Dark Journey

Kindertransport.

‘Kindertransport’ tells story of survival

By Daedalus Howell

BEFORE ENTERING Actors’ Theatre’s production of Kindertransport, audiences are advised to stuff their pockets with the Kleenex thoughtfully provided in the atrium. You will need it. You’re going to cry. Consider wearing a life preserver, perhaps even hip-waders.

Inspired by the real-life evacuation of 10,000 Jewish children from prewar Nazi Germany and their subsequent placement in English foster homes, Kindertransport chronicles the emotional predicament of a woman navigating the harrowing floodwaters of survivor’s guilt.

The play simultaneously depicts two epochs in the woman’s now normal English life. Evelyn (née Eva Schlesinger, marvelously portrayed by Mollie Boice and Rebecca Miller as the mature and younger versions, respectively) has spent a lifetime reinventing herself so as to obscure a painful past that includes the loss of her parents and the lascivious advances of a child-abusing Nazi, among other hardships. To Evelyn’s deep chagrin, her original identity is exhumed by her inquisitive 20-something daughter, Faith (played by Michelle Olmstead), from a trunk in a family storage room. An emotional cataclysm ensues as Evelyn systematically deconstructs the Memory Lane she has built to bypass her former life.

Director Tim Hayes’ spare production strips the play down to its essential emotional elements, leaving no room for the easy manipulation often associated with material of this nature. Hayes seems to engender real sentiment on the part of his players, and the audience benefits. It makes the difference between seeing a play and experiencing it.

Boice is simply exhilarating as she moves her character heedlessly into the play’s emotional white water. Her Evelyn is whole and palpably pained, and her experience is so effectively conveyed that it becomes our own.

Miller expertly portrays Eva’s transformation into Evelyn, traipsing from German to English accents with expert character shading, as when her voice subtly quavers when she first insists on being called Evelyn.

The play’s emotional tautness mercifully slackens with the comic asides of the gracefully understated Olmstead, whose comedic sensibilities are well suited for the part of the nosy daughter Faith. Adding further comic relief is Cameron McVeigh, who ably inhabits a handful of roles, including an officious English postal worker and a persnickety officer. McVeigh also does chilling turns as a Nazi and as a German children’s book character, the Rat Catcher (a riff on the Pied Piper, the play’s key motif).

Sheri Lee Miller is superb as Evelyn’s biological mother, Helga, whose spiritual deterioration marks one of the play’s rueful plot points. Also turning in a fine performance is Betty Cole-Graham as Evelyn’s adoptive English mother, Lil.

Yes, Kindertransport throws open a lot of emotional floodgates, but in the end, it will invariably buoy your soul.

Actors’ Theatre’s production of Kindertransport plays through Oct. 24 at the Luther Burbank Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $6-$12. 523-4185.

From the September 24-30, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Bible Belt

The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged), playing Oct. 8 at the Sebastiani Theatre.

Reduced Shakespeare takes on the Big Book

By Patrick Sullivan

THEY’VE MADE a splash at the Kennedy Center, been called blasphemous by religious protesters, stolen the show in broadcasts on NPR and the BBC, and wowed the crowd in London and Jerusalem. They’ve even braved an uncertain welcome in the sunny but conservative city of Texarkana, where liquor sales end at the dusty Texas border. But Reed Martin of the Reduced Shakespeare Company says coming back to play at the Sebastiani Theatre in his hometown of Sonoma is still no walk in the park.

“It’s funny, but I do get nervous,” Martin says. “I grew up here. Most nights I’m at the theater, I don’t know anyone in the audience. Then we do a benefit for the Sebastiani and there are 400 people and I know all of them.”

Martin serves as both writer and performer in the unique three-man theatrical troupe, which has built a growing international reputation for … well … reducing things. The complete works of William Shakespeare, the history of the United States, and Wagner’s bloated Ring Cycle have all come under the company’s satirical knife. Now the company is bringing The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) home to Sonoma County.

Whatever the source material, Reduced Shakespeare’s method is the same: Take weighty (even ponderous) cultural material that occupies armies of dedicated scholars, and render the whole thing in hilarious fast-forward on the stage. That simple recipe has been packing houses around the world for more than a decade.

“I think we’re successful because we just have a really good time doing it,” Martin says. “The sloughing around isn’t always enjoyable, but those two hours onstage are always fun, and I think people see that.”

The company–which was founded by former member Daniel Singer of Santa Rosa–combines slapstick, cross-dressing, and sight gags with more subtle jokes that delight even people who love Shakespeare (or American history) the most. There are no sacred cows, and even the audience itself is fair game.

“If any latecomers come in to the show, we thrash them,” Martin says with a laugh. “Or if somebody’s crinkling a candy wrapper, well, everybody in the audience is looking at them anyway, so we might as well stop and make a bit of it. … We come through the fourth wall and just react to whatever’s happening.”

The act requires an unusual set of skills, to say the least. Ordinary theater hardly prepares someone to bounce around the stage re-enacting the death of Abraham Lincoln at top speed. At first glance, then, Martin’s résumé sounds oddly traditional–even stuffy. He has a B.A. in theater and political science and an M.A. in acting. He’s even performed in very ordinary productions of Hamlet. As the Reduced Shakespeare folks might say, “Boring!” But then, things get unusual.

“After eight years of university, I ran away and joined the circus to work as a clown,” Martin says. “Which left everyone saying to my parents, ‘What do you think about that?'”

After two years of clown work, where he learned how to work an audience, Martin fell in with the Reduced Shakespeare and was soon touring the world. Before long, the company was performing in England. But weren’t they worried about insulting the Bard in the country of his birth?

“It turns out it’s nothing like that,” Martin says. “I mean, if anything, the British have had Shakespeare forced upon them even more than people here. And also, as with all of our subjects, it’s done affectionately. We’re mocking ourselves as much as we’re mocking the subject matter. … I think they’re flattered that we spend so much time on it, and we do it the way they think three stupid Americans would do Shakespeare.”

THAT’S NOT TO SAY that everyone appreciates Reduced Shakespeare’s irreverent approach to the sacred texts. Sign-waving protesters greeted the company’s Bible show when it played in Ireland. A lawyer in England tried unsuccessfully to use that country’s blasphemy laws to shut down the play. And in Texarkana, some religious students dramatically expressed their distaste for the troupe’s unique take on American history.

“One of the speeches in the history show is full of anagrams,” Martin recalls. “You rearrange the letters in American and it spells ‘I can ream.’ You rearrange the letters in George Washington and it spells ‘Gaggin’ on wet horse.’ And if you rearrange the letters in Spiro Agnew, it spells ‘Grow a penis.’ Right about then, we had 150 home schoolers in the balcony stand up in unison and walk out. So I think we did our job that day.”

But although the actors have fun with their source material, Martin says they also show it respect. In particular, he insists that the troupe was careful to make the Bible show “irreverent, but not blasphemous.” Religious people, he says, tend to enjoy the performance once they actually see it.

“Opening night in Ireland, we had four clergymen in the audience,” Martin says. “Three of them loved it, and one wasn’t that tickled by it. I don’t know that he found it blasphemous, but I think it just made him sort of uncomfortable. I guess if you’re sitting there in collar, every time a joke comes up, everybody looks at you to see if they can laugh.”

That respect also means that Reduced Shakespeare gets the facts straight, except when they skew for comic effect. Some even call the company’s work educational: Could this be the only way to get modern audiences to flock to see Shakespeare?

“Well, we’ve had that question in another form,” Martin says wryly. “The negative side is ‘Are you pandering to people’s short attention spans?’ … But I think we get people interested. People who don’t have a proclivity won’t go see Hamlet anyway. But we do definitely get teachers who tell us that the kids went to see our show and then they wanted to do Romeo and Juliet in the school production.”

Controversy, whether educational or religious, is not the main problem facing Reduced Shakespeare. The real challenge, Martin says, is finding new material, new cultural monuments to cut down to size. So what’s next on the troupe’s agenda?

“I just got back from Los Angeles, from rehearsing our new show, our first musical,” Martin says. “We’re condensing the Millennium. We’re calling it The Millennium Musical, Abridged to the 21st Century.”

The Reduced Shakespeare Company will perform The Bible–The Complete Word of God (Abridged) on Oct. 8 at 8 p.m. at the Sebastiani Theatre, on the downtown plaza, Sonoma. Tickets are $17 for adults, $12 for seniors and for children 12 and under. 996-2020.

From the September 24-30, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Center Stage

Music man: Bentley brings his cabaret act to Sonoma State on Sept. 29.

Author Eric Bentley still shaping theater

By Patrick Sullivan

FOR SOME FIVE decades, Eric Bentley has been a major force in the world of American theater. His criticism in The New Republic in the 1950s cut the likes of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller down to size. His own plays have provided fascinating reinterpretations of the lives of Galileo and Oscar Wilde. His books, such as The Playwright As Thinker, have helped shape contemporary ideas about the dramatic arts.

Last, but hardly least, Bentley’s translation and promotion of the works of Bertolt Brecht helped introduce the controversial German playwright’s work to the United States. Indeed, Brecht scholars have been eagerly awaiting the publication of Bentley’s latest work, Bentley on Brecht, due out this fall. That book was Bentley’s initial reason for his upcoming swing through the Bay Area, but things didn’t work out as planned.

“I was originally coming out to do some readings in bookstores of my new book,” Bentley says from his home in New York City. “But the book isn’t ready, and I’m coming anyway.”

Bentley, now 82, will instead appear at Sonoma State University on Sept. 29 to perform his unique cabaret act and to speak about his personal and professional relationship with Brecht.

But what exactly does Bentley think the world’s most famous communist playwright, who brought the class war to the stage, has to offer the apparently very capitalist world of the 1990s? Does Brecht have any relevance to contemporary theater?

“Well, yes, but I think it’s not along the lines of his politics,” Bentley says. “I was never really a part of that. I always maintained that Brecht’s work had merit quite independent of any communist propaganda. I’m glad I said that then, because it’s even more true now that the Soviet Union is gone. Either nothing is left or we’re left with good plays that simply happen to be good plays, like other people’s.”

Bentley first met Brecht in 1942 at UCLA and soon began translating the playwright’s work into English. It was Brecht’s strong interest in bringing ideas and issues to the stage that attracted the attention of Bentley.

“I was a budding playwright and an adapter of other people’s plays, and I was not happy with the theater scene as it was at the time,” Bentley says. “Brecht’s kind of theater appealed to me. It put me on a new track in my own life.”

After Bentley went on to become a theater critic, he quickly became well known for his blunt observations on contemporary drama. His caustic criticism put him at odds with some playwrights, including Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

“I had arguments, even quarrels with them,” Bentley recalls. “But I was harsh on Brecht too, at times. I suppose I was a contentious kind of critic.”

Miller and Williams even teamed up to threaten Bentley with a lawsuit in the early ’50s after the critic argued in print that the two playwrights owed much of their success to Elia Kazan, the director who brought their work to the stage. But the lawsuit vanished after the two realized they wouldn’t win.

Bentley’s life has been jam-packed with accomplishments of a wildly eclectic nature. The playwright also made a name as a scholar at some of the most prestigious educational institutions in America. In the late ’60s he came out of the closet and declared that he was gay–an experience that he says helped inspire Lord Alfred’s Lover, his play about Oscar Wilde. But surely the venerable Bentley’s most surprising accomplishment is his decades-long career performing in nightclubs, in which he plays music from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, among other works.

Still, Bentley’s first love remains the theater. So he was extremely pleased when he was recently inducted into New York’s Theater Hall of Fame, though it also felt a bit strange.

“I was very flattered, and the people who handled it were very nice,” Bentley says with a chuckle. “The fellow who presented the citation was the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, which I thought was good going for me and Brecht. We’re now recognized on Wall Street.”

Eric Bentley appears Sept. 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the Warren Auditorium, SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. Tickets are $10 for general admission, $6 for students and seniors. 664-2353.

From the September 24-30, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.