'Proof'

'Proof' of life

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent

It doesn’t take a genius in mathematics to appreciate the symmetry in almost everything about Ross Valley Players’ sensitive revival of David Auburn’s “Proof,” which opened Friday, Sept. 15 at the Barn Theatre in Ross -- with variable results.

Mathematics is only ostensibly the subject of playwright Auburn’s precise rendering of human relationships, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award when it opened on Broadway in 2001. It is not exactly a linear tale -- one that reads right-to-left like a mathematical proof or, say, a musical composition. Instead, it gives us a disassembled, sideways look at even the passage of time, as well as the random elements and vagaries of love -- bending them the way some theorems bend light. It is an edge-of-your-seat mystery the way human relationships are a mystery: endlessly surprising, funny and incalculably complex. Rendered in poetry rather than by-the-numbers, this rich, absorbing play has more to do with measuring the depth of the human heart than it has to do with its circumference.Nevertheless, things got off to a stuffy beginning on opening night. In the opening scenes, actors started bouncing their lines back and forth like a quick game of Pong – appearing to be more concerned with picking up the ends of their cues than listening to each other. This was peppered with uncomfortably long pauses in dialogue, presumably to create tension. Alas, the only tension this created was an initial concern that actors had gone up on their lines -- or that maybe we had a clunker on our hands.

Then, something happened.

Perhaps it was that these are four likable actors in four likable roles, but by the end of Act One, you couldn’t help but feel that you already knew these people. Whether it was the surprise piece of information craftily withheld in the opening scene, or the end-of-Act-One shocker that caused audible gasps from the audience, it was as if these four actors took heart from the general intake of air from the audience, causing them to breathe life into these roles by the second half.

Without giving too much away, the story concerns Catherine (Katherine McDowell), a lovely math geek who is the grown daughter of Robert (Wood Lockhart), a genius mathematician who revolutionized his field in the early part of his career, only to descend into mental illness. Daughter Catherine appears to have inherited some of her father’s gifts and, she fears, some of his pathology as well. Enter Hal (Michael Abts), a grad student of Robert’s, to help Catherine sort out some of her father’s potentially promising old notebooks. But not before Claire (Jeanette Harrison) enters the scene as Catherine’s “normal” older sister, a yuppie meddler who takes it upon herself to move in for a “rescue” operation. Boy meets girl; girl loses trust in boy; boy loses girl and – well, you do the math.

Out of this quartet, director Cris Cassel has developed intellectually and emotionally compelling music, especially as this production finds its stride. As demonstrated in her direction of the recent RVP comedy, “Over My Dead Body,” Cassel has a rhythmic gift for time signatures as well as storytelling, which ultimately transcended any opening night jitters Friday.

Of course, it helps that all four of these actors ultimately make us care about them. And it doesn’t hurt that both women in this cast are unconventional beauties, essays in geometry as they glide across the stage. McDowell’s Catherine reveals a visible arc from play’s start to play’s end, moving from strident amateur to knowing ingénue, with touches that were surprisingly subtle and wise. Also, to her everlasting credit, Harrison softens the role of Catherine’s controlling older sister with warmth and sensitivity, instead of opting for a shallow caricature of Claire.

As to the men, Lockhart, as he did with the Henry Fonda role in last season’s “On Golden Pond,” infuses Robert with humor and paternal warmth, even in dementia. And with Abts’ ultimately winning performance as Hal – especially in the love scenes with Catherine – this actor completely inhabits his body, his gestures playful and precise, whether engaged in forelock tugging or erotic intent.

Again, this intriguing play has more to do with the human heart than with math. Greater truths, it seems to say, especially when it comes to "soft" evidence of loyalty, love or family ties, can always be found hidden in plain sight – much like the satisfying symbol that dominates Don Cate’s oh-so-symmetrical set (in case anybody missed it): the symbol for pi, disguised as an archway at center stage.

Employing variables of dissonance and counterpoint, harmonies of opposites, often calling upon the music of the spheres, this production of “Proof” gives equidistance to both the sorrows and exultations of complex relationships – whether they be between rival siblings, a father and a daughter, or two people in love.

It is not difficult to recommend a play whose whole is larger than the sum of its parts. Go see it – if only because it will remind you of yourself, of your humanity, that life is made up of principles of uncertainty and, especially when the equation is love, that you know how to count to two, too.

Photo: Ron Severdia

Marin Shakes' 'The Comedy of Errors'

By Mark LangtonIJ Correspondent

(First published in the Marin Independent Journal, June, 2008)
TAKE ONE PART "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," one part "Road Runner" cartoon, add a dash of "Keystone Kops," spin around three times and do the funky chicken, and you'll begin to get a picture of Marin Shakespeare Co.'s new, wildly funny - if unnecessarily confusing - production of William Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors."

With his return to MSC, veteran director James Dunn is back in fine, high-handed form with his best comedy in recent memory, a mish-mash of ancient and contemporary pop culture that opened Friday at Dominican University's outdoor Forest Amphitheater.

What Shakespeare borrowed from the Roman dramatist Plautus, Looney Tunes borrowed from Shakespeare, and clearly director Dunn decided to borrow a little back. Lovingly drawing on the vaudeville slapstick of a Warner Bros. cartoon, the rat-a-tat-tat of Borscht Belt comedy and a broad visual style that can only be described as a kind of hip-hop Commedia dell'Arte, Dunn's knockabout farce succeeds primarily because it is so outlandish, so over-the-top in its burlesque, that - human error notwithstanding - its comedy borders on the divine.

In this, what many scholars believe to be his first play, Shakespeare extended Plautus's 'The Two Menaechmuses" and gave us this delightful absurdity about two identical twin brothers with identical servant/clowns, a funny story with loneliness at its wistful heart.

The plot line is pure screwball comedy: Behold Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, played by Andrew Fonda Jackson and Brandon Roberts, both decked out in full hip-hop "gangsta" regalia (designed by Patricia Polen from a palette of enough tie-dyed yellows, purples and greens to make your eyes bleed). They wreak havoc on the lives of their counterparts, Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus (also played by Jackson and Roberts). All four confuse family members, paramours, each other and audience alike, as both sets of twins keep crossing each other like, well, Crips in the night.

And here is where things break down a bit. Sadly, where Dunn's experiment does not succeed is in the area of clarity. His choice to cast the same actors as both sets of twins, while common, seems odd, as it takes an already absurdly confusing situation and renders it nearly impossible to sort out. With both sets of twins "thugged out" in the same hip-hop threads and speaking in identical "surfer dude" patois, hilarious though it may be, it is not enough to discover that the only way to tell who's who is that one Dromio turns his yellow cap backward and the other Dromio does not. Ditto Antipholus' bling-bling vs. no bling-bling. The distinctions are far too subtle, and leave even careful students of Shakespeare behind.

Still, this was of little consequence as the action whooshed by on Friday night, mostly because of the pure entertainment factor of rim shots, "Keystone Kops" interludes, telegraphed burlesque (as in pink-clad, vestal virgins who cross the stage like card-carrying, ring-side, prize fight bimbos, with signs that say DROMIO'S BALD PATE BIT and DROMIO'S KITCHEN WENCH BIT) - plus a few standout performances that ultimately ruled the day.

Chief among these was an inspired comic turn by actress LeAnne Rumbel as Luciana, sister of Adriana, wife to Antipholus of Ephesus. While Roberts' energetic Dromio of Syracuse is the acrobatic source of much of the slapstick in the play, and Jackson's Antipholus is the Dean Martin to Roberts' Jerry Lewis, it was the floating comic grace of Rumbel's Luciana that frequently stopped the show.In a giddy love scene where Antipholus of Syracuse calls Luciana his "sweet mermaid," Rumbel appeared to be swimming in a veritable ocean of love - quite literally, as she proceeded to do the backstroke, the crawl, the breaststroke and the Hully Gully, with a final, quick flutter of her feet as a kicker to bring the house down.

Other standouts included Stephen Dietz's drunken Duke Solinas of Ephesus - picture Dudley Moore's "Arthur" as Nero - whose "spit-take" upon sipping a goblet of water from a fountain (because it wasn't alcohol!) brought a roar from the house; Mary Knoll as Adriana, who nailed it with broad strokes and with her usual traces of Ethel Merman and Lucille Ball; MSC co-founder Robert S. Currier as exorcist Dr. Pinch, who took obvious relish in chewing, not just the scenery, but the moat; and the ever-elegant Jack Powell as the elderly father Egeon, who demonstrated a range that went from a Gallagher-style prop comic and puppeteer to surprising poignancy in the reunion with his long-lost wife, Emilia. The abbess Emilia is also played with poignancy and elegance by Maureen O'Donoghue.

Indeed, it is the honesty delivered in these final scenes that makes this incongruous mixture of eloquence and Valleyspeak truly succeed at day's end. There is something ultimately satisfying about a comedy that has something tragic at its core - about a tale in which love conquers all, after all; where all sins are forgiven; where "every why hath a wherefore;" and every wherefore a whatever.

Photo: Ron Severdia

RVP's 'Shadowlands'

Goodbye, Mrs. Chips

By Mark Langton

Article Launched: 03/19/2008 05:05:45 PM PDT, Marin Independent Journal

See Jack. See Jack run. See Jack run from joy.

See Joy. See Joy chase Jack. See Joy catch Jack - and die.

See Jack weep.

So goes a remedial outline of playwright William Nicholson's original stage version of "Shadowlands," now in revival by the Ross Valley Players through April 20 at their historic Barn Theatre in Ross.

But when Jack is C.S. Lewis - or Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis (1898-1963) - the Irish-born writer, lecturer, Christian apologist and author of "The Chronicles of Narnia" series of children's fantasy novels; and when Joy is Joy Gresham, the Jewish-American poet who married Lewis near the end of both their lives, things aren't quite that simple.

It is the 1950s, and Lewis (Chuck Isen) enjoys a reputation as one of Britain's foremost professors and thinkers, living a contented and simple bachelorhood with his brother Warnie (Alex Ross) in the cloistered comfort of Oxford academia. Our story is set in motion when this comfort zone is shattered by the arrival of Gresham (Jennifer Reimer), a fan who has come to England to meet Lewis, with her young son Douglas (neatly played by Philip Bohlman, a seventh-grader at Marin Primary and Middle School).

Despite that she is known to him only by her letters, Jack is nevertheless charmed by Joy's frank honesty and life-affirming sense of humor, as when she receives a less-than-warm reception from his rather stuffy colleagues. When Riley (Wood Lockhart), one of Jack's more condescending peers, asks Joy how she found England, "Cold and dull," is her reply.
"How original," sneers Riley.

"I wasn't talking about the weather," Joy shoots back.

As their friendship deepens, Jack surprises everyone by agreeing to marry Joy - "only technically," at first - so she may obtain an English citizenship. But when Joy is diagnosed with an advanced form of bone cancer, Jack realizes he has fallen deeply in love for the first time, and marries her in earnest as she lies dying in her hospital bed.

Anglophiles and armchair theologians will find much to like in this staid and somewhat off-kilter production of Nicholson's 1989 play about a staid and off-kilter romance. Ably directed by Linda Dunn, it does manage to achieve an authentic, rarefied British air, greatly enhanced by a marvelously artful and utilitarian set design by Patrick Kroboth and scenic artist Megan Kenyon. Comprised of huge bookcases and sliding walls, the set is otherwise dominated by gigantic, fairy tale-sized books, no doubt meant to invoke the world of wonder discovered by children in Lewis' fantasy tales - offset by the spot-on wintry Oxford gloom in Ellen Brooks' lighting design.

The production gets off to a slow start in the first half (imagine, if you will, "Terms of Endearment" without Jack Nicholson), but finds its stride in the second.

Isen is well cast as C.S. Lewis. His "Jack" is a model, mostly, of clipped diction and repressed emotions - indeed, there are times when he struggles so hard to choke out his feelings that he looks like he might require a Heimlich maneuver. But when he finally spits it out - particularly in the difficult scenes that deal openly with grief - he does so honestly, and with great tenderness. Mr. Chips, however, could use a little more Dr. Doolittle.

Reimer also extends the boundaries of her talent to encompass Joy, and manages to be believable as this bluntly intelligent, Jewish-American woman from New York - and even more so once we learn of her conversion to Christianity. The two actors make up for their lack of sexual chemistry by achieving a kind of emotional chemistry instead, suitable to this rendering of a seemingly chaste romance.

This RVP production boasts a couple of strong supporting performances. Most notable is Alex Ross, who renders Jack's devoted older brother almost like an abstract impressionist - bringing to mind one of those all-seeing Fools one finds in Shakespeare ("Twelfth Night," "King Lear"). Also excellent was Lockhart's curmudgeonly Riley. It is great to see this affable actor (a shape-shifter if there ever was one) apply his rubber-faced comedy to a truly unlikable prig. Anne Ripley practically earned an ovation for a wonderful walk-on as a nurse.

Although the playwright's philosophical conflict is clearly understood, the production doesn't always succeed in communicating it.

Loosely fashioned around the biographical facts of Grisham and Lewis's real-life autumnal romance, "Shadowlands" is a kind of anti-Pygmalion tale of equals, made interesting not so much because of the fact of that romance, but because of the philosophical conflict that the playwright found so interesting there. "Shadowlands" is not so much a love story as it is a somewhat academic exploration of love and suffering - and the reasons God might have for burdening us with either. Lewis' answer, that pain is "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world," appears to sew things up neatly from an intellectual point of view in the play's first scene. "We are like blocks of stone," lectures Lewis to his students, "out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt so much, are what make us ... perfect."

But to speculate upon pain is not the same as living it. What Lewis finally gets at final curtain is this: Only when we accept the full measure of life's experiences do we open ourselves to its greatest joys - as well as its greatest suffering. (Indeed, it is during the throes of Joy's illness that Jack exclaims, "I didn't know I could be so happy!")

When the blows of the chisel begin to fall, the Oxford don with the easy answers finally realizes that, when it comes to love and loss, there are no easy answers. The time for answers will come, to be sure, but even then one must accept Lewis' one great, final epiphany - that there are things the heart can know that the mind will never understand.

REVIEW

What: "Shadowlands," by William Nicholson

Who: Ross Valley Players

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

When: Through April 20; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 2 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: $16-$20

Special events: 2 p.m. March 30 post-performance discussion with the director and cast; 2 p.m. April 5 staged reading of Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

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

Rating: Three out of five stars

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

Profile: 'King Lear's' Barry Kraft,' Marin IJ

A man for all seasons




























(*Please note: Actor Barry Kraft stars in the title role of Marin Shakespeare Co.'s "Julius Caesar" this summer. The following is a profile of Kraft written in 2006, during his triumphant run in the title role of Marin Shakespeare Co.'s production of "King Lear." This summer's performance is a master class in the subtle power of a master at his craft, and should not be missed. Be there or unaware. -- ML, 8/08/10)


By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent

Article Launched: 07/21/2006 04:30:00 AM PDT

They are an actor’s hands. Almost out of place in sunlight.

In the stillness of a summer garden, near a cottage in Marin, four days after opening as King Lear, actor Barry Kraft holds one of his beloved texts in one hand, and holds the other hand out before him. Waiting for that thing he cannot name.

It is the kind of hand that reaches emphatically for words, as if to snatch them out of the air, and squeeze the meaning from them, like grapes. When he is asked to recite a passage from “King Lear,” he fairly leaps up to oblige. And not, it seems, for any love of self – but for the love of words.

He chooses a scene where Lear is raging, mad upon a heath, a passage said by some to contain a sublimity of tragic verse that is unsurpassed in Western literature.

His keenness turns to silence. He closes his eyes, opens his hand, and waits to summon Lear.

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” he cries, “Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes ....”

Gone is the gentle hand that greeted a visitor to this garden. Here, instead, is the face of madness. A shaking fist of rage.


Not just an actor, Barry Kraft is a man of words, as he would be the first tell you. Not just words, but words in flight, the jotted-down idea, the half-finished bit of verse, quatrains, sonnets, villanelles. Not only words, but all the spaces in between the words, the way a composer uses silence. The spaces between the notes.

Indeed, he has approached the role of Lear as a conductor might plan out a symphony, but with a chisel, not a baton. For the 2006 Marin Shakespeare Company production of “King Lear,” Kraft has worked with it like ancient clay, kneading it and sculpting it, hoping to find its original shape. He wears his enthusiasm for this text like a heart sewn on his sleeve.

Once inside the cottage, he describes how he’d been living with it, every day. “Here, I’ll just show you a page from our script,” he says, taking out a pencil and demonstrating how he placed his folios alongside his quartos, teasing out what he thinks might have been the Bard’s original intent. “Some of these original passages can be like a hen’s tooth to find,” he says. “We had to bring it under three hours. I started calling it ‘King Clock.’”

Kraft says, “Poetry is my favorite form, above all others…novels, songs or plays. Too many dismiss the poetry of rap, for example. Rap shows a lyrical richness of language and meter that cannot be dismissed.”

As for where Kraft falls in the debate over whether or not a man named William Shakespeare wrote all the plays: “We know much more today than we ever did about the man,” he says. “He was a genius. It’s as simple as that.”

Kraft points out that if one looks at the list of Shakespeare’s debunkers, one will find a list of lords and nobleman and earls, the so-called “winners” who write history.

“Four hundred years from now there will be debunkers who will say there was this American fellow, a poetic genius who lived in the 20th century, who worked as a lawyer for an insurance company. And they’ll say he was a poet who couldn’t possibly have written all the things ascribed to him, poems about the tropics, jaguars, ghosts and angels, books about ideas of order, reality versus imagination and the moon….That man, of course, was Wallace Stevens. And people will say he couldn’t be…and yet…and yet…he was.”

It would appear that Kraft is one of those Jacks of many trades, who humbly seeks to master all. He has performed in all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in more than 100 roles in 82 full productions, appearing in his first Shakespeare play at the age of 12. He appeared with the original Marin Shakespeare Festival in 1968, playing Macduff in “Macbeth” and Octavius Caesar in “Antony and Cleopatra,” and was in the original San Francisco cast of the Lee Sankowich’s production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

He has worked on seven productions of “King Lear,”once alternating the title role with actor Peter Donat at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in 1987 He has also had a distinguished career at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where he performed numerous roles during his 20 seasons, retiring last year with the official title of “Shakespeare Dramaturge and Gadfly.” He also taught at the American Conservatory Theater and the Denver National Theater Conservatory.

He is also a prolific writer, the author of three books: “After-Dinner Shakespeare,” “Thy Father is a Gorbellied Codpiece” and “On the Theatrical Worth of Discarded Words.”

He is a man who revels in his many curiosities and appetites, whose passions include chess and astronomy, and who takes as much delight in exploring ancient caverns as he does exploring ancient texts. “I seem to have this thing for holes in the ground,” he says.

Once, when he was a construction worker in Denver, he paid $5 to watch Bobby Fischer play an exhibition game. Fischer played 59 boards at the same time, one of which was Kraft’s. “He flattered me by stopping at my board. He met my eyes – the only time that he looked up – as if to measure me.” Kraft was one of the last three to finish and when he resigned after the 43rd move, only one pawn down. He was 21 years old, as was Fischer at the time. He has the chess pieces to this day.

His love of stars has taken him as far as Borneo and Cornwall, England, to see a total eclipse. “For the totality of the moment,” he says.

Asked to explain, Kraft says, “I believe it was John Keats, in a letter to his brothers in which he praises Shakespeare, who called it ‘Negative Capability.’ That ability to be open to the mystery without needing a rational explanation of it.”

Kraft pauses for a moment to recall the precise text. When he suddenly remembers, he smiles a white-bearded smile, as if the sun came up inside him.

“Yes, that’s it,” he says. “It goes, ‘…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason… that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration’.”

Kraft grins and shrugs. The interview is over.

He waves his hand goodbye in the middle of a summer garden. Then turns toward the cottage to seek his reason's rose.

Marin Independent Journal, Summer, 2006

IJ Photos/Robert Tong

'45 Seconds to Broadway'

Soup to nuts

by Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent


It’s not that Neil Simon’s 2001 comedy, “45 Seconds from Broadway, ” is a bad play. In order for it to be a bad play, it would have to be an actual play.

It is a tribute to the sheer number of laurels America’s most prolific playwright must have rested on that he was able to pass this sketch of a show off on Broadway as anything other than a collection of one-liners. Delivered by an unlikely gathering of unrelated individuals. Who happen to have the same taste in soup.

However, if it’s an evening of laughs you want, by all means, go see the Ross Valley Players’ current production of Simon’s 32nd Broadway offering, which opened its Bay Area premiere on Jan. 14 at the Barn Theatre in Ross. Fans of the Simon formula will not be disappointed -- providing they know going in not to expect very much in the way of story line or character development or anything else that might constitute a real play.

The hook Simon employs to hoist this petard is its setting, inspired by a well-known coffee shop at the Hotel Edison, located between Broadway and 8th Ave., roughly 45 seconds from the Richard Rodgers Theatre (Simon claimed in a recent interview to have stepped it off himself). A favorite hangout for Broadway theater folk, the Café Edison, affectionately known by habitués as “the Polish Tea Room" -- famous for its home-made soup -- has been run for nearly 30 years by Harry and Frances Destin, who are obviously represented here by two characters in charge of the menu named Bernie (Bruce Vieira) and Zelda (JoAnne Saltzgaber).

Here, the couple frame the action as bookends rather than centerpieces, gruffly serving up acts of generosity to struggling actors and playwrights along with their menu of ethnic comfort food.

Vieira appears to take his comic roles quite seriously, and his hard work shows (during the last couple of seasons alone he has shape-shifted between roles as disparate as MacMurphy in “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Daddy Warbucks in “Annie,” a gangster uncle in “Lost in Yonkers,” and now this utterly convincing Yiddish-speaking restaurateur.) Equally effective is Saltzgaber’s Zelda, although at times her dialect sounds like it veers from Swedish to Yiddish to Irish to Portuguese. It matters little – what becomes more important is that we believe their relationship. Hey, we kid, because we love.

Comedian Jackie Mason is clearly the template for the play’s real central character, a caustic stand-up comedian re-named Mickey Fox. It is telling that the real Mason – never one to miss an opportunity to offend somebody -- has been de-fanged and pre-fabbed in Simon’s idealized version into a hyperkinetic but inoffensive "Stepford comic," ably played by Marin Classic Theatre’s artistic director Artie Gilbert.

Mickey’s relentless one-liners are so dominant they infect the speech of everyone present, including audience members, as with yours truly on the drive home. (“I’ll be glad to show you my driver’s license, officer," I said when pulled over for a broken tail light later that evening. "Now can you show me where I can get a good piece of liver?”).

Bessie: “Read the Good Book.” Mickey: “I’m waiting for the paperback.” Producer Duncan to Mickey: “You absolutely kill me.” Mickey: “Well, maybe later. We’ll see how it goes.” The “story” is mostly a series of these kinds of formulaic exchanges, delivered much like an old episode of “Laugh-In” -- without the window shutters. As each character pops in, the other actors who remain must assume a pose of barely audible hubbub (“apples and pears, apples and pears”), or an even more self-conscious pose of listening with great intent -- usually to Mickey, as he dispenses his knee-jerk wit and wisdom to anyone who will listen.Even when he is not speaking, Gilbert's character seems to always be somewhere nearby, restlessly eager to dive back into the fray; hovering, almost, like the unrepentant ghost of Joey Bishop.

The New York-born Gilbert was an obvious choice for Mickey, possessing all the natural ethnic chops to pull off the shoot-from-the-lip Mason patois. Like Mason, Gilbert is not a naturally fluid presence -- after an hour of this kind of relentless rat-a-tat-tat, even the real Mason can start sounding like a dial tone with an irritable bowel. Again, playwright Simon could have remedied this by giving the Mickey character a little dimension.

Moving in and out of the café is a parade of familiar archetypes: We meet Andrew Duncan, a British impresario trying to make a deal for Mickey to do a show in London (played by Mitchell Field, an actor who possesses the rare gift of active listening); dewy-eyed, "would-be actress" Megan Woods, played by Katie Krueger, making her own semi-professional debut in a thankless role. Krueger has a voice that in higher registers can sound like Minnie Mouse on helium, giving the evening one of its funniest moments, when Megan asks Mickey to help her pick a song for for an audition, and Mickey replies, “I’d stay away from ‘Old Man River’ if I was you.”

Enter a would-be playwright from South Africa, Soloman Mantutu (played by a likeable Wendel H. Wilson, fresh from beyond the “Fringe” Festival of Inexplicable One-Acts). Enter also Arleen and Cindy (Alison Lustbader and Maureen O’Donoghue), a couple of housewives from the suburbs who fancy themselves matinee mavens, all dolled up and ready to dish, stealing scenes along the way. There is the world-wise Bessie James, a black comedienne with a quick, sharp tongue (played by Desiray McFall, who does a great job with an awkward role, written almost as a racist cliché). Most peculiar of all are Charles W. Browning III (Wood LockHart), an ostensibly mute gentlemen whose face speaks volumes, accompanied by his flamboyant and delusional companion Rayleen (played by Anne Ripley).

Making a late entrance in the second act is Harry Fox (veteran Novato actor Norman Hall), Mickey’s repressed older brother. The sibling conflict gives this tale its first inkling of a real relationship, but, alas, even that fails to deliver. It is interesting to note that the immensely gifted Hall usually nails a meaty comic role by artfully throwing it away. Here, even he looks like he's working too hard to give this dog a bone. Hey, not even Yitzhak Perlman can coax “The Flight of the Bumblebee” out of a ukulele.

Nor can Bob Wilson’s able direction cure this threadbare play’s many ills. I don't care what Mom might have said about chicken soup being Jewish penicillin, you can’t really cure everything from a cold to an anxiety attack simply by serving soup to nuts. More is required. As matinee maven Arleen says of a play she’s just seen, “It wasn’t a play. It was two people talking. He said something, she said something, and at the end, nobody said anything.”

The only difference here is that Simon takes a larger cast to do the same thing.

Again, die-hard fans who love what is familiar about Neil Simon will be comfortable here. Still, to paraphrase Mickey when giving his producer Duncan the business about what he finds wanting in English cuisine: Hey, if it’s me, given a choice? If you don't mind, I’d probably pass on the trifle and order a substantial.

Profile: Darren Bridgett, 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)'

Taking risks with the Bard

Article Launched: 07/05/2007 05:18:10 PM PDT

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent


The thing about actor Darren Bridgett's hands is that they are disproportionately large.

They may even be bigger than his head.

Just to give you an idea, he could probably pick up a loaf of bread in one hand and say guess what I got.

Far from looking ham-handed or clumsy, however, there is something extraordinarily precise about the way Bridgett uses his hands on stage: Elegant when taking flight, graceful in repose, and endlessly inventive when they get busy.

And they are very busy now.

At present, his hands are working out the timing of a Three Stooges eye-poking/eye-poke-blocking routine with fellow actor Ryan Schmidt, 28, while veteran actor Jarion Monroe, 59, looks on. The three make up the cast of Marin Shakespeare Company's 2007 season-opener, "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)," a wildly popular Shakespeare parody where three actors are charged with the task of performing all 37 of Shakespeare's plays in less than two hours, playing a total of 75 roles.

Bridgett is manipulating the hands of a life-sized dummy with his face on it, squaring off with Schmidt's dummy, doing Curly moves to his Moe. The scene ends, and Bridgett emerges frombehind a curtain, out of breath, his dummy tucked casually under his arm. "Did that read?" he asks director Robert Currier. "Could you tell that I did the thumb-biting thing?"

"Nope. Couldn't see it," Currier says. "Besides, you're way beyond thumb-biting at this point. You should be well into the area of more grievous bodily harm - eye gouging, ankle twisting, that sort of thing."

"YES!" cries Bridgett, hurling himself and his dummy to the floor and rolling around the stage in a life-and-death struggle. Schmidt seizes the opportunity to start choking his own dummy, before turning and using it to pummel the battling "Bridgetts." Meanwhile, Monroe sits quietly on a stool at stage left, shaking his head in mock disgust. He looks up at the small audience of visitors, staff and crew and does an exaggerated roll of his eyes. I mean, really. Discipline's gone all to hell around here.

Bridgett surrenders to the dummy and gets up slowly, looking defeated. "This is so SAD. To be overpowered and pinned down by a dummy," he says, then quickly brightens. "I know! I'll create a diversion! Look out! Over there!" he cries, pointing to the forest. "IT'S DICK CHENEY!!"

He was born in Palo Alto and started performing in community theater when he was 8 years old. He concentrated on sports in high school and earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley. This is his ninth season with the Marin Shakespeare Company, almost always in a leading role, including three previous productions of "The Complete...(abridged)." Other companies include the Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Marin Theatre Company, TheatreWorks, Magic Theatre, Center Rep, ACT, Laguna Playhouse, California Shakespeare Festival, TheatreFirst, CentralWorks, San Jose Stage and Napa Valley Rep.

Bridgett has a reputation for being an extremely generous actor to work with and notorious for unpredictable comic invention. Character actor George Maguire, veteran of stage and screen, has worked with Bridgett many times. "There was this thing he did with a fish in 'She Stoops to Conquer' that was different every night. We'd just make room for it. And I would gladly bow to Darren any time he wants to go out into the audience."

"He's an ideal actor to work with for a director," says director Lee Sankowich, former artistic director at Marin Theatre Company. "He's an actor who brings lots of ideas to every rehearsal, but is not above taking direction. And he is a genuinely sweet man."

Alexandra Matthew, who played Ophelia opposite Bridgett's Hamlet in an MSC production of "Hamlet," praised his unusually intuitive approach to the Prince of Denmark. "What was so much fun with Darren is that he kept it very loose, even changing the blocking sometimes. He would do soliloquies in the audience, making it more intimate. He took risks, and I thought his approach to the language was honest and refreshing."

Not everybody thought so. Some Shakespeare purists took issue with his unconventional style. Currier, who was his director in "Hamlet," says, "I suppose his Hamlet took some knocks because Darren's not classically trained in that way. Many American actors are not."

But while he may not have had total command of the verse, says Currier, he more than made up for it with honesty, athletic ability and wit. And loads of personal charm.

"People like working with Darren because he is genuine. A sweet, sweet soul. I think he fulfills that ancient Greek definition of good citizen: A good husband, father, friend, artist and athlete - excellence in all.

"Except he can't carry a tune in a bushel basket."

Bridgett is also a popular teacher, leading a class in audition preparation for the company. When three of his students are asked how they like their teacher, they practically fall over each other to count the ways - counting them off on their fingers.

"He's funny," says Jayne Deely, 21. "Dedicated," says Vivian Kane, 23, "the kind of teacher you want to respect." "Yeah," says Laura Taylor, 20, stopping at her ring finger, "and he's the kind of teacher you want to MARRY."

All three laugh. "If he wasn't married...," says the obviously besotted Taylor, "Oh ... my ... God."

Bridgett is lost in another improvised fight scene, this time with what appears to be a toy Godzilla in his left hand and toy Transformer in his right. "Don't look into my eyes," he whispers, "or you will become intoxicated by my toxic robot plastic!"

"Oh nooooo," he cries, now in Transformer falsetto, "Help! Help! My eyes! My eyes!!"

He quickly runs offstage. Within seconds, he's back, riding in on a toy hobby horse, wearing a torn dress with a bustle and a bad female wig. As the sword fight that follows reaches a swashbuckling coup de grace, Bridgett looks at the plastic sword in his hand and starts to laugh.

"I'm sorry. I just realized something ...," he says. "I'm an adult. I'm over 40 years old, and here I am flipping a kidney across a theater with a plastic sword."

He shakes his head, marveling at his good fortune.

"Is this a great job, or what?"

IF YOU GO

Who: Marin Shakespeare Company

What: "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)," by Jess Borgeson, Adam Long and Daniel Singer, directed by Robert Currier, through Aug. 12.

Tickets: $15 to $30, see Web site for special days

Where: Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, Dominican University, San Rafael.

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

Extras: Free conversations with scholars or company artists at 7:30 p.m. Friday nights (except openings)

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

First published: 7/6/07

(Photo Provided by Morgan Cowin Photography)

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

(Click on pages to enlarge)

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

'Dark at the Top of the Stairs,' Marin Classic Theatre

'Of Mice and Men,' Marin Classic Theatre

'Bye Bye Birdie,' Mt. Play

(Click page to enlarge)

'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/