Bitter/Sweet: Robert Ernst's New Play
by David Templeton

Legendary experimentalist Robert Ernst tackles one of his toughest roles to date, as the gallows-humored author and composer of his own mother's story.

"My mother," states actor-playwright-composer Robert Ernst, "has a very dark sense of humor, what some people call 'gallows humor'--but that humor is part of what sustains her as the rest of her life is slowly stripped away. She'll say the funniest things, about things that are not really all that funny. That's more or less what I'm trying to do as I write this story."

This story is Catherine's Care, a darkly comedic semi-musical meditation on aging, memory and the end of life, which Ernst is now developing with San Rafael's innovative 3-year-old AlterTheater. Catherine will be given a fully staged run in February. Though Ernst has lived in Marin for over 15 years, this will be the first time one of his own plays has been staged in the county.

"I don't know why I've never had anything done here," says Ernst, 61. "I'm just glad it's happening now with Catherine's Care, and that AlterTheater is doing it, because I've been really impressed with what they've accomplished over the last three seasons. They do great work."

The respectful affection is mutual.

According to AlterTheater's artistic director Jeanette Harrison--who describes herself as "a longtime Bob Ernst fan"--the collaboration with the playwright/actor is a result of the company's constant search for outstanding, alternative material, plays that can be adapted for nontraditional, offbeat performance spaces: storefronts, coffeehouses or galleries, always somewhere on San Rafael's bustling Fourth Street.

"Finding the right material for us is always a story of building relationships," explains Harrison. "Local artists are especially appealing. Since our first production in 2004, we've been looking for projects that will allow local artists, actors and writers alike to stretch and grow."

Catherine's Care may be more of a stretch for audiences than for Ernst, who says that working in the experimental method is a way of recharging his artistic batteries. For some, the subject matter alone will be challenging, as the play was inspired by Ernst's observations of his mother as she fights to retain a sense of self-control and independence while living within the confines of the elder care system, giving up one freedom after another as she downsizes her existence to fit one tiny room in a retirement care facility.

"She went from being a totally independent woman to being a totally dependent woman, and she's been having a hard time with that," Ernst says. Like the fictional Catherine, his mother--who is now in her 80s--was 39 when her husband died, leaving her with three kids. She spent the rest of her life on her own, doing everything for herself, taking care of her own home. "So to be taken out of that home and placed in a little room, with a roommate she didn't get to choose, that's been a real identity crisis for my mom," says Ernst.

The play fuses movement, text and music (with Ernst planning to play percussion and sing as part of the show's pit band) in a form that Ernst refers to as "pocket opera." Typical of Ernst's work, it's also fairly nonlinear, presenting a clashing and melding, rising and falling series of ideas and memories as the lucid-but-imaginative heroine, nearing the curtain-down of her life, tries to make sense of who she is and who she dreamt she would have been. Things get weird. A younger, wilder version of Catherine appears, singing a big old Broadway show tune at her bedside. Her long-dead husband shows up as a crow, with no explanation for the transformation. The details and indignities of growing old are portrayed in offbeat ways, as when a late-night journey to the bathroom suddenly becomes a mystical, free-form ballet.

Ernst sees the piece not as a sober, enervating slog through the Valley of Infirmity and Death, but as a positive, if darkly tinged, celebration of love and life.

"As babies, we pop out into this world, but we have no say about that," Ernst says, "just as we have no say about the fact that we will one day pop out of it. The entrances and exits are beyond out control. What we do while we're here, that's the fun part."

By that measure, Ernst has been having a lot of fun.

He cofounded the legendary Iowa Theatre Lab in the late 1960s and then relocated to the Bay Area in 1972 to help establish Berkeley's near-mythical Blake Street Hawkeyes, the experimental cooperative that also produced playwright John O'Keefe, visionary writer-director George Coates and actress Whoopi Goldberg. He is probably best known for his work as an actor, solo artist and noted experimentalist. His most talked-about solo shows include The John (a one-man musical based on Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal), and a twenty-four-hour-and-one-minute improv piece he performed in 1987, winning himself a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest continuous performance. He plays drums in the edgy R&B band Smooth Toad, and he supports his occasional experimental projects with paid acting and directing jobs in other people's productions, including the occasional movie, TV show or voice-over gig. He has performed across the country, and locally with every major company in the area: some of his recent performances include roles in Leigh Fondakowski's The People's Temple at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Michael Healy's The Drawer Boy at Pacific Alliance Stage Company and William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life at American Conservatory Theater.

Describing the genesis of AlterTheater's partnership with Ernst, Harrison explains, "Basically, we went to Bob and said, 'Hey, we love you! What have you got going on, 'cause we'd love to support you.'"

Around that time, Ernst was working at San Francisco's Golden Gate Theatre, understudying the role of the baseball team manager in Take Me Out. ("You know," Ernst says, "the play with all the naked baseball players, taking showers and shit.") Ernst tends to view understudy gigs as a sort of grant from the universe, providing paid time with little to do except stand by, so he likes to use such opportunities to write. During the two months of Take Me Out, he worked up a preliminary draft of a story he'd been thinking about, a solo show centering on a woman in a care facility.

With AlterTheater officially on board as producers--and with the added help of a $10,000 New Works Fellowship grant from the Marin Arts Council--Ernst produced an expanded version of the script, now with four characters. In October of 2005, Catherine's Care was given a staged public reading at Rocking Chairs 100%, the store AlterTheater prefers to use for readings. "We knew this was an amazingly powerful and emotional piece," Harrison says, "but the thing that really surprised us when we did the readings was how funny it was. There is so much hope and playful irony and laughter in this play. I was in stitches during the first reading."

While this is Ernst's first play staged in Marin, this show also marks AlterTheater's first-ever production featuring live music, something the author has become increasingly intrigued with. Over the last decade, Ernst has been tinkering with new ways to fuse music and movement. As such, he feels that Catherine's Care represents the next phase in his own evolutionary process as a writer/composer.

"The music is not interjected here and there into the play so much as it's interwoven right into the piece," explains Ernst. "It's more like a braid than something more stratified and layered. We've woven the music in and out of the actor's language. The music is more than just accompaniment or commentary on the narrative. The music often becomes the narrative. It's pretty strange."

Currently (these interviews took place in November), the show has been cast--with Carla Spindt, Craig Jessup, Tamar Cohn and Jenna Johnson taking on multiple roles--and the crew and musicians are working hard on the musical part of the show, writing and developing the music the way a jazz band develops a new tune. In January, the cast and crew will begin working on the text.

This improvisational way of developing music and lyrics can, for a cast unfamiliar with a process, be quite a daunting task. Most musicals demand actors who can sing, act and move. To be considered for the cast of Catherine's Care, the performers were required to be able to sing, act, move--and improvise, since so much of the music, including much of the libretto, is being created by the actors during the workshop period.

"You should have seen the auditions," Ernst laughs. "Wow! What a wild experience that was. Virtually everyone who auditioned, at one point or another, had that deer-in-the-headlights look on their face. But I could have cast the show three or four times over; I saw so many talented people who were up to this kind of challenge. Who knew the North Bay was this loaded with talented people?"

Right now, Ernst is just wishing someone in the cast were talented at repairing heating systems.

"I am rewriting the thing at the same time I'm trying to get the heater in the building to work," Ernst laughs, referring to the former thrift store where the rehearsals have been taking place, and where the show will be staged (as long as the rent-free space isn't rented out from under them before opening night).

"Believe me," Ernst jokes, "I'm not about to sing my own praises as a writer, but I'm a hell of a lot better at writing than I am at figuring out how to work a furnace."

Catherine's Care runs February 2-18. Visit www.altertheater.org.

David Templeton is a North Bay freelance arts writer whose work regularly appears in the North Bay Bohemian, Strings Magazine and online for filmthreat.com. His conversational movie adventures can be glimpsed at www.theguywhotakespeopletomovies.com. He can be reached at talkpix@earthlink.net.