This North Coast Weekend

On Thursday (January 24) at 8 p.m., North Coast Rep opens David Mamet’s American Buffalo, directed by Michael Thomas, and featuring James Read, Joel Agnew and Josh Kelly. Director Thomas describes the play as a "fascinating study of the dynamic, puzzling and perhaps frightening relationships between three men who happen to be crooks." The play is intended for adults and contains strong adult language.  The run continues Fridays and Saturdays through February 16, with Sunday matinees on February 3 and 10 at 2 p.m.

Also beginning Thursdays,  Dell’Arte reprises Three Trees with Joe Krienke, Stephanie Thompson and Lauren Wilson.   Three down and out clowns become involved in a war.  My review of the 2011 performance is here--it was two years ago almost to the day.  "The show contains mature content. Recommended for adults and brave children 12 and older."  One weekend only, Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m. in the Carlo.  In February, Three Trees travels to Sacramento for the American College Theatre Festival Region 7 conference.


  On Friday (the 25th), Ferndale Rep opens Songs for a New World, a  musical revue about emotions and choices by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Dianne Zuleger, it features Alex Moore, Brandy Rose, Craig Waldvogel, Elena Tessler, Jessi Shieman, Jo Kuzelka, Luke Sikora and Qaiel Peltier. Live music is provided by Justin Ross & Laura Welch, keyboards; Tamaras Abrahms, percussion; Bobby Amirkhan, bass. It runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through February 17.

  On Saturday (the 26th), Redwood Curtain presents their annual fundraiser, a dinner buffet and live radio show, Zounds and Gagged, at Blue Lake Casino. Reservations: (707) 443-7688 or redwoodcurtain.com.

Pick Yourself Up

There are columns I mean to write someday.  When an idea becomes more fully formed, and there's an occasion for it, sometimes I actually write them.  And sometimes somebody else does it for me.

David Denby's piece in the New Yorker about the movie version of Les Mis says a lot of what I would have said concerning my feelings about certain musicals.  These days I probably would have said it more delicately but then, not as well.

First Denby trashes the movie, which he'd seen without having seen any stage version or hearing the music beforehand.  Then he trashes the story and the music.

He notes that the story "stripped of its social detail and reduced to its melodramatic elements, no longer makes much sense..." Which goes for some other musicals.  But it's what he writes about the music and the general approach to musicals that I want to copy:

I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

And now, the real point: our great musicals were something miraculous. They were a blessed artifice devoted to pleasure, to ease and movement, exultation in the human body, jokes and happy times, the giddiness of high hopes. Even the serious musicals, like “Carousel” and “West Side Story,” had their funny moments...  If you want emotion in a musical, please, if you’ve never seen it, catch the George Cukor version of “A Star is Born,” in which Judy Garland (John Lahr agrees with me on this) produces the single greatest moment in film-musical history. Late at night in a club, when she thinks no one is listening (while James Mason lurks in the shadows), she sings the Harold Arlen torch song “The Man That Got Away.” Overwhelming.

He offers a cure "for those suffering from absorption in “Les Mis.”

 Download the Astaire-Rogers “Top Hat” from Amazon. Throw it on a big screen if you can. Or download “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, or “The Band Wagon,” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, or “An American in Paris,” with Kelly again. I will tell you right now that these movies will not make you cry. But if you’ve never seen them before, they may open an entirely new path to pleasure. See them twice, and you will put aside the maudlin nonsense of “Les Mis” forever.

"Requiem" in Arcata: An Interview with Ursula Osborne

Ursula Osborne (Kowinski photo)

At the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bayside (Arcata), beginning on Thursday January 10, an ad hoc group of familiar North Coast actors will present the first English language production anywhere of Requiem, a play by Heinrich Liebrecht about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and afterwards. In part—and improbably—it is a love story.

Liebretcht’s concentration camp memoir in book form has been called the most vivid of all such accounts in its presentation of everyday life. It was translated into English by Arcata resident Ursula Osborne, who also translated Liebrecht’s play and guided it to this first performance. 

This is the subject of my Stage Matters column to be published in the North Coast Journal on January 10.  What follows is more background  and my interview with Ursula Osborne.

The background is from the Xlibris site, the publisher of Osborne's translation of Liebrecht's memoir,  Not To Hate But To Love That Is What I Am Here For: My Path Through the Hell of the Third Reich.

Heinrich F. Liebrecht, born 1897, participant in WW I, judge in Berlin, removed from office in 1933 for political reasons. Until 1941 co-worker at the law office of the US Embassy, then arrest, torture, concentration camp. Time spent in USA after the liberation. 1949 he returned to the Federal Republic of Germany. He served in diplomatic service as Consul and General Consul, and after retirement lived in Freiburg where he died in 1989.

The translator, Ursula Osborne, née Solmitz, was born in Hamburg Germany in 1927. She left for England with her siblings in 1938 in a Kindertransport. She lived in England until 1944, at a boarding school, called Bunce Court, where her aunt was a teacher. Meanwhile the Solmitz parents remained in Germany until 1941, and during that time Heinrich Liebrecht and Lies became their special friends. Liebrecht remained a lifetime family friend after WWII, through exchange of letters, and postcards, and visits in California and Germany. Ursula, her husband and two sons met him in Freiburg in 1969, and continued the friendship with visits and exchange of letters.

  Ursula earned a BS degree in Chemistry from UCLA in 1948, became a U.S.A. citizen in 1949, worked intermittently in chemical labs and taught in California public schools and in the Peace Corps at a high school in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. All along she continued to cultivate an interest in her native language, German.

The following is an edited version of my interview with Ursula Osborne at her home in Arcata on December 14, 2012.

Heinrich Liebrecht 1942

"Liebrecht and Lies [Elisabeth Hertz] got married very soon after my parents left Germany in 1941. Lies got pregnant. She was from Hamburg, he was from Berlin. They were in Berlin but they couldn’t find a place to live. They literally pushed a perambulator from house to house trying to find a place to live. It was hard to find nutrition for the child. It was 1942 when they decided they had to emigrate, to get out of the country with the child.

There was a Chilean doctor from the Chilean embassy who told them he could get them a passport, drive them to Italy in a limo, “I’ll take care of you.” But he was a crook, and was in cahoots with the Nazis, too. They kept asking him when are we getting out. It seems almost incredible to me that a man as intelligent as Liebrecht believed Velasco, this man, but he did. It was the only chance he had to get out of the country.

The last time they were supposed to meet him, it was a ruse. Where he had led them to believe he could help them was an office that was a Gestapo office. Liebrecht and Lies went there. Right away they saw what it was. They saw some Jews with their faces to the wall. Liebrecht wondered how can this be that these five Jews aren’t able to overcome the one Gestapo, but they just stood there.

He told his wife to run. She hesitated but she left. She did end up going to the Berlin zoo and committing suicide. But he didn’t know what happened to her. Liebrecht tried to physically overcome the Nazi official, and thought the other Jews would help him but they didn’t. He was taken to a prison and left there for a long time. He describes the prison in detail and how he was tortured.  Finally he was released and put in a facility where Jews were assembled to go to Theresienstadt." (Photo above: Liebrecht in 1940, photo taken by Elisabeth Hertz before their marriage.)

Theresienstadt to Auschwitz

"Theresienstadt was supposed to be a model camp that the Nazis were showing to the Red Cross and the outside world to show that concentration camps aren’t so bad. Actually it also was a transition camp from which people were eventually sent to Auschwitz.

Liebrecht was put on a transport to Theresienstadt. He didn’t know anything about his child or his wife or his mother. But while he was there his mother arrived at Theresienstadt. She thought it was a great thing that she had gotten to join him there. Some weeks later a caretaker brought his child. He could take his child to see his mother on her deathbed. The child was 2 ½ years old and didn’t know him, he had to win her back and become a good father to her.

  He chose Boszi [Weiss] who was head of the infants home to be her foster mother. Boszi said she couldn’t do it because she already had two foster children, but she relented, and the closeness between them evolved. He would go visit her every evening. He would bring her bread for her and the child. His job in the camp was as a potato carrier, and working with others who worked with food he could sometimes get things.

Then his turn came [to be sent to Auschwitz.] Boszi said I’m not going to let you go alone, I’m going with you. He said that can’t be, they won’t let you. She said I figured out a way—if we are married I can go. She went to Leo Baeck and got him to marry them, they had a little wedding, a camp marriage which allowed her to go along. She insisted on it. The child and I are going with you, we aren’t going to let you go alone.

Liebrecht went with the men who were going to the work camp, and Boszi went with the women and children going to the gas chamber. That’s how they did the division at Auschwitz. Liebrecht didn’t know exactly what had happened to them. After the war when he went back to Theresienstadt he found an old woman on her deathbed who told him.

As Boszi and Liebrecht’s daughter were waiting to go to the gas chamber, the Nazis called for a nurse—they needed a nurse. She stepped forward with the child and said I’m a trained nurse. The Nazis said we can use your services but the child can’t go with you. So she said everywhere I go the child goes. So she and the child walked into the gas chamber together. She could have saved herself but that wasn’t what she was about. I believe that story."

  Ursula and Heinrich Liebrecht

"Liebrecht was a friend of my parents in the early 1940s. My parents introduced me to him. Then when my husband and children went to Germany on a sabbatical, they said you have to visit Liebrecht. At that time he was in Freiberg
 as a lay Jesuit. His wife was baking a cake when we got there. He insisted on taking out us to the Cathedral in the bitter cold. He pointed out the gargoyles and so on, he was very amused with everything.  Then we came back and had cake and hot chocolate.  My sons were 14 and 16, and he was so friendly with everybody that my sons really took to him. They became friends and went back to visit him again later.

After our sabbatical trip he wrote to us. He wanted us to come back and lecture there on what people in the United States thought about the world. We didn’t feel up to that, but I corresponded with him from that point on. That was the winter of 1969. In the 70s he wrote to me that he was writing his memoirs, and asked if I would like a copy when they were published. I said of course. I was teaching gifted students then, and I gave some enrichment lessons in German, and corresponding with people in Germany was part of that. I asked him if he would correspond with one of my students, and he agreed. He enjoyed it very much.

When he died I was in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, in the highlands, teaching chemistry. The caretaker for my house in Arcata sent me the his book that had arrived there from Germany. It was his memoir that was published posthumously.

  Some of my colleagues in PNG were De La Salle brothers and Sacred Heart nuns. One of the brothers knew German and he also read the book. When I read it I was very taken by the way that Liebrecht, who had been born a Jew and converted to Catholicism, had at the end of World War II a very significant conversation with Leo Baeck, the chief rabbi in Germany, who was in the camp with him at Theresienstadt. They had met there and had a lot of conversations there.

  When the war ended he went back to Theresienstadt because he was trying to find out what had happened to his daughter, so he met Leo Baeck again, because he was still there. Baeck had not been deported to Auschwitz as Liebrecht was. In this conversation they talked about vengeance and forgiveness. So it was the rabbi who convinced the Catholic that it was a time for forgiveness, not an eye for an eye. That impressed me. So I translated that section of the book right away, right there in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, so I could share it with all my colleagues, not just the German ones.

When I came home I put it aside for a long time. But in 2008 I translated the whole book. I published it with Xlibris as a translation. In the postscript it’s mentioned that he had also written a play. I’m not sure if Liebrecht wrote the postscript or someone else did. But he didn’t think the play was polished enough to publish."

The Play

My son started looking for the play and found that the Leo Baeck Institute had a manuscript, so we sent for a copy. It had a playbill for a performance in Salt Lake City in 1982 in a German theatre. I was intrigued, and when I went to a conference there with the Unitarian Universalists about four years ago, I wanted to know where the German theatre was.

It turned out to be a private home, started by a man and a woman who had been actors in Hamburg. They converted their living room into a theatre for the German speaking people of the city, Mormons mostly.

I discovered this because the playbill had the names of the actors in that premiere performance, so I looked in the Salt Lake City phone book and found the name of the man who had played Liebrecht. It turned out he had died, but his widow was living in the same house with the same phone number. She invited me to the house. It looked like walking distance from where I was staying but it was June and very hot. I walked up and up the hill and had to rest for awhile under a tree. But I finally got there.

  We talked and talked, and she showed me photos of the play and the costumes. We became quite good friends. She said she had lymphoma and would be dead in a year, but as far as I know she’s still alive. I would like to invite her to the play here.

  At the time they did the play, Liebrecht was the German consul in San Francisco. His area included Salt Lake City, so he came there and told them about the play. But when they performed it, he never saw it.

Fairly soon after I got back I translated the play from German to English. But because Liebrecht didn’t think it was performable, I started looking for someone who might be interested in making it performable. I met John Heckel when he was at the HSU theatre department and he pounced on it. But nothing happened for awhile, and then we started meeting regularly to read the manuscript and talk about it. He and Fran Wittman made suggestions for changes, and from that stage it has evolved.

I haven’t met the actors yet. I want to go to rehearsals. My bad hip doesn’t make it easy, but I’ll go."

His relationship with Boszi Weiss

"His relationship with Boszi Weiss is the central relationship in the play. It’s also in the memoir but it didn’t really become as clear to me from the memoir how close the sexual relationship was. I didn’t see that until I learned more about it in the play. At the end, the Gestapo asked her whether the child is her child. She said, I’m the mother of the child and I’m pregnant by the father of the child. She was carrying another child.

There’s a place in the memoir when Liebrecht first noticed her in Theresienstadt, she had a special way of moving her head to move her hair out of her face. She was Czech. She came in the early days of settling when they were allowed to bring all kinds of equipment, like musical instruments.

There’s a scene in the play that happens after the time covered in the memoir. It’s at the consulate in San Francisco, and Liebrecht is talking to his secretary. He talks about women’s rights. The beginning of the play is different, too. Boszi asks him how it was when he was growing up, so he talks about his early life. His memoir doesn’t. He talks about the youth movement in the “teens” and the young people’s idealism. She asks about his first sexual encounters. He talks a lot about the young women he was with when he was still in the military. He was in the German army in World War I—my father was, too. Liebrecht got the Iron Cross on the western front. He encountered these women on leave.

I’m convinced the play is close to how life was for Liebrecht, and the relationships are very real. He had a very sincere and humanistic outlook, an incredible kindness towards other people. I was intrigued by his choosing Catholicism—a man who was born before 1900 choosing to become a Catholic at the end of World War I. I still don’t really know how it happened. But it was a sincere conversion—not just to avoid the troubles that were already happening. I think he liked the ritual rather than the dogma. He liked being with other people observing the ritual together."

How Ursula Got to Arcata

"My husband, Clyde Osborne, taught chemistry at Long Beach State. He retired in 1976, his health was not good. I was still teaching in southern California but he wanted to retire to somewhere with big trees, like those he knew in his childhood in Bremerton. He grew up near the naval base there. We visited our son at Humboldt State and thought the redwoods were big enough. So we retired here."

R.I.P. 2012

These days actors become famous for their work in movies and on television.  But many of the famous who died in 2012 were also stage actors, and not only at the beginning of their careers.  British actor Joyce Redmond was nominated for an Oscar for her film performance as Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier in his Othello, though she was later most famous for the notorious eating scene with Albert Finney in the film Tom Jones.  But she maintained a classical theatre career, as is typical in England.

What's less organized (and less known) is that American actors can do the same.  Celeste Holm made her stage debut opposite Leslie Howard in Hamlet. One of her last performances was in the comedy I Hate Hamlet.  Charles Durning won his acting stripes in Tennessee Williams, as did Ben Gazzara (photo directly below Durning.)  He was the original Brick in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.  Gazzara played in O'Neill and Odets, and probably did more stage work than was good for his screen career.

Lupe Ontiveros used her visibility as a TV and film actor to further stage possibilities for others as a founding board member of the Latino Theatre Company in Los Angeles. Someone else who wanted to expand the theatre community was British playwright John Arden, who Michael Billington notes was probably "ahead of his time." But texts last, and the work can be revived.  Stage performances disappear however, so it's a further irony that these actors will live on through their movie and TV performances.   

Other theatrical personages who died in 2012 include actor Ernest Borgnine (another actor who started out in Tennessee Williams), playwright and musical adapter Mark O'Donnell (I saw one of his plays in New York many years ago, and had a long funny interview with him), composers Marvin Hamlisch and Richard Adler, designer Eiko Ishioka, playwright Jack Richardson, director Gunnar Eide, actors Jack Klugman, Joan Roberts, Jerome Kitty, Patricia Kennedy.  May they rest in peace, and their work live on. 

The Year That Was: Topical and Timeless on North Coast Stages

A version of this year-end retrospective appears in the North Coast Journal "Top 10" issue.  I didn't do a top ten, though.  It's not practical.  Though I see a lot of shows, I don't see everything, so it wouldn't be fair.  And I've got multiple conflicts of interest when it comes to HSU shows.  But it's not fair to ignore those shows either.  So this is my compromise.

“Drama is a mansion with an almost infinite number of rooms,” wrote Michael Billington, the great drama critic for the Guardian. “I see no point in shutting off any of them.” As I’ve noted on other occasions, there are gaps in the North Coast theatrical ecology. But it’s worth noticing the variety that does exist, and that this past year’s productions supported and altered that ecology, however subtly.

Dell’Arte pioneered “theatre of place” on the North Coast, and this year saw a unique example in the second version of Mary Jane: The Musical. It’s unique precisely because it’s the second version. Dell’Arte has brought shows back before, updating their topical and local references. But this time they re-conceived a show from just the summer before, and so the 2012 version was actually the product of two successive years, which resulted in a deeper (and darker) show. I still recall their Blue Lake: The Opera as the more successful production (a coincidence of talent, music and story), but certainly Mary Jane is more relevant to local identity and its future.

Another successful “theatre of place” show was Women of the Northwest at the Arcata Playhouse. It also was a group effort, part of the national fascination with “devised theatre” that worked in these two productions, with adequate time and thorough process.

  It wasn’t so successful in the Dell’Arte holiday show, The Fish in My Head— well-performed and produced, but so disjointed that it’s the first show I can recall that got me to root for the villain: the guy who wanted it to make more sense.

  This year also brought an unusual number of topically relevant dramas written by actual playwrights: Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room at Ferndale, Justin Lance Black’s 8 and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus at HSU, for example. HSU and College of the Redwoods also contribute classics (Moliere at CR, Noel Coward at HSU) and a glimpse of a different cultural approach in HSU’s version of the Sanskrit drama Shakuntala. A theatrical ecology is sustained by educational inquiry for both participants and audience.

   Humboldt Light Opera Company added to its high quality contributions with Damn Yankees and Cinderella. Redwood Curtain continued to concentrate on small cast contemporary American comedies, but took a few more chances this year with plays of challenging form and content, such as Circle Mirror Transformation, Dusty and the Big Bad World, For Better and The Language Archive.  These forays work largely because Redwood Curtain nurtures a high level of acting.

  Our two community theatres (Ferndale and North Coast in Eureka) have the words “repertory” in their names, which refers to producing shows from “the repertoire,” or the roster of successful plays (artistically, commercially or both) of the accessible past. There are a lot of judgments involved: some shows are too big (and expensive) or too small, too new (rights are unavailable) or too old.

But how old is too old? Looking back at this year yields a rule of thumb. Dramas can be quite old, though Shakespeare is about the limit. This year we got a searing drama from the 1950s (Look Back in Anger at Ferndale Rep) and a mystery from the 1940s (Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap at North Coast Rep.) Comedies and musicals are usually more recent. Which is another reason that North Coast Rep’s production of the pioneer musical comedy Anything Goes was so fascinating.



There are few if any Broadway musicals older than Anything Goes that get produced anymore. In fact, only 3 previous shows are generally classified as modern musicals (Show Boat in 1927, The Band Wagon in 1930 and Of Thee I Sing! in 1931.)

Songs have since been stolen from other Cole Porter shows for this version of Anything Goes, and the script is not exactly the same as the show that premiered in 1934. That script began with legendary Brits P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton but the Broadway version was quickly assembled by its director Howard Lindsay with a press agent named Russel Crouse.  They were so successful at it that they themselves became a legendary Broadway writing team.  The script was revised for the 1987 revival by John Weidman and Timothy Crouse, Russel's son and the author of one of the great books on U.S. presidential campaigns and the press, The Boys on the Bus (1972).  I knew him for a few years around then.

Anyway, the changes in the latest, the Tony-winning 2011 version that’s on tour into 2013 seem to be in musical arrangements, etc.  So I don't actually know who is responsible for my favorite bit of dialogue.  Asked by a ship's officer if he'd seen infamous racketeer Snakeyes Johnson somewhere on the ship, one of the characters says he saw him at the mizenmast. “ But this ship doesn’t have a mizenmast.” “Oh. It must have been somebody else.” 

The constant in all this is Cole Porter.  His songs have not changed. His music is timeless, but his lyrics are very topical—particularly in one of this show’s most famous songs, “You’re the Top.”  They haven't been revised, so the lyrics are still a kind of mini-tour of 1934. While some of the places and the famous people named in the song are still well known, others mostly aren’t. Quite a few clever references go right by a lot of the audience nearly 80 years later.

 So how does the song still work? It was interesting to watch how Molly Severdia and Erik Standifird relieved anxieties by acting out contemporary reactions to some references in their performance of the song, a highlight of the North Coast Rep production. For instance, they gave the line “You’re broccoli!” the icky vegetable look, but in 1934, broccoli was new to the U.S. and quite fashionable.

They simply ignored other references, like Jimmy Durante, a showman who was often parodied into the 1960s. In fact some lyrics are now so obscure that there are several online attempts to track down their meaning. There was a long and involved theory about “you’re a drumstick lipstick” (which involved ice cream and kissing) until somebody uncovered an old ad that showed that Drumstick lipstick was a 1934 brand name.

 Still, it isn’t necessary to know that moisture-proof cellophane was a modern miracle in the 30s to laugh at the exuberant brilliance of “You’re the National Gallery/You’re Garbo’s salary/You’re cellophane!” The strange alchemy of the topical and the timeless in a play that lasts is one of the wonders of theatre, as it is in other arts. So it’s a vital part of our theatrical ecology.

This North Coast Weekend (or Two)

Only new show this week is the Dell'Arte School's MFA second years performing their Character Projects ("some comic, some tragic, all unique")  Thursday-Sunday (Dec. 6-9) at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. Pay-what-you-will, reservations and information 707-668-5663, www.dellarte.com.

For a second and final weekend at Gist Hall Theatre, Shakuntala, presented by HSU Theatre, Film & Dance.  Thurs-Sat (Dec. 6-8) at 7:30 p.m., Sunday Dec. 9 at 2. HSU Stage.

Also continuing: Anything Goes at NCRT.  Last performance is Dec. 15.www.ncrt.net.

The Dell'Arte holiday show A Fish in My Head returns to the Carlo for its last performances Thurs.-Sun Dec. 13-16 at 7:30.  $10/8. www.dellarte.com.















And at Ferndale Rep (sorry, I never got a photo), Annie, which closes Dec. 16.
www.ferndalerep.org.

In a holiday event associated with Humboldt Light Opera Company, their Women's Chorus (known officially as The Babes) presents their annual Christmas concert on December 15 at 7:30 p.m. at the Arcata United Methodist Church (1761 Eleventh Street.)  "Donations accepted at the door."

This North Coast Weekend

 

Opening on Thursday November 29 for two weekends, HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance presents the magical love story from India, Shakuntala.  Though this epic fairy tale (with gods, demons and heroes) is a cultural icon in India,  it’s seldom seen on stage in the U.S.  Playwright and HSU department chair Margaret Thomas Kelso adapted it for the contemporary American stage. Directed by Rae Robison, it also includes original music by Brian Post. Rose Gutierrez and Mark Teeter head a cast of 20. Brian Post composed the original music.

“This is a family-oriented show,” Kelso said, “so we’ve scheduled it for the holiday season. There’s singing, dancing and masks in an exotic, romantic and fanciful story.” Shakuntala is performed in the Gist Hall Theatre at 7:30 p.m., Thursdays through Saturdays Nov. 29-Dec. 1 and Dec. 6-8, with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on Dec. 2 and 9. 826-3928. http://HSUStage.blogspot.com.

Also opening on Thursday, last year's Happy Family returns to the Arcata Playhouse for The Larry Welcome Happy Holiday Extravaganza.  This year another family member appears, Frank Happy’s twin brother, Larry Welcome.  It's their now-traditional combination of comedy, music, mistaken identity and holiday tips (and elves, don’t forget the elves.)

  Lynne and Bob Wells are back, along with Jacqueline Dandeneau, David Ferney, Amy Tetzlaff, Amelia Davide, Cora Dandeneau and Jeremy Santos. Tim Randles, Tim Gray and Marla Joy provide the music, and in another tradition, there are a couple of different special guests for each performance. The Arcata Playhouse holiday show runs two weekends: Thursday-Saturday Nov. 29-December 1, and Friday and Saturday Dec. 7 & 8 at 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday December 9. 822-1575. www.arcataplayhouse.org.

Meanwhile, the musical Annie continues at Ferndale Rep, and the musical comedy Anything Goes continues at North Coast Rep.  Dell Arte's holiday show, The Fish in My Head, is on the road (see schedule in post below.)

This North Coast Weekend

When Black Friday comes, so will two stage openings. The 1977 musical Annie opens at Ferndale Repertory Theatre on Friday (November 23.)   With a story based on the popular 1930s comic strip, it’s set in the Great Depression, featuring an 11 year-old orphan heroine, a mean orphanage director, a beneficent millionaire and a singing-and-dancing President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And it ends on Christmas.

With music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Martin Charnin, Annie was an immediate sensation and has been a theatrical staple ever since. The latest Broadway revival just opened in early November, providing New York critics with opportunities to muse on optimism after the hurricane and the politics of rich and poor. But basically it’s a big, very child-friendly musical that Ferndale produces with a cast of 24, featuring Craig Benson as Daddy Warbucks, Andrea Zvaleko as the evil Miss Hannigan, Kristi Peifer as Daddy’s faithful personal assistant and Jeff Kieser as the comic villain, Rooster. Ariel Vergen and Marina Benson will play Annie. Kate Haley directs, with choreography by Linda Maxwell, scenic design by Calder Johnson, costumes by Taylor Depew, lighting by Greta Stockwell and music direction by Justin Ross, who also conducts the live band.

The NY Times review of the new production there (which led with the audience response to the cute dog) noted the number of little girls in the audience.  Of course, there are a number of little girls in the cast as well, and this play has incubated a number of child stars.  Among those who appeared over the years were Sarah Jessica Parker, Molly Ringwald and Alyssa Milano.

  Annie runs Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons from November 23 through December 16. 1-800-838-3006. www.ferndalerep.org.

Also opening November 23 is the North Coast traditional Dell’Arte holiday show for all ages, that begins in Blue Lake and travels up and down 101 from Scotia to Cave Junction, Oregon for mostly free shows. This year it’s an original fantasy called The Fish In My Head, created by the ensemble of seven actor/musician/acrobats: Janessa Johnsrude, Ryan Musil, Jacob Trillo, Meridith Ann Baldwin (all seen in last summer’s Mary Jane: The Musical), Rux Cantir, Anson Kalani Smith and Anthony Arnista. Directed and designed by Ronlin Foreman, it’s a fish story about transformations and adventure that starts out in the humdrum but escapes to the bottom of the sea and off to the moon, and back.

Opening weekend performances at the Carlo Theatre in Blue Lake (Friday and Saturday, Nov. 23 & 24 at 7:30 p.m.) are free, though audiences are asked to contribute non-perishable food items to be donated to local food banks. That goes for the touring shows, too, which reach an estimated seven-to-ten thousand people, many of them school children.  Then The Fish in My Head returns to Blue Lake Dec. 13-16, with tickets priced at $10 and $8. Ticket outlets include Wildberries Marketplace, Pierson Building Center and Moore’s Sleep World. Also: 707-668-5663, ext. 20. www.dellarte.com.

Meanwhile, the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes continues at North Coast Rep.  My review is in this week's NC Journal.

Fish in My Head Full Schedule

Nov. 23, 24 Blue Lake, CA DAI’s Carlo Theatre 7:30 PM FREE
Nov. 26 Klamath, CA Yurok Tribal Headquarters 6:00 PM FREE
Nov. 27 McKinleyville, CA McKinleyville High School 7:30 PM FREE
Nov. 28 Arcata, CA Van Duzer at HSU 7:30 PM FREE
Nov. 30 Trinidad, CA Trinidad School 7:00 PM FREE
Dec. 2 Point Arena, CA Arena Theater 4:00 PM $10/8
Dec. 4 Redway, CA Mateel Community Center 6:30 PM $10/5
  Dec. 5 Scotia, CA Winema Theater 7:30 PM FREE
Dec. 6 Orick, CA Orick Community Center 5:00 PM FREE
Dec. 7 Burnt Ranch Burnt Ranch School 12:30PM FREE
Dec. 8 Eureka, CA Eureka Theater 7:30 PM FREE
Dec. 10 Cave Junction, OR Lorna Byrne Middle School 7:00 PM FREE
Dec. 13- 16 Blue Lake, CA DAI’s Carlo Theatre 7:30PM $10/8

This North Coast Weekend

 

Tonight (Thursday Nov. 15) North Coast Rep opens the classic Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes.   Like many movies of the period, this 1934 show is an escapist comedy involving love and high jinks among the hilariously wealthy. This time some romantic criminals are added to the mix-ups aboard an ocean liner, with Cole Porter tunes that are simultaneously topical and timeless. Its latest Tony Award-winning Broadway revival was in 2011. Lauren Wieland directs the NCRT production featuring Eric Standifird, Keili Simmons Marble (also the dance director), Clayton Cook, Molly Severdia (also the music director) and David Simms. Anything Goes plays for a solid month of weekends, November 15-December 15. Tickets and information: 442-6278. www.ncrt.net.

This is the last weekend for Dusty and the Big, Bad World at Redwood Curtain.

It's Not Easy ReLiving Bush

I do my best each time in my reviews, though I'm not always crazy about the result.  Some pieces I do particularly like, and this is one of them--it appears in this weeks NC Journal.  I've probably mucked it up with some additions, but it has a proper Election Day theme.  I did bury the lead, however, which is VOTE!

Dusty and the Big Bad World, now on stage at Redwood Curtain, is loosely based on real events: the 2005 decision by PBS not to air a segment of a children’s program (Postcards From Buster) dealing with lesbian parents, under pressure from the Bush administration. Playwright Cusi Cram, who worked for an associated program (Arthur) then, engages in some score-settling, puts words of one actual participant in another’s mouth, and inaccurately impugns the motive of the PBS president at the time (who admittedly is an old acquaintance of mine.) But on the whole, Cram uses the situation to create an independent, thoughtful and lively work of theatre that entertains ideas as well as the audience.

  First we meet 11-year-old Lizzie Goldberg-Jones (played by Alissa Barthel) who talks into her video camera about why she should win the contest to be on the animated PBS children’s show Dusty, along with her family: because her little brother really likes it, and “TV is important.” It might distract him from being teased about their “two dads.”  (The TV is important line turns out to be a major theme--not an unexpected one from a writer who is still involved in television.  Another biographical tell: Cusi Cram was herself a precocious and cute child TV star.)

Next there’s Marianne Fitzgibbons (Dianne Zuleger,) a sunny but formidable presence who tells us at length how much she loves her new job, which turns out to be Secretary of Education. Her cheery demeanor towards her troubled secretary Karen (Carrie Hudson) is edged with menace, but the doubleness of her response to Karen--apparently real feeling along with shrewd coldness--goes a long way towards making the character of Marianne more than caricature.   

Marianne—whose zealous fundamentalism becomes increasingly clear-- already has her sights on the Dusty episode resulting from Lizzie winning the contest. She means to squelch it, and to cancel the series entirely. This puts the show’s producer and self-described paranoid liberal Nathan Friedman (Nathan Emmons) on the bubble, along with the show’s protective creator, Jessica Fields (Tisha Sloan.)

Playwright Cram gives these characters dimension and individuality, and this superb group of actors gives them even more. Dianne Zuleger inhabits her role to a truly scary extent. Nathan Emmons and Tisha Sloan are immediately convincing, and Alissa Barthel provides the not entirely innocent burst of light that redeems the adult-made muddle. But it’s Karen who becomes the moral center of the play (as a troubled child she wore green socks everyday to remind her of Kermit the Frog and his song, It's Not Easy Being Green.)   Carrie Hudson’s compelling performance takes us on that journey.

    How all this is a comedy with a partially happy ending is hard to describe. Some invented aspects of the plot are weak, but the script is witty and emotional, with lots of ideas flashing amidst the politics, confessions and intrigue. The characters are believable and memorable.  Marianne is an especially impressive character, especially as Zuleger plays her.  She's almost archetypal at times, and also very much like some of the political and religious fundamentalists in and around the Bush administration I've met--that combination of ingredients that people like me find unfathomable.

Reliving that Bush atmosphere wasn't easy, even for the length of this play.  But it is well-timed to motivate the one action we can take to prevent its second coming.  (Hint: vote! Save Big Bird!)

This play had its premiere performance in Denver, where the director apparently hyped it up with elements of farce. However,  I felt Redwood Curtain director Jyl Hewston made the right choice of tone—subtle and straightforward, letting the play and the actors carry the evening.

Scenic design is by Daniel Nyiri, lighting by Michael Burkhart, costumes by Laura Rhinehart, sound by Jon Tunney. Dusty and the Big Bad World plays weekends at Redwood Curtain through November 17.

   Dusty and the Big Bad World is one of three plays on North Coast stages this fall based on real events, involving similar issues. Eureka High just closed The Laramie Project, about the 1998 torture and death of a gay student that led to the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2009. The third play was 8, about Proposition 8 and marriage equality, presented by HSU Theatre, Film & Dance to a big crowd at the Van Duzer on Thursday.  There was a lengthy discussion afterwards as well. These plays have at least one real world message in common: vote.

Apropos of Dusty and this message, a real world girl very much in the same situation as Lizzie's little brother in the play--bullied by classmates because of her "two dads"-- wrote a letter to President Obama asking what she should do.  This is President Obama's reply ( and recall that he was raised by a single mother along with grandparents):

"In America, no two families look the same. We celebrate this diversity. And we recognize that whether you have two dads or one mom what matters above all is the love we show one another. You are very fortunate to have two parents who care deeply for you. They are lucky to have such an exceptional daughter in you. Our differences unite us. You and I are blessed to live in a country where we are born equal no matter what we look like on the outside, where we grow up, or who our parents are. A good rule is to treat others the way you hope they will treat you. Remind your friends at school about this rule if they say something that hurts your feelings."

This North Coast Weekend

 
8, the marriage equality play, gets its one and only North Coast staged reading at HSU tonight, Thursday, November 1.

In a 2010 trial, the federal court judge found that California Proposition 8 (passed in 2008) could not amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriages, because it violates provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Though the Supreme Court is yet to weigh in, this case made same-sex marriage a Constitutional right.

That trial is the subject of 8, a play by Dustin Lance Black, whose script for Milk—the movie starring Sean Penn about San Francisco’s Harvey Milk--won the Academy Award. After celebrity-rich readings on Broadway and in Los Angeles, the Foundation for Equal Rights granted permission for staged readings throughout North America (and beyond.) The HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance pursued and got the opportunity to produce it for the North Coast. Each local theatre gets the spotlight for one night. In the week just before Arcata’s turn, there were readings scheduled in Des Moines, Baltimore, Anchorage, Austin and Minneapolis.

  As in readings elsewhere, the emphasis is on involving the whole community, beginning with the actors. So at HSU participants include Michael Fields, James Floss, James Hitchcock, Christina Jioras, Susan Abbey, Michael Thomas, JM Wilkerson, Elisa Abelleira, James McHugh, Catherine L. Brown, Sam Machado, Juan Carlos Contreras and Shea King. Clint Rebik directs, with set and lighting by Katie Dawson.

“People need to witness what happened in the Proposition 8 trial,” said playwright Black, “if for no other reason than to see inequality and discrimination unequivocally rejected in a court of law where truth and facts matter.” This staged reading is a benefit for the Foundation for Equal Rights. It’s followed by a panel that will lead audience discussion. 8 is on the Van Duzer Theatre stage at HSU on Thursday, November 1, at 7:30 p.m. Donation is $5. Box Office: 826-3928. More information: HSU Stage and Screen.

Also this weekend, Humboldt Light Opera Company's KidCo opens the musical Once Upon a Mattress on Friday at 7 p.m. in the Forum Theatre at College of the Redwoods.  It's also onstage Saturday.

On Sunday the road company for A Chorus Line comes to the Van Duzer at HSU for two shows, at 3 p.m.. and 8 p.m., through CenterArts. 

Dusty and the Big Bad World continues at Redwood Curtain.  I review it this week in the NC Journal.

This North Coast Weekend

 

Just in time to motivate votes for Big Bird, Redwood Curtain presents a satirical comedy about a PBS children's show based on a true story.  Dusty and the Big Bad World is by Cusi Cram, and is directed by Jyl Hewston.  Featured players are Dianne Zuleger, Tisha Sloan, Nathan Emmons and Carrie Hudson, and introducing Alissa Barthel playing the 11-year old Lizzie Goldberg-Jones.

Previews are Thursday and Friday (Oct. 25-6) and official opening night is Saturday, all starting at 8 p.m.  Performances continue Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights through November 17, with a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. on Nov. 11.

Dell'Arte presents its Macabre Cabaret Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights (Oct. 26-8) at 8 p.m. in the Carlo.  It features Michael Fields, Ronlin and Lydia Foreman, Laura Munoz, Nicholette Routhier, Lynnie Horrigan, Pratik Motwani and special guest Debbie MacMahon, "along with some folks who came back to life just for this occasion."

Dell'Arte invites the audience to come in costume and be entered in a raffle.  "A full bar, with drinks served at your seat," should suggest the appropriate mood.

In other news, the big fat Centennial edition of The Dramatist, the Dramatist Guild magazine, is out. In addition to a number of known playwrights recalling the plays that first inspired them, there's a cartoon by Mark Krause that says quite a lot about the state of playwriting today.  It purports to display Future Playwriting Awards.  They are the awards for Smallest Cast, Simplest Technical Needs and Highest Theatrical Subsidiary Rights.  The awards may be in the future, but that's the rueful reality now. 

This North Coast Weekend

Women of the Northwest continues with its second and final weekend at the Arcata Playhouse.  I'll add one point to my generally expository and laudatory review: I felt at the time, and that impression has returned, that the section on prostitutes was the one place where the history was overromanticized.  This group scene made it sound like these were empowered women running the equivalent of a restaurant.  The reality was likely a lot more complicated, and unhealthy.

Also continuing (and ending) this weekend: In the Next Room (The Vibrator Play)  at Ferndale Rep, and The Laramie Project at Eureka High.

Women of the Northwest

Women of the Northwest, on stage at the Arcata Playhouse, celebrates 14 or so individual women in local history. But in performance, the lively, inventive, and relatively brief vignettes about them do something more: they shine a different light on that history itself.

 Many of these women are appropriately remembered for individual accomplishments. Elta Cartwright, a track star at Eureka High (which itself made history by becoming the first high school to allow girls to run races in shorts) became the first woman in America to qualify for the 1928 Olympics.

 As Mayor of Eureka from 1926 to 1931, Emily Jones was the first female mayor west of the Mississippi. After Martella Cone Lane moved to Fortuna with her husband in 1899, she revealed the redwoods to the world in her paintings.

 Emma Freeman was a prominent photographer who chronicled Eureka and Humboldt scenes from 1907 to 1920. Known as “The Lady of the Hills,” Margaret Smith Cobb lived in the wilderness near Garberville in those years, and wrote poems and romantic novels that were championed by Jack London.

 Susie Baker Fountain, columnist for the Arcata Union and the Blue Lake Advocate through the 1950s, collected a century of Humboldt County history. Humboldt State claims her as its first graduate in 1915, and houses her historical records in its library.

Stella Patterson, who came north after the San Francisco earthquake, had a full life but found herself alone in 1946 at age 80. She decided to live in an isolated cabin in the mountains on the Klamath River west of Happy Camp, where the two miners who were her nearest neighbors called her simply “Dear Mad’m.” That became the title of her book about the experience, which is still available.
 “I have lived the life I wanted,” she says in this play, “and the life I’ve loved.”

 The core cast of 12 actors presented aspects of these women’s lives, and storyteller Charlene Storr honored her grandmother, Sadie Gorbet (Tolowa), who at the age of 72 was the only Native American in the California delegation to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She counseled her family to take the good parts of their tradition and of the modern world, and throw the rest away.

 Besides historical figures, the play depicts some legendary ones as well as composite characters and representative figures (a telephone operator, prostitutes, suffragettes.) Historical material was gathered and shaped by Jackie Dandeneau, Edith Butler and Tammy Rae Scott, but the presentation was created by the actors. They came up with an entertaining, very theatrical combination of monologues, dialogues, dramatic and comedic scenes, music and movement, plus bustling and lyrical meditations on themes such as food and motherhood.

 The first act was mostly a mosaic of lives, ending with a memorable moment: members of the Native Women’s Collective sang some of the songs associated with the Flower Dance, a coming of age ceremony for girls that local tribes basically have in common. Reviving this dance has been a priority for at least 15 years, as I recall.  They also spoke of the needs it addresses to restore a sense of self-respect, support and belonging to young women.

 The second act had more thematic threads, culminating in a final evocation of childbirth and motherhood, children and the lineage of women. Though the actors typically play several roles each, there were strong individual moments.

 With that peculiar 1930s diction, Dandeneau conveyed the scary if somewhat comic authority of Mayor Jones. Laura Munoz moved easily from an American Indian woman known only as one of Emma Freeman’s favorite photographic subjects to Antoinette Chartin, a cultured French woman who became one of the first non-Native pioneers in Blue Lake of the 1870s, opening a hotel there with her husband. Ali Freedlund was a spirited Elta Cartwright.

The most amazing feature of Siena Nelson’s performance as a cowboy who was secretly female (a not uncommon subterfuge) wasn’t her perfect gait and vocal cadence: it was the hardness in her eyes. There were vivid performances by Jada Owen and Ciara Cheli Collado in the final thematic sections. Musicians Julie Froblom, Jill Petricca, Dharla Curry and Jan Bramlett joined the action as needed. Other onstage participants were Tammy Rae Scott and Rebecca Zettler.

 These roughly two hours did not offer complete portraits, nor were all ethnic groups and occupations represented. But by including themes from women’s lives that influence common events, this production as a whole evokes in dynamic fashion a dimension of experience often neglected in the usual histories.

From a rhythm of life revealed by cooks for a lumber camp to the “river of blood” of childbirth, the play suggests a perspective it is vital to include. Set design is by Siena Nelson, lighting by David Ferney, costumes by Lydia Foreman. Women of the Northwest continues at the Arcata Playhouse Friday and Saturday (Oct. 19-20) at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. before shows in Petrolia Oct. 27 and Briceland Oct. 28.

Additional Notes: A Preview

Women of the Northwest features a dozen actors portraying at least that many women who figured in local history from 1900 to the 1930s and beyond. Actor/writer Jacqueline Dandeneau, researcher Tammy Rae Scott and historian Edith Butler got the project started this summer, but the cast combined to shape the final show. The Native Women’s Collective is also involved.

 “We tell some of the stories through song and movement,” Dandeneau said, “so it’s not all talking heads, which is the danger with a history piece.”

Women involved in logging, mining, ranching and politics, as well as teachers, artists, athletes, mothers, prostitutes and even a stage coach robber are all represented. “These pieces are about women who figured out—by necessity or from some spirit within them—how to live life on their own terms, given what terms might be available,” Edith Butler said.

For background on the women’s suffrage movement in Humboldt, they brought filmmaker Martha Wheelock up from L.A. Coincidentally, her film on the subject airs on KEET next Monday (Oct. 15) at 7:30 p.m. “She told us that it was the men in rural areas like Humboldt that made the difference in voting for women’s suffrage,” Dandeneau said.

 It was in 1912, exactly 100 years ago, that women voted in their first California election (they didn’t get to vote for federal candidates until 1920.) “So we’re hoping to have the League of Women Voters registering voters in the lobby for our shows,” she said. “There are a lot of women’s issues right at the top of this year’s election—things that have been assumed, and things that have been fought for.” By Humboldt women, among others.

Women Ruhl: The Vibrator Play

Edison’s electricity was just beginning to transform middle class American life in the early 20th century. This is the setting for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl, now on stage at Ferndale Repertory Theatre.

The fictional Dr. Givings (played convincingly by Calder Johnson) has designed what today would be known simply as a vibrator, in order to treat hysterical symptoms in women. The joke in this play is that (with one or two possible exceptions) none of the characters—male or female—has today’s understanding of the vibrator’s effects in stimulating sexually pleasurable orgasm.

 What Dr. Giving’s patients experience was described as tension released in “hysterical paroxysm.” That one idea could easily organize a kind of farce, and there are predictably comic moments. But Ruhl does more, by exploring the mores and relationships that follow from this disconnect.

 Patient Sabrina Daldry (Megan Rae Johnson) gets her first vibrator treatment while Dr. Givings relates an interesting anecdote involving Benjamin Franklin. Meanwhile, in the parlor, the lively Mrs. Catherine Givings (Kelsey MacIlvaine) wonders what’s really going on, in her life as well as in the next room.

 There are plot threads involving a wet nurse (played by Ashley Russell) for Mrs. Givings baby, Dr. Giving’s nurse assistant (Greta Joan Stockwell), Sabrina Daldry’s husband (Jeremy Webb) and a male patient and artist (Bobby Bennett) who sets up contrasts of art and science.

 This play (first produced in 2010) could be described as layered, or cluttered. It sometimes totters from the inspired to the insipid but Ruhl takes the history seriously, with inevitable contemporary resonance. There is enough originality, humor, humanity and poetry in this play and this production, directed by Rae Robison, to engage audiences and foster conversation. It’s an adult theme, but it’s treated within conventional theatrical standards.

 The first night show I saw went smoothly, and except for some vocal projection problems, the acting was at least adequate and sometimes eloquent. All the actors had good moments, with MacIlvaine and her character’s nervous energy moving the action forward.

There were particularly effective and moving scenes between Catherine (MacIlvaine) and Sabrina (Megan Johnson, who continues to add subtle new colors to her acting), and between Sabrina and nurse Annie (Greta Stockwell.)

 But the flow of it all often felt rudimentary, with performances not always accessibly related to each other and to the play as a whole. Perhaps it hadn’t quite jelled yet, or it’s the nature of the script. The play does seem to involve some difficult and dynamic balancing acts in mood and style, which this production manages pretty successfully.

 Liz Uhazy is scenic and lighting designer, Calder Johnson designed costumes, JM Wilkerson the sound. In the Next Room continues weekends at Ferndale Rep through October 21.

This North Coast Weekend

The San Francisco troupe called the Pi Clowns returns to the Arcata Playhouse with a new show, The Good the Bad and the Stupid, a Wild West romp with acrobatics, high speed horse races, dramatic duels, juggling, eccentric dance and live music. Members of the Pi Clowns include Bruce Glaseroff from Arcata and Tyler Parks from Fortuna.

Performances of this all-ages show are at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 28 and 29, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 30. Arcata Playhouse impresario David Ferney cautions that last year’s shows sold out, so better advance tickets than sorry, at Wildwood Music, Wildberries, or 822-1575.

Continuing: The Fox on the Fairway at North Coast Rep.  My Journal review is here. 
Final weekend: Circle Mirror Transformation at Redwood Curtain.

The Fox on the Fairway

It was a chilly summer here on the North Coast but the early autumn is warm and sunny, so maybe it’s appropriate that the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka has begun its 29th season with a summer stock comedy about golf, The Fox on the Fairway. 

 This 2010 play by Ken Ludwig is given the full farce treatment by director David Moore, especially with lots of doors entering onto scenic designer Calder Johnson’s set. (Though the game is golf, the action is inside.) People running in and out of doors, chasing and avoiding each other, entering unexpectedly and leaving inconveniently—it’s the signature of stage farce. It’s basically the same setup as in NCRT’s 2009 production of Ludwig’s more famous Lend Me a Tenor.

In this story, Bingham (played by Anders Carlson) runs a country club that holds an annual golf tournament with a rival club run by “Dickie” (Phil Zastrow.) The two make a huge bet on the outcome. But the player Bingham was counting on has changed sides, and all seems lost until Justin (Michael Pietrelli), the callow young man Bingham has just hired as his assistant, turns out to be a golf prodigy. But of course complications ensue, involving Bingham’s business manager, Pamela (Jennifer Trustem), his wife, Muriel (Gloria Montgomery) and a club waitress and Justin’s fiancé, Louise (Kyra Gardner.)

 These descriptions soon turn out to only scratch the surface of their tangled relationships. Their pasts are prologue to the quickly unfolding events. Director Moore keeps it all moving fast whenever possible. The dialogue scenes depend on the comedic characterizations of the actors. Jennifer Trustem’s Pamela is straight out of a 1940s movie, the sweetly hard-drinking and wittily sensual woman with an innuendo for every occasion. Michael Pietrelli is the energetic movie juvenile and Kyra Gardner the winsome ingénue: Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but with modern neuroses.

 At the center of the action and the story is Anders Carlson. He had a key role in Lend Me a Tenor but this production completely revolves around his performance. He plays Bingham with a controlled, rolling frenzy, as a man of constant outrage reminiscent of “the boss” character in TV sitcoms from the 50s onward. It’s a physical and vocal tour de force, and the wonder isn’t just that he pulls it off, but that he does it without becoming insufferable.

 This seems to be accomplished partly by his genuine interactions with the other actors. Together they manage to make something human out of a cascade of contrivances. That includes the contributions of the always believable Gloria Montgomery in her few scenes, and Phil Zastrow, who seems to play Dickie as an affected pretend Englishman breezily unaware of his malapropisms or terrible taste in sweaters.

 The pleasures of the production and the wit of the script (with contrivances from Oscar Wilde as well as I Love Lucy) must race past basic credibility problems, like everything hinging on a bet for very high stakes witnessed by nobody. (And who exactly is the fox of the title?)

 Some of the revelations are at least foreshadowed (pretty obviously), but some developments seem like a child’s improbable improvisations while inventing a story with dolls or action figures (possibly waving golf clubs.) The appeal of Pietrelli and Gardner as the young lovers, and the older four as the love springs eternal ones, mostly overcome the clichés. As a farce, this play adds nothing new except perhaps greater latitude in naughty talk. For farce that actually expands the form, something from early Tom Stoppard or Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw more nearly fit the bill. But there are enough laughs here, plus charm and skill in this production, to extend a summery mood.

 Jenneveve Hood designed the strange and striking costumes. Michael Thomas designed the inventive sound, which is crucial to the story. The Fox on the Fairway continues at North Coast Rep Fridays and Saturdays through October 13 at 8 p.m., with a Thursday evening performance on October 11 and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on September 30 and October 7.

Circle Mirror Transformation

Long ago and far away, I was party to a conversation between two multi-talented and wise women of American drama, Corinne Jacker and Patricia Cobey. Lingering by a stone wall, gazing at the Atlantic ocean in the fading light of a long summer day at the O’Neill Center playwrights conference in Connecticut, they talked casually about the importance of theatre in their lives. “Whenever someone I know is having problems,” Cobey said, “I tell them to take an acting class. It always straightens you out. That’s where you learn that you can’t lie.”
 In Circle Mirror Transformation, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, four members of a small Vermont community gather for a creative acting class. We soon learn that Theresa (Wanda Stamp) is a recently transplanted would-be New York actress trying to get over an obsessive love affair. Schultz (Dmitry Tokarsky) is a recently divorced local, a bit awkward and secretly artistic. Lauren (Mira Eagle) is a high school student buried in her hoodie who wants to try out for West Side Story. James (Gary Sommers) is the still handsome gray-haired husband of the instructor, Marty (Adina Lawson.)

 After a few classes Lauren pointedly asks Marty if they are going to learn to act in a play. Marty says probably not. It’s fair warning for the audience, too. This is not the usual stage storytelling. But during the offbeat exercises as well as encounters before and after the six classes we witness, characters are excavated and discovered, relationships change, and there are consequences to revelations and self-revelations.

 Circle Mirror Transformations is one of four plays by contemporary American playwright Annie Baker that are set in this Vermont town. Three of them were staged in the Bay Area in the past year—this one just closed at the Marin Theatre. After successful productions in New York (where it won a couple of Obies), Washington and Los Angeles, it is becoming a regional theatre favorite.

 This play invites and also requires a different kind of attention. The actual plot is fairly simple, and even predictable in TV reality show outcomes. But the story is told by every movement, every stutter and change in body language. It’s in the silences, and the odd and sometimes wildly funny exercises.

These are theatre games—the play’s title is the name of one. Some involve one character pretending to be another. Some involve creating a group story. Others look like a cross between actors’ warm-ups and group therapy.

 Director Nathan Emmons and the cast make the necessary precision of depicting this look natural. There are short fragments and sustained scenes. The dialogue is mostly banal, laced with psychobabble. Some liken Baker’s work to Chekhov because nothing apparently happens, but I see more of Mamet and Pinter in the way the characters use dull received language as masks that reveal them anyway.
 (Considering my last column it is a coincidence however that Baker’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya was one of its New York productions this year.)

 It’s a different kind of comedy. But it is a comedy. At the end of all the accidental honesty there’s a happy conclusion of sorts. And it’s funny (despite the reluctance of the small preview audience I saw it with to join me in laughing.)

 I had problems with both the play and the production, but as long as audience members let go of conditioned expectations, this is an unusual and enjoyable two hours. The cast is skillful and endearing. I’d expect this is one that people will talk about.

 Daniel C. Nyiri designed the intentionally drab set (though maybe it didn’t have to be that drab.) Lighting is by Calder Johnson, the interesting sound design by Nathan Emmons, costumes by Laura Rhinehart.

 Circle Mirror Transformation continues at Redwood Curtain on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through September 29 at 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee on September 23.

 More about the upcoming season: Ferndale Rep is going through a management shakeup but early indications are that they are sticking with their season as announced.

 At HSU, students are back and preparations are underway for Theatre, Film and Dance Department productions. The first is a special one-night reading on November 1 of 8: The Play by Dustin Lance Black, about the court case that overturned California Proposition 8 and its ban on same sex marriages. That case is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Clint Rebik directs a cast from the North Coast theatre community.

 In late November, Rae Robison directs the classic Sanskrit love story Shankutala in a new adaptation by Margaret Thomas Kelso. In February, Michael Fields directs Hater, Samuel Buggeln’s adaptation for the 21st century of Moliere’s The Misanthrope. Then after the spring dance production and Humboldt Film Festival in April, Michael Thomas directs David Auburn’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning play, Proof.  Find out more about them at HSU Stage & Screen.

 Coming Up: Fox on the Fairway, a tribute to the stage and film farces of the 1930s and 40s by Ken Ludwig, opens at North Coast Rep on Thursday September 20.