Berkeley Daily Planet, May 1, 2001
By John Angell Grant

'Slings & Arrows' players hits their mark

Black Box Productions - "the anarchist wing of Shotgun Players," joked playwright/director Rebecca Goodberg - is currently presenting two new challenging and thought-provoking short experimental works at LaVal's Subterranean Theater in Berkeley.

The first play, "Slings & Arrows," written and directed by Goodberg, is subtitled "love stories from Shakespearean tragedie."

In this series of short scenelets and monologues, all on the theme of unsatisfactory love relationships, six characters from various plays by Shakespeare springboard off of bits from the original plays, and then wing it into modern-language improvisations built around various unlikely romantic pairings.

There is some gender-bending in the casting. A drunken Romeo (a smooth Joseph Kaneko), for example, picks up Lady Macbeth (played by a man, Alan Coyne) at a bar, and they almost end up in the sack together.

Elsewhere, Portia (Benjamin Lovejoy) from "Merchant of Venice" and Desdemona (Staci Foley Marengo) from "Othello" swap dysfunctional love-life stories while chatting in the lobby of a sperm bank.

Even Brutus (Jonathan Krauss) from "Julius Caesar" and Macbeth (Drew Barrymore look-alike Eliza Bell) have a fling, although Portia also falls hard for Brutus who's studying to get on "Jeopardy."

Romeo manages an on-going flirtation throughout the play with aggressive, short-tempered chicken-hawk Desdemona, after he climbs up the wrong balcony into the wrong bedroom.

Most of these performers are dressed in black and other dark colors, in the LaVal's black performance space. Fragments from contemporary pop love songs open and close the show.

Since the modern language segments of "Slings & Arrows" - more than half the play - are improvised, each night the play is different. The acting, which seemed initially a little rough from this youthful cast, smoothed out as the show progressed and the relationships evolved among the characters. It made an interesting evening.

The second play, Masha Rapoport's "Blue Roses," features a dreamy sister Laura (Linda Kim) and drunken poet brother Tom (John Mok) chafe under the authority of their oppressive mother Amanda (Wendee Yung).

"Blue Roses" is sort of a conceptual piece, like a Jorge Luis Borges story about a classical piece of literature existing in a modified form in a parallel reality.

The wrinkle here is that "Blue Roses" is told more from the point of view of quiet sister Laura. Director Schneider, who also conceived the piece, said he wanted originally to direct Glass Menagerie, but when he went back and reread the script, it was different than he remembered it.

He was interested, then, in creating a work that commented on how memory of a past experience can lock in the mind as a memory that is different from the original experience.

The actors do strong work in this show, especially Mok's intense performance in the role of Tom. He is a fine actor. Giao-Chau M. Ly's realistic set and Erin McKenna's realistic costumes give the show a sense of hyper-reality after the stylized staging of the first play.

A short question and answer discussion session between audience and artists follows each play. This allows the audience members insights into the evolution of each show, and gives them a chance to comment on the results. There is also a chance to meet the actors. The night I attended, these post-play discussions were enlightening.

In the Black Box series, Shotgun Players is showing its commitment to the encouragement of "firsts"- by actors, directors, playwrights and technical people. With these two productions, the company has planted a few seeds for the future of American theater.

Vernal Variants
It's springtime and love takes front stage

Spring is in the air, and a young dramatist's fancy turns to thoughts of love--and adaptation. How else to explain the synchronicity of three different directors, working independently, giving us stunningly new versions of existing work by the masters? At La Val's, the Shotgunners produce black-box glosses on Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, while the Rep collaborates with Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre to present an adaptation of Aeschylus' The Suppliant Women. Like consultations with the I Ching, all three, while made of recognizable elements, get a thorough shaking to see what new insights surface. Generally true to the source material, each of the new plays finds a way to bring its parent work into the present and make it relevant to a modern audience.

The directors who agreed to play in the Shotgun sandbox were faced with an unusual challenge: everyone involved had to be doing something for the first time--acting, running the lights, stage managing, etc., and the script had to be a new work. The cast of Slings and Arrows goes a step further--while part of their text is as Shakespeare wrote it, much more is (often flawlessly) improvised, making it the first time every time.

Director Rebecca Goodberg's plan was to take the critical love relationships within familiar works and examine them more closely, stripped of all the pomp and politics that usually surround them. So to the strains of a mix of disco hits, we observe the wordless courtships of Portia and Brutus, the Macbeths, and the lonely peregrinations of Desdemona and Romeo--many of whom are played cross-gender, very convincingly considering their minimal drag. Wars and murders and so on progress, the lovers process their feelings, cross paths with the others, die in their various famous ways, and eventually coalesce into an afterlife support group. ("So you died for love like me, how, exactly?" Portia asks Romeo disbelievingly.)

Shakespeare might have been horrified by how fast and loose Goodberg and her cast play with his work, but he would have to appreciate moments like the one in which Romeo climbs through what he takes to be Juliet's window--and mistakenly embraces Desdemona. ("Your windows are strikingly similar," he deadpans.) There is something both moving and indefinably funny about Joseph Kaneko as Romeo. My companion thought it was his combination of youthful arrogance and longing--whatever the case, sometimes a single word or facial expression would wring helpless laughter from the audience. Benjamin Lovejoy, in his first-ever speaking role as Portia, and Eliza Bell as Lord Macbeth bring an unexpected yumminess to their characters, especially in the tenderer interactions with their respective spouses: Jonathan Krauss as the workaholic Brutus and the fiercely arch, witty Alan Coyne as Lady Macbeth. While it helps to know the plays Goodberg is mining for material, it's not absolutely necessary, and the work slowly develops an internal logic of its own, which is generally satisfying.

[More wrenching than Slings] Blue Roses is a little Tennessee Williams, a little Yukio Mishima, and all longing. Though Blue Roses does capture a haunting, oppressive atmosphere, heavy with layered anger and disappointment, it's technically the weakest of the three productions. Not because two-thirds of the cast are making their stage debuts in this show: although their inexperience shows, it is more than compensated by the emotional truthfulness of their performance. Rather, in re-examining the memory-play nature of The Glass Menagerie, director Christian Schneider has incorporated several tedious video interludes that fragment the work and break the spell cast by Wendee Yung as the bitter Amanda and Linda Kim and John Mok as her tremblingly rebellious children. He might have had more success integrating a sense of silence and isolation using his actors, rather than a television, and allowing what is an accurate translation of many of Williams' themes--alienation, duty, fragility, and a soul-deadening nostalgia--to shine through his dedicated cast.