Latest news with #AuroraTheatreCompany
San Francisco Chronicle
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Aurora's possibly last show champions the wonder of human connection
When our narrator says, 'Going crazy was the best thing that ever happened to me,' you not only believe her; soon, you're jealous. As she beams into other people's consciousnesses, like a psychic radio picking up distant stations, the human species starts to look like an untouched banquet hiding in plain sight. Immerse yourself in someone else's yearnings, voice and story, she implies, and you're nourished — if only you'd climb out of the rabbit hole of your own mind once in a while. The bag-lady narrator of 'The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,' played by Marga Gomez, might be explaining what it's like to give her alien 'space chums' a tour of planet Earth, but she could also be describing Aurora Theatre Company's mission since 1992. The hyper-intimate Downtown Berkeley thrust stage, with just four wraparound rows of seats, always inspires an involuntary hush, like you're wearing a cloak of invisibility at someone else's dinner table. In that way, Jane Wagner's one-woman show of interrelated monologues, which opened Thursday, July 17, has the making of a fitting coda. In May, the company announced it was suspending production next year because of an ongoing operating deficit, taking a possible step toward closure. Artistic Director Josh Costello told the Chronicle he hoped to find a way Aurora could continue to exist but acknowledged that 'The Search for Signs' might well be the theater's last main stage season show in its own venue. Unfortunately, the show is equal parts bang and whimper. Gomez, under the direction of Jennifer King, is one of the Bay Area's most likable performers. Even when she's poking fun at a character — a himbo gym rat, an angsty 15-year-old aspiring performance artist, a posh hair salon customer with a whiff of Katharine Hepburn — it's scrubbed of any meanness. Her subtext is always, 'But hey, aren't we all kind of like this?' and you can't help but agree. She finds delicious little inflections that make the text prickle. A vibrator saleswoman has the disjointed tone of a robot, as if she's spent so much time with the device that she's short-circuited. And few actors are better at making characters come alive through stage business. When a pathetic aerobics student strikes a Statue of Liberty pose, you can tell this is the closest this poor sap will ever get to glory. But as of opening night, Gomez hadn't mastered the text yet, once calling backstage for help. More often, she simply seemed to be groping for her next line instead of driving the show forward. And 'Search' sprawls. Not all characters are equally interesting; in particular, a second-wave feminism tale that dominates the second act is paint-by-numbers. You keep waiting for a twist or clearer raison d'etre that never comes. Part of that might be a function of the 1985 show's age, which reveals itself in other ways. While Wagner has a keen ear for funny-sounding phrases — 'cracker consciousness,' 'Nobel sperm bank,' 'Hamburger Helper for the boudoir' — the wheezy parade of one-liners feels like a throwback to Phyllis Diller or Joan Rivers. But watch as 15-year-old wannabe punk rocker Agnes takes the stage at some club with an act in which she moves the palm of her hand closer and closer to an open flame, all to LeAnn Rimes' 'You Light Up My Life.' It's a lament for and protest against her shambles of a life and the messed-up world that gave rise to it. As Gomez ratchets up the intensity till you start to shift in your seat from the vicarious burn, Agnes is somehow more effective and beautiful in her futility. Like all great theater, it's a gift freely given, infinite in dividends.
San Francisco Chronicle
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Bay Area artists make Tony Awards history
Among the big winners at the 78th Tony Awards was the Bay Area, as three theater artists with ties to the region took home the nation's highest honors for commercial theater. Two San Francisco natives — and Saint Ignatius College Preparatory School alumni — won acting awards during the ceremony Sunday, June 8, at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Francis Jue, who's performed locally with San Francisco Playhouse and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, nabbed best performance by a featured actor in a play for ' Yellow Face,' David Henry Hwang's semiautobiographical comedy about racial representation in theater. Darren Criss, an alumnus of American Conservatory Theater's Young Conservatory program, won best performance by a leading actor in a play for 'Maybe Happy Ending,' Hue Park and Will Aronson's sci-fi show about two robots who've been abandoned by their humans. Meanwhile, Oakland playwright Jonathan Spector won best revival of a play for 'Eureka Day,' his comedy about a mumps outbreak at a progressive Berkeley private school with anti-vaxx parents. Berkeley's own Aurora Theatre Company commissioned and premiered the play in 2018. It was each artist's first Tony Award, and Spector's marks the first such honor in recent memory for a current Bay Area resident. Spector in his acceptance speech thanked 'my theater community, who gave me space to find my voice as a writer.' Aurora Theatre Company Artistic Director Josh Costello, who helmed the world premiere, revisits 'Eureka Day' at Marin Theatre in September. In his acceptance speech, Criss thanked Craig Slaight, the former director of ACT's Young Conservatory program, 'for shepherding me and so many people here.' Fellow nominee Julia Mattison, co-composer of 'Death Becomes Her,' is also a Young Conservatory alum, and the two helped Slaight, who retired in 2017, travel to New York and attend the ceremony. 'I was honored and humbled to be invited and to have the gift of the arrangements to make it possible,' Slaight told the Chronicle the morning after the ceremony. 'For (Criss) to mention me in his remarks was just so moving.' 'Maybe Happy Ending' is slated to tour to San Francisco as part of BroadwaySF's 2026-27 season, the operator of the Golden Gate, Orpheum and Curran theaters announced Monday, June 9. It joins previously announced titles 'Death Becomes Her' and 'The Outsiders.' Casting has not yet been announced. The Tony Awards ceremony, hosted by ' Wicked ' star Cynthia Erivo, also made history for Asian American representation. Jue's and Criss' wins, alongside Nicole Scherzinger's for best actress in a musical for her role in 'Sunset Blvd.,' doubled the number of actors with Asian heritage who have won Tonys throughout history. Criss' mother is Filipina, Jue is Chinese American, and Scherzinger has Filipino and Native Hawaiian ancestry. The only other winners of Asian descent are Chinese American actor BD Wong (1988), Filipina actor and singer Lea Salonga (1991) and Ruthie Ann Miles (2015), whose mother is Korean. In accepting his award, Jue told the audience he was wearing a tuxedo that the actor Alvin Ing had made for himself for the opening of ' Pacific Overtures ' on Broadway in 1976. Ing gave it to Jue 20 years ago, Jue said, telling Jue to wear it 'when I accepted my Tony Award.' In a statement to the press after walking offstage, Jue said, 'Isn't it interesting that it is still unusual, historic, groundbreaking to tell an Asian American story on Broadway? And to tell it at a time when this country is wrestling with its identity, with who gets to be American, who gets to say who gets to be American?' His character in 'Yellow Face,' an avatar for the real-life father of Hwang, who emigrated from China, begins the show as a fervent champion of what Jue called traditional American values such as 'freedom and inclusion and justice.' He continued, 'We're living in challenging times where we're being asked whether we still value those things that we always assumed make us American.' The Antoinette Perry Awards have honored Broadway plays and musicals annually since 1947. They're named for the actor, producer and director who co-founded the American Theatre Wing, which co-presents the awards with the Broadway League. Nominees are chosen by a committee of a few dozen theater professionals who serve three-year terms, and winners are voted on by a group of more than 800. Tony Awards can boost box office receipts or extend runs for shows still performing on Broadway as well as further career opportunities for winning artists. For Bay Area audiences, they also boost chances that a particular title might tour nationally.
San Francisco Chronicle
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Another Bay Area theater is ‘suspending' as industry's free fall continues
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company plans to 'suspend' producing shows in the 2025-26 calendar, taking a possible step toward closure. The company hopes to continue to exist in some smaller form, Artistic Director Josh Costello told the Chronicle in advance of announcing the news Tuesday, May 13, 'But what it comes down to is the income is just not matching expenses anymore.' He noted a $500,000 operating deficit and a 50% decrease in the company's subscriber count compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic. 'We can't do another season like this in '25-'26, and it's obviously really disappointing,' he said. The move marks the latest major loss in a Bay Area theater scene that's been hemorrhaging companies since the pandemic. Its 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' running through May 25, followed by 'The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe' starring Marga Gomez and running July 10 through Aug. 10, could be the last Aurora shows in its 150-seat space, located conveniently near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. For 33 years, the Aurora has been renowned for language-forward theater performed by exceptional Bay Area actors in an up-close venue. Its deep-thrust shape means other audiences' reactions, right across the stage from you, are as much a part of the show as the scenery. The actors — who revere the company for its longstanding tradition of paying union and non-union performers the same — feel the closeness, too. 'They can't hide,' Costello said. 'They can't lie. They have to be fully in it all the way through, and it's exhilarating.' Aurora's productions, said interim board president Rebecca Parlette-Edwards, who's been a subscriber since the company's second season, 'put forth truths that I hadn't really thought about, but there they are.' It's not just coveted gigs and A-list performances under threat by the suspension but also new contributions to the art form. Aurora commissioned and premiered 'Eureka Day,' which just got nominated for a Tony Award. Playwright Jonathan Spector, who wrote 'Eureka Day,' said the suspension inspired not just grief but 'a fear about the Bay Area theater ecosystem more widely.' A vibrant theater ecosystem, he continued, needs 'theaters of different sizes and different styles and different interests that allow people to have an artistic life, and I really wonder about the viability of that in the region in the next five to 10 years.' He placed Aurora firmly in the 'middle rung,' explaining that without such professional but perpetually resource-strapped institutions, it's not clear how artists can climb from theater held together with gaffer tape, Red Bull and college acting class bonds to the art form's upper echelons. After Aurora achieved its emergency fundraising campaign goal of $500,000 last fall, Costello attempted to meet the harsh economic realities by planning a crowd-pleasing season with well-known playwrights — Noël Coward, Lynn Nottage — and cutting more than half of his full-time staff. But audiences still didn't return, he said, and running a company with just four full-timers was 'not sustainable.' 'People have been making a heroic effort, but people are tired,' he said. Costello was outspoken about what he sees as the reason for audiences' changing preferences. 'The pandemic was a trigger point, but I don't think it was the cause,' he said. He blamed social media and smartphones, which isolate us, literally drawing our gaze downward. Theater, he continued, 'is all about being in a room with other people and sharing in a communal act of imagination.' Social media, by contrast, 'makes us feel like it's us or them,' he said. 'It makes us feel that the individual is what matters.' As the staff and board ponder next steps, one option is to move into a smaller space. A second is to turn the venue into an arts hub in which other companies share space and software systems such as ticketing and payroll, helping Aurora pay its rent to Gordon Commercial. A third is to focus on co-producing; Aurora is already partnering with Marin Theatre on 'Eureka Day' in the fall. For now, Aurora is fundraising with a three-to-one match campaign to complete its current season 'with the same kind of integrity this company has always had,' Costello said. The company forewent another emergency drive. 'We all felt it was disingenuous to do it two years in a row, because then it's not an emergency campaign,' he explained. 'It's just, you don't have a business plan.' Costello is only the third artistic director in Aurora's history, succeeding Tom Ross and, before that, Barbara Oliver. He started in 2019, so he didn't even get to have a full season before the pandemic kiboshed his plans. Reflecting on his tenure, he told the Chronicle that his appointment was 'not a stepping stone' but 'a dream job.' Aurora has brought classics to skin-tingling life. In Alice Childress' backstage drama 'Trouble in Mind, ' a triumphant Margo Hall impaled Black stereotypes, and Ross' 'A Delicate Balance' seemed to realize the platonic ideal of Edward Albee's comedy of bourgeois unease. Mark Jackson's take on 'The Arsonists' made excruciating and delicious the backflips and somersaults the privileged will make to avoid seeing the costs of their mistakes, even as fascism approaches. The company has also shown new sides of beloved actors. Elsewhere the ubiquitous James Carpenter often plays Shakespeare's royals, but at Aurora fans could see him twitch as an overconfident lowlife in 'American Buffalo' or smolder with mystery and menace in 'The Children.' In 'Born With Teeth,' Dean Linnard didn't just reveal infinite facets; he sliced from one to another with a jeweller's precision. If Aurora's suspension evolves into a permanent closure, it will hardly be alone. California Shakespeare Theater, Cutting Ball Theater, Bay Area Children's Theatre, PianoFight, TheatreFirst, American Conservatory Theater's master of fine arts program, foolsFury and Exit Theatre's Eddy Street venue have all closed in recent years, while Custom Made Theatre Co. and Mugwumpin both went into long-term hibernation. San Francisco nonprofit musical theater company 42nd Street Moon stopped producing without even making a public statement or responding to press queries. 'For a couple of years now, everybody's been saying, 'I hope this is the bottom, and then we'll start to climb our way out,' ' Spector said, adding he hoped there was no further nadir to plumb. 'But I don't know.'
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
A case for ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy' as a great American play
History doesn't happen in great sea changes above our heads. It's whether one Black family decides to migrate north. It's which stranger you let talk to you on the train. And in 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' it's which ideas and experiences a girl hears over the breakfast table in her humble Brooklyn apartment — and how they inflect what she sees as possible for herself. Lynn Nottage's 1995 play about a postwar Great Migration family, whose Aurora Theatre Company production opened Thursday, May 1, could have been written today. Grieving widower Godfrey (David Everett Moore) is in thrall to a charlatan spiritualist, making excuses whenever his great leader doesn't deliver on promises. Communist Party footsoldier Aunt Lily Ann (Asia Nicole Jackson), taking it upon herself to move in with her brother-in-law and take care of his girls, keeps urging the family to unshackle themselves from servile capitalist ideology. As for her own joblessness, she says, 'Nobody wants to hire a smart colored woman.' And when daughters Ernestine (Anna Marie Sharpe) and Ermina (Jamella Cross) suddenly get a new stepmother in Gerte (Carrie Paff), a white German expat scarred by wartime privation and chaos, the conversations between her and Lily Ann feel startlingly 2025. They play the oppression olympics. They debate Gerte's assertion that 'When I see you I see no color' and just how much the world will allow any person of color to achieve — professionally, romantically. But it's never philosophical or abstract; it's grounded in romantic jealousy and insecurity that tick like a time bomb. Elizabeth Carter's production can feel a little stagey and clumsy sometimes. Some monologues that are supposed to be devastating have all the humanity of a foghorn, and light cues practically galumph in and out. But watch Sharpe and Cross as the two sisters. In physical comedy, Cross — one of the Bay Area's rising stars — has the precision of a gymnast or a figure skater. Slithering away from the singeing clutches of Lily Ann's hot iron comb, she makes the inanimate object into an enemy snake; each fresh crackle of burning hair is an escalating battle in that war known to every child: between common sense and adults' incomprehensible whims. And Sharpe makes Ernestine the poetic, impressionable sort who gulps down experience with her eyes and lets it suffuse her being. As the play's narrator, she gives Nottage's intricate, redolent text an easy buoyancy, trotting out lines like 'I want to go someplace where folks don't come home sullied by anger' with a winsome earnestness that makes the highfalutin natural. If there's an old-fashioned discursiveness to the script — it's the kind of play that feels like it ends three times over — Nottage constructs such a multilayered, expansive world that she earns the right to linger on the theatrical equivalent of sustains and fermatas. Here, the microcosm and the macrocosm are the same: The question of whether social change comes from revolution or everyday individual choices somehow equates to one girl's choice between following the humdrum path her father has paved for her or imagining something more.
San Francisco Chronicle
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
From stutter to stage star: David Everett Moore's journey in theater
When David Everett Moore landed his first big role in a school play, he had an epiphany. 'That was the first time that I noticed that I was on stage speaking these lines, and I didn't stutter,' he told the Chronicle. 'And I was like, 'What? Interesting! I didn't know that was possible! '' He was 12 years old in Los Angeles and the play was 'Annie Get Your Gun.' Discovering that onstage he could speak without his stutter 'was freeing. It was empowering,' he recalls. Now 46, the Berkeley resident and professional union actor doesn't think of the speech impediment he's had since early childhood as a tragedy or a cage. More Information 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy': Written by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Elizabeth Carter. Opens Saturday, April 26. Through May 25. $38-$68. Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-843-4822. Instead, Moore learned, 'It has to do with flow.' He contrasted extemporaneous speech with recited lines or music: 'When words are already living in your brain, when it's already memorized, there's a flow for that.' That's especially true with Shakespeare, with its rhythmic iambic pentameter, which Moore frequently performs. Moore, currently performing in Lynn Nottage's 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy' at Aurora Theatre, said that to get where he is now, he suffered less prejudice than one might think. But the system he had to devise for himself requires a dedication to craft that might make many lesser men quit. 'There's never been a point where I was like, 'Oh, I should give up acting because of this,'' he said. And he's hardly the only public-facing professional with a speech impediment; former President Joe Biden, James Earl Jones and Samuel L. Jackson all had or have stutters. Moore's stammer isn't severe, but you do notice it in conversation. When he meets people for the first time, he might ask them not to suggest words to him when he pauses. 'I know the word; I'm just having trouble getting it out,' he said. In prior years, when he'd meet new collaborators in audition or rehearsal rooms, he'd explain that he speaks more fluidly onstage, 'just to make sure they knew I could do it,' he said. Then one time, he gave no preamble, and no one ever raised an eyebrow. Same thing every time after that. Eventually, he realized that his reputation and resumé, with roles at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Crowded Fire Theater and Colorado Shakespeare Festival among many others, speak for themselves. Victoria Evans Erville, a playwright, director and erstwhile leader of the now-defunct TheatreFirst, described Moore as an ideal actor, and he credits her with seeing his potential before he could. 'When he acts, you don't ever hear it, ever,' she said of his speech impediment. Instead, his other qualities shine: his focus, bravery and willingness to play, his ability to work with actors of any experience level. Most of all, he doesn't have to be in the spotlight if it doesn't serve the story. 'He loves the craft more than he loves himself,' she said. But being onstage doesn't 100% cure his stammer, Moore cautioned. He still occasionally stutters in performance, such as that one time in 'Much Ado About Nothing' at Colorado Shakespeare Festival. 'I just got stuck onstage in front of 1,100 people,' he recalled. 'The play ground to a halt because I couldn't get the word out. It was probably like five seconds, but five seconds onstage is an eternity.' After he exited, one of the show's more seasoned actors pulled him aside to say, 'Hey, it's not your fault' — a gift he still remembers fondly. Over time, Moore has learned more about how his brain works and developed mitigation strategies to decrease the likelihood of such incidents. For example, he learned that words that start with hard consonants followed by short vowels are harder for him. 'Dine' is easy; 'dinner,' not so much. When he first reads a script aloud to himself, he notes all the words that could be 'spicy,' he said with a laugh. He tries to make sure he's at or toward the beginning of a breath on tough words, a bit like the way singers and reed and brass players might plot where in a score they inhale. Or he'll imagine other words coming before a tough word, but not say them, and then mentally put a little music to the whole phrase as well. All the audience hears is 'dinner is served,' but in his head he appends 'what time shall I tell them that' to the beginning. All professional actors learn to be aware of where they're holding tension in their bodies, but for Moore the practice takes on additional importance. If he gets stuck on a word, he tries to take a 'mental photograph' of his physicality and ask himself, 'Is the tension in my throat? Is there tension in the neck muscles, or in my tongue?' Then, if he identifies the spot, he can try to release it or breathe through it. Sometimes he simply has to slow down, even when a play's scene demands urgency, presenting an intriguing artistic challenge of 'playing the tension of the moment without bringing physical tension,' as Moore put it. When all else fails, Moore might ask a director for permission to change a word in a script. Surveying his career, Moore attributes his success first to his parents, who took him to see theater growing up, which is 'still not commonplace for Black people,' he said. As a young boy, he saw Dulé Hill ('The West Wing') in a national tour of 'The Tap Dance Kid,' which showed him that people who look like him can be actors. 'Representation matters,' he said. Now he tries to pay that forward. He works frequently as a teaching artist, and once, working with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he gave a talkback to students, showing them that the actor they'd just seen onstage speaks with a stutter. Afterward, a student wrote him a note saying he made her feel better about her own speech impediment. 'That's everything,' Moore said. When other theater artists ask him for advice about working with speech impediments, he makes it a point to give them however much time they need, too. I thought I remembered docking Moore for vocal stumbles in my reviews of his work, before I learned about his speech impediment, but then didn't find any evidence in the Chronicle's archives. Still, I can say I at least thought about doing so. I recently asked Moore what he might think about such a criticism. 'If the person said that it took away from their enjoyment of the experience,' he replied, 'then I I would encourage that person to ask themselves why it took them out of it.' Flawlessness is illusory anyway, he noted: 'Seeing something different than my expectations doesn't make that thing bad.'
