Oakland Tribune, 4-12-04

-- By Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER

THERE'S some sweet -- and well-planned -- irony in the fact that the Shotgun Players kick off an admission-free season with a play about greed.

With Monday's opening of "The Miser" by Moliere, the Berkeley troupe finds itself at a turning point in its already-impressive 12-year history.

Following the success of last fall's extraordinary "The Death of Meyerhold," the bar has been raised for Shotgun shows. Not only was "Meyerhold" the best Shotgun show ever but also one of the major events of Bay Area theater in 2003.

What do you do for an encore?

If you're artistic director Patrick Dooley, you do something revolutionary and eliminate admission fees. Each summer, Shotgun performs a free show in John Hinkel Park that concludes with actors taking bows and then passing the hat.

Turns out that more money is raised through hat passing than through ticket sales, so Dooley and his crew have decided that each of the five Shotgun shows produced from now until early next year will be free. Audiences will be hit up for donations after the curtain calls. It's now up to audience members to determine how much good theater is worth to them.

No other theater company in the Bay Area -- possibly even the country -- offers an entire season of free shows.

Now the question arises: do you get what you pay for?

And the answer, at least based on "The Miser," is a resounding no. You get a terrific show that you'd be happy to pay for.

The Shotgun Players are clearly still feeling the effects of the critical and commercial success of "Meyerhold," Mark Jackson's kinetic, boundary-pushing examination of Russian art and politics. Under Dooley's direction, "The Miser" takes its cue from the physical inventiveness of "Meyerhold" and successfully translates it to Moliere's 17th-century satire.

When Clive Worsley as Harpagon, the most miserable miser in Paris, delivers a line, he does so with every muscle in his limber body. He prances, preens, contorts and mugs with abandon. Imagine Ebenezer Scrooge with the body of a hip-hop dancer and you'll begin to get the picture.

But Worsley isn't the only physical comedian on the stage of the Julia Morgan Theater. The entire cast strikes poses with nearly every line of David Chambers' loose, hip translation of the French comedy.

The result looks something like a silent movie or an operetta, an effect augmented by Valera Coble's foppish and very funny costumes.

Like any good tale of greed, "The Miser" begins with sex as pouty Elise (Emily Jordan) and strapping Valere (Joe Wyka) lose themselves in a fit of clothes-throwing passion.

But as with all things in the world of this play, pleasures of the flesh become secondary to the gleam of gold.

Everyone in the play wants old Harpagon's money, but the skinflint won't part with a single coin. Lisa Clark and Alf Pollard's amusing set -- a decaying mansion -- conveys just how little Harpagon cares about material things other than money itself.

Although daughter Elise wants to marry servant Valere, Harpagon won't hear of it and will marry her off to an old widower instead. Why? Because the widower doesn't require a dowry.

Son Cleante (a delightfully dithery Andy Alabran) wants to marry lovely but impoverished Marianne (Meghan Doyle), but in a surprising turn of events, the old miser wants to marry the young maiden himself -- if she can raise a dowry.

Throw in a mercenary matchmaker (Fontana Butterfield), a meddling manservant (Robert Martinez) and a bitter butler (Paul Shepard) and you've got a farcical -- although not unfamiliar -- universe where money is the ruling god.

The cartoonish quality to "The Miser" begins to wear thin as the players strike pose after pose, but just as the comic shine begins to dull, the comic gears shift.

Big laughs abound in the two-plus hours it takes to arrive at the happy ending in which everyone has exactly what they want: money and, less important, love.