Julie Douglas as Circe and James Udom as Telemachus. Photo by Mark Kitaoka.

Hey, I have a new review in today’s Marin Independent Journal! It’s We Players’ day-long adaptation of The Odyssey on Angel Island. So click on the link to read all about it.

The Odyssey runs through July 1 on Angel Island. http://weplayers.org

Show #45 of 2012, attended May 12.

Blues for an Alabama Sky, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.

Shinelle Azoroh in Blues for an Alabama Sky. Photo by Steven Anthony Jones.

By Sam Hurwitt

The first season that longtime American Conservatory Theater actor Steven Anthony Jones has programmed as the new artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre has been an interesting mix for San Francisco’s most venerable African-American theatre, from an odd pairing of one-acts—a broad slapstick bit of 1960s agitprop with a tense new Brazilian thriller—to a new version of LHT’s traditional Christmas pageant, to a drama about the British psychiatric system. Now the season closes with a trip back to the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression and Prohibition with Blues for an Alabama Sky, a 1995 melodrama by Pearl Cleage.

The play is set in 1930 Harlem, but it would be hard to mistake it for something written in that period, and not just because of all its frank talk about homosexuality and abortion, which are discussed as easily as they might be in 21st-century San Francisco, and just as heedless of any red-state reactionaries that might be in earshot. The dialogue also name-drops major figures of the period like Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker as major offstage characters in a way it wouldn’t back when they were actual contemporaries. One never makes such a big deal about period details when one is actually living in the period in question.

Nightclub singer Angel has just lost her job because she got drunk and told off her gangster ex-boyfriend from the stage in the middle of “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Having trouble scoring a new singing job in the Depression (at least one that doesn’t involve a casting couch), she’s crashing at the house of her old friend and guardian angel Guy, a gay costumer who’s putting all his energy into an escape plan to Paris. He keeps sending Josephine Baker sketches of outfits he’d like to make for her, hoping that she’ll send for him. Their next-door neighbor Delia is a social worker whose cause is establishing family planning clinics in Harlem.

Cleage’s dialogue has its charms despite some hokeyness, but the play is much too long at three hours and finally descends from high-spirited comedy into full-on melodrama. Fortunately it’s given a solid production by Michele Shay, who played Angel at Denver Center in 1998, and the cast brings out the humor in the script remarkably well.

Shinelle Azoroh has radiant, vampy charisma as Angel, and Tobie Windham is a whirlwind as Guy, forceful and magnetic. Robert Gossett carries a winning world-weary wryness as their friend Sam, a hard-working doctor and hard-playing ladies’ man, though he’s so laid back that he was sometimes hard to hear on opening night. Leilani Rosine Drakeford is awkwardly overstated and oddly shouty as the prim Delia. Joshua L. Green has folksy charm as troublingly old-fashioned but sincere Leland, a young “Southern gentleman” who comes calling on Angel, although he milks it a little too obviously whenever he gets a laugh.

Martin Flynn’s bright and busy set makes effective use of the large stage with simultaneous views of side-by-side apartments, plus a bright orange backdrop looming over the walls with human silhouettes cut out of it. Costumer Karen Perry provides fetching dresses for the ladies and sharp suits and fedoras for the gents. The show has a great jazz and blues soundtrack with a touch of gospel, including several songs sung by Azorah’s Angel or by charming child performer Kiara Fitzgerald in the otherwise nonspeaking part of a neighborhood girl. (The program calls the character “Little Angel,” but there’s certainly nothing in the staging or performance to suggest that she’s a younger version of Angel.)

The story becomes immensely frustrating toward the end, when all Angel’s friends start pressuring her to make the worst possible choice for her life and her friendships. It’s presented as if it’s the only moral thing to do, while her last best hope for a chance at happiness is snatched away by those who profess to care most about her. There’s a lot more involved in all the troubling choices that led to this point, but there’s a “that’s what you get, floozy!” quality to the melodramatic ending that’s just plain perplexing. It’s a shame that a play that inserts such perhaps anachronistically forward-looking values into a retro setting shifts so abruptly into Sunday-school moralism in the home stretch.

Blues for an Alabama Sky plays through May 12 at Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post St., San Francisco. http://lhtsf.org

Show #39 of 2012, attended April 7.

Anatol, Aurora Theatre Company.

Mike Ryan, Delia MacDougall and Tim Kniffin in Anatol. Photo by David Allen.

By Sam Hurwitt

Chicks dig Anatol, and Anatol digs chicks. Exactly why the ladies are drawn to the title character of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Anatol is a bit of a mystery. As played by Mike Ryan in Aurora Theatre Company’s production, he’s a very average guy, not notably attractive or charismatic. He’s fickle, jealous, easily flustered, weak-willed and peevish. He is, however, monomaniacally devoted to romance—the kind of guy who wins women over simply by laying it on thick and not giving up until they give in. He convinces himself that he’s madly in love with each one, whether or not he’s already madly in love with someone else. Anatol loves not wisely but too prolifically.

The Aurora production is also the world premiere of a new translation of the play that the company commissioned from Berkeley Schnitzler scholar Margret Schaefer. The witty dialogue flows easily and drolly throughout the show while preserving a distinctly period feel in Schaefer’s English translation from the original German, and Aurora founding artistic director Barbara Oliver and a small, sharp cast keeps the pace brisk without becoming overly antic.

Written in 1893, Anatol was the Viennese author’s first play. His work was apparently controversial in his day because of its indiscreet depiction of what was going on in bedrooms all over Vienna, but what’s surprising about Anatol is less its content than its structure. It hardly feels like a play at all. It’s almost hard to believe that it was originally written as a play rather than adapted from a novel, because the scenes have no connection to each other. In fact, as it turns out, the play is made up of six of nine short sketches about the title character and his amorous exploits, so the lack of any overarching dramatic arc is no illusion.

It’s a series of vignettes in which Anatol and his friend Max are the only recurring characters; the rest are a seemingly endless succession of women that are the objects of Anatol’s romantic attentions, but each woman exists only for the space of one scene, never to be spoken of again. When he’s engaged in one scene and about to be married in the next, everything that’s gone before tells us that the woman he’s about to marry can’t possibly be the woman he was engaged to before, because that’s just not the kind of guy Anatol is. Either way it scarcely matters, because the woman we’re dealing with in that scene isn’t his fiancée anyway.

What this means is that Anatol makes a fabulous showcase for Delia MacDougall, who gets to play many different women over the course of the play. First she’s a breezy and pettish flibbertigibbet whom Anatol wants to hypnotize to find out if she’s been faithful. (Not that he’s been faithful to her, but that’s different.) Then she’s a worldly Russian circus performer who Anatol is convinced is in love with him, when in fact she can’t place him at all. She plays a now married and very proper and disapproving former lover; a blithe and boorish showgirl; a haunted, slavishly devoted fiancée; and a coarse and clingy lover who doesn’t know she’s an ex. Playing with a variety of accents and outsize personalities, MacDougall is a cornucopia of delights.

But it’s the amorous Anatol at the fickle heart of the piece, and Mike Ryan makes him a terribly amusing antihero, if not exactly a likeable one. He’s brimming with nervous energy and can’t help overromanticizing everything, even his own fickleness. He’s the kind of guy who’ll pitch a fit when someone breaks up with him, never mind that he was just that moment about to break up with her. In fact, he pitches a lot of fits when any one women shows herself to be anything other than hopelessly devoted to him, never mind that he’s rarely if ever seeing just one woman at a time. Both he and his friend Max are very cultured high-society types accustomed to the finer things in life.

Tim Kniffin’s Max is cynical and cool as a cucumber, although even he becomes appalled with Anatol’s lack of character in some of the later vignettes in the show—which is curious, because you’d think by then he’d be used to his friend’s caddish behavior. There’s also a sly, amused reserve to Kniffin’s portrayal that makes you wonder about his own love life, which may or may not be any less prolific than Anatol’s, but in any case he has the good sense to keep a lid on it. Wiley Naman Strasser puts up with Anatol’s nonsense admirably as a variety of waiters and butlers. John Iacovelli’s rotating set creates a fanciful atmosphere with its deep blues and reds, and Anna Oliver’s period costumes add a touch of (upper) class to all the bad behavior.

It’s a funny show, and the cast is terrifically entertaining. Just as Max gets increasingly fed up with Anatol’s antics, however, it’s hard for the audience not to root against the serial romantic more and more ardently as the play goes on. Some of MacDougall’s women are sympathetic and others are as appalling as he, but either way all you want is for them to be free from him as soon as possible. Anatol hoards so much of the love in the world for himself that one becomes increasingly convinced that he deserves love less than almost anyone else.

Anatol plays through May 13 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. http://auroratheatre.org

Show #41 of 2012, attended April 13.

Crevice, Impact Theatre.

Marissa Keltie and Reggie D. White in Crevice. Photo by Cheshire Isaacs.

By Sam Hurwitt

Who hasn’t wondered what his or her life would be like if, well, everything were different? It’s the sort of reflection that nobody really indulges in when everything’s going well, but that tends to consume one’s mind when one’s life seems to be going nowhere. That certainly describes the siblings in Lauren Yee’s new play Crevice: Liz is a jobless 27-year old Ivy League grad who recently caught her fiancé cheating on her and now never leaves the couch (a strikingly similar situation to that of a character in Kim Rosenstock’s dark comedy Tigers Be Still, but that’s a very different story). Rob, 29, is supposedly an actor but hasn’t worked in years, and both of them are still living with their mom, waiting for something to happen. And something does. Liz and Rob get a taste of what might have been when they slip through a crack in the floor into a parallel world in which their every wish has come true, and that’s not necessarily good news.

Yee is a native San Franciscan in her mid-20s whose 2008 comedy Ching Chong Chinaman was one of the best shows I’ve seen at Impact. (I had much more mixed feelings about her more recent play A Man, His Wife, and His Hat, which AlterTheater premiered last fall, but it was still a fun evening.)  A coproduction with PlayGround, which commissioned the play, Crevice reteams Yee with Impact and CCC director Desdemona Chiang, and that’s definitely good news. The play itself still feels very much like a work in progress, with a lot of cool ideas that aren’t quite developed to a point where they make sense, but it’s so damn funny that it doesn’t give you much chance to fret about what it all means until afterwards.

Alex Friedman’s set completely transforms Impact’s pizzeria-basement space into a quaint suburban living room, with wallpaper and wainscoting, an orange shag carpet and many family photos up on the wall. The earth-shaking events in the play are punctuated by low rumbles from sound designer Colin Trevor (plus some priceless use of Fatboy Slim), and Jax Steager’s lights keenly capture the subtle shifts from one world to the next.  And thanks to costumer Ashley Rogers, everyone in the other world seems to be much better dressed.

Chiang’s brisk and lively staging is often hilarious, largely due to an awfully strong cast of Impact regulars (including rising star prop baby Tamaaron Ishida-White).  Marissa Keltie makes a winning if hapless heroine as Liz, who’s depressed, unmotivated and medicated into passivity, but even so, her sharp intelligence and charisma shine through the haze, and she’s very funny in her worry and wonderment at the strange events all around her. Timothy Redmond’s Rob starts off an irresponsible overgrown kid, and the transformations he undergoes in his curiously successful new life are truly hysterical, especially because he has no idea what exactly it is that he’s so successful at.

Reggie D. White is awfully likeable as Liz’s super-supportive, gentle best friend Christopher, and amusingly hardboiled as his rough-and-tumble mirror-universe version. Laura Jane Bailey is sweetly mild-mannered as the sibs’ preternaturally patient mom, and Jordan Winer is entertainingly perplexing as the unctuous Realtor Kathleen is dating, with a ludicrously broad Canadian accent that belies his professed Texan origin.

Though good for some chuckles early on, the Realtor character is one of the elements that it seems like Yee couldn’t quite figure out what to do with, and he drops out of the play oddly abruptly. Crevice is a play with many delightfully intriguing plot threads that ultimately become loose ends. We never learn anything about what the heck is up with this other world (is it a real place where people live real lives, or all a put-on for their benefit?), who the sinister Stepford duplicates of Rob and Liz are that pop up or what they’re up to (actual mirror-universe counterparts or deranged synthetic duplicates?), or why there’s another strange visitor running around. (I won’t say exactly what kind of visitor, because its primary virtue is surprise.) It’s not at all clear what happens at to whom the end, how it happens, or what if anything it all means. So I can’t imagine that this world premiere run is actually the play’s final version, but there’s so much hilarity in what’s there to make it a thoroughly enjoyable 70 minutes or so, and not one to let fall through the cracks.  If you bring down some pizza and beer from upstairs, all the more so.

Crevice runs through June 9 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Street, Berkeley. http://impacttheatre.com.

Show #43 of 2012, attended May 5.

I’ve had to take a break from the blog the last couple of weeks for a wide assortment of reasons, but I do have  a review in today’s Marin Independent Journal, of AlterTheater’s production of Jose Rivera’s References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot.

Rebecca Frank and David Sinaiko in Tenderloin. Photo by Rob Melrose.

I also had a feature in the IJ last week on Cutting Ball’s world premiere of Tenderloin. So click on the links and check ‘em out before they expire.

References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot runs through May 20 at 888 4th St., San Rafael. http://altertheater.org

Tenderloin runs through May 27 at Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. http://cuttingball.com

References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot: Show #42 of 2012, attended April 28.

God of Carnage, San Jose Repertory Theatre.

Maple and Vine, American Conservatory Theater.

The Aliens, SF Playhouse.

Bob Sorenson, Amy Resnick, Joey Parsons and Benjamin Evett in God of Carnage. Photo by Tim Fuller.

By Sam Hurwitt

French playwright Yasmina Reza seems particularly interested in how small things become blown out of proportion. In her ubiquitous play Art, the close friendship between three men is threatened when one of them buys an expensive painting that another one thinks is crap.  The Unexpected Man depicts two strangers on a train obsessing over the coincidence that one of them is reading a book that the other one wrote. And in God of Carnage, her 2006 comedy now making its Bay Area debut at San Jose Repertory Theatre, two couples meet to discuss an incident of playground violence between their sons, but their pleasant and civilized chitchat gradually gives way to chaos and savagery.

Translated by Christopher Hampton, God of Carnage won an Olivier Award for best new play after its 2008 West End debut, and its star-studded 2009 Broadway production won Marcia Gay Harden a best leading actress Tony Award. It was adapted into an unusually clumsy Roman Polanski film, 2011’s Carnage, with Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly. (Amusingly, some reviews said it was a lousy movie of a great play, while others said it was a decent movie of a lousy play.) Now it makes its Bay Area debut at San Jose Repertory Theatre in a production helmed by artistic director Rick Lombardo that has already played Arizona Theatre Company. (Amy Resnick is the only local actor in the coproduction’s four-person cast.)  Not long after the San Jose staging closes, Marin Theatre Company will do its own production in May.

Lombardo’s staging effectively conjures the tension in the room, and the awkward pauses are terrific. Everyone’s very friendly and cautious with each other at first, but it doesn’t take long for the knives to come out in every conceivable direction. The play is 90 minutes with no intermission—and in fact it can’t have an intermission, because there are no scene breaks. Every time it seems like everyone’s ready to adjourn, someone says something that drags everyone back into the fray.

Kent Dorsey’s impressive set depicts an elegant living room with rough stone walls that look like an ancient Mesopotamian ruin. This is the home of Veronica and Michael Novak—he’s a wholesaler of household goods, and she’s writing a book about Darfur. The Raleighs, Alan and Annette, are there because their son Benjamin hit the Novaks’ son Henry with a stick, knocking out two of his teeth. Alan is a lawyer, and their talk is constantly interrupted by cell phone calls in which he counsels a pharmaceutical company to cover up adverse effects of one of its drugs.

This whole meeting is really Veronica’s idea, and Amy Resnick marvelously captures her judgmental anxiety, from the dirty look she shoots Michael when he sends her to bring everyone espresso to the way she keeps pressing the point of whether the Raleighs are really going to make it clear to Ben that what he did was wrong. Bob Sorenson’s Michael is an easygoing peacemaker, bordering on a parody of the open-minded liberal, just as Veronica exemplifies an uptight one.

Benjamin Evett’s Alan is boorish and condescending, with little patience for this whole exercise. “Our son is a savage,” he says, and it’s useless to expect Ben to learn to error of his ways. Alan thinks that boys will be boys with the same cavalier attitude that lets him delegate all parenting responsibilities to his wife. The way he cavalierly drops crumbs from the clafoutis Veronica made all over the floor while pacing around yakking on his cell phone is priceless. Joey Parsons is especially funny as Annette, who’s chirpy and pleasant and eager to please at the outset but has a temper to be reckoned with.

Lombardo keeps the energy high, sometimes to the point of being madcap. The extreme level of hysteria the play reaches (including a little gross-out humor) isn’t always credible, but the cast makes watching all the shifting rhetorical alliances so entertaining that it’s easy to suspend disbelief. The suggestion that we’re all howling apes under a thin veneer of civilization is ultimately a bit heavy-handed and unconvincing, but that doesn’t make all the tantrums and bad behavior any less fun to watch.

Emily Donahoe and Julia Coffey in Maple and Vine. Photo by Kevin Berne.

The people depicted in Maple and Vine are also reverting, but much more intentionally than the ones in Carnage. Jordan Harrison’s play depicts a community of throwbacks who choose to leave the modern world behind and party like it’s 1955 and will remain 1955 forever.

This sort of nostalgia is usually based on a sanitized Happy Days or Leave It to Beaver view of the ’50s that ignores the myriad ways in which that “simpler time” was much worse than today: segregation, the anti-Communist witch hunts, and repressive attitudes on gender roles, race, sexuality, religion, and almost anything you care to name. The people of the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence who’ve created their own hermetically sealed ’50s town are more than aware of these attitudes. They try to recreate them as best they can in the name of authenticity and talk a lot about trading one kind of freedom for another. In their minds women having to stay home and serve their men is a small price to pay for a society in which people actually talk to each other and make things instead of just ordering everything over the internet. No one’s been there long enough not to know what the world outside is like; they just choose to forget it.

An Actors Theatre of Louisville and Berkeley Repertory Theatre commission that premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays last year, Maple and Vine now gets its West Coast premiere at American Conservatory Theater in an elegantly polished staging by Mark Rucker.

The show starts in 21st-century New York city, in one of those ridiculously palatial Manhattan apartments that people always have in the movies but only a multi-millionaire could possibly afford in real life. Ralph Funicello’s set makes it sleek and ultra-modern, with a luscious view of downtown skyscrapers through the giant bay windows. Katha, a young editor of coffee table books, lives here with her husband Ryu, who works in a plastic surgery office—the implication is that it’s in some junior capacity, but that’s never entirely clear. The spaciousness of the apartment may be a bit of poetic license to fill ACT’s large stage, because the couple can clearly hear their neighbors yelling in another apartment.

As Katha watches Anne of Green Gables on her Macbook at the breakfast table, she tries to pick apart her attachment to the TV series: “I don’t know if it’s nostalgia for the 1880s or the 1980s.”

Katha and Ryu have been having a hard time. She recently had a miscarriage and has been depressed, sleepless and aimless at work. Ryu feels helpless, like she’s drifting away, and rejected because she never wants to have sex anymore. No sooner has Katha abruptly decided to quit her job than she runs into a suave guy in a retro suit and fedora who stops to ask for directions. This is Dean, the de facto leader and recruiter for the ’50s community, who still comes to the big city from time to time on business. (We never have a sense of how large the community is, whether it’s one subdivided town or several, but we’re told that there’s a headquarters that Dean and only Dean reports to.)

This isn’t the first we, the audience, have seen of Dean. The first few scenes cut back and forth between Katha and Ryu in Manhattan and Dean and his wife Ellen giving an orientation speech to new arrivals, contrasting the world they’ve chosen to the world outside. There’s some particularly funny stuff in these speeches, especially Ellen’s litany of all the foods you have now never heard of, from hummus to sushi to lattes.

Katha’s enchanted with the idea of the retro settlement, albeit initially with a sense of amusement. Ryu thinks it’s crazy talk, and clearly a cult, but he’s reluctantly convinced to give it a try. Because Ryu is Japanese-American, the two of them have to be given a period back story that makes it plausible for them to be living in a mixed marriage.

Emily Donahoe has an oddly childlike quality as Katha, like she’s lost and always in need to guidance, which makes her leading this expedition into the past particularly worrisome. Nelson Lee is bright and likeable as Ryu, with a constantly amused quality. Jamison Jones is a smooth man’s man as Dean, charismatic and ultra-confident, and you can see why he’s the one sent to draw new people into the fold.

Julia Coffey, who displayed marvelous retro flair in ACT’s production of Once in a Lifetime earlier this season, is a revelation as Ellen, the very model of a perfect ’50s housewife. She’s the one who trains new arrivals and heads the authenticity committee that keeps watch on how well the community captures the feel of the period. There’s a lot of talk about how people kept secrets much better in days gone by, and Ellen gives a palpable sense of that. There’s a lot more going on with her than meets the eye. She’s also immaculately poised in Alex Jaeger’s stylish period costumes.

As Roger, Ryu’s floor manager in a cardboard box factory, Danny Bernardy shows how frail that veneer can be. He’s very much a square, repressed ’50s guy, but he’s also obviously struggling with that role in a way that amply shows this chosen world’s unsustainability for people who, deep in their hearts, know better. For all the frustrations of alienation of modern life, society has progressed in the last 60 years, and it’s impossible to really unlearn the lessons of history once you know them.

Bernardy and Coffey also play Katha’s catty, gossiping publishing-house coworkers who watch her like buzzards, waiting to swoop in when she leaves, and the contrast between their vapid modern selves and their severely repressed old-timey versions is striking.

Maple and Vine is very much a concept play; you never believe in what’s going on so much as accept the premise for the purpose of exploring it, the way you might with science fiction. Most notably, and most problematically, it’s hard to understand why Katha buys into the place so readily, particularly seeing as how ’50s racial attitudes are going to make life tough for Ryu.  Sure, she’s been depressed, but you get the sense that it could be anything that she latched onto. Her whole psychology as a character feels severely underdeveloped.

For all its period theme, the play itself is very much of its time, that time being today. Most scenes are very short, intended for a 21st-century attention span. That’s appropriate enough, because the play isn’t really about the ’50s at all. Inside or outside the retro bubble, everyone is completely modern, and all the talk about their new 1955 life is always couched in comparisons with life outside. There’s nothing they do or say that isn’t a self-referential commentary on the good old days. It’s all postmodern play-acting of ’50s life, only it’s a serious game, with the intention of somehow actually living that way from now on. It’s no wonder that it proves so unsustainable for people in the play. It’s a lesson that the reactionary forces in today’s political life who talk about a return to those old-fashioned values would do well to learn.

Haynes Thigpen and Peter O’Connor in The Aliens. Photo by Jessica Palopoli.

The guys in Annie Baker’s 2010 play The Aliens have opted out of the social contract altogether. They’re also living in the past to a certain degree, reminiscing about the band they never quite had (the Aliens was one of many band names they never quite agreed on) and talking about stuff that happened in high school as if it still matters now that they’re 30. Now all Jasper and KJ do is sit around in the backyard of a coffee shop in Vermont, a yard they’re not even supposed to be in, staring into space. Jasper smokes a lot, and KJ steeps shrooms in his tea and sings amusingly inane little songs to himself (music and lyrics by Michael Chernus, Patch Darragh and Erin Gann). Evan, a teenage busboy at the cafe, tries nervously to get them to leave, but he soon falls under their influence instead.

SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English’s set nicely captures the small, slightly run-down backyard for the company’s West Coast premiere, deftly directed by Lila Neugebauer. The pauses in particular are exquisite, as the dudes stare silently for an uncomfortably long time at Evan, or at nothing at all. In one scene KJ repeats the same word over and over for an unbelievably long time to truly striking effect. (It’s annoying, sure, but the annoyance soon fades into a kind of wonderment.) Baker, who also wrote Aurora Theatre’s recent Body Awareness, is suddenly all over the place, with another play coming up at Marin Theatre Company, and it’s easy to see why.

Jasper and KJ are truly epic time-wasters. KJ’s a college dropout who lives with his mom (whom he always refers to by her full name, Sandy Jano), and Jasper never made it through high school. Naturally, both of them think they’re geniuses. Jasper fancies himself a budding novelist, writing hilariously self-aggrandizing fiction in imitation of Bukowski, his idol.  KJ talks in the most incomprehensibly vague terms about what his masterful thesis in math would have been and murmurs meandering a cappella songs about aliens, time machines, and geometry. (“I’m a Martian masterpiece from another dimension”; “where the fat lady ate all the Ring Dings”—that kind of thing.)

Haynes Thigpen could not possibly be more laid back as KJ, a schlubby lump who’s lying on the ground if he’s not reclining against the fence on a picnic-table bench. KJ has an amusing habit of saying any random thought that comes to mind, made all the more so by Thigpen’s hilariously understated comic delivery. Peter O’Connor’s Jasper is more moody and agitated, fuming over what his ex-girlfriend’s up to. He seems just on the edge of hostility in the way he toys with Evan (whom he calls by his last name, Shelmerdine), but also clearly likes the kid. They always look as if they just rolled out of bed in Christine Crook’s appropriately grungy costumes.

Brian Miskell is endearingly nervous and awkward as the clean-cut Evan, who’s helplessly weirded out by the layabouts’ constant presence where they’re not supposed to be. He doesn’t really have any friends, so on the one hand you’re happy with him that he makes a connection with these older guys, but on the other hand they couldn’t possibly be a worse influence, and he does indeed try to emulate these emotionally stunted losers as some kind of template for cool. As he clumsily tries to find his way in the world, your heart can’t help but go out to him, and Miskell ably embodies the teenage angst that eats at him. Initially an interloper, even if he’s clearly not interrupting anything, he becomes kind of the heart and soul of the play, if only because he’s the only one who really has a future. Ultimately the best thing his backyard pals can do is leave him to it.

God of Carnage runs through April 15 at San Jose Repertory Theatre, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. http://sjrep.com.

Maple and Vine plays through April 22 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. http://act-sf.org.

The Aliens runs through May 5 at SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. http://sfplayhouse.org

God of Carnage: Show #36 of 2012, attended March 31.

Maple and Vine: Show #38 of 2012, attended April 4.

The Aliens: Show #34 of 2012, attended March 24.

Aldo Billingslea and Craig Marker in Othello. Photo by David Allen.

Marin Theatre Company does its first Shakespeare play in years, and I reviewed it in Thursday’s Marin Independent Journal. So click on through to check it out before all those nice things I said about it expire from the site.

Othello, the Moor of Venice runs through April 22 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. http://marintheatre.org.

Show #37 of 2012, attended April 3.

Octopus’s Garden, PianoFight.

Gabrielle Patacsil, Nandi Drayton and Leah Shesky in Octopus’s Garden. Photo by Andy Strong.

By Sam Hurwitt

Scott Herman’s play Octopus’s Garden doesn’t actually have anything to do with octopi, nor gardens, nor even the Beatles. Now being given its world premiere by San Francisco’s PianoFight, the Seattle-based playwright’s first full-length play is instead a funny and bittersweet portrait of a young lesbian couple raising their eight-year-old daughter.

The play opens with a visit from Grant, their daughter Anna’s biological father. Grant is the former roommate and best friend of Lilly, the biological mother. They were never romantically involved, as they’re both gay; he just acted as the donor when Lilly and her partner Claire wanted to have a baby. Just the same, Claire never liked Grant and doesn’t want him in their lives, saying it would just make things more confusing for Anna when they finally get to the discussion about exactly how it is that she has two mommies. He hasn’t seen or heard from them since they moved from New York City to Boulder, Colorado, nine years ago, and he’s never met Anna. He just drove out to see them as soon as he finally got a Christmas card from them.

The play goes back in time, each scene taking place before the last one we saw. We’re told pretty much exactly what happened by the end of the first scene, and then we go back and see the things we’ve already heard about, so there’s not much suspense about what’s going to happen. The scenes that follow deepen our appreciation of the characters, but with perhaps one notable exception (depending on what you assumed), they don’t particularly change our understanding of what happened. However, the structure does raise curiosity about how the story is going to be told—whether we’ll keep going backward or eventually catch back up to the present and see what happens after the first scene.

There is some initial confusion in the second act about whether we are indeed still headed backward or forward in time, because there are some references in the scenes that could be interpreted either way, but it’s not so much of a problem because those particular scenes work fine either way.

Director Devin McNulty gives the play a bright and largely well-paced staging. The set looks like a studio apartment, with a double bed, a loveseat, and a small dinner table set for four, although the furnishings are used in separate scenes and may be in different rooms in the world of the play. Costumer Elyse Wilford accentuates the casual with comfy-looking house clothes. In a particularly clever touch, all the scene-changing music is other tracks from the Beatles’ Abbey Road (the album from which “Octopus’s Garden” hails), some of the blackouts lasting longer than strictly necessary to let the song play a little longer while members of the audience sing along with the familiar ditties under their breath. (When the tiny songlet “Her Majesty” started up at the end of a scene, I thought, “Boy, this had better be a short scene change.”)

The backwards storytelling is particularly effective in unfolding layers of character. Leah Shesky’s Claire seems like a controlling and brittle snob when talking to Lilly about Grant, and she’s hilariously condescending to him over dinner, so it’s a relief to see how warm, playful, and loving she is with Lilly and Anna when it’s just them. We also get a richer view of Lilly over time that shows she isn’t nearly as passive as the initial scenes might lead us to believe—that the couple’s vegetarianism, for instance, was totally her influence. (Anna, as a growing girl, gets to have meatballs: “No, no, we’re still veg, and Anna will be too when she gets older,” Lilly explains.) After seeing how vulnerable Grant is and how gently guarded Lilly is after their long separation, it’s delightful to watch them goofing around together back in the old days, if also bittersweet because of the rough times ahead.

Gabrielle Patacsil is bright and playful as Lilly, and Andrew-Hansen Strong is charming and funny as Grant, though he’s also foot-shufflingly nervous in the first act. He’s a musician, long reconciled to a simple bohemian life, and we occasionally hear him strumming his acoustic guitar and singing (including the title song). As Claire puts it, “I know he’s your friend, but he’s kind of a bum.”

Whether or not they were right to leave Grant behind, Lilly and Claire clearly did a great job raising Anna. As played by 12-year-old Nandi Drayton, she embodies cheerful, matter-of-fact confidence, whether instructing Grant in how to draw a purple octopus or measuring out the smallest carrots if she has to eat any at all.

The play makes much of the logistical challenges encountered by a same-sex couple that wants to have kids. Lilly is grossed out by the idea of artificial insemination from an anonymous donor, and Claire understandably has a problem with the idea of her partner getting pregnant the old-fashioned way. Some of Lilly’s stubbornness feels exaggerated for drama’s sake, but the dialogue is so lively and the cast so appealing that it’s easy to put any disbelief aside and just go with it.

Octopus’s Garden runs through April 7 at the Alcove Theater, 414 Mason Street, San Francisco. It then plays April 14-28 as part of PianoFight’s Triple Threat (alternating with Mission CTRL Goes Public: The $7 Billion IPO and ForePlays’ This American Lie) at Stage Werx, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. http://pianofight.com.

Show #29 of 2012, attended March 17.

Red, Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

John Brummer and David Chandler in Red. Photo by kevinberne.com.

By Sam Hurwitt

British-born director Les Waters has been a consistently outstanding artistic presence at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for the last eight years as associate artistic director for the company. He’s now been named the new artistic director of the prestigious Actors Theatre of Louisville, home of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, so his latest production at Berkeley Rep is also his last as a staff member. At least he’s going out in style, with a superb production of Red, John Logan’s play about legendary abstract expressionist painted Mark Rothko.

Red, which debuted at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2009 and hit Broadway in 2010, is by far Logan’s most acclaimed work, winner of the Tony for best play and several other prestigious awards. He’s written other plays (Never the Sinner, Hauptmann, Riverview), but he’s also a prolific screenwriter of many movies (Hugo, Rango, Coriolanus, Bats, Any Given Sunday, The Aviator, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, Sweeney Todd, The Time Machine, Star Trek: Nemesis) that are notable for many things other than their screenplays.

It’s a tidy, well-crafted, intellectually engaging and often very funny play with enough obvious artifice that it never feels like anything other than a play.  The conversations—arguments, really—in Red are tremendously enjoyable. They don’t sound much like real conversations but are full of grand statements and aria-like extended rants. If people actually said all the things they wish they’d said in retrospect, they might talk this way.

A young man in a suit comes to the studio of painter Mark Rothko. The artist stands the kid in front of one of his paintings and asks him what he sees, but for a long time he doesn’t get a chance to say a word as Rothko preempts any response by fiddling with the lights and berating him to “be a human being” for once in his life. It doesn’t matter, because we already know what his response is going to be—we already know what he sees in the painting. It’s the title of the play.

The kid has come to be Rothko’s new assistant, which makes the difference between his clean suit and the artist’s paint-covered clothing all the more amusing. (I don’t envy whoever has to launder Anna Oliver’s sharp costumes. It’s 1958 or so, and the now-legendary abstract expressionist is working on a commission of a series of murals for the posh Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram building, all in dark reds.

There’s one marvelous scene in which the two furiously apply a ground coat of red paint to a white canvass in time with a forceful classical piece on the phonograph, but that’s the only time we see Rothko at work. The rest of the time he spends talking about himself, occasionally taking a break to talk about his friend and late contemporary Jackson Pollock or to rant about the new pop artists who are ruining art. Although initially deferential and shy to speak, the assistant takes the counter position of youth and modernity. Even right after being screamed at for presuming to answer the artist’s rhetorical question about what a painting needs, he quickly regroups and quietly clarifies himself. He doesn’t presume to be treated as an equal, but he makes himself heard nonetheless.

It would be hard to suspend disbelief enough to think that the assistant is actually a real person. He doesn’t even seem like a composite character drawn from several real people, but just as a device created to be a foil for Rothko. He’s given a name in the program, Ken, but he’s never called anything in the dialogue because he doesn’t really have a name. He only thinks he does.

That’s fine as far as it goes. He serves his purpose admirably well, giving Rothko someone to rant to and providing an opportunity to comment on the artist, analyze his work, challenge him, get him riled, and call him on his bullshit. And, at times, even if we don’t believe in the assistant we feel for him anyway and take pleasure when he asserts himself. The flimsiness of his fictional existence does call attention to itself in a couple of places, though, particularly when Logan suddenly gives him a surprisingly gruesome back story that feels gratuitous, except that it ties in naturally (and luridly) with the color red.

The other conspicuous moment is a mixed bag, because it’s awfully satisfying when it happens and only becomes problematic when you give it any thought. At one point the assistant asks Rothko if he knows anything about him—where he lives, if he’s married, anything. The artist doesn’t, of course, because his only use for the kid, besides to do odd jobs around the studio, is as a mirror that he can use to think and talk about himself. That seems rude and self-centered on the surface, of course, and it is that, but the thing is, Rothko is not wrong to think of this person that way. That really is all he is and all he’s for. It’s unkind to the assistant but not unfair.

John Brummer brings the kid to life admirably well, from his initial hand-wringing nervousness to his quiet, soulful stoicism to his frustrated and incisive intelligence. David Chandler is marvelously imposing as Rothko: stern and quick to anger over a base coat of disdain, always testing and challenging the helper who is by no means his disciple, and never so energized as when he’s talking about himself, which is always. He’s a bully but not quite a blowhard because he really does know what he’s talking about; the trouble is that his only interest in anyone else’s views is to appraise how close they come to his own correct ones.

A rarity in the Rep’s Thrust Stage in that it forgoes a raised stage, Louisa Thompson’s set is a wonder, a terrific portrait of a paint-splattered artist’s studio. Large Rothko canvasses of red rectangles lean against the walls, behind rolling carts covered with paint cans and a sink streaked with red.

At the performance I attended the stage lights went haywire in the middle of an early scene, so the rest of the performance had to be staged under unvarying work lights. (There was even an announcement from the booth about it at the end of that scene, less for the audience’s benefit than to let the actors know they’d have to proceed without lighting cues from now on.) That was unfortunate because there’s a lot of talk in the very next scene about how much Rothko’s work depends on the light in which it’s viewed, which got a laugh as the actors winced at the harsh light that we’d now have to imagine. It’s also a pity because Alexander V. Nichols’s lighting design looks to be very involved and interesting: a couple of times the panels of the rear wall slid aside to reveal a huge bank of large lights pointing right at us, which presumably would have been turned on during a normal performance. They looked pretty cool regardless.

Once the initial lighting disturbance had passed and the work lights became the new normal, however, the change didn’t detract from appreciation of the play. In the performances, the dynamic pace and all the design elements (one matinee’s technical difficulties aside), the Rep production shows what Waters does best—take all the strengths of the play and show them in their best light.

Red runs through May 12 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. http://berkeleyrep.org

Show#33 of 2012, attended March 24.

THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO

High, SHN.

Kathleen Turner and Evan Jonigkeit in High. Photo courtesy of SHN.

By Sam Hurwitt

The last time SHN brought screen icon Kathleen Turner to the Bay Area, in 2007, she was costarring with Bill Irwin in a superb production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, straight from Broadway. Turner’s current SHN show at the Curran Theatre, High, is also fresh from Broadway, but the difference is that this one did very poorly there last April, opening on a Tuesday and closing by that Sunday. But the producers must figure there’s life in the old dog yet, or at least that Turner’s star wattage would be able to sustain it on tour. The current Curran run is only five days, but at least this time it was planned that way, clearing out just in time to bring in Jonathan Pryce in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker next week.

High is written by Matthew Lombardo, who also wrote Tea at Five, the one-woman show about Katharine Hepburn that’s been a vehicle for Star Trek: Voyager’s Kate Mulgrew and passed through Marines Memorial Theatre a few years back. This one’s a more personal story for Lombardo, as it’s all about hardcore drug addiction and recovery or lack thereof. Lombardo tells his own story about having been a junkie in a note in the playbill, and it’s sobering to say the least, although nowhere near as grotesque as the stories told in the play.

It may surprise anyone who’s seen to ads to learn that High is not a solo show. It costars fellow original cast member Evan Jonigkeit as young addict Cody and Broadway understudy Tim Altmeyer as priest Father Michael. Turner plays Sister Jamie, a plainclothes nun who works as a counselor in a Catholic drug rehab center. Jamie couldn’t be farther from the by-the-book Sister Aloysius in Doubt. She cusses a lot, is a recovering alcoholic herself, and generally doesn’t seem to give a crap about anyone. When Cody comes into their care—a teenage gay junkie hustler found after an overdose alongside his dead 14-year-old lover—she tells her supervisor, father Michael, that they should turn him away. He’s not the kind of good Catholic with a slight pill or drinking problem that they cater to. But Father Michael insists that they take him and that Jamie be the one to treat him, and his unwillingness to hear her objections (even the most basic one, that Cody has to want to get better before he can get better) is one of the initially puzzling subplots of the play. Can Cody get off the drugs and turn on to that Jesus high instead?  Well, I guess we’ll see.

Turner has had a public battle with alcoholism herself, so the fact that she followed her acclaimed turn as the raging drunkard Martha in Virginia Woolf with the role of a drug counselor with an aching weakness for the sauce is interesting. Her performance as Sister Jamie is, alas, problematic. Turner seems badly hampered by shortness of breath that slows down her delivery considerably and segments it into bite-size chunks that sound a bit robotic, particularly in the long stretches of monologue that she’s saddled with. Her perpetual windedness also has the effect of making her always husky voice sound muffled and slurred, which makes it hard to tell sometimes if Sister Jamie has had a relapse.

Turner does better in scenes with other people, where her dialogue is peppered with wisecracks that sound a lot more clever than they actually are, partly because of the emphasis she puts on them and partly because her celebrity and a receptive audience conspire to turn anything that sounds vaguely like a punchline into a laugh riot. Consequently, these zingers don’t look like much of anything on the page: “You call me lady one more like and I will make you cry,” f’rinstance, or, “I cuss. A lot.” And whenever she cusses, all the better.

This is not a comedy, however. Far from it. It’s a grueling series of confrontations with Cody in counseling sessions, where she’s such a hardass and he’s so surly and confrontational that there’s not much danger of developing a fondness for either of them. We’ll soon hear horror stories from their youth that make us understand how each of them got to be this way, which makes it easy to sympathize with their younger selves while still not caring a whit for the people they’ve become. That makes it hard to have much investment in the question of whether Sister Jamie will manage to save Cody’s life or her own soul or whatever.

Jonigkeit is very effective at making Cody an unbearable little shit, but he’s also good at conveying the hurt and desperation underneath his defiant folderol. Altmeyer is filled with charm in his initial scene, when Father Michael is convincing Jamie to take Cody on, but as the priest becomes more stubborn and evasive, it becomes increasingly hard to believe in his as a character. He becomes more grounded toward the end, just in time to lend the heavy-handed conclusion some gravitas, but it’s a very mixed bag with him for the great yawning middle of the play.

Every time Turner’s Jamie is left alone in the room, she launches into a monologue about her wild years. There is eventually a point to these stories, and when it arrives it’s very effective, but unfortunately that means that for the first two-thirds of the play (and, for that matter, the remainder of the play after that very effective moment) they seem completely pointless, an irritating encumbrance. Lombardo’s dialogue isn’t stellar, but at least it has a rhythm to it and gives the tough nun a chance to fire off some quips. But the direct-address passages are a drag, filled with a lot of generic observations about how life is made up of truth and lies, so it comes as a shock when her anecdotes about raiding her dad’s liquor cabinet and her attraction to bad boys suddenly become deeply relevant to our understanding of her character (such as it is). Oh, and she tells that same damn fable about the scorpion and the frog that we’ve all heard countless times, including in so many other plays, TV shows, and movies (Mr. Arkadin, The Crying Game, Natural Born Killers, Skin Deep, Drive, Star Trek: Voyager, CSI, etc., etc., etc.) that it makes me groan whenever a character starts telling that story. Get some new material already, Aesop.

The show is directed by Rob Ruggiero, senior artistic associate at Hartford, Connecticut’s TheaterWorks (not to be confused with our own TheatreWorks in Palo Alto), where the play premiered in 2010. (The Connecticut company is currently best known for the recent flap over casting white actors as Puerto Rican characters in The Motherfucker in the Hat.) Ruggiero seems to want to make the play a lot more gripping than it actually is, with some startling suspense music from sound designer Vincent Olivieri for scenes you might not otherwise realize are supposed to be suspenseful. The problem is that, while there’s some power to the tales of the terrible things that have happened in the past, it’s hard to get caught up in the drama of what’s happening in the present, even when what’s going on involves a whole lot of hollering and running around and who knows what-all. Given some of the desperate behavior (including some abrupt nudity) on display in High, it’s impressive in a way that it packs so little impact.

High plays through March 25 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. http://shnsf.com

Show #31 of 2012, attended March 22.