Arts Listings

The Theater: TheatreFIRST Stages ‘365’ Play

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday June 12, 2007

TheatreFIRST, Oakland’s only resident theater company—and now bereft of their latest home in Old Oakland, will perform Week 31 of Suzan-Lori Parks’ year-long, nationwide 365 Days/Plays project 8 p.m. this Friday night, June 15, at the Temescal Arts Center at 48th and Telegraph in Oakland. 

This will be followed by two staged readings for plays under consideration for full staging, The Women of Lockerbie by Deborah Brevoort, concerning the response of the town beneath the infamous Pan Am flight disaster, 7 p.m. Sunday, June 17, and The Clearing by Helen Edmundson, about Oliver Cromwell’s harsh rule in Ireland, 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 18—both at 469 Ninth St. (between Broadway and Washington), Oakland. 

“We’re out but not down!” is how artistic director Clive Chafer refers to the status of the game little group after commercial pressures in the neighborhood found them moving out on June 1 from their former home of the Oakland Metro on Ninth Street. 

Chafer, who meets later this week with City of Oakland representatives, is “looking hopefully in all the right places” to house the 13-year-old company in a permanent residence and announce its next annual program from a location “that works for the kind of theater we do, and which theatergoers can identify with us.” 

Their version of the seven 365 Days/Plays from Parks’ project of writing a play a day for a year will be staged “in response to Parks’ challenge of herself, and in like manner,” by having the actors, “mostly Equity actors, most familiar to theatergoers” come in cold at 6 p.m. to rehearse plays they’ve never seen that will go up at 8 p.m. and then invite the audience to suggest new combinations of actors and new ways of doing the plays just seen. 

“We have 65 seats,” said Chafer. “We’ll have up to 65 directors in that second round.” 

Ideas will be elicited from audience members, and the company will quickly rebound them, bringing a different dimension of spontaneity to the short plays which Parks “wrote in response to impulses every day, not to a sequential sense of meaning,” according to Chafer, who went on to say, “I think this gave her the opportunity to write less political plays than those she’s known for [Parks is a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur “Genius” Award]. They’re whimsical, slightly skewed, surrealistic visions of the world. Maybe one of our seven is naturalistic. In order to reflect her own consistent yet eclectic vision, we let our production be as scattershot as her approach was—and not just as much as we, TheatreFIRST, can make them, but in as many different ways as possible.” 

 

365 DAYS / 365 PLAYS 

All performances are free, with donations requested. Info at: 436-5085 or theatrefirst.com.