NOW PLAYING, through Sept. 27: ''Back To School Night': No more apples, please

By Mark Langton

Article Launched: 08/28/2008 10:39:29 PM, PST; Marin Independent Journal

Something flits across the face of Mel Aubert that has no business being there.

It is a moment's insecurity amid all the animation, a quick lowering of the eyes, the way she drops her smile like a facial tic, the nervous way she adjusts her bangs, the ones that she grew out, presumably to hide the lines across her forehead drawn by darker seasons. The ones she forgets all about when she throws back her head and laughs.

There is something vulnerable about Mel Aubert, whose latest one-woman show, the satirical "Back To School Night," opens Sept. 6 in College of Marin's Fine Arts Building and continues each Saturday in September. Proceeds go to the charity she created last year called the Mellow Bear Foundation - get it? Mel Aubert? - which channels money into keeping arts alive in schools.

It is a vulnerability that seems incongruous in this otherwise fearless performer, sexy soccer mom and popular Kent Middle School teacher who has the guts to do stand-up comedy - and to spill her guts onstage.

Like many actresses who skirt the edges of comedy and performance art, Aubert, 40, draws much of her humor from a troubled childhood, especially in her first one-woman show, 2007's "Growing Out My Bangs," by all accounts an alternately funny and harrowing look at child molestation and personal redemption.

This time, however, with "Back To School Night," it is much lighter fare, though portions are R-rated and decidedly un-PC. It is drawn from her experiences as a middle school teacher and touches on parenting, teaching and her own brand of perky existentialism. She expects the content to be a bull's-eye for teachers who are preparing their classrooms for real back-to-school nights.

Sitting on a park bench at the COM's Kentfield campus, the exuberant Aubert shared some of her thoughts on her new show, looking every bit like a bouncing exclamation point. A tall exclamation point. With blonde hair. In italics.

Q: Your first show was called "Growing Out My Bangs." What is the significance of growing out your bangs to you?

A: For me, it's so representative of what women do when they feel their life is out of control. It's like when you go, "I feel fat, I just lost my boyfriend, I need a change, but nothing too big." So the first thing you do is you cut your bangs. And immediately you go, "Oh crap! What did I do?" And literally you go, "That's it, I'm growing out my bangs." It's something you feel that you can do to move forward. My life has been a series of events that happened while I was growing out my bangs.

Q: While you were busy making other plans?

A: Exactly. You betcha, baby! Only now I'm finally starting to live out my dream.

Q: ...Which is performing?

A: Yup. I was in the choir from the time I was born and sang all the way through college. It took me until I was 38 to live out my dream. When I left school I had a degree in marketing, graduated in '91, and never used it. I got a teaching credential in '94 and taught for 12 years and left in 2006 to pursue acting and writing. I've been performing with a sketch comedy troupe called the Sugar Cube Tube since 2005, and right now we're filming a really high-end collection pilot package of 30-minute episodes. I've taken a part-time job as a middle school drama teacher to pay the mortgage and inspire sixth- and seventh-graders to live their dreams until my acting and writing ship comes in.

Q: What is "Back To School Night" about?

A: It's all stand-up comedy, nowhere near as dark as the last one. The show created itself, from the all the banter in the teachers' lounge where I work. I will be talking to the audience as a teacher, based on my 14 years' experience, talking with them as parents who are attending a back-to-school night. I'm literally going to be handing out clipboards, pencils, agendas and notepaper so that parents can take notes on what teachers would really like them to know.

Q: I'm afraid to ask.

A: (Laughs) Well, for one thing, no more apples. Or mugs with apples on them, puh-lease! Who started that? I'll be telling them that this year in science astronomy we'll be studying that the earth revolves around the sun, and in the parental astronomy class they'll be learning that the world does not revolve around their child. É I'm not up there being angry or lecturing. I'm kind of taking the role of an innocent, like Georgette, Ted Baxter's girlfriend on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," kind of a bespectacled, doe-eyed dim bulb who doesn't know enough to know why she's funny. ...

It speaks to the fact that these kids, especially in an affluent community like Marin, are so over-parented and so over-scheduled with soccer and piano lessons and Hebrew school and chess tournaments that they have no time for school. Hey, do you THINK you could drop the tofu sculpturing class and do some math homework? I don't know, call me crazy. É

What it's really about is living out your dream, demonstrating to my students that I'm living out mine. That it's never too early and never too late. ,,, That, and someone's got to tell these parents that their children are not all gifted! Come on, people! Work with me!

IF YOU GO

- What: "Back To School Night" comedy show and fundraiser for the Mellow Bear Foundation

- Who: Mel Aubert

- When: 8 p.m. Saturdays, Sept. 6-27

- Where: Fine Arts 72, College of Marin, Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Laurel Avenue, Kentfield

- Tickets: $25

- Information: 800-838-8006, http://www.brownpapertickets.com/

Mark Langton can be reached at mark.langton@comcast.net

Profile: Kings of Comedy, S.F. Examiner, 1990

(Click on pages to enlarge)

Stephen King Scares Himself (1990), interview in Image mag., S.F. Examiner

The architecture of the joke

Comedian David VanAvermaete

By Mark Langton

Article Launched: 08/14/2008 01:34:21 PM, Marin Independent Journal

Standup comic David VanAvermaete, 55, who will probably live to 110, is having a mid-life crisis.

Looking like a cross between Jiminy Cricket and a short-cropped Benjamin Franklin, dressed in all "neo-boho-preppie" black, VanAvermaete is not only an award-winning comedian, he is the former CEO of a $1 billion Fortune 500 company.

Not your run-of-the-mill millionaire, VanAvermaete found he was unsatisfied with early retirement. Smart, edgy, restless and quick, he turned his lively, analytical mind from corporate re-structuring to the architecture of the perfect joke.

When VanAvermaete joined LifeScan, a medical device company in Milpitas in 1990, he took it from being a $90 million business to a multibillion-dollar division of Johnson & Johnson. When he retired five years ago, he enrolled in the San Francisco Comedy College (SFCC) and became a member in good standing, so to speak, of the Stand-up Project, the SFCC's premier performance troupe.

In recent years, he has earned first place in the 2006 Rooster T. Feathers Comedy Competition in Sunnyvale and the 2007 Tommy T's Comedy Competition in San Jose. He was runner-up at the 2007 San Francisco International Comedy Competition, the contest that launched the careers of Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Ellen Degeneres and Kevin Pollak (all of whom finished second, too).

VanAvermaete -also a former PGA golf professional -is set to headline a new comedy series that kicks off Aug. 14 at the Seafood Peddler restaurant, an oasis of classy dining situated in a kind of no-man’s land in the middle of San Rafael’s canal district, surrounded by an abandoned Chrysler car dealership to the left and a houseboat shanty-town to the right. Hoping to lure new patrons to navigate the seaweed and tumbleweeds, the upscale eatery has booked VanAvermaete, Johnny Steele, Larry “Bubbles” Brown and Richard Stockton, for the first of what will hopefully be a regular offering of comedy muckey-mucks (yuckey-mucks?).

Reached during his lunch at the American Ale House in Reston, Va., VanAvermaete shared his thoughts on his unique, analytical approach to comedy as he carefully dissected a filet of haddock.

Q: Let's start with the most obvious question: How did you go from a CEO of a $1 billion Fortune 500 company to stand-up comedy?

A: Well, I've been a fan of comedy longer than I can remember. As I was moving through my corporate career, I used to go watch standup a lot and made a habit of stealing the best jokes and incorporating them into my presentations at business meetings. I found it to be an effective communication tool. When I retired, a friend of mine said, why not go to the standup comedy college - yes, there really is such a thing - and do it for real? I found the idea fascinating.

Q: Can that be taught? Can someone learn how to be funny?

A: I think so. It helps to be naturally funny. What they teach you there is there's a whole language of comedy - premises, punchlines, setups, callbacks, tags É it's a writing medium that has its own vernacular, its own structure. When you watch a comedian work, you might think it's just flowing out of his head extemporaneously, but usually it's not. There's a precise structure there, where the words are extraordinarily important. Just where you put the word is in the sentence is so important. If you watch a comedian do the same set night after night, as I have at comedy competitions, you find he becomes redundant. But when it's done well, it sounds like it's coming out of his mouth for the first time.

A good routine is one word or one punchline from being a great routine. I analyzed routines into PLPM's - that's punch lines per minute - shooting for six to seven. For competitions, I used to record bits and weigh laughs on a 1 to 4 scale, 4 equaling an applause break, and score routines 15 laugh points per minute. For a six-minute set, you want 30 to 40 punch lines and 90 laugh points. You have to treat every second like it's gold. You want to avoid riffing, orchestrate controllable interaction. You want your first sentence to be funny - not "Welcome, Sunnyvale! How's everyone doing?" That's just BS. Every word is important. Wasted words equal wasted time.

Q: How do you know what's unnecessary?

A: By constant trial and error. By weeding out words that aren't funny and putting in words that are. For example, for some reason, words with a lot of consonants are funny. I'm not sure why that is. But even then, it has to be the right word. The word "fish?" Not so funny. But the word "haddock" - now THAT'S funny É

It can also be a visual thing, too. You can have the funniest joke in the world, but if you don't have the right body language, they look at you like you just did a card trick for a dog.

Q: Now that's a funny line.

A: Ah, but it's funnier when you cock your head to the side when you say it. (Laughter) See what I mean?

IF YOU GO

What: Marin Comedy Show series at the Seafood Peddler

Who: David VanAvermaete, Johnny Steele, Larry "Bubbles" Brown, Richard Stockton

When: 8 p.m. Aug. 14

Where: Palm Ballroom, Seafood Peddler restaurant, 100 Yacht Club Drive, San Rafael

Tickets: First row with table $25; second/third row with table $20; general admission $15 (two-drink minimum)

Information: 460-6669 (dinner reservations), http://www.marincomedyshow.com/

Mark Langton can be reached at mark.langton@comcast.net

Marin Shakes' "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)"

Jarion Monroe, Darren Bridgett and Ryan Schmidt (from left)
infuse some popular culture into Marin Shakespeare 's
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) in which
they storm through all 37 of the Bard s plays in less than two hours.
(Provided by Marin Shakespeare Company)

Article Launched: 07/11/2007 11:10:03 PM, Marin Independant Journal




The Works

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent


There is a great moment in Marin Shakespeare Company's new revival of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)" that strikes a note with anyone who has ever struggled with the Bard's text. Actor Ryan Schmidt addresses fellow actor Darren Bridgett with a typically florid and complex passage of Elizabethan verse, causing Bridgett to take pause. "What did you just say?" replies Bridgett, cracking both of them up.

You don't have to be a scholar or even a fan of Shakespeare to appreciate this bawdy, silly and thoroughly enjoyable romp through the Bard's canon, which had its opening last Friday and continues through Aug. 12 at Dominican University's Forest Meadows Amphitheatre.

Vigorously performed by actors Darren Bridgett, Jarion Monroe and Ryan Schmidt, the premise is that three actors have taken on the daunting task of presenting all 37 of Shakespeare's plays in under two hours, playing 75 different roles.

Not familiar with Shakespeare? These guys fill in the gaps. Know your Bard? All the funnier for you.

What makes it all come together and work so smoothly and so well are three things: A literate, wide-open script by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, whose Reduced Shakespeare Co. used to perform it at the original Renaissance Faire in Novato; the able direction of MSC co-founder Robert Currier, who is firmly in his element here; and the talents of three local actors - most notably Bridgett, who unavoidably steals the show.

While the format and order of scenes remain mostly unchanged, a lot of the pop culture references have been updated. There's a timely send-up of "The Sopranos," a racy reference to "Brokeback Shakespeare," the occasional George Bush snicker ("Mission accomplished! Heh, heh, heh"), as well as references to Paris Hilton, Stephen Colbert, Lindsay Lohan - even iPhones.

The evening starts off with a parody of "Romeo and Juliet" that plays like a French farce, featuring Schmidt as Romeo and Bridgett as Juliet, followed by a send-up of "Titus Andronicus," done as a gore-filled cooking show led by a French-accented Monroe. The histories are played as a football game, using a crown for the ball, and all 16 comedies are performed as one - the point, of course, is they pretty much all have the same plot anyway, so what the heck.

"Othello" is still done as a one-minute rap song ("Let me tell you people all about/a man named Othello/he liked white women/and he liked green Jell-O...!") with Bridgett doing the Moor of Venice dressed like a pirate (picture Darren Bridgett doing Johnny Depp doing Keith Richards doing Othello). Also quite funny is an abbreviated "Macbeth" done in an incomprehensible Scottish burr. The sonnets are dispensed with by combining them all on a 3X5 card to be passed throughout the audience, and the second act is given over completely to "Hamlet."

There is plenty of bawdy innuendo, but parents needn't worry, as it passes right over kids' heads - almost. During a quick skip through "Anthony and Cleopatra" last Friday, the children in the audience laughed knowingly when the punning bordered on the obscene, causing Bridgett to look out at his director in the audience and ad lib, "Oh, Bobbbbb....I think we need to do more preeeviews...."

During a sock-puppet Punch and Judy show for the play-within-a-play from "Hamlet," a simulated sex act (between puppets) caused Bridgett to run upstage, holding out his hands to block the children's view. "Think of something else!" he shouted, then started singing, "Oh, the wheels of the bus go round and round...."

Monroe, the most classically trained of the three, provides many stylized touches throughout the evening and quietly classes up the joint. Newcomer Schmidt is extremely likable, and holds his own admirably with these two older pros. However, there is no escaping it: Bridgett's immense talent almost swallows the other two.

There comes a moment in this play when one of the actors gets to do a straight reading of one of Hamlet's great soliloquies, "What a piece of work is man...." Most productions will slowly dim the lights for this scene, or otherwise darken the theater to signal a shift or create a reverent air. Not so here.

When the task fell to Bridgett Friday night, he started the speech so casually he almost threw the thing away. But as he began to slow it down, and met the gaze of his audience, it was the sheer beauty of the words and the quiet honesty of their delivery that snuck up on this audience and brought it to silence, the way great poetry can sneak up on you, grab your heart and stop you in your tracks. The scene was everything it should have been, and more, placing things in their proper perspective, and back in their proper place.

Doubting Thomases, doubt no more.

IF YOU GO

What: "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)" by Jess Borgeson, Adam Long and Daniel Singer

Who: Marin Shakespeare Company

When: Through Aug. 12; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays

Where: Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, 1475 Grand Ave., San Rafael, on the Dominican University campus

Tickets: $15 to $30

Information: 499-4488, http://www.marinshakespeare.org/

Rating: Five stars out of five

Mark Langton can be reached at mark.langton@comcast.net.

Last man standing

By Mark Langton

Article Launched: 07/24/2008 10:47:06 PM PDT, Marin Independent Journal

Stand-up comic Mark Pitta is a very funny guy. His impression of an apoplectic Al Pacino ordering coffee at Starbucks is to die laughing for. Ditto his tear-up of rock concert lineups (Talking Heads with Simple Minds, Meat Loaf and Bread, Climax with the Pretenders and so on). And he's been known to kill audiences with his routine about Celebrity Voice GPS Devices. With all the voices in his head, he'd probably make a great ventriloquist - if he ever stopped moving his lips.

Pitta is also a very busy guy. The unapologetically in-your-face, shoot-from-the-lip host of the popular comedy showcase "Mark Pitta and Friends," which is every Tuesday night at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, is about to undertake a three-day Comedy Marathon, Aug. 1-3, featuring 200 or so of his funniest friends.

Proceeds will benefit ailing comedian Max Alexander, a New York-bred, Los Angeles-based comedian who received a kidney from his brother earlier this month.

Q: Why a comedy marathon? Are you trying to break a world record?

A: Funny you should say that. That was the original idea. At least until we had to deal with the Guinness Book people. They are the most annoying people to deal with in the world. They have all these ridiculous rules - we would have had to pay two of their representatives to be there $2,000 apiece or something. We would have had to pay for a medical team - theirs - and account for this and that. É In effect, their attempts to dictate how to do it improbability of pulling it off, took all the fun out of it. By eliminating the Guinness aspect, it took our ego out of it and put the fun back into organizing it. I think there's a reason they're called Guinness, 'cause when you're negotiating with 'em they're on a two-beer buzz. They're a little foggy over there.

We were going to do this Guinness attempt and pick a charity, but when we got tired of dealing with them, we thought, why not make Max our charity?

Q: You've billed this event as you and ALL your funny friends. Are you inviting comedians from anywhere or just the Bay Area?

A: All over. We've got comedians flying in from L.A. who know Max, comedians who are coming in who happen to be in the city (San Francisco). Todd Glass is headlining the Punch Line, we're trying to get Kevin Nealon, who happens to be performing in town that weekend. Lots of local comics, of course.

Q: You've frequently had Tuesday night drop-ins by the likes of Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Richard Lewis, Kevin Pollack É are you expecting them to show up?

A: Dana is in Tahoe and is coming back on the third, so depending on when he comes in he'll probably show up on Sunday. There are more who are only available on Sunday. There's nothing concrete. Robin was here a couple of Tuesdays ago and told me he's leaving the area for five weeks to make a movie, so he won't be showing up. I'm still billing it as Mark Pitta and Friends, and when you look at the list, these really are my friends, so it's kind of cool. I book people who I know are hilarious but they're not household names, so the audiences are discovering them at the Throckmorton when in reality they've been doing it 10-15 years.

Q: Is 142 Throckmorton a tough room?

A: It's a tough room for people who do not have their street cred. It's become an A room. There's a huge misconception that Tuesdays are an open mike. It's never been an open mike; it's a showcase room for working comics. These guys work for a living. You'd never call the MGM Grand and say, "Hey, I'm gonna try comedy É"

Q: Is anything off limits these days?

A: If you're smart, you won't do breast cancer jokes in the No. 1 county for breast cancer.

Off limits to me is being boring. I wouldn't recommend doing your act word for word the same way every time. But topics? I've never told anybody what to do or what not do. No subject is off limits. I'd say 'know your environment.' Child abduction jokes, pedophile jokes - probably not good. But people get hissed a lot around here. When Robin Williams was here last time, he got hissed for certain. Whenever that happens, Robin goes, "Uh oh É the p.c. snake is loose again."

IF YOU LAUGH

- What: Mark Pitta and Friends' 3-Day Comedy Marathon, "How Long Can You Laugh?"

- When: 5 p.m. Aug. 1 to 2 a.m. Aug. 2, noon Aug. 2 to 2 a.m. Aug. 3, noon Aug. 3 to 10 p.m. (or longer). There will be two breaks from 2 a.m. to noon on Saturday morning and Sunday morning.

- Where: 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley

- Tickets: $10 each visit

- Information: 383-9600, www. 142throckmorton theatre.com

THE DARK PRINCE

A Birthday rant
7/22/2008

By Mark Langton

(Excerpt of a letter to Neal)

Dear Neal:

I turn 55 today.

However, first things first:

Just saw "The Dark Knight" and can easily say I'm putting it up there with the 10 great American movies of all time, it was that good, Heath Ledger was that good, I loved it that much. Maybe I'm still just in the first flush of sobriety again and loving everything I do or taste or smell or see, but I know my mythic archetypes enough to know a GREAT performance when I see one, and a GREAT, mythical, fucking GREEK, sin-eating, biblical, personification of satan and christ-slammin' yarn when I see one, and this is one. Wow. It's got everything, man. I'm talkin' black, white, yin, yang, good, evil, ego, id, disney, picasso, fellini, tarantino...I shit you not. It's got it all.

Actually, the movie is mostly style -- ah, but what style! -- with Heath providing the only real substance. And that's what makes more than just a good movie: Heath Ledger's Joker...! oH..my...god. SPASTIC. Everybody said no one could live up to the hype after he died, but let me tell ya, he so far surpasses the hype that he prolly will leave most movie audiences in the dust. (The one I saw it with was.)

As usual, I was the only one laughing at most of the stuff I laughed at, except for the all-knowing Alicia laughing beside me, and me with that "Neal" laugh that somehow got imprinted on me over the years, that low, suggestive, knowing laugh that only begins to bring others into the secret, killing joke if they have the capacity to get it to begin with, fuck 'em if they don't GET the joke, and Oyes, I hear you in my ears allatime, Neal, and often in my own voice, the way young men put their stamp on each other when they've gone through the same fire. THAT blood, it runs, ran, through Ledger's veins, you can tell, at a glance, especially if you've tasted it, like Kobain, like Bruce -- he's one part James Dean (that spastic opening scene in "Rebel" when you realize the police siren that you hear is coming out of his mouth), one part Jerry Lewis in "Nutty Professor," one part Brando, another part Stuart Smalley (he seems, actually, to be imitating Al Franken), with Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, De Niro, Mr. Rogers, the dual(dueling)selves of Sam Shepard's "True West" thrown in ....He is the anti-Bozo, Pennywise the Clown, my own worst nightmare, a dream come true... and just the best fucking acting job I have seen in years.

There are two scenes that left me frozen in my seat, my mouth agape -- one, where he's facing off with Batman during an interrogation in a holding cell where you realize at the same time Batman does that he IS Batman, that he's more than just evil, his Joker is not a comic book villain out for money or self-interest, he just wants to see the WORLD BURN....!!! His simplicity is fascinating, and, as the movie goes on, that simplicity, in itself, becomes a grotesque.

The other scene is one shot, actually, that, in the words of one local reviewer, deserves to be "anthologized, YouTube-ized and immortalized": The Joker is in the foreground, walking toward the camera, playing (and really, that's the only word for it) with a bomb detonator; huge explosions are going on behind him as he walks toward us, stiff and happy and hobbling, like a toddler. He practically tosses the scene away, and if not for the mammoth explosions going on behind him, it could almost go unnoticed. He's a child, and this is pure id. The banality of evil. Convincing all who see it that at the heart of existence isn't creation at all, but chaos. Has to be. It may be the most chilling thing I've ever seen on film.

(to be cont'd)

A profile of 'Othello's' David A. Moss

Finding balance
Former stand-up comic turns to acting, yoga with zeal

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent


“It was always about acting,” says former stand-up comic David A. Moss, presently cast in the title role of William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” now playing at the College of Marin.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds quickly, “I loved doing stand-up – and everything that came with it. I just got tired of three-chord rock. I wanted jazz.”

Charming, abrasive, funny and intense – by varied accounts, at once vulgar, elegant, ruthless and vulnerable – Moss’ journey from doing stand-up comedy to doing classical roles began in what was, according to Moss, the perfect spot for a serious actor to cut his teeth -- the wide-open stages of San Francisco comedy clubs during their heyday of the 1980’s.

If comedy was, as former S.F. Examiner columnist Bill Mandel once wrote, the “rock ‘n’ roll of the ‘80s,” then a growing subset of edgy, angry young comics like D’Alan Moss (his stage name at the time, an affectation that now makes him cringe) were clearly its punk rockers. Deliberately deconstructing the conventions -- even the vocabulary -- of tranditional stand-up, performers like Moss (“Bobcat” Goldthwaite also comes to mind) reveled in pushing the edge of the envelope. And, in Moss’ case, sometimes off the edge of the stage.

Veteran Marin comedian Mark Pitta, who competed with Moss in the 1984 S.F. Comedy Competition, was not surprised to hear that the intense young comic had become a serious actor. To Pitta’s reckoning, Moss was always a better actor than a stand-up. “When he did a joke,” says Pitta, “he didn’t tell it, he acted it out. He became the joke. So it was normal to think that he’d be more of an actor than a stand up.”

Pitta also remembers Moss as a snappy dresser. “I just dug out a video of that comedy competition in ’84. He wore these red shoes with blue pants and matching jacket….When I started out in stand-up I dressed from Mervyn’s – and he always looked like ‘Shaft’.”

Marin County comedian Michael Pritchard, who holds the distinction of having once won first place at the San Francisco International Stand-Up Competition the same year he won the S.F. Probation Officer of the Year Award, remembers Moss as being a little cranky.

“He was definitely one of the angry ones,” Pritchard says. But with ‘D’, the anger was legitmate…at least half of the time,” he chuckles. “There’s a reason for anger in comedy when it’s about injustice,” continues Pritchard. “And ol’ ‘D’ had lived his share of that. He had a razor-sharp edge, and you could tell, there was a deep, thick soul to this guy, an amazing person of amazing depth. And when he wasn’t being self-indulgent, he was one of those comics who dealt with social issues…who was willing to take risks, to deal with the question of race, to put his own identity crisis under a microscope, using it to mirror our own.

“And besides, I think anger was his juice,” says Pritchard. “I think he found his creativity there.”

If so, says Moss, then that “juice” was hard-won – and hard lived. Born in Cleveland, OH to a Caucasian mother and an African-American father, Joyce Englehardt and Elwood Moss, from as far back as Moss can remember he felt like an outsider. His father left when he was six years old (“Society was my father’s Iago…one night he tucked me in, kissed me good night, and I have not seen him since”), and soon afterwards his family moved to Oakland, CA.

Says Moss, “By the time I hit junior high, I had a white stepfather and two maternal twin sisters, Erika and Dierdre. Talk about your identity crisis! No one could place me in this white family. Was I Puerto Rican? Colored? Adopted….? I was just not emotionally equipped to handle it. I took it personally…thought something was wrong with me.”

That’s where his armor started, says Moss. He was always aware of the stares, the whispers, of being different, feeling different. As a result, the younger Moss began acting out, sometimes violently. By his own account, he never met a confrontation he didn’t like.

“As far back as elementary school, I was aggressive, combative, really psychotic,” he says, “and I don’t use the term loosely. By the time I got to high school I was constantly in fights, always in the principal’s office, always in trouble.”

By the time he was 14 or 15, Moss found an outlet in acting. “At first, I didn’t do much. Once I played Toto in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ That was great. I did some other school stuff, nothing remarkable.”

But where he found an outlet for his identity crisis in acting, he found an outlet for his rage in comedy. His moment of clarity came in 1979, when he saw Richard Pryor live at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos. “It was an epiphany,” he says. “He came out and did 90 minutes, and the only time the audience was allowed to stop and take a breath was when he decided to take a sip of water. I just sat there, slack-jawed, dumbfounded. My friends thought I didn’t find him funny, but I was in shock. Shock and awe. I mean, he did a Doberman Pincher here, a monkey there, he would do hunters, the deer, the deer hunters hunting, even the gun, the flat tire….the freebase pipe and the fire -- and above all, he did his pain.

“And, I thought to myself, he’s not just telling jokes. He’s acting! I mean, I also saw Bill Cosby at the Circle Star, too, right around the same time, but this was something different. This was real theater. Edgy, scary, beyond funny. And at the same time, I thought, I can do this. I could combine the two! I could express that anger in me this way, and I didn’t have to adhere to anyone else’s words. In fact, at that moment I realized … that was the only thing I ever wanted to do.”

Moss threw himself into standup, going to open mikes, developing an act, a following -- and, by his own account, an attitude. “I started at about 15 or 16…doing Dan White jokes in suburban clubs -- which didn’t exactly go over very well. But I didn’t care…I never believed in the adage that you adjust your act to the crowed, to the office party or the Christmas party. If you hired me, you got what I did. I considered it a badge of honor that I never censored myself. If they told me not to cuss, I’d cuss even more. I wasn’t out to make friends. I reveled in scaring people. I liked working without a net. I liked digging a hole and seeing if I could get out of it. I knew I could be intimidating, and I loved it. I loved the power of it.

“You have to understand .The City was like Comedy Mecca back then. We were like rock stars. Plus, I got myself a SELF. Add to that, the girls, the power, the free drugs… “But no matter how fast I kept dancing, I was still miserable. I was still in pain. So dealt with the pain in the old-fashioned way. By using anesthesia.”

Michael Pritchard remembers the drug culture among comedians back then. “I think the entire scene was just amped in those days. There was this blizzard of cocaine that hit the scene in the early ‘80s…. I remember being concerned for ‘D.’ After my son was born, I had a family life, and I used to talk to all of the guys. You just felt helpless…I’d watch these guys literally killing themselves.”

None of which, despite all appearances, was entirely lost on Moss. Not only was he sleepwalking through his act, he became intuitively aware that his lifestyle was killing him, body and soul. “In order to keep you from knowing me, I just made you laugh. I got tired of having to be funny, even when I didn’t feel particularly funny. You can’t call in sick as a comic. And my offstage behavior and life…,” Moss shakes his head. It was like being a boxer -- how many rounds can you go before you’re jelly; what’s the score, who cares, you’re not swinging at anything. . I just got tired of standing behind not only the microphone but this image I’d created. And I knew it was eating me alive.”

So, he cleaned up his act and headed for the hills. A Larskpur resident, he took a psychology class at College of Marin, and found himself wandering around the drama department. “I used to peek through the crack in the doors at the Studio Theatre, Moss recalls, “and just stare at the naked lightbulb on the empty stage, thinking, damn, I miss that. I started to feel again that that’s where I belonged. I knew I had more to offer artistically besides stand-up, besides just being funny. I knew I had this ‘more’ to offer, and that the theater was the place to offer it.”

So he started taking acting classes at the College of Marin, finding himself drawn to classical roles. His restless mind rediscovered a fascination — and an aptitude -- for Shakespeare. He’d done a few scenes in class, actually played a young William Shakespeare in “Eleven Variations on Friar John’s Failure” (a Shakespeare parody/pastiche written by student prodigy Yuri Baronovsky), turning in an honest, nuanced interpretation of the young Bard, unfettered by the usual trappings of cape and quill.

But Moss credits drama department founder James Dunn for really opening his eyes, by casting him as the mad Malvolio in the COM production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

Moss’s Malvolio was electrifying. A comic tour de force, heads above the other actors onstage, earning him a year-end mention as Marin Independent Journal’s “Performance of the Year.” He followed that with another comic truimph as Bassinet in Georges Feydeau’s 1886 classic French farce, “A Gown For His Mistress” (“Tailleur pour dames”), proving himself to be an expert farceur. (“Like Peter Seller’s Inspector Cloussea,” wrote one reviewer, “his awkwardness is comic ballet.”) He then topped his show-stealing turn as Bassinet with a nearly operatic, eerily feral Foxwell J. Sly, the leading role in Ross Valley Players’ production of Larry Gelbart’s “Sly Fox,” which won him rave reviews.

Moss also earned a reputation for being a consummate professional – always the first actor to be “off book,” walking into the first day of rehearsal with his lines already down. It became a point of pride for him that race never became an issue with casting. “I played people, not people of color. It just never came up.”

His work and his reputation preceding him, he was a clear choice for the lead in COM director’s upcoming production of Shakepeare’s “Othello.” He was then “pre-cast,” according to Moss, in what he considered to be the role of a lifetime – Othello.

But then something happened.




By his own account, Moss went into a tailspin. “The old arrogance came back. I started to rest on my laurels. I wouldn’t call it over-confidence…it was more like a warped sense of entitlement. I thought, hey the role was mine, so I didn’t have to work for it. I began resorting to old coping mechanisms, anesthetizing myself again…until I found that all the anesthesia did was douse my fire.”

According to Moss, director Taylor caught wind of this. “He called one day, and the way he put it was, ‘are you dealing with those demons again?’ At first I said I was drinking a little a bit, and then finally I told him the truth. That yes, in fact, I was.”

According to Moss, he then learned to his horror that director Taylor had promptly re-opened auditions in January for the role of Othello. THAT got Moss’s attention.

“It was perfectly understandable, Moss says, “and humbling, to say the least. He wasn’t confident in my being of sound mind and body for the show, and who could blame him? You don’t go into ‘Lear,’ ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Richard II’ without a Lear, Hamlet or Richard. I now look at as a gift. I learned that no matter how talented you think you are, that alone is not going to preclude your offstage behavior. I realized I was going to have to earn this one back.”

Moss began preparing for the audition like an Olympic athlete. He attended regular recovery support groups, crediting them with a leading him to a new spiritual path. He started lifting weights, running every day, and now swears by Bikrim Yoga, an extreme form of yoga whose practitioners work out in temperatures in excess of 100 degrees. Instead of going into seclusion, as he might have in the past when preparing for a role, he reached out and shored up his relationship with his family and best friends, crediting his sons Cameron, 16, and Devin, 13, with being instrumental in what he considers to be a bona fide spiritual reawakening. Above all, he threw himself into the text of Othello like a 16th Century scribe.

Needless to say, he aced the audition.

Director Taylor was impressed. “David came in prepared, as always, and just really amazed me with his grasp of the language, his understanding of the character’s world and circumstances. I was especially impressed with the amount of preparation. He knew what he was saying, which is not always the case with actors when they do Shakespeare.”

Asked what it is that sets Moss apart, Taylor says that one word in particular comes to mind: “Specificity. David doesn’t just investigate, he excavates the script for every nuanced action he can find.” Taylor continues, “Another word that comes to mind is fearless. He’s not afraid to try new things in rehearsal and performance. Now that’s rare.” According to Taylor, “Othello” is about more than jealousy or betrayal. “It’s about isolation, about an outsider struggling to assimilate. David’s understanding of the complexity of being a child of mixed- race parentage gives him a unique perspective on this role. I think David is in a unique position to project that, that sense of being an outsider,” says Taylor.

“We’re doing it the Studio Theatre, and at times the audience will be only inches away from the actors. So it should be a very visceral experience.”

Taylor chuckles. “With David, it’s always a visceral experience,” he says.

Marin Independent Journal
May, 2007

IJ photo/Jeff Vendsel

NOW PLAYING: RVP's 'Brooklyn Boy,' through June 15, reviewed

Home ‘truthiness’


By Mark Langton

Article Launched: 05/14/2008 04:14:08 PM PDT, Marin Independent Journal

Ross Valley Players' production of "Brooklyn Boy" - a somewhat thought-provoking, occasionally nuance-layered and, at times, well-crafted evening of community theater - is, well, a little dull.

Now, I am a critic of a certain age, born in the '50s and therefore presently admitting to being 50-something. I am just old enough to have an appetite for well-written, ponderous dialogue, but just young enough to have had my attention span permanently ruined by MTV.

The result: I suffer from a kind of mixture of narcolepsy and Tourrette's, in which I bore and nod off easily, only to be awakened suddenly by my own curses and mutterings.

Such was my struggle to engage with "Brooklyn Boy," Donald Margulies' thoughtful take on a familiar homecoming motif, the ties of family and the vagaries of success, which plays through June 15 at the Barn Theatre in Ross.

And while I applaud the intent of any company or director who will take the risk of attempting a difficult work that is not an immediate ticket-seller - for their courage alone - alas, this one kept losing me to its sluggish pace, its uneven cast and its playwright's absurd "Hail-Mary-play" ending despite the skills of its award-winning director, Phoebe Moyer.

The play opens as Eric Weiss (Matthew Lai), a newly successful novelist and self-described "escape artist," is returning to the outerborough of his childhood to visit his dying, long-widowed father (Jerry Jacob of San Rafael). The visit leads to a chance meeting with Ira (Timothy Beagley), a childhood friend, who confronts Eric about the way he wriggled, Houdinilike, from the chains that bound him to his old neighborhood, friends and faith. (Not coincidentally, Harry Houdini's real name was Erich Weiss).

There follows a bittersweet bid at reconciliation with Nina (Robin Steeves), his estranged wife, causing Eric to look inward even further. We then find him in Hollywood, where a reading and book signing leads to his bringing a chippie named Alison (Allison Kinzy Porto-Yale of Kentfield) back to his hotel room with unexpected results.

Next, he meets with the over-the-top Melanie (Safiya Arnaout), the crass woman producer in charge of the movie version of his novel, and the popular but ludicrously unsuited actor Tyler Shaw (Joseph Rende), who wants to star in it.

Right from the top, something seemed amiss Friday night. The opening scene between Eric and his father appears written to be played as broad comedy of the Borscht Belt variety, and is not. Many opportunities here were missed, and Jacob's lackluster delivery set a monotone from which the play never quite recovered.

Things did pick up when Beagley entered the scene as Eric's old friend Ira, but despite his much-needed comic energy, this scene, too, suffered from a lack of ethnicity (I don't know if Beagley is Jewish, but I suspect he is not, since no healthy, red-blooded Jewish boy would ever -- as Beagley did Friday night -- mispronounce the word "shiksa,” the Yiddish term for a non-Jewish female).

The scene between Eric and Nina, which begs for an undercurrent of long-lost intimacy - sexuality, even - was painful to watch at times because of the actors' lack of chemistry, and an overwrought performance by Steeves worthy of "The Days of Our Lives." Set changes went on far too long for a minimalist set (designed by Ken Rowland in abstentia). How long could it take? How many Ninjas does it take to move a chair?

A couple of performances do stand out, however. Along with Beagley's energetic turn as Ira was Rende's WASPy actor Shaw, so comfortably over the top he could have gone even farther, as well as Arnaout's cartoonish producer Melanie – all provide welcome laughter. But the performance that lights up the night is Kinzy Porto-Yale's Alison - who could so easily have resorted to a caricature with this not-quite airhead and not-quite groupie. Instead she played Alison as written, with irony and intelligence, making her authentic and complex.

In her brief comments before the show, Moyer- a triple-threat teacher/actress/director - acknowledged the need for a strong Eric to pull off this play and praised Lai as a rare find. She described him as young actor of an old school, a generous actor who "listens" and is true to speaking and responding the way people do in life instead of relying on “actorly” tricks to relay moments of theatrical truth.

This was not my experience of Lai's performance. Unless by “generous” the director means he surrendered every scene he was in to whoever was up there with him, making each scene a showcase for them. He's a likeable enough sort, and plays Eric as a kind of "Every-nebbish" with no discernable arc or strength of resolve. To be fair, he carries a tremendous line load - he is practically never offstage - but shows none of the beleaguered strength one might find in, say, Adam Arkin, who opened in the role on Broadway in 2005.

The simple poetry found in ordinary lives has never been lost on me. I just didn't find it here. And sometimes the way people really speak and respond to each other is boring.

Thomas Wolfe was the first of the American writers to say you can't go home again, and presumably Margulies is providing an addendum here, another "home truth,” if you will. That is to say, with a hint of irony, that the reason you can't go home is because you never left.

There is something profound to be found in that, I thought to myself Friday night. If I could just keep my eyes open long enough to think it through.

REVIEW

What: Ross Valley Players' "Brooklyn Boy," by Donald Margulies

Where: The Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. at Lagunitas, Ross

When: Through June 15; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Thursdays; 2 p.m. Sundays

Tickets: $16-$20; pay what you will on May 16 between 7 and 7:20 p.m.

Of note: Brooklyn transplants are encouraged to attend a special matinee performance at 2 p.m. May 25 followed by a lighthearted interactive forum in which audience members can share their stories and memories of life in Brooklyn. Hosted by "Brooklyn Boy" lead actor Matthew Lai. Reservations recommended. Share your Brooklyn tales at www.rossvalleyplayers.com/talesofbrooklyn.

Information: 456-9555, http://www.rossvalleyplayers.com/

Rating: Two stars out of five

Mark Langton can be reached at mark.langton@comcast.net.

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(Click page to enlarge)

'11 variations On Friar John's Failure,' COM

'Over My Dead Body,' Ross Valley Players

Murder most funny in Ross

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent

Article Launched: 07/20/2006 04:29:00 AM PDT

IN THE LONG evolution of the murder mystery, nearly all modern attempts at giving tired plot conventions an added twist have turned most whodunits into "whodidn't's?" - where the cast consists of everybody who answered the phone and everybody's guilty but the butler.

Not so with Ross Valley Players' hilarious season-closer, "Over My Dead Body," which opened Friday at Marin Art and Garden Center's Barn Theatre, and will be performed through Aug. 20.

Where most murder mysteries present audiences with a convoluted puzzle and all the clues they need to solve it, this playful little play turns the formula upside down, and does so with a marvelous local cast, led by a veteran director of mystery pastiche in the person of Cris Cassell. Here, the guilty parties are established early on, and the audience is let in on the construction of the puzzle, to then experience the morbid pleasure of watching it go awry.

Or does it? Even the red herrings have red herrings in Michael Sutton and Anthony Singleton's farcical tribute to the form, based on a novel by Robert L. Fish (whose writing also inspired the motion picture "Bullitt").

The deceptively simple plot centers on three mystery writers: Trevor Foyle (likeably played with broad strokes by an earnest Mitchell Field), Dora Winslow (done with nearly inexcusable class by veteran Anne Ripley) and Bartie Cruikshank (played by Hugh Campion with all the bemused reserve of the profoundly hard-of-hearing). The elderly trio are the three surviving founders of the Murder League, a fictional society of mystery writers that once counted Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr among its members.

As we arrive on the scene, we find the timeworn triumvirate lamenting their encroaching irrelevance and the fact that the stylish, bloodless murder mysteries, once their stock and trade, have been increasingly bumped off by a newer wave of splatter v}rit}. Complains Hoyle, in perhaps an uncanny prediction of TV's "CSI" (the play was first produced in 1984), "They don't write mysteries anymore É (just) anatomical textbooks."

Taunted by younger colleague Simon Vale (in a suitably oily portrayal by David Shirk), the trio devise a plan to regain their lost glory, "with a touch of the baroque," by committing a stylish murder of their own.

Their plan? Elementary, gentle reader: The victim will be stabbed, shot and hanged in a gorilla suit in a room locked from the inside.

Enter Vale's boorish American literary agent, Leo Sharp (played by Greg Soskin, who nailed it), glad-handing everyone he sees; thus, the problem of finding a victim is solved. Indeed, the moment he shouts "Holy Toledo!" we know he's not long for this world.

Throw in a demonstration of nearly every device ever employed in a "locked room" mystery scenario (as well as a demonstration of everything that could possibly go wrong); a bumbling Chief Inspector Smith (admirably done by John Anthony Nolan) and the dimbulb Sergeant Trask (Ray Martin); a clueless, ancient butler "Charters" (a tip of the hat to Wilfrid Lawson's "Peacock," the cobwebbed butler in "The Wrong Box"), played with the grace of a slow soft shoe, by senior hoofer Roy Harvey; and an unexpected shock of an ending that will leave you as surprised as, well, an aging actor with a paycheck.

The obvious standout in the cast was veteran actress Ripley, who, to her everlasting credit, resisted the temptation to do a startled bloodhound a la Dame Margaret Rutherford when playing Dora Winslow - instead bringing her own unique interpretation and brand of elegant sweetness to the role. Another glaring delight was the idiosyncratic dialect of Nolan's Chief Inspector Smith - think W.C. Fields meets the ineffectual Inspector Lestrade.

James S. Anderson's set design is as much as a tribute to the genre as is the plot, with its mace-wielding suit of armor and judiciously placed portraits of Agatha Christie and Edgar Allen Poe, and the sound design by multitasker Bruce Vieira was good enough to convince you of a dark and stormy night - even on a hot and sultry summer evening.

More a spoof than the intended homage, it doesn't take too much deductive reasoning to figure out whether to recommend this likeable evening of midsummer theater. Leave your thinking caps at home, put on your deerstalker, and go see this funny little gem of a play.

IF YOU GO:

What: "Over My Dead Body" by Ross Valley Players

Where: The Barn Theatre, Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Aug. 20

Tickets: $15 to $19; Thursdays all tickets $15; Friday, "pay what you will" with limited tickets available at the box office only between 7 to 7:20 p.m. on the night of the show

Information: 456-9555 or http://www.rossvalleyplayers.org/