THE QUALITY OF LIFE at The Pear Avenue Theatre

I hope you can come to see this wonderful play by Jane Anderson playing through February 23rd at The Pear Avenue Theatre.

www.thepear.org for tickets.

Dissecting Mamet

Directing "Speed-the Plow" has been a challenging and engaging experience. The dialog is difficult for the actors, and even though it seems on first reading to be somewhat broad and disjointed, the writing actually requires a high degree of specificity from a directorial standpoint as well as from an acting standpoint. For instance there are moments when a one of the characters is angry about something. As I work the scene with the actor it becomes obvious that the anger needs to display a certain type of anger. It has to be seen as more of a frustrated sort of anger than a vengeful type of anger. The lines after the outburst simply don't make sense if the appropriate type of anger isn't displayed.

After discovering this, another problem surfaces. You want the actor to respond in a realistic meaningful way that doesn't involve the "forcing" of any particular emotion. So, how do you get the actor to display a particular shade of anger without it becoming forced or fake? It requires a conversation with the actor about the situation and why a more frustrated anger is supported by the given circumstances of the play. Hopefully, you have cast actors that are versatile enough to understand shades of gray and to translate them into grounded and poignant moments on stage. I am happy to say that our cast is exquisite in this respect.

We have a month before the show opens and we are in great shape. One advantage of not having to hire Equity actors is that you can afford to spend more time than normal on a difficult script. This has certainly been the case with this particular play.

More to come soon......

The Circle by Somerset Maugham

The Pear Avenue Theatre is currently running Somerset Maugham's greatest work, "The Circle", running through February 1st. The writing is just fabulous. I had know familiarity with Maugham other than for his novels. The play is full of biting humor and wit. I found it thoroughly entertaining. The director, Bill Kenney, and his actors do an excellent job of bringing this rarely done play to life.

Where: The Pear Avenue Theatre
1220 Pear Avenue, Mtn. View, CA
www.thepear.org
Runs through February 1st.

P.S. - It seems as though The Magic is out of the woods for now, having raised barely enough to keep their doors open for a while longer. This is very good news.

San Francisco Theater Festival

Last year I had the opportunity to perform in a short piece at the San Francisco Theater Festival. This thing is a blast! I highly recommend that you go and check it out!

This year I get to do it again with The Pear.

There will be everything you can imagine there and it's all free.

Featured at the 2008 festival:

-AfroSolo presents Angela Dean-Baham as Black Patti
-Amiri Baraka’s provocative plays of black experience, including his new play, “Sisyphus Syndrome”
-Lamplighters Music Theatre’s “The Mikado”
-Best of Playground’s one act plays
-Aleshia Brevard & Gina Grahame's transsexual production of "One Damn Man!"
-Oh My Godmother, gay Cinderella
-Best of the Buddy Club, 16 great children’s shows
-Improv Groups: Blue Blanket, BATS, SPF7, Big City & Stagebridge's Over-50 Improv
- The Pear Avenue Theatre performs two short pieces

The Pear Avenue Theatre

The Pear Avenue Theatre


The Pear is producing a world premiere of a fantastic award winning play called Homeland Prayer by Jeff Carter. I know it's a good play because I've read it a few times. It's about a family dealing with the return home of a wounded soldier. Timely, and poignant, Homeland Prayer glimpses into the hidden tragedy of war.

Running at The Pear from June 27 to July 13.
Tickets

Look! “Creatively staged” Northanger Abbey is a hit at the Pear!

Diane Tasca, the Pear's Artistic Director, has written a fabulous adaptation to Jane Austen's, Northanger Abbey. It's playing at The Pear Avenue Theatre through June 8th. I haven't seen it yet, but it looks like people are loving it.

Below is what Director, Rebecca Ennals, has to say about audience enthusiasm for this remarkable show.

"Reviews are coming in for “Northanger Abbey” at the Pear Ave. Theatre, and they’re great! We’ve heard from the San Jose Metro, KQED, and, most importantly, the audience.

• “Throughout the play, the audience is treated to energetic, physical performances by the actors that go far beyond mere blocking. At times, the cast is called upon to dance, speaking their lines as they twirl, lock elbows, and promenade. Indeed, the entire play feels like a work of choreography, which makes it a delight to the eye… The stars of the show, though, are Austen's words, and the way in which Ennals has chosen to frame and illuminate them.” – Ben Marks, KQED

• “The Pear's gleeful creativity, under director Rebecca J. Ennals, brings out the youthful humor of the book in which 22-year-old Austen poked fun at Gothic novels like Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho… Ennals turns the production's sparse set and multipurpose cast into a source for comedy… Austen is meant to be sipped on a lazy afternoon, and this cast has the charm to make a pleasant sipping tea.” – Marianne Messina, SJ Metro (don’t read the whole review if you haven’t seen the show, too many spoilers!)

• “I went last night with my husband, 14 year old daughter, and 12 year old son, and we all loved it. It was funny, engaging, and the acting was superb. We highly recommend this performance!” – Mary from Menlo Park, posted on Artsopolis.com

• “Extra Kudos to the most creative staging I have seen in forever, the choices made were fresh and fun, both simple and complex at the same time, and were so intricately woven into the script, and all the other technical designs.” – Susannah from San Jose, posted on Artsopolis.com

I am so proud of this show and this cast, and I really want you to come! The Pear tends to sell out, so get your tickets early – we’re sold out for tonight and getting close for later dates. My production of Arcadia sold out the whole run there last year, including added shows, and we can’t extend. We run Thursdays-Sundays through June 8 – visit The Pear Web Site for tickets and details."

Read a very interesting review of this show on another Blog.

Two Excellent Reviews for Pear Slices 2008

Review from the Mountain View Voice.

Arts & Entertainment - Friday, April 18, 2008
Superb slices from The Pear

by Alexa Tondreau
Who knew the folks at Mountain View's Pear Avenue Theatre were such serious multi-taskers?

Not only have they established themselves as being top-notch actors, directors and producers, but with Pear Slices 2008, these thespians have proved once and for all they can write, too.

Running through April 27, Pear Slices — now in its fifth year — is a unique treat of a theatrical experience. Perfect for the sort of crowd with attention spans attuned to television's eight- to 12-minute intervals between commercials, Pear Slices presents eight short plays over the course of a two-hour production. Each slice is written by a member of The Pear's writer's guild, and this year's selection includes a diverse group of material.

For instance, Pear Slices begins with a short called "Miss Direction," by V.B. Leghorn, which details the obsessive and stalker-ish relationship between a car's automated navigation system (personified with great comedic timing by Camila Frausto) and the car's driver. Sample line: "You hurt me to the micro-grade."

Sound unusual? Not compared to the next piece, "The Near-Death Experiment," by Richard Medugno, which tells the story of a serial killer on death row who, as part of an experiment hatched by an ambitious doctor, is momentarily killed and brought back to life again in order to study the transformative effects of such an experience.

If there is any unifying theme among the Pear Slices of 2008, it seems that a certain penchant for the bizarre and surreal connects the theatrical material in them all. And a sign of the high quality of writing here is that the playwrights successfully pull off a number of challenging themes which might have appeared silly or trivial in lesser hands.

Caryn Huberman's "Pig Me, Act II" manages to make the relationship between human and pig a nuanced and intimate thing. What appears at first to be a completely outlandish proposal on the playwright's part — that a woman and her talking pig live together, and that the pig has been genetically modified to provide her with replacement organs — turns into a sad yet powerful story about cross-species love and loyalty.
About half way through "Pig Me," you have the unnerving realization that you've become emotionally invested in the strange material. It's a feeling that comes again and again while watching Pear Slices.

Just as important in these productions are the eight actors, who make multiple appearances in a variety of challenging roles. John Romano and Ray Renati, who were so good as dueling brothers in The Pear's recent production of "True West," appear frequently and continue to raise the bar for acting on The Pear's stage. Romano is particularly memorable when playing Salvador Dali in Ross Peter Nelson's "Allegorical Construction with Ectoplasm and Soft Cheese, Act II," uttering such lines as "Dali is a flaming giraffe!" and "My madness is that I believe I'm not mad!" with total dead-pan sincerity.

Pear Slices has become one of Mountain View's best artistic traditions. Nestled just a block from the expansive Microsoft campus and situated on land recently purchased by Google, the theater reminds us that in the land of technology titans, the small, intimate and quirky deserve a place too.

Review from Metro Active.

Juicy

Pear Avenue presents eight short 'slices' of theater in one night

By Marianne Messina

THIS YEAR'S "Pear Slices" production at the Pear Avenue Theatre is a humorous eight-pack of 20-minute plays with quirky premises and surprisingly well-rounded arcs. Written by a handful of local playwrights and performed by an astute, versatile cast, the plays roll smoothly from one to the other by way of music, created by Michael Pease, which sets upcoming moods and themes. For example, the Beatles' song "Piggies" ("Have you seen the little piggies crawling in the dirt?") introduces Caryn Huberman's play Pig Me, in which a woman (Corrie Borris) befriends the articulate pig (Camila Frausto in pig nose) created with her DNA to be her future organ donor. In an acting tour de force, eight actors recycle through wildly varied characterizations; most ubiquitous is the all-purpose Ray Renati.

In V.B. Leghorn's play Miss Direction, Renati is a man in midlife crisis and the object of his Global Positioning System's affections (Frausto makes an amazing Grace, the GPS, producing the familiar digital-voice hitches to a T). A few moments later, Renati is in uniform guarding and abusing Luke (Matt Sameck), a criminal about to undergo an experimental cure in The Near-Death Experiment by Richard Medugno. Suddenly, in Ross Peter Nelson's Cheese Cubed, Renati plays a mop-haired film crewman working for Jessica's (like Sally Jessie) nasty talk show, and Frausto, the formerly bodiless GPS, has become the glamorous talk-show host with an underhanded modus operandi. She pits an unsuspecting art-gallery expert (Monica Cappuccini) against a former nemesis (John Romano), a pretentious artist.

Romano, who also plays the withdrawn, work-focused doctor testing his hypothesis in The Near-Death Experiment, goes on to play an extroverted, self-congratulating Salvador Dali—red sash, flowing cape, scrolling mustachio—in Allegorical Construction With Ectoplasm and Soft Cheese (also by Nelson). Romano's chest-thrusting Dali is as fascinating as Cappuccini's Gala, a brooding, dominant woman in flowing dark hair, fluttery gold dress and black beads (costumes by Mae Heagerty Matos and Gail Farmer). With two projected images, the play draws a comparison between a Dali painting and a photograph from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, suggesting how one inspired the other by way of a few "ectoplasmic" (deceased) visitors.

Directed either by Kristen Lo or Michael Pease in no particular order, the plays have simple blue-box sets, dressed with the occasional coconut palm tree (Ron Gasparinetti, set design) and ending with a king-size bed for the Dali slice and The Perfect Match. In the latter, in a kind of reverse psychology, a woman picks up a man for no-strings sex, and their mutual distaste for forming any kind of bond becomes their special bond. Possibly the most serious "slice," Paul Braverman's The Castaway, manages to draw us into the inside of a bipolar man's worldview. Gradually, as Donny's (Sameck) interpretation melts into the "real facts," the play shifts from funny to poignant. Years past have included the sinister and the sad among the eight Pear Slices, but this year's fare keeps it light—other than The Castaway and a sentimental moment in Pig Me—and instead, the slices draw their eight engaging journeys from the ironic, the clever and the revelatory.

PEAR SLICES, eight short plays presented by Pear Avenue Theatre, plays Thursday–Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm at the Pear, 1220 Pear Ave., Unit K, Mountain View. Tickets are $15–$30. (650.254.1148)

Google Takes Over The Pear

The Pear Avenue Theatre is about to be crushed by the Goliath on the block. Google has recently purchased The Pear's building in a defensive move against Microsoft who's trying to take over the Mountain View neighborhood. Will the little Pear be smashed by the two monsters at war? It looks like October will mark the witching hour..
Read on...

New Works Festival at The Pear

Bravo Pear! New works are what keep theatre alive and vital and The Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View is dedicated to giving new playwrights there moment in the sun each season. Coming up is The Pear's annual one act festival featuring plays from The Pear's playwright's guild. Take a look ....

Review of The Pear's "True West"

There's a nice review of True West on the KQED web site. Check it out.
True West is currently showing at The Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View.
Check out www.thepear.org for details.



Theater Review : True West

Somewhere in the thick of True West, Sam Shepard's classic tale of brothers, alcohol, Hollywood -- and toasters, ne'er-do-well Lee tells his younger, Ivy League-educated, screenwriter brother, Austin, about an idea he has for a movie. Lee's story is a preposterous riff on Steven Spielberg's first full-length film, Duel, in which Dennis Weaver is stalked by the mysterious driver of a menacing 18-wheeler. Like Weaver and the truck in Duel, Lee's pair tear up a lot of asphalt. Unlike the characters in Duel, Lee's cartoon daydreams dodge twisters in the Texas panhandle, run out of gas on cue, and then continue their four-wheel struggle on four legs. (Did I mention that both drivers are conveniently pulling horse trailers?)

Austin, the artiste, is appalled by the stupidity of his oafish older brother's story, embarrassed that he could even be related to someone whose mind could harbor such implausibly idiotic plot twists. But Lee has a metaphysical side. "The one who's chasin' doesn't know where the other one is takin' him," Lee explains. "The one who's being chased doesn't know where he's going." more...

True West is Coming

Get ready for TRUE WEST at The Pear opening Jan. 11. As you can see the set is coming along and the actors are hard at work. You might want to wear a raincoat to this show as things may get a little messy near the end.