Mention the size of the Shotgun Players' Love Is a Dream
House in Lorin to another company's artistic director, and the response
is always the same: "[Patrick] Dooley is insane." It's
been a burning question this season: How will the Shotgunners get
a whopping thirty people onto their postcard-size stage? It's not
much bigger than the Aurora's, and the Aurora's Tom Ross once told
me that when he put more than eight people on his stage, fisticuffs
broke out backstage.
So how does Dream House's director Aaron Davidman do it? As soon
as possible, that's how. At the beginning of both the first and
second acts, he floods the stage with actors, overlapping poetry
and song as they come in. It's impressive, particularly in the second
act when they're all wearing bright red choir robes. Ranging in
age over an extraordinary sixty-year span, the cast includes Berkeley
High students, a mother-daughter pair, and a retired Berkeley art
prof. It's also one of the most diverse casts to grace an East Bay
stage in a long time, appropriate for a show that's not only a play,
but a celebration of and for the community.
Shotgun commissioned Marcus Gardley to write a play based on interviews
with residents of the Lorin district, the area the theater has called
home since 2004. The story centers on a young mixed-race couple
buying the rundown house of the title. Cynical Adeline hates it
("I smell dogshit," she complains. "What you smell
is history," the slick Realtor responds), but her optimistic
husband Russell, the sort of man who dances from place to place,
loves it because it reminds him of Adeline when he first met her.
Some of Gardley's funniest zingers come out of their dialogue —
"You wouldn't even have to wear a bra," Russell points
out to Adeline as a reason they should live in Berkeley. She acquiesces,
and they begin a journey into the house's rich and sad past, from
its faithless architect to everyone who has since lived in it.
Shotgun has long battled uneven acting, which is probably a consequence
of often using actors with more potential and energy than experience.
That's not all bad, of course; regular audiences have gotten to
watch certain actors blossom with the company. While the current
show is no exception — there is some unintentional awkwardness,
and actors were struggling with their lines opening night —
for some reason, it's not as obvious as you would expect in a large
cast with so many untried performers. Davidman's actors, who apparently
bonded easily and early in the process, are on the same page, and
he keeps them there. And then he keeps the sprawling story moving,
even though it jumps all over time, if not space.
Gardley has loaded the story with larger-than-life characters —
Brian Rivera's rubbery zoot-suited Coyote hissing "I will eat
you, bitch" at a Spanish missionary, then turning to a surfer-dude
Jesus, who greets him with "What up, dawg?" Jeanette DesBoine
is salty neighborhood matriarch Aunt Woolsey ("Sit that ass
down, you're making my plants nervous"), and Tamiyka White's
Pastor Grant opens up the second act so beautifully with a buoyant
sermon that honors the theater building's origins as a church. But
even the less extreme characters are engaging — check out
Nicholas Guillory as an angry young man who carries his copy of
Soul on Ice around with him for years, or the neighbor (Anne Healy)
who, when she shows up to welcome the new arrivals, invites them
to join her and her girlfriend for a nice day trip to the Livermore
Lab to get arrested.
There's a lot of humor in the script, between the shootings and
the sibling rivalries and the sad moments — Japanese families
being forced to leave their homes, people losing their spouses,
a family seeing off their son to Vietnam. There's also a lot of
singing, but this is not a musical. And unlike the summer's Ragnarok,
which was one long dirge, there's variety and brightness here, from
the Andrews Sisters-like trio of Winds to a crew of men singing
as they build the house to the whole group singing gospel or that
they are "dancing on the brink of the world."
The second act is not as focused as the first, although that may
reflect last-minute script changes meant to keep up with current
events in the neighborhood. Things get a little preachy and diffuse,
although the moment where one young person takes another to task
for using the word "nigga" is nicely done. It feels as
if Gardley couldn't decide on an ending, so he put in a few different
ones. But overall Dream House is a surprising chance to learn about
the neighborhood that cradles the theater, from a poetic description
of how to make umeboshi (many of South Berkeley's plum trees were
planted by Japanese immigrants who craved pickled plums) to the
Ohlone creation myth. It's also a moving and lively celebration
of Lorin's people and history that does not gloss over some of the
area's very real problems. Community concerns that the finished
play would not represent Lorin in the most positive light can be
put to rest. The creative team always envisioned this show as a
gift to the community, and it really is: loving, generous, and smart.
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