Play On: A San Francisco Theater Excursion

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President Charles H. P. Smith (Andrew Polk) and his speechwriter, Clarice Bernstein (RenÈ Augesen), share a quiet moment in the midst of the madness in "November" at A.C.T. Photo by Kevin Berne

When the final applause for "All's Well That Ends Well" fades a little after 10:30 tonight in the New Theatre, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will have ended for another season. With 11 plays stretching over an eight-month season, the OSF can sometimes seem like an endless feast, as befits one of the country's oldest and largest regional theaters.

But now it's going dark until February when the 2010 season will arrive. Your casual playgoer might make it through with a minimum of involuntary twitching of the facial muscles. And you might get by with a little help from your off-Bardway friends at the likes of Oregon Stage Works down the street and Camelot Theater up the road in Talent.

But hardcore theater junkies may find themselves going all Melville on us — growing grim about the mouth, wanting to step into the street and knock people's hats off, feeling damp, drizzly November creeping into their souls.

When this happens it's high time to get an out-of-town theater fix as soon as you can.

One strategy is to use the money you'd have spent on plane fare to New York to pay instead for a hotel in San Francisco, a short day's drive from Southern Oregon. The Bay Area is home to theaters of almost every stripe, from the patrician American Conservatory Theater to the very happening Berkeley Repertory Theatre to the risk-embracing Magic Theatre down to funky little storefronts and lofts South of Market and elsewhere. And that's not to mention the downtown stages that present those big, traveling Broadway shows.

We chose three of the best-known theaters in the Bay Area and saw four plays (counting as one a collection of five one-acts). All of them have substantial time remaining in their runs, and all are at well-known nonprofits with big-time reputations.

• We caught the first preview of David Mamet's cranky, over-the-top political comedy "November," which runs through Nov. 15 at A.C.T.
• At Berkeley Rep we saw "Tiny Kushner," five one-acts from the fevered brain of Tony Kushner, which plays on the 400-seat Thrust Stage through Nov. 29.
• At the Magic Theatre were John Kolvenbach's "Goldfish" and "Mrs. Whitney" playing in repertory, enabling playgoers to see both in one night. "Goldfish" runs through Nov. 8. We saw a preview of "Mrs. Whitney," a "Goldfish" spin-off that runs through Nov. 22.

Following are some notes on the plays.

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BERKELEY REP (2025 Addison St., Berkeley, 510-647-2949, berkeleyrep.org, tickets $13.50 to $71) started four decades ago in a storefront and won a Tony in 1997. It's hotter than ever, with two plays moving to Broadway and a rave New York Times review of its recently extended Green Day musical "American Idiot," which is based on the East Bay band's 2004 punk epic album.

Tony Taccone's production of Carrie Fisher's "Wishful Drinking" recently opened at Studio 54 in New York City, and Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)" will open at the Lyceum Theatre later this month (Ruhl wrote "Dead Man's Cell Phone," which played into June in the OSF's New Theatre).

All this caused the Rep's Elana McKernan to make up funny fake headlines ("Berkeley Rep boffo on B'way," "Organic free-range yoga cow takes a bite out of the Big Apple!"). Taccone insists that the Rep has its eyes fixed on its own audience, not New York. Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York's Public Theater, told San Francisco Chronicle critic Robert Hurwitt that the Rep's audience is much like New York's.

"It's a pretty good barometer of how things will fly here," he said.

Kushner is known for writing long, so for him an evening of one-acts is playing against type.

"For people who think I'm an unbearably long-winded playwright, 'Tiny Kushner' is proof that I can be unbearable in short plays as well!" he cracks in the Rep's program.

Good line, but of course he's anything but. People think of him as not just a gifted language slinger but this towering intellectual. Taccone thinks of him as a 200-year-old rabbi writing sketch comedy about the universe.

The scope of the five short plays that make up "Tiny Kushner" may not be universal, but it encompasses New York, California, Albania, the moon, the psychoanalyst's couch, the afterlife. Along the way we meet Laura Bush, Richard Nixon's shrink and the queen of Albania.

This is the show's West Coast premiere, produced in conjunction with the Guthrie in Minneapolis, where it premiered in June. Four actors (J.C. Cutler, Kate Eifrig, Jim Lichtscheidl and Valeri Mudek) play all the roles, and Taccone directed, brilliantly.

"East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues" is perhaps the most accessible of the five scripts. Based on a real case, it stars Lichtscheidl as at least a dozen characters — most of them New York cops and other public workers — arguing that they don't legally exist and thus owe the government nothing.

It's based on Jarvis, the anti-tax activist who in 1978 sparked California's Proposition 13, which set off the modern tax revolt and began the fiscal crippling of the state. In Lichtscheidl's hands, the true story of New York City employees in the '90s downloading Jarvis's cockamamy instructions (claim 98 dependents) to screw the government out of taxes is jaw-dropping as the actor morphs from one character into another and another.

From there "Tiny Kushner" opens up and out. "Flip, Flop, Fly!" imagines a meeting on the moon of Geraldine, Queen of Albania, who died at 87 in 2002, and Lucia Pamela, an eccentric American beauty queen who died the same year at age 98. Mudek is fey and loopy as the delusional Lucia, while Eifrig's unlikely life has been steeped in tragedy (WARNING: the script requires Mudek to brandish an accordion). Now they share the afterlife in a lunar purgatory that meets Sartre's definition of hell.

In one piece a therapist is as messed up as her patient, a trope we've seen before. After intermission we meet Dr. Hutshnecker, Nixon's analyst, who consults an angel, and, well, conservatives don't usually make out well in Kushner.

But it's in the evening's final sketch, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy," that the gloves come off. Laura Bush (Eifrig), a librarian after all, has been invited to read to a group of Iraqi kids killed in the American invasion of Iraq. She struggles in her ever-smiling way with the conflict between her literacy/humanity and her need/determination to turn a blind eye to the bloody human cost of her husband's war-by-mistake-or-whatever. As she explains to kids why they died (Saddam was a bad guy) it's provocative and painful and a little unfair and vivid theater.

"Tiny Kushner" is a zany treat for unabashed dramaphiles, intelligent, entertaining and steeped in a love of language. You almost have to be a Kushner to get an evening of one-acts on a major stage, and that's a shame. They're a vehicle for ideas too slight to go to feature length but still deserving of a life on the stage. There's even a theory that the YouTube generation, which is gonna struggle with "King Lear," eats up plays of 15 or 20 minutes like candy.

* * *

"NOVEMBER," now playing at A.C.T., (415 Geary St., San Francisco, 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org, tickets $10 to $82) is Mamet Lite. Just as Kushner has a long association with Berkeley Rep, Mamet has one with A.C.T.

As the one-liners fly and the yuks add up, it's hard to believe you're watching a political farce by the creator of "American Buffalo" and "Glengarry Glen Ross." What it looks and feels like is a sketch from TV's "Saturday Night Live" with some *&%#!@! Mamet language ladled on.

Challenging theater it ain't, but you have to admit, under the slam-bang direction of Ron Lagomarsino, it's funny as hell. Even though we saw a preview, and comedy is all about timing, the characters were finely honed and the pacing sharp.

President Charles "Chuckie" Smith (a very funny Andrew Polk) is the most corrupt, inept buffoon ever to sit in the oval office (vividly rendered in Erik Flatmo's set). Smith's liberal lesbian speechwriter wants him to marry her and her partner on national television, the Indians want a casino, and the Thanksgiving turkeys are awaiting his pardon, which he's not about to give for free.

In a bid for graft blatant enough to rival Spiro T. Agnew's reign as governor of Maryland, when everything had a price tag, Smith wants money from the turkey people, lots of it, in exchange for pardoning the turkeys for publicity.

Smith is our worst nightmare. He has Richard Nixon's ethics, Bill Clinton's chutzpah (but not the slick veneer) and George W. Bush's intellect. It's the final week of his campaign for a second term, and his poll numbers are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol.

The laughs come from set-ups followed by slam dunks. Smith: "Aren't we at war with China?"

Cynical advisor: "Not yet."

One thing about satire. The target should be worthy of the barbs. In corrupt politicians, Mamet squanders a lot of ammo shooting fish in a barrel. The play opened on Broadway about two years ago and undoubtedly had more edge prior to the November 2008 elections (although Smith is not Bush). But as the foibles of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford remind us, you should never sell short the American penchant for perpetual political scandal.

"November" won't make you think or feel deeply, but it will make you laugh. It's been called Mamet for people who don't like Mamet. You could also call it theater for people who like television.

One of the most prestigious theaters on the West Coast, A.C.T. has a small core of company actors who have the security of full-time contracts, several of whom are on display in "November." Although these characters are written in fewer than three dimensions, the actors find the laughs in them.

There's an Ashland connection, too. Former OSF actor Marco Barricelli came here when he left the OSF and more recently departed for New York. A.C.T.'s Main Stage season runs from Dickens to Racine to Brecht and includes such tasty fare as Barricelli returning with Olympia Dukakis to star in Morris Panych's "Vigil," opening March 25.

* * *

MAGIC Theatre (Fort Mason Center, Bldg. D, 415-441-8822, www.magictheatre.org, tickets $25 to $45, some $15 rush tickets) has, like Berkeley Rep and A.C.T., a history that goes back to the 1960s. It bills itself as the second-largest theatre in San Francisco, and it seems to have made a career of living on the edge in the financially fraught world of nonprofit theater.

In December Artistic Director Loretta Greco announced the Magic had so much debt ($600,000) that it would shut its doors in January unless it raised $350,000 more or less immediately. The community quickly coughed up $450,000 in a measure of the depth of feeling for Magic in the Bay Area.

The theater has offered many world and Bay Area premieres, nurtured Sam Shepard and staged the work of four Pulitzer Prize winners, including most recently Nilo Cruz.

More Southern Oregon connections: Greco directed "Romeo and Juliet" and "Stop Kiss" at OSF, and the OSF has produced Cruz's "Lorca in a Green Dress" and "Two Sisters and a Piano."

In John Kolvenbach, the Magic has evidently found another favorite, mounting two of his plays in repertory this fall. "Goldfish" was commissioned by Orange County's South Coast Rep and premiered there. "Mrs. Whitney" was commissioned by Steppenwolf in Chicago and is having its world premiere production. Greco directed an understated but emotional "Goldfish," and Kolvenbach himself directed "Mrs. Whitney," which is related to "Goldfish" through theme and characters.

In "Goldfish," 19-year-old straight arrow Albert (Andrew Pastides) sets aside the rent money for his dysfunctional, gambling-addicted father, Leo (the amazing Bay Area actor Rod Gnapp, a graduate of A.C.T.), and goes off to a ritzy college. There he falls in love with the lovely Lucy (Anna Bullard), who has to prod him to face his feelings. He's a duck out of water but should be OK because of all that money ensuring everything's OK back home, right? Um, not so much.

With its gritty dialog and Greco's rendering of Kovlenbach's pregnant silences, "Goldfish" introduces us to the formidable Mrs. Whitney (Patricia Hodges), Lucy's mother. We come face to face with the black hole of family energy that is Leo. He's the most complex character in the play, rent by a fierce love for his son and an absolute inability to fight off his demons.

A goldfish will eat itself to death, and "Goldfish," like its namesake, is a comedy without a traditional end. It's graced by fine acting, including a bravura performance by Gnapp.

Yet it's not Leo but Mrs. Whitney who wormed her way into Kolvenbach's brain to the point where she demanded a spin-off of her own.

"I am a romantic," she announces in the beginning of "Mrs. Whitney."

Which would explain that cynical armor she wore so deliciously in "Goldfish." This time out Albert and Lucy are married and living in Spain and never show up. Margaret Whitney tests the common wisdom that you can't go back by suddenly deciding to look up her ex, who was a mess, but made her feel alive. Is that wise?

"I'm sure it's not,' she says.

The ex, Tom (played by Gnapp, which is a tad confusing because it looks as if Leo has jumped plays), has made a life-long career of marrying different women and disappearing from his life for long periods of time. He is in fact absent again when Margaret comes calling and is welcomed by wife number five, Louisa (Arwen Anderson). When Tom appears, as he must, he's as incapable of coping as ever.

"Do you think I can knock myself out with this?" he asks, brandishing a dictionary.

In contrast to the characters of "Goldfish," who seem weighted down with heavy burdens, those of "Mrs. Whitney" seem disconnected from their lives and personalities, as if they might almost float away. The resolution is as breathtakingly brave as it is implausible.

Kolvenbach is writing about deep stuff of the heart, here. His characters' skins seem barely able to contain them, so close to the surface are their nerves. Yet their endless desiring and bouts of lyrical silences sometimes give way to a pained articulateness that is affecting.

In "Goldfish" it's about the parent/child bond; in "Mrs. Whitney" the focus shifts to the nature of lasting love, if such a tattered thing is still possible. Kolvenbach has a gift of making you laugh while he breaks your heart.

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