When Theatre Rhino announced its 2014-15 season in the early fall with "Breaking the Code" as its March production, a movie titled "The Imitation Game" was but a speck on Hollywood's list of upcoming releases. By good fortune or uncanny foresight by Rhino's Executive Director John Fisher, "The Imitation Game" put a new spotlight on Alan Turing, who happens to be the subject of "Breaking the Code," opening March 7 at the Eureka Theatre.
Benedict Cumberbatch played Turing in the movie, earning him an Oscar nomination as the pivotal code-breaker for Britain during World War II, before laying the groundwork for the coming computer revolution. Fisher himself is taking the role in the Rhino production. Turing also happened to be rather too casual about his homosexuality amidst Cold War paranoia, leading to his conviction under the same "gross indecency" laws that undid Oscar Wilde decades before.
Agreeing to undergo "chemical castration" in lieu of prison, Turing may or may not have become a depressed husk of a man, depending on who is telling the story. And he may or may not have committed suicide, though the official coroner's report concluded that he intentionally ingested cyanide shortly before his 42nd birthday. This is obviously the stuff of drama, and it became politically recharged with the advent of gay-rights movements that cast Turing as a hero and/or martyr. The British government formally apologized in 2009 for its "appalling" treatment of Turing, and the Queen herself granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013. These later acts of contrition came about after mass online agitation - ironic and appropriate for someone who helped make online anything possible.
These so-sorry actions helped rekindle an interest in Turing that led to "The Imitation Game," but playwright Hugh Whitemore had already visited the same territory in 1986 with "Breaking the Code." The play, like the movie, jumps around in time, taking stock of the most certainly eccentric Turing at various points in his school years, his career as a wartime cryptographer, and his post-war years in computer research and inopportune dalliances.
Turing, playwright Whitemore has said, was a victim of times that affected both homosexuals and heterosexuals. "I think Turing stopped growing emotionally at the age of 14," Whitemore told author Nicholas de Jongh for the book "Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage." "His tragedy was his inability to make adult sexual relationships. It happens all the time with heterosexual men as well, but heterosexuals can slip into a social slot and not be put under a microscope."
Whitemore goes on to say, "Half of his tragedy was that he was driven by his sexual energies but could not relate them to his intellectual life...a Jungian gap between thinking and feeling."
In addition to playing Turing, Fisher is also directing the Rhino production. It's the first San Francisco production of the play since the Magic Theatre offered its area debut in 1989. Ticket information is available at therhino.org or (866) 811-4111.
Gearing up at ACT
Five of the seven shows that will make up ACT's 2015-16 season have been announced. And two of the five will take place at ACT's new Strand Theater venue amidst the rebooting Mid-Market corridor. The much larger Geary Theater remains the company's primary home.
It's a diverse collection of productions, including a recent Broadway attraction and a homegrown world premiere. Will Eno's "The Realistic Joneses" provided this quirky playwright with his Broadway debut last year. It's the tale of two neighboring families who both intentionally and inadvertently spill secrets. "Wonderful and weird," wrote critic Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Monstress is the result of ACT's commissioning program, in this case aligning local playwrights with the short stories that make up San Francisco-based author Lysley Tenorio's Monstress, about the Filipino-American experience. Philip Kan Gotanda's Nado and Vincente, adapted from "Save the I-Hotel," focuses on the relationship between two men living next door to each other in San Francisco's landmark residential hotel. One is in love with the other, while this friend loves a woman he can't be with. Sean San Jose's Presenting the...Monstress is adapted from the title story in Tenorio's collection, about a Filipina actress and her B-movie director husband who wind up chasing the Hollywood dream.
The lurid musical fantasies of a doomed man are at the heart of "The Unfortunates," a big success for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2012. As World War I prisoners are summoned from their cell for execution, the last man standing goes into a reverie in which he is the owner of a dive bar overflowing with a phantasmagorical collection of entertainers. Created by Jon Beavers, Ramiz Monsef, Ian Merrigan, and Casey Hurt, the musical has been further developed through ACT's New Works program.
In "Satchmo at the Waldorf," John Douglas Thompson recreates his acclaimed New York performance as a late-in-life Louis Armstrong whose memories are interrupted by the challenging presence of Miles Davis, also played by Thompson. Author Terry Teachout is the theater critic for The Wall Street Journal.
The season also includes a chestnut, Eugene O'Neill's 1933 comedy "Ah, Wilderness!," which takes a sunnier autobiographical look at the tortured family that populated "Long Day's Journey into Night."
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