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San Francisco Chronicle
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Another Bay Area theater is ‘suspending' as industry's free fall continues
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company plans to 'suspend' producing shows in the 2025-26 calendar, taking a possible step toward closure. The company hopes to continue to exist in some smaller form, Artistic Director Josh Costello told the Chronicle in advance of announcing the news Tuesday, May 13, 'But what it comes down to is the income is just not matching expenses anymore.' He noted a $500,000 operating deficit and a 50% decrease in the company's subscriber count compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic. 'We can't do another season like this in '25-'26, and it's obviously really disappointing,' he said. The move marks the latest major loss in a Bay Area theater scene that's been hemorrhaging companies since the pandemic. Its 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' running through May 25, followed by 'The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe' starring Marga Gomez and running July 10 through Aug. 10, could be the last Aurora shows in its 150-seat space, located conveniently near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. For 33 years, the Aurora has been renowned for language-forward theater performed by exceptional Bay Area actors in an up-close venue. Its deep-thrust shape means other audiences' reactions, right across the stage from you, are as much a part of the show as the scenery. The actors — who revere the company for its longstanding tradition of paying union and non-union performers the same — feel the closeness, too. 'They can't hide,' Costello said. 'They can't lie. They have to be fully in it all the way through, and it's exhilarating.' Aurora's productions, said interim board president Rebecca Parlette-Edwards, who's been a subscriber since the company's second season, 'put forth truths that I hadn't really thought about, but there they are.' It's not just coveted gigs and A-list performances under threat by the suspension but also new contributions to the art form. Aurora commissioned and premiered 'Eureka Day,' which just got nominated for a Tony Award. Playwright Jonathan Spector, who wrote 'Eureka Day,' said the suspension inspired not just grief but 'a fear about the Bay Area theater ecosystem more widely.' A vibrant theater ecosystem, he continued, needs 'theaters of different sizes and different styles and different interests that allow people to have an artistic life, and I really wonder about the viability of that in the region in the next five to 10 years.' He placed Aurora firmly in the 'middle rung,' explaining that without such professional but perpetually resource-strapped institutions, it's not clear how artists can climb from theater held together with gaffer tape, Red Bull and college acting class bonds to the art form's upper echelons. After Aurora achieved its emergency fundraising campaign goal of $500,000 last fall, Costello attempted to meet the harsh economic realities by planning a crowd-pleasing season with well-known playwrights — Noël Coward, Lynn Nottage — and cutting more than half of his full-time staff. But audiences still didn't return, he said, and running a company with just four full-timers was 'not sustainable.' 'People have been making a heroic effort, but people are tired,' he said. Costello was outspoken about what he sees as the reason for audiences' changing preferences. 'The pandemic was a trigger point, but I don't think it was the cause,' he said. He blamed social media and smartphones, which isolate us, literally drawing our gaze downward. Theater, he continued, 'is all about being in a room with other people and sharing in a communal act of imagination.' Social media, by contrast, 'makes us feel like it's us or them,' he said. 'It makes us feel that the individual is what matters.' As the staff and board ponder next steps, one option is to move into a smaller space. A second is to turn the venue into an arts hub in which other companies share space and software systems such as ticketing and payroll, helping Aurora pay its rent to Gordon Commercial. A third is to focus on co-producing; Aurora is already partnering with Marin Theatre on 'Eureka Day' in the fall. For now, Aurora is fundraising with a three-to-one match campaign to complete its current season 'with the same kind of integrity this company has always had,' Costello said. The company forewent another emergency drive. 'We all felt it was disingenuous to do it two years in a row, because then it's not an emergency campaign,' he explained. 'It's just, you don't have a business plan.' Costello is only the third artistic director in Aurora's history, succeeding Tom Ross and, before that, Barbara Oliver. He started in 2019, so he didn't even get to have a full season before the pandemic kiboshed his plans. Reflecting on his tenure, he told the Chronicle that his appointment was 'not a stepping stone' but 'a dream job.' Aurora has brought classics to skin-tingling life. In Alice Childress' backstage drama 'Trouble in Mind, ' a triumphant Margo Hall impaled Black stereotypes, and Ross' 'A Delicate Balance' seemed to realize the platonic ideal of Edward Albee's comedy of bourgeois unease. Mark Jackson's take on 'The Arsonists' made excruciating and delicious the backflips and somersaults the privileged will make to avoid seeing the costs of their mistakes, even as fascism approaches. The company has also shown new sides of beloved actors. Elsewhere the ubiquitous James Carpenter often plays Shakespeare's royals, but at Aurora fans could see him twitch as an overconfident lowlife in 'American Buffalo' or smolder with mystery and menace in 'The Children.' In 'Born With Teeth,' Dean Linnard didn't just reveal infinite facets; he sliced from one to another with a jeweller's precision. If Aurora's suspension evolves into a permanent closure, it will hardly be alone. California Shakespeare Theater, Cutting Ball Theater, Bay Area Children's Theatre, PianoFight, TheatreFirst, American Conservatory Theater's master of fine arts program, foolsFury and Exit Theatre's Eddy Street venue have all closed in recent years, while Custom Made Theatre Co. and Mugwumpin both went into long-term hibernation. San Francisco nonprofit musical theater company 42nd Street Moon stopped producing without even making a public statement or responding to press queries. 'For a couple of years now, everybody's been saying, 'I hope this is the bottom, and then we'll start to climb our way out,' ' Spector said, adding he hoped there was no further nadir to plumb. 'But I don't know.'
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
A case for ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy' as a great American play
History doesn't happen in great sea changes above our heads. It's whether one Black family decides to migrate north. It's which stranger you let talk to you on the train. And in 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' it's which ideas and experiences a girl hears over the breakfast table in her humble Brooklyn apartment — and how they inflect what she sees as possible for herself. Lynn Nottage's 1995 play about a postwar Great Migration family, whose Aurora Theatre Company production opened Thursday, May 1, could have been written today. Grieving widower Godfrey (David Everett Moore) is in thrall to a charlatan spiritualist, making excuses whenever his great leader doesn't deliver on promises. Communist Party footsoldier Aunt Lily Ann (Asia Nicole Jackson), taking it upon herself to move in with her brother-in-law and take care of his girls, keeps urging the family to unshackle themselves from servile capitalist ideology. As for her own joblessness, she says, 'Nobody wants to hire a smart colored woman.' And when daughters Ernestine (Anna Marie Sharpe) and Ermina (Jamella Cross) suddenly get a new stepmother in Gerte (Carrie Paff), a white German expat scarred by wartime privation and chaos, the conversations between her and Lily Ann feel startlingly 2025. They play the oppression olympics. They debate Gerte's assertion that 'When I see you I see no color' and just how much the world will allow any person of color to achieve — professionally, romantically. But it's never philosophical or abstract; it's grounded in romantic jealousy and insecurity that tick like a time bomb. Elizabeth Carter's production can feel a little stagey and clumsy sometimes. Some monologues that are supposed to be devastating have all the humanity of a foghorn, and light cues practically galumph in and out. But watch Sharpe and Cross as the two sisters. In physical comedy, Cross — one of the Bay Area's rising stars — has the precision of a gymnast or a figure skater. Slithering away from the singeing clutches of Lily Ann's hot iron comb, she makes the inanimate object into an enemy snake; each fresh crackle of burning hair is an escalating battle in that war known to every child: between common sense and adults' incomprehensible whims. And Sharpe makes Ernestine the poetic, impressionable sort who gulps down experience with her eyes and lets it suffuse her being. As the play's narrator, she gives Nottage's intricate, redolent text an easy buoyancy, trotting out lines like 'I want to go someplace where folks don't come home sullied by anger' with a winsome earnestness that makes the highfalutin natural. If there's an old-fashioned discursiveness to the script — it's the kind of play that feels like it ends three times over — Nottage constructs such a multilayered, expansive world that she earns the right to linger on the theatrical equivalent of sustains and fermatas. Here, the microcosm and the macrocosm are the same: The question of whether social change comes from revolution or everyday individual choices somehow equates to one girl's choice between following the humdrum path her father has paved for her or imagining something more.
San Francisco Chronicle
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
From stutter to stage star: David Everett Moore's journey in theater
When David Everett Moore landed his first big role in a school play, he had an epiphany. 'That was the first time that I noticed that I was on stage speaking these lines, and I didn't stutter,' he told the Chronicle. 'And I was like, 'What? Interesting! I didn't know that was possible! '' He was 12 years old in Los Angeles and the play was 'Annie Get Your Gun.' Discovering that onstage he could speak without his stutter 'was freeing. It was empowering,' he recalls. Now 46, the Berkeley resident and professional union actor doesn't think of the speech impediment he's had since early childhood as a tragedy or a cage. More Information 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy': Written by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Elizabeth Carter. Opens Saturday, April 26. Through May 25. $38-$68. Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-843-4822. Instead, Moore learned, 'It has to do with flow.' He contrasted extemporaneous speech with recited lines or music: 'When words are already living in your brain, when it's already memorized, there's a flow for that.' That's especially true with Shakespeare, with its rhythmic iambic pentameter, which Moore frequently performs. Moore, currently performing in Lynn Nottage's 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy' at Aurora Theatre, said that to get where he is now, he suffered less prejudice than one might think. But the system he had to devise for himself requires a dedication to craft that might make many lesser men quit. 'There's never been a point where I was like, 'Oh, I should give up acting because of this,'' he said. And he's hardly the only public-facing professional with a speech impediment; former President Joe Biden, James Earl Jones and Samuel L. Jackson all had or have stutters. Moore's stammer isn't severe, but you do notice it in conversation. When he meets people for the first time, he might ask them not to suggest words to him when he pauses. 'I know the word; I'm just having trouble getting it out,' he said. In prior years, when he'd meet new collaborators in audition or rehearsal rooms, he'd explain that he speaks more fluidly onstage, 'just to make sure they knew I could do it,' he said. Then one time, he gave no preamble, and no one ever raised an eyebrow. Same thing every time after that. Eventually, he realized that his reputation and resumé, with roles at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Crowded Fire Theater and Colorado Shakespeare Festival among many others, speak for themselves. Victoria Evans Erville, a playwright, director and erstwhile leader of the now-defunct TheatreFirst, described Moore as an ideal actor, and he credits her with seeing his potential before he could. 'When he acts, you don't ever hear it, ever,' she said of his speech impediment. Instead, his other qualities shine: his focus, bravery and willingness to play, his ability to work with actors of any experience level. Most of all, he doesn't have to be in the spotlight if it doesn't serve the story. 'He loves the craft more than he loves himself,' she said. But being onstage doesn't 100% cure his stammer, Moore cautioned. He still occasionally stutters in performance, such as that one time in 'Much Ado About Nothing' at Colorado Shakespeare Festival. 'I just got stuck onstage in front of 1,100 people,' he recalled. 'The play ground to a halt because I couldn't get the word out. It was probably like five seconds, but five seconds onstage is an eternity.' After he exited, one of the show's more seasoned actors pulled him aside to say, 'Hey, it's not your fault' — a gift he still remembers fondly. Over time, Moore has learned more about how his brain works and developed mitigation strategies to decrease the likelihood of such incidents. For example, he learned that words that start with hard consonants followed by short vowels are harder for him. 'Dine' is easy; 'dinner,' not so much. When he first reads a script aloud to himself, he notes all the words that could be 'spicy,' he said with a laugh. He tries to make sure he's at or toward the beginning of a breath on tough words, a bit like the way singers and reed and brass players might plot where in a score they inhale. Or he'll imagine other words coming before a tough word, but not say them, and then mentally put a little music to the whole phrase as well. All the audience hears is 'dinner is served,' but in his head he appends 'what time shall I tell them that' to the beginning. All professional actors learn to be aware of where they're holding tension in their bodies, but for Moore the practice takes on additional importance. If he gets stuck on a word, he tries to take a 'mental photograph' of his physicality and ask himself, 'Is the tension in my throat? Is there tension in the neck muscles, or in my tongue?' Then, if he identifies the spot, he can try to release it or breathe through it. Sometimes he simply has to slow down, even when a play's scene demands urgency, presenting an intriguing artistic challenge of 'playing the tension of the moment without bringing physical tension,' as Moore put it. When all else fails, Moore might ask a director for permission to change a word in a script. Surveying his career, Moore attributes his success first to his parents, who took him to see theater growing up, which is 'still not commonplace for Black people,' he said. As a young boy, he saw Dulé Hill ('The West Wing') in a national tour of 'The Tap Dance Kid,' which showed him that people who look like him can be actors. 'Representation matters,' he said. Now he tries to pay that forward. He works frequently as a teaching artist, and once, working with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he gave a talkback to students, showing them that the actor they'd just seen onstage speaks with a stutter. Afterward, a student wrote him a note saying he made her feel better about her own speech impediment. 'That's everything,' Moore said. When other theater artists ask him for advice about working with speech impediments, he makes it a point to give them however much time they need, too. I thought I remembered docking Moore for vocal stumbles in my reviews of his work, before I learned about his speech impediment, but then didn't find any evidence in the Chronicle's archives. Still, I can say I at least thought about doing so. I recently asked Moore what he might think about such a criticism. 'If the person said that it took away from their enjoyment of the experience,' he replied, 'then I I would encourage that person to ask themselves why it took them out of it.' Flawlessness is illusory anyway, he noted: 'Seeing something different than my expectations doesn't make that thing bad.'
