PianoFight, best known for interactive theater and sketch comedy, strikes a different chord in its latest production. The company is presenting the world premiere of Octopus's Garden, a full-length drama about a family of two moms and their 8-year-old daughter. This is also the first full-length play by Seattle's Scott Herman, who came to know PianoFight Artistic Director Rob Ready from a non-theatrical meeting on a surfing trip to Northern Ireland.
"We read the play in mid-January," Ready said, "and we knew that this was a story that needs to be told now, not after two years of tweaks and readings."
In Herman's play, domestic normalcy seems to rule Lilly and Claire's home as they raise Lilly's 8-year-old Anna with all the white-picket trimmings despite the same-sex parentage. But their studied tranquility goes askew with the unexpected arrival of Anna's biological father. a gay man, whom she has never met. The second act jumps back nine years to reveal the events leading to conception.
Devin McNulty is directing Octopus's Garden, which will first play the Alcove Theatre (March 17-31) near Union Square before moving to Stage Werx (April 14-28) in the Mission. PianoFight, currently itinerant, is the group working to turn the former Tenderloin home of Original Joe's into a theater and arts center. Octopus's Garden tickets are available at www.pianofight.com.
Bright days for Kushner
It's Tony time again. No, not the awards show, but the home-brewed Tony Kushner, who will be on local stages both as a playwright and as a person.
A Bright Room Called Day, which debuted at SF's Eureka Theatre four years before the same theater unleashed Angels in America, is receiving a rare revival under the aegis of the Custom Made Theatre Company. And during the run, though independent of it, Kushner will be at Berkeley Rep, on a metaphorical couch, for some psychological diggings into his plays.
The Eureka staged A Bright Room Called Day in 1987, when Kushner was just three years out of graduate school. The setting is an apartment in 1932 Berlin, where a minor movie actress named Agnes provides a haven to a cadre of artists, actors, filmmakers, refugees, and homosexuals who want to fight the Nazi rise but can't rouse themselves much beyond talking. Periodically during the play, an American character named Zillah brings the play into the 1990s with what Kushner calls "interruptions" that try to find ties between the past and her present.
When the Eureka produced the play's premiere, Zillah offered her interruptions from her New York apartment. But when the New York Shakespeare Festival staged Bright Room in 1991, Zillah was delivering her rants on Reaganism and other American policies from the same Berlin apartment where Agnes had once lived. Kushner allows for either version to be produced, and there is even a no-Zillah edition that can be licensed though Kushner warns that it is less "dangerous." Custom Made director Brian Katz opted for the Zillah-in-Berlin version to help push a "collision of time and space."
Bright Room runs at the Gough Street Playhouse March 13-April 8. Tickets and info at (510) 207-5774 or www.custommade.org.
Kushner himself will be at Berkeley Rep on March 23 for a staged reading of his play Terminating and a panel discussion with Kushner and several Bay Area psychotherapists about the psychological themes in his works.
The short play Terminating is, appropriately enough, about a patient-therapist relationship. In reviewing a 1998 production of the play, New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote, "Mr. Kushner's spirited dialogue between doctor and patient, with the voices of their lovers thrown in as condiments, turns psychiatric free association into a floating metaphor for the transforming perspective every reader brings to every piece of literature."
The performance and discussion is a benefit for the Psychotherapy Institute. Tickets are available through www.berkeleyrep.org.
(Photo: Charles Brady)
Girl power
An ambitious new theater group is debuting this month with an inaugural presentation of two full-length plays, staged readings of three more plays, and developmental readings of yet another three plays. The impressive opening salvo of 3Girls Theatre takes place at Thick House throughout March in a repertory schedule.
The titular figures of 3Girls are Suze Allen, AJ Baker, and Lee Brady, each of whom is a resident playwright of the new company as well as, respectively, the artistic director, the managing director, and the literary director. Baker and Brady are the authors of the main initial productions, and Allen is directing both of them.
Baker's The Right Thing, which opens March 9, tells the story of a corporate executive, fired on charges of sexual harassment, who fights her dismissal in what becomes a legal whodunit. On March 18, Brady's What About Ben? begins performances with Marie Shell starring in and writing songs for a solo show about a widowed folksinger who wonders if she can invite a sexy tree-trimmer in the home that her husband Ben built. Staged and developmental readings by another nine playwrights will be mixed into the rotating schedule.
3Girls Theatre has a "mission to produce the work of women playwrights who write fresh, compelling, and entertaining plays." All ages and viewpoints are welcome. "No feminist agenda, no political fish to fry, no multicultural mission, although we're happy to include plays that are motivated by those issues." In addition to its stage productions, 3Girls will introduce in 2013 a biannual playwriting competition under the title Girls Get It Up.
For tickets and info on all 3Girls Theatre projects, as well as to connect with its leaders who are seeking collaborators, go to www.3girlstheatre.org.