A New Play about Race + Immigration
Written + Performed by Ariel Luckey

Directed by Susannah Martin
Original Score by Lila Sklar
Dramaturgy by Corey Fischer

Photos by Pak Han

Presented by La Pena Cultural Center
May 15-18, 2014

Amnesia was commissioned by La Peña Cultural Center with support from The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s 2012 Playwright Commissioning Award, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s 2013 Visibility Award and the Zellerbach Family Foundation’s 2014 Community Arts Fund.

Press
“Ariel ignites Amnesia with riveting stories of immigration and memory, drawing connections that span generations and crisscross borders. A gripping, exciting play not to be missed…”
— Jeff Chang, Author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Director of Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Stanford University

Preview article from JWeekly.

Preview article from 3200 Stories.

More info at: www.arielluckey.com

From the Dramaturge
I met Ariel Luckey a few days before Traveling Jewish Theatre, the company I co-founded in 1978, closed. He told me about the theatre piece he was about to start developing and asked if I’d help him dramaturgically. The Baal Shem Tov, the semi-legendary 17th century Jewish mystic is reported to have said as he died, “We go out one door to come in through another.” As the doors finally closed on TJT, Ariel’s invitation opened another one for me. It’s been deeply satisfying to follow, and, at times, to guide Ariel on a journey of discovery that took him to the Ukraine, Belarus, New York, Los Angeles, Arizona, the Sonoran Desert, to the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries and into his own expansive imagination. And, it’s been a great delight to see him transform what he found into music, movement, story – into theatre that invites us all to expand our sense of “us” and “them.”

Immigration is a central fact of the American Jewish experience. But it’s also a central fact of the American experience and, really, isn’t it a defining fact of human experience itself? Those of us who are only two or three generations removed from the literal act of immigration to America retain, perhaps, a keener sense of being shaped by it and are more able to make an empathic connection to today’s immigrants. Or not. All immigrants feel varying degrees of pressure to assimilate and with assimilation comes amnesia.

Amnesia is an act of radical remembering. Radical as in root. Remembering as in rejoining, reconnecting what has been falsely separated. Ariel’s story, like all stories worth telling, is an antidote to amnesia.

— Corey Fischer, Dramaturge

Musicians
Lila Sklar / violin, vocals, mandolin
Dan Cantrell / accordion
eO / sound design + trumpet
Jessica Ivry / cello
Valentino / percussion

Crew
Costume Design / Christine Crook
Dialect Coach / Rebecca Castelli
Graphic Designer / Rich Black
Lighting Design / Wolfgang Lancelot Wachalovsky
Scenic Painter + Fine Art Painter / Meeka Schmalle
Set Design / Steve Decker
Sound Designer / Peva Pardel
Stage Manager + Technical Director / Cory Sands
Voiceovers / Caitlyn Louchard + Daniel Petzold

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by John Weidman

Directed by Susannah Martin
Musical Direction by David Möschler

Photos by Pak Han

Presented by Shotgun Players
September 27 – November 11, 2012

Press
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “taut, close-up staging… captures much of the show’s capacity to shock, amuse, beguile and astonish.” – Robert Hurwitt

THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN “enchantingly alluring… smoothly executed… a twisted vaudeville expression of American history” – Ann Horrocks

BERKELEYSIDE.COM “director Susannah Martin has worked wonders with Assassins.” – Lance Knobel

EAST BAY EXPRESS “a superb rendition… inventive and wonderful… a tantalizing spectacle.” – Erika Milvy

SF WEEKLY “The production resonates with election-year narratives… But the show is also timeless as an achievement in musical theater; its storytelling is just as complex as Sondheim’s notoriously manic melodies.” – Lily Janiak

SF BAY GAURDIAN “a raucous, thoughtful, and intimate American fever dream.” – Robert Avila

Director’s Interview
In deciding to tackle this famous Sondheim musical, what were your initial inspirations for the production?

Dave Möschler was my initial inspiration for this production. He came to me in 2009, right after we had opened The Threepenny Opera, said “I have the next ‘Susannah and Dave’ show”, and presented me with Assassins. He instinctively felt that it would be right up my alley, and he was right. It’s not a traditional musical in terms of its characters or structure; it’s political and historical in its subject matter, it’s simultaneously disturbing and entertaining, and it’s eminently theatrical.

How would you describe the concept of the American promise? In what way do you consider this to be the driving force behind each of these assassins?

Because of the nature of our founding as a country (it was a revolution, after all), the tenets listed in our founding documents, and our long history of manifesting destiny, we are brought up as Americans with certain expectations of what we are owed. You could say that the “American Dream” is a set of expectations built on promises made to us – both literal promises in those founding documents and more amorphous, implied promises. I know we live in a time where many don’t see the American Dream as possible anymore. But we want to believe. We want it to be possible.

With the assassins, those implied promises go beyond the idea of, “If you work hard, you will succeed and thus, be happy.” The assassins live in a place of, “I am owed happiness, I am owed success, and I have the right to criticize, to judge if those things are not given to me. I have the right to take action and claim my happiness.”

This may sound extreme. But I don’t think the assassins are alone in that expectation, that we have a right to judge, to criticize, and to take action. For some of them, their frustration comes from a very acute place of poverty, desperation, and neglect. It comes from a place of being backed into a corner and expressing their helplessness, their powerlessness through one, great “historic” act. It is the only way they see out of the trap they find themselves in.

You chose to put together this production without an ensemble of additional characters, preferring instead to make the assassins “every man & woman” in addition to their roles as the presidential killers. What motivated this choice and how would you describe its importance to your audiences?

When I first read the script – and mind you, I read the published script from the original 1991 production – I was struck by how streamlined it was, how efficiently it told each of the assassins’ stories and hurtled us to its final moments. It was so beautifully focused that, though I saw these other characters in the script (bystanders, witnesses, Emma Goldman, David Herrold), they all seemed incidental to me. Or, if not incidental, they were there with the dramatic purpose of aiding, supporting, moving along each assassin’s story, and moving along our central story of watching this motley crew of lone wolves become a makeshift family. So when I read it, I just assumed that the show was performed without an ensemble. I assumed that the assassins would not only want to tell their own stories, but would also want to support the stories of their fellow assassins.

I also thought a lot about how the Bystanders reflect the everyman. They reflect – along with the balladeer – us. And yet, all of these assassins (except John Wilkes Booth) were not extraordinary or famous figures before they assassinated or attempted to assassinate the president. They were the everyman, just like us. Their complaints, frustrations, and arguments are not uncommon to any of us. Only their one act is. We try and forget about them – we try to dismiss them as crazy, or as an anomaly. But they are just as much a part of the fabric of what makes up this country as anyone else.

Does history repeat itself? What is the cycle of repetition embedded within our culture that continuously drives individuals to take this drastic step? Are we all just stuck in some kind of massive zoetrope, doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of the past?

Yes, I think history repeats itself. Can I say why I think we’re doomed to repeat it? I am not a historian, a sociologist, or a psychologist. So it’s all conjecture from me. I will say that circumstances aren’t changing enough to allow people a way out of frustration, desperation, misery, powerlessness, or hopelessness.

I will also say that I don’t think that time is linear. I think it’s a continuum with cycles. We jump back and forth in time in our own lives – I think the world does that, as well. This musical reflects that non-linear representation. It reflects that, though the reasons around an act may change, the act itself will not – and it will repeat and repeat and repeat.

What is it about assassination that captivates the imagination and why do you think it is particularly relevant right now?

What captures the imagination? I don’t know a single person that hasn’t felt frustrated about politics or government. And yet, do those people then pick up a gun and shoot the president? How do we get from powerlessness to shooting a leader?

Why is it relevant right now? The election. The amount of anger in the country right now. The very, very sad slew of violent, gun-related tragedies that have occurred in the U.S. in just the past few months. The incredible helplessness and powerlessness that people feel right now vis-a-vis the government. The strong desire to DO something about it and yet the strange inability to fully commit and take action in a way that feels definitive or that feels like it changes anything.

Assassins is, by no means, a historical document. It’s a piece of theatre. Thus, what it says about these nine presidential assassins is not always grounded in fact. What, thematically, it says about the country, the principles the country was founded on, and Americans’ expectations of what the nation, or the government, or the President “owes” us, is fascinating.

Cast
Giuseppe Zangara / Aleph Ayin
Sara Jane Moore + Dialect Coach / Rebecca Castelli*
John Hinckley / Danny Cozart
Sam Byck / Ryan Drummond*
Proprietor / Jeff Garrett
Charles Guiteau / Steven Hess
Hinkley Understudy / John Lewis
Squeaky Fromme / Cody Metzger
John Wilkes Booth / Galen Murphy-Hoffman*
Leon Czolgosz / Dan Saki
Balladeer + Oswald / Kevin Singer

*Member of AEA

Musicians
Jeff Patterson / double bass
Andrew Maguire / drums + percussion
Derek Brooker / guitar + banjo + mandolin
Amar Khalsa / reed 1
Carolyn Walter / reed 2
Jeremy Carrillo / trombone
Rafa Postel / trumpet

Crew
Founding Artistic Director / Patrick Dooley
Assistant Director / Lynda Bachman
Assistant Lighting Designer + Research Assistant / Wolfgang Wachalovsky
Assistant Musical Director / Ben Malkevitch
Assistant Stage Manager / Katy Adcox
Choreographer / Erika Chong Shuch
Choreography Assistant / Janet Das
Company Reps / John Mercer + Katja Rivera
Costume Assistant / Ashley Rogers
Costume Designer / Christine Crook
Dramaturg / Dori Jacob
Follow Spot Operator / Jocelyn Edwards
Lighting Designer / Gabe Maxson
Properties Designer / Jackie Scott
Set Designer / Nina Ball
Sound Designer / Theodore J.H. Hulsker
Sound Technician + Install / Anton Hedman
Stage Manager / Hanah Zahner-Isenberg
Technical Director / Anne Kendall
Weapons Assistant + ASM / Lizz Guzman
Weapons Specialist + Fight Director / Dave Maier

Written by Sam Shepard
Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Pak Han

Presented by Boxcar Theatre
March 9 – April 14, 2012

Press
SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY “…under Martin’s direction, this frenetic magnum opus plays as a series of taut, poignant individual moments, each of which feels at once impossible and urgently necessary.” – Lily Janiak

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN “…the exceptionally sharp and powerful production currently up at Boxcar Theatre under direction of Susannah Martin… suggests 1985’s Lie may cut deeper than most…Martin’s intelligent staging…adds tangible weight and texture to the play’s radiant dialogue and engrossing characters, realized by one of the finest ensemble casts all year.” – Robert Avila

THEATRE STORM “…howlingly funny as well as dramatically terrifying. This is one hell of a night at the theatre!” – Charles Kruger, member BATCC

Director’s Note
“Something identifies you with the one who leaves you and it is your common power to return: thus your greatest sorrow. Something separates you from the one who remains with you, and it is your common slavery to depart: thus your meagerest rejoicing.” – Cesar Vallejo

Months ago, I attempted to discern what this play was about by distilling its themes and motifs. My goal was to create a one-page document. It quickly turned to three. When I tried to eliminate any items on my list, I couldn’t do it. Everything was essential.

I have directed Shepard’s plays before and so I recognize the many repeated motifs that are strung throughout this script and every other script he has written. I have joked about how this play is the one in which Shepard took every idea, image, or theme that he was ever interested in and threw them in a blender.

But to say that is to do him a huge disservice. As we pored over this script we discovered that every single moment – every character – every relationship – every line – every image – is essential. The play captures life, love, family, addiction and denial in all its abstract and absurd glory. When we fight, when we love, when we try and communicate with each other – it is as hard – as funny – as sad – as bizarre – and as crossed-wired as the interactions in this play.

So what is this play about?

This is a play about love. Love in all its forms and variations: abusive, dysfunctional, chaotic, familial, co-dependent, addictive. This is a play about how hard it is to love and be loved. About the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to run towards and away from love. About how love – and the loss of love – alters and transforms our minds, bodies, and souls.

Cast
Meg / Carolyn Doyle*
Jake / Joe Estlack
Sally / Marissa Keltie
Mike / Tim Redmond
Lorraine / Katja Rivera*
Frankie / Josh Schell
Beth / Megan Trout
Baylor / Don Wood

*Member of AEA

Crew
Artistic Director / Nick Olivero
Assistant Director + Rehearsal Stage Manager / Lynda Bachman
Assistant Lighting Designer / Jacqueline Steager
Assistant Stage Manager / Colin Johnson
Costume Design / Christine Crook
Dialect Coach / Rebecca Castelli
Fight Choreographer / Durand Garcia
Lighting Design / Lucas Krech
Production Manager / Bonnie Robertson
Production Stage Manager / Mina Sohaa Smith
Properties + Set Dressing / Jessica Chaffin + Megan Hillard
Scenic Design / Steve Decker
Sound + Music / Theodore J.H. Hulsker
Technical Director / Bert van Aalsburg

Created by The Ensemble
Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Pak Han

Presented by Mugwumpin at San Francisco’s Old Mint
January 6 – 29, 2012

Director’s Note
To make an “Artist Statement,” singular, for this piece seems absurd. Future Motive Power was made collaboratively by every single person you see listed in the program. The process was a conversation, from beginning to end, between me and each performer/maker and each designer/maker, and this beautiful, haunted, enthralling old space. Therefore, I didn’t hold the vision for this piece and insist that everyone follow me. We all held the vision for this piece, and discovered the path it needed to take, together. You, the audience, are the final, most vital, and compelling component. You are the best “last touch.”

Created and Performed by
Misti Boettiger
Joe Estlack
Natalie Greene
Rami Margron
Christopher W. White

Crew
Artistic Director / Christopher W. White
Assistant Director / Madeline H.D. Brown
Assistant Stage Manager / Elena Wagoner
Costume Design / Ashley Rogers
Documentation / Sarah Elovich
Production + Lighting Design / Wolfgang Wachalovsky
Properties Design + Painting / Shannon Walsh
Sound Consultant / Teddy Hulsker
Stage Manager / Jessie Wayburn

Written by E. Hunter Spreen
Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Pak Han

Presented by Shotgun Players
May 18 – June 26, 2011

Press
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “Susannah Martin’s skillful stagings…[and] orchestration of their courtship, growing desire, consummation and deepening bond laces the familiar with smartly comic originality.” – Robert Hurwitt

HUFFINGTON POST “Ms. Martin has done a stunning job of pulling two extraordinary performances from her actors.” – George Heymont

SF WEEKLY “…Director Susannah Martin…delivers a conclusion that’s a total stunner.” – Chris Jensen

Director’s Note
I have fallen in artistic love twice. Both times I have been graced with theatrical collaborators who have allowed me to create work that engages the community in difficult questions about the world. The first collaborator is Elizabeth Spreen. Elizabeth and I met in the late 90’s and for five years, ran a theatre company together. In that five years, I learned more about who I was as an artist and what kind of work I needed to make than I learned in any institution of higher learning. The second is Shotgun Players. Every show I have worked on with this company has pushed me to be better at what I do. To bring these two artistic loves together is an incredible honor and joy. And to do so with a play that asks some tough questions about the nature of love and life in the face of cataclysmic change is a hard-core reminder of why I do theatre.

What is this play about? With it’s collage like structure, where time and space are fluid, several issues are touched upon as we swirl through the memories of one couple: the environment and our responsibility to it; illness and its effect on a relationship; language and its limitations in articulating what we feel (especially when our experience becomes so big that it is beyond words); our very contemporary obsession with cataloguing and generating artifacts (both real and virtual) of our relationships, and what happens to those memories as time passes and things change… In the midst of all of those themes, ultimately, this play asks: what happens when your partner embarks on a journey where you can’t follow? And concurrently: what happens when life forces you to choose a path that may mean the loss of your relationship? Life is about change. It’s about death. It’s about re-birth. This beautiful play demonstrates that process on both the most intimate and the most magical scale. I’m extremely grateful to both Elizabeth for writing it and Shotgun for having the gumption (20 years and counting!) to produce it.

Cast
Travis DeKalb / Patrick Russell*
Georgia Swift / Liz Sklar*

*Member of AEA

Crew
Founding Artistic Director / Patrick Dooley
Assistant Stage Manager / Eli Wirtschafter
Board Operator / Hannah Birch-Carl
Choreography Consultants / Jennifer Chien + Kimberly Dooley
Costume + Set Design / Nina Ball
Costume Assistant / Ashley Rogers
Graphic Artist / R. Black
Lighting Design / Lucas Krech
Makeup Consultant / Kevin Clarke
Master Electrician / Heather Gallagher
Producers / Les + Sue Polgar
Properties and Set Dressing / Mia Baxter + Seren Helday
Sound + Music / Jake Rodriguez
Stage Manager / Amanda Melton
Technical Director / Anne Kendall
Video Consultant / Torbin Xan Bullock
Video Creation + Design / Ian Winters

Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Jay Yamada

Presented by Town Hall Theatre Company
February 17 – March 19, 2011

Press
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS “What Martin has done with the play is cast it in a slightly surreal world, avoiding playing the story as a late Depression-era slice of life, or anything else that attempts to be completely realistic… And that is what unlocks a fresh look at the old classic, not only giving audiences a new look at the play, but making its meaning considerably more pointed and clear.” – Pat Craig

CONTRA COSTA TIMES “There are no easy answers in Susannah Martin’s enthralling version of Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie”….Martin takes the playwright’s description of the drama as a memory play to heart, creating a dimly lit, evocative world where Tom’s memories live in their own haunting reality. Through Martin’s superb direction and the interpretations of four skilled actors, this classic play leaves many unanswered questions, allowing the audience to decide for themselves why Tom leaves, whether the poignant scene between his sister Laura and the Gentleman Caller actually happened as he recalls, and how Laura and her mother Amanda fare after his departure.” – Sally Hogarty

ROSSMOOR NEWS “Town Hall’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’ is an emotionally packed production, due in large part to the outstanding actors and Susannah Martin’s directing skills.” – Charlie Jarrett

Director’s Note
I read The Glass Menagerie when I was 11 years old. It was the first play I picked up on my own and simply read for the pleasure of reading a play. I fell in love instantly with the characters, the story, and the beautiful, magical world that Williams created. I identified with every single character even though they lived in a time much removed from my own. I related to Tom’s poetic words, Amanda’s heartfelt recollections of her past, and Laura’s fantasy life created amongst fragile glass. I was also struck, even then, with the theatricality of the play and the way that Tennessee Williams layered images to create a vital and indelible world of memory. It’s a world that captures how both palpable and yet fleeting memory is — and how memory is inexorably linked to longing and loss. Williams makes it clear that memory is simultaneously in the past and hauntingly bound to the present.

As the designers, actors, and I prepared to start rehearsal, we worked to bring that energy and relevance — that immediacy that makes the play feel both like something lost along the way and yet still viscerally alive — to the production. We asked ourselves: what makes a memory stick? What are the details in an event that we remember? What becomes a blur? What do we hold onto? What do we grasp for and, inevitably, lose? Tom, the character so autobiographically close to Tennessee Williams, is the architect of memory in this play. The play chronicles a crucial period in his life and a life-changing decision that he must make. As he looks back and remembers this time, what does he alter? What does he manipulate? What does he forget? What becomes lost to him?

Cast
Amanda Wingfield / Heidi Abbott
Tom Wingfield / Aleph Ayin
Laura Wingfield / El Beh
Jim O’Connor / Michael Perez

Crew
Artistic Director / Clive Worsley
Assistant Stage Manager / Abra Kent
Costume Design / Rebecca Redmond
Lighting Design / Stephen Jones
Production Manager / Leah McKibbin
Properties + Set Dressing / Mia Baxter and Seren Helday
Scenic Design / Steven Decker
Scenic Painter / Sarah Spero
Sound Board Operator / Nico Brenni
Sound Design / Theodore J. H. Hulsker
Stage Manager / Jennifer Stukey
Technical Director / Chris Hayes

Written by Neil LaBute
Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Jeff Thomas & Steve Decker

Presented by Sonoma County Repertory Theater
September 22 – October 24, 2010

Director’s Note
America is quite a conundrum when it comes to body image and weight issues. On one level, it feels like we talk about it all the time. Turn on the television and we are inundated with diet pills and fads, the latest surgery to eliminate obesity, and at least half a dozen reality shows that alternately cajole, dance, abuse, and humiliate overweight contestants into losing weight. On another level, we avoid looking at the issues behind why people are overweight and how we, as a society, treat obese people. We shame, blame, tease, and discriminate because obesity is seen as a choice that can be overcome by sheer force of will.

In contrast, Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig pulls no punches. It’s all right there in the title: we cringe when we read it – we blanche if we have to say it out loud. As he often has in both his plays and films, Mr. LaBute delves right to the heart – and gut – of any matter: be it gender, romance, religion, or body image. He has no interest in being politically correct; his characters say the things that, though we may not admit it to ourselves, we are thinking or feeling on some primal level.

This play does not shy away from our secret (or not-so-secret) belief that fat people are slovenly beings who deserve what they get. The writing gets right to the core of the shame that we all carry with us about our bodies – or about the bodies of those that we choose to love. It is a play about that shame and those secrets. But also, the play does not shrink from the fact that these ideas about body and weight, and the shame and secrets we carry because of it, are heaved with quadruple force at women.

You may read this and say, “Not me. I don’t feel/think that way. I don’t act that way. I would never say the things that people say, or do the things people do, in this play.” OK. But ask yourself if you agree – even a tiny bit – with the core philosophy espoused by Carter, the play’s designated “Dr. a**hole”:

“It’s one of the many laws of nature. ‘Run with your own kind.’”

And then, put yourself in Tom’s shoes. We all want to be admirable – to stand up for what we believe in – to put our heart and soul and conviction behind the person we love; in the words of Helen, the designated “fat pig” of the title, we all want to be “good and strong and brave.” Are we? Can we be? With the ridiculous (not to mention unhealthy and unrealistic) expectations and images thrown at us about what we’re supposed to look like, can we fully embrace and love ourselves and others – no shame, no fear, no baggage attached? Can we, as Helen also says, not be afraid, take a blind chance, and not care what people think?

Cast
Jeannie / Casi Maggio
Tom / Tim Redmond
Carter / Dan Saki
Helen / Jennifer Stukey

Crew
Artistic Director / Scott D. Phillips
Costume Design / Rebecca Redmond
Production Manager + Properties Design + Lighting Design / April George
Stage Manager / Rachel Huey
Set Design / Steve Decker
Sound Design / Joe Winkler

Created + Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Liz Lisle

Presented by Mugwumpin at the Pacific Heights Inn
June 7, 2010

Press Release
written in collaboration with Christopher W. White
Every day we hear more stories in the news about people forced out of their homes by disasters: volcanoes, oil spills, civil war, hurricanes, floods. Lost within the scale of those stories are people who wait in the neither-here-nor-there, hoping for safety to return, having to make do with only what they could carry with them. In such situations, what would you take with you? What would you leave behind?

Acclaimed San Francisco performance troupe Mugwumpin has created a brand new performance piece for motel rooms, exploring these questions. Get This Go invites small audiences to move freely between three motel rooms at the Pacific Heights Inn in San Francisco, peeking into the lives of the people sheltering in this in-between place.

Created + Performed By
El Beh
Madeline H.D. Brown
George Chan
Joe Estlack
Rod Hipskind
Erin Mei-Ling Stuart
Maryam Rostami
Michelle Talgarow
Christopher W. White

Crew
Artistic Director / Christopher W. White
Associate Artistic Director / Liz Hitchcock Lisle
Company Manager / Julia Lynton
Stage Manager / Eli Wirtschafter

Written by Oscar Wilde
Directed by Susannah Martin

Photos by Jay Yamada

Presented by Town Hall Theatre Company
February 25 – March 27, 2010

Press
CONTRA COSTA TIMES “Under the thoughtful direction of Susannah Martin, the actors have a great deal of fun with Oscar Wilde’s witty satire on society’s foibles. Moving the time to the 1920s adds pizazz enhanced through the colorful costumes (Rebecca Redmond) and lovely set (Nina Ball). The highly stylized production takes full advantage of the wonderful characters Wilde penned.” – Sally Hogarty

ROSSMOOR NEWS “Director Susannah Martin and her production team have sculpted a well crafted production…This play, in the wrong hands, is just another trivial comedic pursuit, but in this production, with its precise execution and attention to detail, you will be rewarded with an entertainment experience that is quite exceptional in local or regional theater.” – Charlie Jarrett

BENICIA HERALD “…director Susannah Martin brings out the best in the entire cast for a fun, lighthearted look at hypocrisy in the social mores of the early 1900s.” – Elizabeth Warnimount

Director’s Note
Why set a classic Victorian comedy in the 1920’s? The Importance of Being Earnest is full of artifice, posing, duality, and the battle between what’s superficial and what’s serious. The hidden depths in the supposedly trivial pursuits that our characters hold dear are the unexpected riches in the play. It was this world of posing, storytelling, and secret lives that compelled me to move the play forward in time. What better age to represent a desperate desire for amusement as a means to blot out the pains of the past and the anxiety of the future than the 1920’s: an era of excess, Jazz, and a booming youth culture. Just as the play reveals concealed complexity in our supposedly superficial characters, the 20‘s had an undercurrent of anger and trauma that drove the almost willful quest for entertainment.

Another theme in the script that drew me to a more modern era was the correlation between the women’s behavior in the play and the shift in women’s roles in the 1920’s. Hemlines changed, hair length changed, the corset went away: youth culture was born. Some women got the vote and the suffragette movement was alive and well. Women were also struggling to re-acclimate to a life that demanded, after WWI, that they go back to their roles as wife and mother. In Earnest, whenever the women are on stage, they control the scene, the space, and ultimately, the outcome. If women had enjoyed a new freedom and then were suddenly expected to re-conform to old ideas, how would they still find a way to control their circumstances? Certainly Gwendolen and Cecily would embrace popular culture as a means of claiming some sort of freedom of expression. But I also think they would speak their minds as openly as they do in the script. The audacity of these two very modern women surprise Algernon and Jack so completely that they speak the truth, claim their identities, and fall in love – truly – for the first time.

Cast
Merriman / Kristoffer Barrera
Gwendolyn Fairfax / Sally Clawson
Algernon Moncrieff / Christopher Kristant
Cecily Cardew / Casi Maggio
Jack “Ernest” Worthing / Ryan O’Donnell
Lady Bracknell / Nancy Sale
Miss Prism / Trish Tillman
Lane + Dr. Chasuble / Don Wood

Crew
Artistic Director / Clive Worsley
Managing Director / Vangie Long
Assistant Director / Ava Jackson
Assistant Stage Manager / Maggie Manzano
Costume Design / Rebecca Redmond
Lighting Design / Chris Guptill
Production Manager + Stage Manager / Leah McKibbin
Properties Design / Chris Kristant + Rebecca Pingree
Set Design / Nina Ball
Sound Design / Patrick Kaliski

Written by Bertolt Brecht with Music by Kurt Weill
Directed by Susannah Martin
Musical Direction by David Möschler

Photos by Jessica Palipoli

Presented by Shotgun Players
December 3, 2009 – January 31, 2010

Press
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “A half-decent ‘Threepenny’ is a gift at any time, and Susannah Martin’s staging of the 1928 Brecht-Weill masterpiece is better than that…Nina Ball’s set is the savaged, wastepaper-covered interior of a once grand bank. Martin makes it work equally well for every aspect of Brecht’s cross-section of capitalism…this ‘Threepenny’ is not to be missed.” – Robert Hurwitt

EAST BAY EXPRESS “In Martin’s version of the play — presented in collaboration with Shotgun Players — she stays true to the original script and concept, but reformats it for a modern audience. With the help of a talented cast and a couple of snide references to the current banking crisis, she manages to pull it off.” – Rachel Swan

SAN FRANCISCO BAY TIMES “Who is the greater criminal? The man who robs a bank, or the man who founds one?” asks the timeless 1928 Brecht/Weill epic-theatre-piece, The Threepenny Opera. And Shotgun Players’ must-see, darkly-brilliant production, staged with raw, seductive power by Susannah Martin, answers the question….Where others shoehorn in concepts based on trend, Martin slyly slides in her chosen time-period and punk aesthetic with a custom fit that’s as flattering as costumer Mark Koss’s period and character-appropriate garments. This production of The Threepenny Opera is worth every cent, and a whole lot more! It’s simply one of the best theatre productions of the year.” – Mike Ward

MY CULTURAL LANDSCAPE “Susannah Martin’s staging kept anger and irony in full force throughout the evening,,, Finding a way to make a show that was edgy in 1928 relevant to an audience in 2009 (especially after 80+ years of societal change and the globalization of financial markets) is a difficult challenge. Martin and her creative team took the bull by the horns and wrestled it to the ground quite nicely.” – George Heymont

Director’s Note
When Patrick Dooley and I began talking about this show a year ago, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was: What does it mean to do this play now? We are 21st Century Americans. Where do we go after decades of grappling with Brecht’s ideas? The catchwords about Brecht and Brechtian acting don’t mean the same thing to us now. Even Brecht’s own theories on certain totemic terms (alienation, gestus, epic theatre) changed throughout his life and were highly influenced by whatever – and whomever – he was working with at the time. How do we fully investigate these ideas and invest in them in a way that is relevant to the culture and the world that we live in now?

How do we tell the story and embrace all that is odd and contradictory about this play’s structure and characters? We all know the music and songs are inventive, catchy, and fun. But the core ideas of the show are contained in these numbers. The plot is all in the script. The story, though, and the ideas that make it tick, are in the songs. It’s easy to get lost in the duality of the play. It’s funny! No, it’s dark and scary! No, it’s about big political ideas! No, it’s a musical about a dapper guy! It’s a play about beggars – about poverty – and yet the ones we meet, under Peachum’s reign, are the wiliest Capitalists. It’s a play about a rapist and a sadist. But he compels us. It’s dark and scary and yet you have to laugh.

The notes that follow are a brief illustration of where I went over the last 6 months as I grappled with these questions.

I think about historicization and Brecht’s credo that we cannot do plays set in our own time. We need the necessary distance of another period in order to understand our own.

I dig into both the cultural upheavals of Brecht’s Berlin in the 20’s and America in the 70’s. I keep going back to this period. The American economy was depressed. People were reacting to similar issues then and now. The revolution of the 60’s felt like a total bust in the 70’s. People were left picking up the pieces and feeling scammed. Lots of good ideas had paved the way to self-indulgence with very little changing for minorities or the poor. The bitterness that people felt about that led the way to a takeover by the right. This scenario is similar to Berlin in the 20’s and 30’s. In reaction to the social upheaval after World War I, Brecht and his contemporaries were interested in taking apart assumed structures and hierarchies in order to question and protest the faulty system that had been left behind. Was there a contemporary movement that did the same thing?

I keep thinking about Punk. Joanie McBrien hands me the book, Panic Attack: Art in the Punk Years. I’m reading Brecht’s theories at the same time as I read the essays in this book.

“You have to kill your neighbor to survive/It’s selfishness that keeps a man alive…” – Second THREEPENNY Finale

“You’ve got nothing. There is nothing. You’ve got to fight to get out, you’ve got to fight to survive, you’ve got to fight to live.” – Stephen Willats, Every Day and Every Night, 1984

The artists of this era picked up where Brecht left off. The artists of the early punk movement were rebelling against the same failed ideas as the artists of Weimar Germany. Punk was a way of expressing anger and taking back power.

You can’t tell me what to do or who to be.
You can’t tell me
Where
Or how
Or when I can make art.
I take it back,
I take it apart,
And make it MINE.

Punk. The philosophies and motivations behind the movement, not mohawks, biker jackets, and safety pins: not the commodified image that Punk became. Being “punk” is more about recognizing the weaknesses in the rules that were written for you and deciding to rebel against that.

The original Punk artists, writers, musicians, and poets were Brechtian actors. They turned poverty into glorious art and the passion they felt in ripping something to shreds and putting it back together remains infectious and incredibly inspiring. THE THREEPENNY OPERA lives in this meeting place between honoring the form that came before and the desire to take it apart. It is rife with broken expectation, contrast, and contradiction. That disjointedness is at the heart of what Brecht termed the alienation effect but it is also the beating heart that drove the punk movement.

Cast
Ensemble / Andy Alabran
Ensemble / El Beh
Ensemble / Madeline H.D. Brown
Ensemble / Daniel Duque-Estrada
Mrs. Peachum / Bekka Fink
Mr. Peachum / Dave Garrett
Ensemble / Casi Maggio
Lucy / Rebecca Pingree
Ensemble / Josh Pollock
Ensemble / Eleanor Mason Reinholdt
Polly / Kelsey Venter*
Ensemble / Christopher W. White
Jenny / Beth Wilmurt
Tiger Brown / Danny Wolohan*
Macheath / Jeff Wood

*Member of AEA

Musicans
Nick Antipa / trumpet
Dave DiGiacomo / piano, organ
Adrian Gormley / alto sax, clarinet
Eric Marshall / double bass
David Möschler / banjo, guitar, accordion
Josh Pollock / percussion
Sean Seuss / tenor sax, clarinet

Crew
Founding Artistic Director / Patrick Dooley
Assistant Director / Ben Prusiner
Assistant Stage Manager / Jen Stukey
Carpenter / Andy Fitts
Choreographer / Erika Chong Shuch
Costume Design / Mark Koss
House Tech / Heather Gallagher
Lighting Design / Allen Willner
Projection Design / Chris Paulina
Properties + Set Dressing / Chris Kristant
Set Design / Nina Ball
Stage Manager / Leah McKibbin
Technical Director / Adam Puglielli