Since 1997, the Crowded Fire Theater Company has strived to produce challenging and provocative plays, making the group a key player in San Francisco’s experimental theater scene. Spark visits Crowded Fire hard at work as it prepares “One Big Lie,” a new work written by New York playwright Liz Duffy Adams especially for the company’s actors.

Adams’s play tells the story of a family that is reincarnated several times only to encounter similar problems again and again. The three-act play moves from mythical Greek times to the 1930s to a point in the post-industrial age that is just beyond our own. Each time, the family members struggle to discover some truth about the world as they are subjected to the whims and fancies of the same malicious gods.

For the players that make up the Crowded Fire Theater Company, “One Big Lie” offers a rare and exciting opportunity. The play was designed with the input of the actors in mind. Each member was asked what his or her dream role would be, which formed the basis of the characters Adams developed. The original score by David Rhodes was commissioned by Crowded Fire, along with the Playwrights Foundation.

The play does offers certain challenges. Despite the fact that most of the actors have had little musical training, the play calls for them to perform 20 songs, along with a live orchestra. As if this were not difficult enough, the performers also must wear elaborate animal masks that cover their entire heads, leaving gaps only for showing facial expressions.

More about the Crowded Fire Theater Company
The Crowded Fire Theater Company is dedicated to discovering and developing work that challenges audiences to see the world differently. Founded after a successful Fringe Festival by a small group of artists, Crowded Fire has since grown to a core group of 15 members. Each year, Crowded Fire produces three plays, including commissioned pieces and existing work. Past productions include plays by such noted contemporary writers as Charles Mee, Mac Wellman and Naomi Wallace. Crowded Fire also offers educational programming, including workshops open to the community at large.

More about Liz Duffy Adams
A graduate of NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing and Yale School of Drama, Liz Duffy Adams is, in her own words, “interested in the poetics and formal expansiveness common both to classical and experimental theater.” Her play “Dog Act” won the Glickman Award for Best New Play. Her published work includes “Greeks and Centaurs” in Smith and Kraus’s anthology “Rowing to America” and “Poodle With Guitar and Dark Glasses” in Applause’s “Best American Short Plays 2000-2001.” Crowded Fire also staged the West Coast premiere of Adams’s “The Train Play” in 2002.

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The Theatre of Yugen was founded in 1978 by Yuriko Doi to bring classical Japanese theater to American audiences. Based on Japanese Noh drama and Kyogen comedy, the Yugen ensemble crafts highly stylized productions from dramatic and literary classics. Spark goes backstage for their adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Dating back to the 14th century, Noh is the oldest form of theater in Japan. It is highly stylized, nonrealistic and ritualized as a theatrical form, emphasizing stillness rather than action, symbolism and allusion rather than realism and representation. With minimal dialogue, a slow meditative pace and mannered movement, there is a stillness and grace to this dramatic form that can challenge American audiences, who bring different cultural expectations to the art of performance.

“The Old Man and the Sea” adapts well to the world of Noh. As a fusion piece, the production presents unhurried musical rhythms, chanting, controlled choreography, masks, shadows and puppetry. Noh works well with Hemingway’s simple tale, which is recounted sparingly in distilled prose and is rich in symbolism and allegory.

Using the theatrical elements and techniques of Noh theater, Jubilith Moore stylizes “The Old Man and the Sea.” Props such as puppetry, costumes and masks play an important part. The set is sparse and has pieces uniquely fashioned from glass, designed by Kana Tanaka.

More about the Theatre of Yugen
In 2001, Moore, Libby Zilber and Lluis Valls took over from Doi as co-artistic directors of Theatre of Yugen and have continued her mission. The Theatre of Yugen has presented visiting master Noh performers in the Bay Area, working in collaboration with Cal Performances, the Asian Art Museum, the Consul General of Japan and the Japan Society of Northern California. The Theatre of Yugen also provides ongoing training and education programs for K-12 and university students as well as adults.

Theatre of Yugen
theatreofyugen.org
Where: Noh Space, 2840 Mariposa St., San Francisco
Phone: (415) 621-7978

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In the episode “Kids on Stage,” Spark goes behind the scenes as 40 kids from San Francisco tackle the premiere of “Jip, His Story” at Marsh Youth Theater (MYT) in the Mission District. The play is based on the children’s novel of the same name by National Book Award winner Katherine Paterson.

Over 14 weeks, the fifth- through ninth-graders learn to sing, dance and act, many for the first time. They also pitch in with set production, learning the importance of all the jobs behind the scenes. For this production, seventh grader Keith Seales was selected to play the lead role of Jip. Under the direction of Danny Duncan, Seales and the other MYT Mainstage Performance Ensemble members memorized lines and learned to sing and dance to 18 musical numbers.

As program director of MYT, Emily Klion ensures its commitment to making high-quality theater education available to any child who wants to take part, regardless of financial circumstance. In addition to the Mainstage Performance Ensemble, MYT offers a broad range of classes in acting, music and theatrical production, including Flying Poles, a workshop developed by aerialist Jo Keiter, in which students learn to dance off the ground on low flying poles.

More about The Marsh
The Marsh is a unique space dedicated to providing a breeding ground for new performance. It began in 1989 as a Monday night performance series at the Hotel Utah, organized by founder Stephanie Weisman and original collaborator Peggy Howe. In 1990 the series moved to Morty’s in North Beach, then to Café Beano, where The Marsh began presenting more than 150 performances a year. In December 1992, The Marsh moved to its current home on Valencia Street.

The Marsh
themarsh.org
Where: 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco
Phone: (415) 826-5750

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Editor’s note: John Belluso passed away on February 10, 2006.

Playwright John Belluso brought physical handicap to the stage, front and center. But rather than using his plays to teach his audience a lesson, Belluso’s works are darkly humorous and even sexy. Spark goes backstage at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre when Belluso and director Chris Smith were working on “The Rules of Charity.”

Los Angeles-based Belluso used a wheelchair from the age of 13 and often put his own experiences with disability at the center of his dramatic work. “The Rules of Charity” tells the story of Monty, a middle-aged gay man who suffers from cerebral palsy, a debilitating disease that results from a lack of oxygen at birth. Those who suffer from the disease commonly experience both physical disability and speech impairment, to varying degrees.

In “The Rules of Charity,” although Monty has a slight speech impairment, his disability is expressed primarily through bodily contortions and movements. An able-bodied actor, David Keith, was cast in the lead, a decision that was made in part because of the exceptional physical demands of the role. It was a great responsibility for Keith, who had to render the experience of someone struggling with the disease for his entire life.

For Belluso, “The Rules of Charity” signified more than an isolated theatrical event. He believed that the growing awareness of the rights of the disabled is spawning a cultural movement. Other handicapped people are learning storytelling skills, resulting in more emerging theater dealing with experiences of the disabled.

More about John Belluso
John Belluso was a 2003-2004 National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Playwright-in-Residence at the Atlantic Theatre in New York and received a VSA-Arts Playwright Discovery Award, the John Golden Playwriting Prize and an NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program’s Graduate Playwriting Award. In addition, he was director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Other Voice Project, one of the nation’s few professional developmental labs for theater artists with disabilities, and was a member of New Dramatists, the Taper Writer’s Workshop and Ensemble Studio Theatre.

More about the Magic Theatre
Founded by John Lion in 1967, the Magic Theatre has since premiered more than 200 works. The organization is dedicated solely to the development and production of new plays, from both emerging and established playwrights. Magic Theatre plays and playwrights have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, given to Sam Shepard for “Buried Child” in 1979 and to Nilo Cruz in 2003 for “Anna in the Tropics.” Other awards include numerous Bay Area Critics Circle Awards, a Kennedy Center Award, the Los Angeles Drama-Logue Award, the NAACP Image Award and 10 Obie Awards.

Magic Theatre
magictheatre.org
Where: Fort Mason Center, Building D, 3rd Floor, San Francisco
Phone: (415) 441-8001

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On November 18, 1978, more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple religious movement, together with their leader, Reverend Jim Jones, died in Jonestown, Guyana, South America. That same day, Bay Area congressman Leo J. Ryan and three journalists were also killed as they were leaving Jonestown. Leigh Fondakowski’s “The People’s Temple” at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre is a production about this tragedy. Spark follows the project from conception to opening night.

David Dower and his wife, Denice Stephenson, attended college with Rebecca Moore, whose sisters Ann and Carolyn were members of Peoples Temple and died at Jonestown. They wanted a way to give meaning to the Jonestown event by presenting it as a theatrical documentary. Stephenson became the play’s researcher/archivist, and Dower, artistic director of San Francisco’s Z Space Studio, commissioned Fondakowski to write and direct “The People’s Temple.”

As a member of the Tectonic Theater Project (TTP) and head writer of “The Laramie Project,” Fondakowski has been working with the documentary theater technique for more than 10 years. Moises Kaufman and members of the TTP have produced plays that blended journalism and theater, thus developing what is now known as documentary theater. This format was chosen to retell this terrifying chapter in history by giving a voice to those who died as well as to the survivors, friends and relatives of Temple members.

Fondakowski, with Greg Pierotti, Steven Wangh and Margo Hall, based the play on historical documents from the Peoples Temple Collection at California Historical Society and more than 75 interviews. Facing the challenge of transforming the wealth of documentary evidence into compelling theater, the team worked for more than three years to stage this material. As Stephen Jones, son of Jim Jones, reflects, “Putting people’s experience on the stage and leaving people in the audience to make their own interpretation of it, I think that is powerful.”

More about Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Michael W. Leibert founded Berkeley Rep in 1968 as a storefront community theater. Winner of the 1997 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater, its national reputation draws theater artists from around the country to work on a variety of productions from September through July. The season consists of seven productions of the finest classic, contemporary and new plays. The Berkeley Rep School of Theatre offers classes and activities for both youth and adults and tours a fully staged professional production to schools throughout the 11-county Greater Bay Area.

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Brian Copeland has turned painful memories of growing up black in what once was one of America’s most racist suburbs into a confessional performance that is part comedy, part tragedy. Spark checks out Copeland as he performs in one of San Francisco’s longest-running one-man shows, “Not a Genuine Black Man,” at the Mission District venue The Marsh.

In 1971, San Leandro was named one of the most racist communities in the United States. Though the city borders Oakland, whose population at the time was 50 percent African American, San Leandro’s population was 99 percent white. Congressional hearings found that the city was practicing police harassment and housing discrimination to keep it that way. Through a series of federal investigations, media inquiries and court cases, the city’s system of institutionalized racism was eventually dismantled. But Copeland, who was 8 years old when his family moved there in 1972, grew up right in the middle of it.

“Not a Genuine Black Man” is an artistic stretch for Copeland, who is more accustomed to doing stand-up comedy. Over the course of the two-hour monologue, Copeland steps into the roles of more than 25 different characters and deals with topics that the performer never thought he would discuss in public, including his abusive father and his suicide attempt at the age of 35. Copeland’s performance, a unique combination of humor and heart-wrenching tales of suffering and abuse, has captivated audiences and has even garnered interest for a book deal and a television series for HBO.

More about The Marsh
The Marsh is a unique space dedicated to providing a breeding ground for new performance. It began in 1989 as a Monday night performance series at the Hotel Utah, organized by founder Stephanie Weisman and original collaborator Peggy Howe. In 1990 the series moved to Morty’s in North Beach, then to Café Beano, where The Marsh began presenting more than 150 performances a year. In December 1992, The Marsh moved to its current home at 1062 Valencia.

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In its 26th season, the Traveling Jewish Theatre (TJT) takes on its most challenging project to date, addressing the conflict in the Middle East. Spark visits the TJT’s ensemble cast of “Blood Relative,” a collaboratively created play about Israel/Palestine from both perspectives.

TJT’s artistic director, Aaron Davidman, began work on the “Blood Relative” project in 2002, with a research trip to Israel and to the Acco Theatre Festival. There he met actors Ibrahim Miari, a Palestinian who is the son of an Arab Muslim father and a Tunisian Jewish mother, and Meirav Kupperberg, who is Jewish. Both had ensemble theater experience and had worked on projects that dealt with Arab-Jewish issues. Miari’s story became the central theme of “Blood Relative.”

The characters’ stories in “Blood Relative” were developed using TJT’s unique, collaborative technique, which derives stories from a combination of external and internal sources. Interviews were conducted with families on both sides of the conflict. Material was also created from the personal lives and feelings of the play’s actors as well as from meetings with the Jewish Palestinian Dialogue Group, documentary films, and the two holy doctrines of Judaism and Islam — the Torah and the Koran.

All of this research and discovery yields materials that are finessed into a script through discussion and improvisation that goes through many revisions until a final draft takes shape. This process is one that the TJT has been following for more than 25 years — a truly collaborative process through which the performers are deeply invested in the content and the production.

The TJT was founded in 1978. It has created more than 20 original works for the theater and has performed in more than 60 cities worldwide. Its works have covered a range of issues, from the legends of the Hasidim to the assassination of Trotsky; from the politics of the Middle East to African-American/Jewish relations. The TJT acquired its present home in San Francisco’s Project Artaud in 1994, completing a renovation of the space in 1998. The company and its artists have received critical acclaim, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award for “See Under: LOVE,” by Corey Fischer — nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association as one of the best American plays of 2001.

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Persistence has finally paid off for the East Bay’s Shotgun Players. After more than a decade of being nomads, the theater ensemble finally has a more permanent home with a 35-year lease on their space on Berkeley’s busy Ashby Avenue. Spark checks in on this grassroots troupe as they rehearse for a production of French existentialist Albert Camus’s “Les Justes” (1949).

The Shotgun Players came together in 1992 when a group of 11 theater artists decided to put on a play in the only reasonable space they had available to them — the basement of a local pizza parlor. This became their home base for five years and the site of a half-dozen performances a year. Since then, the Shotgun Players have worked in more than 30 different venues, including church basements, print shop back rooms, university stages, outdoor arenas and even in front of inmates at San Quentin Prison. Over the years, their hard work has earned them a wide subscriber base, critical acclaim and devoted audiences.

The mission of the Shotgun Players is to make bold, relevant and affordable theater with a commitment to doing rarely produced plays. “Les Justes” considers a group of terrorists from the early 20th century. The play stirred heated discussion in France at the time of its first production, and the Shotgun Players believe it is as relevant today as it was more than half a century ago.

Since their formation, the Shotgun Players have won prestigious DramaLogue awards for direction, set design and production. Other awards include the 1998 SF Weekly Black Box Awards for Best Company, Production and Acting, the 1999 SF Bay Guardian Award for Outstanding Theater Company, and four 1999 Bay Area Critics Circle Awards for Entire Production, Original Script and Ensemble.

Shotgun Players at Ashby Stage
Where: 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley
Phone: (510) 841-6500

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Spark drops in on San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) on a typical Saturday night. There are three theater spaces, and each one is full: cabaret in Theater Three; a comedy about drug addiction called “Rescue and Recovery,” by Steve Murray, in the Walker Theatre; and “Mambo Italiano,” by Steve Galluccio, in the Decker Theatre.

NCTC founder Ed Decker, who is also the theater center’s executive and artistic director, explains how, for him, risk-taking is what it is all about. “I strive to push past my comfort level. Whenever I start to see us producing things that are easily done, I quickly move in the other direction.” He celebrates the uniqueness of the NCTC as a populist community theater that speaks to and for diverse audiences, especially for the gay community in San Francisco.

The productions under consideration for the NCTC’s 2005 Gay Pride Season illustrate a commitment to trying new and challenging material. Contenders include a piece about photographer Richard Mapplethorpe and “Slap and Tickle,” by new writer Davis Parr, about a gay bathhouse. Both pieces are controversial, as is the work of Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally, who is currently in residence at the NCTC as part of its new works program. McNally will have his third première at the NCTC in the 2006 Gay Pride Season.

Now that dramatizing the gay experience has become more acceptable, Decker sees the NCTC responding and moving in a new direction. It is no longer a question of gay theater or black theater or women’s theater. Now that theater articulates these voices, Decker believes that theater needs to reach out to other communities. Things may change, but the mission of the NCTC remains constant: to effect personal and societal growth, enlightenment and change.

The NCTC is a recipient of multiple Drama-Logue, Bay Area Theatre Critics and Dean Goodman awards and has also received substantial support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The NCTC was the first theater in the United States to use theater to educate youth in grades K-12 on HIV awareness and prevention as part of its nationally acclaimed YouthAware Education Theatre. The NCTC also offers adult classes throughout the year.

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Lu Yi is transplanting the centuries-old art of Chinese circus to the Bay Area. Since the early 1990s, the former star performer and artistic director of the world-renowned Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe has turned the Circus Center into the most comprehensive Chinese acrobatics program outside of China. Spark checks in on Lu Yi as two of his American protégés, Olga Kosova and Philip Rosenberg, share their professional debut in the Pickle Circus’s “The Birdhouse Factory.”

Before coming to America, Lu Yi was well-known in China, as both an acrobat and an artistic director, for his whimsical tricks that stunned circus audiences. His skills in this traditional art form, however, were not popular with the Communist regime. In 1970, followers of Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution ransacked his house and demanded that he give up his art. When Lu Yi refused, he was locked away, unable to see family or loved ones for an entire year. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, Lu Yi decided to leave China for good, to establish his art in the United States and eventually, he hopes, across the world.

Chinese circus is a far cry from the loud spectacles of lion tamers and human cannonballs most often associated with Western big tops. Chinese acrobats spend a lifetime studying the subtle, even spiritual principles of force, balance and agility. Learning the acrobatic arts is excruciatingly difficult, and Lu Yi teaches his students to always keep in mind the traditional Chinese saying “Training is bitter.” But years of tireless effort have paid off for Lu Yi’s students, as their debut is met with resounding success. The circus’s careful combination of theater, dance and art direction produces an unusual, lyrical performance unlike any other.

San Francisco School of Circus Arts was founded as a project of the Pickle Family Circus in 1984 by Wendy Parkman and Judy Finelli. Lu Yi became a trainer and artistic director of the school in 1990 and established the San Francisco Circus in 1996 to give his students performing opportunities. The school changed its name in 2001 to the Circus Center, which now encompasses the San Francisco School of Circus Arts, the New Pickle Circus and the San Francisco Youth Circus. The Circus Center is the only school outside of China that specializes in Chinese acrobatics.

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Art as a form of healing is examined in the episode of Spark “Art Frees the Soul,” with Rhodessa Jones. As the founder and director of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, Jones uses improvisational theater to transform the lives of incarcerated women and ex-offenders. Over the past decade, Jones has worked with more than 300 women, helping many of them make a return to society.

When Jones was hired in 1986 to teach aerobics at the city jail in San Francisco, she found that the part of the class that the women enjoyed most was talking. As Jones learned their stories she created the solo work “Big-Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women” based on their lives. Though her own piece received much critical acclaim, she wanted to find a way to let the women she worked with tell their own stories. In 1989, Jones conducted a residency at the San Francisco County Jail that resulted in the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.

Though Jones hopes the women make their return to society, she knows many women who have gone through her program and still return to jail. She says, “I’m just glad to go back inside and they’re alive … not dead. Because a lot of these people — it’s amazing they’re still alive.” Many women, inside and outside the system, report a positive change from the experience. Jones never knows whom she is going to touch.

Jones is no stranger to a difficult path. One of 12 children, a daughter of migrant workers, Jones found herself pregnant at 16; she didn’t marry the father. She eventually ended up dancing nude to pay the bills. Finding the experience more fascinating than demeaning, she knew that there was a story to tell from it. Jones continues to draw on the experiences from her life. Her more recent piece, “Hot Flashes, Power Surges and Private Summers,” speaks about womanhood after 50.

In addition to her one-woman shows and her work with the Medea Project, Jones has taught and lectured at Stanford and Yale and in Italy and East Africa. She collaborated on the documentary film “We Just Telling Stories,” which won Best Documentary at the San Francisco Black Film Festival (2001). She has directed at Theater for the Twenty-first Century and Campo Santo and was featured in Eve Ensler’s award-winning hit play, “The Vagina Monologues.”

The Medea Project is housed by Cultural Odyssey, which was founded by Idris Ackamoor, executive director, in 1979. Jones joined as co-artistic director in 1983. The two first began performing together in a jazz cabaret act; their repertoire now includes solo performances, workshops and nearly a dozen original projects. Over the years, professional actors and students from workshops have joined the troop, blending their performances with the incarcerated women and ex-offenders.

After 15 years, Jones may be coming to the end of directing for the Medea Project. “I’ve stepped out onto the path, and I’m about to head off into my second life.” Through the project, she feels, many of the issues that face incarcerated women have been unearthed. She now needs to shelve some things to make room for others. She is shifting her focus to a younger generation, hoping to help them through theater before they reach a point where it is too late. “I created the Parachute Project with the idea, maybe we can catch them early enough, to challenge them to start to be introspective now.”

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