Review: Aurora's possibly last show champions the wonder of human connection
As she beams into other people's consciousnesses, like a psychic radio picking up distant stations, the human species starts to look like an untouched banquet hiding in plain sight. Immerse yourself in someone else's yearnings, voice and story, she implies, and you're nourished — if only you'd climb out of the rabbit hole of your own mind once in a while.
The bag-lady narrator of 'The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,' played by Marga Gomez, might be explaining what it's like to give her alien 'space chums' a tour of planet Earth, but she could also be describing Aurora Theatre Company's mission since 1992. The hyper-intimate Downtown Berkeley thrust stage, with just four wraparound rows of seats, always inspires an involuntary hush, like you're wearing a cloak of invisibility at someone else's dinner table.
In that way, Jane Wagner's one-woman show of interrelated monologues, which opened Thursday, July 17, has the making of a fitting coda. In May, the company announced it was suspending production next year because of an ongoing operating deficit, taking a possible step toward closure. Artistic Director Josh Costello told the Chronicle he hoped to find a way Aurora could continue to exist but acknowledged that 'The Search for Signs' might well be the theater's last main stage season show in its own venue.
Unfortunately, the show is equal parts bang and whimper.
Gomez, under the direction of Jennifer King, is one of the Bay Area's most likable performers. Even when she's poking fun at a character — a himbo gym rat, an angsty 15-year-old aspiring performance artist, a posh hair salon customer with a whiff of Katharine Hepburn — it's scrubbed of any meanness. Her subtext is always, 'But hey, aren't we all kind of like this?' and you can't help but agree.
She finds delicious little inflections that make the text prickle. A vibrator saleswoman has the disjointed tone of a robot, as if she's spent so much time with the device that she's short-circuited. And few actors are better at making characters come alive through stage business. When a pathetic aerobics student strikes a Statue of Liberty pose, you can tell this is the closest this poor sap will ever get to glory.
But as of opening night, Gomez hadn't mastered the text yet, once calling backstage for help. More often, she simply seemed to be groping for her next line instead of driving the show forward.
And 'Search' sprawls. Not all characters are equally interesting; in particular, a second-wave feminism tale that dominates the second act is paint-by-numbers. You keep waiting for a twist or clearer raison d'etre that never comes.
Part of that might be a function of the 1985 show's age, which reveals itself in other ways. While Wagner has a keen ear for funny-sounding phrases — 'cracker consciousness,' 'Nobel sperm bank,' 'Hamburger Helper for the boudoir' — the wheezy parade of one-liners feels like a throwback to Phyllis Diller or Joan Rivers.
But watch as 15-year-old wannabe punk rocker Agnes takes the stage at some club with an act in which she moves the palm of her hand closer and closer to an open flame, all to LeAnn Rimes' 'You Light Up My Life.' It's a lament for and protest against her shambles of a life and the messed-up world that gave rise to it. As Gomez ratchets up the intensity till you start to shift in your seat from the vicarious burn, Agnes is somehow more effective and beautiful in her futility. Like all great theater, it's a gift freely given, infinite in dividends.
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