"Detroit '67" at Aurora Theatre Company

Aurora Theatre Company photo by David Allen

For my first taste of the fall season in the bay area theater community, I caught a production of Aurora Theatre Company's first show of their 2018-2019 season, Detroit '67 by Dominique Morisseau. The first of a trilogy of plays by Morisseau about her hometown. This one is set in July of 1967.

The Play

The late 1960s saw a rash of urban incidents, many of which got classified as "race riots," though that term probably doesn't accurately reflect the actual conflicts going on. Yes, race was a big factor as dissatisfaction with decades of racism and segregation boiled over.

Detroit '67 takes place in a basement in the center of the black community in Detroit. With limited options for socializing, many illicit after-hours parties spring up in homes and basements. A bit of booze and a lot of Motown dance music transforms an ordinary basement into a kind of night club. This one is run by Chelle and Lank, in the house they inherited from their parents. Running the parties brings in a bit of extra money. Chelle finds security in this, but Lank has bigger aspirations.

While Chelle is content to hang a few extra Christmas lights to liven up the basement, Lank is looking to upgrade from their balky record player to a new 8-track tape player. And unbeknownst to Chelle, Lank is looking to buy a local bar and run it with his friend Sly. The other friend from the neighborhood, Bunny, pretty much just wants to dance and party as a relief from the drag of everyday life.

A bit of extra disturbance comes into their lives when Lank and Sly bring home a white girl they found beaten and dazed on the street. Caroline is a mystery, evasive about her past and even how she ended up in this situation. But Chelle immediately senses trouble, while Lank insists that they have an obligation to help her.

So here we have an internal conflict that in some ways mirrors the conflict going on outside in the street. As the mostly white, often corrupt, police force cracks down on both legitimate clubs and bars as well as the after-hours parties, the characters in the play find themselves torn between ideals and dreams and the harsh reality around them.

The one thing everybody can agree on is the Motown sound, and the music provides a delightful backdrop to the whole show.

Stylistically, the whole setup obviously owes a lot to August Wilson's cycle of plays about Pittsburgh through the 20th century. By focusing on a small group of people in a single spot at a key moment, we get a personal insight into the larger social tides.

The Production

The key to the production is making a believable version of 1967, which is made easier by setting the whole play in one room. The basement, the decorations, the furnishings, and especially the music and costumes really worked. Having lived through 1967, I found it pretty convincing. The costumes by Kitty Muntzel were particularly good, and the set designed by Richard Olmsted  were excellent. And it's hard to go wrong with a Motown soundtrack (and some riot effects) courtesy of sound designer Cliff Caruthers and associate Elton Bradman. All of that felt very familiar.

More jarring was some of the language, particularly hearing the police almost uniformly referred to as "pigs." It felt authentic, but definitely hit my adult sensibilities pretty hard.

The acting was really quite good. Particularly I felt the supporting characters, Bunny (Akilah A. Walker) and Sly (Myers Clark), felt really authentic, including when they were not the focus of attention. Both felt like real people, not like manufactured caricatures.

The lead actors, Halili Knox as Chelle and Rafael Jordan as Lank, managed a pretty good version of adult siblings with some differences. Knox in particular seemed to have a solid connection to the style and behavior of a woman of the sixties. She conveyed very keenly the desire not to lose ground, juxtaposed nicely with Jordan's upward ambitions.

And director Darryl V. Jones pulled the package together really well. By making the full package feel right, he enables Morisseau's words to sell the conflict of the story.

Bottom Line

This is a very good play, and extremely well done, both by the actors and critically by all the supporting artists who make the setting believable.

As luck would have it, the show has been extended all the way to October 7th, so there are still two full weeks of shows you can catch, and I would recommend that you do. This is kind of Aurora at its best, pulling together a solid cast and crew in a relatively simple but totally recognizable setting.

"The War of the Roses" at Cal Shakes

Cal Shakes photo by Kevin Berne

As I noted recently, there are not very many Shakespeare plays that I have yet to see performed. Among those is the set of history plays collectively depicting the life of Henry VI, which comes in three parts as written. Because of its sheer length and verbosity, the trio of Henry VI plays is rarely produced at all, and is generally condensed considerably. So I've seen bits and adaptations, but never a full version.

I'm in something of a quandary now, after seeing the California Shakespeare Theater production of The War of the Roses, which they describe as adapted "from William Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and Richard III". Totaling almost four hours (including an intermission), Roses is roughly half and half of the Henry plays and Richard III. So I still haven't seen a full version of Henry VI, but I have now seen a lot of it.

The Play

As usual, I'm not going to try to summarize the plot of Shakespearean history plays. This basically picks up with the untimely, relatively young death of Henry V, whose son Henry was crowned king as an infant. His uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, served as Lord Protector until Henry achieved his adulthood and dismissed him. Meanwhile, the French territory won by Henry V was slowly frittered away, and ultimately bargained away by the Earl of Suffolk, who has designs of his own. So there is dissension and unrest in England under Henry, and lots of intrigue and machinations within the extended royal family.

The big split in the ruling Plantagenet family comes between the factions nominally supporting Henry (including Suffolk) called the House of Lancaster, and opposing him, led by the Duke of York and called the House of York. The factions signify themselves with red or white roses, respectively. Hence, the name of the play. Because the conflict does devolve into civil war (more than once) between the factions.

And of course loyalties switch as we go along. Ultimately, this all traces back to the same contested lines of succession that characterize the several generations (and four Shakespeare plays) reaching back to Richard II and his rival, the eventual Henry IV. Rising from the ruins of the House of York as the Henry portion of the play winds down, York's sons, including Richard, who will eventually connive his way to the throne as Richard III.

It's a lot to keep track of over the course of many hours. The program had helpful text and illustrations to help out, but mostly it's just fun to watch all the backstabbing and manipulation.

The Production

Given the plethora of characters in the story, they manage to cover them all with a relatively modest sized cast. Everyone plays multiple roles, but never at the same time. As director Eric Ting noted in his curtain speech, the actors only assume new roles when their previous characters die. As luck would have it, lots of characters die in this play.

There are some really terrific performances in this show. Several veteran local actors provide their usual excellent contributions, including Stacy Ross (Humphrey, Edward IV, and the Dutchess of York), Aldo Billingslea (Warwick, Buckingham), and Catherine Leudtke (Winchester, Elizabeth Grey). Some of the younger local stalwarts put in great performances, too, notably Lance Gardner (Suffolk, Rivers, Tyrrel) and Jomar Tagatec (York, Louis XI, Stanley).

I can't go without commenting on the performance of dependable local actor Danny Scheie as Richard III. As he grows from one of York's vengeful sons to become Duke of Gloucester, his menacing, conspiratorial, and eventually maniacal behavior grows steadily and rather quickly. Unfortunately, by the time he's becoming King Richard III, there's not much room for him to build anymore, so it gets a bit old. Also, his years of comic roles seem to seep into his Richard at somewhat odd moments or in inappropriate ways. Overall I found his Richard III much less compelling than his younger roles, which surprised me because if anything, he's a bit old even for the older role.

Throughout the production, Joshua Pollock provides an effective soundscape with is guitar from the side of the stage, and occasionally supplies lines for minor characters (and eventually takes the stage as Catesby toward the end). The set designed by Nina Ball is relatively unobtrusive most of the time, but they made good use of it, particularly as numerous characters were confined to The Tower (never a good sign). The throne at the center of the stage (nearly the whole time) makes for an effective center to the story. After all, that's the thing all the conflict is about.

Bottom Line

Although Richard III is a reasonably well known piece, the Henry VI trilogy is pretty rarely performed. But as noted above, a lot of Richard's early development comes in the latter parts of the Henry plays. This adaptation (by Ting and Cal Shakes dramaturg Philippa Kelly) trims the politics around Henry almost to the bone, such that if you don't know the story, it might be hard to follow. On the other hand, it move pretty quickly and preserves most of Richard's bits. I gather Ting and Kelly each wanted to do either Henry or Richard, and compromised by doing both. I suppose it works. I doubt a strictly Henry production would have drawn the degree of interest, and Richard is less interesting without the lead-in.

Ultimately it's nice to see Cal Shakes dipping a bit deeper into the canon for material. Under Ting's artistic direction the company has moved to diversify its offerings in general, so it's nice to see them choosing some less common Shakespeare works, too.

Overall I would say the show was worth seeing: I always enjoy an evening in the outdoor theater, and this one was well done and different. Unfortunately I had to reschedule my original date (because of our trip to Stratford), so ended up seeing the show's penultimate performance, so it's already closed by the time you read this.

But I will say that I enjoyed all three shows of the Cal Shakes season this year, and am looking forward to seeing their remount of last season's black odyssey in a couple of weeks. That should be really good.

"Kiss" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz Studio

I thought this was going to be a really simple write-up, because I'd seen the show as a reading last year. But apparently I neglected to blog about it at the time, so I won't be able to just refer back to that text. Alas!

The current offering at Shotgun is a really interesting play. Thematically and spiritually, it's as if someone decided to mash up Shotgun's 2016 production of Christopher Chen's play Caught with last season's rendering of Sarah Kane's Blasted to produce a consciously self-negating and unnervingly experiential exploration of cultural miscommunication and the horrors of war, all rolled into one.

The Play

As with any play that intentionally undercuts itself, I find it hard to write much about the plot or structure of the play without giving a lot away. Suffice it to say that much like Chen's Caught, each of the four scenes in the play serves to subvert in some manner the audience's understanding of what has gone before. In this case, we start with a pretty straightforward, rather melodramatic rendering of a group of friends gathering in war-torn Damascus to watch their favorite soap opera. We eventually come to understand that this is a play within the play, that a group of actors found a script on the Internet and decided to perform it. When they finish, they treat their audience to a live-via-Internet video chat with the playwright, who is in a refugee camp.

As the discussion with the playwright continues, it becomes clear that the actors have severely misunderstood the script they read, and have a lot of trouble getting clear just what they do and don't understand about the situation in modern Syria. Based on their new understanding, the revisit the script in ways that genuinely amazed me. The artful performance of essentially the same words with an entirely different context is probably the single most impressive aspect of the show. It continues even beyond that, but more I shall not say, for fear of revealing too much.

Suffice it to say that what starts as a pretty simple-seeming little soap opera scene turns out to me much, much deeper when read in the right light.

Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón wanted to write a play about the situation in Syria, but since he knew almost nothing directly about the conflict, he also decided to write about that: the difficulty of learning and understanding what truly happens in another place, another culture, without first-hand experience. In that sense, the play is quite successful. By depicting artists earnestly trying to convey a message about a situation that they do not themselves comprehend, Calderón suggests the limitations of his own art and abilities, and causes the audience to question what they think they know about such situations, and how they might have learned that.

All in all, it's a very clever piece of writing. I wasn't entirely clear on what Calderón intended from the last scene, but even so, I came away impressed.

The Production

As noted up top, I saw this play in a staged reading at Shotgun last year, so had a pretty good notion of what the play was about. But a full staging made for a much more effective and viscerally satisfying version of the story. Just as one example, having the playwright and her interpreter actually appearing projected on the wall, rather than just sitting on the other side of the stage, is quite satisfying. Similarly, setting the play in a purpose-built living room, rather than adapting the set from some other play, really helps to convey what the actors are going through.

I have to single out actors Rasha Mohamed and Jessica Lea Risco, as the playwright and her interpreter, for managing to act literally behind the scenes and still manage to convey coherent characters when projected on the wall. The fact that they also function in both English and Arabic is impressive, and adds to the general feeling of cultural awkwardness.

The four American actors, played by Roneet Aliza Rahamim, Elissa Beth Stebbins, Wiley Naman Strasser, and Phil Wong, all bring distinct degrees and types of their own biases and misunderstandings to their roles. They manage to represent the earnestness of their endeavor as well as the splintered, inconsistent levels of misinterpretation they all carry. Director Evren Odcikin coordinates all of this chaos quite masterfully. I can see where it would be easy to let this play devolve into a terrible, confusing mess, but Odcikin manages to keep the audience off balance without completely coming untethered.

There's a bit of uncomfortable messing around as we move from the initial presentation to the online session, but that ultimately feeds into the awkwardness of learning that what seemed to be a well-intentioned attempt to convey a political message was in fact not even understood by the messengers. There was definitely a sense of disquiet between the scenes as audience members had to decide for themselves what was really going on.

Bottom Line

I would say this is a good, not great play, but it does some things very well that are difficult and probably necessary right now. Making people question what they think they understand and why, especially across cultural boundaries (that need not be ocean-spanning) is valuable. Perhaps if people start to analyze the kabuki aspects of the way facts and their alternatives filter around our own country, they might feel less certain of their stances in a polarized society that is part of a fragmented world.

In short, the play's not perfect, but it's doing something important, and is really well worth seeing. And as luck would have it, the run as been extended through September 30th, so you still have two weeks to catch the show. It's definitely worth your time.

Stratford Festival 2018

Festival Theatre and swan. Stratford Festival photo by Krista Dodson

This will be a somewhat different sort of post, partly because I'm so backed up, and partly because I don't really feel it's worth writing 5-or-more posts on this festival visit. So...consider this an experiment (much like this trip was!).

What am I doing in Canada?

I've been hearing for years about this Stratford Festival, usually in the context that it's sort of Canada's version of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival we've been attending for the last decade or so. Stratford is a bit less convenient to this Bay Area resident than Ashland, but when the opportunity presented itself, we decided to go.

Specifically, we won an auction at a local theater fundraiser that gave us airfare and lodging and maybe two tickets to a show. Clearly we were not going all the way to Ontario just to see one show, so we planned out a long weekend trip. Last year. Personal circumstances kept us from going last year, but we were able to reschedule for this year's Labor Day weekend, so here we are in Stratford!

Stratford is a lovely little down in Southern Ontario, population something like 32,000. It seems like the main industry is this festival, though there are some others. Mostly it has struck us as a quiet little rural town, quite pleasant and walkable (which is good, because parking is difficult). We have basically parked the rental car we drove down from Toronto at our lodgings and not used it since. Lots of walking! Very pleasant.

We scheduled five plays over three days, with a travel day on either end. We wouldn't have minded adding a sixth play, but the schedule didn't permit it. We had already seen the show(s) on offer tonight, and we didn't want to see the other options we could have swapped for.

Much like the Ashland festival, Stratford's is a large, rotating repertory company spread across three theaters in town. (A fourth is undergoing major renovations/replacement and will reopen in 2020.) Each venue basically has a matinee and an evening show every day, with Mondays dark. All three theaters are indoors.

The main theater, the Festival Theatre, is the heart of the festival complex, housing both the 1800+-seat room with a 3/4 thrust stage and the rehearsal spaces, administrative and creative spaces. The 550-seat Avon Theatre is a converted vaudeville house with a standard proscenium stage. Adjacent to it is the Studio Theatre, a roughly 250-seat black box that is at least currently set up in 3/4 thrust.

It's about a 20-minute walk from the Festival Theatre to the downtown area where the Avon and Studio theaters are. If you want a more leisurely stroll, you can walk along the river and see ducks, geese, and swans in abundance. It's quite a lovely feature of the town.

OK, enough of that...let's talk about plays.

Bronté: The World Without

Small play, small theater, and a commissioned premiere at that. This one is in the Studio, and it has only three actors, portraying the Bronté sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. It's basically a historical piece about these three sisters growing up in poverty, largely confined to the parsonage where they live with their aging father and dissolute brother. For a literary group, they seem remarkably poor at communicating among themselves. They seem mostly to live by insulting one another, and barely seem to even realize they are all writing poetry and novels. Eventually they have to decide whether to publish their work, and that puts additional strains on the relationship.

Overall, it's pretty interesting and quite well acted. Jessica B. Hill as Emily was truly outstanding, and Andrea Rankin as the youngest and least-known sister Anne really blossoms as the play progresses. Beryl Bain plays Charlotte as something of a cipher, so stoic that it's really hard to understand her character's motivations and development.

I found the play itself somewhat lacking in an overall message, but it was a well-done portrait of three characters I knew little about. I would have appreciated a bit more background on how they got to the point they started from. The sibling rivalries are evident, but unexplained, so I'm left to speculate, which seems a bit unsatisfying.

It was a pretty easy introduction to the festival, however.

Paradise Lost

Yet another commissioned work and world premiere--not bad for our first day in town! This one, as the name implies, is based on John Milton's epic poem of the same name, but it's a new play written by local (Hamilton, Ontario native) playwright Erin Shields. It also tells the tale of humanity's fall from grace (including the retelling of the revolt of Lucifer/Satan and the angels), but from a rather different, more modern perspective. The first and most obvious change is that Satan is female (played by 30-year Stratford veteran Lucy Peacock, who is terrific in this role). That changes a lot of the dynamics, and many of the other angels are also played by women.

I thought the best bits in the play came early, as the newly-fallen angels debate how to deal with the fact that they are now in Hell, but the later scenes leading to Adam and Eve (and a clever handling of the serpent) were good, too.

I came in expecting something a bit more staid and Miltonian, but I was pleased with the creative effort in this new show.

Coriolanus

I'm getting really close to fulfilling my goal of seeing the entire Shakespeare canon performed, and one of the plays I hadn't ever seen was this one, about an ambitious and arrogant Roman soldier who moves into politics but has a huge falling out that leads him to join with his rival to come back and fight against Rome.

André Sills as the title character is quite brilliant, as is Lucy Peacock (again!) as his mother, Volumnia. And the conception of the production, from Director and Set Designer Robert Lepage, is clever, maybe even brilliant. The execution of that design seems a bit self-absorbed; particularly early on, there are transitions that are just too long and slow. But the overall presentation, very cinematic and paced more like a TV drama than a Shakespearean play, does highlight the interactions of celebrity, media, ego, family, class, and connections that all combine to bring down Coriolanus.

But there are other elements that I just couldn't quite fathom. The dress and setting is contemporary, but the projected sets are (largely) Roman period, so there is a lot of dissonance that I can't quite reconcile. And underlying everything is probably the fundamental reason this play isn't produced very often: the main character is just really problematic. It's really hard to understand how he ends up in the situation he does, how the combination of his ego and his boosters' interests culminate in a  thoroughly unstable position. But the bits around it are all really good, so I guess that's forgivable.

One special treat for us was seeing Stephen Ouimette as Junius Brutus, one of the tribunes. Having just rewatched "Slings and Arrows" shortly before our trip, it was really fun to see him on stage.

On the down side, the access in the lovely Avon Theatre is terrible. We were seated rather near the front, and it took nearly the entire intermission to get out to the lobby. Luckily we were able to obtain drinks we could bring back in, but I shudder to think what would happen if they needed to clear the building quickly.

Overall, an impressive production, and a satisfying way to add another tick to my list of the Shakespeare canon.

A Comedy of Errors

While the rest of the family went off to see The Rocky Horror Show, I decided to see how the festival would treat one of my favorite comedies.

The answer is: very well. This is a crisp, clear, pretty straightforward rendering of this classic mistaken-identity play. Most of the productions I've seen of this play have tried setting it in a different time period (e.g., prohibition-era Chicago or the Harlem Renaissance), those settings generally add a layer of complexity to this already-complex scenario. I appreciated the way director Keira Loughran mostly just let the words and actions handle the humor.

What they did play with a lot was gender. Right off the bat, the Duke is cross-dressed as a dutchess, and we'll soon see that both sets of identical twins (the Antipholuses and the Dromios) are both male/female pairs. But importantly, none of this is an issue: each of the pairs is as interchangeable as if they were truly identical, and it never causes any issues. The androgynous costumes for both sets works really well, definitely less distracting than the drag characters, but those are peripheral anyway.

With my fourth play, it was the third time in the Studio Theatre, and interestingly, all three of the actors who were in Bronté were also in both Paradise Lost and The Comedy of Errors. So I got to see the repertory company in action, with all three in quite varied roles. The Studio is small (about 250 seats), but the seats are rather steeply raked, so you feel as if you're right on top of the thrust stage.

All in all, I was quite pleased with my choice, though the family loved the production of Rocky Horror next door.

An Ideal Husband

Last but not least, back into the Avon Theatre for a matinee of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. None of us had ever seen the play, but it seemed like it would be fun. We found the first two acts to be a bit tedious, but after the intermission the play picked up nicely and the witty banter and plot twists kept us quite thoroughly engaged. But it definitely felt like the first half could have been either trimmed or somehow paced more quickly.

Other than that, I don't have a lot to say. It was well done, particularly by Brad Hodder as Lord Goring and Zara Jestadt as Mabel, with a comic boost from Joseph Ziegler as the Earl of Caversham, Goring's father. The whole ensemble is quite capable, though, and the sets are well done.

We were glad we persevered and stayed to the end, as the post-intermission acts were quite satisfying. It's not a show I would go all the way to Stratford to see, but being there, it was a perfectly good play to see.

Reflections on the Festival

The first visit to a festival such as this is a bit intimidating. There is a long-time crowd that has a relationship with the town, the theaters, and of course the company. Of note this season was long-time performer Martha James (who we didn't see at all!) starring as Prospero in The Tempest, where her first appearance at the festival in 1962 was as Miranda in the same play. Through 44 years, 65 plays (30 by Shakespeare), she is obviously an institution and a real draw for the long-time attendees.

We got a definite sense of some of this when we took some of the excellent tours offered at the festival. The backstage tour of the Festival Theatre is quite impressive--the size and scope of that complex is rather daunting. But I think we got the best feel for the festival itself with the tours of the warehouse and (especially) the archives. The festival has retained a vast amount of material over the years: scripts, costumes, props, photos, and video, and it's all available to researchers and theater makers. That's pretty awesome. And it also illustrates the long-standing community that has grown up around the festival.

We had a similar experience a decade or so ago when we first went to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It was a little like walking into someone else's family reunion. But eventually we settled in and now we feel comfortable there, looking forward to seeing what our favorite artists are doing each year, noticing the changes, etc.

I think it's safe to say we'll be going back to Stratford, though perhaps not as often or as religiously as we do to Ashland. The quality of the plays is comparably high, and the little community is quite nice as well.  There is definitely more to see.

In retrospect, it would probably have been nice to see more of their signature productions, the big shows in the Festival Theatre and some of the smaller shows such as Long Day's Journey into Night with several of their long-time stars. I heard great things about both The Tempest and To Kill a Mockingbird, neither of which we had scheduled. Unlike Ashland, it really didn't seem like there was a good way to come in and see everything (or nearly so) in a relatively short period, and that seems unfortunate for a destination theater festival such as this. I know not everyone wants to see two shows a day, every day, but some of us do!

All in all, it was a good trip, and one we'll look forward to making again.