They Come In Threes by / Sam Hurwitt

 Dramatic trilogies go back about as far as Western drama does. The ancient Greeks were holding dramatic competitions of tragic trilogies 2,500 years ago. Nowadays, of course, they’re considerably less common, and you’re more likely to find them at the cinema than on the stage, usually as a way of milking a franchise until it’s lost whatever goodwill it may have had at the start. Works conceived as multipart cycles from the outset are a rarer breed, particularly in the theatre, where if what you’re doing is longer than 90 minutes it increasingly had better be for a good reason. There’s only so long people can go without tweeting. So it’s particularly impressive that this season sees more than a handful of trilogies and other play cycles on stages all around the Bay Area, most of them starting this fall.

Of special note is Tarell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays, the West Coast premiere of which will be produced by American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company this fall in an unprecedented partnership between the three companies. Each will produce one of the plays. MTC will put on the first play, In the Red and Brown Water from September 9 to October 3, directed by MTC producing director Ryan Rilette. Magic will follow up with The Brothers Size from September 9 through October 17, helmed by playwright Octavio Solis, and ACT will finish up with Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet from October 29 to November 21, directed by Mark Rucker.

Having three of the Bay Area’s major theatres working on the same cycle of plays gives an unusually strong sense of the local theatre season starting in a coordinated way, rather than the usual piecemeal openings of which any theatrical season is made up. It’s all the more exciting because the trilogy isn’t a well-known piece by a well-known name, although that’s changing mighty quickly. McCraney is a 29-year-old gay African American playwright from Miami, and The Brother/Sister Plays had their world premiere as a trilogy in April of last year at New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre Center. The Red and Brown Water had previously debuted at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2008 and The Brothers Size bowedat the Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival in 2007.

MTC’s Rilette has been following McCraney’s rise into the public eye more closely than most since he first met the playwright back in 2006. At the time, Rilette was producing artistic director of Southern Rep Theatre in New Orleans and was commissioning two plays about the impact of Hurricane Katrina. One would be by a local playwright and the other by three playwrights from outside the region.

“Bonnie Metzger’s partner was a professor of playwriting at Yale,” Rilette recalls, “and she said, ‘Oh my god, you’ve got to hear about this hot new kid named Tarell McCraney. He’s up at Yale, he’s still in school, but he’s the freshest new voice. I just saw his workshop of this play named The Brothers Size, and it’s amazing.’”

So Rilette brought McCraney aboard to work on the Katrina play, 2007’s The Breach, and expressed interest at the time in premiering In the Red and Brown Water at Southern Rep.

“It was right around the time that the Alliance’s Candida Award was coming up for best new play by a young grad student,” Rilette says. “So I said to Tarell, ‘You have to submit it, because I think people need to know about this play.’ He won the award, and they chose Tina Landau to direct the show. And the play sort of took off, and at least in the US, Tina was the only director of it until pretty much this past year. So I’ve just been sort of waiting on the edges to finally get the chance to direct it, because I really love it.”

MTC had initially been talking to McCraney’s agent about doing the whole trilogy this fall, and the collaboration came out of what initially seemed like a complication.

“His agent called and said, ‘Listen, Carey [Perloff] at ACT’s really interested in doing Marcus. You should talk, because I understand you guys want to do the whole thing. Obviously this is a much bigger paycheck for us if we can do it with ACT, but we’ve already been talking to you about it,’” Rilette says. “We went and talked with Carey, and at the time she wasn’t sure if she wanted to do Marcus or Marcus and Brothers Size together, or if they weren’t going to do both maybe we would still do In the Red and Brown and Brothers Size. Then the Magic came into the picture, and Loretta [Greco] said that they really loved Brothers Size, and it was her favorite play in the trilogy. We all thought it had become kind of a gift to the region to be able to do this amazing trilogy at three different spaces so that it becomes a big citywide event. We thought that was more interesting than any one of us trying to do the plays.”

Before any of that, Shotgun Players is getting started on a world premiere cycle that will take up two slots in its season. The Salt Plays are adaptations of Homer’s epics The Iliadand The Odyssey by writer-director Jon Tracy, who created last summer’s musical take on Animal Farm, called The Farm, for Shotgun. The Trojan War story In the Wound plays at Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park from August 21 to October 3, and the tale of Odysseus’s 10-year voyage home from the war, Of the Earth, finishes up Shotgun’s season December 2 to January 16. Company member Daniel Bruno is composing music for both.

“Dan Bruno and Josh Pollack had worked together on a bunch of projects for us, percussive-based stuff, and they had been talking for a long time about doing a piece using music and percussion as a lead character,” says Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley. “Daniel had the idea to take the story of The Odyssey, as we did with Animal Farm, and incorporate drumming. I think Jon actually had the epiphany that we’re doing The Odyssey for the last show of the season, so we have to do the prequel. It was one of those ideas that was so huge and so delicious, I just couldn’t say no to it.”

This isn’t the first time that Shotgun has done a version of The Odyssey: it staged an upbeat adventure-story version by Richard J. Silberg in 1998 with a huge puppet Cyclops. But a two-parter is an entirely new thing for the Berkeley troupe. Fortunately, having seen one should be by no means a prerequisite for seeing the other, as it’s not necessary to have read The Iliad to appreciate The Odyssey.

“We are figuring out how to bring back the park show in an indoor incarnation so you can actually do the double feature,” Dooley adds. “It would look different, and it probably wouldn’t happen until we get to January. We’d want to get December up and then do it on off nights, or maybe matinees.”

Meanwhile, because its own Ashby Stage was going to be available while the summer show’s in the park, Shotgun decided to stage a whole trilogy there this August as an extra treat outside of its regular season. Shotgun has been doing staged readings of large-scale works in January for the last few years. Alan Ayckbourn’s comic trilogy The Norman Conquests was the latest of these, after Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and John Barton’s 10-hour Trojan War cycle Tantalus.

The Norman Conquests is an unusual trilogy in that the plays don’t take place one after another but at pretty much the same time in different areas of the same house with the same characters. Shotgun did readings of all three this January, and the response was encouraging, to say the least.

“These were staged readings, and the audiences were going crazy,” Dooley says. “We only did one night of each, and they were like, ‘Oh, I wish my friend had a chance to see this.’ About that same time the Berkeley Playhouse, which had been renting a lot of space from us over the summer, canceled a huge chunk of their rentals. So I thought, we’ve got this big empty slot, we did 15 hours of rehearsal for each of those, with costumes, with set, with props. Imagine if we just did them all in rep. The actors were excited to do it, the directors were excited to do it, the designers were excited to do it, we’ve got a space—let’s do it.”

Between the January reading and the August staging, ACT did a full production of one of the Norman plays, Round and Round the Garden, in May as part of its regular season. “I didn’t even know they were doing it until we had done our reading,” Dooley says. “Like we would ever steal thunder from ACT anyway!”

Berkeley Repertory Theatre is no stranger to ambitious projects—nor to multipart play cycles, though it doesn’t make a habit of them. The last one was David Edgar’s two-parter Continental Divide in 2003, although as an off-season event Berkeley Rep hosted Mike Daisey’s four-part Great Men of Genius series of biographical monologues in 2007. And, in fact, the company did The Norman Conquests way back in 1981. This fall Berkeley Rep takes just one of its season slots to host the West Coast premiere of a particularly ambitious trilogy: The Great Game: Afghanistan, Tricycle Theatre’s play cycle that wowed London audiences last year.

The Great Gameis actually 12 plays by a dozen playwrights in three chronological clusters that run through the last century and a half in Afghanistan.

“As soon as you hear about the idea, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what’s that?’ says Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone. “I’d been talking to Nicolas Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle, and he said, ‘I was watching the news for the umpteenth time about Afghanistan, and it felt like I was hearing the same kind of conversation about it, and I just wondered what the artistic response would be. I wanted to change the channel in my head.’ So he had the idea to commission a whole bunch of English writers to write little history plays, and it morphed into this event where there’s 12 plays, and they each are about half an hour long and cover a different period of Afghani history. It’s a collision of different expressions of what this culture’s all about.”

The cycle is currently being reprised at Tricycle through the end of August, after which Taccone’s own production of Tiny Kushner, which played Berkeley Rep last October, starts a September Tricycle run. Meanwhile, The Great Gamehits the road to Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Berkeley Rep and then New York’s Public Theater. The limited run plays in Berkeley from October 22 to November 7.

Taccone says he was following the buzz on the production last year with rapt attention, but didn’t think at the time about bringing it over. “I just thought, ‘That sounds fantastic, but I don’t see how there’s any way,’” he says. “Then I was at the Guthrie last year, and Joe Dowling was saying they were really interested in bringing it over. I said, ‘Well, if you do that, we would be really interested in being part of that.’”

San Francisco’s four-year-old Sleepwalkers Theatre isn’t just setting aside a slot or two in its season for a cycle; its entire 2010-11 season will be one trilogy by Berkeley playwright J.C. Lee, a pre- and postapocalyptic fable called This World and After. The first play, This World Is Good, plays at the Phoenix Theatre August 5 to 28, staged by artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp, in which a meteor is headed to Earth and a woman tries to decipher her dead brother’s homemade comic books. Into the Clear Blue Sky follows in spring, directed by Jessica Holt, and The Nature Line comes in summer, helmed by Mina Morita. Look for mutant dogs, monster seahorses and “an epic saga to restart time” in the later chapters.

Despite the fact that all concerned are local, the productions came to be not because of any personal connections or previous familiarity with Lee’s work but through the company’s regular submission process.

“J.C. sent us the second piece, Into the Clear Blue Sky,”Ingersoll-Thorp says. “Also at the time Crowded Fire did a reading of it, which we went and saw. It’s a really beautiful piece of writing, and we didn’t realize it was part of a trilogy at all. Then he kind of casually sent me the other two pieces to read, and within 10 minutes of finishing the last piece I called the company and said, ‘Let’s do this.’ There’s something in the nature of being an epic, sweeping story that resonates right now with the time we’re living in. I feel like he’s really tapping into some bigger questions about what kind of world are we creating for ourselves now and what some of the consequences might be.”

As for reserving its entire season to do the trilogy, Ingersoll-Thorp says it didn’t seem like a big decision at the time.

“Ultimately we just want to find work that we connect with and feel like will entertain our audience, and this time it just happened to be bigger,” he says. “But it’s very different for us, and I guess you’d say a big deal. I think as a new works company it’s a statement to other emerging writers that we might work with, saying we will take this risk. We’ll double down our commitment to a new writer. I also think that you can only tell stories about young people in apartments for so long before it gets old. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—we told a lot of those stories, but last year and the end of our second season we started to evolve into different styles and themes, and it just felt right to keep looking for work that felt bigger than us on some level. It’s really exciting for us to take on something that is out of our comfort zone. And who knows? Maybe we’ll screw it up, but we’ll find out.”