Tag: Marin Theater Company

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ASR Theater ~~ Stark Reality: “Bees & Honey” at Marin Theatre Company

By Barry Willis

Obsessive sexual attraction proves inadequate to sustain a marriage in Guadalis Del Carmen’s Bees & Honey, at Marin Theatre Company through March 10.

Strongly directed by Karina Gutierrez, Del Carmen’s two-actor, no-intermission script covers a wide territory: mating behaviors, racial and cultural identities, class distinctions, family and professional obligations, the nature and seriousness of commitments, and many other issues.

… It’s laudable that any playwright would attempt all of this in a single play …

Del Carmen does so adroitly and mostly succeeds, provoking questions without providing answers. Her somewhat disjointed story involves two ethnic Dominicans from the Washington Heights district in Manhattan: Manuel (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.), owner of an auto repair shop, and Johaira (Katherine George), a recent Columbia law school graduate on track to become an assistant district attorney.

Katherine George as Johaira and Jorge Lendeborg Jr. in “Bees & Honey” at Marin Theatre Company now through March 10, 2024. Photo credit: Kevin Berne

The two meet in a neighborhood bar and are immediately drawn to each other, propelled partly by their shared love of Caribbean and Latin American music (Michael Kelly, sound designer). They flirt, dance, and make love to exhaustion and soon are co-habiting in a nice apartment (Carlos Antonio Aceves, set designer), but trouble looms as their differences emerge. Johaira is college-educated and worldly, while Manuel is working class and suffering from a bit of arrested development, as many men do—his favorite hobby is playing video games, which he tackles with the enthusiasm and demeanor of an adolescent boy.

But Manuel’s no mere immature wrench jockey—he’s planning to expand his business by opening a new location, and ultimately hopes to have one in each of New York City’s five boroughs. Johaira admires his ambition and offers encouragement while pursuing her legal career, including a gut-wrenching case that consumes her. She admonishes Manuel about his misogynistic tendencies, giving him feminist books to read, which he dutifully does and learns from—a palpable character arc. Johaira’s arc is less pronounced until she suffers a miscarriage and concludes that she needs far more from life than she will ever find with Manuel.

There are also secondary plots about how to care for Manuel’s mother, suffering the early stages of dementia, hopeful plans about caring for a baby that never arrives, and issues about personal identity. In one assertive outburst, Manuel shouts “I’m not black! I’m not white! I’m Dominican!” to which Johaira responds that maybe he should dial back his indiscriminate use of the “N” word.

Katherine George and Jorge Lendeborg Jr. at work on the MTC stage. Photo credit: Kevin Berne

Lendeborg and George are both passionate and convincing in this demanding performance. Their characters’ irresistible attraction and ultimately dividing differences are all made abundantly clear. While the time-line isn’t as obvious, we guess that it covers probably two intense years in the lives of a vibrant couple—wisely or not, Del Carmen deletes all time-wasting connective tissue from the script. The two get married, but we never know about it until the end, when Johaira says “I’ll draw up the papers.”

Repeated distractions about Manuel’s mother and his brother Mario never reach resolution the way Johaira’s failed court case does. Not that we care. Both celebration and tragedy, Bees & Honey is a beautifully flawed long-exposure portrait of the intersecting lives of two very likeable young lovers.

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Aisle Seat Review NorCal Executive Editor Barry Willis is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and president of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact: barry.m.willis@gmail.com

 

ProductionBees & Honey
Written ByGuadalis Del Carmen
Directed byKarina Gutierrez
Producing CompanyMarin Theatre Company (MTC)
Production DatesThru Mar 10th, 2024
Production AddressMarin Theatre Company
397 Miller Avenue
Mill Valley, CA
Websitewww.marintheatre.org
Telephone(415) 388-5200
Tickets$12-$66
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall3.75/5.0
Performance4.0/5.0
Script3.50/5.0
Stagecraft3.50/5.0
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!
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PICK! ASR Theater ~~ On Track: Marin Theatre Company’s “Two Trains Running”

By George Maguire

Recognized as one of the greatest voices in American theater, Pittsburgh native August Wilson set out with the task of chronicling a century of the African American experience with ten plays reflecting each decade of the 20th century.

Two Trains Running is his 1960s play, bringing to life the assassination of Martin Luther King, inner city re-development and subsequent brewing discontent.

Set in Home Style, a restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Hill District, we meet owner Memphis (Lamont Thompson – an actor of endless vocal variety and passion), as he prepares for the inevitable selling of his property to the city, which will tear it down eliminating both history and the convivial meeting place for the few remaining patrons.

Sam Jackson (Risa) and Lamont Thompson (Memphis
) at work at Marin Theatre Company. Photo: Kevin
Berne

Memphis has property in Jackson, Mississippi and he is eager to take one of the daily two trains running from Pittsburgh to Jackson to set claim with the papers he owns on his entitled land.

I love this play…

This play always resonates home for me, as I am from Pittsburgh and can recall when a vast swath of the Hill District was torn down to build the huge City Arena where I would begin my own career as a professional actor. The inhabitants were simply given notice and moved. Eminent domain! No choice! Literally hundreds of families and the history of a vital and thriving section of Pittsburgh ended in the 1960s.

What makes Two Trains Running so remarkable is that as we are introduced to seven characters whose threatened lives bring the play to life, there is no bombast as their idiosyncratic personalities express pain, humor and a searching for some continuity. We meet Wolf, a dynamic and always plotting numbers-runner played to slithering perfection by Kenny Scott. There is Holloway (a remarkable Michael Asberry), the moral compass of the café, always there, always at the down front table ready for a coffee and a chess game and a tete-a-tete conversation with Memphis.

Michael J. Asberry (Holloway) in Marin Theatre Company’s production of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” — Photo: Kevin Berne

The stage is then energized by Eddie Ewell as Sterling. Fresh out of the state pen, he is glib and suave. Mr. Ewell fills the room with effortless radiance with a smile and guile that can melt the heart of Risa the waitress (Sam Jackson) whose life, it seems, is to refill the always emptying coffee cups and dish out the cornbread and chicken, which seem to be the only foodstuffs served at the Home Style. Risa has a secret which has protected her from any assault. Jackson hides the daily grind and the pain with a quiet resolve.

Eddie Ewell (Sterling) in MTC’s production of “Two Trains Running”. Photo: Kevin Berne.

Home Style is across the street from West’s Funeral Home. Khary L. Moye’s West, wearing his black suit and black gloves at all times, proudly announces his many Cadillacs, the dream cars of the black experience, are always in tip-top shape readying for the next death. Lastly and most movingly there is Hambone, whose two reiterated lines “I wants my ham. He gonna give me my ham!” brings us to tears in Michael Wayne Rice’s simple rendering of this sad complicated man.

Wilson’s play is filled with lengthy but distinctive monologues as Memphis and Holloway especially bring us Wilson’s prescient, proud profundities with shooting arrow precision. “No wonder Justice is wearing a blindfold” . . . “We are all a part of everything that came before.” The play is directed with infinite care and precision by Dawn Monique Williams. Even the scene changes under sound designer Gregory Robinson’s haunting work bringing the shifting passage of time are a part of Ms. Williams’ clarity.

I love this play and its bold attempt not to be bold, but just be! It is never boring. All we have to do is listen. Listen to the beating hearts of the black men and women impatiently and patiently knowing that change is coming.

Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who scream the loudest in our hearts,

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ASR Contributing Writer George Maguire is San Francisco based actor-director and is Professor Emeritus of Solano College Theatre. He is a voting member of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact: gmaguire1204@yahoo.com

 

ProductionTwo Trains Running
Written byAugust Wilson
Directed byDawn Monique Williams
Producing CompanyMarin Theatre Company (MTC)
Production DatesThrough Dec. 18th
Production AddressMarin Theatre Company
397 Miller Avenue
Mill Valley, CA
Websitewww.marintheatre.org
Telephone(415) 388-5200
Tickets$25.50 – $60.50
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall5/5
Performance5/5
Script5/5
Stagecraft5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!
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ASR Theatre Review! Quirky, Fascinating “Wolves” at MTC – by Barry Willis

 

A high-performing athletic team is very much a family, with all the closeness, cohesion, and dysfunctionality that “family” implies.

“The Wolves,” at Marin Theatre Company through April 8, is about one such family—a girls’ soccer team angling for a national championship. We never see them compete. Instead, all the action plays out before each game, on an indoor practice field where they train and rib each other about everything from typical teenage interests—parents, boyfriends, school—to issues they only partly understand, such as world geography and historical events.

Playwright Sarah Delappe has an expert’s ear for teen patois—her girls stammer and stall for time by inserting “like” in every other phrase, in near-universal rising intonation. She also has an intimate knowledge of athletes’ rough-and-tumble camaraderie—there are plenty of “f-bombs” hurled, none intended to harm, and the players, identified only by the numbers on their jerseys, often call each other “dude.” There’s a surplus of this stuff in the opening scene, which almost comes off as an overlong Saturday Night Live sketch, but the storyline takes a somber turn with the appearance of a talented new teammate claiming never to have played organized “football,” followed by a potentially career-ending knee injury to the Wolves’ star striker.

It gets more serious still with a tragedy that befalls the team, threatening to derail all their hard work, but they quite believably close ranks, more united than ever. It’s a beautiful moment about the empowering potential of loyalty and friendship.

Director Morgan Green coaxes excellent performances out of her ten-woman cast, all of them stage veterans and for the most part young enough to pass as high-schoolers. Of particular note are Portland Thomas as #11, with an amazingly relaxed and natural performance, and the energetic Sango Tajima as team captain #25, who pushes her comrades with a drill instructor’s grit and the shouting of almost comical slogans like “Teamwork makes the dream work!” Liz Sklar is outstanding in a cameo as the distraught Soccer Mom.

Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission, “The Wolves” is a captivating production and an unusual undertaking for Marin Theatre Company, which will host a final-day performance by the troupe’s understudies, most of them real high-school girls from Marin County. Their nickname: the “Wolf Pups.”

ASR Senior Editor Barry Willis is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and president of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.

 

“The Wolves” by Sarah Delappe

Through April 15, 2018

Marin Theatre Company

397 Miller Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941

Tickets: $10 – $49 Info: 415-388-5208, boxoffice@marintheatre.org

Rating: Three-and-a-Half out of Five Stars

 

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