By Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
War is raging in Berkeley's John Hinkel Park. It isn't pretty. It isn't particularly heroic. But it's damned good theater.
"In the Wound," Jon Tracy's liberal rewrite of Homer's "Iliad," pulsates to the drums of goddesses and throbs with the combat, tedium, confusion and carnage of extended war. Not that this ambitious project, the first part of Tracy's two-play Homeric "The Salt Plays," is anywhere near as gory as the average war movie. The swords are drumsticks. The carnage is choreographed and the bloodshed left to your imagination. Which may make it more intense.
Written and directed by Tracy - with a stirring and yearning percussion and vocal score by Brendan West and the unusually large 31-person ensemble - the Shotgun Players world premiere runs weekends in the park through Oct. 3. It is by no means a straight dramatization of the "Iliad." Like "The Farm," Tracy's very loose adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" last year, "Wound" takes considerable liberties with its source.
It encompasses the entire Trojan War, for one thing. Where Homer focuses on the ninth year of the siege of Troy, "Wound" covers the whole decade, from the sacrifice of the Greek leader Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia (Nesbyth Rieman), - a more cynical act in this version - to the Trojan Horse (or a modern military equivalent of the ruse that ended the war).
Just as Christine Crook's costumes mix ancient Greek military gear with corporate suits, Tracy's script inhabits a fertile no-man's-land between the old and new. Michael Torres' domineering, semi-articulate Agamemnon, more in love with command than life, cops (and creatively mangles) bits from Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Daniel Bruno's scheming "social mathematician" Odysseus is a master of corporate-speak.
But "Wound" is a more radical rewrite than that. The gods are comparatively powerless. The unseen Zeus is only a phone call away, but the beauteous nurse-goddesses - the perplexed Athena (Elena Wright), Troy-loving Aphrodite (Charisse Loriaux) and fed-up Hera (Emily Rosenthal) - can only seek to influence men's minds when they're not drumming up martial frenzies from the camo-netted watchtowers of Nina Ball's set.
Tracy reframes the story around the long journey of Bruno's cold Odysseus and on the Greeks' suffering as payback for the murder of Iphigenia. Lexie Papedo's sweet Greek-crooning Penelope and Yannai Kashtan's wise-child Telemachus keep beckoning Odysseus home. Rieman's still-stunned Iphigenia haunts the father who betrayed her, Odysseus as the man who engineered her death and the lover who let it happen - Aleph Ayin's tortured, athletic warrior Achilles.
That's not all. Tracy fills the stage with sharply performed subplots, involving the Achilles-besotted Patroclus (Roy Landaverde), Dave Garrett's deteriorating Menelaus, Alex Hersler's snarky Hektor and more. Dave Maier's combat-maddened Ajax is a searing indictment of the senseless agony of war by himself. The "Salt" Tracy rubs in this "Wound" becomes a remarkable drama.
By Robert Hurwitt, The San Francisco Chronicle
The gods are almost as messed up as they are mesmerizing in "Of the Earth: The Salt Plays: Part 2" at Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage. In the final chapter of Jon Tracy's two-play Homeric epic, Odysseus' long voyage home is as engrossing and suspenseful as the entire Trojan War was in the first.
Brendan West's inspired drums-and-vocals score infuses and drives the action. Lexie Papedo's impatient Penelope weaves white-cord boats and caves around Dan Bruno's driven Odysseus as five gorgeous goddesses labor to keep him from getting home. The drums, athletic choreography and Lloyd Vance's thickly layered videos anchor the action in the previous play as they propel it forward.
Like last summer's "In the Wound," this is a loose take on Homer's epic. Author-director Tracy sticks more closely to the events of "The Odyssey" than he did to "The Iliad," but "Earth" is a retelling of one of Western civilization's foundational myths through contemporary eyes.
Tina Yeaton's time-traveling costumes frame the tale. In his dark business suit, Bruno (who helped conceive the project) is Odysseus as everyman, albeit with an epic guilty conscience. Penelope's voluminous blue gown bespeaks traditional domestic comforts he can't recover, while the skintight outfits of the deities could be celestial space suits.
Even the reason Odysseus can't go home again is less straightforward than it appears. Rami Margron's soft-as-nails Zeus insists that he suffer until he pays for the death of Iphigenia (Nesbyth Rieman on film), a theme of the first play. His - or her - wife, Hera (Emily Rosenthal), calls those motives into question. To some degree, Odysseus' odyssey reflects the problems of war-traumatized veterans trying to reconnect with lives left behind.
Grumbling and rebelling under Zeus' commands and the power of his fearsome brother Poseidon (Anna Ishida), Athena and Aphrodite (Elena Wright and Charisse Loriaux, like Bruno, Papedo and Rosenthal repeating their roles from "Wound") help thwart Odysseus' journey. All five goddesses - yes, "father" Zeus and Poseidon are female (these are deities; get over it) - transform themselves into everything from the hero's crew to a brilliantly low-tech ensemble Cyclops and monster Scylla.
Meanwhile, Penelope's strong will keeps weaving ways home for her husband, and their son, Telemachus (Daniel Petzold), tries to reach him through everything from paper airplanes to TV shows. Her strongest challenge comes from the sorceress Circe (Loriaux), expressed in a dynamic vocalized clash and in Loriaux's seductive dancerly suspension over Odysseus in predatory eroticism.
Goddesses hang from the steel poles of Nina Ball's striking, spare set. Drumsticks become swords in dynamic battle scenes. Lucas Krech's lights turn shadows into added actors. As in "Wound," the action becomes so thickly layered that you may want to see the play more than once. That's also true of the story Tracy so vividly tells.
You've Been Served
By Karen McKevitt, editor Theatre Bay Area
San Francisco companies, take notice: The most ballsy and edgy theatre I've seen all year hasn't been in the Tenderloin or in the Mission, it was last night in Vallejo.
I know, I was shocked, too.
Under artistic director Jon Tracy, Darkroom Productions presented a loose adaptation of Trainspotting, which probably would have been a Northern California premiere had a group not produced it years ago at SF's Edinburgh Castle pub. It closed last night. If you didn't see it, you fuckin' missed out.
Trainspotting was a pure, in-your-face production, yet stripped of any artsy pretensions and certainly stripped of any amateurish, just-out-of-theatre-school tricks. On a set littered with crates, a few pieces of furniture and a TV, director Tracy created gritty, kinetic scenes: rad, slow-motion Jean-Claude Van Damme fight scenes or creepy heroin-induced fantasias, to mention a couple. His minimal yet precise lighting design and John Epperson's brilliant sound design (with Warren Sandoval's original music) served the play perfectly, neither one overpowering the other.
Travis Mullins kicked ass as Mark Renton, as did Victor Ballesteros as his mate Tommy Begbie. While Ballesteros's wide-ranging credits include San Jose Rep, Teatro Vision, Willows and the Mountain Play, Mullins is based in Sacramento with only a few credits. We should be seeing a lot more of him; his performance was completely present and devoid of any obvious false notes. Rob Dario and Jena Rose turned in equally committed and strong performances.
Jon Tracy and Darkroom Productions is the real deal, a much-welcome alternative to fringe theatre that has turned safe over the years. This production showed a passion, with talent to back it up, of a company with really nothing to prove and nothing to lose. Well, maybe they feel a little differently. But they filled the house with a bunch of 20-30-somethings that could have been mistaken for a SF audience.
Some of Tracy's upcoming directing jobs include Aurora Theatre (the Global Age Project) and Richard III at Artaud, but Darkroom seems committed to Vallejo, which, as weird as it may sound, I think is great. It just needed a burgeoning artistic fringe, and that finally seems to be happening.
"Shooter" plumbs video violence, killings
by Robert Hurwitt, The San Francisco Chronicle
A pair of teenagers shoot and kill several classmates at a rural Illinois high school. One of the killers has posted a crazed message of thanks and solidarity on the Web site of a very violent and popular video game. The founders of the small, Bay Area startup company are besieged by the press, lawyers and politicians just when they've staked the company's future on launching the game's successor.
It's only an accident of timing that makes Aaron Loeb's "First Person Shooter" sound as if it's been ripped from recent headlines (with the usual details changed for artistic purposes). The play that opened Saturday at SF Playhouse has been in the works for two years, commissioned by the development group PlayGround, which is co-producing the world premiere. After the tragic college shootings in Virginia, the producers debated whether to postpone the opening, but, in the end, decided to go ahead.
It's good that they did, both for theatergoers and for the ongoing debate about whether video games and movies contribute to America's distressingly high level of violence. Loeb, chief operating officer at the video game house Planet Moon Studios, is far from an impartial observer -- which is also a good thing. His passion informs both sides of his engagement with the issues, and his insider's knowledge animates his depictions of the video game workplace.
Not that "Shooter" is an argument in dramatic clothing. It's a human drama about people, with good and devious intentions, trying to survive emotionally and financially in the whirlwind aftermath of a school shooting and an environment poisoned by media overkill, a litigious culture and politicians who think it's safer to regulate video games than guns. It's inhabited by fully drawn people and strikingly performed in director Jon Tracy's sharp, smart and energetic staging.
On one side of the escalating battle are the video game developers, a close-knit group of sleep-deprived, quirky, joyfully foul-mouthed longtime collaborators, including a dynamic Chad Deverman as the marketing pro and all-around fixer Tommy, vibrant Kate Del Castillo as the resourceful, more emotionally savvy managing director Tamar, and engaging Sung Min Park as the weary, edgy chief artist Wilson. Pushing the confrontation on the other side are a magnetic Susi Damilano as Rose, the distraught stepmother of one of the shooting victims, and a meticulously single-minded Park as a lawyer for an anti-violent video game group. Caught in the middle, where the heart of Loeb's drama lies, are the fathers of the video game and Rose's murdered stepson. Adrian Roberts is a solid thoughtful farmer Daniel, father of the school's only African American student, riveting in the depth of his internalized wrestle with grief and doubt. Craig Marker is outstanding as boy-genius Kerry, the insomnia-frazzled, impetuous, immature and irresistibly good-hearted designer, haunted by a personal tragedy that may have fed the racial aspects of the controversy (it doesn't help that the killers called themselves a "clan").
Some aspects of "Shooter" are still a bit schematic, in an issue-of-the-week drama mode. But Tracy and his strong cast vividly bring it to life on a striking, video-upholstered office set by Melpomene Katakalos that projects into the first rows of seats. From the sound and fury of the headline-rattling conflict emerges an evocative drama about two men trying to maintain their integrity and focus in a society pushing to reduce them to sound bites about video violence, school bullying and race.
By Chloe Veltman, The SF Weekly
At the top of the second half of Tracy Letts' 1996 play, Bug, Peter, a troubled young man who claims to have escaped from an Army hospital, squats over a microscope, scrutinizing a sample of his blood. The squalid Oklahoma motel room in which Peter conducts his chemistry experiment looks nothing like it did when Agnes, a lonely, liquor-and-coke-addled woman in her mid-40s, first invited him to stay a couple of nights previously. Silver foil and plastic sheeting mask almost every available surface including the walls, windows, and lampshades. Flypaper strips hang like extraterrestrial tendrils from the ceiling, and cans of Raid jockey for space alongside half-consumed bottles of booze on the rickety dressing table. The room may more closely resemble the set of a 1960s sci-fi flick than a cheap place to spend the night, but Peter seems completely at one with his homemade lab. Others, however, are less convinced. When Agnes' abusive ex-husband, Jerry, shows up, he echoes the audience's feelings of foreboding when he says, "Y'know, if I was a roach, I believe I'd take the hint."
This is the defining moment in Letts' skin-crawling melodrama about the human Petri dish otherwise known to us all as planet Earth. At one level, the dramatist's outlandish story about a man who believes ruthless military doctors have planted tiny insects in his body as part of some evil government plot and manages to coerce an impressionable woman into believing it makes us feel like the crew of the Enterprise stumbling upon some alien life form. We observe the characters' trailer-trash antics and outlandish conspiracy theories from a distance, as if the play were unfolding under a magnifying glass. But at another level, the passionate yet pathological relationship between the forlorn Agnes and her aphid-obsessed beau, Peter, feels anything but remote. So skillfully do the cast and crew involved in SF Playhouse's gripping production manage to engulf us in the ludicrous goings-on, that by the end of the show, the microscope appears to be trained on us.
Bug — at least as brought to life by director Jon Tracy for SF Playhouse — exerts a powerful effect. The production makes us itch. At one point, it even elicits screams. Along with Tracy's taut pacing, much of the credit for this skin-tingling feeling goes to the actors. In particular, Susi Damilano and Gabriel Marin inhabit the characters of Agnes and Peter so completely that we find ourselves transported to that motel room and almost feel compelled to leap onstage to help them search the bedsheets for lice.
Agnes is a weak, emotionally dependent woman, but Damilano is careful not to play her solely as a victim. Her quiet defiance of both Jerry and her lesbian friend R.C. tempers the credulous side of her nature, smoothing out her slide into madness as the drama unfolds. Marin's Peter provides a perfect counterpoint to Damilano's Agnes. Peter is a textbook basket case whose understated, shifty mannerisms recall a lineage of quietly sinister characters from Much Ado About Nothing's John the Bastard to The Usual Suspects' Keyser Soze. Yet Marin raises Peter above stock character status with his warmth and passionate beliefs. Despite the warning signs, nothing prepares us for his leap into unbridled, bloodthirsty lunacy. When the actor suddenly takes off his shirt to reveal a chest lacerated with wounds like some kind of latter-day St. Sebastian, audience responses range from sharp intakes of breath to uncomfortable laughter to yelps of fear. Though every bit as over the top as Jack Nicholson's battier moments in The Shining, the scene completely sucks us in.
Because Letts sends the one vaguely normal character in the play, R.C., packing about two-thirds of the way through, he leaves little space for sanity within the claustrophobic confines of Agnes and Peter's motel room. This has the effect of embroiling us further in the characters' madness, regardless of the absurdity of their conspiracy theories. Before long, the dull, drill-like throb of sound designer Cliff Caruther's sweeping choppers brings surveillance systems to mind, and the shattered concrete and twisted metal borders of Bill English's motel room set suggest the effects of war in general and hint at the possibility of chemical warfare in particular. The real world is knocking at the door.
SF Playhouse finds an almost Orwellian dimension in Letts' potboiler. I, for one, left the theater feeling a bit like 1984's Winston Smith, a hapless insect swimming about in a Petri dish, part of some grand and foolish experiment. Like the invasive bugs that threaten to wipe out the protagonists' lives — and, they insist, humankind in its entirety — this play gets under our skin.
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