Harper Regan Disappears into a Netherworld at SF Playhouse A.C.T.’s Hilarious Clybourne Park Brings a Chicago Slum to San Francisco Spalding Gray left more stories to tell in a church on Gough Street

 

 Harper (Susi Damilano) is denied time off to see her dying father by her boss, Mr. Barnes (Richard Frederick)

 

 Daughter (Monique Hafen) and Harper (Susi Damilano) bond.

Harper (Susi Damilano) boldly converses with stranger (Daniel Redmond)
 

After learning of father's death Harper heads to bar and seeks solace from stranger, Mickey (Richard Frederick)

   Continuing her search for connection, Harper answers personal advert and meets
James (Michael Keys Hall) in a hotel.

Failing to find fulfillment with strange men, Harper reconnects with estranged mother (Joy Carlin)

  

Photos by Jessica Palopoli

Harper Regan, in the play named after her, steals a black leather motorcycle jacket and becomes a rebel without a cause. The depressed English housewife takes a sabbatical from her life and wanders aimlessly into a world so foreign to her that she finally realizes she was already in the best of all possible worlds. This two-hour production, just opened at SF Playhouse, features some outstanding Bay Area acting talent on a clever set in a well-written play by Simon Stephens.

Harper’s rootless drifting begins in a modern office setting at an employer/employee meeting with distinctly sexual overtones. Susi Damilano creates a sympathetic Harper with a complex depth of character.  She keeps a desperately professional attitude when Richard Frederick as boss Elwood Barnes puts his arm around hers, but the fear of and loathing for this sort of life read distinctly in her eyes. Elwood says, “If you go, I don’t think you should come back.” She leaves.

Harper's journey

Susi’s sense of unease and her skill at projecting it, along with her spot-on British accent, give a fine sense of yearning to be free from entrapment. She is burdened with not only a scut job but also with an unresponsive husband and a pseudo-punk teenage daughter at home. Still in her work clothes she goes to a familiar bridge to experiment with her newly found freedom. She opens a conversation with a stranger who will come to symbolize an anchor of stability in the maelstrom of her new life.

Seventeen-year-old  engineering student Tobias Rich (Daniel Redmond) says he does not like ladies in fancy dresses. When he asks why she left, she replies, “I wanted some time off [from life], that’s all.” Tobias says, “I like white women. And I like older women.” Then she flirts with and touches him. She later returns to the bridge for a reality check, but first she tests her possibilities elsewhere.
               
After confronting her daughter Sarah (Monique Hafen) in the home kitchen for a bout of mother/daughter bonding to show the gravity of what she’s leaving, she winds up flirting with a lager lout in a pub. Monique effectively presents a sassy rebellious nature covering a deep seated sense of fear and uncertainty, but Richard Frederick returning now as Mickey Nestor presents a character entirely different from Elwood Barnes, yet he still wants to paw Harper.

On the set by Artistic Director Bill English, they converse, she in a credible English middle-class accent and he in more low-class Cockneyfied style. Mickey in his black leather jacket moves closer to Harper and praises her shoulders. It’s eleven AM at the pub, and he looks rough in the jacket like that worn by the iconic rebel James Dean.

Mickey strokes her breast casually, then stops. The slightness of her discomfort surprises her.     He asks if she wants to go back to his place. Another caress and he suggests they get a hotel room. Susi at blackout radiates with surprised pride at the deed she has done, stealing the jacket. And that’s just Act I.

With a simple moving element, Act II opens in an opulently elegant but simple set, where she meets an anonymous older man. Harper says she’s never before seen a hotel room with two floors. She also says, “I’ve never answered a personal advert before.” She wears the jacket.

Michael Keys Hall as James Fortune is gently blunt as he simply states to Harper, “I’m married.” And “I want to f… you here.” In pre-coital small talk, he asks her why she left. Susi gives Harper a blend of loss and resignation when she explains she just “walked out.” Harper is awkwardly shy and tenuously aggressive when she asks to touch him. But first he must sing a song for her and dance with her. Michael’s seduction song was tuneful and his ballroom dancing was graceful.

Bay Area favorite actress and director Joy Carlin appears as Harper’s mother in a homey setting with chairs, table, mantle with clock, and paintings hanging. Joy as mom Woolley does not like the jacket Harper is wearing and wonders where she was. “You were ‘orrible to ‘im,” she chides her for her treatment of her husband Seth (also Michael Keys Hall). After that Harper goes back to the bridge.

“You’re ‘ere,”    Tobias says to her in a Caribbean Island-inflected British accent. In this place of truth she has found a reliable witness. She shows no great sense of contrition when she confesses to him she had used a ploy to start speaking the first time. “I lied to you about thinkin’ you were somebody else … I’ve been following you …” “You’re f…ing crazy,” he tells her. She takes his cap and caresses his hair.

Harper's family
  
The finale finds her back home gardening on the patio and casually telling Seth that she had sex with a stranger in a hotel room. Sarah and the home life now seem pleasant and secure.

The part of Harper Regan takes skilled creative artistry because she has no antagonist to play against. She is both protagonist and antagonist at once. She is not battling against anyone and does not hate anyone, only the drudge that she perceived herself to have become. The other members of the excellent cast are assiduously attentive supporting actors. Harper is the show in herself, and Susi Damilano is fascinating to watch as she puts Harper through her inward journey. This play is a star vehicle and it’s no jalopy. Susi steers and she drives the whole play to distinction.

Harper Regan runs through March 5 at The SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street (one block off Union Square), San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $70) are available online at www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415.677.9596.

For a full review please visit www.DoctorTheater.com.

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Beverly (A.C.T. core acting company member René Augesen) and Russ (A.C.T. core acting company member Anthony Fusco), a married couple in 1959, are packing to leave their family home.

Beverly (René Augesen) offers a chafing dish that she never uses to her maid, Francine

(Omozé Idehenre).

Neighborhood association representative Karl (Richard Thieriot, left) discusses the sale of the house with Russ (Anthony Fusco), while their wives, Betsy ( Emily Kitchens, back left) and Beverly (René Augesen), make conversation.

Photos by Erik Tomasson

Clybourne Park, now at American Conservatory Theater, pays particular ironic attention to the marvelously comic lines of playwright Bruce Norris. A.C.T. Company core veterans René Augeson,  Anthony Fusco and Gregory Wallace warmed up to make the production itellingly hilarious and sharply critical with an engrossing story that spans decades.

They try to sell the house.

René gloried in her ditzy character in Act I, and then reveled in the ennui of her different Act II character. Anthony sat in his grumpy chair mostly making unpleasant noises, as well he should considering what happened in the neighborhood he is moving out of, as he later intones vociferously. When the comic satire picked up steam, other characters were introduced to illustrate the plight of Bev and Russ (René and Anthony) as they are selling their family home.

Norris’ work is funny and provocative. The keen social insights of this play are chillingly obvious behind the broad overlay of incisive wit. The A.C.T. cast of seven (René Augesen, Manoel Felciano, Anthony Fusco, Gregory Wallace, Omozé Idehenre, Emily Kitchens, and Richard Thieriot) works enthusiastically as an ensemble in less than two hours. When they argue over buying Bev and Russ’ house years later, the actors allow their characters to be wholly focused on their own immediate needs to the exclusion of the larger issues of urban decay and racism raised by the play.     

In 1959 Act I a middle-class white couple sells their home in a Chicago neighborhood to a black family, causing uproar. Neighborhood association representative Karl (Richard Thieriot) explains the differences between the races to house maid Francine (A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program graduate Omozé Idehenre) and her husband Albert (A.C.T. core acting Company member Gregory Wallace). Unctuous Karl seeks to undo the sale to Negroes by trying to convince them that they won’t be able to find their preferred foodstuffs in this lily-white area. René comes in and tries to give a castoff chafing dish to the maid. “We got our own things,” Omozé as Francine proudly refuses, saying she prefers spaghetti and meat balls.

They try to buy the house. 

In the same house in 2009 Act II, the stakes are different, but the debate is strikingly familiar.  The nabe has deteriorated drastically and the house is an empty derelict with wallpaper stripped and spray-paint tags on the bare walls. As an anomaly, a white couple is trying to buy into the now-black neighborhood. Worse, they seek to improve, tearing down the two-story and erecting a three story totally out of line with the local architectural aesthetics.

Between acts, the ensemble smoothly shifts from an Archie Bunker milieu to a contemporary property acquisition. In this story about race and real estate in America, the Act II characters discuss with barely contained hostility the deterioration of the neighborhood. In Act I, the local pseudo-activists want to keep blacks out of the neighborhood. In Act II, the same sorts of organizers want to keep the gentrifying whites out.

While the opening scenes focused on Anthony as Russ in his chair with his radio down stage left, the cast of seven actors eventually used all the stage under the direction of Jonathan Moscone, Artistic Director of California Shakespeare Theater, in his A.C.T. main stage debut. His CalShakes directing style is greatly different from what is usually seen at A.C.T. Though uneven or static at times, the staging picks up and becomes engrossing. The running gag of the trunk is handled with surprising humor moving into bitter-sweet poignancy. Moscone handled the surprisingly redemptive, optimistic ending simply and with no distracting flourishes.

The West Coast premiere of Clybourne Park by adamant provocateur Bruce Norris plays through February 13 at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets (starting at $10) are available online at www.act-sf.org or by calling the A.C.T. Box Office at 415.749.2228.

For a full review please visit www.DoctorTheater.com 

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Richard Wenzel as Love
Photo by Jay Yamada

In Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell a five-person ensemble performs his beloved classics and never-before-heard stories. Custom Made Theatre Company’s Bay Area premiere of Spalding Gray’s autobiographical monologues embraces his wit and wisdom and touches on subjects ranging from a child in a high chair being subjected to Beethoven, a visit to “the Bermuda Triangle of health care,” a car explosion, and his first communion. In 50 recitations, the cast takes him from Vineyard Haven and Provincetown in Massachusetts (getting away from his mom) to a prison mess hall in Nevada (watching a barbecue on a prison bunk).
 

Spalding became world-famous for such monologues as Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box and Gray’s Anatomy. His widow Kathleen Russo conceived of a tribute to him using five actors of mixed age and gender to take on parts of Spalding’s psyche in the reading of his works. The five (miming reading from book props but obviously having memorized the lines) have symbolic names: Love (Richard Wenzel), Family (AJ Davenport), Career (Patrick Barresi), Adventure (Leah S. Abrams), and Journal (Gabriel A. Ross).

He was shockingly neurotic, brutally funny and amused by the irrational world around him. She put together beloved sections of his famous works with unpublished private writings into a vibrant, creative 90-minute narration that is both familiar and unexpected. The result is a collage of his reactions from the 1960s to the ‘90s.

There is very little interaction between the players. Each one having a unique style, they create a synergy of self-exposure with their personal inhabitations of Spalding’s storytelling. The professional intonations of the cast dramatically underscore the genius of his lines. This staging does involve some slightly choreographed group dancing, but there is no drama in the production, only in the lines. With their caring involvement in the text, the ensemble gives insight to his complex, funny and touching private life. Even so, the finale degenerates into a cacophony of individual voices proclaiming all at once.
 

Custom Made Theatre Company produces plays of literary significance and social conscience in their intimate space attached to the historic Trinity Church. Their core of actors has great talent, but the paucity of its display in this production screams out for a better presentation of this new, beautifully poetic prose. The individual personal narratives leave no room for interaction between the actors.

Directed by Brian Katz and Daunielle Rasmussen; Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell continues through February 19 at The Gough Street Playhouse (formerly The Next Stage), 1620 Gough Street (at Bush), San Francisco. Tickets ($20 to $25) are available online at 510.207.5774.

For a fuller review visit www.DoctorTheater.com.