Photo: Jennifer Reiley

Carl Lumbly in the first American production of Mark O'Rowe's "Terminus" at Magic Theatre.

When director Jon Tracy first read the script for Terminus, Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe's dark and lyrical story which has its American premiere at the Magic Theatre, his biggest challenge was having little context for how to put together the tag-team monologues by the three unnamed characters.

"I led with passion to figure it out and find the right group of people to spelunk through it," he says. "And it helped to have a nice dialogue with Mark by phone and email and that he was able to come to rehearsal for a few days."

O'Rowe had directed Terminus himself at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, but Tracy says the playwright was the opposite of controlling about his work.

"It wasn't intimidating because of the way Mark set up the conversation," Tracy says. "He said he'd directed the version he'd wanted to do, and he was much more interested in what someone else would do, and the only thing I could do wrong was try and replicate his. That was like instant freedom."

Photo: Jennifer Reiley

Marissa Keltie, Carl Lumbly, and Stacy Ross in the first American production of Mark O'Rowe's "Terminus" at Magic Theatre.

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courtesy of the Marsh

Will Durst

In his new one-man show at the Marsh Theater on Valencia, comedian Will Durst, 61, uses technology designed not to spook any Baby Boomers in the audience -- an overhead projector.

In Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG, Durst clearly enjoys himself, riffing on getting older in the face of a youth-obsessed culture. Durst's last show at the Marsh, Elect to Laugh, played for 41 weeks, from Super Tuesday to Election Night. After doing what he's most famous for, political humor, Durst is delighted to have a chance to do material about being seen as pieces of furniture by younger people or repeating phrases your parents said that you swore would never come out of your mouth.

"It's so liberating because I can deal with the evergreen," Durst said. "I can talk about recollections and observations."

Durst thought this was a good time to do the show.

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Pak Han Photography

Steve Boss plays some mean guitar (and skeleton) in Montoya's "The River"

Identity is often times difficult to unravel -- there's many layers to define. So what happens when you try to describe the persona of an entire state like California?

Richard Montoya -- founder of renown, Mission-bred political performance group Culture Clash -- has written The River in collaboration with Sean San Jose, co-founder of theater company Campo Santo. The play -- which is actually part of Montoya's larger project, "The Borders Series" -- is designed to help us navigate California's conflicted identity, exploring in equal parts the humor and pathos surrounding California's notorious diversity and the inherent tension it brings.

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Lynne Kaufman's Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass, now at the Marsh SF after an extended run at the Marsh's Berkeley venue, doesn't feel like a work of theater -- and not in a good way.

The 90-minute play about the rich-kid-turned-Ivy-League-professor-turned-psychedelic -turned-spiritual guru is a solo show -- a format that's already relatively untheatrical. Performer Warren David Keith has almost nothing to separate him from the audience. His only set is a chair and an end table that holds photos of important people from his life, as well as a projection screen that allows audiences to see larger versions of those pictures.

See also:

Symmetry Theatre's The Language Archive has many plot threads; most unravel

Sound Design Seizes the Lead in Custom Made's Eurydice But Fails to Deliver

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With a wife and two kids, his own appliance store and a house with a pool, Walter Wells, the protagonist of Julie Marie Myatt's play, The Happy Ones, has pretty much achieved the American Dream. Myatt wanted to explore that dream -- and people on both sides of it -- in her play.

Images from Bill Owens' classic 1972 book, Suburbia, photographed around
Livermore, inspired The Happy Ones. With a father in the Marine Corps, Myatt grew up all over the country, but the images of planned neighborhoods in Owens' book resonated with her from what she remembered from her childhood.

"The houses all look the same on the outside and on the inside they're different," she said. "You present your own life through decoration."

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Doug McKechnie

The only new word captured during this foreign language recording was "fuckbutt."

Julia Cho's The Language Archive, now in a Symmetry Theatre production directed by Chloe Bronzan, is several different unfinished plays rolled into one. Only toward the end does it become the play it's supposed to be.

See also:

Gender Roles: Local Theater Confronts the Lack of Women Behind the Scenes

Sound Design Seizes the Lead in Custom Made's Eurydice But Fails to Deliver

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Jay Yamada

Eurydice (Jessica Rudholm) goes to hell in Sarah Ruhl's eponymous play.

Sound design is one of those aspects of theater that usually slips by under the radar. It almost never makes or breaks a production. Instead, ideally, it should help make individual moments more complete, helping to fully immerse an audience into the world of a play.

The design in Custom Made Theatre Company's production of Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice is a rare exception to this rule.

See also:

The Arsonists Explores the Downside of Appeasement

The Happy Ones Messes With Your (American) Dreams

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Firefighters (front l-r, Tristan Cunningham*, Kevin Clarke) observe as a policeman (r, Michael Uy Kelly) pays a surprise visit, and Mr. Biedermann (c, Dan Hiatt*) tries to get to the bottom of the arsonists' (l, Tim Kniffin*, c. l, Michael Ray Wisely*) actions in his attic in The Arsonists

Long time Bay Area actor Dan Hiatt who stars in Max Frisch's The Arsonists at the Aurora Theatre, says the comic parable contains elements of farce, tragedy, and a morality play.

"I like things that are unique and unclassifiable," Hiatt says. "It's its own genre."

Hiatt plays Mr. Biedermann, a respected businessman who lets two arsonists into his house, hoping that by appeasing them, he will keep himself safe and prevent anything bad from happening. Biedermann is a bit of a pompous stuffed shirt, and the tragic elements of the play come in because of the character's flaw, Hiatt says.

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Playwright Julie Marie Myatt says often she starts writing with an image in mind. The images that sparked The Happy Ones come from Bill Owens' classic book Suburbia, with its photos of Tupperware parties, Big Wheels, and tract houses in '70s California. Myatt, whose father was a Marine stationed in Vietnam, picked the year 1975 and set the play in Orange County, which was then a fairly conservative, mostly white, area. In April of that year, Saigon fell, and an estimated 125,000 Vietnamese refugees came into the U.S, most of whom settled in the Orange County cities of Westminster and Garden Grove.

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Samuel W. Flint

Tobie Windham, L. Peter Callender, and Nicholas Pelczar in the Bay Area premiere.

Jasson Minadakis, artistic director of Mill Valley's Marin Theatre Company, is no stranger to bringing firsts to the company -- two playwriting prizes, entry into the all-important League of Regional Theaters, and the theater's first Shakespeare production.

Now in his seventh year, Minadakis is still charting new ground, now by directing a production of The Whipping Man. This show is MTC's first-ever coproduction, which means that it and another theater (Virginia Stage Company, in Norfolk, Virginia) share expenses and produce the same show (same set, same director, and same actors) on two different stages. It's also the first show Minadakis has directed that's set in his hometown of Richmond, VA. Matthew Lopez's play follows two freed slaves and their former master, a Confederate soldier, at the intersection of three important events: the end of the Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln, and Passover (the three characters are Jewish).

It's also one of the most-produced plays in America in the past year. We talked to Minadakis about how his background influences his direction, what makes this play so popular, and how to schlep a production across the country.

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