Daniel Petzold, Marissa Keltie and Cory Censoprano in Little Brother. Photo by Jay Yamada.

I reviewed Josh Costello’s adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s novel for today’s Marin Independent Journal.  Head over there to read all about it before the review expires or becomes otherwise unlinkable. (Short version: I liked it. It’s good.  Go see it.)

Little Brother runs through February 25 at Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough St., San Francisco. http://www.custommade.org

Show #10 of 2012, attended January 27.

Double Indemnity, San Jose Repertory Theatre.

Carrie Paff and John Bogar in Double Indemnity. Photo by Chris Bennion.

By Sam Hurwitt

If crime doesn’t pay, it’s not for lack of trying. Though it’s a quick and pulpy read, hardboiled crime writer James M. Cain’s 1935 novella Double Indemnity gives some of the same moral lessons as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s literary classic Crime and Punishment—that murder, no matter how carefully planned or covered up, has a tendency to hound the perpetrators to the ends of the earth.

Like Cain’s very similar story The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity is about a femme fatale wife plotting with her new lover to kill her husband, and how things turn sour after they pull it off. In this instance the lover is the family’s insurance agent, and he’s in it for the money—to defraud his own company into coughing up not only for an accidental death claim, but paying double because it happened on a train.

No matter how carefully insurance man Walter Huff plans the murder, complicating factors abound. He’s still not sure he can trust his partner in crime, the slinky Phyllis Nirlinger. Mr. Nirlinger’s daughter Lola keeps coming to him for favors or to voice suspicions about her mother-in-law, and Lola’s boyfriend Nino seems to be up to no good. Most worrisomely, Walter’s coworker Keyes, a monomaniacal claims adjuster, sees something fishy about the case and won’t rest until he figured out what it is.

Double Indemnity is best known for the 1944 movie version starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson, which has rightly become a classic of the film noir genre. Substantially rewritten by Raymond Chandler and director Billy Wilder, the movie greatly punches up Cain’s dialogue and completely changes the ending. Now San Jose Repertory Theatre unveils a new stage version that, for better or worse, is much more true to Cain in a world premiere coproduction with Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre, which premiered it first in October.

The script by David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright is diligently faithful to the book, enough so that its divergences stand out. It skips over any of the material about Nino’s motivations, for instance, and drastically abbreviates Walter’s meticulous process of setting up his alibis. Some embellishments work remarkably well, such as an added touch of the husband getting suspicious of Walter, if not of his wife. A climactic face-off between Phyllis and Walter that doesn’t happen in the novel is particularly striking. Other additions such as a bit of disturbing love play with a knife are a bit more perplexing.

The biggest flaw in the play is not a result of the changes made but of its fidelity to the source material. The dialogue is mostly either straight from the novel or at least very true to its terse, minimal style. In the book Walter is omnipresent as the first-person narrator, so we don’t have to guess at why he does things or what the significance of what other people say or do is to him. He brings his keen eye and experience as an insurance man to every interaction and isn’t stingy about sharing it with the reader. When Mrs. Nirlinger asks about accident insurance, Walter tells us immediately in the book that it’s a huge red flag. When the scene is reduced to just its surface dialogue in the play, it takes longer for it to sink in that something’s mighty suspicious, and when Walter broaches the subject of murder it seems completely out of the blue.

A bit of the narration survives in brief monologues between scenes, and the balance between showing and telling is pretty good at this point, so I doubt would be the best solution. More of Walter’s thinking process should come out in the dialogue, and maybe some of the subtle hints that he picks up on might be a little less subtle to let the audience in on them too.

Some of those blanks could also be fleshed out in performance, but John Bogar’s portrayal of Walter doesn’t offer much glimpse into his internal life. He doesn’t convey anything but some combination of cockiness and nervous jitters, least of all any chemistry with Carrie Paff’s Phyllis. He’s all business, which doesn’t engender much interest in how things turn out for him.

Directed by A Contemporary Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie, the cast is a made up of three Seattle actors and two Bay Area ones. On the local side, Paff can also be difficult to read as Phyllis, but in a genre-appropriate way that helps preserve the character’s mystery. Certainly her playful firtatiousness gives off a lot of the sexual heat that’s lacking in Bogar’s Walter. Paff’s recent Tiny Alice castmate Mark Anderson Phillips is marvelously creepy as Lola’s shifty boyfriend Nino, who looks at Walter the way a feasting animal might look at any intruder that could take its meal away. He’s also entertaining as a blithely chatty train passenger and as Walter’s pompous milquetoast boss.

From the Seattle posse, Jessica Martin is a bright, sparkling presence as the precocious Lola, and she has a charming cameo as a nerdy secretary with a clomping walk. Ziman’s rumpled, regular-joe Keyes is much more hearty and friendly than the abrasive character in the book or movie, which makes a line like “I don’t often like somebody” less believable, but also makes him an enjoyable presence and brings out the humor in lines that may or may not be intended to have it. He conveys a good sense of a successful man who considers himself shrewd as Nirlinger, but it’s not always immediately obvious which part he’s playing, at least not while the husband is still kicking.

Beattie’s production does capture the mood of the genre, between Rick Paulsen’s moody lighting, Annie Smart’s sharp period costumes and Brendan Patrick Hogan’s sounds of rain and thunder. Thomas Lynch’s intriguing and versatile rotating set depicts a towering, dark green ship’s hull that opens to reveal various rooms.

This Indemnity succeeds generally in conveying the mood, voice and basic plot of its hard-boiled source material, but to really make it work as a story, to make it both emotionally involving and generally comprehensible, it needs a bit more attention to the details. Much like the perfect murder.

Double Indemnity runs through February 5 at San Jose Repertory Theatre, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. http://sjrep.com

Show #3 of 2012, attended January 19.

Future Motive Power, Mugwumpin.

The cast of Future Motive Power. Photo by Pak Han.

By Sam Hurwitt

It’s hard to imagine what Future Motive Power would have been like if the ensemble Mugwumpin hadn’t managed to obtain use of San Francisco’s Old Mint to stage it in. It’s not that the Mint has anything to do with the story of inventor and electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla being told in the collaboratively devised performance piece, but so much of the experience is defined by the interactive experience of the crowd moving through the historic building’s basements and vaults at the prompting of the actors that one wonders what people would get out of it in a traditional theater space.

Abstract and abstruse, the piece allows you to glean only tiny, disconnected bits of actual information about the Serbian-American developer of AC electricity who laid the theoretical groundwork for inventions such as radio, but it’s an interesting riff on themes of his life if you already know a ton about Tesla. There’s a timeline on one wall in the preshow lobby that you’d be well advised to study.

As the show begins, you hear far-off voices talking, keening and ululating but clearly drawing closer through the corridors. Mugwumpin artistic director Christopher W. White’s Tesla appears in the doorway moaning and slapping his eyes as if battling a tremendous headache. The trio of Rami Margron, Misti Boettiger and Natalie Greene surrounds him, reciting words that Tesla mouths, and all three pull long red strings out of his suit-clad chest as he groans in agony. White plays Tesla with a vague Eastern European accent and a warehouse full of nervous tics, from running back and forth to clatter around behind a screen to gyrating his hips salaciously. It’s hard to know whether his bursts of pain are literal or metaphorical, or in either case what they signify.

Joe Estlak plays financier and philanthropist J.P. Morgan as a screeching, animalistic creature in a leather hood who’s always in a bubble bath, his hands twisted into shaking claws. He also portrays Thomas Edison, the inventor for whom Tesla worked as an assistant before a falling-out turned into a feud, with direct current backer Edison going on the road to propagandize against the dangers of alternating current. Estlak’s Edison is a shameless huckster with a cigar butt always clenched in his teeth. There are a few moments of actual conversation with these characters, just enough to give you the sense that Tesla was, or at least felt, screwed over in business.

Frantic speeches about Tesla’s nervousness, monomaniacal devotion to his work and aversion to being touched alternate or coincide with puzzling bits of business such as Tesla playing a game of “red light, green light” with the triumvirate of women  At times the trio seems to play what might be friends or family of his, if indeed he had any, but if they’re supposed to be anyone in particular we’d never know it. At one point White takes on the role of someone about to be put to death in the electric chair—googling the name in the program tells me it’s William Kemmler, the first to be executed by that method—while Edison talks about how it should be called being Teslaed, just as the guillotine was named after its inventor. (Tesla had nothing to do with developing the electric chair—less than Edison did, in fact—except that it used alternating current.)

For all that the show is hard to penetrate, it’s inventively staged by director Susannah Martin, with plenty of intriguing movement and images. At one point a preselected audience member (actor Emily Morrison on the night I attended) stands up to recite a long explanation of how alternating current works using a script dictated to her through an iPod, offering a welcome touch of down-to-earth humor as she scrambles to keep up with the audio input.

So far all this is in the conventionally seated first section of the piece, but soon the audience is asked to get up and join hands in an immense circle to feel a current passed through them and then to move from room to room—first to Mr. Edison’s Hall of Wonders, a goofy sideshow consisting of Edison pointing to things and saying he invented them. Everyone in the audience has a red string or a blue string tied around his or her wrist, and is told that it will affect the actors’ instructions, but it only comes up once, when one group follows Tesla for a few minutes and the other follows the triumvirate, after which the two groups quickly rejoin. It feels more like a crowd control device than a salient artistic choice. One group lingers with the women as they room through the corridors and vaults talking about domestic routine before and after electricity.

Aside from a speech at Niagara symbolized by a slowly pouring bucket, we seldom know where or when anything is supposed to be, so when we jump to an elderly, addled and embittered Tesla it’s hard to say how much time has passed since we last saw him. Although visually interesting, with pigeons represented by balloons, the last section is especially abstract, and after most of the cast walks out of the room there’s a long moment of silence. I wouldn’t have known it was over if someone hadn’t started clapping.

Tesla was a strange man, and there’s something in him that naturally inspires avant-garde theater (Austin’s Rude Mechanicals also did a fascinating Requiem for Tesla that I happened to catch while living there in 2003), but in a show as way-out as this one, the trouble can be that it’s hard to get a sense of how much of the weirdness is actually related to Tesla and how much is just an experiment of the ensemble’s that seemed interesting at the time. The result is that a great mind whose historical significance has been overshadowed by people with better PR, money and interpersonal skills appears once again to take a back seat to flashy showmanship, the signal of his voice drowned out by mesmerizing noise.

Future Motive Power runs through January 29 at the Old Mint, 5th and Mission, San Francisco. http://mugwumpin.org

Show #5 of 2012, attended January 21.

The Pink Dot Stories, SF Sketchfest.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour, SF Sketchfest.

The Black Version, SF Sketchfest.

The Drawing Room Apocalypse, SF Sketchfest.

Eddie Izzard in Conversation, SF Sketchfest.

Ann Magnuson performs The Drawing Room Apocalypse at SF Sketchfest.

By Sam Hurwitt

Once a humble assemblage of local sketch comedy acts, SF Sketchfest now brings a staggering number of comedy heavyweights to San Francisco every year. The 11th annual comedy fest opened last Thursday, and  the last week has already seen performances by John Hodgman, Ann Magnuson, Bruce McCulloch, Phil LaMarr, Eugene Mirman, Bobcat Goldthwait, Ben Gibbard, Molly Shannon, Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, Paul Rudd, David Cross, Amy Poehler, Judy Greer, Will Durst, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, Kevin Pollak, the Groundlings, Stella and the original Upright Citizens Brigade, including a radio-play reading of Wet Hot American Summer and a table-read of its unproduced sequel. The next week will bring Drew Carey and the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast, Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage, Barry Bostwick, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman, Fred Willard, Rachel Dratch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Florence Henderson, Laraine Newman, Oscar Nunez, Will Forte, Mary Lynn Rajskub, W. Kamau Bell, Dan Harmon, Kevin Smith, Will Franken, Bob Odenkirk, and… well good lord, isn’t that enough for you?  Apparently not, because that doesn’t even cover half of what’s going on.

What’s great about Sketchfest is that a lot of the performers are thrown together into sketch comedy or improv combinations projects that they may not normally be part of or might just be one-time experiments; the festival is fertile ground for cross-pollination and trying stuff out, which is half the fun for participants and audiences alike. Despite its high-profile visitors, Sketchfest tends to be off the radar of much of the local theatre community, attracting its own crowd of comedy aficionados. It doesn’t help that it falls at the same time that most theatre companies are opening shows after the post-holiday dead period. This year, though, I managed to catch several of the shows opening weekend.

First up was Bruce McCulloch, who’s performed at Sketchfests past both on his own and with his old sketch comedy compatriots, the Kids in the Hall. The Pink Dot Stories is a book of short pieces that he’s working on, and Friday’s show has a chance to read some of them in front of a live audience at the Eureka Theatre. His opening act was Knuckles and Tits, a duo made up of Stephen Brophy and Ebbie Parker, half of a Los Angeles sketch comedy group I’ve never seen but think has the best name ever: Oh, You and Your Bone Spurs. Almost every one of their sketches had to do with a horrific date, each involving a stalker, a demon or gunplay. They were borderline disturbing, but amusing nonetheless.

McCulloch’s performance was a mixture of stories and songs, accompanied by Marc Capelle on keyboard. “It’s a series of stories I may or may not write,” he explained. “I don’t know, it was a fucking bluff to get here.” All the stories had a madcap, stream-of-consciousness style, though for my money the bits delivered in a seemingly off-the-cuff standup style were more hilarious than the ones he read, about “waking up with a crazy chick” or going into Taco Ball and trying to score free food because his dad died. He talked about how terrible his show was the last time he was here in a string of florid similes that would put Raymond Chandler to shame. He described coming to San Francisco and “partying down” with the mayor, who kept saying things like “you want to drink from a puddle of bus driver’s tears? I can arrange that.” or “C’mon, Bruce, I know where the guns are kept. Let’s fuck shit up.” McCulloch didn’t name the mayor, but somehow it’s all the funnier picturing the current mayor talking like that. In the course of talking about what a good read the Bible is, he said, “I love religion. It gives stupid people something to do besides buying lottery tickets, which really is kind of the same thing.” His boyish demeanor and deadpan delivery  made whatever he had to say all the funnier. Sometimes he even couldn’t help but crack himself up, such as in his closing musical number, “Angie the HIV Unicorn”

I was particularly excited to see The Thrilling Adventure Hour at Marines Memorial Theatre Sunday afternoon, because I’d caught the show last year and it was hilarious. Cocreated by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker, it’s a series of scripted comedy shows in the style of 1940s radio adventure serials, with star-studded casts and priceless theme songs and commercials for Work Juice Coffee and Patriot Brand Cigarettes. The actors perform with scripts in hand at a row of mics, just like they would if it were an actual radio recording. Because of the large casts and guest stars that vary from show to show, I’d been under the impression that the installments in the ongoing serials were written for the occasion, but the episode of Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars we were treated to on Sunday clearly took place before the one I heard last year (this one introduced Sparks’s faithful Martian companion Croach the Tracker, who was already his sidekick last time around), so it may be that they keep older scripts in the rotation.

Whatever the case, the show’s just delightful. The Saturday evening installment had some guest stars I didn’t see on Sunday, including McCulloch and Andy Richter, but it was hard to mind much. A narrator sits off to the stage manipulating sound effects on a Macbook, usually Hal Lublin in a variety of styles from booming nobility to dusty old prospector. After a hilarious Work Juice commercial featuring Paul F. Tompkins as the imperious King of Coffee, the players went into a rollicking space Western adventure of Earth-born, robo-fisted Marshall Sparks Nevada (Mark Evan Jackson) and noble Martian Croach the Tracker (Craig Cackowski), with The Daily Show’s John Hodgman as the infuriating voice menu of the lawman’s ray gun and  Garret Dillahunt as genteel robot outlaw John Steelhands, the Gentleman Thief. The superhero romp The Adventures of Captain Laserbeam featured John DiMaggio as the blustery, befuddled hero, Lublin and Cougartown’s Busy Phillips as kid sidekicks the Adventurekateers, Joshua Malina and Colin Hanks as supervillains the Difficult Man and Kid Ragnarok, and John Ennis as a former Adventurekateer turned criminal henchman.

The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock, a Victorian-era time traveler in the mode of Doctor Who (only much more plummy), had the titular adventurer (Cackowski) sent by Queen Victoria to rescue Neal Armstrong (James Urbaniak) and Buzz Aldrin (Samm Levine doing a priceless Shatner impersonation) from time piranhas. Perhaps the funniest segment this time around was Beyond Belief, a Thin Man style quasi-horror show featuring Frank (Tompkins) and Sadie Doyle (Paget Brewster), socialites turned supernatural detectives, or at least people who encounter otherworldly forces at random and banter wittily about them. This one involved a hapless goat (Community’s Gillian Jacobs), a chupacabra unconvincingly disguised as a farmer (Matt Gourley), a snooty prince (Hodgman) and a cynical hipster witch (Annie Savage) interrupting the Doyles’ morning cocktails. The whole show was only 80 minutes or so, but in terms of laughs per minute, it felt like a feast.

Saturday night was The Black Version back at the Eureka, one of two shows by the Groundlings in this year’s fest. This one’s an improv show in audience members shout out classic films, and the cast of African-American comedians improvises “the black version” of that movie, with character types and names suggested by the audience. Apparently one past show was The Silence of the Lambs, retitled Why You Eatin’ People? This time the movie picked was The Breakfast Club, despite some bellowers’ loud and repeated insistence on Star Wars or Steel Magnolias.

The opening act this time was 7th Grade, the Awkward Musical, which certainly lived up to its name, both in capturing the wrenching anxiety of junior high and in the awkwardness of its own humor, which tended toward the sophomoric. Having the Period Fairy show up to explain pubescent changes through “a menstrual show” in redface was a cute touch, but it really was just a musical about 7th grade, the songs were grating and it felt awfully long for an opener.

The Black Version’s Breakfast Club parody was also generously proportioned, packed with “DVD extras”: cut scenes, blooper reels, and particularly hilarious audition footage from imagined actors who didn’t make the cut. Newly dubbed Gonna Eat Some Breakfast, it opened with a meandering R&B theme song made up on the spot by actors Keegan Michael-Key, Cedric Yarbrough, Daniele Gaither and Gary Anthony Williams, replete with sections for each to vamp with a rap or bit of mid-song seductive patter. For each scene, director Karen Maruyama would call out which actors she wanted onstage and which bit from Breakfast Club she wanted them to reinvent

Michael-Key was cast as an aspiring rapper, Ice Kool-Aid, who kept getting tangled up in search of a rhyme. Yarbrough was the jock, a member of the swim team who kept punching the Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed nerd perhaps inevitably named Obama (Jordan Black). Gaither was given the “diva whore” role of Shaquillitia, and Williams played Trixie, a shy girl with an unspecified eating disorder. Phil LaMarr played the hardass, OCD-plagued principal Richard Head, and Maruyama gave Yarbrough the last-minute extra role of the janitor, who he interpreted surreally as an ex-slave from a last American plantation that somehow survived into 21st century Oakland, adding a whole new level to the story. The story was predictably all over the place, but some of the ad libs were hysterical—and because ultimately it was all ad libs, that was good news indeed.

Tuesday I was at Yoshi’s in Oakland for Ann Magnuson’s show The Drawing Room Apocalypse, a cabaret evening loosely based around the Mayan hysteria about the world ending this year—or, as the show was billed, “a salon des beaux arts for the fin du monde 2012.” Looking for all the world like a gracious Victorian hostess in a glittering gown with opera gloves, the singer/actress/performance artist staggered around as if in an earthquake, then tottered gingerly to the mic in her heels to read a section of Jack London’s somber account of the 1906 earthquake before launching into a delicate, trilling rendition of the ‘60s Skeeter Davis hit “The End of the World.” The evening veered between charmingly frenzied rants about the doom awaiting us when Quetzalcoatl comes and the planet Melancholia collides with the Earth on December 24, 2012 and a delightfully off-the-wall selection of songs, whether her own or by Jacques Brel, Bessie Smith, Kurt Weill, David Bowie, Jobriath, the Doors or the Rolling Stones. Stripping down to a corset, she even did a medley of her old cult duo Bongwater, pulling from “Talent Is a Vampire,” “The Power of Pussy,” “Chicken Pussy,” “Obscene and Pornographic Art” and “Nick Cave Dolls.” (I say “even” because I understand that partnership ended badly, but maybe that’s all bongwater under the bridge by now.) Mixed in were originals from her past performance The Luv Show such as the saucy “Sex with the Devil,” plus a heartrending song about loved ones lost to AIDS and a duet written by her pianist Kristian Hoffman (whose sheet music totally fascinated me looking over his shoulder, with big block letters of the notes in lieu of traditional musical notation). She sang a lovely rendition of Weill’s “September Song” and provided her own fake echo on David Bowie’s “Five Years” (“I knew he was not lying…lying”). The whole evening was thoroughly charming, generous, lovely and amusing, if not particularly sketchish and anything but sketchy.

I finished up my week at the fest Wednesday night at the Palace of Fine Arts, where British actor and comedian Eddie Izzard was being interviewed onstage by comic Greg Proops. For years now, the SF Sketchfest Tributes have been a great way for the festival to attract high-profile artists such as Amy Sedaris, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, Dana Carvey, Paul Reubens, the Kids in the Hall, the State and Conan O’Brien, some of whom have stuck around to play in subsequent Sketchfests. After an excited introduction by festival cofounders David Owen, Cole Stratton and Janet Varney, the evening opened with a tribute reel of clips from Izzard’s various standup shows and film roles. The rest was just Izzard and Proops sitting in comfy chairs drinking wine and talking about Izzard’s career, from developing his voice as a London street performer in a double act to trying to weed out his comedic habits as a serious actor (including playing Long John Silver in a recent TV version of Treasure Island in the UK). He’s even avoided comic roles, he says, to avoid getting pigeonholed, arguing that even in comedies like Mystery Men or My Super Ex-Girlfriend he’s played his parts straight.

Izzard talked about the challenges of street performing and the brazen confidence that had to go with it. He related getting his first West End stage role, in David Mamet’s The Cryptogram, without even having to audition because Alan Rickman had turned down the role and recommended him instead. He described what a bizarre experience it was to play Lenny Bruce and have to learn to inhabit the voice and style of a very different standup act from his own.

As his mile-a-minute, stream-of-consciousness style might indicate, Izzard said that he’d never been able to write out his routines in advance, preferring instead to record himself when he’s on a roll riffing on the street or in the pub, and using that to shape his act. As someone who’s been performing in French in Paris in recent years, Izzard debunked the whole idea of different nations having different national senses of humor, saying that in any country you’ll find people who find different things funny, just as you do here, and as long as he kept the culturally specific references to a minimum he found the same jokes went over in one country about as well as another. He talked about performing in drag after coming out as a transvestite, and some of the questionable fashion choices that went along with that. “I am a straight transvestite,” he explained. “We have no fucking design sense whatsoever.”

Proops proved a charming, witty interviewer, and Izzard a generous, forthright subject. At the end of the two-hour event they opened it up to questions from the audience, in which fans got a chance to ask after whatever obscure, unavailable-in-the-US projects they’re particularly into, or about running 43 marathons in 51 days a few years back. “I have the legs of a Greek god,” he said. San Francisco clearly knows its Izzard. When one woman asked, “My only question is, would you like a cup of coffee?” Proops quipped, “Well, that was brazen.”

Nary a one of these particular shows is still running, but there’s a whole other week of still more shenanigans to come, notwithstanding the usual trickle of Sketchfest-related events after the festival itself. (Not that I know of any offhand this time around, but they usually pop up.) Seriously, take a peek at the schedule once you have your dazzle-proof glasses on.

SF Sketchfest runs through February 4 at various venues. http://sfsketchfest.com

Pink Dot Stories: Show #4 of 2012, attended January 20.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour: Show #6 of 2012, attended January 22.

The Black Version: Show #7 of 2012, attended January 22.

The Drawing Room Apocalypse: Show #8 of 2012, attended January 24.

Eddie Izzard in Conversation: Show #9 of 2012, attended January 25.

Ghost Light, Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Humor Abuse, American Conservatory Theater.

Peter Macon in Ghost Light. Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com

By Sam Hurwitt

It’s a remarkable coincidence: In the last couple of weeks both Berkeley Repertory Theatre and American Conservatory Theater have opened plays about sons grappling with their memories of their fathers, both prominent Bay Area figures of the 1970s.  Ghost Light at Berkeley Rep is a fictionalized play based on California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone contending with the specter of his father, the assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Humor Abuse is Lorenzo Pisoni’s one-man show about growing up as a baby clown in San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus under the unrelenting tutelage of his father, Pickles founder and clown Larry Pisoni (who thankfully is still around and was in the audience opening night).

Commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which premiered the play last summer, Ghost Light was written by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone, and in fact was his playwriting debut. The company’s season opener in September, Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup, was also written by Taccone out of long conversations with its subject. A similar process went into Ghost Light, which Jonathan Moscone coconceived and directed. OSF’s world premiere production is the one that now comes home to Berkeley.

Todd Rosenthal’s set is terrific, with a few simple furnishings in Jon’s home overshadowed by the immense facade of City Hall. Maya Ciarrocchi’s projections show snippets of old sitcoms and news reports of the 1978 shooting of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by fellow Supervisor Dan White.

The character of Jon in Ghost Light is also a theatrical director, and his father is also the mayor of San Francisco who was assassinated when Jon was a kid. Jon is directing a production of Hamlet but is hopelessly stuck on how to stage the scene involving the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and he’s plagued by dreams in which his drunk prison-guard grandfather harangues Jon’s imaginary boyfriend, proclaiming that Jon’s father is coming. Meanwhile, a ghostly policeman lectures Jon’s child self on how he has to allow himself to grieve to free his father’s spirit.

It’s tricky subject matter to tackle, and Taccone’s script dances around it in a convoluted, elliptical way. The Hamlet conundrum is an interesting point of entry, although it soon becomes clear that it’s not really a big deal if Jon doesn’t solve it. A much bigger problem is that most of the characters exist only in Jon’s head. The dream-sequence scenes in which they appear are largely tedious and emptily portentous, which is bad news because they make up the vast majority of the play.

After one of these scenes involving his younger self being lectured on “universal traffic control,” Jon shows up in the audience saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t believe that. How many of you believed what happened in that last scene?” It’s a breath of fresh air, because the preceding section was indeed full of heavy-handed nonsense. “That scene we just saw was from the ooga-booga school of acting,” Jon says, and he’s not wrong. But it turns out that he’s just giving an acting seminar and there’s plenty more ooga-booga to come.

It’s not the actors’ fault. Peter Macon has a rich, booming voice as the spectral policeman, and Danforth Comins is charmingly at loose ends as the hunky man of Jon’s dreams, Loverboy. Sarita Ocón has several walk-ons as a silently smoking widow, but nothing comes of her presence except an egregious pun. The ghost grandpa that Bill Geisslinger plays is unrelentingly irritating, shouting homophobic abuse and obtuse prophecies, but Geisslinger has a terribly effective unspeaking cameo as Jon’s tremendously self-assured father. Tyler James Myers plays very young and petulant as Jon’s withdrawn younger self, avoiding addressing his feelings and sullenly answering a disembodied shrink’s questions.

It’s hard to see what a scene lampooning the director of Milk (a dismissive and gossipy Peter Frechette) adds to the arc of the story, aside from giving Jon a chance to rant about how his father’s legacy has been overshadowed by Harvey Milk’s. Jon has a blind date with a guy he met online (Ted Deasy), mostly to highlight how different he is from the fantasy Loverboy that Jon made him into.

Much stronger are the more grounded scenes between Jon and his friend, colleague and confidante Louise. Here too the dialogue sometimes drags, getting bogged down in thinly veiled thesis statements and debates on the nature of dreams, but these characters are so engaging and likeable that they make the “real” world of the play infinitely more entertaining than its netherworld.

Christopher Liam Moore does an amusing impression of Moscone as Jon, but very much as a goofy, puckish comic figure. When we first see him, he’s lounging around in boxers eating Chinese food, watching TV and talking back to his answering machine messages inquiring whether he’s available to introduce a Harvey Milk tribute or endorse a chocolate bar memorializing his dad. Robynn Rodriguez is down-to-earth and together as Louise, who indulges Jon but is always willing to call him on his bullshit.

There are a few great moments in the play, including a strong final image and a very funny array of auditioning ghosts for Hamlet. By and large, though, Ghost Light just feels scattered and overloaded with more ghostly visitations than A Christmas Carol. It’s a play badly in need of an exorcism.

Lorenzo Pisoni in Humor Abuse. Photo by Chris Bennion.

An import from New York, where Lorenzo Pisoni is based nowadays, Humor Abuse comes to ACT in association with Seattle Rep, which hosted the show last fall. Pisoni has played both theaters as a straight actor, delighting audiences in ACT’s 2005 production of the 17th century French comedy The Gamester.

Bart Fasbender’s set is simple: a smudged and torn, once-white curtain with a large steamer trunk in front of it, a staircase going up and away on one side, and lots of suitcases stacked in the corners of the stage. Pisoni emerges in a well-padded tux jacket, top hat and baggy checkered trousers to give his introduction, but first he has to chase down the spotlight that keeps slipping away from him. Once he staples it in place, he addresses the crowd apologetically. “This is a show about clowning, and I’m the straight man,” he says. “I’m not funny.”

That’s nonsense, of course. Pisoni is very funny indeed, and his deadpan delivery makes him even more hilarious.  But he makes the point that “I was born to be my father’s straight man,” and it’s true that when he was a little kid running around in a gorilla suit or in a miniature version of his father’s clown costume, he was always the stony-faced, serious one.

When Pisoni was a little kid in the circus with his dad, I was a not-quite-as-little kid watching him every summer with my dad. And on opening night, as he recreated routines that either he or his dad used to perform in the circus decades ago, I found that I remembered all of them remarkably well, and the way he captures his father’s clown act is uncanny. Pisoni’s been out of the circus for a long time now, working as an actor, but his clowning skills are so keen that it really shows that he learned to pratfall as soon as he learned to walk.

There’s a bit of commedia dell’arte and many astounding quick-changes where no sooner does he dive behind the trunk than he emerges inside it in a different costume. But best of all are the extended routines he learned in his childhood, whether he’s trying to carry multiple suitcases up stairs that he keeps tumbling down or simply trying to hold onto a balloon that keeps getting away from him.

As Pisoni tells it, his father was always clowning at home. He’d never bring a plate to the table without tripping over his own feet on the way. But Larry took clowning very seriously and made Lorenzo practice each trick again and again at an early age. “As soon as I could walk, I tried to run away from my parents’ circus,” Pisoni says. He talks about making his circus debut, uninvited, at the age of two, doing tricks at intermission.  His parents had to put him into the show to get him to stop distracting the patrons from buying concessions. After Bill Irwin and Geoff Hoyle left the circus, Lorenzo went under contract from ages 6 to 10 as his father’s clown partner.

He tells us about all the time he spent in the steamer trunk on hot days, cramped with other people, dummies or balloons, waiting to spring forth from it. He talks about how his complicated relationship with the circus wasn’t just hopelessly intertwined with his tricky relationship with his father, but ultimately amounted to the same thing.

Cocreated with director Erica Schmidt, the narrative is touching and often hilarious, and Pisoni tells it with remarkable self-assurance and the crisp elocution of a Shakespearean actor. Occasionally he delivers a line as if he’s a little too aware of the moment’s poignancy, but for the most part it’s superbly crafted and immaculately timed—and as a tense routine with falling sandbags demonstrates, to circus folk timing is everything. Humor Abuse may recount Pisoni’s early misadventures in the Pickles’ roofless tent, but everything about it shows a mature performer who’s truly come into his own.

Ghost Light runs through February 19 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. http://berkeleyrep.org

Humor Abuse plays through February 5 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. http://act-sf.org

Ghost Light: Show #1 of 2012, attended January 17.

Humor Abuse: Show #2 of 2012, attended January 18.

It’s a good problem to have: Looking over the list of the 118 local shows I saw this year, I had a hard time narrowing it down to a Top Ten. There are plenty of ways in which 2011 was a tough, lousy, no-good year, but in terms of what I saw on the Bay Area stage, it was pretty damn good. It was a great year for solo shows, between the Marsh (Marga Gomez’s Not Getting Any Younger, Don Reed’s The Kipling Hotel and Geoff Hoyle’s Geezer) and Berkeley Rep (Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and The Last Cargo Cult, Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy and Rita Moreno’s Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup). There were a couple of great visiting performances by screen stars: Kevin Spacey as Richard III, John Malkovich as mass murderer Jack Unterweger. And there were any number of other shows that thoroughly charmed me in one respect or another but didn’t quite crack the Top Ten: Crowded Fire and Asian American Theatre Company’s Songs of the Dragons Crying to Heaven, Sleepwalkers Theatre’s The Nature Line, Shotgun Players’ Beardo and Care of Trees, Impact’s Disassembly, SF Playhouse’s Tigers Be Still. As for what did make it onto the list, I tried to rank them in order of preference, but no matter how many times I tweak it the ranking feels arbitrary. So let’s say that, like one’s own children, I love them all equally, and just hope they buy that.

1. Fly by Night, TheatreWorks

Wade McCollum, Keith Pinto and Rachel Spencer Hewitt in Fly by Night. Photo by Mark Kitaoka.

The Bay Area got a terrific introduction to playwright Kim Rosenstock this year, between Tigers Be Still, her hysterical comedy about crippling depression at SF Playhouse, and Fly by Night, the delightful musical that she cowrote with Will Connolly and Michael Mitnick, which premiered at TheatreWorks at about the same time. Set around the great Northeast blackout of 1965, this bittersweet romantic comedy of a nebbishy sandwich maker who strikes up a romance with an aspiring actress only to fall in love with her happy-go-lucky diner waitress sister seems like a recipe for disaster. But the end result is magical, between beautifully pared-down songs, a sly fractured chronology guided by a hilariously whimsical narrator, and a crabby sandwich shop owner who steals the show. It’s an absolute gem.

2. Clybourne Park, American Conservatory Theater

Omozé Idehenre, Gregory Wallace and Richard Thieriot in Clybourne Park. Photo by Erik Tomasson.

Sure, it’s a little strange that Bruce Norris’s quasi-sequel to A Raisin in the Sun won the Pulitzer Prize when Raisin itself didn’t, but Clybourne Park is such a sharp and funny play that it’s easy to see why it did. Where Lorraine Hansberry’s classic deals with an African-American family about to move into an all-white neighborhood, and some future neighbors’ attempts to dissuade them, Clybourne is set entirely in the house they’re about to move into. The first act focuses on the white family who’s moving out in 1959, and what they’re going through at the time, and the second act takes place 50 years later, with concerned neighbors in what’s now a historic black neighborhood confronting a white couple’s plans to build the house up. The way people attempt to dance around the issue of race in both acts is hilarious and terribly revealing, and director Jonathan Moscone and a tip-top cast brought it all out beautifully.

3. Ruined, Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Ruined at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com

For better or for worse, this was also a boom year for wartime atrocities in local theatre, between this play, Golden Thread’s Night over Erzinga (rooted in the Armenian genocide) and SF Playhouse’s Honey Brown Eyes (amid Bosnian ethnic cleansing). A drama about horrifically violated women in the war-torn Congo taking refuge in a bar and whorehouse caught between rival military factions equally given to such atrocities may not sound like the most enticing entertainment in the world, but Lynn Nottage’s Ruined was, as I put it in my review, “a breathtaking work of theater that’s not to be missed.” Tonye Patano’s formidable proprietor mama Nadi and Oberon K.A. Adjepong’s charming traveling salesman Christian had marvelous chemistry in South African-born director Liesl Tommy’s superb staging.

4. The Verona Project, California Shakespeare Theater

Harold Pierce, Dan Clegg and Arwen Anderson in The Verona Project. Photo by Kevin Berne.

On paper The Verona Project didn’t sound promising—a musical based on Two Gentleman of Verona in modern language, with nary a Launce nor Crab to be seen. Add to that a setup with a rock band performing a concept album all about love, and it could be a nightmare. But writer/director/composer Amanda Dehnert’s delightful comedy proved itself to be much more than Two Gents the Musical. She borrows the plot and characters of Shakespeare’s play but spins a story from these threads that’s entirely new and electric, with a touch of magical realism, witty dialogue, fiendishly clever storytelling devices, and some awfully catchy pop-rock songs. It was a breath of fresh air, terrifically performed by the young cast of actor-musicians.

5. The Wild Bride, Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Éva Magyar in The Wild Bride. Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com.

The only show on my list that’s still running, The Wild Bride at Berkeley Rep is a thunderous return for Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company and adapter/director Emma Rice after 2009’s acclaimed Brief Encounter at ACT. The shaggy-dog Grimm fairy tale about the misadventures of a girl with chopped-off hands pursued by the devil is given a stunning staging with bluesy tunes and three dancing actresses playing the harried heroine. It’s fierce and funny, inventively staged and entirely magical.

6. Metamorphosis, Aurora Theatre Company

Patrick Jones. Allen McKelvey, Megan Trout, Madeline H.D. Brown and Alexander Crowther in Metamorphosis. Photo by David Allen.

Director Mark Jackson and a dynamic cast perfectly captured Franz Kafka’s tale of a hard-working man who awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant bug, much to the embarrassment of his family. Transplanting the story to the American 1950s keenly conjured the alienation and desperate need to appear to be the perfect family, hiding behind brittle, panicky smiles.

7. A Delicate Balance, Aurora Theatre Company

Kimberly King, Anne Darragh, Charles Dean and Ken Grantham in A Delicate Balance. Photo by David Allen.

I’d certainly seen Edward Albee’s woundingly witty 1966 play before, but what made Aurora’s revival so compelling was the superb performances throughout Tom Ross’s solid production. Kimberly King was magnetic as the tightly smiling matriarch, sharply keeping order in a home overrun with house guests: her smirking alcoholic sister, frequently divorced daughter, and old friends who find themselves suddenly terrified of their own house and won’t go home. King’s husband Ken Grantham was terrific as her mild-mannered peacemaker husband, as were Charles Dean and Anne Darragh as their pals beset with nameless dread.

8. The North Pool, TheatreWorks

Remi Sandri and Adam Poss in The North Pool. Photo by Mark Kitaoka.

The trouble with Rajiv Joseph’s suspenseful two-character drama is that you take one look at it and you’re pretty sure you know exactly what it’s about. A Syrian-American high school student of Iranian descent is called into the vice principal’s office after school for a friendly chat. Dr. Danielson won’t tell Khadim what this is all about and won’t let him leave either, trying to play good cop and bad cop at the same time. But the genius of the play is that it’s not just another post-9/11 paranoia story but something much deeper that cuts to the core of both characters. The play continually upturns expectations and its end is unexpectedly moving.

9. Phaedra, Shotgun Players

Trish Mulholland and Catherine Castellanos in Phaedra. Photo by Pak Han.

It’s been a fascinating 20th-anniversary season of commissioned world premieres for Shotgun, from the crazed Rasputin song-play Beardo from the makers of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage to E. Hunter Spreen’s fragmented romantic horror story Care of Trees. But my favorite had to be Adam Bock’s modern retelling of Phaedra, the Racine (by way of Euripides and Seneca) tragedy about a powerful man’s wife who’s fallen in love with her stepson—a young man who decidedly does not feel the same way. In Bock’s version the husband’s not a hero-king but a high court judge, and the son is a recovering drug addict trying desperately not to screw up again. But the focus is on Phaedra’s—or in this case Catherine’s—helpless discontent and monstrous self-delusion, achingly captured in Catherine Castellanos’s performance.

10. Bellwether, Marin Theatre Company

Danny Wolohan, Arwen Anderson, Gabriel Marin, Rachel Harker and Patrick Jones in Bellwether. Photo by DavidAllenStudio.com.

Marin Theatre Company had a very good year, with excellent productions of well-worn plays from Chekov’s Seagull to Albee’s Tiny Alice, August Wilson’s Seven Guitars to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, plus a very funny production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers. But my favorite show was their only world premiere this year, Steve Yockey’s Bellwether. It was also a good year for Yockey, whose Disassembly at Impact Theatre was delightful as well. But there was something about his ultra-creepy dark domestic fantasy about child disappearances in a Stepford suburb that felt like a great step forward in the playwright’s work. Ryan Rilette’s sharp production was also superb, with wrenching performances from Arwen Anderson and Gabriel Marin as the bereaved parents who find the gated community at their throats.

One thing I did with last year’s list (and that I totally stole from Hurwitt the Elder) was that I gave special honors to a most valuable player of the year.  I hadn’t planned to do it, but that year’s choice was so obvious to me that I felt I had to do it. This year I didn’t plan to anoint an MVP either, but the more I thought about it the more appealing it seemed to me to do it because the choice isn’t at all obvious this year. A lot of artists had great years this year, but in the end it really came down to several actors, any one of whom would be worthy of the honor, and it was a heck of a job trying to narrow them down. Try as I might to narrow it down to one, it kept gnawing at me that it could just as easily be another.  So the heck with it—it’s my list, and I’m going to do two.

MVPs: Arwen Anderson and Gabriel Marin

Gabriel Marin and Arwen Anderson in Bellwether. Photo by DavidAllenStudio.com.

Anderson’s parts this year couldn’t be more different: a frantic young mother struggling to be fair to her equally troubled husband in Bellwether and a young oddball in love, chasing a young man too selfish even to remember her, in The Verona Project. But Anderson was the aching heart at the center of both those plays, and the audience ached with her. Her adorably dizzy recovering addict daughter of a filthy rich magnate was easily one of the best things about Love in American Times, even if it wasn’t altogether clear why that character was even in the play. Marin’s fretfulness was infectious as the anxious father in Bellwether, the depressed husband in Collapse at Aurora, and even as a regular guy obsessed with worry that cybernetic enhancements are making him obsolete in SF Playhouse’s Wirehead. His angsty discombobulation made a small part memorable as the avenging son of a ruined man in Love in American Times at San Jose Rep. Marin’s so good at conveying gnawing worry and discontent that it can make your stomach hurt in sympathy. Both have given great performances before, and both surely have their best performances still ahead of them.  I can’t wait.

That’s it from me this year.  I’m off for a badly needed vacation in London and India with my lovely wife, and will jump back into showgoing with both feet in the middle of January. A happy new year to all, and here’s hoping 2012 has many more theatrical delights in store. Surely the Mayans could tell us.

Show #117: The Wild Bride, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, December 7.

Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Éva Magyar in The Wild Bride. Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com.

By Sam Hurwitt

“You know, for a feminist folk tale, this book isn’t half bad.” It’s the devil who says that in The Wild Bride at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, but in this case he’s not steering you wrong. The only misleading thing is that he understates the case.

Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company dazzled Bay Area audiences in 2009 with director Emma Rice’s inventive stage adaptation of the Noēl Coward film Brief Encounter in its US premiere at American Conservatory Theater. Now Rice and Kneehigh are back with another adaptation, not from film but from folklore. This time it’s Berkeley Rep that brings us the American premiere of Kneehigh’s The Wild Bride, and it’s fantastic—for my money, better than Brief Encounter.

The Wild Bride takes its inspiration from a German fairy tale, “The Girl Without Hands,” that’s one of the many collected by the Brothers Grimm. The devil comes to a poor miller saying that he’ll make the miller rich if he’ll just give the devil whatever is in his backyard. Knowing there’s nothing there but an apple tree, the miller agrees, but unbeknownst to him, his daughter is in the backyard at the time. The devil’s ready to carry the girl off, but he can’t touch her because she’s too pure, so he forces her father to cut off her hands. Even that doesn’t sully her enough for the devil to take her, so he stalks off to wait for the world to wear her down. Understandably peeved by the whole experience, the handless girl goes off to find her way in the world, and believe it or not that’s just the beginning of the girl’s adventures and tribulations.

This is not the first time this particular story has been brought to the East Bay stage. Just last year Ragged Wing Ensemble offered up its own original adaptation in Richmond, called Handless. But Kneehigh’s version really captures the magic of folklore brought to life.

One of Rice’s great innovations in The Wild Bride is to have the part of the girl played by three distinctly non-identical women: a brunette, a blonde and a redhead. Rice and writer Carl Gross also cast the story very much as a fairy tale, with the devil/narrator reading it in a storybook before he decides to go cause trouble in the story itself. The script is lyrical, with much of the dialogue in rhyme, and the protagonist herself doesn’t speak for the majority of it. The women wear blue aprons when they’re not in character, dancing behind whichever one of them is playing the title character at the moment or playing musical instruments.

The cast is superb from top to bottom, though that sort of ranking doesn’t really apply to such a well-utilized ensemble. Stuart McLoughlin is a magnetic devil in a sharp pinstripe suit and fedora, strumming a guitar and singing sinister songs based heavily on American blues (the terrific music is by Stu Barker). He moves smoothly from friendly and casual to monstrously lewd and menacing, at one point playing the terrified upside-down girl like a standup bass.

Stuart Goodwin is funny and heartwarming as the jolly, silver-tongued father (“oh darling daughter, daughter darlin’,” he says more than once) and the nebbishy, Scottish-accented king who finds the girl stealing his carefully catalogued and numbered pears and falls in love with her. The fact that the same actor plays her father and her lover is a little disturbing, but it was also true in Handless, because it’s an awfully convenient bit of doubling, seeing as how one character is out of her life by the time the other shows up.

Audrey Brisson is tremendously endearing as the wide-eyed, playful young girl, with acrobatic movements and a beautiful, full-bodied singing voice that’s put to good use once she’s handed off the role to the next woman (although “handed off” may be an unfortunate turn of phrase, considering the circumstances). Patrycja Kujawska is bewitching as the near-feral, nonverbal young woman whom the king finds in his garden, doing a fierce, animalistic dance (choreography by Etta Murfitt) or giddily enjoying life with the king. Where the original has the king commission silver hands made for her, this version has her rigged with fearsome bladed instruments as prosthetics.  Éva Magyar has an assured, commanding presence as the full-grown woman, also doing a dazzlingly intense dance, this one with an air of vistory.

There are magical touches aplenty in Rice’s staging. Magyar realistically manipulates a lifesize puppet deer, and Brisson voices the King’s mother, her arms protruding through a painted portrait. The band is a fluid mixture of the actors who aren’t in a scene at the moment, with Ian Ross as its only constant, hopping from instrument to instrument as needed.  Bill Mitchell’s enchanting set is a jumble of ladders and tree branches, rocking chairs and buckets.

It’s a very grim fairy tale, with plenty of maiming, murder and woe, but in the same sense that many fairy tales are pretty gruesome if you think about them.  (Consider Little Red Riding Hood, with all its grandma-eating and wolf-gutting.) The hand-chopping, for example, is symbolized simply by the girl dipping her hands into a bucket of red paint. It’s shaggy-doggier than most, with the handless girl going through one damn thing after another, but that just gives you more appreciation for the heroine’s spirit and fortitude.  If the devil’s waiting for her to be crushed and sullied by the hard road she travels, he’s in for a long wait.

The Wild Bride plays through January 22 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. http://www.berkeleyrep.org

Show #116: God’s Plot, Shotgun Players, December 3.

Will Hand, Juliana Lustenader and Anthony Nemirovsky in God’s Plot. Photo by Pak Han.

By Sam Hurwitt

American theater started as a criminal act. The first play performed in English in the colonies was Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe, a satirical stab at the English throne performed in rural Virginia in 1665. As Shakespeare’s contemporaries could attest a generation before, the Puritans were no fans of theater. Performing plays was a crime under their governance, and so was breaking the Sabbath—so this play performed in a tavern on Sunday was doubly forbidden, even disregarding any treasonous content. The show was reprised in a command performance in court, where it was judged harmless.

No script nor detailed record of the play survives, but prolific and inventive playwright-director Mark Jackson pays tribute to this cornerstone of American drama in God’s Plot, the final selection in Shotgun Players’ 20th-aniversary season entirely made up of commissioned world premieres. A small portion of the audience sits in pews onstage in Nina Ball’s handsome set of a humble period church that also stands in for a pub, a barn and other locations. Christine Crook’s costumes give some flavor of the period, although I find it very hard to believe that a young Puritan woman in colonial America would be wearing a purple dress.

Although the performance of Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe is the central event of God’s Plot, the main character isn’t involved in the play at all, although she’d like to be. She’s Tryal Pore, the teenage daughter of the judge who tries the case and the private student of the playwright. She’s taking instruction from William Darby (a roughishly charismatic Carl Hovick-Thomas), a new guy in town with a shady past that he’s thoroughly reinvented in the New World, but most of their lesson time is taken up with free-thinking and canoodling. Playful, aggressive Tryal wants to jump the guy’s bones, but worldly William doesn’t think that’s such a good idea.

The girl is a living anachronism, with 21st-century attitudes in a 17th-century world. She alone has the tendency to break out in song, and nothing remotely period-appropriate either but some kind of modern jazz/blues/cabaret hybrid. She does most of her singing unheard by the community around her, commenting on the action in progress. Unfortunately, the play would be better if she never sang at all. The songs, composed by Daveen DiGiacomo, are lackluster and meandering, with awkward lyrics (“old and scold world”) and unwieldy meter. The jazzy backing music is quite good, however, deftly played by Travis Kindred on stand-up bass and Josh Pollock on banjo.

Juliana Lustenader displays great energy and precocious intelligence as Tryal, although her line readings are stiff. Jackson doesn’t attempt to make the dialogue sound period-appropriate, with the exception of a pervasive formality that often feels stilted. (“You instigate a physical encounter with me and I’ll remind you of your age, old man.”)

John Mercer exudes hauteur as a sour and severe Quaker (an outlawed sect at the time) and a pompous major visiting from Jamestown to observe the trial. The Quaker Edward Martin is essentially the Malvolio of the piece, which seems ironic because he’s one of the few non-Puritan characters but is the most puritanical of the lot.

Kevin Clarke is quite funny in flashbacks as Thomas’s bawdy father and pleasingly repressed as Tryal’s father, the local judge, with Fontana Butterfield all aflutter as his exaggeratedly prim wife—both aghast at Tryal’s modern bluntness. Joe Salazar is a bland presence as the upright, pious carpenter Daniel Pritchard, so much so that when he emerges as a rival for Tryal’s affections, it’s impossible to understand why.

Dave Maier makes an amiably imposing Sheriff Fawcett, and Daniel Bruno is well grounded as mild-mannered barkeep Thomas Fowkes. Anthony Nemirovsky is amusingly shiftless as Cornelius Watkins, a curmudgeonly tobacco farmer ruined by bad debts and English trade regulations. It’s Cornelius’s discontent over the latter that spurs William to rope him into performing a play satirizing King Charles and his trade policies. The other actor in Ye Bare is Phillip Howard (Will Hand), a simple farmhand who’s elated to be upgraded from indentured servant to tenant hand.

There’s a little awkward slapstick in the show, but there are also priceless bits, especially in overtly theatrical sections such as Ye Bare’s drawn-out death scene or when William’s back story is acted out as he tells it. Jackson plays fast and loose with the period references, at least in terms of the timeline, and inserts a clever gag foreshadowing the American Revolution of the next century. As historical fiction it’s pretty lightweight, at least until the end. The play ends with a truly marvelous final speech that takes the what-happened-to-whom roundup to dazzling new heights. If it weren’t followed by yet another cumbersome song, it would be the perfect note to end on.

God’s Plot plays through January 29 at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. http://shotgunplayers.org

Show #118: Bring It On: The Musical, SHN, December 14.

Adrienne Warren and company in Bring It On. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

By Sam Hurwitt

Bring It On: The Musical may look like just the latest in a very, very long line of hit movies and cult classics that have been turned into stage musicals in recent years, but looks can be deceiving. This should be where I say that it’s so much more than that, but in fact it’s considerably less. It is, in fact, a total bait-and-switch.

Aside from its producers, Universal Pictures Stage Productions and Beacon Communications, Bring It On has nothing whatsoever to do with the 2000 cheerleading-competition comedy of the same name. If you’re expecting any favorite lines, songs, characters or scenarios from the surprisingly smart hit movie that spawned umpteen so-so sequels, forget it. It has cheerleaders in it, but the connection ends there. The musical does lift key plot points from a much older film (50 years older, in fact), so much so that it’s not even subtle, but telling you which movie it is would be a major spoiler if you’re considering seeing the show. That said, the musical’s villain is clearly named after her celluloid inspiration.

The stage show has an impressive dream team of talent working on it: The book is by Jeff Whitty of Avenue Q and Tales of the City, the music’s by Next to Normal’s Tom Kitt and In the Heights’ Lin-Manuel Miranda with lyrics by Miranda and High Fidelity’s Amanda Green, and it’s directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, also of In the Heights. Bring It On comes to the Orpheum Theatre as part of SHN’s Best of Broadway season, but the show has yet to hit Broadway. It’s on tour from L.A. to here to Denver, Houston and Fayetteville with an eye toward New York when it’s ready. From the look of things, that may be a long time.

The movie Bring It On is essentially a sports movie. It focuses on cheerleading as a competitive sport, split between internal cheerleading squad politics and the preparation for a major competition, complicated by the discovery that the previous squad captain stole all their cheerleading routines from a competing inner-city school. The stage musical scraps all that. There’s still a cheerleading competition in it, but in this one, perky blonde squad captain Campbell finds herself abruptly redistricted into an inner-city school with no cheerleaders at all, and she has to figure out how this happened when she thought she had her life all figured out, and how to adjust to not being the popular golden child anymore. Will she learn to adjust to having nonwhite classmates and form a cheer squad for a climactic comeback? Well, what do you think?

Oddly, there’s also no cheering in the show. Everyone’s too busy singing to do any of the chants that people think of when they think of cheerleading—although a rowdy group in the opening-night audience contributed a few just before the show. You get plenty of acrobatic dance routines courtesy of Blankenbuehler and all the real-life cheerleaders in the ensemble, and they’re terrific, although it’s a glaring mistake that we never see any of the competing routines, only the one by the team we’re rooting for, even when half the named characters are in one of the teams performing offstage. Talk about stacking the deck.

There’s no song list in the program because the creators are still retooling the show. That’s just as well, because there aren’t any memorable songs.  From time to time there’s some good rapping, particularly from Nicolas Womack as the minor character Twig, but even then the songs under the rhymes are lackluster. The best musical moments come when the sappiness of the songs turns into a joke, such as when the romantic interest croons about how hot our heroine is while she does a slo-mo dirty dance in a ludicrous sports-mascot leprechaun suit with a giant head. That’s easily one of the top three moments in the entire show.

Most of the main characters are bland and underdeveloped. Taylor Louderman is a likeable protagonist as Campbell, but she lacks any of the peppy zing of Kirsten Dunst’s Torrance in the movie. Adrienne Warren has a strong presence as Gabrielle, the “queen bee” of the new school and leader of its hip-hop dance crew, but after all the build-up of what a hardass she is, she turns out to be a total softie. Kate Rockwell’s Skylar gets some funny lines about being a megabitch, but she doesn’t get much chance to demonstrate her prowess in that regard. A running gag about fellow cheerleader Kylar (Janet Krupin) copying Skylar never quite becomes funny. We get no sense at all of who the love interest Randall is (Jason Gotay), except that he’s kind of sarcastic and makes mix tapes. He’s supposed to be vaguely reminiscent of Jesse Bradford’s Cliff in the movie, and relies on that association for any likeability or personality.

Fortunately, there are some great characters in the mix who make the entire show.  Chief among these is Bridget, the boundlessly enthusiastic but neurotic team mascot with low-self-esteem, played with considerable comic panache by Ryann Redmond. Gabrielle’s transgender sidekick La Cienega is also a huge crowd-pleaser, due to a hilariously sardonic performance by Gregory Haney. Elle McLemore builds beautifully to monstrous heights as the eager-beaver new recruit Eva, and Womack is way more charming than he has any right to be as the one-joke character Twig—the one joke being a pretty limp one, that he thinks chubby, schlubby Bridget is the hottest thing ever.

The story’s amusing enough, and the script has plenty of funny lines, although it too could stand to be punched up a bit. There are some halfhearted cheer puns and dumb-blonde misquotations, but nothing half as clever as the movie’s “this is not a democracy, it’s a cheerocracy.” (Kudos to screenwriter Jessica Bendinger, who has nothing to do with this production.) Although it’s not intended as a period piece, many of the show’s references such as Miss Cleo or Mrs. Garrett are far too old for the actors saying them, let alone the teenage characters they’re playing. At some point Gabrielle says that this isn’t one of those movies where the white girl comes to a black school and changes all their lives, and the line is all too telling because this is exactly that kind of story, and being aware of it doesn’t make it any less of a cliché.

What’s here so far is an entertaining evening, as long as you adjust your expectations going in, and the gravity-defying choreography keeps the energy high. But as a musical, especially one called Bring It On, it’s hardly ready for regionals, let alone nationals. The show just isn’t bringing it yet.

Bring It On: The Musical plays through January 7 at the Orpheum Theatre, Market St. San Francisco. http://shnsf.com

Show #109: The Chalk Boy, Impact Theatre, November 5.

Luisa Frasconi and Caitlyn Tella in The Chalk Boy. Photo by Cheshire Isaacs.

By Sam Hurwitt

If there’s one thing we learn from Joshua Conkel’s recent plays at Impact Theatre, it’s that kids are jerks. Last season Impact produced MilkMilkLemonade, Conkel’s comedy about preteen bullying, repressed homosexuality and chicken processing. Now the Berkeley company reteams with the Washingtonian playwright for The Chalk Boy, a dark comedy about how the abduction of the most popular boy in school affects the lives and alliances of four thoroughly unpleasant teenage girls. Well, that’s not entirely fair.  Only three of them are cruel, horrible people. The fourth isn’t mean so much as wishy-washy and clingy.

Director Ben Randle’s staging immediately immerses us in the characters’ high school world. Chalkboards cover the walls of Anne Kendall’s minimal set, and as the audience enters two of the girls are writing and drawing all over them while bopping along to Colbie Caillat and Pink songs: “Welcome to Clear Creek,” “Penny is a witch,” “Lauren Trisha BFFs 4eva,” “Go Vikings.”

The story is loosely framed as a dramatic presentation that snotty and superficial teens Lauren and Trisha are performing at an event for “the fellowship of Christian athletes” to recount what happened in the town of Clear Creek, Washington, after their classmates Jeff Chalk disappeared. Apparently there have been a lot of abductions in town over the years, and everyone’s on edge.

Not all of the actors necessarily look like teens, but they’re pretty convincing in their mannerisms. Maria Giere Marquis injects a surprising note of nuance into ultra-Christian ringleader Lauren, whose prim and unforgiving evangelism is accompanied by an almost desperate bossiness and a nervous tic of playing with her hair. She’s particularly amusing in her chatty prayers: “Hi God, it’s me, Lauren Radley. I hope you’re well.”

More of a jock, Chris Quintos is a bundle of aggression as Lauren’s henchgirl Trisha, whose piety is always at odds with her lack of self-control; she’s always blurting things, cussing and getting into fights.

On the other side are the girls they detest and talk smack about. Luisa Frasconi’s Penny always wears black, but she’s more sulky than spooky, her posture hunched and arms crossed like a petulant child. Penny seems like a one-note character until near the end, when she undergoes a fascinating transformation. Just seeing her smile is like a metamorphosis. Before that, though, she spends her time rolling her eyes at her mother, spreading lies about Trisha just for kicks, and dragging her only friend Breanna into chugging cough syrup and conducting Wiccan séances to try to contact Jeff, whom Penny’s decided she’s in love with after she let him finger her under the table at Olive Garden.

“You’re boring and sometimes I don’t know why I’m friends with you,” she says to Breanna, which is obviously cruel but not really inaccurate. Caitlyn Tella is likeable but wooden as Breanna, who’s clearly in love with Penny and doing a lousy job trying to conceal it.

Most of the cast plays other roles along the way. Quintos’s Trisha also does a cartoonish impression of a teacher with a singsong Midwestern accent and her histrionic warnings to her students not to be abducted. Giere Marquis is stiff as Penny’s mom, nagging her rail-thin daughter about how she’s putting on weight, but she’s effectively creepy as a late-night driver. Jeff Chalk is embodied by one actor and voiced by another in an otherworldly encounter that’s made strikingly effective by Colin Trevor’s creepy sound effects and Jax Steager’s horror-movie flickering lights and projections of swirly static for otherworldly visitations.

At first the dialogue seems awkward, both in writing and execution, and yet the story sucks you in with its black humor, shifting alliances and slight deepening of the characters over time, which is fortunate because they’re so shallow to begin with. Conkel also does some interesting experiments with breaking the fourth wall that almost but don’t quite work. The device of the whole story being a show that Lauren and Trisha are putting on falls apart as the story goes on, replaced by freewheeling metafiction in which characters are occasionally (but not often) aware that they’re in a story being told to an audience. Its internal logic doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny, but the show becomes more entertaining as it goes along, and that’s enough to give the girls’ school project a passing grade.

Chalk Boy runs through December 17 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., Berkeley. http://impacttheatre.com