TheatreFIRST

THEATREFIRST RECENTLY LOST its home at the Oakland YWCA, but its itinerant status hasn’t prevented the company from starting its new season on the right foot. With renowned South African playwright Paul Slabolepszy’s Mooi Street Moves, a one-act post-apartheid duet, artistic director Clive Chafer introduces Bay Area audiences to another well-wrought drama from the greater English-speaking world.

This contemporary urban tale, engagingly presented and buoyed by an understated humor, takes place in a once affluent and segregated district of Johannesburg now transformed by the fall of apartheid into an inner-city hodgepodge marked by poverty and crime. Henry Stone (Joseph Foss), a naive white bumpkin, has returned after six years to his brother’s apartment only to find it occupied by Stix Letsebe (David Skillman), a streetwise black man with a roomful of stolen goods. Arriving alone in the world and penniless, having been taken in by a grifter, the terrified Henry responds only gradually to Stix’s gestures of hospitality amid the city’s new social calculus. Stix finally convinces him to stay until they locate his brother, meanwhile pulling Henry into the trade and teaching him the rules of life on the lively Mooi Street, where “middlemen” like Stix hock their wares.

The play has its melodramatic and sentimental side, but Skillman and Foss fix our attention immediately and hold it to the end. Chafer gets the most from their complex relationship, which manifests itself beautifully in the continual jockeying for position, as well as the boyish clowning and tussling that go on between them. The actors also convincingly render the two befuddling accents and dialects that underscore the cultural chasm between Stix and Henry. At the same time, they do a superb job of making us believe how readily their mutual longing for friendship and aid not only bridges that divide but also brings them in a brotherly bond as authentic and necessary to each as the one that originally drew Henry to Johannesburg.

Anyone who has seen a play in the elegantly molded space at the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club, where TheatreFIRST has taken up temporary residence, will have to admit what a fine job set designer Christina La Sala has does in turning it into a shabby, low-budge “Joburg” apartment. Bordered on one side by a rumpled bed and on the other by a wall-sized stack of boxed appliances, Stix’s modest digs betray a frighteningly authentic species of male housekeeping. Together with Dale Altvater’s moody lighting and Greg Scharpen’s discreet sound design, it all serves wonderfully to focus an already intimate stage on two magnetic performances.

BY MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE

The girl’s name is Josephine, but her English parents call her Joe Egg after a saying of her very English, very suburban-provincial grandmother’s: "Just sitting around like Joe Egg." Young Josephine does nothing but sit around; she has cerebral palsy.

The parents, Sheila and Brian (”Bri”), made the decision about 10 years earlier to care for her, though she would never be, as Sheila puts it, more than "a kind of living parsnip." Peter Nichols’ graceful and well-formed drama, based on his own experience raising a child with cerebral palsy, dates from the ’60s, but it’s been revived twice on Broadway, most recently last year with Eddie Izzard. TheatreFirst’s small-scale production at its new Mills College home has a surprisingly intimate, real-life feel; director Clive Chafer — with the energetic help of Simon Vance as Bri and Cynthia Bassham as Sheila — has re-created the mood of 1960s London with touches as subtle as clothing (Bri’s elbow-patched coat) and makeup (Sheila’s blue eye shadow and straight hair). The show does lose momentum in the second act, in part because Howard Dillon and Jessica Powell, as a pair of snobbish upper-middle-class Londoners, put on broad caricature performances that might work in a middling BBC sitcom but seem out of place here. Wanda McCaddon, though, as Bri’s petty fussing mother (who uses the Joe Egg phrase), is brilliant, and so is the young Miranda Swain, who seems to have studied cerebral-palsied girls in order to play one with so much vivid sympathy. After almost four decades, Joe Egg has not lost its power to shock or entertain; it’s a witty and nimble exploration of what even humanists mean by “human”.

sfweekly.com | originally published: October 6, 2004

TheatreFIRST’s spring production investigates the vicissitudes of life after apartheid.

Hillbrow used to be a nice, white suburb of Johannesburg.

TheatreFIRST inaugurates its new home at Mills College with a top-notch staging of Peter Nichols’s still-potent 1967 black comedy, about a young English couple with a severely handicapped, vegetative child.

Sheila and Bri (real-life couple Cynthia Bassham and Simon Vance) like acting out for one another  and the audience, which they readily acknowledge, a series of made-up personalities for their daughter, Joe (Miranda Swain), and recounting vaudeville-style the quack diagnoses and feeble remedies proffered by the unpersuasive representatives of Medical Science and Religion. Although undertaken with sardonic glee, it’s clear this private performance no longer affords the release it once did, as the strain of the last 10 years makes itself felt. When another couple (Howard Dillon and Jessica Powell) who "have it all" drop by unexpectedly, along with Bri’s possessive mother (Wanda McCaddon), a terribly funny, but increasingly disturbing meltdown ensues that (in its quieter, sadder moments) registers the profound tensions between the individual and the fabric of familial and social obligations. In a production whose quality easily rivals that of much larger houses, the play’s sly and fiercely unsentimental blend of Music Hall comedy and stark realism gets just the right touch from director Clive Chafer and an outstanding cast. (Avila)

Joe Egg Lisser Hall, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur, Oakland;
(510) 436-5085, www.theatrefirst.com. $18-22. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 17.

A biting drama about homelessness and displacement in post-apartheid South Africa.

by Michael Scott Moore
Clive Chafer’s semihomeless Theatrefirst company turns the elegant patio room of the Berkeley City Club (where Aurora Theatre once played) into a laundry-and-shoebox-cluttered squat for a biting drama about homelessness and displacement in post-apartheid South Africa. Mooi Street Moves shows a white farm boy, Henry, returning to an apartment his brother used to rent, but finding in his place a dreadlocked, cheerful, and deeply unhelpful African named Stix. This suburban neighborhood of Johannesburg has been abandoned by middle-class Afrikaners and overtaken by Africans in a sudden sort of white flight, mainly because of inadequate civil rights legislation in the aftermath of apartheid (according to director Clive Chafer’s useful notes). Stix survives as a thieving middleman; he fills the squat with boxes of TVs, shoes, and toasters for resale. Henry himself is homeless, so to live with Stix and earn money he learns the patter and moves of a street hustler — "Mooi Street moves." Paul Slabolepszy is one of South Africa’s leading playwrights, and under Chafer’s crisp direction, not to mention pitch-perfect acting by David Skillman (as Stix) and Joseph Foss (as Henry), his brief, slightly contrived pas de deux comes on bright and strong. Chafer has made a local career of mounting fine, neglected plays about race from every corner of the former British Empire — India, Israel, South Africa, even England itself — and Mooi Street is one of his most highly polished.

sfweekly.com | originally published: April 28, 2004

Superb acting and careful directing draw out a play about sex and socialism

by Michael Scott Moore
SF Weekly, June 18, 2003

V.S. Naipaul has been a mandarin for longer than most of the literary world has heard of him. He grew up in a large Indian family on Trinidad, the son of a journalist, and the Caribbean’s teeming poverty gave him a lifelong horror of chaos, crowds, and filth. As soon as possible he went to Oxford, and identified himself intellectually with the English tradition that lay behind his colonial upbringing. He writes about Third World countries with a mixture of understanding and contempt; you can’t read his books without noticing how much he hates steel-drum bands and reggae. He also famously turned up his nose at Salman Rushdie by calling Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence "an extreme form of literary criticism." Naipaul has nevertheless written some of the century’s best novels, and the always politically oversensitive Nobel committee resisted giving him a warranted prize for decades until 2001, when a certain day in September made his sniffy observations about radical Islam impossible to ignore.

His elitism casts a pall on certain writers. Paul Theroux wrote a book about this paternalistic chill, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, but in some ways David Hare beat Theroux to the punch 20 years ago with a brilliant if contrived play called A Map of the World. The title comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism": "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at." Hare is one of the most eloquent and measured liberal voices writing plays in English: He’s not a compulsive America-hater, like Harold Pinter, or a one-sided editorialist, like Tony Kushner. From his youth in the ’60s he owes a lot of his politics to Marx, but he’s grown out of that, and A Map of the World was a very public part of the process.

Map takes place in Bombay, at a 1978 UNESCO conference on poverty. An ill-dressed young reporter from some left-wing British rag complains to another journalist outside the conference hall about general conditions in India. Then Naipaul — or someone like him — strolls on suavely and orders champagne. "Victor Mehta" was born and raised in India, so the two men start arguing right away about colonialism. "The India of the rich," growls Stephen, the reporter. "How I despise it." But Mehta the novelist believes that fashionably anti-Western liberals are even more condescending to the Third World than he is. "Socialism," he scoffs. "A luxury of the wealthy. For the poor, a suicidal creed."

And they’re off: For the next two hours, Stephen and Victor and a few other characters run through the relationship of poverty to wealth, the U.N. to the Third World, and England to her colonies. If that sounds dry, remember this is a David Hare play. He cuts to the essence of his material so skillfully that even the bits about socialism resonate now, in debates (for example) over liberating oppressed Iraqis. Hare also weaves his conversations into a love triangle involving an American woman, Peggy, and adds some international tension when an African delegation to the conference objects to something Mehta has written on Mozambique. Sex, politics, international controversy — Hare makes it fascinating stuff, and excuses himself for simplifying Naipaul and the young socialist by turning the UNESCO setting into a movie, being filmed 10 years later by a slimy London director named Angelis (Dana Kelly).

Mark Farrell is perfect as Stephen, in his rumpled suit and loose tie; he throws the right amount of angry-young-man peevishness into his British accent. Amy Resnick is solid as Peggy, the American woman — who adds a women’s-lib motif to the show — and doubles gracefully as the British actress playing Peggy 10 years on. David Winter also doubles well as Martinson, a smooth U.N. official in charge of the conference, and the decidedly un-smooth (in fact obnoxious) actor who plays him. Christine Odera gives two passionate, beautiful speeches as M’Bengue, a U.N. delegate from Senegal. "[Mehta] is hailed as a bringer of truth," she says in a powerful African accent, "because he seeks to humiliate those who struggle."

The whole thing works because of Clive Chafer’s careful directing; Chafer deserves as much credit as Hare for avoiding simple answers to the play’s provocative questions. Just mounting Map in the Bay Area and giving Mehta a chance to utter some of his woollier pronouncements can seem impolite, not quite on, but Chafer grants all the characters their fair say, and his leading man, Terry Lamb, is more than up to the job of making Mehta seem intelligent and human.

Lamb is worldly, unruffled. What he lacks (compared to Naipaul) is both an impish sense of humor and a profound Asian gloom, the saturnine contempt that inspires Stephen to blurt at Mehta, "What you call the truth is nothing but a projection of your own despair and loneliness." We don’t see that despair; Lamb is constitutionally too cheerful for it. But he fences nimbly during all the debates, and he’s in full command of Mehta’s strongest lines. "Mankind," he declares, "has only one enemy. It is not poverty. It is self-deception." The best part of Lamb’s performance — and A Map of the World — is that we sense both Mehta’s nose for self-deception and his inevitable weakness for it. "I’ve been wondering for ages how to drag mime into the new millennium," one of the Umbilical Brothers deadpans into a microphone, "and the answer was — sound." Sure enough, the Umbilicals’ off-Broadway hit THWAK is a brilliant hybrid of mime and what you might call Looney Tunes beatbox. Australians Shane Dundas and Dave Collins have one microphone between them (usually), and what one of them mimes — cooking on a barbecue, waving away a fly, throwing a dog, firing numerous guns — the other makes vivid, cartoonlike sound effects for into the mike. Or is it the other way around? After a big introduction stressing that Shane, the "action guy," is the star of the show, Dave makes it clear that holding the mike and producing appropriate noises is a firmer kind of power. "No, not the fly," Shane protests, breaking off midscene. "I don’t want to do the fly right now." But Dave insists on the fly. That starts a 90-minute struggle for control of the mike, which stitches together all the skits. The best part of THWAK is the sense that Shane and Dave are just overgrown kids, imitating old cartoons, who just happen, at the same time, to be reinvigorating the tradition of Marcel Marceau. — Michael Scott Moore

Doing clever stuff with mime (see above) seems to be local theater’s soupe du jour, and Kinetic Theory Experimental Theatre has put on a wordless, impeccably cool re-enactment of a ’20s-era silent film. Stephanie Abrams, Simon Chaban, and Sean Michael Williford play in a black-and-white penny dreadful about a young couple who get kidnapped by an evil baron. Abrams’ young woman is sweet and demure, in a polka-dotted dress, hiding behind her boyfriend and gushing with pleasure when he picks her a flower — or presents her with an engagement ring. Chaban’s young man is an amusingly stiff and civilized hero in a gray suit who finds himself (late in the show) battling the undead with a sword. Williford is a wonderfully nefarious villain, in a black cape and ridiculous sideburns, turning the young couple’s happiness into a living hell for no good reason. He even hypnotizes the projectionist, a bumbling woman played by Carrie Loser, who joins the show in full-color costume. The 90-minute melodrama plays out with no sound except an original (and very funny) piano score by Steven M. Forker; the most turbulent music seems to involve not just ordinary piano, but also a frantic harpsichord and someone pounding on the bass strings of an echoey grand with a wooden mallet. This is not your mother’s mime: It’s a stylish period piece that manages to be postmodern and even sexy. — Michael Scott Moore

sfweekly.com | originally published: June 18, 2003

TheatreFIRST has more than made good on its goal to give Bay Area audiences theatrical offerings on a global scale.

The intrepid Oakland company concludes its three-play season with David Hare’s "A Map of the World," a fascinating (if messy) polemic about ideals in a world ravaged by ego, cynicism and cultural imperialism.

by Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER
Oakland Tribune, June 13, 2003
British playwright Hare has provided intriguing bookends to the TheatreFirst season. Earlier this year, the company produced Hare’s fascinating one-man show about the Israel-Palestine conflict, "Via Dolorosa."

Now, with "Map," originally produced in London in 1983 and on Broadway in 1985, TheatreFirst continues to demonstrate that theater can be an excellent forum for discussions on an international scale.

Performed in the Oakland YWCA, "A Map of the World" takes its title from an Oscar Wilde quote that begins, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at."

The comic drama is set in luxurious Bombay hotel during a 1978 UNESCO conference on world poverty and delves into George Bernard Shaw territory in which political arguments are dressed in the trappings of conventional drama.

The primary mouthpieces here are an urbane Indian-born writer named Victor Mehta (Terry Lamb), who has forsworn his native land for the more lucrative shores of England, and Stephen Andrews (Mark Farrell), a journalist for a "literary left-wing" magazine.

Given Victor’s reputation for worldly comedy and for the incisive satire in his novels, it’s easy to see why people have claimed the character is loosely based on writer V.S. Naipaul. But Hare never makes a convincing argument for inviting a novelist to be the keynote speaker at a United Nations conference on poverty.

Clearly, the playwright wants to make statements about the nature of fiction and the ways we distort truths through our own personal filters, but Victor’s presence at the conference is a contrivance — although one that eventually yields a payoff.

Stephen and Victor dislike each other almost immediately, and the reason goes beyond their opposing politics. They both fancy another guest at the hotel, Peggy Whitton (Amy Resnick), a fetching movie actress.

A conflict arises when the delegate from an African country, M’Bengue (astonishingly powerful Christine Odera), derides Victor and his work and questions the appropriateness of having him at the conference.

An unctuous Scandinavian official (David Winter) tries to smooth ruffled feathers by asking Victor to read a short statement before his address in which he basically admits that fiction is all lies, so no offense is meant by his political barbs.

Of course Victor refuses, but Stephen argues that if Victor reads the statement, the conference continues, leaders develop aid programs and suffering in the world is lessened.

As hostilities mount between Victor and Stephen, Peggy steps into the fray and suggests the two men hold a debate. A CBS newswoman (Leontyne Mbele Mbong) will serve as judge and Peggy herself will be the prize. The victor becomes her companion for the night.

Before he arrives at the debate, the real centerpiece of the two-hour play, Hare muddies things up by flashing forward in time to a movie set where a film is being made based on a novel by Victor about the events of the UNESCO conference.

This is Hare offering more thoughts on the multi-layered nature of truth, interpretation and simplification. As a dramatic device, the movie component is fun but unnecessary. Director Clive Chafer makes effective transitions between the two time periods, but the effort fails to make much impact.

Once the final debate begins, both Lamb and Farrell catch fire and make their characters’ eloquent, passionate arguments more than just fancy speeches.

Victor, true to form, is whip smart and incisive. He says the West’s aid to the Third World is a waste of time and the worst sort of arrogant interference. Stephen makes his attack more personal and says Victor’s gloomy world views are more a reflection of his own loneliness and inadequacies than anything else.

Peggy’s "appalling contest" never quite concludes, and as we flash forward in time once more, Victor has a moment of compassion: "This feeling, finally, that we may change things, this is at the center of everything we are," he says. "Lose that, lose everything."

Thoughtful, smart and well acted, TheatreFirst’s "A Map of the World" is a strong production of an imperfect, thought-provoking play.

You can e-mail Chad Jones at cjones@angnewspapers.com or call (925) 416-4853.

David Hare evokes a whole region through one man

by Michael Scott Moore
SF Weekly, February 12, 2003

If Mayor Brown cared about good writing he would name February "David Hare Month," because really devoted fans of the British playwright can pull — in one weekend — a Hare triple-header: The Blue Room at the Exit (highly recommended), The Hours at some cinema (he wrote the screenplay), and Via Dolorosa at various venues around the Bay Area. All three shows are thoughtful, witty, rather dry, and totally uninfected with suspense. Via Dolorosa is maybe the best example of these reserved qualities, because the other two shows have, at least, characters and conversation. Dolorosa puts the playwright himself onstage (in this case played by Simon Vance) in order to engage the audience frankly about Israel and the occupied territories.

It’s a kind of Letter From the Middle East, written for The New Yorker or the Times Literary Supplement by — well, by David Hare, or anyone else as balanced and rational (meaning not Susan Sontag or Christopher Hitchens). It really is an act of journalism. You have to care about Israel to enjoy it. The actor playing Hare describes his trip in a skeptical, humane voice, now and then lapsing into character as an Israeli theater director or a grave Palestinian historian. It’s a reversal of the playwright’s customary job, which is to write lines for other people. "I usually try to get Judi Dench to do this sort of thing," he quips. Hare has performed the 90-minute show himself about 200 times.

As a writer he does justice to everyone, on either side of the conflict, with the crucial exception of Israeli settlers, who come off as dangerous Jewish fundamentalists, well-off fanatics who believe that the words of the Old Testament give them every right to squat on Palestinian land, no matter how much trouble it causes. When Hare asks one of them about "the way forward" — that is, how she envisions peace — the answer is as striking and blunt as it is innocent, polite, and Canadian. (The woman hails from Canada, and would do damn well to go home, in my opinion.) She says, "I don’t know."

He talks to Israeli novelist David Grossman, a nuanced critic of his own culture, who points to the Six-Day War in 1967 — when Israel took by force and held what are now call the occupied territories — as a turning point in "our basic Jewishness," because it was the first time in recorded history that Jews had ever fought to acquire land. "It’s new, this idea that you have to own things," he says. "Suddenly the religious Jew saw the Bible not as a historical story, but as a contemporary operations manual."

Hare also meets with Benni Begin, the conservative son of Menachem Begin (the former Israeli prime minister), who serves in the Likud party. He’s described as a steely, slight, low-voiced man with eyes as "black as caviar." In Begin’s guise we hear the conservative opinion that a Palestinian state, under Yasser Arafat, would equal a terrorist state right next to Israel. Hare is skeptical, but still gives him a few good lines: "When you see the Nobel Peace Prize pinned on the chest of a man whose maps still do not depict the state of Israel" — Arafat — "then you know there is nothing you can do." This trip was made before the current intifada, in the palmy, hopeful days of 1997, and the intervening years may have proved Begin’s point by reducing Arafat’s Nobel Prize to something worse than bitter sarcasm.

After Begin, for contrast, Hare travels to Gaza, and remarks that passing out of Israel is like "driving from California into Bangladesh," into a country of mules and dusty streets that flood with three feet of shit-filthy water when it rains. "Even now, one-third of Gaza is held by the Israelis," says Hare, "on behalf of just 6,000 religious settlers. Around them are crammed 750,000 Palestinians, half of whom live in the refugee camps, which were temporarily established in 1948."

Hare talks to a number of Palestinians, including the historian Albert Aghazerin, "a frightening figure with a big pipe and a superb sculpted face, rather like the actor Anthony Quinn." Aghazerin’s mind leaps about "like an angry gazelle" as he regales Hare with facts and opinions and colorful stories about his mistreatment by frivolously cruel Israeli checkpoint guards. This portrait is one of the strongest segments of the show, partly because Vance does such good work evoking (Hare, evoking) Aghazerin, and partly because Aghazerin is such a powerful voice of outraged reason.

Other portraits in Gaza feel dated, though — especially the fervid Palestinian poet Hussein Barghouti, who complains about Arab stereotypes in the United States. Without a Soviet Union, he says, "[I]t suits the Americans to say, ‘The Arabs are the people who will start the third world war.’" Does it? That silly stereotype of murderous anti-Western Arabs has turned out, in the meantime, to fit, at least for 19 men who for their spectacular bloodlust never even had the excuse of a ghetto in Palestine.

Still, Via Dolorosa is a fine piece of writing exactly because it visits so many opinions. It’s up there with the movie Promises as a record of trouble in Israel. Vance and his director, Clive Chafer — along with Hare himself — have put together a sometimes slow but provocative snapshot of the melancholy (and currently hopeless) road to peace.

sfweekly.com | originally published: February 12, 2003

The tragic story of Stephen Lawrence comes to the TheatreFIRST stage.

by Lisa Drostova
East Bay Express

Here in the United States, Rodney King and Amadou Diallo are the names we associate with tragedies that have forced the public to assess lingering antiblack sentiments. In Britain, the name is Stephen Lawrence, a quiet young man stabbed to death in 1993 by six white youths as he waited for the bus. Nine years later, because of a series of legal missteps, the perpetrators have yet to be prosecuted. It’s a bitter story, one that TheatreFIRST artistic director Clive Chafer knew would resonate with American audiences. So he’s taken the script that Richard Norton-Taylor edited from 11,000 pages worth of court transcripts, called in director Randall Stuart, and brought together the largest cast outside a musical we’re likely to see this season for the US premiere of The Colour of Justice.

Vivacious, thoughtful director Randall Stuart, who describes himself as a big fan of "activating the text," has reshaped the play to make it both more epic in presentation and more representative of people from all over the world. Stuart specializes in "style plays," such as those of Shakespeare and the Greeks. "We have someone from every continent except Antarctica," he says of his cast, which ranges in age from ten to "about sixty." Many of the roles that were played in London by men will be played here by women, and the text has been streamlined to bring out all the gradations of people’s thoughts and behavior while remaining truthful and clear.

The Colour of Justice, which opens May 3 at the Oakland YWCA’s Ehmann Hall, promises to be an interesting theatrical event for many reasons. It’s much different from the small, intimate shows TheatreFIRST tends to stage. Chafer and Stuart will utilize the graceful Julia Morgan-designed building’s space in a new and daring way. Chafer is making a concerted effort to attract audience members from communities that might not ordinarily come to a TheatreFIRST production. He also promises that this play, even though it is based on actual testimony, will not be your standard stodgy courtroom drama, but will engage the full attention and participation of the audience. Finally, it’s a show that could get people within our own community to talk honestly about racism — before another black man’s name becomes a grim symbol.

<a href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2002-05-01/theater2.html/1/index.html" target="blank">eastbayexpress.com</a> | originally published: May 1, 2002