There and Here: London, Blue Lake

Not to be outdone by the glittering past season on Broadway, London theatre shines with stars, writes the NY Times Ben Brantley: that's Gillian Anderson as Nora in a praised production of Ibsen's Doll's House, and Helen Mirren stars in Racine's Phedre. Not to be outdone by the New York revival, London has its own Waiting for Godot starring Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart.

Meanwhile back on the North Coast, Dell'Arte opens the Mad River Festival with a revival of its own first hit, Intrigue at Ah-Pah in its chilly outdoor backyard theatre in Blue Lake Thursdays through Sundays at 8, beginning tonight (June 25) and continuing to July 12. This is usually a community event, with lots of highly bundled people sipping wine, eating grapes and minding children. Did I mention it gets a little cold after sundown?

Broadway Revived

The Lincoln Center revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone--besides being Barack's choice for the show to take Michelle to see--is one representative of an exceptionally strong Broadway season, especially for plays.

 The New York theatre season began with a sense of catastrophe--with empty streets and empty seats, as the Wall Street financial crisis morphed into the Great Recession, and tourism threatened to dry up completely.

But it will end--officially with the Tonys--in triumph, and more high quality plays and musical revivals than in recent memory, including The Seagull, Exit the King, God of Carnage, Hair, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Mary Stuart, Next to Normal, The Norman Conquests, reasons to be pretty, Billy Elliot, West Side Story and Waiting for Godot.

New York Times critic Ben Brantley was effusive as well as descriptive in his summary piece. So why did it happen? Brantley offers several reasons, noting that when tourists deserted Times Square, the New York theatre audience returned, and fortunately found the quality that kept them coming. While a lot about this season has to be coincidence, the return of that audience is fascinating in itself--or rather, the existence of a new New York audience.

Years ago, I interviewed Jason Robards, Jr. about New York theatre, since he was the second of three generations of actors who were part of it. He dated the decline to the rise of suburbia, which took the traditional New York audience away. "When I was starting out just after World War II," he told me, "my father came to see me and he told me---'this is terrible! When I was an actor, there were 700 road shows out, and two hundred some-odd theatres on Broadway!'"Even when I was starting out we still had 134 theatres in New York, and many road shows and stock jobs and resident theatre jobs...Now I think theatre in New York is going to become like the opera, if it isn't already becoming that: a small, specialized thing."

But lacking that local audience base, for the past decade or so Broadway concentrated on spectacles for tourists. The Disneyfied Times Square more than symbolized that idea.

Somehow, New York City itself seems to have grown a new theatre audience, made up of residents and those who may commute but consider themselves New Yorkers. This is a trend that bears watching.

Of course, not everything about this season screams theatre Renaissance. Many if not most of those shows were revivals. Broadway and New York theatre won't return to the vibrancy of former days until new plays are the talk of the town.

Arsenic and Old Lace: Auntie Mayhem at Ferndale Rep

 “A play was like a watch that laughed.” So wrote theatre critic Walter Kerr, describing the mechanism of Broadway comedies of the 30s and 40s, like The Front Page, Room Service, You Can’t Take It With You and the 1939 play now on stage at Ferndale Repertory Theatre, Arsenic and Old Lace.

 Situations and relationships get wound up tighter and tighter in the first act, and fly apart in the mayhem of the second. There are typically lots of characters and several simultaneous disasters-in-progress. Arsenic and Old Lace is best known today for the movie version starring Cary Grant and directed by Frank Capra, but the play was a Broadway hit during World War II, running for three and a half years and 1444 performances.

 Several of the actors in the original cast are also in the movie: Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the maiden aunt sisters, and John Alexander as nephew Teddy Brewster, who believes he is really Teddy Roosevelt. The movie is pretty faithful to the play, with a few added cinematic scenes and differences in detail.

 The play (the only success of Kansas playwright Joseph Kesselring) begins in a more leisurely fashion, with one of the elderly aunts serving tea in the front room of a solidly traditional Brooklyn house, to her neighbor, Reverend Harper. It’s clear that the aunts are beloved for their cheery charity, but the Reverend is troubled by the romance between his daughter, Elaine, and another nephew, Mortimer Brewster. 

He objects to Mortimer spending so much time in certain unseemly places. That’s his job: Mortimer is a theatre critic. But the sedate witticisms of this scene constitute the only quiet moments of the play. The young lovers, Mortimer and Elaine, sweep in and announce their engagement, but after Elaine goes, Mortimer learns that his aunts have expanded their charity work: they bring peace to lonely old men by poisoning their elderberry wine and burying them in the cellar--with an appropriately prayerful funeral service.

 Further complications ensue, principally generated by the sudden appearance of a third nephew, Jonathan Brewster, the black sheep who returns as an international criminal looking for a hideout, and a place for his faithful plastic surgeon companion, Dr. Herman Einstein, to give him yet another new face. The one he’s currently wearing reminds people of Boris Karloff (the famous Frankenstein), which enrages him. (Original Broadway production audiences got additional laughs because Jonathan was played by Boris Karloff.)

 In the Ferndale production, director Renee Grinnell has the story and the cast moving briskly across the handsome set, though there is so much going on that the play pushes the clock to two and a half hours, with intermission. Several of the performances are reminiscent of the movie: Wanda Stamp has the same sweet charm (if not the same funny walk) as Josephine Hull playing Aunt Abby, Steven Fontain is an even more political cartoonish Teddy than the movie’s John Alexander, and Evan Needham sneaks in some Peter Lorre notes as Dr. Einstein.

 Lexus Carlton Landry as Jonathan is even more menacing (with a deliciously chilling laugh) than Raymond Massey in the movie, and Marilyn McCormick as Aunt Martha has no comparison—with her authoritative voice and the rapturous and murderous gleam in her eye, she ups her auntie.

 Sam Cord has the most difficult role as Mortimer, and it is his energy, clarity and physicality that propel the play forward. He doesn’t quite have the expressions and moves of Cary Grant that made the movie so funny, but then, who does?

 Brittany Gonzales (Elaine), Samuel Dallas McComber (Rev. Harper and Lt. Rooney), Tom McCarthy (Mr. Witherspoon), Neal Schoonmaker (Officer O’Hara) and Denim Ohmit (Officer Brophy) contribute to this competent production.

 In fact, the clockwork machinery tends to obscure just how weird this play is: part romance, part thriller, it’s a macabre comedy with the mechanism of farce. Even Frank Capra couldn’t settle on a consistent style for it. The moral ambiguities at the heart of it are never quite dealt with, though the pieces are there. Too many gears may be going for one evening, but Ferndale fans will find some laughter in the old machinery yet.

 Arsenic and Old Lace is at Ferndale Rep for only two more weekends: June 5,6,12,13 at 8:00 pm, with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on June 7 and 14. Incidentally, though there are funny lines about theatre and critics in this show, for my money the funniest play with critics as characters is still Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound.

 Coming Up: The second-year students of Dell'Arte International's MFA program present Tell Me A Story, an evening of participatory storytelling, Thursday through Sunday, June 4-7 at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. Looking forward, Dell’Arte kicks off the annual Mad River Festival on June 20 by presenting a Lifetime Achievement Award to stage and screen actor Rene Auberjonois, in a ceremony followed by festivities (featuring the Joyce Hough Band and Joanne Rand) in the Rooney Amphitheatre beginning at 8:30 pm.

This North Coast Weekend

North Coast Rep continues the musical The Producers, reviewed below. Ferndale Rep opens the classic comedy Arsenic and Old Lace for a three weekend run, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. with Sunday matinees at 2. Members of the Dell'Arte School Class of 2009 present their "Finals" in the form of six short plays, Thursday through Saturday at 8 in the Carlo.

The Producers and Quixote at North Coast Rep & Prep

As a teenager, Mel Brooks' summer job at a resort hotel was insulting guests, parodying popular singers and improvising outrageous acts as a kind of court jester called a tummler. Entertainment was a major attraction for the mostly Jewish patrons of mountain resorts in New York and Massachusetts. The stage shows were directly in the vaudeville tradition, cross-fertilized with burlesque, variety theatre and early Broadway musicals.

Vaudeville trained the first stars of radio and television, and provided an early staple: the comedy and variety program. Before his famous films, Mel Brooks wrote for one of the best of these: Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows.

Vaudevillians were versatile: Comedians like Bob Hope sang and danced; singers and dancers like Donald O'Connor did comedy. But after adapting for a final burst of glory in ’70s TV (The Carol Burnett Show, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and even The Electric Company) the vaudeville tradition faded. It is alive again in Mel Brooks' musical, The Producers, now on stage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka.

It's all there: the structure of jokes, and of running jokes (sometimes just a word, like "Elizabeth"), and of ethnic humor that Brooks broadened to religious and sexual preference identities. The play's first act in particular is an extended vaudeville sketch, satirizing institutions (the Broadway theatre and its producers, and "unhappy" accountants) with contrasting connivers and their sexy blonde assistant. Brooks finds new ways to be outrageous and vulgar, with bizarre comic invention but without meanness. This, and the 1940s-flavored music (also by Brooks) is why The Producers is so different from most new musicals.

The NCRT ensemble performs that first act with hilarious effect. David Powell as the boisterous producer Max Bialystock and Ethan Vaughan as the meek yet larcenous accountant Leo Bloom confidently deliver character and comedy, along with excellent singing. Bloom realizes that by raising much more money than the show costs (which Bialystock does by wooing lots of little old ladies), the producers can make a fortune if they don't have to pay these investors any profits because the show flops.

Rigel Schmitt as the baby-faced Nazi playwright of the "worst play ever written," which guarantees failure, is so right that the opening night audience laughed as soon as he appeared. His backup-singing pigeons were a bonus. The act ends with a show-stopping, walker-stomping production number that's just amazing. Kudos to choreographer Anthony J. Hughes.

The second act is more conventional musical than comedy, perhaps because its centerpiece is the premiere of the flop -- which of course is a hit -- Springtime for Hitler. If you've seen either of the movies or the touring show CenterArts brought to the Van Duzer, you know how much this scene depends for its comic frenzy on the big Broadway trimmings. This production does its best, and though it's funny it doesn't quite rise to that first act finale. Still, John Ludington is memorably zany as director-turned-star Roger De Bris playing Hitler as a cross between a gay Al Jolson, David Bowie and a schnauzer.

Excellent costumes (by Marcia Hudson), ingenious staging, glittering dancing girls and a versatile ensemble (especially Adina Lawson and Danielle Cicon), fine performances by Keilli Marble as the Swedish bombshell Ulla and Gabriel Holman as De Bris' swishy assistant, and a backstage band all combine to make this a delightful evening. Tom Phillips directed, with musical direction by Dianne Zuleger. Enjoy the controversial wit of Mel Brooks (this 2001 play is only now premiering in Germany) and the solid echoes of vaudeville.

The Producers continues at North Coast Rep Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 until June 20.

Don Quijote de la Mancha

In its own way, Cervantes' The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is also parody, of knight-errants and the chivalric romances. But like Brooks and Broadway, it also supports what it parodies. The first and second year students of Northcoast Preparatory and Performing Arts Academy began their stage version presented in Gist Hall last weekend by reciting the virtues of chivalry.

This generative classic of fiction by an aging unsuccessful playwright was adapted for this production by its director, Gretha Omey, who acted and was an artistic director in Spain. In addition to theatre, she teaches Spanish at Northcoast Prep, and students performed partly in that language (plus a little French and Italian). It was an intriguing adaptation and a sparkling production, with stage-filling ensemble dances, mood-setting music, brilliant costumes, a giant puppet and a steed for Quixote that looked like it had momentarily escaped from the Kinetic Sculpture Race.

Silas McIlraith as Don Quijote (the production's preferred spelling) heroically kept the play moving through moods of drama, comedy, pathos and action, with the delightful assistance of Gina Montagna as Sancho Panza. Sandra Gbeintor, Larkin O'Shea and Kirra Moon were particularly impressive, but the whole huge cast performed well. Add the remarkable musicians and other participants too numerous to mention, and this talented cohort bears watching.

This North Coast Weekend

The first and second year students of Northcoast Prep present Cervantes’ comic classic, Don Quijote de la Mancha, adapted and directed by Gretha Omey, on Wednesday and Thursday, May 20 and 21, and Saturday and Sunday, May 23 and 24, in the Gist Hall Theatre at HSU at 7:30.

North Coast Repertory Theatre opens Mel Brooks musical comedy, The Producers on Thursday, May 21 at 8.

On Friday and Saturday (May 22-3) the Arcata Playhouse hosts a circus adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by the San Francisco Circus, at the kid-friendly time of 7 pm.

The Arcata Arts Institute will be performing Jean Paul Satre's one act play, No Exit, and monologues from the works of Christopher Durang on Thursday and Friday at 7:30 pm in the Arcata High School Multi-Purpose Room.

The second group of thesis plays by Dell'Arte School students is performed May 21-24, at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. As noted below, the HLO/CR production of the musical Little Women concludes Friday and Saturday at 7:30.

Little Women

I feel pretty good about my review of Little Women, produced by the Humboldt Light Opera and College of the Redwoods, so I'm reproducing it below. I'm not happy with all my reviews, for one reason or another, but this one is okay.

A couple of additions to the historical background: The humorous newspaper article by Louisa May Alcott I refer to, was in the form of a letter she submitted under the name Tribulation Periwinkle to the Springfield MA Republican. It's described and excerpted in the introduction to the new book, American Trancendentalism: A History by Philip Gura (Hill and Wang.) Referring to Concord, MA, she writes: "No gossip concerning this immortal town seems to be considered too trivial for the public." She writes of a new hotel for visitors to "this modern Mecca," eager to see Emerson (who "will walk by at 4 pm") or hear her father, Bronson Alcott, (who will "converse from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m.")

Later in this book, it's mentioned that Bronson Alcott's own book was an account of the education he provided for his daughters. Apparently Emerson was hard put to say anything in its favor.

As it happens, there's a review of several books about Margaret Fuller (mentioned below) in the May 24 issue of the New York Review of Books. Fuller was also educated by her father, and her achievements were substantial. She had read Virgil and Cicero by the age of ten, and Horace, Livy and Tacitus in her teens--all in the original Latin. This level of achievement was unusual, especially for a girl, but not entirely unknown among these New England families. Josiah Quincy, son of the president of Harvard, was reading Virgil by age six. Thomas Wentworth Higginson entered Harvard at 13.

In 1868, Louisa May Alcott created a classic American story that enthralled and inspired generations of (mostly) girls, by writing about aspects of her own life and family—and also by ignoring other aspects.

In Little Women, a mother and four sisters are isolated in a small New England town, dreaming their dreams despite an absent father and poverty that contrasts with the better off characters around them. Actually, Alcott’s family was fairly famous (though comparatively poor). Her father, Bronson Alcott, began and ran a well-known school, and was associated with the liberal thinkers known as Transcendentalists. He took particular pride in educating his daughters, and among Louisa May’s personal teachers were Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Their presence made Concord (and her own house) a magnet for reporters and tourists, which she herself noted in a satiric newspaper account.

She had strong and accomplished women models as well, including her own mother, an activist for womens’ voting rights and abolition of slavery. Perhaps the most brilliant and independent women of the era, Margaret Fuller, taught for awhile at her father’s school.

But when the publisher of her romance novels (much like Jo’s in Little Women) requested something in another genre—an uplifting book for girls—Louisa May Alcott concentrated a story that transcended its time and place, and elevated creativity from Puritan disrepute to a natural element in moral development. In some of the many stage, screen, etc. versions since, bits of her background were added back. A little got into the 2005 Broadway musical version, currently performed by the Humboldt Light Opera at the College of the Redwoods.

Even more than the novel, the musical emphasizes the quest of second-oldest daughter Jo March to become a writer. Some of her swashbuckling fantasies are acted out on stage (with spirited performances, particularly by Coral Bourne), but her success comes from writing the home truths, and by her devotion to others. Essie Bertain as Jo capably unites the show, maturing before our eyes from the petulant bravado of adolescence to a centered young woman.

The script dramatizes the novel’s most cherished moments, but with so many characters, the other players must make the best use of their brief time on stage. Shaelan Salas is sweet and then steady as the eldest daughter, Meg. As Amy (the youngest), Rachael Fales breaks through with her energy and commitment. Jessica Malone is so perfectly pretty and angelic as Beth, that even if you didn’t know the story and only the conventions of melodrama, you’d be sure she’s doomed. But she’s affecting anyway, with an especially attractive voice. Her duets with Bill Ryder (as the wealthy Mr. Lawrence) and especially her second act duet with Bertain felt to me like the show’s most emotionally effective moments. The final Bertain-Sharkey duet was another high point.

Tyler Rich (Laurie), Tandy Floyd (Marmee), Valerie Bourne (Aunt March) and especially Kevin Sharkey as Professor Bhaer played their important supporting roles well. Since this is an HLO production, directed by Carol McWhorter Ryder, with musical direction (and piano accompaniment) by Sharon Welton, the singing is superior.

Some of the songs are charming, some are Broadway- bombastic, and with so many characters and so much to do (and sing about), plus frequent clamorous scene changes (though the crew was very efficient), the play feels choppy, without dramatic momentum. The costumes, designed by Kevin Sharkey, are dazzling, though I’m not sure how well they support the impression of poverty.

With comic moments in the mix, Little Women is reasonably entertaining for those not already devoted to the story. I can’t speak for devotees—mostly what I recall from watching the 1949 movie on TV with my sisters was getting a little buzz from June Allyson. But maybe all that devotees need to know is that the characters are more contemporary interpretations but still the same March girls, and their favorite scenes are given life, ready to evoke memories and tantalize another generation.

Little Women concludes its run this Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 in the CR Forum Theatre.

Does This Explain It All?

I'm fascinated with a dialogue in the March/April issue of the Dramatist, in which playwrights Marsha Norman ('Night, Mother, and--among other works, the book and for the musical The Secret Garden, seen recently at Ferndale Rep) and Christopher Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, which coincidentally was also on stage at the Rep recently, performed by the teen ensemble.)

They were talking about a playwrighting class they taught together at the Julliard School in New York. The students, described as a year or two out of college (grad students then?), numbered only four in the beginning, though the next year another class of four was added to the four who remained for a second year.

After describing how they came to teach the class together, the playwrights talked about their approach and how things worked out. Early on, Marsha Norman described the effect of the second year students on the first years': "They're also very good about helping the first year writers learn to talk in the Julliard way. We really do speak about plays in a very particular language, to the point that when they leave us they go out and start writers' groups and still kind of travel in this pack. Which is great, because what you need as a writer is to feel that you're in some kind of group that's going to help you. You can't make it if you're out there by yourself."

There is no denying the truth of those words I've put in bold. But the spectre of a pre-elite is pretty stark, as is the danger of groupthink. Going to "the right schools" is pretty much defined by the advantage those schools provide, not just in excellent teaching but in excellent connections. Theatre is susceptible to this, especially since it requires that people work together. Actors need producers need playwrights need directors need each other. Right now the road to success in American theatre (as well as TV and movies) often runs through Julliard, Yale Drama, Carnegie Mellon and no more than a half dozen other programs. (Here on the North Coast, it runs through Dell'Arte, and in design and technical areas, HSU. )

Those eight students are likely to be among the most serious and most talented, but they are also most likely to be from upper middle class big city families. Now they are being formed into packs, which will hurt them a little (if they come up against other gangs) but will help them much, much more.

There are other ways to form and become part of groups that support and advise each other. The young black playwright from HSU, John ADEkoje, is now plugged into a couple of strong support groups: Boston University, which has a production arm in the Boston Playwrights Theatre, and an informal but very involved group of black playwrights on the East Coast.

The summer Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center in Connecticut also was an institutional support mechanism, which re-generated and broadened itself every summer with a dozen or so new playwrights from various backgrounds and parts of the country. That's much less the case there now, and it's more of a pre-elite situation. O'Neill participants never forgot each other, or what they learned there: not only how to approach plays, but how to support each other.


This isn't all that interests me in this dialogue. Norman and Durang have interesting things to say about how they approach the class, which also suggest what playwrighting and theatre are like these days. The playwrights are encouraging, positive and supportive, but they try to get the student to focus on some practical matters. Norman suggests that "On page eight you have to tell the audience when they can go home," meaning that early in play, the audience should know what the question is that the play is asking, so when it is answered, the play is over.

"Rules" like this are distillations of experience, and I especially like suggestions that get writers (and others involved) to think about what they're doing from the audience perspective. August Wilson told me that one of the most useful pieces of advice he got at the O'Neill was to make sure that at the beginning of the play, the audience knows where the action is, and when. It's very simple, but it's smart, because if the audience is trying to figure that out, they miss what else is going on. And we all make sense of things based on time and place.

Something else that emerged from this class I learned at the O'Neill and elsewhere: it is very useful for a playwright to see the play read by actors, and to get actor feedback, because it is usually specific to their character, or to how that character might or might not say something. That's another major advantage of a place like Julliard, which attracts excellent acting students.

Another "tool" that Marsha Norman uses also suggests that not everything works for every play. To test the attraction or power of a play idea, she has everyone write five sentences about their play ("This is a play about___. It takes place___. The main character wants___. It begins when___. It ends when___. ) Then after each 5 sentence summary is read, students are asked which ones they remember (other than their own.) Norman says that out of 20, the most that are remembered is usually five. And then she asks, which would you pay to see? The money question, in both senses. Usually it's one, or two.

Two would be about right. It's the ten percent rule which governs the arts, and possibly a lot more. When he was director of the O'Neill, Lloyd Richards told me that it's uncannily consistent: of the plays that come in, 10% are passed on by the first readers. Then 10% of those are considered worthy by the judges. And so on.

But I wonder if this exercise doesn't have some pitfalls. I'd like to see added to the mix those five sentence descriptions of a few other plays, like say Waiting for Godot. It would be interesting to see if it makes the cut. (Maybe it's worth mentioning in this regard that Christopher Durang told me that the reason he stopped sending plays to the O'Neill was that he was afraid the first readers would screen him out and he'd be crushed.)

But this isn't to criticize their teaching techniques. I'm frankly in awe of the whole thing--of the attention and care they give, the discussions they have about every student's work. But I'm also very aware of the many of us who never got and never will get that kind of attention and support.

This North Coast Weekend

Humboldt Light Opera and College of the Redwoods presents the musical version of Louisa May Alcott's classic story, Little Women, Fridays and Saturdays through May 23, starting at 7:30, with a 2 p.m. matinee this Sunday (the 17th), in the CR Forum Theatre. My review in the NC Journal is here. Photo: Essie Bertain as Jo and Jessica Malone as Beth.

The Dell'Arte School students who created the Glasnost Family show last Christmas present original short plays as their individual thesis projects. The first set is this weekend, Thursday through Saturday and the second May 21-24, at 8 p.m. in the Carlo.

Jeff DeMark performs a selection of his stories together with music by UKExperience at the Westhaven Center for the Arts on Saturday night.

At the Arcata Playhouse, this is the final weekend for Third Base, a comic presentation by Nick Trotter and Jerry Lee Wallace Thursday May 14 through Sunday at 8.

This North Coast Weekend

Jeff DeMark does his 200th North Coast solo performance Friday night (May 8) at Muddy's Hot Cup in Arcata. He's presenting his Writing My Way Out of Adolescence for the first time in two years--and the Great Recession price is right: just $3.89.

The Humboldt Light Opera and College of the Redwoods opens the musical version of the classic Little Women on Friday (through May 23) at 8 in the CR Forum Theatre.

Third Base, the Jerry Lee Wallace and Nick Trotter clown show, is at the Arcata Playhouse Thursday through Sunday at 8, and again next weekend.

The HSU Ten Minute Play Festival concludes this weekend, Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 in the Gist Hall Theatre.

The Tainted Muse

A new book by Robert Brustein explores prejudices in Shakespeare, reviewed below.

Shakespeare With Prejudice

The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare's Works and Times
by Robert Brustein
280 Pages
Yale University Press

Robert Brustein is one of the most familiar names of authority in American theatre. He is perhaps most widely known as a critic and a public speaker, but within theatre he is recognized as the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre at Yale and the American Repertory Theatre near Harvard. He has also written and adapted plays, and is now officially enshrined in the Theatre Hall of Fame.

This book focuses on an uncomfortable area of surmise: the evidence for various gender, racial and ethnic prejudices in the plays of William Shakespeare. Some are obvious and often discussed: the Jewish Shylock, the Blackamoor Othello, the shrew that is tamed. Others that Brustein emphasizes are not so widely held: he considers Hamlet as drenched in misogyny, for example.

Brustein focuses on six prejudices: misogyny (or the hatred women), dislike of womanish men ("effemiphobia"), the correlative prejudice in favor of macho men, a political prejudice against "mobocracy" and for monarchy, racial prejudice and religious prejudice.

Though Brustein recognizes that prejudices and how they are seen to be expressed is a matter of interpretation that changes according to the times, he is using current standards, especially as applied by today's cultural/political theorists. (He is however, mercifully a better writer.) He traces Shakespeare's exploration of these themes through various characters, and finds (at least to his satisfaction) lines of development in the playwright's attitudes.

All in all, the salient effect of this book may be to counteract the too easy enthusiasm for Shakespeare as a mirror of whatever the current attitudes are. On the other hand, since we are such an either/or society, such sweeping charges of prejudices could taint readings and discourage productions--particularly by producers sensitive to political pressure groups and the various loudmouths who can get pretty vicious.

In fact this does seem the book of a scholar but mostly a producer, who has faced such controversies when mounting these plays. Less obvious is the approach of the playwright, who does things for any number of reasons having more to do with the internal dynamics of the play--as well as the players, the playhouse, the public and so on.

So while I can take Brustein's interpretations into account (though I don't agree with them all by any means) I see them as interpretations from a particular point of view, at a particular time. I haven't lived quite as long as Brustein, but even I have seen the meaning imputed to various words and actions change over the years. Still, a contemporary production should face these issues without becoming overwhelmed or especially defined by them. This book can be a useful tool to that end.

But it's only one point of view. Brustein is mostly pretty literal. He doesn't deal with the symbolisms and mechanisms of the Elizabethan theatre in the way that, say, Northrop Frye does. He acknowledges that in his terms, Shakespeare infused characters like Othello and Shylock with a humanity than other authors of his time did not. But my guess is that Shakespeare the playwright also likely had other considerations beyond such statements.

So this book goes on my Shakespeare shelf, to be consulted when I'm seeing one of these plays, along with studies that take quite different approaches.

This North Coast Weekend

The annual HSU Ten Minute Play Festival begins tonight at 7:30 in the Gist Hall Theatre, and continues Thursdays through Saturdays this weekend and next. Check HSU Stage for more. Also opening this weekend, the Ferndale Rep annual All-Teen production--this year they are doing two Christopher Durang plays: the classic Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You, with its traditional curtain-raiser, Actor's Nightmare. It's Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 at the Rep theatre. The Dell'Arte School presents its clown show Thursday through Saturday at 8 in the Carlo. And The Misunderstood Badger plays its second and final weekend at the Arcata Playhouse, Friday and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 7. I review it in this week's North Coast Journal.

The Misunderstood Badger

The mascot of the University of Wisconsin’s Big Ten football team is (like the state of Wisconsin’s) the badger. There’s a costumed Bucky Badger on the sideline, and thousands of screaming fans identifying themselves as badgers. But Professor Harold Burroughs of that university takes this badger thing even further.

 As portrayed by David Ferney in this solo show The Misunderstood Badger currently at the Arcata Playhouse, the fictional professor is obsessed by this “noble but misunderstood” animal, and begins to identify with it.

 We see the professor act out scenes in the wild (some in photo projections), recount the childhood origins of his fixation and a dream encounter with a giant badger who has a taste for Scotch and cigars. We hear portions of his badger research lectures, delivered in a faintly Southern, faintly 1930’s accent that reminded me at times of actor Charles Ruggles, the fussy big game hunter in the Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn comedy, Bringing Up Baby.

 But in this piece the humor flashes with surreal discovery, and hints of dread. Burroughs digs out some badger lore, like early American badger-baiting (sending dogs to harass badgers for entertainment), from which comes the verb “to badger,” describing human behavior towards the animal, not the other way around. Human-badger transference is a theme played in various ways, including Burrough’s elaborate attempt to learn one badger’s true name.

 David Ferney’s wrote this solo show with fellow Four on the Floor member Nick Trotter. Trotter also contributes slide guitar interludes, Greg Lojko handles sound and lights, and Bruce Marrs did the painting and construction of the evocative badger hat-mask, which Ferney deploys with comic magic.

 In its first official performance of what I presume is still a work in progress, Ferney brought his considerable physical and vocal skills to this character. I experienced the show as entertaining but uncertain. I was intrigued, but never sure where it wanted to go. For example, the program quotes from Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and it’s clear enough that Burroughs feels that call. If this show’s intent was only to portray a befuddled professor gripped by badgermania, then it could be clearer.

 Tone determines our attitude. The mad scholar is a comic type that must go back before the Romans, and was in the repertoire of vaudeville-trained comedians, so it’s familiar from movies. Even though this piece seemed to at least nod in that direction (as with the professor’s name of Burroughs, you know, the badger burrows…you dig?) Ferney wasn’t broad or frenetic enough to push this into madcap sketch territory.

 Instead, his more deliberate pace suggested the intent to offer a dimensional character, and certainly the professor’s clueless projection and identification with the badger had autobiographical back story, as well as those surreal but also obvious dreams. But that went only so far. For example, apart from his clichéd professor appearance, we don’t learn much about any contrast between his wild yearnings and any academic and civilized life. And why of all animals the badger? Is it accidental, so essentially his obsession could be any geeky frenzy?

 There’s a mother lode of connections between the badger as a digger and the scholar who digs for facts, (Wisconsin is reputedly the Badger State not because of the animal, but because of its miners who dig like badgers) but while this possibility is mimed, it seems otherwise unmined.

Digging into the unconscious is another theme that seemed partially realized. There were hints of a mythic realm, of Native American stories in which animals and humans transform into each other, but this also came and went. Maybe the intent was to remain ambiguous in that ol’ postmodern portmanteau way. In any case, it’s got a lot of absorbing and entertaining moments. I guess we can identify with an awkward guy possessed of a helpless obsession and no self-awareness. But I left wanting more meat on this badger’s bones. The Misunderstood Badger continues at the Arcata Playhouse this Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 7.

 Coming Up:  There’s a new Great Recession pricing policy for all the Dell’Arte School shows in May: pay what you will. You can still make reservations, then name your admission price when you arrive. That goes for the Clown show this weekend (Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Carlo) and also the Thesis Festival and the Finals on the remaining May weekends.

 The annual HSU Ten Minute Play Festival begins Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Gist Hall Theatre, playing this weekend and next, Thursdays through Saturdays.

 Next weekend, Humboldt Light Opera and College of the Redwoods open a musical version of Little Women, beginning Friday, May 8 in the CR Forum Theatre at 7:30.

Pulitzer

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Lynn Nottage (top photo) for her play, Ruined (bottom photo, from the Manhattan Theatre Club production), a play about the brutalizing of women during a decade of war in the Congo, modeled on Brecht's Mother Courage. Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey visited refugee camps in Uganda, Rwanda and other parts of Africa to base this play on reality. In an article in the March American Theatre magazine by Randy Gener, Nottage said, "You can't reconcile the incredible beauty and gentleness of the culture with the horror and the suffering. The play is about how they coexist." Among her other plays, Nottage wrote Intimate Apparel which was produced a few seasons ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Here's my brief review:

Intimate Apparel by contemporary playwright Lynn Nottage is set in early twentieth century New York, and concerns a modest young African American seamstress (played by Gwendolyn Mulamba) whose correspondence with a man from Barbados while he is laboring on the Panama Canal (Erik LaRay Harvey) leads to marriage. Their lives intersect with a wealthy and lonely white socialite (Terri McMahon), a ragtime piano-playing prostitute (Tiffany Adams), a Jewish cloth merchant (Gregory Linington,) and a maternal landlady (Perri Gaffney.)

 This drama (directed by Timothy Bond) uses graceful language, generous acting and expressive staging (with scenic design by Richard Hay) to portray complicated and often warm relationships, in an historical context in which we see class, race, ethnicity, gender roles, economics and even technology influencing the fates of these characters. The audience in the 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre were spellbound, and audibly got the main character’s final secret, expressed in a single gesture.

 Lynn Nottage is a fast-rising playwright, and Intimate Apparel is a solidly built and subtle play. 

This North Coast Weekend

Humboldt Light Opera presents the childrens show Seussical Jr. the Musical this weekend at College of the Redwoods. A one woman show from Portland, The Last Show You'll Ever See, is on stage at the Arcata Playhouse on Saturday. The HSU Opera Workshop presents a children's opera and other theatrical offerings on Friday and Saturday at the Fulkerson Recital Hall. The HSU spring dance concert, From Floor to Flight, has its last weekend at the Van Duzer Theatre, with the annual Silent Auction on Saturday (photo above). And Ferndale Rep continues The Secret Garden (top photo above.) For specific information, click on the appropriate organizations in the links list to your right at you go out.

This North Coast Weekend

Opening this weekend is the annual HSU spring dance concert, From Floor to Flight, at the Van Duzer Theatre. I don't have the vocabulary to write about dance, but I can say I was really moved by three of the dances presented on opening night, and admired other dances and dancers in them as well. In the finale, dancers interact with the 60 member Arcata Interfaith Gospel Choir. It was a good theatrical evening. The shows start at 7:30, this Friday and Saturday, and next Thursday through Saturday. More information at HSU Stage.

This North Coast Weekend: Continuing

Continuing this weekend are: the musical The Secret Garden at Ferndale Rep, the drama Painting Churches at North Coast Rep, and in its last weekend, the comedy Bad Dates at the Arcata Playhouse.

In case you missed it, here is my review of Bad Dates from last week's Journal.


I had my doubts. I was going to a show called Bad Dates, written while Sex in the City was hot, by a New York playwright who made her living in television: a monologue about romantic misadventures by a woman surrounded by her several hundred pairs of shoes. When I could be at home witnessing the meaningful drama of the NCAA basketball tournaments (M and W.)

But what could have been trendy triviality—and judging from some reviews online, has been played that way—became something different in the Redwood Curtain production at the Arcata Playhouse, because actor Tinamarie Ivey created a dimensional character you come to care about, and director Dan Stone found and told a compelling story.

That’s not to say that Theresa Rebeck’s script is lacking. In fact, part of this triumph is finding and using the potential that’s in it.

From the first moment—even in the preview I saw—Tinamarie Ivey instilled complete confidence and belief, partly because she was totally committed to inhabiting this character. Her honesty supported the character’s vulnerability, her ease on the stage nurtured credibility, and her physical and vocal skills suggested the shades of this character, from irony, anxiety and denial to pride and bravery.

The character she plays is Haley, who came to New York City from Texas. Divorced, she’s old enough to have a 13 year old daughter, and has become successful as the manager of a dubious but trendy restaurant, but she’s starting to look for romance again.

Ivey doesn’t do an obvious Texas accent (although she can mimic one to hilarious effect with just one word: “law.”) But she does have the undertones, and especially the occasional deep, throaty resonance (she kept reminding me vocally of Mary Kay Place of The Big Chill and Big Love fame, although Place is from Oklahoma.) This propels the raucous humor.

Though we see only Haley, and never leave her apartment, there’s a story threaded through her accounts of dates she remembers, has just been on, or is just about to begin. It eventually involves a visit to a police station (which is all just like we see on TV cop shows, she assures us—kind of an in-joke since Rebeck was a writer and co-producer for NYPD Blue and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.) In fact, if this story had been a TV show, the twist at the end would have been predictable, but as a play it works quite well on several levels.

I don’t want to give away too much, but there is a startling moment towards the end of such raw emotion that our presence as an audience feels intrusive, and the convention we’ve accepted—that this woman is simultaneously in her living room and addressing us as an audience—suddenly seems on the verge of shattering. The whole play could have fallen apart here, but it doesn’t, and this directorial gamble pays off because Ivey is in complete control of the stage.

At a certain point, Haley apologizes for male-bashing. Frankly, that’s the tone I had more or less expected but didn’t really hear, so the apology came as a surprise. I expect that men have similar dating stories anyway, including being absurdly influenced by friends and an old movie.

Even though Dan Stone (as scenic, lighting and sound designer as well as director) made very good use of the limited possibilities at the Playhouse, this is an intimate theatrical experience that such an intimate space affords. I doubt that it could work so well without that intimacy.

Studio Theatre

Just the words give me a rush--Studio Theatre. When I was in college it was where the action really was. We had big main stage productions (even a rotating stage) but the shows conceived and directed by students were in the Studio--that's where I did most of my acting, all my directing, and where the plays I wrote were mounted. Plus it was where I saw my first Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Genet, etc. Some of those productions still stay with me. When I think of Krapp's Last Tape, I get an image from the production I saw there, not from the one I saw in New York.

Studio Theatre isn't just a college phenomenon--I remember going to a big showy and not very interesting production of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford, Ontario but I stuck around for a play in their studio theatre that night, mounted by the actors on their own, and it was thrilling.

But the studio theatre is where university student work is usually done, often in the spring, as for-credit projects. I remember going to several such productions at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, especially when it was a play I wanted to see but hadn't seen yet. That's where I saw Joe Orton's farce, What the Butler Saw, and it was one of the most enjoyable shows I can remember seeing anywhere.

Anyway, it's been a few years since I've been back to the HSU Studio Theatre but I did see two student shows in the past week that reminded me of how bracing and fun this kind of theatre can be.

On March 27, Megan Hughes directed two short plays by David Ives (in a program she titled "The Ives of March,") both with the same cast: Kelly Whittaker, Ethan Heintz and Clayton Cook. The first one, "Time Flies," is a terrific very short play, about the very short lives of a couple of Mayflies, with a guest appearance by nature documentarian David Attenborough. It's funny, poignant, imaginative and beautifully constructed, and the cast hit all the right notes. The second play, not sure of the title, is about 3 workers on a highrise beam who aren't what they seem. This didn't have quite the same sure rhythm, but it was still an effective presentation. I'm glad I saw them both. Thanks to Megan Hughes and her actors, my afternoon was considerably brightened.

Yesterday evening I saw the first performance of another project, the first act of Patrick Marber's Closer, directed by Steven Robert King, featuring Jamie Banister, Johanna Hembry, Omari Howard and Jessi Walters. This is an edgy contemporary play, witty and provocative. The actors were all very good, very sharp. They also all had a lot of presence, and that's something you can't necessarily teach. Through instruction, experience and directing, performances can improve and styles can develop. But if you start with presence, you are way ahead.

I was particularly impressed with Jamie Banister (who I haven't seen act before) and Omari Howard (who I recall seeing just once.) Jessi Walters did well with her character, which was a difficult one. (Omari's character was also difficult in that he went through a big unexplained change, and was basically mercurial anyway.) I've seen Johanna Hembry a number of times, and this seemed to me like one of her best performances, particularly in relation to the other actors. They all worked together well, which was necessary in this piece, particularly in selling the quirky dialogue. That's also a compliment to the director, who staged the play well, given the limitations of these very basic studio theatre productions. It's crisply paced, a bit rough or unsure in places, but I've certainly seen more formal productions that have deeper flaws and less energy. I enjoyed it.

Closer continues in the HSU Studio Theatre (entrance is to the left of the Van Duzer doors) on Friday and Saturday (May 3 & 4) at 7:30 and on Sunday at 2. Admission is free. It's one hour--just the first act--so on the way home, you can try to imagine what happens to these people in the second act. Be forewarned that sex is the subject and though the behavior on stage isn't very graphic, the talk is.

Both of these productions reminded me of what studio theatre can do, especially when participants are engaged by the material, and have chosen to do it. That feeling of risk and commitment is part of what makes the studio theatre still whisper possibilities.

Johanna Hembry also designed this poster--she designed most of the HSU theatre posters over the past few years. Johanna impresses me in a number of ways, including how well she has used her time at HSU, as a theatre and art student. Now she has all these posters, which for the last year or two at least are professional level work. And she's been in all kinds of plays. She's been an enthusiastic participant in the publicity photo shoots for those plays--apart from being photogenic, she understands what these photos are about. When the photographer, director and I ran out of ideas for the shoot of the staged reading earlier this year (The Fire-Bringer), she staged what became the central image for the production. She's made the most of her opportunities, and that's heartening.

This North Coast Weekend

Ferndale Repertory Theatre opens The Secret Garden tonight (Thursday, April 2.) This 1991 musical is probably the best known of the many adaptations and extensions of the 1911 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who also wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy. With book by playwright Marsha Norman (‘night, Mother), and staged around the time of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, this musical originally dealt with complex themes often inhabiting children’s stories, and even Burnett’s novel was said to be influenced by Theosophical ideas.

But basically there’s Lucy Simon’s music, the beguiling if repeated story of a displaced orphan (which in this case somewhat mirrors Burnett’s own life) confronting sinister and colorful figures, and the perennially enchanting image of the secret garden (or wardrobe, looking-glass, Pepperland…)

The Ferndale Rep production appears very promising, with young Brianna Schatz as the heroine, Brad Curtis as the aptly named Alexander Craven, and a cast of supporting players that mixes skilled local veterans with fresh faces and voices. The production team is also impressive: The Rep’s Executive Director Ginger Gene directs, with musical direction by Dianne Zuleger and choreography by Linda Maxwell.

In their press release, Brad Curtis suggests the musical’s themes will resonate emotionally in these troubled times, and Ginger Gene affirms that there “are layers of meaning for audience members of all ages. Ultimately, this play is about courage and the willingness to search for the magic in life and the joy that awaits all who open their hearts.”

This weekend and next at the Arcata Playhouse is the outstanding Redwood Curtain production of Bad Dates, which I review in the Journal here.