Monkey Night PlayGround Tonight

I snapped the photo above on our PlayGround field trip to Tao House in Danville, where Eugene O’Neill wrote the plays considered his masterpieces: Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. I can see how that view might inspire you to greatness.

I post it because tonight is Monday Night PlayGround at Berkeley Rep, and the topic this month was THE HAIRY APE, inspired by O’Neill’s play. Six short plays will get staged readings tonight; I’m hoping at least one features a monkey:

• Trolls by Cass Brayton
• The Audition by Alex Moggridge
• The Cow by Evelyn Jean Pine
• Very Smart Dog by Dan Rubin
• Mugging by Nick Turner
• The Safety of Pools by Malachy Walsh

Last month, it was completely packed in the Roda Theater. If you want to check it out tonight, you might want to buy tickets online ahead of time.

PlayGround, in residence at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St, Berkeley, tonight. Tickets at playground-sf.org.

SF Chronicle Interviews Peter Nachtrieb

Robert Hurwitt interviews Peter Nachtrieb in today’s SF Chronicle. Peter is not only a fantastic writer and a super-nice guy, but he’s one of the few playwrights in the country, let alone the Bay Area, actually making a living as a playwright:

With “Boom” now a national success, and “T.I.C.,” which premiered here with Encore Theater in January, getting some interest in New York, Nachtrieb is turning his attention to two new commissions, for Orange County’s South Coast Rep and American Conservatory Theater’s master’s of fine arts program. He is, in other words, making his living as a full-time playwright.

“It’s coming up on three years,” he says. “Hopefully, I can make it last. At this point it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m good through May or June,’ but I hope I can keep pushing that termination date farther out. I’m committed to being a Bay Area-based playwright. Living here definitely colors everything I write.”

Go see his play and keep him in SF writing plays and not in LA writing Desperate Housewives. And read the interview; it’s a good one.

boom by Peter Nachtrieb, at Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave, Mill Valley, Nov 12 – Dec 6. Tickets at marintheatre.org.

‘THE WOMAN IN BLACK’ by Second Wind Theatre

If you happen to be reading this right when it’s posted, which looks to be around 5:45 on Saturday, then you have about one hour to rush down to Phoenix Theatre to catch Second Wind’s production of The Woman in Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt, before it closes tonight.

I got a chance to catch it on Friday night. It’s directed by my friend Ian Walker, who does a great job playing up the theatricality of the piece, which you probably know is right up my alley: a chair is moved to the right to become an office, moved to the left to become a horse, moved offstage to create a bedroom, and the whole thing flows without a lot of realistic furniture being hauled around. Hey, that’s my aesthetic, too.

The play’s been running nonstop in London since 1989, and not just because it’s a two-person play. It’s got a taut, suspenseful story; an opportunity for actors to play multiple characters; and a framing device that admits to the audience that we’re all an audience about to listen to a story. Lovely.

Normally I would stick a little thing at the bottom that tells when the play ends in case you want to go, but you can’t, so I’ll skip that. But do check out Second Wind’s website if you get a chance. And these are the same folks doing the very cool video blog series I mentioned before, so check that out, as well.

Dan Hoyle Goes From The Marsh To The NY Times

Bay Area playwright and actor Dan Hoyle’s solo show Tings Dey Happen was one of my favorite shows of, hmm, I guess it was about three years ago. It’s now back, having moved from the smaller stage at The Marsh to the larger (and more tourist-friendly) Marines Memorial Theatre. And today it’s reviewed in the New York Times by our own Chloe Veltman:

Many things have happened since Dan Hoyle performed in the premiere of “Tings Dey Happen,” his incendiary and brilliant solo show about Nigerian oil politics, nearly three years ago at the compact theater the Marsh in San Francisco.

His career has been on the rise. “Tings Dey Happen” won the Will Glickman Award for best new play in the Bay Area and was featured, to critical acclaim, in 2007 at the Culture Project in New York. (Wilborn Hampton in The New York Times called Mr. Hoyle “a first-rate reporter and actor.”) Last month the State Department invited Mr. Hoyle to return to Nigeria to perform “Tings Dey Happen” as part of an official diplomatic tour.

The article/review updates both the state of Nigeria and the play in the three years since it previewed. You can read it here. And the show, if you missed it the many times it played The Marsh, is:

Tings Dey Happen by Dan Hoyle, at Marines Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, SF, through Nov 29. Tickets at marinesmemorialtheatre.com.

Peter Nachtrieb Article: 14 Theaters Can’t Be Wrong

Today’s Marin Independent Journal has an interview by Sam Hurwitt with Peter Nachtrieb, whose play boom is finally playing in the Bay Area — as well as at 13 other theaters around the country:

Q: What’s it like seeing so many interpretations of the play?

A: It’s pretty wild. It had a workshop production at Brown in 2007, then I had a quick turnaround to its world premiere at Ars Nova. Last fall I got to go to two productions, one at Wooly Mammoth — and I felt I finished the play there — then the following week in Seattle. All of those productions were very different. Getting a chance to hear it with different audiences, different casts and different directors was really helpful for me to see what was working consistently and where were the bumps. If I made any changes now I think it wouldn’t make the play any better.

Read the whole thing here. See the play here:

boom by Peter Nachtrieb, at Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave, Mill Valley, Nov 12 – Dec 6. Tickets at marintheatre.org.

Marsha Norman in American Theatre Magazine

And in case the previously mentioned M.R. Fall is still reading this blog, here’s an article that follows up on what we were talking about at Short Leaps. It’s by Marsha Norman, published in American Theatre magazine, and it’s really, really good.

The gist:

The U.S. Department of Labor considers any profession with less than 25 percent female employment, like being a machinist or firefighter, to be “untraditional” for women. Using the 2008 numbers, that makes playwriting, directing, set design, lighting design, sound design, choreography, composing and lyric writing all untraditional occupations for women. That’s a disaster if you’re a woman writer, or even if you just think of yourself as a fair person. We have a fairness problem, and we have to fix it now. If it goes on like this, women will either quit writing plays, all start using pseudonyms, or move to musicals and TV, where the bias against women’s work is not so pervasive.

And an interesting aside:

Literary managers are caught in a kind of limbo. They don’t have much real power and they are swamped with work. They probably know more about good writing and good writers than anybody else in their theatre, but in practice, they feel very much on the outside, underpaid and underused. Worst of all, they have been put in charge of readings and re-readings, the process by which most new plays are worn out. We are wasting our lit managers, their time and their talents.

Richard Nelson, writing in these pages in September ‘07, was right: Theatres need to abandon development, talkbacks and rewrites. I suggest they adopt the rules of the fine art world—if you like it, you buy it. You don’t bring a piece into your gallery, take a brush and change the red patch in the bottom of the painting to green, and then decide not to buy it and send it back. That’s exactly what happens to playwrights’ work in development.

I believe “if you like it, you buy it” may very well be the policy of Sleepwalkers Theatre — which is only one of two hundred and twelve reasons why they rock.

‘GHOSTS OF THE RIVER’ and ‘SHORT LEAPS’

On Sunday, I had a jam-packed day of theater and food. First of all, our show closed on Saturday night, so Sunday morning came way earlier than I’d have liked. I rushed off and would have been late to Ghosts of the River by Octavio Solis at Brava, except much of the audience was also late (probably because a Veteran’s Day Parade coincided with a Forty-Niners’ game).

Ghosts of the River was a shadow play performed by ShadowLight, a group that does stunningly beautiful work with shadow casting, puppets, actors, cutout sets and live music. Combined with Octavio’s gorgeous storytelling — switching rapidly from hilarious to tragic and back again — it made for an astonishingly brilliant afternoon.

After grabbing a maple bacon donut at Dynamo Donuts — since (a) it’s right across from the theater and (b) it’s a donut with freaking bacon on it! — I rushed off to an early Burma Superstar dinner with a friend of mine who’d flown in from Austin to see closing night of our play, then headed straight back across town to Off-Market for Three Wise Monkeys‘ Short Leaps Festival.

This was three things at once: a fundraiser, a night of staged readings, and an announcement of the plays that are being produced as part of the Bay Area One Acts Festival this spring. I was a bit late, ducking in right before intermission, but got to see the second half, with some pretty cool short plays, including a very funny one by someone named “M.R. Fall,” who I didn’t know I knew until I found out afterwards. Them initials can be tricky, which I believe is the point.

And here’s the news I alluded to in an earlier post, which I not-so-cleverly bury at the bottom of this too-long post: my one-act Three Little Words will be produced as part of the festival. Rehearsals probably in January; show in February; posts about it all somewhere in between.

‘Most Theatre Is Still Really Bad’

Playwright Mike Bartlett was interviewed in The Observer yesterday:

If you’re still going at theatre-in-the-1970s speed and your audience has been watching The Wire, then your play’s going to seem pretty slow.

….We’ve got to get away from the idea that it’s good to go to the theatre. It isn’t church. There’s nothing innately good about it. Most theatre is still really bad.

Must-Read Interview With Amy Mueller

The New Play Blog — run by NEA’s New Play Development Program at Arena Stage — has an extensive interview with Amy Mueller, artistic director of the Playwrights Foundation. It covers everything from the history of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival to the criteria for choosing the plays in the first place, including a discussion of the all-important retreat before the festival:

The artist retreat is a kind of a crucible for the writers, a brain trust of the artistic members of the team, and is a time for the company to bond and get to know one another. No one is ever allowed to make suggestions for the writing of the plays, but asked to respond only to the work itself. We follow the Artist Response Format modeled after Liz Lerman’s well known process. We’ve found, and playwrights tell us, that for the retreat, writers find this incredibly useful. It allows the playwright to think about the questions s/he has at this point in the process, and gives them info about how the play is landing and that sort of thing.

I was a part of BASH (Bay Area Shorts) a few years back and can attest that the retreat is a really amazing experience, particularly the part where playwrights read their entire play out loud. Nothing like hearing a writer read a work-in-progress to really understand their intentions. Plus there’s free food and occasionally bourbon.

If you’re planning on submitting for the festival, you should definitely read this article. And get cracking on your play: submissions are due November 30. Info on the submission process is here.

‘GOLDFISH’ at Magic Theatre

One of the benefits of being an Artistic Associate at Magic Theatre is that I get invited to the first rehearsal of new plays, such as the one that opened this season, Goldfish by John Kolvenbach.

One of the very few downsides with having a show of my own in production is that I didn’t actually get to attend said rehearsal, nor the opening, nor any production of it until yesterday. It opened on the same day of our final dress and closes the day after our closing, so I had to do a little maneuvering to finally get a chance to see the show last night.

Man, I’m glad I did. Kolvenbach is a great writer. In fact, here’s what I said off the top of my head when emailing a fellow Magic Literary Committee member about the show, after she mentioned that playwrights in particular have been going out of their way to praise the play:

I’m not surprised playwrights are digging it; there’s some great dialogue there, with brilliant performances to bring it to life. I really enjoyed how he was able to make the emotions front and center without either resorting to irony on the one hand or getting maudlin and soap opera-ish on the other.

And I fully agree with what Nathaniel Eaton said in SF Weekly:

Last year, when Loretta Greco was hired as artistic director for the Magic Theatre, she said she wanted to bring back some of the Sam Shepard-esque energy to its productions. With playwright John Kolvenbach’s Goldfish, she (serving here as director too) does just that.

It’s a great script with powerful acting. And here’s the coolest part, if you jump on it: They’re running Goldfish in rep with Kolvenbach’s follow-up to the play, called Mrs. Whitney, featuring one of the best characters in Goldfish, set five years later.

You can even see both shows the same night, with a dinner served in-between. The last two marathons are Nov 6 and Nov 7, then Goldfish closes on the 8th and Mrs. Whitney continues until Nov 22. Knowing me, I’ll squeak in and catch it the very last week, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

In fact, you should go to the marathon, see them both the same day, and then go to the comments here and tell me what the experience is like. I’d love to do it, but, as I said, my play’s running those exact dates. So there you go.

Goldfish by John Kolvenbach at Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, through Nov 8. Tickets at magictheatre.org.

‘THE BALD SOPRANO’ at The Cutting Ball Theater

After months of being consumed by the premiere of my own play, I finally got a chance to get back to seeing other people’s plays this weekend, starting with The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, in a brand new translation by Rob Melrose — the person I once called “the best interpreter of absurdism in the Bay Area and possibly the planet.”

I stand by the quote. This was a wonderful translation, based on Rob’s realization upon seeing the original French production, still running in Paris after playing over fifty years, that, as he put it in the program, past productions of the play “can often veer off into ornate parody of British people.”

Seeing the French production (which doesn’t try for a British accent or particularly British costumes), made me realize that these overly British productions tend to miss the point. Ionesco himself said that if he had been learning Italian or Russian or Turkish, then the characters would be Italian or Russian or Turkish. If anything is being parodied, it is the simple language of textbooks….

That, of course, because, as anyone who reads this blog probably knows, The Bald Soprano was inspired by Ionesco’s trying to learn English and noticing how absurd and inane the dialogues of the husband and wife in the textbook were. “You are my husband. I am your wife. We have three children. The cat is on the chair. The monkey is on the branch.”

This production rocked, from the translation to the hilarious and precise movement of each of the killer actors. The audience really dug it, and not just because it was opening night — although that always does give the room a nice post-show buzz.

In fact, we ended up laughing and eating and drinking and talking for twice as long as the play itself. Caught up with some local theater people I haven’t seen since before the summer. Got some good news about a play of mine that I’ll share later, when it’s official. And all in all had a really fun night.

The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Rob Melrose, at Cutting Ball Theater, 141 Taylor Street, San Francisco, Oct 23 – Nov 22. Tickets at cuttingball.com.

Hey, The SF Bay Guardian Loved ‘ZOMBIE TOWN’

Check it out! Robert Avila at the SF Bay Guardian gave us a great review — with a cool headline, as well: “Sleepwalkers’ Zombie Town has brains (and eats them, too!)”

This gem is penned by Tim Bauer, a San Francisco playwright and former Texas resident, whose eye and ear for the culture clashes attendant not only in zombie movies but also between the humbler masses and certain rarified sections of the theater world makes Zombie Town a consistently witty treat. Sleepwalkers’ artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp directs with an equally strong parodic sense a lively cast of living and post-living characters — played to perfection by an ensemble that could hardly be sharper or funnier were it to have a mining pick protruding from its collective forehead.

Read the whole thing; it does a fantastic job of summing up the play. Then come see the show and see if you agree!

Monday Night PlayGround

Monday night was the season opener of PlayGround at Berkeley Rep, and I was lucky enough to have my play selected as one of the six that received a staged reading.

The topic was Futurism Revisited, in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the original Futurist Manifesto. I chose to focus on the movement’s appreciation of hyper-conciseness and speed and conveniently ignore its later association with Mussolini and fascism.

So I wrote a 10-minute play called A Futurist Supersaga In Six Acts. Which is a bit of a misnomer, actually. One of the six acts is actually broken into three acts itself, making eight acts total — but who’s counting?

Even though rehearsal was only 90-minutes long, it was a complete joy. Stacy Ross and Steve Irish, two of the best actors in the Bay Area and beyond, were cast as the Man and Woman. (I suppose that should be Woman and Man.) And Jon Tracy, of The Farm at Shotgun Players fame, directed. Watching the play move from page to table read to a brilliant performance in about 2 hours was unbelievably fun.

After a 45-second tech — you can’t really have a lot of light cues when doing a six act play in 10 minutes — I was part of a pre-show panel with Marisela Orta, Ken Slattery and Raelle Myrick-Hodges, the artistic director of Brava. Raelle had just directed a number of the original Futurist plays from 1909, so she gave a lot of insight into how Futurism evolved and still influences the art world today.

Then came the readings, which rocked, feeding off the energy of an almost-full Roda Theater. Afterwards, one of the biggest groups yet of playwrights, actors, directors, board members and friends headed to Beckett’s for a lively post-show drink.

You can tell the conversations were captivating because Eric Hayes went off to buy me a beer, got caught up talking about Eugene O’Neill, and didn’t come back for quite a while — and I was so busy laughing and talking I didn’t even notice I was sitting in front of an empty beer glass. Trust me: that is a very rare occurrence.

Bay Area Fave Liz Duffy Adams Interviewed

Adam Szymkowicz has been doing an amazing series of interviews with contemporary and indie playwrights. Today is #78: Bay Area favorite Liz Duffy Adams:

Q:  A lot of your work has been done in San Francisco. What is the theater scene like there?

A:  In my experience, there’s a wealth of small theaters doing new work there; it’s a fantastic place for new plays. I’ve worked with a handful — Crowded Fire, Shotgun, Cutting Ball — and there are many more. And Playwrights Foundation is tremendously supportive of local and visiting playwrights. I love the Bay Area, I’ve had nothing but wonderful experiences there. The audiences are marvelously smart, receptive and un-jaded.

Read the whole thing.

Magic Theatre’s New Website

I’m a bit of a design nerd (which is why I’m a big fan of Cheshire Isaac’s posters for Impact and Berkeley Rep, FYI) so I was surprised when I saw how cool Magic Theatre’s website redesign looks.

Not surprised that it looks cool, but surprised that I hadn’t thought about how boring the old site looked. Whoever did the new design did a great job.

Although I suppose I should say I could be biased since I’m a Magic Theatre Artistic Associate — but I’ve been away so long because of summer and then the production of my play that there’s a good possibility no one remembers that.