Election Section

Shotgun Players Open ‘Dog Act’ At New Home: By KEN BULLOCK

Special to the Planet
Tuesday September 28, 2004

“An apocalypse can be a funny thing.” 

It seems appropriate that, after long peregrinations of their own, the Shotgun Players are opening their first season at their new home, Ashby Stage (1901 Ashby Ave., across from Ashby BART), with Dog Act, Liz Duffy Adams’ play about wandering vaudevillean survivors of an apocalypse who’re just trying to make it to China for a gig.  

Dog Act, inspired by “a vision of a small group of people toiling across...bleak wintry marshes...carrying...something” (glimpsed from an Amtrak train, New York City to Boston, 1998), features a strange band of travelers on “a quest to survive in a world turned inside-out.” All the characters (played by Shotgun members Beth Donohue and Dave Meyer, joined by Richard Bolster, Eric Burns, C. Dianne Manning and Rami Margron) play musical instruments that Stewart Port has fashioned from found objects.  

It’s an after-the-end-of-the-world, neovaudevillian tale of performer Rozetta Stone (Beth Donohue) and her companion, Dog (voluntarily demoted in species from young man—Richard Bolster), on the road to their next gig—if they can ever make it to China, and find it when they get there.  

On an appropriately bare stage, Rozetta’s cart (which unfolds into a stage, and is coveted by Vera Similitude—Dianne Manning) provides the focus, though it’s really the ensemble’s acting and the strange, rhythmic quality of the spoken text that carry the show...and singing: Rozetta and Dog sing to each other to communicate, and the cast sings new lyrics to old tunes, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” being one (with the forlorn cart as backdrop). 

Phrases like “an owl” become “nowl”—and the changed times are expressed in other ways: tribal loyaties, codes of the performers and profane scavengers, with constant testing of other survivors to measure their authenticity. The play’s deliberately slow in establishing character’s identities and relationships, and ends with a rehearsal of the show Rozetta hopes to take to China (from a ruined North America? it’s never really clear), a kind of Creation Myth, new and old—though not exactly a Miracle Play...  

Originally premiered at the 2002 Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, Dog Act’s directed by Kent Nicholson, director of new works for TheatreWorks on the Peninsula—a prolific director, who directed Adams’ Wet at NYC’s Summer Play Festival (and filled in admirably for a sick cast member the night this reporter was in the house). 

It’s all part of Shotgun’s program to support and produce new plays and experimental work in the Bay Area. That commitment is made clear by what’s been going on at the Ashby Stage even before Shotgun’s homecoming on Wednesday: Their Theatre Lab was producing Susannah Martin’s work-in-progress, The Faith Project, midweek while Oakland-based Iranian company Darvag staged The Death of Yazdgerd weekends, with personnel familiar to Shotgun audiences wearing various hats in the show. 

This community spirit will continue, at a time when most urgently needed in the current California scene of slippery funding with theater space bartered out like trophy homes. The Eastenders, for instance, whose series A Century of Political Theater just finished at San Francisco’s Eureka Theater, will return to the East Bay this spring with original plays, one by founding Artistic Director Charles Polly, to be staged at the Ashby. 

The Shotgun Players have made many a gig themselves at a variety of venues since their founding in 1992, when Artistic Director Patrick Dooley and about a dozen others put on David Mamet’s Edmund in the basement of LaVal’s Northside pizzeria. They’ve covered plays from Sophocles and Euripides, through Shakespeare and Marlowe, to Chekhov, Brecht and Genet—as well as experimental pieces and originals, like last year’s hit, The Death of Meyerhold—on stages indoors and out, the old UC cinema to the Julia Morgan Theater, John Hinkel Park to San Francisco’s McLaren Park Amphitheatre. 

The Shotgun Players have always been ambitious; settling down isn’t likely to decrease their vigor. This is one gig on their own stage these heretofore-wandering players have not only made, but one they may be playing (with many different texts) for quite awhile.