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SF Chronicle, September 24, 2006

 

NEIGHBORHOOD THEATER
Block by Block, the Shotgun Players bring life in
the Lorin district of South Berkeley to the stage.

-- By Janet Wells


Three years ago, the Shotgun Players theater company moved into a barrel-vaulted building across the street from the Ashby BART station. Company members were thrilled, not only about having their first permanent home, but also because it was in South Berkeley, a neighborhood that had been the canvas for some of their most memorable productions.

There was the jam-packed performance of Agatha Christie's "Verdict" in the back of a print shop on Adeline Street, closed down by a police officer who couldn't understand what 100 people were doing gathered on the sidewalk at night (it was intermission). Then the season the company staged productions like "Man and Superman" and "The 8th Voyage of Sinbad" at the South Berkeley Community Church on Fairview Street, but only after Shotgun founder and Artistic Director Patrick Dooley went door to door with the pastor to get
approval from the neighbors.

South Berkeley was a perfect fit for Shotgun, diverse and dynamic, simpatico with the company's ideals of artistic exploration and inclusion. They revamped the building into the Ashby Stage, and organized an open house, inviting everyone in the neighborhood to check out its newest cultural resource. No one showed up.

"We were perceived as outsiders," said Dooley, 38. "I had a woman come up to me and say, 'You kicked our grandma out of her church.' " Never mind that the church had re-located five years earlier. Dooley's disappointment was compounded by the inauspicious welcome he and his wife, Kimberly, had received after buying a house in the neighborhood the year before. Their car was stolen two days after bringing their new daughter home from the hospital. They heard gunfire that killed a man
the next block over. They had stuff stolen off their porch.

Dooley and his wife couldn't afford to live in a neighborhood where those kinds of events weren't part of the deal, and, besides, they didn't want to leave. They liked the diverse history, architecture and culture of South Berkeley, and Dooley wanted to see his neighbors at the Ashby Stage.

But he couldn't figure out how to connect to the community. One day, while voicing his frustrations on a stroll along Solano Avenue -- across the city, and a world away from South Berkeley -- friend and fellow theater director Aaron Davidman suggested a different tack: Put the neighborhood on stage. Because there was no ready-made play that captured the essence of South Berkeley, Davidman, 39, artistic director of the Traveling Jewish Theatre, suggested they do one, modeling it on the community-based work of the Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles. Not to be confused with community theater, which showcases local amateur actors in the umpteenth production of "The Music Man," community-based theater is a collaboration, with professional artists tapping into a community's history and experience. The Laramie Project and the work of solo performance artist Anna Deavere Smith are some recent examples of theater built on interviews with individuals, putting their stories onto the stage.

While performance is usually the end point in traditional theater, with community based projects it's as much about the process, said Jan Cohen-Cruz, associate professor of drama at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and author of "Local Acts: Community Based Performance in the United States." Listening to people's stories and soliciting their feedback on a work-in-progress can be a springboard, a kind of community therapy that continues after the performances end.

"When it works, it can be very powerful," said Cohen-Cruz. Dooley and Davidman started by commissioning Marcus Gardley, a 28-year-old New York playwright. His professional pedigree -- Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama, work that had received awards and acclaim -- was impressive, but even more important: Gardley grew up in West Oakland.

As a kid, he ate at Lois the Pie Queen, he played in Grove Park. He understood
what it was like to live in a neighborhood rife with drugs and crime. His mother refused to let him and his siblings play outside. His sister was stabbed, and almost died. Gardley also grew up hearing from his great-grandmother -- who worked in
a laundry and lived in a garage after moving to Oakland from Louisiana -- that South Berkeley was where the rich black people lived. He had never thought of it as a nexus of dramatic tension. "But the more I learned, the more I realized there's a lot going on here," he said.

For almost a year, the three researched the neighborhood. They interviewed Melody Ermachild Chavis, who wrote "Altars in the Street," a neighborhood memoir based on her years living on Fairview Street amid the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s. They trolled the archives of the Berkeley Historical Society and the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. They peeled back the layers, going back to the time of the Ohlone Indians.

"You can't just tell about what's happening now. It's a product of what happened 40 years ago. And that was a product of what happened before that," Dooley said. "There's history that's in the dirt. In a creek that runs under Tyler Street, under the road. It's covered over, but when there's a flood, you're reminded it's there."

Dooley, who grew up in Virginia, in a house built during the Civil War, clearly is fascinated by the history of place. By now, he knows South Berkeley block by block. He gave an animated oral tour of the neighborhood, reeling off facts, leaning forward in his chair, lifting his visor on and off his head, traces of his Southern accent poking through the faster he talked.

In the late 1800s, he said, the area got its residential start from a farmer-turned-developer who built houses on spec near a Union Pacific railroad station at Alcatraz and Adeline streets. Developed as a separate community from Oakland and Berkeley, the district was variously called Alcatraz, Garfield and Lorin, according to the Berkeley Historical Society. The town got its name when it applied to establish a U.S. Post Office: Garfield was already taken, so the community settled for Lorin.
Both Oakland and Berkeley wooed the community, but by the early 1900s a
majority of the residents had voted to be annexed to the city of Berkeley.

Some who lived along the Alcatraz Street corridor, however, voted to go with Oakland, giving Berkeley its zigzag southern boundary. Racist real estate covenants made Lorin one of the only places in Berkeley that African Americans and Japanese could buy houses. When World War II brought the involuntary relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps, many of their homes were purchased by African Americans migrating from the South to fill shipyard and factory jobs in the East Bay. Lorin became an entertainment destination for African Americans, with live music and theater. But the boom didn't last. With the end of the war came the
loss of high paying blue-collar jobs. Shops closed. Whole blocks of once stately Craftsman and Victorian homes became dilapidated, boarded up.

By the early 1980s, South Berkeley was being torn apart by the influx of crack cocaine, unemployment and gang violence. Today, the old issues still simmer, with the newer pressures of gentrification and a mercurial economy. To gather personal perspectives from the community, the Shotgun Players organized more than a dozen story circles, listening to neighborhood archivists and activists, students and folks from the South Berkeley Senior Center and the South Berkeley Community Church. At first, many of the participants didn't believe they had anything of value to share, said Dooley. So he would ask them to describe a local store where they used to shop, or a memory from the 1970s, or what they remembered of the
Japanese internment. Or, simply what was on their mind. "Then they'd talk for
half an hour," he said.

Gardley did phone interviews, and flew out six times from New York, focusing on the neighborhood's young people, talking to kids hanging out on the street, as well as residents attending Berkeley High School and Berkeley Alternative High School. One subject that kept coming up -- the tension between old and young -- would become a lighting rod for the play.

"It's such a large gap, the miscommunication between older people and young people, and that's the tragedy. I remember that growing up," Gardley said. "Older people didn't bother to listen. Young people had nothing to say to them."

In June, Gardley wrote in residence in South Berkeley, distilling enough material for a Wagnerian-length work to a two-hour play. That doesn't mean "Love is a Dream House in Lorin" shies away from covering a vast emotional landscape. The play has a cast of 25 characters -- all named after streets in the neighborhood -- and touches on religious and ethnic diversity, racial tension, drugs, murder, marriage and parenting, sibling rivalry, the generation gap, property values and the making of umeboshi, Japanese pickled plums.

As part of the collaborative process, Shotgun held a reading in July of a draft version of the first two acts of the play, inviting the community to attend and give feedback. Flyers stapled to telephone poles around the neighborhood promised a comedy, a tragedy and a love story all rolled into one, and, afterward, pie from a local bakery.

Once again, Dooley thought they'd been snubbed. "At 15 minutes to 1, there were 10 people in the audience. No one was saying it, but it was my worst nightmare. I thought the community doesn't care, they're not interested. And I had just spent $240 on pie," he said.

Dooley had cause to be worried: some 85 percent of Americans don't attend
live theater. One of the reasons? "They don't feel that what they care about will be on the stage," said Cohen-Cruz.

But at a few minutes before 1 p.m., Dooley said, "There was a line out the door. We ran out of places to put people." Dooley asked how many in the audience had come to the 99-seat theater for the first time. A third raised their hands. Others had been in the building, but not since it was the South Berkeley Church of Christ.

What had spurred them to venture in? Perhaps because community-based theater has something that traditional stage performance lacks. "For the audience and community, it's inclusive," Davidman said. "The community has participated by telling their stories. Whether or not their stories wind up on stage explicitly, there's an investment in it."

At a lively talk-back session after the reading, it was clear the play had
connected. Many of the comments were appreciative. But there was criticism
-- about the portrayal of racial tension and property values, about the liberal use of profanity and racial epithets. Gardley said that in response he removed some of the profanity -- not because he's worried about offending people, but because he doesn't want it to be a distraction.

"I felt like, to be honest, that the community honed in on (profanity) because there are issues that are more pressing that they don't want to talk about." He cited the area's high infant mortality rate, and the fatal March shooting of a young father supervising a teenage dance party as examples of issues that are "too personal, too hard to deal with."

"When I was doing interviews, the n-word never came up," Gardley added. "People said, 'I'm afraid' or 'My neighbors never leave their house.' The n-word, that can be taken out. But is that what you're upset with, really?"

D. Anthony Harper, an actor who lived in South Berkeley as a child and plays King in the play, thought it was a good sign that the talk-back "got a little heated. If you're affecting someone, whether they like or dislike it, it's making people think," he said.

Davidman, the play's director, agreed. "Part of the whole point is to bring up stories that people have a hard time hearing, a hard time telling," he said. "Story telling is such a powerful tool and process for community reconciliation, community conversation."

Already, the project has created a buzz in -- and about -- the neighborhood. Local residents -- some who had never before been onstage -- showed up to audition for the play, and several won roles in the cast. The reading was packed, and afterward, residents like 66-year-old Cora Brown, secretary of the South Berkeley Community Church and one of the many story circle participants said of the play, "I feel like it's part me in there, like it's mine, my baby."

The impact has even crept into the real estate market. In May, Prudential Realtor Nancy Taussig listed a 1904 row house on Ellis Street as being in the "hip Lorin District," and gave a plug to the Shotgun Players' "neighborhood stories" project. Did it increase the value of the house? "What can I tell you," she said, "It went for $100,000 over [the asking price]."

Dooley hopes the reverberations continue -- after the performances, and beyond South Berkeley. Initially he wondered if the project would result in a play that was too provincial, the "I'm from North Berkeley or I'm from San Francisco or I'm from Oakland. What should I care?" syndrome, he said. "But it's a great story that transcends the location. When you get in there, you find out that every community has got its things, and even if you're not from that place, you can see yourself in that place."

"Love Is a Dream House in Lorin" opens Thursday at the Ashby Stage, with previews on Tuesday and Wednesday. The first week admission is pay-what-you can. Janet Wells last wrote a My Word for the Magazine about her Lorin district house.




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