Paying Tribute: Bygone Theatres Part 2
by Jean Schiffman

Last month we reminisced about the midsize, subscription-based theatres that left an indelible mark on the Bay Area over the past quarter century. Many smaller groups with specific artistic and cultural agendas also contributed to the scene, eventually breaking up due to financial difficulties, diverging artistic interests or relationships gone sour.

The Experimentalists

The Bay Area theatre community has also long had a reputation for theatrical innovation. Many companies helped cement that reputation and pave the way for today's young adventurers.

In the late 1970s in Marin, Chris Hardman and Laura Farabough, along with composer Larry Graber and choreographer Evie Lewis, founded the mask-and-movement–oriented, largely site-specific Snake Theatre. Productions like 1978's Somewhere in the Pacific, performed on the beach at Fort Cronkite, amazed and delighted audiences. But after doing seven shows together, artistic partners Farabough and Hardman had what Hardman refers to as an acrimonious divorce. Hardman founded the audio-visual/experiential Antenna Theatre, still thriving today, and Farabough established Nightfire, which produced such shows as Beauty Science and Obedience School before succumbing to economic pressures.

In the same era, Berkeley was a hotbed of experimentation. Chief among the Berkeley groups was the Blake Street Hawkeyes. Founded as an anarchic collective by Bob Ernst, John O'Keefe and David Schein--performance artists who originally began working together at the University of Iowa in 1968--the company mounted its first collectively developed piece, Hog's Tale, in 1973. The artists named themselves after the University of Iowa sports teams and the South Berkeley street, 2019 Blake, where their warehouse (formerly the Magic Theatre's scene shop) was located. Using Grotowski acting techniques, they experimented, both independently and as a group, with new vocal, textual and visual forms. George Coates and Whoopi Goldberg were among the artists who passed through the ranks.

But the administration, run by Cynthia Moore and Deborah Gwynn, fell apart after the 1989 earthquake. Even before then, the group was functioning only sporadically, the founders having gone their separate ways. Ernst still rents the now-famous Blake Street space.

Meanwhile, another Berkeley company founded by a trio of men was also experimenting with form and content. The Moving Men--Edward Botts, Matthew Gottlieb and Michael Brown--had known each other since the mid-'60s, when they were street performers and members of a men's consciousness-raising group in New York. So it was a natural transition for them to dramatize stories about being male in America, using music, puppets and masks. Their influences, says Brown, were the Open Theatre, the Living Theatre, and Bread and Puppet Theatre. Along with later arrivals Mitchell Cohen and Peter Candell, the group continued to create original material.

But by 1983, says Brown, a combination of Reagan's cuts and the fact that the performers started having kids and needed real jobs forced the company's closure.

The women's answer to the Moving Men was Lilith, a collective started by playwright Terry Baum, along with Charlotte Colavin and Shelley Fields, in Berkeley in 1974. After two years the group moved to San Francisco and rehearsed in the old Goodman Building. Most of the material was written collaboratively by the performers, developed through improvisation and then transcribed and turned into scenes.

We had a desire to look at women's lives, which was something people were just starting to do then, says Baum. We had an ironic viewpoint, we laughed at ourselves. We were feminists, but we were not dogmatic. We dealt with political issues in a human way. Marga Gomez is the most well-known performer to have worked with Lilith in its heyday.

But gradually the artists who had been the heart of the organization drifted away (Baum left after five years) and the group lost its spark. Within a decade, it quietly folded.

Another women-oriented company, It's Just a Stage, opened simultaneously, blossoming out of an improv class taught by Adele Prandini at Berkeley's University Without Walls. The performers wrote their own material based on comic improv, including musical comedy, and performed at various venues under the auspices of the People's Theatre Coalition. At the time, there was really nothing out there of a feminist perspective, let alone a lesbian consciousness, recalls Prandini. Artistic differences spelled the demise of the company in 1980.

With only a seven-year lifespan, San Francisco's Life on the Water made a strong impression, partly because three of its founders, Bill Talen, Ellen Sebastian and Leonard Pitt, were popular artists well before they joined forces with Joe Lambert in 1986 to reinvent his six-year-old People's Theatre Coalition. We originated the theatre as artists to do our own work, explains Pitt. The company's first production, a performance by seminal soloist Spalding Gray, established the producing/presenting organization as an important player on the scene. It seemed there was a vacuum that we walked right into and filled, says Pitt of the theatre's inception. To be at Fort Mason, a great location, at a time when things were bubbling... Eventually there was a rift between Talen and the others, and Talen departed.

As highly regarded as Life was, though, it closed. Says Pitt, We found running a theatre is a real business, and you can't do your work as much as you want to.

The Z Collective made the same discovery. An artistic collective of 11 theatre artists who were waiters and bartenders at the trendy Zuni Cafe (hence the name) banded together in 1988 under the leadership of director David Dower and staged Bay Area and West Coast premieres of unfamiliar works at site-specific locations. We wanted to control our own artistic agenda and to challenge ourselves and grow [as artists], says Dower. We enjoyed long rehearsal periods, then we'd do a show in a park or on a beach. Of the 12 plays they produced, the most popular was the hilarious spoof Good Night Desdemona by Ann-Marie MacDonald.

By 1992 the collective retired, burned out on administrative work and eager to explore other opportunities individually. That's why we morphed into the Z Space, says Dower. Here, other companies can come together without having to support an administrative structure.

The Culturally Specific

Back when nontraditional casting and colorblind casting were new concepts, several small, culturally specific companies were a harbinger of the diversity we see on our more mainstream stages today.

Full Circle Theatre Collective, created in 1984 by writer/performer Donald Lacy and his collaborator, Tony Spires, produced original works plus work by such well-known writers as Amiri Baraka, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka and Lorraine Hansberry. The company performed at various San Francisco and East Bay venues, produced radio theatre, and toured to middle and high schools. In 1989 artistic differences sent the partners in separate directions. There were a lot more small African-American theatres in the Bay Area back then, recalls Lacy. Now there aren't many places for emerging actors to perfect their craft.

At about the same time, nationally known playwright Ed Bullins (The Taking of Miss Janie) was producing his own plays with partner Jonal Woodward before establishing the Ed Bullins Memorial Theatre in Oakland in 1988. He then moved the organization to a 49-seat live-work space in Emeryville. The group did more than a dozen productions, including plays by Ishmael Reed, Baraka and Bullins himself, as well as by non-black writers. The company was named after Bullins's son, Ed Bullins, Jr., who was killed in Philadelphia in the late '70s.

But the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989 shook the building's foundation. Bullins did repairs, with help from FEMA and the Black United Way, but audiences dwindled during that period. I finally gave in to economic pressure, sighs the soft-spoken Bullins. He closed the theatre, leaving the Bay Area in 1995 to return to his East Coast roots.

The Berkeley Jewish Theatre--later renamed the Pacific Jewish Theatre--provided a mainstream counterpart to San Francisco's A Traveling Jewish Theatre. Founded in 1982 and in residence for several years at the Berkeley Jewish Community Center, it mounted Jewish-themed plays like The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Neil Simon comedies and Arthur Miller dramas. Artistic leadership was unstable for several years. Barbara Damashek was artistic director in 1986 and 1987, Joy Carlin was interim artistic director for a while, and such freelance directors as Albert Takazauckas and Julian Lopez-Morillas worked there. Eventually the company moved to a custom-built facility in West Berkeley and tried out new, more inclusive and experimental artistic programming under Bill Reichblum. But the company, now with increased maintenance costs, failed to build a new audience and raise sufficient funds. It folded soon after the big move, and activists were unable to retain the facility as a performing venue.

The Funny Folks

Just as the Bay Area has long been a stomping ground for stand-up comics, so has the theatre community claimed its share of zanies.

A female comedy troupe, Les Nickelettes, emerged from a group of women who were performing musical parodies at midnight at the Mitchell Brothers cinema in the early '70s. We were cheerleaders for the midnight shows, which were called the People's Nickelodeon, explains founder Denise Larson, of the group's name. For a while Scrumbly Koldwyn played piano for the company, which eventually began writing and performing original full-length plays at various venues. Strongly connected to San Francisco's underground performance scene, Les Nickelettes included, sporadically, such cast members as an early-career Marga Gomez. But by the mid-'80s, financial difficulties arose, says Larson, and the group disbanded.

An all-male team of highly trained physical comedians, Vaudeville Nouveau, emerged in 1982 to participate in a burgeoning new vaudeville movement. Jeff Raz, Dan Mankin and Mark Sackett juggled and joked their way through America and Europe, directed by Jael Weisman. They appeared in Servant of Two Masters with Geoff Hoyle at Berkeley Rep, The Detectives with theatre legend Joeseph Chaikin just after his stroke, The Comedy of Errors on Broadway with the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Avner the Eccentric, and coproduced the New Vaudeville Festival at San Francisco State University.

The mix of physical skills, circus, and theatre that we were so interested in has become more mainstream, with companies like Theatre de la Jeune Lune, points out Raz. All of us who work in popular idioms that have been degraded because they use forms considered childish, and speak the truth in those idioms--I think we're getting recognized more.

The company folded in 1992 as the members' interests diverged.

No group was ever wackier than another all-male team, Fratelli Bologna. Originally consisting of 10 men and women doing commedia dell'arte at the 1979 Renaissance Pleasure Faire under the name La Familia Bologna, the group morphed into I Fratelli Bologna (they later dropped the I), organized by Richard Dupell and comprising Ed Holmes, Jack Tate, Chris Beale, William Hall and Drew Letchworth. When the company was cast as the paparazzi in the film The Right Stuff, they became local celebrities.

By 1984 the group had narrowed down to Hall, Dupell, Letchworth and John X. Heart. But even as they performed their annual Weber Family Christmas and mounted a hysterical spoof of Medea in Golden Gate Park, they were making money entertaining at parties. Gigs at Disneyland and for other corporations poured in.

Not long after Letchworth and Heart left the group to pursue other activities, Hall and Dupell realized they'd squeezed about as much out of their hilariously dysfunctional Weber family as they could. We were all getting slightly older, says Hall. We felt we were being passed over [in the public arena]. Reviews dismissed us as low humor. They realized they'd make as much money for a few days' work at a Microsoft trade show as they had during three months of Weber. The group quit performing publicly around 1997. We can only hope other groups won't go this route in the future.

Where Are They Now?

Snake Theatre

Chris Hardman founded and still runs Antenna Theatre. Evie Lewis lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and is no longer in theatre. Lary Graber died of leukemia in 1979. Laura Farabough lives in Berkeley, is writing her dissertation for a doctorate in theatre at Stanford University, and is active in Sponge, an international nonprofit think tank that researches and experiments with immersive environments.

Blake Street Hawkeyes

Bob Ernst is an independent performing artist who does voice-over work and recently created The John, a musical comedy for himself and two musicians based on Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. John O'Keefe lives and works in Project Artaud. His latest play, Glamour, premiered at Cinnabar Theatre in Petaluma in April and ran in O'Keefe's studio in October. David Schein runs a youth theatre in inner-city Chicago.

Moving Men

Michael Brown dropped out of theatre for 14 years to work as a fund-raiser, recently reappearing as a local playwright/director. He directed his play, Rachel and Charlie, in San Francisco. Ed Botts is a carpenter. Mitchell Cohen is a psychologist.

Lilith

Terry Baum moved back to the Bay Area from New York a year ago. She did a solo show at Venue 9 and The Marsh. Her play, Divide the Living Child, set in World War II Holland, had a reading at The Marsh last February.

It's Just a Stage

Adele Prandini went on to work at Theatre Rhinoceros for 15 years, 10 of them as artistic director. Burned out, she is now keeping a low profile, directing small projects, teaching and rekindling her love of theatre.

Life on the Water

Leonard Pitt teaches movement and mask independently and is writing a guidebook to Paris, a memoir about his life in Paris and a book about 17th-century Irish healer Valentine Greatrakes. He wishes he were performing. Ellen Sebastian Chang is a freelance director with her finger in many theatrical pies. Joe Lambert runs the Digital Media Center in Berkeley and travels all over the world teaching classes in digital storytelling. Bill Talen, "Reverend Billy," is a performance artist in New York.

Z Collective

David Dower is artistic director of Z Space Studio and continues to develop and direct new plays. Brian Thorstenson is a local playwright and actor, and appears in Josh Kornbluth's Haiku Tunnel. His latest play, Summerland, opened in New York last January. John Balma is in L.A. and can be seen on TV from time to time. He recently filmed a Dustin Hoffman/Susan Sarandon movie. Patty Silver is a local actor. Molly Goode acts locally and runs Life Theatre. Rick Hickman and Nancy Lee Russell are in New York. Anne Block runs Take My Mother Please, a worldwide tour company based in L.A. Jane Angeles is a local actor. Stanley Goldstein is a painter. Mat Schwarzman founded Urban Arts in the East Bay, a youth arts organization.

Full Circle Theatre Collective

Actor/writer Donald Lacy commutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He has a script in development for VH1 and started a nonprofit to produce plays about violence, written by young people. In the spring he appeared in the Campo Santo production of Hotel Angulo. Tony Spires lives in Los Angeles and produces the Bay Area Black Comedy Competition.

Ed Bullins Memorial Theatre

Ed Bullins is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at Northeastern University in Boston. His musical, Storyville, opened in Miami last March.

Les Nickelettes

Denise Larson is a kindergarten teacher. She says being a mother ended her theatrical career. She is writing a book about Les Nickelettes.

Vaudeville Nouveau

Jeff Raz trains professional clowns at the San Francisco School of Circus Arts (now Circus Center), performs "circus stuff" with Tandy Beal, and is artist in residence at the University of Nebraska. Dan Mankin runs a vaudeville theatre in southern Washington. Mark Sackett works at the San Francisco Opera box office. Jael Weisman is still a resident director at Dell'Arte Company.

Fratelli Bologna

John X. Heart is pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles. Drew Letchworth works locally as a performance artist and at parties and events. Ed Holmes invented the St. Stupid's Day Parade and works with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. William Hall performs with Bay Area Theatresports and is a recurring character in an online game. Richard Dupell has a thriving business, along with William Hall, performing for corporate clients. Jack Tate is inside the Jack in the Box head in the TV commercials and is a puppeteer in Los Angeles. Chris Beale is an East Bay commercial actor and process server.

Jean Schiffman is a regular Callboard contributor.