PICK ASR! Oakland Theater Project’s “Cost of Living”

By Susan Dunn

Heading to a show titled Cost of Living, I anticipated an evening of economists discussing the GNP. Given our current rampant politics, that would have seemed a fit.

Mercifully, Martyna Majok’s play is a more personal view of costs—economic, physical, and emotional. Four characters—two disabled and two caregivers—play out the feelings and the passions of their respective situations, juxtaposed against their class and educational backgrounds.

Cost of Living is a “must see”…

In the opening scene, a feisty, loquacious Eddie (masterfully played all over the stage by high-energy Daniel Duque-Estrada), regales us from his bar stool about how the “shit in life is not to be understood.” We learn he’s lost his truck-driver’s license due to a DUI. Moreover, his estranged wife and texting mate has died, and in his loneliness and desperation, he continues to send text messages to her cell phone to comfort himself. When he gets text replies, he is confounded but also mysteriously buoyed.

The play is framed by two capable and well-cast disabled actors: Matty Placencia, who has met the emotional and physical challenges of cerebral palsy all his life, and Christine Bruno, whose accomplished acting resume has focused on a range of acting roles and disability-inclusion consulting.

In Majok’s play, Placencia embodies John, a young upper-class professor at Princeton, who partially manages with one functioning hand, a wheelchair, and a wealthy family, but requires a part-time caregiver for his daily personal hygiene. He is supercilious, defensive, and insensitive to needs other than his own. Christine Bruno plays Eddie’s paraplegic wife Ani, crippled by a traffic accident following her estrangement. Eddie has come back to care for her, hoping to share in her insurance proceeds. Bruno’s wide range of facial expressions and sharp and ironic tongue reveal her frustrations with her ex-husband. But she warms up to Eddie as her caregiver over time.

Finally, there is Carla Gallardo’s Jess, a 20-year-old Latina struggling to sustain herself with bar jobs and living in her car. In desperation she applies to be John’s caregiver, attracted by his higher-class aura and his financial means. Gallardo gains our sympathy through her wide range of expressivity while meeting the physical challenge of showering, shaving, and dressing John on stage before us. Prompted by John, her own challenged history ekes out as they get used to his routine.

The cast at work. Photos by Ben Kranz Studio

Cost of Living is two plays with one set representing two apartments that occupy their own respective mini-set areas and finally merge together in the final scene. The mini-sets create difficulty for the arena staging, but are mostly well-handled by set designer Emilie Whelan. Blocking for disabled actors is also tricky, but necessary to play well to the three audience sections. Some scenes were partly obstructed by the five or more floating mini-sets.

For this reviewer, occasionally, actors’ words were lost when delivering lines away from parts of the audience, but in general the utilization of space clarifies the action and imaginatively creates an atmosphere with a single rear window. Projections keep us emotionally in the right plane with grey weather, rain or pelting snow.

With a complex story and characters that ring true as individuals in straits that could be our fate as well if we were not so fortunate, Cost of Living is a “must see.” The authenticity of the actors in this play demands kudos to the production.

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Since arriving in California from New York in 1991, Susan Dunn has been on the executive boards of Hillbarn Theatre, Altarena Playhouse, Berkeley Playhouse, Virago Theatre and Island City Opera, where she is a development director and stage manager. An enthusiastic advocate for new productions and local playwrights, she is a voting member of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, and a recipient of a 2015 Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. Contact: susanmdunn@yahoo.com

ProductionCost of Living
Written byMartyna Majok
Directed byEmilie Whelan
Producing CompanyOakland Theater Project
Production DatesThru Mar 24th, 2024
Production AddressFlax Art and Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland, CA 94612
Websitewww.oaklandtheaterproject.or
Telephone(510) 646-112
Tickets$35-$60
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4/5
Performance4/5
Script4/5
Stagecraft4/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK!YES!

ASR Theater ~~ “Exodus to Eden” – A Fever Dream and Journey of Hope

By Susan Dunn

In a reverse metaphor from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in Exodus to Eden, a company of wanderers travels from California, which climate change has rendered a dust-bowl, to Oklahoma, which offers the possibility of affordable housing and hope for new life.

The always-unique Oakland Theater Project goes to the mat in this sprawling three-hour new production which seeks to save us from our current gods of capitalism and power. In a promo video, Arielle Powell, who plays the lead role Miriam, shares that this new play, written and directed by Michael Socrates Moran, is about this theater company coming together to try to right our seriously-wronged community.

According to The Man: “Exodus isn’t about ‘The People.’ It’s about gods. Gods fighting over a nation’s economy.”

What is wrong? That’s not always clear in the mix of character groups, historical and theatrical allusions, fuzzy transitions between dream sequences and reality, and above all, the difficulties with everyday communications across our own community. What’s wrong is conveyed to us from harangues, from bodily reactions, from mysteries, from the weather, and from technology. These elements arrive helter-skelter. Sorting this out through the play is the audience’s challenge.

The prologue announces the end of history, the end of the Cold War, and the takeover by capitalism and power. Embodied by “The Man,” we are lectured that the world is now ruled by contracts, by transactions to individuals. The social covenant is the glue which binds our communities across all different peoples. And that covenant is now dissipated by drugs.

The Man and a prisoner at work for Oakland Theater Project.

As technology advances our lives, it also destroys our planet. In a brilliant touch, a guardian angel shadows and protects The Man with a ray gun which zaps our cares for the planet by shooting off constant TV announcements of trouble. Readily available drugs help the rest of us chill out, like soma in 1984.

For the wanderers, life is a prison boxing them in. Their journey, the search for home, for house, for safety and sustenance, is to find out how to get out of that prison. As they face enormous odds, most will not survive.

Does technology “zap” our lives? See “Exodus to Eden” and find out.

This panorama of issues is fitted out with fascinating costumes, projections, sound effects and props which help to punctuate and sort out the many themes and characters. However, the road forward through the central character of Miriam, is not easily understood. She has dodged a deal with the devil throughout the play.

What she carries forward with her new child is up to our imaginations. See this play for the scope, the passion and occasional magic of the work, and decide which world you need to live in.

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Since arriving in California from New York in 1991, Susan Dunn has been on the executive boards of Hillbarn Theatre, Altarena Playhouse, Berkeley Playhouse, Virago Theatre and Island City Opera, where she is a development director and stage manager.

An enthusiastic advocate for new productions and local playwrights, she is a voting member of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, and a recipient of a 2015 Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. Contact: susanmdunn@yahoo.com

ProductionExodus to Eden
Written byMichael Socrates Moran
Directed byMichael Socrates Moran
Producing CompanyOakland Theater Project
Production DatesThru Feb 26th, 2023
Production AddressFlax Art and Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland, CA 94612
Websitewww.oaklandtheaterproject.or
Telephone(510) 646-112
Tickets$10– $55
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall3/5
Performance3/5
Script2/5
Stagecraft4/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK!----

An Aisle Seat Review. OTP Tries Drive-in Theater With Binding Ties: The 16th Street Station – by Vic Cordell

It’s been virtually a year since the pandemic darkened the live performance stage. All theatergoers lament the absence of our favorite intellectual stimulation and fear that many theatrical organizations may lack the wherewithal to rebound from financial catastrophe.

Many companies now offer electronic alternatives – from the filming of previous stage performances to original productions using Zoom technology. Although electronic media don’t offer the same urgency and reward as live performances, these endeavors do provide a way for companies to reach their audience and for audiences to support companies.

Enter drive-in theater productions which, unlike viewing at home, offer the advantage of bringing theater lovers together at the venue to recreate some sense of community and allow some possibility of live elements. So it goes with Oakland Theater Project’s (OTP – formerly Ubuntu) entire 2021 season. In keeping with OTP’s origins as a peripatetic, site-specific theater company, its season opener Binding Ties: The 16th Street Station takes place away from its current home base. Even more poignant, the visuals are cast upon the outside walls of the titular station in Oakland.

This presentation of Binding Ties is the 30th anniversary of the documentary created by the esteemed Bay Area theatrical lighting designer, Dr. Stephanie Anne Johnson, with Michael Copeland Sydnor. It focuses on the African-American, and to a small extent, on the Asian and Mexican immigrant minority’s experience working in service capacities on long-distance trains in the first half of the 20th century.

The stately Beaux-Arts-styled 16th Street Station plays a major character in the stories that unfold. The station itself was damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and was subsequently condemned, and former rail lines have been rerouted to other stations. Nonetheless, attempts to revive and repurpose this beautiful grande dame continue to this day.

…The concept and message of Binding Ties: The 16th Street Station appeal and deserve our patronage…

In addition to contextual narration, recorded interviews comprise the substance of Binding Ties The subjects are Oakland-based, Southern Pacific Railroad workers, primarily sleeping car porters, who recount vignettes of their lives and work. This worthy look into history reveals maltreatment of minorities in this country, even those with relatively esteemed employment.  Despite their dignified hard work, their tales reveal many layers of indignity directed toward them. The pay was poor. Treatment by passengers and supervisors was often demeaning. Unfounded claims that black employees were stealing from passengers and the company were common. And even though female employees served as stewardesses, they were classified and referred to as maids.

The viewer also catches glimpses into the sometimes very luxurious aspects of train travel that also serve to emphasize the social and economic gulf between the passengers and those who served them. Although the interesting storytelling yields a kaleidoscopic view of working on the trains, there is no dramatic arc or trend line leading to a dénouement.

One bright spot reported in the documentary was the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, which protected and advanced its members. This noteworthy accomplishment in the labor and civil rights movements was the first-ever union founded and led by African-Americans to be chartered by the American Federation of Labor.

As a result of inconsistent audio quality in the soundtrack (delivered by FM through car radios), some speakers sound loud and clear, but others are faint or scratchy, suggesting the need for audio engineering. Sound designer Kevin Myrick has incorporated musical numbers, beginning with the appropriate “Hear That Train Whistle Blow,” that add life and dimensionality to the piece.

The visual component of the work is represented by a slide show of relevant black and white period photos projected on two screens. The parking spot assigned this reviewer was extremely oblique to the screens so that most text and smaller image details in the nearer screen could not be deciphered, and nothing could be discerned on the far screen.

In order to add a live element to the production, a “Conductor” played by William Oliver III introduces and closes the show.  From my vantage point, I heard him clearly but caught only a glimpse of him. The concept makes sense, but more content and spark for the role would be welcomed.

The concept and message of Binding Ties: The 16th Street Station appeal and deserve our patronage. However, the dramatic elements could be strengthened as could the technical side of delivering performance with this technique. Nonetheless, credit is due Oakland Theater Project for taking on important topics and providing some intellectual stimulation for its supporters.

Oakland Theater Project’s Binding Ties: The 16th Street Station

Created by Dr. Stephanie Anne Johnson with Michael Copeland Sydnor

Performances in the parking lot of Oakland’s 16th Street Train Station

Through February 28, 2021

Tickets: Per car price, $25 for one person, $30 for two, with some pay-what-you-can.  No sales at the door.

Ticket info: https://oaklandtheaterproject.org/

Reviewer ratings

  • Overall: 3 of 5 stars
  • Performance: 3 of 5
  • Script: 4 of 5
  • Stagecraft: 3 of 5

ASR reviewer Victor Cordell is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle and the American Theatre Critics Association, and a Theatre Bay Area adjudicator.

 

 

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