny’s bedroom and toys just as they were. It’s been eight months since their world was knocked off its foundation. Now Howie wants to get their love life going again, but Becca can’t relax, even with a neck rub. What should they do? Go on a cruise? Sell the house? Have another child?

“Rabbit Hole”s director, Mary Ann Rodgers, says in her program notes, Howie and Becca’s ability to survive “physically, emotionally and spiritually . . . is very much up in the air.” Family members can only offer awkward affection.

Becca’s mother Nat shows up for Izzy’s birthday party, wanting to discuss “the Kennedy curse”and how she mainly feels sorry for Rose Kennedy, who lived to 104 and saw it all. Family curses interest Nat, and maternal loss is something she knows about. Nat also lost a son, Becca and Izzy’s brother, who died of a heroin overdose when he was thirty. Becca resents any comparisons between her self-destructive brother and her innocent little boy.

Empathy is everywhere, but comfort is elusive. Support groups haven’t helped, and old friends like Debbie seem to have disappeared. Yes, maybe it’s time to sell the house and move. But while the house is open to shoppers, Jason shows up. Jason is the teenager whose car hit Danny. It’s Jason who gives the play its name and its ultimate sense of hope.

Liam Hughes portrays the conscience-stricken Jason, Gregg LeBlanc plays Howie, whose steps for survival find the way out in “Rabbit Hole.” And the three women – Beth Kellerman, Floriana Alessandria and Maureen O’Donoghue deliver an honest, tough-loving ensemble as Becca, Izzy and Nat.

In 2010, the play was made into a short-lived film. Here’s a comment that was overheard at intermission last Friday: “This is like a breath of fresh air after the movie!” Director Mary Ann Rodgers, who clearly loves the play, has created an artistic best for The Ross Valley Players and The Barn.

“Rabbit Hole” will be at The Barn Theater in the Marin Art & Garden Center through June 12. Shows are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. An audience “talk back” with Ms. Rodgers and some of the performers will be offered May 29.

For tickets, call 456-9555 or see www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Kept In the Dark at College of Marin

2011-05-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

Being told before we enter the theatre, “If you want to use the restroom, you’d better do it now,” puts us in a very young frame of mind, and for this particular play, that’s a fine thing.

There’s also a practical reason for the admonition. “Black Comedy” begins in pitch-black, bottom-of-the-coal mine darkness, and entering late would be impossible. There are already people onstage. We can track their voices as they move about and hear them as they drop something heavy, but that’s all we know until the lights come on abruptly and plunge the actors into confusion. Peter Shaffer’s farce serves up a world in reverse. For the audience, it’s now light; for the characters, it’s a blown-fuse blackout. Where’s the phone? Where are matches, the candles? Carole will crawl up the stairs and search while Brindsley will attempt to find the phone and put in a call.

Their situation is all the more distressing because they’re expecting visitors. Carole’s “Daddy-pegs” is coming to meet his daughter’s new fiancé, and a wealthy German art lover will also arrive to see Brindsley’s sculptures. To impress both of them, the couple has “traded” Brindsley’s ratty furniture with some elegant pieces belonging to his decorator neighbor, Harold, who is out of town.

But first, an elderly neighbor, Miss Furnival, arrives because she’s terrified of the dark and seeking company. They offer her a drink, but she won’t accept anything stronger than a bitter lemon. Daddy too appears, and he has a lighter. A military man, he’s appalled that his future son-in-law’s home is so ill-equipped as not to have emergency lighting supplies. And then – oh, the horror! – Harold is back. Under cover of darkness, they will have to return all the furniture while holding Harold in place with a cocktail. (It’s entirely possible the drinks will get switched in the dark.)

Three more characters arrive, each of them subject to misidentification and miscues. Imagine someone secretly moving furniture over and around people already in the room. Enjoy civil-sounding conversations in which one sticks one’s tongue out at the other. Chuckle as a rocking chair is mistaken for a non-rocker. Be tickled when Brindsley’s groping around reveals the familiar bottom of an old girlfriend.

Shaffer had a lot of fun with this play. “Black Comedy” was produced in 1965, more than a decade prior to more serious works, “Equus” and “Amadeus”. Its present appearance is at the College of Marin’s Studio Theatre. Director Jeffrey Bihr has polished the physical comedy like the pro that he is. The farcical elements, however, could use some fine-tuning.

Less screaming and more deadpan would work well here. Carole (Caroline Doyle) should be the whiny debutante who always gets what she wants from Daddy-pegs, and Daddy (Dennis Crumley) should be part of “Dumpling’s” game. Brindsley (Daniel Labov Dunne) needs a different giggle; this one’s too closely identified with “Amadeus.” Miss Furnival (Marilyn Hughes) feels her liquor immediately, while Harold (Jasper Hirose) should be awarded the only scream of the evening; he has earned it.

The parts with accents get special recognition. Leilani Meng as Clea shows what she can do with her darkness-disguised portrayal of the Cockney cleaning lady. And Maurice Thouvenin as Schuppanzigh reveals a contented man completely at home in dark, even when he’s mistaken for someone else. Ryan Martin as Georg needed a bigger part. And Light Board Operator (Frank Cardinale) worked flawlessly in an especially important role.

“Black Comedy” will be at College of Marin through May 15. Performances are Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8 PM and Sunday at 2 PM. The play is a one-act with no intermission, so if you need to use the restroom, you’d better do that now.

Sad-Funny "Fuddy" at MTC

2011-04-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Publicity for Marin Theatre Company’s new production, “Fuddy Meers” describes it as “hysterical,” “mad-cap,” “zany,” and yet, during last Wednesday’s show, there was barely a chuckle in the audience. The prevailing mood seemed to be thoughtful, even serious. What’s going on?

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire wrote “Fuddy” when he was in graduate school, and it was his first professionally-produced play. He’s since gone on to great success as a screenwriter, a Broadway playwright, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and now as author of a successful new Broadway show, “Good People.” Nothing zany.

But through all of Lindsay-Abaire’s work, writes MTC Artistic Director, Jasson Minadakis, runs a current of sympathy for his characters. “This compassion is the essential quality of David’s writing,” says Minadakis. In another part of the same program, the playwright is quoted that his characters are “outsiders in search of clarity.” Here are the outsiders at work in “Fuddy Meers.”

Central character, Claire, wakes to a clanging alarm clock, is greeted by a husband she can’t remember and offered a dress from her closet that is supposed to be her favorite. The husband, Richard, says that he is about to drive their son, Kenny, to school. Kenny’s in eighth grade, he reminds her. She can’t remember.

Richard also reminds Claire that she has amnesia, has had it for two years, but when she asks how she got it, he evades the question. None of this bothers her. Even the limping, lisping man in a ski mask who crawls out from under Claire’s bed, fails to frighten Claire. The man says he’s her brother, Zach, here to rescue her from Richard and take her home to Gertie, their mother. Claire goes along.

By now, any semblance of a character-driven story has begun to buckle and distort, much like the images in the fun-house mirrors that Gertie, with her speech defect, describes as “fuddy meers.”

Richard is driving the slumping, sullen Kenny and sharing his marijuana. They get pulled over by an attractive female who may or may not be a cop, but does carry a gun.

Claire, still in bedroom slippers, arrives with Zach at her mother’s home. Zach, once the mask is off, reveals a badly deformed ear. He is deaf on that side. He also wears a dangling manacle.

Gertie is struggling with a severe speech defect from a stroke. She’s pleased to see her daughter, but seems frightened of Zach, supposedly her son.

They are interrupted by a figure at the window, Millet, also wearing half a manacle. Millet speaks through his rude hand puppet, Hinky Pinky. He is desperately attached to this puppet.

Portraying these not-quite-lifelike folks needs an imaginative director (Ryan Rilette) and a cast with superior talent. As Clair, Mollie Stickney strikes just the right note of good-natured befuddlement, and as Richard, her husband, Andrew Hurteau can seem either a good guy who puts up with a lot or an advantage-seeking exploiter.

Tim True as the limping man with the cauliflower ear is both terrifying and pitiable. Dena Martinez as Heidi, the non-cop, is seductive, but vaguely threatening. As Kenny, Sam Leichter manages to grow and change as Clair does, while Lance Gardner’s Millet/ aka Hinky Pinky reveals a painful, grown-up example of parental abuse. Joan Mankin’s Gertie plays her whole role in “stroke talk,” and does it so securely, the audience can almost – but not quite – understand.

“Fuddy Meers” is an engaging story of six characters and their interactions. It moves fast – could even be presented as a long one-act, and its ending is perfect. But it’s not hilarious.

“Fuddy Meers” will be at the Marin Theatre Company through April 24. Performances are Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8p.m., Wednesdays at 7:30, and Sundays at 7p.m. Matinees are at 1p.m. April 14 and at 2p.m. April 9, 23, and every Sunday. Ticket prices are between $33 and $53, with discounts available. For complete information, see www.marintheatre.org or call 388-5208.

QUILTERS warms up the stage

2011-04-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

Before Ross Valley Players’ “Quilters” begins, the musical’s director, Linda Dunn, points out a quilt that is draped on part of the set. It’s hers, she says, a family heirloom. Her family were Texas homesteaders, and sitting beside her grandmother at the quilting frame is a treasured memory.

Like the piecing bags each character carries, “Quilters” is a collection of skits and songs, joined together through the ongoing construction of old Sarah’s legacy quilt, a colorful cloth album of her life on the 19th Century American prairie. It was a hard life. Sarah remembers a blizzard so hard the cows froze. She recalls Pa’s disastrous experiment with windmills, dust storms and prairie fires. Each memory shows up as a block in the quilt.

But prairie life was also joyous and exuberant. The all-female cast of eight performs musical numbers that vary from an old spiritual and folk songs to adaptations from poems. But the show is more than a choral work. An offstage piano, played by Kathryn McGeorge, accompanies the singing, while onstage, cast members perform on the guitar, dulcimer and drum. With the addition of fine choreography arranged by Linda Dunn, these songs move.

“Thread the Needle” leads into a happy dance based on a children’s game. A covered wagon is constructed onstage, and the wagon bumps its way, musically, across the landscape. “Every Log in My House” guides the cast through construction of a shelter, and a baptism by immersion washes more than it was expected to.

One audience favorite depicts a quilting bee organized by the mother of James Prentice to prepare a special new quilt for her son Jamie’s 21st birthday. As they sew in time to the music, the young ladies stitch in hidden affectionate messages for the birthday boy. (We never get to see Jamie; we can only imagine what inspires all this devotion.)
Other male characters are played by the women of the cast, seven of whom take multiple parts. Only Sarah, the mother, (Sandi V. Weldon) is consistently steady and wise. Quilt pieces, she says, stand for “what’s given to you and what you make of them.”

Sheila M. Devitt, Kele Gasparini, Dawn Marie Hamilton, Olivia Harrison, Carolyn Montellato, Monica Turner and Rachel Watts complete this talented cast.

Michael Berg’s period costumes are too good to cut up, even for quilts. Billie Cox’s whip-cracking sound effects and Bruce Lackovic’s rustic set build on the 19th Century mood.
The audience does, eventually, get a look at Sarah’s Legacy Quilt – and it’s a beauty.

This 1984 work by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek started life in Colorado, at the Denver Center Theatre Company. In the years since, it’s had a full production schedule, including runs in New York and three Tony nominations.

“Quilters” will play at The Barn Theatre in Ross through Sunday, April 17.
Performances are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturdays at 8:00, and Sundays at 2:00. Ticket prices run from $20 to $30, $25 for seniors and students. For reservations or more information, see www.rossvalleyplayers.com or call the box office, 456-9555.

Doubt: a Sure Thing

2011-01-31T14:34:00.000-08:00

John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 play is set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, and that’s significant. President John Kennedy had been assassinated the year before; the Civil Rights Movement was underway; the Vatican’s Second Ecumenical Council had taken place, and the women’s movement was starting to stir. The mid-sixties were a time of unsteadiness, or, as Shanley put it in his preface, “emotion longing for the familiar.”

The playwright probed these emotions in “Doubt, a Parable,” his Pulitzer Prizewinner and the Ross Valley Players’ newest production. Here, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, long-time principal of St. Nicholas School, holds tight to tradition, defends penmanship taught with a real ink pen and the teaching of history that doesn’t “have sugar all over it.” Young and idealistic Sister James, on the other hand, loves history, loves the arts and music programs, loves teaching, and doesn’t even object to the ball point pen. “Innocent teachers are easily duped,” the principal warns. “Liars should be frightened in your presence.”

But Sister Aloysius herself recognizes the power of the well-placed lie, whether to defend another nun’s blindness or to rid herself of an enemy.

St. Nicholas’new priest, Father Flynn, is Sister Aloysius’ counterpart, but not her superior, in the church’s chain of command. He evokes the friction between them in his sermons, summarized from frequent notes he takes with his ball-point pen. And he works off his energies on the basketball court, where he is the boys’ coach. Here he addresses the issue of good grooming for the fingernails – long, he says, but impeccably clean.

But Sister James reports an action of Fr. Flynn’s that may be more serious than his long fingernails; she suspects he has secretly given wine to a twelve-year-old altar boy, Donald Muller. Worse, the boy is the school’s first black student, and he’s already acquired the reputation of being under the priest’s protection.

On the pretext of discussing next year’s Christmas pageant, Sister Aloysius calls Fr. Flynn into her office and charges him with the incident. Because a third party is required in these proceedings, Sister James, painfully uncomfortable, is required to be a witness. (“Gossip” will be the topic of Fr. Flynn’s sermon this week.)

Donald Muller’s mother is called in for a conference. She isn’t outraged about her son’s getting special attention from the priest. At least, he’s nice to Donald, not like his father. All she wants now is for Donald to finish eighth grade at St. Nicholas in June and get into a better high school. “You accept what you gotta accept, and you work with it,” she says.

Director Chris Cassell believes that the onstage version of “Doubt” is more powerful than the film. The script is fast-paced, with only four in the cast, and the energy among them changes moment to moment. Each character is capable of temper; each understands power and uncertainty.

As the formidable Sister Aloysius Beauvier, Chris Macomber is a standout. She is in charge – for now. Jamie Dawson’s Father Flynn feels authentic. His character evokes sympathy, but also suspicion. Shannon O’Neill Creighton shows Sister James’ tenuous position in the whole organization. And Clara Kamunde, a native Kenyan, brings out Mrs. Muller’s Bronx-mom determination.

Shanley’s script is discussion food. See this play with someone you can talk to.

“Doubt” will be performed Thursdays through Sundays at The Barn Theatre in Ross through February 13. Thursday shows are at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday shows are at 8 p.m., and Sundays are at 2 p.m., with a post-performance talkback on Friday, January 28. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25.

For additional information or tickets, please call the box office at 456-9555, or see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

An Austen Heirloom for the Holidays

2010-11-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

What’s this? A cast of fourteen actors playing twenty characters? A tale of manners and courtship in 19th Century England? Not a new playwright, just an adaptor? What’re the Ross Valley Players thinking, producing Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice?” for 2010 audiences? After eighty-one seasons, shouldn’t they know better?

As it happens, they know a good script. Jon Jory’s 2005 adaptation is a fast-moving, fun presentation of the 1813 Austen classic. Its characters are engaging and their emotions recognizable, but their social environment is almost two centuries away. Here’s etiquette so exquisitely refined that a young man’s request to use his sweetheart’s given name almost suggests an engagement. Here the lack of a governess in a home with children is regarded as scandalous neglect. But even more, the pressure to marry at the appropriate time is a cultural necessity. Without it, women face lives of economic distress, and bachelors face social disapproval. Mrs. Bennet assumes, “A single man of large fortune must be in want of a wife.”

At least, she hopes that’s the case because the Bennet home has five unmarried daughters, all of them “out,” or marriageable, and the inheritance laws of the time will not allow women to be heirs. So if dear Mr. Bennett should pass away before his daughters are wed, his estate would go to his nearest male cousin and lawyer, the detestable clergyman, Mr. Collins, instead of to a son-in-law. Mr. Collins is more than willing to do his duty; he’ll marry the Bennet’s daughter, Elizabeth. But when Lizzie is unwilling, he picks somebody else.

Clearly, Lizzie is too proud. She’s even prejudiced against young Mr. Darcy, who has been watching her at the Assembly Ball, but is said to have “an extremely critical eye.” The two engage in a crisp and prickly dialogue that shows they are made for each other.

Family and social connections are all over the place in “Pride and Prejudice,” but when everyone isn’t minding everyone else’s business, they take time to sit civilly and discuss the events of the day. The play is a period piece brought up to date with artistry and care, a nicely polished old jewel.

Phoebe Moyer directed the Ross Valley production according to the Jory script and added a raked stage with wings, similar to the stages in the 18th Century. The actors themselves or costumed stagehands arrange minimal props without interrupting the plays’s brisk pacing.

Lori Dorfman is a perfect Elizabeth Bennet, balanced and uncompromising. Her impossible mother is played by Pamela Ciochetti, with Alex Ross as the patient, long-suffering father. Caitlin Evenson is Lizzie’s compliant and dreamy younger sister Jane, with Ariel Harrison, Beth Deitchman, and Rachel Watts completing the Bennet family.

Erik Rhea portrays the aloof and high-minded Mr. Darcy, and Michael Cassidy doubles as both Jane’s suitor, Mr. Bingley, and Fitzwilliam, one of the cousins. Aaron Malberg is convincing as the ingratiating Mr. Collins, and British-born Judy Holmes takes a commanding turn as his dowager guardian. (She’s also, if you look closely, the Housekeeper.) Craig Neibaur, Nicole Zeller and Kurt Gundersen round out this large and capable cast.

“Pride and Prejudice” will be performed through December 12 at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center, Ross. Shows are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m.Sundays, November 28 and December 5 and 12, and 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, December 2 and 9. Tickets are $15-$25. They may be ordered online at www.brownpapertickets.com, by phone, 800-838-3006, from the box office, 456-9555, or purchased at the door.

Happy Now? No, Not So Much

2010-11-27T14:01:00.000-08:00

Marin Theatre Company advertises its new production, “Happy Now?” as a “scathingly funny new British play.” For those who revel in snarky British comedy, who go giddy waiting for the next Ayckbourn, these words inspire delicious hope. Unfortunately, “Happy Now?” doesn’t deliver. It’s familiar and edgy; it’s not funny.

This is the story of a career woman in the sandwich generation, pressed between the demands of her parents and her children. Do we all know Kitty? Have we even been Kitty? This is not a new story, but it is a new play.

Jasson Minadakis, MTC’s Artistic Director and the Director of this production, first saw Lucinda Coxon’s “Happy Now?” in 2005 in Atlanta. It had its world premiere in 2008 in London. The Mill Valley presentation is the play’s West Coast premiere.

In “Happy Now?” Kitty’s parents are long divorced. One is crazy, and one is always on the brink of dying. Her children are offstage, their voices amplified through the audience, and her husband is navigating his career change from successful lawyer to harried elementary school teacher. The couple’s social life centers around Miles, an alcoholic friend, and Bea, his despised wife. When the four are together, they drink a lot and tease Kitty’s gay best friend, Carl. The only character who seems happy at all is Michael, a character Kitty runs into at bars in the course of her work travels. Michael admits that he’s happy when he’s pursuing women outside of his marriage. He is now making moves on Kitty and predicts that she will change her mind about him. Is he right about that?

The story is essentially dark, but there are some laughs in it. When Carl’s out of earshot, Miles makes jokes about Carl’s twenty-something boyfriend, Tony. Says Miles, “You know what I see when I look in his eyes? The back of his head.” And the wall of paint swatches at Miles and Bea’s – each shade of beige almost identical to the next – brings chuckles of recognition. The biggest laugh, however, comes when Kitty visits her mother, and Mom bears a striking resemblance to Michael, mustache and all.

The play’s scenic designer, Melpomene Katakalos, has created a remarkable set of floating screens around a modern kitchen with bar. The screens change to suit the scene and mood, from a hotel bar to a giant, throbbing heart monitor. But the multi-cartoon backdrop for Mom’s house is baffling.

The acting in “Happy Now?” is superb. Kitty is played by Rosemary Garrison, who holds control over her nerve-shattered character. Kitty could be shrill, but Ms. Garrison keeps her in line. Alex Moggridge is Johnny, her sincere, idealistic and clueless husband. Miles, is portrayed in different shades of inebriation by the talented Mark Anderson Phillips. Millie Stickney is Bea, who appears to grow onstage. Steady, dependable Carl is played by Kevin Rolston, and Andrew Hurteau has the best part as the philandering Michael and as Kitty’s dotty mother.

But the play’s troubling first act never resolves, and the question in the title is never answered. We can only wonder what Ms. Coxon had in mind when she set out to write.

“Happy Now?” will play at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley through December 5. Shows are at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, and Sundays at 7 p.m. with matinees November 27 and December 2. Ticket prices range from $33 to $53. For complete information, see www.marintheatre.org or call the box office at 388-5208.

Always Darkest Before Election Day

2010-10-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

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.

MTC in Red and Brown for Season Opener

2010-10-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

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.

The Middle Ages: a Gurney Forebear

2010-07-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

If we find ourselves in the overstuffed trophy room of a private club (lavish set by Bruce Lackovic) where a distracted young man in funereal black appears to be hiding from the ceremonies outside, and young woman, also in black – a sister? – finds him; if she then urges the man to go back and make his speech quickly, promising that after he does, it will be, “Over, out, and into the bar,” then Aha! We’re in Gurney country!

This discovery can allow us to anticipate other favorites of this popular playwright – WASP families observing dining rituals, having cocktails, old loves connecting with one another. But A. R.Gurney’s 1977 play has a somewhat different focus. The Middle Ages of the title refers, says Director Billie Cox, not to an age range, but to the “courtly love” of that time. So we learn that the young woman in black is not a sister, but a permanent sweetheart, and the young man, Barney, has enduring attachments both to her and to Robin Hood.

In other ways, though, The Middle Ages reveals its ancestry to Gurney’s later works. The Dining Room (1982,) The Cocktail Hour (1988,) Love Letters (1989) enlarge on themes that began here. This trophy room can stand in for the ritual dining table; the couple at the funeral might be the two who will write love letters over the years; Barney, the lead character and bad brother, will have his counterpart in the embarrassing son of The Cocktail Hour, while the absent good brother, Billy, stands for the powerful, unseen forces of convention and virtue.

Only four characters tell The Middle Ages’ story: Barney, his longtime love, Eleanor, his father, Charles, and Eleanor’s mother, Myra, who later marries Charles and becomes part of the family. Their interactions take place over thirty years, beginning in the late ‘40s, and demonstrate the social changes of those decades. When they are all younger, “El’s” mother impresses upon her daughter that she has “only five more years to stake her claim before everyone else goes off to college.” And Barney, though complaining about being imprisoned by his family history, doesn’t hesitate to tell El his name and position in the club.

Thirty years later, everything’s changed. Barney has relocated to San Francisco, where he is making a lot of money in a socially questionable occupation. El is a married woman with three children. Charles is in a wheelchair, but still giving orders, and the club is on the market because even though it has broadened its membership policy, nobody has the time or the money for such activity. “Even the Catholics don’t have money anymore.”

Their stories are told to each other, but also in revealing asides to the audience. Myra discloses her delight in the prospect of marrying Charles and says she wants “the most spectacular party since the Cerebral Palsy Ball!” An exasperated Charles declares his obligation to observe “the rules of hospitality” for Barney’s “guests,” but it’s clear that he’d rather suck lemons.

However, the tenderness that sometimes appears in Gurney’s work is not much in evidence here, largely because we don’t hear much from Barney. Barney is the lead character, but we never quite know what, other than resentment, makes him tick. Peter Smith of Kentfield depicts Barney as a playful and resourceful Peter Pan. Monique Sims of Tiburon plays Eleanor, whose character also grows older along with Barney’s. (Sims’ portrayal of the 14-year-old El is convincing without being a caricature.) Tamar Cohn of San Rafael portrays the gently conniving Myra, with Alex Shafer of Richmond as the stone-solid head of the family. Michael A. Berg’s fine array of age-and-occasion-appropriate costumes define and enhance the time frame.

The Middle Ages is the Ross Valley Players’ final production of its 80th season. It can be seen at The Barn Theatre in Ross through August 15, Thursdays through Sunday afternoons. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25, $15 on Thursdays. For directions or reservations, call the box office, 456-9555 or see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Marin Shakespeare Shakes Up its Opening

2010-07-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

In opening remarks to the audience before the opening of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Robert S. Currier, Marin Shakespeare Company’s founder and Artistic Director, explained that this playwright’s work can be “intellectually challenging.” Stoppard’s style frolics with language, throws in bits of Shakespeare and sets up parodies. (Parody is one definition of “travesty.”) The Czech-born playwright also composes absurdist and existential story lines that don’t make sense and don’t resolve, so audiences might ask themselves, “Is Tom Stoppard an unfettered genius or a self-indulgent smartypants?” Robert Currier has made up his mind: “I totally love the guy.”

Travesties, which won a Tony Award in 1976, explores the unreliable memories of Henry Carr, a real-life British Consulate employee who was stationed in Zurich in 1917. At that time, the city also housed Vladimir Lenin and his wife, Nadya, James Joyce, who was working on Ulysses, and Tristan Tzara, founder of the Dada movement in poetry and art. Joyce and Carr did actually meet and cooperate in a Zurich production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, but ended up suing each other. The other connections are fiction.

And so Carr’s “senile reminiscence” of Lenin’s “full, blond hair,” Tzara’s gymnastic entrances into a room, and the food fight about art vs. patriotism are not entirely to be believed. Nor is the Wildean segment, complete with cucumber sandwiches.

But Tom Stoppard pulls the realism rug out from under an audience again and again. Carr’s opening reminiscences, for instance, run without interruption for thirty minutes, broken only by outbursts from the cuckoo clock. A scene with Joyce, Gwendolyn, and Tzara is spoken entirely in limericks. Another scene is shaped from some lines of Shakespeare’s, while a duet between the two women from Earnest is modeled on the old vaudeville song, Mr. Gallegher and Mr Shean.

Pulling this off requires and gets some first-rate talent. Henry Carr is onstage in almost every scene, both as an old and a young man, so William Elsman deserves a deep bow for taking this on and making it work. Stephen Klum in costume is a ringer for Lenin, and he’s consistently dependable with the accent. Darren Bridgett’s athletic gyrations show Tristan Tzara at his peculiar best. And when Sharon Huff, as Lenin’s wife, delivers the news (in Russian) that the Revolution has started, she counters her husband’s disbelief with “Da! Da! Da!” echoing Tzara’s repetitions of “Dadadadada.”

Cat Thompson and Alexandra Matthews as the Gwendolen and Cecily of Earnest juggle the Edwardian ladies’ roles of Travesties. And Julian Lopez-Morillas as Carr’s manservant, Bennett, delivers a moving account of the workers’ uprising in Russia. All of this takes place on a set comprised of wheeled staircase-bookcases that travel beneath a trio of clocks that will never tell time. (The ship in the background has no purpose and will appear in a later play.)

After almost three hours, the nature of art has been explored, political passions have been challenged, beauty has been acknowledged, and the question remains: is Stoppard a glittering innovator or an unconvicted plagiarist?

These will make good conversation on the drive home.

Travesties will play in repertory with Taming of the Shrew in the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University until August 15. Ticket prices run between $20 and $35, with discounts available for advance, seasonal and multiple purchases. For a complete schedule of performance times and dates, see www.marinshakespeare.org or call the box office, 499-4488.

The amphitheatre welcomes picnickers and advises evening playgoers to bring extra layers and jackets for after dark. Call the box office for special parking.

Woody, It's Been Good t' Know Ya

2010-06-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

The house lights go down, and within minutes, we find our toes tapping under the theatre seats, wanting to sing. We know these songs. We’ve heard them performed by Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, by Country Joe McDonald and Joan Baez, by the Kingston Trio and Bruce Springsteen. The youngest in tonight’s audience probably learned at least one of them in school. Woody Guthrie’s tunes are now as traditional as campfire s’mores, but Marin Theatre Company’s Woody Guthrie’s American Song interweaves the legendary folksinger’s familiar music with his unfamiliar writings. All the words in Peter Glazer’s artistic tribute are Guthrie’s, and the voices of a powerful ensemble – five singer-actors and three musicians – interweave the script of this musical show.

In ‘30s costume, the actors begin by talking over one another, describing conditions in the Depression, the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, and then their narratives are lifted into a unified chorus of “Hard Travelin’,” soon followed by “So Long, it’s been Good to Know You.” Woody Guthrie would spend a large part of his life traveling, much of it by foot or by rail, and another part saying goodbye.

In the mid-1930s, he leaves a wife and three children and sets out to ride the rails to California. Here he encounters a group of fellow self-described Dust Bowl Refugees in the boxcar of a speeding train. As they race along to “This Train is Bound for Glory,” the lights flash, the brakes squeal, and the entire stage seems to shake – a brilliant piece of staging by Director Glazer, with David K.H. Elliott’s lighting and Ted Crimy’s sound.

Arrival in California is a bitter letdown, though. Anticipated work on Fresno’s Friant Dam has not begun yet, and nobody can live in this state without the necessary “Do Re Mi.” Guthrie spends time with other squatters in a ramshackle campground called The Jungle outside Redding. The Jungle is even bigger than the town, and there’s no sign of work anywhere. Two of the women sing that it takes a worried man to sing a worried song, and others vow, “I Ain’t Gonna be Treated This Way.”

In the ‘40s, the singer finds himself in New York City, engaged in a delightful musical duel for tips with another busker called the Cisco Kid. (They settle it with hats.) The big city now feeds inspiration for other tunes about the subway, the Holland Tunnel, the unions, even the “Jolly Banker,” waltz, in which the banker declares, “I take great interest in all that I do.” “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” an actual event, forecasts W.W. II, during which Woody served in the merchant marine and was torpedoed twice.

He was struck with his mother’s disease, Huntington’s Chorea, when he was only forty. Increasing nerve damage led to fifteen years of hospitalization. But no one in America can say that Woodrow Wilson Guthrie led a short, unremarkable life. “He was a man,” says one of the play’s final voices, “who told you something that you already knew.”

The Company of actors and singers is excellent to a person. Four of them – Sam Misner, Megan Smith, Lisa Asher and Matthew Mueller – are also members of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. They’re joined in this production by Bay Area performer Berwick Haynes.

And though the guitar was Woody’s instrument, American Song adds a mandolin, fiddle, banjo, bass viol, piano and dobro from onstage musicians Tony Marcus, Chuck Ervin and Harry Yaglijian.

Woody Guthrie’s American Song concludes on a high note with the number we’ve all been waiting for – “This Land is Your Land.” Sing along!

MTC’s popular final production of the ’09-’10 season has been extended through June 27. Ticket prices range from $37 to $54, with student and senior discounts available.
Total playing time is two and a half hours, including one intermission. For group sales, call Julie Knight, 388-5200, x3302. For additional information, time, prices or reservations, please see www.marintheatre.org or call 388-5200.

Girls All Grown Up

2010-06-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

The program cover for Ross Valley Players’ new production, Top Girls, illustrates the dilemma: a woman’s legs are climbing a steep ladder, but she’s wearing high heels and a slit skirt. Can she make the climb? Should she?

British playwright Caryl Churchill has long been recognized for her successful feminist plays, most famous of which was Cloud Nine, which premiered in 1979. Top Girls followed in 1982, followed by Serious Money four years later. All of these won Obies. But it would be a mistake to assume that this material is now dated and dull. Churchill’s stagecraft is full of discovery, and what will help audiences appreciate this in Top Girls is to read page 11 of the program first.

The play’s opening appears to show a smartly-dressed hostess arranging a dinner party – and then the guests arrive. In full costume and talking over one another, are five extraordinary females, both real and fictional, describing their triumphs and hardships. Isabella Bird, a nineteenth century clergyman’s daughter, has escaped the life of an invalid and traveled all over the world, writing about her experiences. Lady Nijo, consort to the Emperor of Japan, has also written about her life in court after she was expelled and became a Buddhist nun. Pope Joan may or may not have been the successor to Leo IV, but if so, it was only while she maintained the disguise of a man. When that was no longer possible, she was stoned for the attempt, but she’s here at tonight’s party. Two other guests are fictitious: Dull Gret, Breughel’s warrior woman who led an assault on hell, and Patient Griselda, Chaucer and Boccaccio’s peasant, who waited all her obedient life for reward. (Griselda arrives at the party late, of course, but she’ll have dessert if everyone else is.)

All these partygoers are the hungry and thirsty guests of Marlene, who is celebrating her promotion to Managing Director of the Top Girls Employment Agency. Marlene’s worked hard for this position. She’s served her time, and she’s even unseated Howard, whose wife comes to reason with his successor to step down because, after all, Howard has three children.

The women who come to the agency for jobs have stories too. One hopes to save money for her wedding. One has been passed over for promotion after twenty-one years in the same job; she now wants out. And another, a persistent teenager named Angie, is just here to spend time with Marlene. Angie will have the last word in this play.

Top Girls’ Director, Chris Cassell, has kept a firm grip on this demanding script. With help from a shadowy, fast-moving crew of stagehands, Cassell arranges multiple scene changes with portable screens. The dinner guests sit along one side of a long, white-draped table that recalls DaVinci’s Last Supper. And when laundry is being folded from a basket, the items are clothes that would belong to an early ‘80s wardrobe.

This production has several outstanding scenes: Pope Joan’s long, fluid speech in Latin; Dull Gret’s description of her role in the battle; Joyce’s controlled narrative of her life in the suburbs; Angie and Kit’s sleepover chat in the backyard.

With the exception of Marlene (Loring Williams,) all the characters play multiple parts. Michelle Darby is both Joyce and Isabella Bird. Lina Makdisi portrays Lady Nijo and Win; Carolyn Power is seen as Pope Joan and Louise, the lady who’d missed a promotion. Susan Donnelly is the helmeted Dull Gret as well as Mrs. Kidd, while Theresa Miller is patient as both Griselda and Angie. Melissa Claire and Chelsea Stone serve as waitresses at the dinner as well as characters Jeanine and Nell, Kit and Shona.

This is a drama full of characters, past, present and absent. But it’s the absent ones – the children – who are the quiet engine behind this story.

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls will play at The Ross Valley Players Barn Theatre, the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross through June 20. Tickets range from $15 - $25.

In a separate event, The Ross Valley Players will celebrate its 80th anniversary with a festive gala to be held at The Barn on Sunday, June 27, from 2 to 5 p.m. Wine, a light buffet, entertainment, and prizes will be part of the celebration. Tickets to the party are $28.50 each.

For information about Top Girls or the 80th anniversary celebration, please see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com or call 456-9555.

Equivocation: Truth, Near-Truth and Staying Alive in 1605

2010-04-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

Marin Theatre Company did a good thing for itself last fall when it booked Equivocation for this season. Bill Cain’s year-old play continues to rack up awards, most recently the 2010 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award with a subsequent $25,000 cash prize. Local buzz about it has created an extraordinary demand for tickets and two extensions of the closing date, now set for May 2.

Equivocation’s central character is William Shakespeare, called Will Shagspeare in the script, but this is not your father’s Shakespeare. This is a businessman trying to maintain his life and his livelihood in tumultuous times. Queen Elizabeth has died, and the nation has a new monarch, James I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth is said to have had executed. Since James is the closest thing Elizabeth has to an heir, the Scottish king, born of a Catholic mother, has taken her throne. This change of monarch brings Catholic-Protestant rivalries bubbling to the surface again and destabilizes the established social order.

One sign of the tumult is the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a supposed attempt by Catholic rebels to blow up Parliament along with the king and his family. On behalf of the King, “Shagspeare” is approached by a scheming Robert Cecil to write a play about it, telling him, “Your works last . . . and you do it all with a straight face.”

The playwright’s business partners in the Globe Theatre, the King’s Men theatrical company, resist any works about current events because audiences want their actors to be heroes. Still, the powerful Cecil has ordered it, so a script begins to take shape and to go through preliminary rehearsals, but Shagspeare finds blank spaces in this Gunpowder Plot story. If the tunnel was constructed, how did these gentleman diggers get rid of the dirt? Who brought timbers to shore up the tunnel? Where did the plotters find so much gunpowder? And was Fr. Garnet, a Jesuit priest, one of the masterminds of the plot? (Playwright Cain is himself a Jesuit priest.) Interviews with two of the imprisoned plotters only deepen the mystery. All this happens in the first act.

But the second act of the play vaults ahead with a dizzying succession of plot lines, for Equivocation has three more stories to tell: exploring the difference between truth and “truthiness;” mending Shagspeare’s strained relationship with his daughter, Judith; restoring unity among the quarreling King’s Men, and defending against Cecil’s hunger for power with the new King. The King, it turns out, will be appeased with a new, Scottish play, Macbeth, featuring James’ favorite characters, witches. But the demands of so many stories results in almost three hours of multiple endings and no single big finish. “Confusing” was an overheard comment.

MTC’s Artistic Director, Jasson Minadakis, has directed this fast-paced production with exquisite timing and attention to detail. J.B. Wilson’s skeletal set mimics the contours of The Globe and “the path between the Globe and the Tower” that Bill Cain describes in his program notes. Fumiko Bielefeldt’s costumes span the centuries, as the play’s theme intends. And the actors, all of them Equity members, are superb.

As Shagspeare, Charles Shaw Robinson, is beleaguered, middle-aged, and still grieving for his dead son, Hamnet. His daughter Judith (Anna Bullard) is sturdily loyal, while still accepting her less-favored state. The King’s Men, played by Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker, Lance Gardner and Andy Murray, provide the play’s movement, athleticism, accents and characters. And let’s also reserve applause for dialect coach Deborah Sussel, who can turn any of them into Scotsmen at the drop of a cue.

Equivocation will play at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley through May 2. Evening performances are at 8:00 Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, Wednesdays at 7:30 and Sundays at 7:00. Matinees are every Sunday at 2:00 and Saturday April 17 and 24 at 2:00 also. For additional information or for reservations, contact the box office, 388-5208, or see www.marintheatre.org.

Thoughtful Boys at The Barn

2010-04-08T14:04:00.000-07:00

The Boys Next Door are not boys at all, except in the developmental sense. Take Arnold, for one. Arnold is nervous from his extravagant shopping trip, but then, Arnold gets nervous a lot. Lucien, his roommate, rejoices in a new library card with his name on it; he has already checked out several old yearbooks from the Dept. of Agriculture. Norman and Barry, two more housemates, are behaving suspiciously. Norman is hiding a boxy shape under his shirt, and Barry is offering golf lessons to a neighbor. The big question is for all is, will Jack be mad?

Jack is the social worker who supervises their group home. Though kind and even affectionate to the “boys,” Jack tells the audience that he’s getting burnt out on this job because “They never change.” So Arnold will now have to return all his purchases to Livingston’s Market because he’s already been told that Livingston’s “takes advantage.” Lucien, who -- in a later, remarkable monologue -- assesses his own mental capacity at “between five years old and an oyster” will use his library books as furniture. Norman, who has achieved a job in a donut shop, is putting on far too much weight from the store’s product. And Barry, the most seriously ill among them, won’t abandon his protective armor of golf pro.

There is humor in this play, but The Boys Next Door does not take cheap shots for laughs. Tom Griffin’s 1987 play treats his characters with a full count of humanity, and The Boys’ director, Kim Bromley, has kept this Ross Valley Players’ production consistent with the time it was written. That’s important, says Bromley, because “retarded” has since become a pejorative term, but in its original meaning, “slowed, hindered, impaired,” the word can be applied to all the play’s characters, even Jack, about whom we know little.

The time-appropriate set with its ‘80s décor and furnishings was designed by RVP veteran designer, Ken Rowland, who now submits his designs from North Carolina. Billie Cox has assembled “oldies” musical intervals, Michael Berg designed the costumes, and Linda Dunn found or invented suitable props. (Watch what comes out of the shopping bags.)

There are some wonderful scenes in this production. A nighttime rat hunt with flashlights is almost too realistic. An arranged dance with residents of a women’s group home, ends in a fine, romantic flourish. Lucien’s hearing at Health and Human Services, for which he has costumed carefully, reveals his integral dignity.

Their story is, as the play says, “all about behavior patterns.”

The actors present a fine piece of ensemble work. Wendell Wilson’s Lucien is both tender and vulnerable. David Yen plays the nervous, obsessive Arnold. Brook Robinson is Barry, the fantasy golf pro, with Josh List as the sweetly innocent donut aficionado, Norman. Jack, their tightly-controlled supervisor, is played by Timothy Beagley. Rod Bogart takes on three roles as other male characters, and Jeff Garrett portrays the menacing Mr. Klemper, Barry’s father.

Monique Sims of Tiburon is Sheila, Norman’s love interest. (Norman’s lavishly-decorated birthday present contains just what Sheila’s always wanted.) Candace Brown plays The Boys’ three other female characters.

The Boys Next Door will be at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross through April 18. Shows are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. For reservations, call 456-9555 or see www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Not Misery, Just Miserly

2010-02-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

The plays of Jean Baptiste de Poquelin (aka Moliere) are more than three hundred years old now and still being produced. Moliere was one of three founders of the French National Theatre, La Comedie Francaise. He was the chief actor in his own theatrical company, and he stuck to writing comedy only. His works are derivative of the Italian commedia del’arte, their plots are sometimes lifted from other writers, and the playwright specializes in stock characters. So what’s the secret of his three-century success?

In Ross Valley Players’ new production of The Miser, Moliere introduces Harpagon, a stereotypical skinflint who loves his strongbox more than he loves his children. Harpagon’s latest hiding place for his treasure is buried in the back yard, where it is guarded by a pack of snarling Dobermans. He’s also busily arranging marriages for his children according to the dowrys involved. However, daughter Elise is already in love with Valere, a servant in his own house, and son Cleante adores the beautiful Marianne, who comes from a poor family: “clean, but very poor.” Their father has other plans. He wants to marry his daughter to a rich old man who doesn’t require a dowry and won’t last long, and he himself wants to marry the same Marianne, who has no expensive habits.

This script adaptation of the play is not in its original verse form; it uses modern language, and Director Bruce Vieira, in partnership with Costume Designer Michael Berg, has had fun with it. The costumes are colorful composites from the last three hundred years. Harpagon, for instance, wears a faded satin dressing gown over something that might be a sweat suit or long johns, while the Chief of Police declares his authority in a splendid Napoleonic hat. David Apple’s two-layered set, by contrast, presents a 17th Century miser’s grand, but decaying, mansion.

The Miser is an especially physical play. Action moves all over the stage, even flopping off the stage and down into the audience. There are also well-choreographed fight scenes, and the grand entrances of some key characters signal their dramatic importance.
The first of these entrances belongs to the matchmaker, a flamboyant seductress with the unlikely name of Frosine. Frosine (Courtney Walsh) is more than anxious to secure the match between thrifty Marianne and greedy old Harpagon, assuring him, “She adores older men!” but first, the matchmaker needs “a small gratuity,” to get her out of legal trouble. Harpagon pretends not to hear.

The next surprise appearance is the by-the-book Police Chief (John Anthony Nolan) who believes no one, suspects everyone, and insists on adherence to procedures. Nolan’s proper Britishness in this French play is a fine bit of casting.

The final grand entrance – bringing an onstage gasp – is the wonderfully wigged Anselm (Michael Fay,) the same rich old man who was planned for Elise because he was not supposed to last long. As events unfold in a Shakespearean way, Anselm’s presence at the house – though unexpected -- is entirely necessary to tie up the plot and supply the requisite happy ending.

GreyWolf, an experienced actor new to the Ross Valley Players, has the title role. He delivers Harpagon with considerable volume, but more wheedling and whining, less shouting and blustering would seem more in the miser’s character. Kelly Rinehart as his daughter Elise is convincingly desperate to marry the man she loves, the servant (or is he?) Valere. And when Valere’s role becomes suddenly Spanish, actor Chad Yarish accomplishes the change seamlessly. Beth Deitchman portrays the modest, but much desired Marianne, and Andrew Gruen is her devoted Cleante. Ben Knoll plays Master Jacques, cook, coachman, and all-purpose servingman to Harpagon. Fred Pitts as La Fleche and Victoria Lee Williams in two roles complete this large, high-spirited cast.

Moliere’s The Miser will be at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center through Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14. Performances are given Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m., and Thursdays at 7:30. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25.
For complete information, see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com, or call the box office, 456-9555.

9/11 Clouds Dim "Sunlight"

2010-02-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

Marin Theatre Company’s press release states that it is “committed to the development and production of new plays by American playwrights, with a comprehensive New Play Program. . . and a leadership position in the National New Play Network.” The theatre’s newest production, Sunlight, fits the mission statement; it is both a winner of MTC’s Sky Cooper New American Play Prize and a co-production with New Play Network. Jasson Minadakis directed the work. But the question with each prizewinner is, will this one become a new classic? Will this playwright be the next Arthur Miller?

Sunlight’s drama takes place in a New England university president’s home, a bucolic old residence now filled with packing boxes. (Wonderful set by J. B. Wilson.) The president’s adult daughter, Charlotte, is cursing into her telephone as she feeds papers into a shredder. The president’s loyal, long-time assistant – called either Midge, Marianne, or Mimi – objects to the shredding (“It’s an archive!”) and to the curses.

Now, brushing off snow, Vincent, Charlotte’s ex, arrives to summarize, “Nothing says scandal like a living room with a shredder.” He wants to reconcile with Charlotte, to take her out for steaks and martinis, as they did in the old days, but Charlotte is adamant that these boxes, containing thirty years’ worth of her father’s records, law reviews and taxes must be organized, put away or destroyed – and fast. Dad is facing a vote of confidence from the Board of Regents. It could go either way.

Her father, Matthew Gibbon, arrives in a fury, having crossed lines of student protestors. His disloyalty list has 300 names on it now, but he refuses to be compared to Nixon. Those on the list are people who’ve brought down the law school, “his brightest jewel,” and who have turned their backs on him now. They objected to him shutting down the student newspaper, backed the law school’s defense of “controversial techniques” in the questioning of political prisoners. “Where’s the outrage?” he demands. And Vincent, his former son-in-law, is now dean of the law school.

The play’s title, comes from Vincent’s quote, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” referring to the Regents’ investigation of the president’s alleged law school break-in. (The student paper left out “alleged.”) And as the investigation goes on, the old home’s occupants shout, rage, bully, cajole, and shout some more. Sunlight is a loud play.

The actors, as always at MTC, are superb. Carrie Paff is the conflicted Charlotte, Kevin Rolston presents a reasonable, right-wing Vincent, Charles Dean is the “mighty liberal university president,” and Wanda McCaddon is dedicated Midge, who just wants everybody to be polite and have something to eat. The audience would like to see more of Midge, who’s the only thing close to comic relief.

Sunlight is an idea-driven play. Its characters are vehicles for carrying those ideas. It has passion and intelligence and gives viewers something to talk about afterward. However, even though the play was only written in 2006, its backward focus is already starting to make it feel dated. Dated works do not become classics. And Sharr White, at least in this work, is not looking like the next Arthur Miller.

Sunlight will play at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley through Sunday, February 14. Performances are given every day but Monday, with ticket prices ranging from $20 to $51. Performance times vary. For complete information, please call the box office, 388-5208, or see www.marintheatre.org.

80th Season Premieres Premiere!

2009-10-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

It isn’t often that members of a playwright’s family show up to talk to members of an audience, but that’s exactly what happened at The Barn Theatre’s West Coast premiere of Premiere!

In the first place, Abby Wasserman of Mill Valley had brought this, her uncle’s play, to the attention of Robert Wilson of the Ross Valley Players. The script arrived with full credentials. Abby’s uncle was Dale Wasserman, who’d adapted Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and prepared the book for Man of La Mancha, among many other original works. Robert Wilson agreed to open RVP’s 80th consecutive season with Dale Wasserman’s play.

Premiere!’s central character, Gil Fryman, is a hugely successful comedic playwright, possibly modeled on Wasserman’s friend, Neil Simon. Fryman is just coming from a celebration of his third consecutive hit, but he’s weary of winning at comedy, feels that he’s entitled to “write a flop, the same as everybody else.” His wife Becky says he’s “in a mood,” and Gil explains his dissatisfaction in a monologue to the audience. (This will be the first of several monologues by different characters.)

Gil’s father-in-law, Dr. Eli Brand, is a tireless book collector who buys whole collections, sometimes in other languages. He never reads the books he buys, so it’s not inconceivable that he might have accidentally acquired Shakespeare’s lost work, Alcibiades. (Here the characters entertain themselves with riffs on the word “Bard.”) The lost work is especially important now because an internationally-recognized Shakespearean scholar, Professor Justinia Hawkins, will be coming to look over Dr. Brand’s collection. If Alcibiades is in there, she’ll certainly spot it, and Gil is determined that it will be there. He will write and forge a fake Shakespeare, then proclaim that he did it and finally be recognized as a poet.

Surprisingly, his wife offers no objections to the plan, and Gil sets out to find Lefty, a master forger who charges “by the century.” Lefty explains how a fake antique book is made – matching the binding, ink and paper. (The paper will be burgled from some of Dr. Brand’s excess of old books.) Gil sets out to write the work that will make his reputation. All this – the writing and the forged volume – is accomplished in a matter of months.

Lefty’s masterpiece is presented in “simply awful condition” and is inserted into Dr. Brand’s bookshelf just before the eagle-eyed Professor Hawkins is due to arrive. Will she find the hidden volume? Will she spot it as a fake? Will Gil Fryman be recognized as the serious poet he believes himself to be?

Without spoiling the surprise, we can say that the ending is not what the audience might be expecting, but it’s satisfying, and is accomplished with a generous helping of good-natured wit. Ron Severdia has the role of would-be Shakespearean, Gil, with Molly McGrath as patient, exasperated Becky. Dr. Brand is played with scholarly detachment by Wood Lockhart, and Edward McCloud portrays his son Peter, Gil’s hanger-on producer.

The comic roles – Lefty Guggenheim and Professor Hawkins – have the most fun. Buzz Halsing’s Lefty is right out of Damon Runyon, even neglecting his cell phone in favor of the more-secure wall instrument. Judy Holmes yields Professor Hawkins’ authoritative soprano as a cross between Julia Child, who wasn’t British, and television’s fictional Hyacinth Bucket, who was.

The time of this work is supposed to be the present, but both Michael Berg’s costumes and some anachronisms in the script (“I’m the Queen of Romania!”) suggest that it’s really earlier. These are bumps that usually get ironed out in the workshop process – especially by a pro like Dale Wasserman. But Mr. Wasserman never got to see the finished show. He died last December, one month before Premiere!’s Arizona production, having worked on the play right up to the last. He was ninety-four.

Dale Wasserman’s Premiere! will play in the Barn Theatre at the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross through Oct. 11, Sundays through Thursdays. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. For complete information or reservations, see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com or call 456-9555.

Hail, Caesar, and Farewell, Summer

2009-09-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

Before the show begins, Director Robert Currier discloses one big problem that showed up during rehearsals of Marin Shakespeare Company’s Julius Caesar: the laundry! (Reasons why will soon be apparent.) Another problem for the actors was learning to manage a toga. This final production of the season is not a modern-dress update of The Bard’s tragedy; it’s the fully costumed original, anachronisms (clocks) and all. Yet much of it seems modern and accessible.

Currier gives credit to veteran actor Barry Kraft for inspiring him to stage Caesar, a first in MSCo’s twenty years. Kraft had already played almost every major Shakespearean role, but never this play’s title role, and he wanted to do it. In spite of the Director’s own reservations – “the first play millions of teenagers are subjected to around the English speaking world” – Robert Currier planned Julius Caesar for the 2009 summer season, then found that “contemporary parallels are everywhere.”

The play was especially contemporary when it opened in 1599, possibly the first ever staged at the newly-opened Globe Theatre in London. At that time, Queen Elizabeth was aging and had no heir, and anxiety about the nation’s future was building. So William Shakespeare, who knew how to sell theatre tickets as well as write, crafted this parallel story from the writings of Plutarch, a Greek biographer, and his tale of similar fears in ancient Rome.

Shakespeare’s Romans have histories with one another, complex motivations and loyalties. Julius Caesar, though the central character, is not the mover of events. That task belongs to Brutus and Cassius, deftly portrayed by Jay Karnes and Jack Powell, respectively. The crowd – an unpredictable, bipolar force – has already offered Caesar the crown; he might be close to acceptance. Then the skies open with a furious thunderstorm ( Billie Cox and Ellen Brooks' design,) declaring an ominous future. Alarmed, Brutus and Cassius, reinforced by Casca (Stephen Klum) and Cinna (Lucas McClure,) plot to kill Caesar, fearing that his ambition will undo the republic.

But Brutus’ wife Portia (Cat Thompson) demands to know, “Who were those men?” and begs her husband not to go to the Senate. Caesar’s wife Calpurnia (Alexandra Matthew) has seen portents, had bad dreams, and she too begs her husband to stay away. Even Artemidorus (Carl Holvick-Thomas,) a citizen friendly to Caesar, writes a letter naming the plotters and passes it to Caesar on his way to the Senate, urging him to read it immediately. All to no avail. Within minutes, the gory deed is done.

The first funeral speech is delivered by a self-bloodied Brutus, in defense of the assassination. It’s followed by Mark Antony’s famed address (William Elsman,) in which the phrase, “Brutus is an honorable man,” takes on ever-more sinister shadings. There will be war.

The play’s second act, though furnished with a beautifully-constructed quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius and the necessary clashing battle, seems anticlimactic compared to Act One. But see how much of this script has found its way into our language: “Beware the ides of March.” “The fault . . . is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” “It was Greek to me.” “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” “Let slip the dogs of war!” “. . . the unkindest cut of all.” “. . . the noblest Roman of them all.”

Julius Caesar, alive or dead, still has a lot to say.

Marin Shakespeare Company’s Julius Caesar will play in repertory with Twelfth Night, or All You Need is Love in the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University through Sept. 26. Ticket prices range from $15 to $30. For a complete performance schedule and additional information, please see www.marinshakespeare.org or call the box office, 499-4488.

A Hard Day's Twelfth Night?

2009-08-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

Marin Shakespeare’s newest offering is not your father’s Twelfth Night – or maybe it is, depending who your daddy used to hang with. This one’s a psychedelic stew of hot colors, hot babes, cross-dressers and funky costumes, all served up in Shakespearean sauce.

If the set’s stylized flowers and lava lamps haven’t convinced you, then the entrance of the miniskirted Valentines singing “My Heart is Cryin’”with a Sgt. Pepper-suited Duke Orsino should complete the picture: this is Twelfth Night’s summer of love. However, the Duke is suffering because the beautiful Lady Olivia won’t give him the time of day. She’s in mourning for her lost brother; he pounds out his disappointment in a drum solo.

Then a trio of sailors (choruses of “Aaargh!”) arrives with a shipwrecked Viola, also grieving because her brother was also lost at sea and presumed dead. Viola begs the captain to get her a serving position with the Duke – this will involve wearing a man’s clothing – and they promise to help her “like a bridge over troubled waters.”

There’s more. Sir Toby Belch, played by Robert Currier, one of Marin Shakespeare’s founders, arrives inebriated as always, and belching. He takes a turn at the harmonica. And the fussy Sir Andrew Aguecheek “accosts” the serving girl Maria with a ukulele riff on “Tiptoe through the Tulips” before attempting a re-enactment of the Funky Chicken, a high-risk endeavor in high platform soles.

We’ll hear from Olivia’s Bob Dylan-like clown, Feste, and her funereal steward, Malvolio. But we’ll also get Malvolio delivering Shakespeare’s original speech about “Some are born great.”

It’s a romp of a production with chases up and down the stairs, dueling golf clubs, revealed identities and a wedding performed by the Maharishi. Throughout, the audience hums along with the musical numbers and howls at the costumes. How did all this mayhem come together?

Twelfth Night, or All You Need is Love was itself a labor of love from Robert and Lesley Currier, the play’s directors. Program notes explain that the Curriers have been bringing Shakespeare to Baja for the last nine years, and that their musical version of Taming of the Shrew had been a great hit there. Twelfth Night was born out of “opportunities . . . to speak glorious language and enliven complex characters, but also to sing and dance.” In this Marin production, one of the cast members, Camilla Ford, also played Sir Andrew Aguecheek last year in Baja.

The large cast has some outstanding principal players: William Elsman as the lovesick Duke Orsino, Cat Thompson as the elusive Lady Olivia, Alexandra Matthew as the cross-dressing and shipwrecked Viola, with Lucas McClure as guitar-strumming Feste and Jack Powell as the unlucky Malvolio. (All these deserve an additional “Huzzah!” for performing in all three of Marin Shakespeare’s overlapping offerings this summer – an astonishing feat for those of us who struggle to remember our four-digit PIN numbers.) Terry Rucker doubles as Viola’s rescuing Sea Captain and the marrying Maharishi. Shannon Veon Kase is the resourceful servant, Maria.

The play’s remarkable costumes were the creations of Abra Berman, and Billie Cox arranged the sound. Psychedelic light effects (unseen, unfortunately, at the matinee) were assembled by Ellen Brooks.

Twelfth Night, or All You Need is Love is playing in repertory at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University through Sunday, Sept. 27. At present, it’s alternating with The Importance of Being Earnest, and after August 21, it will alternate with Julius Caesar. For a complete schedule, see the website, www.marinshakespeare.com or call the box office, 499-4488.

The amphitheatre has free parking and bench seating, and it opens an hour before the performance to allow time for picnicking. As with all open-air performances, especially in the evening, bring extra clothing to allow for changes in weather.

Private Fears Intensely Ayckbourn

2009-07-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the private fears in Alan Ayckbourn’s 2004 work, Private Fears in Public Places: I’m engaged to a loser; I wrecked my career; I’ve been stood up; I hate my father; I have a secret life; I’m gay and in the closet; we are pathetic. The public places are an apartment, bar, café, and real estate office intertwined through Ron Krempetz’ jumbled set. Here the play’s seven characters intersect one another’s lives.

First on stage is Nicola, a professional-looking young woman who is looking at an apartment with her obliging and hopeful real estate agent, Stewart. The apartment isn’t quite suitable, she says. Her fiancé, who’ll be living here too, has insisted on a room for his study, and there isn’t quite enough space because one of the rooms has been divided. Dan, the fiancé, is supposed to have met her here, but since he didn’t, she can’t agree. Never mind, Stewart smiles brightly; he has other properties to show her.

Dan is at his usual hotel bar, ordering “Same again,” from Ambrose, the bartender. After work, Ambrose will go home to his roaring-offstage father, for whom he needs an additional caretaker while he works an extra night job. The caretaker turns out to be Charlotte, Stewart’s office worker, who is also taking on another job. And Stewart’s week ends with Sunday games of Scrabble with his sister, Imogen. None of the characters has a last name.

Of them all, Charlotte is the most complex. Snugly buttoned up in her spinsterish grey sweater, Charlotte carries her Bible with her everywhere, especially when she’s tending to Arthur, Ambrose’s horrible father. But Charlotte has another life that acts as a secret weapon with the crockery-smashing old tyrant.

Alan Ayckbourn is the second-most performed playwright in the English language -- Shakespeare’s first – and this is his 67th play out of 72. Some, like Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests, and Communicating Doors were manic comedies, but Private Fears is not one of them. It’s a bleak play, and it’s delivered in fast scene changes, “a film on stage.” It demands a strong cast, a strong director and almost a choreographer to pull it together. Happily, Ross Valley Players has assembled them from all over the Bay Area.

Director Jessica Holt describes the play as “a collective portrait of people who are deeply, achingly lonely,” and she adheres to that vision throughout. Stewart (Keith Jefferds) is steadily upbeat in his smiling desperation. Dan (Patrick Barresi) barely functions away from his bar stool. Ambrose (Jim Fye) has been locked-down so long, he can barely move at all. Nicola (Dana Zook) gives up the idea of marriage and freezes in place. Imogen, Stewart’s sister (Lauren Rosi) wants to quit weekly Scrabble, but can’t get beyond the bar scene. Charlotte (Linnea George) wrestles mightily with the Devil, but lets the Devil win sometimes. And the offstage rantings of old Arthur (Hugh Campion) reveal the dungeon he’s made of his own mind.

In this production, special credit should go to the lighting and sound designers, Carrie Mullen and Greg Scharpen, for signaling the quick scene changes, and to Dialect Coach, Rebecca Castelli, for crafting smooth English accents in this non-British cast.

Private Fears in Public Places will be at the new, improved Barn Theatre (new restrooms!) in the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross through August 16. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, and 7:30 p.m. Thursdays. Prices range from $15 - $25.

This play is performed without intermission, and it is almost two hours long. Some shows are almost sold out. For reservations, please call 456-9555 or see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Marin Shakespeare Goes Wilde

2009-07-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

Prolific Irish writer Oscar Wilde was really out there and didn’t care who knew it. In late Victorian England, he cultivated a languid, long-haired flamboyance that was recognized and criticized as effeminate. And in spite of being married, he also pursued male romances, one of which got him imprisoned for two years.

Wilde’s last and most successful play, The Importance of Being Earnest, premiered in London on Valentine’s Day, 1895, but it only ran for eighty-three performances. By then, Wilde’s notoriety about his love affair with the Marquess of Queensberry’s son shut it down.

Earnest’s fast-paced satire about British society and its manners is now making a stylish return engagement at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University in San Rafael. Marin Shakespeare Company’s all-star production offers a witty and gleeful visit to Oscar Wilde’s imagination.

Its story concerns two young bachelors, Algernon and Jack, who find themselves pursuing two young ladies, each of whom desires to marry a man named Earnest. To bring about the comedy’s necessary happy ending, its plot employs a London residence and a country home, an ironclad dowager, an attractive female ward, questionable ancestry, deceit, a misplaced manuscript and a possible re-baptism. The whole thing crackles with Wildean one-liners: Aunt Augusta says her widowed friend’s hair “has turned quite gold from grief.” The governess, Miss Prism, hearing that Jack’s wicked brother is dead, comments, “What a lesson for him! I hope that he will profit from it.” Algy defends his own costume with, “If I’m occasionally overdressed, I make up for it by being overeducated.”

Algernon, the first Earnest in this production, is played by Marin Shakespeares’ perennial bad boy, Darren Bridgett. (Bridgett always obliges fans in the amphitheatre by venturing into the audience and filching their snacks.) William Elsman, recently Don Quixote in the Mountain Play, is the second Earnest, and a good counterpoint to Bridgett.

George Maguire is cleverly cast as the formidable Aunt Augusta, Lady Bracknell. However, when Aunt Augusta first appears onstage, having rung the doorbell “in a Wagnerian manner,” Maguire gestures with gloved hands, smooths his skirts neatly, but delivers her lines in his own voice, not falsetto. It’s disappointing.

The young ladies, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, are played by Cat Thompson and Alexandra Matthew. These two at first perceive themselves as rivals. Watch for a lovely tea-fight.

Joan Mankin is the novelist/governess, Miss Prism, and also the affectionate object of the Reverend Dr. Chasuble, played with patient dignity by Jack Powell. Lane and Merriman, city and country house servants, are portrayed with two different accents by Lucas McClure.

Director Robert Currier has added some fine directorial touches to the script. Listen for the young ladies’ pronunciation of the men’s real names and for Aunt Augusta’s enunciation of the loaded word “handbag.” Enjoy the choreography of the “housemaids” rearranging Mark Robinson’s revolving set.

Patricia Polen’s costumes are lushly Victorian and topped with lavish wigs. The Importance of Being Earnest is a full, flamboyant, outdoor presentation of a Victorian play. Wilde would have loved it.

The Importance of Being Earnest will be at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, 1475 Grand Avenue in San Rafael, through August 20. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays. Ticket prices run from $15 to $30.

Seating is on benches outdoors, but cushions may be rented. Picnics are welcome.
The weather cools rapidly after the sun goes down, so lap robes and jackets are recommended. For additional information, see www.marinshakespeare.org or call the box office, 499-4488.

Three Sisters Blow Into Town

2009-07-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

On opening night of Porchlight Theatre’s new production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters brought wind that had been building all afternoon. By 7:00, when the play began, it was a full gale. The windows on Steve Decker’s ingenious cantilevered set swung like they were motorized. A prop flower vase blew over. (The old family retainer, played by Candace Brown, stepped in and swept it up.) Actors shouted to be heard over the redwoods’ heavy rustle. And when one of the characters forecast “a wild, elemental storm coming,” he got an unscripted laugh. Nevertheless, in the best theatrical tradition, the show went on, as players and playgoers coped with the conditions.

This is the 8th season for Porchlight, who call themselves “the Merchant-Ivory of Marin” and who stage their works in the amphitheatre behind The Barn in Ross. They are a seasoned group. Of the eleven Core Members, seven performed tonight, four of them Equity, and all struggled along in “the simple magnificence of our natural surroundings.”

Anton Chekhov’s plays are suited to undisciplined nature. His characters are also buffeted about, but don’t really go anywhere, rooted in their own idealism or fecklessness. Yet Three Sisters, which made its debut in 1901, seems surprisingly modern. These people make bad marriages, gamble recklessly, hate their jobs, long for an idealized past, get fat, get old.

The Prozorov sisters in the title share the inherited family home with their brother, Andrey. He’s assigned to be the family intellectual, and the sisters have hopes that he’ll become a professor. The youngest sister, Irina, is celebrating her 20th birthday as the play opens. Irina is excited about the future, longing to start work. The oldest sister, Olga, is still single, worries that she’s getting old, and blames her teaching job. Masha, the one in the middle, sits, reads and smokes. She quietly detests her husband, the high school teacher Kulygin, but comes to life when an army officer, Vershinin, is transferred to this small garrison town. Vershinin is from Moscow, a magic name in the Prozorov home. He has a glowing vision of the beautiful future that awaits them all in another 200 years. He also has a wife and two daughters.

Two years go by, and much is the same, except Olga and Irina are now forced to share a bedroom. Andrey has married a dragon of a young woman, who has installed little Bobik in Irina’s room. Another baby will be along soon, then job changes, followed by failed courtships, dashed hopes, and the recurring theme of exhaustion, of being worn out, alternating with manic visions of the future.

But through all this Russian suffering, Chekhov inserts some bitterly funny lines: “When a man just wants to talk, it’s good to have a deaf person to talk to.” Or many variations on, “I love my wife, but . . .” Director Susannah Martin has chosen this play’s Paul Schmidt translation, which is, she says, “less poetic, more conversational.” And she has used the amphitheatre’s surroundings as part of the set.

Chekhov gives the large cast some excellent speeches to work with: Olga’s (Julia McNeal) declarations of patient despair; Masha’s (Tara Blau) silent contempt for her husband and delight with Vershinin (Nick Sholley;) Irina’s (Thais Harris) gradual collapse of hope; Andrey’s (Jon Wesley Burnett) frozen acceptance of his domestic life; Tuzenbach’s (Craig Neibaur) retreats into clownishness; Kulygin’s (Ryan O’Donnell) exaggerated pride.

The action in Three Sisters is advanced by the villains. Andrey’s grasping wife, Natalya (Rebecca Castelli,) is steadily acquiring both the family home and a lover. Solyony (Michael Barr) determines to be noticed by Irina any way he can. Romanich (John Mercer) dissolves his medical skills in alcohol.

Jarrod Quon and Don Wood share multiple roles throughout the play.

Three Sisters will continue at the amphitheater in the Marin Art & Garden Center through July 11, with no performance July 4 and a special performance on July 6. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. To order in advance, see www.porchlight.net.

Note: The amphitheater is not easily handicap-accessible. Also, on opening night, besides the high wind, there was only one Porta-Potty in service. Audience members are advised to plan accordingly.

Over the Border without Passport -- in Just one Day!

2009-06-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

We journey by automobile, following a full night’s sleep and a light breakfast. We take time to admire the countryside and hum along to the car radio. We have no timetable and almost no itinerary. It’s exotic and eerie! However, in almost no time at all – forty-three minutes, to be precise – ZIP! – we’re crossing the border into Sonoma County.

We make similar excursions at least twice a year, but this one’s different. This time, we’re going to stay overnight, move slowly and see what’s been missing.

Our central destination is Santa Rosa, but it’s still too early to check into our hotel. No problem; more time to meander around. Instead of watching the clock, we motor back to the Coddingtown Mall to have lunch at Narsi’s, a hofbrau-style place we remember from years past. Both Narsi’s and the mall are showing their age now, but the food is as good as we remember, and for Marinites, a great bargain.

Refreshed, we return to Hwy. 12, which takes us out to Sebastopol. Once we spot the rustic cow statue standing in a dairy and pass the big metal dog with the lolling tongue in front of the Humane Society, we know we’re getting close to Florence Avenue, home of the world’s best fun collection of junk sculpture.

These creations represent the quirky inspirations of French Canadians Patrick Amiot and wife Brigitte Laurent, who assemble their art from rubbish and discards of all kinds. The Amiots have their studio on Florence, and it’s easy to spot. But almost every neighbor along the street – and many off the street – reinforces this outdoor exhibit. For instance, we park our car in front of the Mad Hatter standing on a teapot. Then within a short stroll, we encounter Batman, a cow in a pickup truck, vacationers in a VW, a large and peculiar totem pole, a sharkmobile, big puppy dog, fisherman in his boat, fire engine with firemen clinging to the back, wolf driving a hot rod, reclining mermaid with wavy metal hair and giant quail. And besides looking like a fun place to live, Florence Avenue in Sebastopol is a pretty old street with beautiful gardens. Who knew this great stuff was here, so close to home? Why haven’t we explored it before?

By now, we could get into our hotel, but we continue our commitment not to hurry. Early summer will be prime time at the Luther Burbank Garden, right across from Santa Rosa City Hall. The garden is also convenient to Peet’s, where visitors can cool down with an icy mocha freddo, and investigate a clean and organized used book store called Treehorn.

Burbank’s garden is educational and free. It holds live exhibits of the horticulturist’s experiments, including high-yielding grains that he developed during World War I, examples of his 800 hybrids, and an edible landscape. Burbank’s striped corn and slicing tomatoes will be on exhibit later in the summer, the literature says. This garden is situated in an old neighborhood with plenty of two-hour street parking. We spend some of that time just smelling the flowers.

Our hotel has a fine restaurant right on the premises. When we tell them we have theatre tickets, they supply us with a superb dinner and get us out exactly in time, without rushing.
Both the play and its performing space are a short drive away and allow another discovery. We’ve never been to the 6th Street Playhouse before. Formerly the 6th Street Warehouse at Railroad Square, The Playhouse has two theatres in it, and we’re going to the GK Hardt, a big space, almost full on this Thursday night. Another surprise is tonight’s show, In the Mood, a 40’s musical version of Much Ado about Nothing. Remarkably, it works! Shakespeare’s returning soldiers are now American troops on leave in Italy, and the set is a USO center. When they dance, they dance swing. The audience loves it. In the Mood will close June 28, but there’s also a Studio Theatre here and an intriguing new season planned.

No worries about the drive home, of course. We’re staying in town. And tomorrow, we’ll stop off in Healdsburg, where we’ll find more bookstores, art galleries, wine tasting rooms, wine tasting rooms in art galleries, non-chain coffee shops, two great bakeries and antique stores.

Healdsburg is only fourteen minutes down the road, so we can sleep in. We’re local, after all – just over the border in Marin.

Buckle Your Butler Belt, and Hang On!

2009-06-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

The play’s title is misleading. There is no butler in What the Butler Saw. Before the play ever begins, its set reveals that this is not an English country house, but a doctor’s office in a mid-‘60s mental institution. Swinging doors upstage lead into the Ward; another door goes to the Dispensary, and one more to Reception. (All these doors are going to get a workout.) Medical supplies appear in a cabinet on the back wall, but the bookcase behind the doctor’s desk contains a row of what appear to be gin bottles. And the doctor in residence, Dr. Prentice, is now interviewing Miss Barclay, a miniskirted blonde, for the position of secretary.

There’s a form to be filled out, he tells her, and she must be entirely candid about her background. What’s all this about her stepmother being “killed by a public utility?” It seems that an explosion toppled a statue of Sir Winston Churchill, and some of his parts were embedded in the stepmother. Dr. Prentice says he’ll have to examine Miss Barclay’s legs to see what effect the stepmother’s demise has had on her, but during the exploration of her legs, he determines that a full exam will be required. “Undress,” he says, and pulls the curtain around the examination table.

We are only ten minutes into the play.

Joe Orton’s script is a full-fledged farce, and its frenetic pace will continue for the full two hours. The butler, program notes explain, is us. The title refers to “peep-shows once common in polite English society.” This audience is the voyeur. And there is plenty to peep at, though thankfully, it doesn’t go beyond underwear.

In short order (and an astonishing costume,) Mrs. Prentice makes an unwelcome appearance and has one of many drinks. Then the bellman at the hotel she’d stayed in, shows up, wanting to make some money in exchange for the secret photos he’d taken of the two of them.

A supervising physician, Dr. Rance, has an answer for everything. Finding that Prentice has a nude young woman behind the curtain, he proceeds to diagnose her condition. The young lady vehemently denies a love affair with her father, so she’s clearly delusional; off to the Ward she goes.

And there is, of course, a straight-arrow policeman trying to straighten out all the missing persons and alleged molestations while preferring “not to have Royalty mentioned in this context.” He’s especially upset about the damage to the manhood on Sir Winston’s statue.

The play’s action ratchets into a snarl of disguises, overdoses, gunfire and strait jackets, then ties it all up – even through lockdown -- with an entirely unexpected, delightful finish.

In this closing show of the season, Marin Theatre Company has pulled in a stageload of big talent. Amy Glazer, a frequent credit all over the Bay Area, is the Director, and all the actors are Equity professionals. Charles Shaw Robinson plays the bumbling Dr. Prentice, with Stacy Ross as his randy (for other men) wife. Cat Walleck is the much put-upon Miss Barclay; Rowan Brooks is the bellman and/or missing secretary, Nicholas Beckett. Andy Murray’s rigid explanations bring Dr. Rance to full attention, and Kevin Rolston’s Sgt. Match is no match for this bunch at the mental hospital.

It’s entirely right to direct applause also to Eric Flatmo for his homage-to-the-‘60s set and to Fumiko Bielefeldt’s costumes. (Where did she find the go-go boots?)

What the Butler Saw is a wild romp conclusion to the ’08-’09 season, but as good a show as it is, alas, this one isn’t for children. The play will be performed Tuesdays through Sundays through June 28. Ticket prices range from $20 to $51. Both prices and performance times vary. For complete information, see the website, www.marintheatre.org or call the box office, 388-5208.

Great View from The Barn

2009-05-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

Much-honored American playwright Arthur Miller never shied away from tough subjects. Two years after the close of W.W. II, his All My Sons (1947) took on war profiteering. Death of a Salesman (1949) showed one destructive side of capitalism and might have been inspired by one of his uncles. The Crucible (1953,) a drama about the Salem witch trials, paralleled the House hearings about Communism. And in After the Fall (1964,) Miller even fictionalized his own marriage to then-addicted Marilyn Monroe.

A View from the Bridge (1955,) now being produced at The Barn Theatre, examines crime on the docks in New York, but this is no watered-down On the Waterfront. The playwright also throws in illegal immigration, lust and homosexuality – or is it homophobia?

Its story is unfolded by Mr. Alfieri, an all-seeing lawyer in Red Hook, New York. Mr. Alfieri’s practice is with “the petty troubles of the poor,” but while justice is important here, he admits that suspicion of the law is 3000 years old. This Italian-American community has its own laws, many of them concerning appearances and behavior.

Eddie Carbone admonishes his 17-year-old niece, Catherine, about “walkin’ wavy;” down here on the docks, it’s an invitation to trouble. Even more worrisome, Catherine has a good job offer -- $50 a week. Her aunt Beatrice is delighted, but Eddie isn’t. He wanted more for her, he says.

Beatrice has additional cause for joy; her cousins have arrived from Italy, smuggled over on a ship. They now must work on the docks to pay off their transport. The dark one, Marco, hopes to stay three or four months and send money home to his wife and children. His brother Rodolpho, unexpectedly blonde, loves everything in America, wants to stay and become a citizen. But Rodolpho likes to sing, and that could attract unwanted attention. He’s already getting noticed on the wharf for his hair and his speech: “You can never remember what he says, but it’s the way he says it.”

Things are not so good between Eddie and Bea in the marriage department, either, especially when Bea suggests that their “Katy” is a woman now, getting too big for certain things.

But Eddie’s more obsessed with their visitors. Rodolpho sings, cooks, makes dresses. “He ain’t right” and doesn’t belong on the waterfront. Mostly, though, he doesn’t belong anywhere near Katy. Eddie makes a move to prove that he’s right about the young man and disgraces himself.

When Eddie shows up at his office, Mr. Alfieri sees the worst coming “I’ll never forget how dark the room became when he looked at me.” Eddie has only one last weapon in his arsenal. Once he uses it, the family’s tragedy will be complete.

Director Cris Cassell has brought in a fully realized production of Miller’s play, from Michael Berg’s mid-50s costumes to David Apple’s set to Billie Cox’s waterfront sounds and music.

Bridge’s large cast has six principle actors, each one flawlessly cast and believable. Rick Williams’ Alfieri’s resigned gravitas foreshadows the direction of the drama. Eric Burke’s Eddie is the consistently unyielding tragic hero. Hallie Frazer as Beatrice and Denise Elia as the teenaged Catherine demonstrate the feminine constraints of their time and culture. Michael Orlando as hardworking Marco and Jordan Winer as ebullient Rodolpho seem both exotic and familiar, like the 50s themselves. And happily, mercifully, all the accents work.

A View from the Bridge will be at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center, Ross, through June 21. Performances are at 8:00 Fridays and Saturdays, 2:00 Sundays, 7:30 Thursdays. Tickets may be ordered online at www.rossvalleyplayers.com,
from the box office, 456-9555, or at the door. Prices range from $15 - $25.

MTC: African Drama on Inauguration Night

2009-01-29T16:07:00.000-08:00

Was it uncanny good timing or fine marketing that led Marin Theatre Company to open its apartheid drama, My Children! My Africa! on Barack Obama’s Inauguration night, the day following Marin Luther King’s birthday? The opening night juxtaposition brought a lively, warmed-up audience to Athol Fugard’s play about a segregated South African school in 1985. Unfortunately, the play itself failed to sustain the upbeat mood.

Fugard drew on South Africa’s apartheid system for the force behind much of his work, such as Blood Knot and “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys. In My Children! My Africa!, the playwright examines its effect on education through the voices of a dedicated black teacher, Mr. M., Thami, his best male student, and Isabel, a white girl from a prep school in town. All the action takes place at the segregated school in the black part of town called “The Location.” A school debate on women’s rights in front of an invisible school audience has brought them all together.

In the first of many monologues that make up almost half of this play, Isabel describes the conditions in The Location, the greyness of the school. Feeling an outsider at first, she says she soon felt “a strong sense of myself” and “discovered a whole new world.” She wants to know more.

Not long after, Mr. M., the idealistic teacher who arranged the debates, admits his favoritism toward Thami and delivers another monologue about his love of the Chinese philosopher, Confucius. He also admits to feeling a sense of peril now because the wild animal Hope “is prowling around in my heart.”

Thami’s own monologue comes later, after a rift is developing between him and his teacher. Beginning with an African child’s song about the school bell, he explains that he has always made his teachers happy, but he doesn’t trust that anymore.
Whenever one character is speaking to the audience, the other characters either stand frozen or go sit in the wings.

As the play’s planned debate practice goes forward, the two teenagers drill each other on aspects of 19th century British lit, but neither of them has much enthusiasm anymore, and Thami wants to drop out. Other students there are doing the same; attendance has fallen off all over school.

In the best monologue of the play, Mr. M. woos these children and the audience with a passionate defense of the power of words, achievable only through education. Describing an imagined walk north through the length of Africa, he “sees” all its countryside, its animals and geography and people, a journey he’s made with the help of books.

As Mr. M., L. Peter Callender is entirely believable as the dignified teacher we all wanted. His accent and voice are pure music. Lloyd Roberson II (Thami) and Laura Morache (Isabel) are both too old to play teenagers, but their acting and timing are faultless.

Josh Costello’s direction, as well as Ted Crimy’s intervals of African music and sound and Eric Sinkkonen’s stylized schoolhouse all contribute to the feeling of being in another country in another time. That’s part of what removes this drama from modern audiences.

When the play premiered in 1987, its author, who is white, had already left South Africa and was living in the United States. The country’s black leader, Nelson Mandela was still in prison. After majority rule had been achieved, Fugard went back, Mandela became the country’s first President and My Children! My Africa! became part of history.

My Children! My Africa! will have a short run at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, Tuesdays through Sundays, through Feb. 8. Times vary, and ticket prices range from $31 - $51, with discounts available for seniors and students.
A separate program celebrating African music and dance will be performed Monday, Feb. 9, at 7:30 p.m. For complete information on both these events, see www.marintheatre.org or call 388-5208.

Glengarry in Ross??

2009-01-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

Producing David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is a big change for the always-civil Ross Valley Players. This script, says Director James Dunn, is “edgier than most,” and the theatre cautions audiences at the outset that “adult language” is used in the play. In fact, adult language (depending of what adults you hang out with) plays a major role, as the characters spray each other, their clients, their business, with undiluted venom.

But that’s only one part of Mamet’s hard, often comic style. Here’s a sample from the first scene, in which agent Shelly Levene confers with his boss at their usual Chinese restaurant: “. . . You . . . Moss . . . Roma . . . look at the sheets . . . look at the sheets. Nineteen eighty, eighty-one . . . eighty-two . . . six months of eighty-two . . . who’s there? Who’s up there?” Levene’s staccato is as revealing as a facial tic. He is desperate, and we are all eavesdropping. The language might even be lifted from the playwright’s own experience in a similar Chicago office. Mamet’s vision of sales pressure in real estate won Glengarry Glen Ross a Pulitzer in 1984.

And it has juicy parts for actors. (There are no women in the script.) RVP’s Bob Wilson says that more than seventy actors turned out for the auditions, and seven were selected. With skill and purpose, James Dunn keeps each character authentic and separate.

Shelly Levene (Norman Hall) is frenzied for his office’s good leads, which he’s sure are being withheld. He’ll work a deal – any deal – to get back in the game, and he uses every technique he knows to get what he wants.

But Williamson, the boss, (H.D. Southerland) is a cooled-down policy man; he’s “not permitted to give premium leads to low achievers,” he says, not even when they pay for them. Levene must be content with leads from the B list.

A fast-paced complaint duet between two other agents, Moss (Richard Conti) and Aaronow (Tim Earls) generate a plot for their own benefit; steal the good leads, and sell them to a competing agency. Seriously? Could it work? “Are we talking, or are we speaking?”

But now we see the No. 1 seller at work. Richard Roma (Eric Burke) shows his style with a fellow single diner at the same restaurant. In smoothly crafted conversation, Roma purrs, “What’s special? What draws us?” and begins to reveal his pitch. James Lingk (Stephen Dietz) is the target; there’s no way he’ll get away without signing a contract.

The second act set (wonderful work by Bruce Lackovic) shows the office’s gritty interior with the El train making occasional passes overhead, trash cans stacked outside and “Caution” tape over the broken window. A no-nonsense policeman (Jason Souza) is taking names and asking questions. The filing cabinet has been rifled, and the leads are missing. Who did it?

This is not the best time for one of the agents to enter and crow about the big sale he just made, but it’s an excellent time for James Lingk to show up. Disorder’s in control. “What do we have to do to make it right?”

David Mamet’s play offers no easy answers. The last line says it all.

Glengarry Glen Ross will play at the Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center through Feb. 22. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays. Ticket prices range from $15 to $25. For reservations or more information, see the website, www.rossvalleyplayers.com or call the box office, 456-9555.