Downsize This
The financial shenanigans that brought the economy to the brink of collapse are tailor-made for satire, and Bay Area theater companies were quick to rise to the task, from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Too Big to Fail a couple years ago to No Nude Men’s Hermes this spring. Now Berkeley’s Central Works—which does nothing but collaboratively created new plays—gets into the act with Patricia Milton’s comedy Reduction in Force, directed by company codirector (and usual playwright) Gary Graves.
Vamping the Vampire
He may be long in the tooth, but he never gets old. The big daddy of all vampires, Count Dracula is one of those characters that everyone knows, and his story has been told time and time again, never quite in the same way. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has been adapted hundreds of times for every imaginable medium. According to the program, Center REPertory Company’s production at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts uses the earliest stage version by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, but this is balderdash. Some scenes remain from the 1927 play that starred Bela Lugosi on Broadway in the 1920s and Frank Langella in the 1970s, leading to their respective Dracula movies*, but the bulk of it has been so radically rewritten for this production that it’s bizarre to see no adaptor credited.
Oh That Norman
The Norman Conquests isn’t your standard trilogy. The plays in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedic 1973 triptych don’t happen one after another but all at more or less the same time with the same characters in different areas of the same house: Round and Round the Garden in the garden, Table Manners in the dining room, and Living Together in the living room. Ackbourn crafted them in a rotating fashion, writing the first scene of the first play, then the first scene of the second play, then the first scene of the third, before proceeding to the second scene of the first play, and round and round between the three plays until they were all finished. That’s more or less how the action plays out, too. Some events in any two plays are clearly happening simultaneously, while other scenes fill in the gaps of time the other plays skip over. The idea is that you can see them in any order, and that’s more or less true. (I wouldn’t recommend starting off with Living Together, but more on that later.)
