The Aurora Theatre — Weekly Theater Guide

Lunacy Over Professionalism: Every Time, Please

The Aurora Theater in Berkeley is the King of dressing up junk in well-acted, well-designed productions. If steady competence alone were a virtue, the Aurora would ascend to the heavens to lounge with Shakespeare and Aristophanes. And yet somehow here they are producing The Creditors, August Strindberg’s nut fest of betrayal and revenge, tempting the Gods with the real thing.

And let’s just say the real thing destabilized the Aurora’s well-oiled machine and was a welcome surprise to the opening night crowd. As you might guess, it’s more fun to see a great play in an imperfect production, than a bad play in which the acting, direction, and design are without fault.

Barbara Dameshak’s direction rarely courts the mania of Strindberg’s fever dreams, though she does manage one brief flourish that is expert and true. Towards the end, Gustav runs from Adolph’s room to hide from Tekla and spy on her. He’s told the hapless Adolph that he wants to help him by observing them alone. As soon as he’s shut the door behind him, the lights change, and what we thought was a solid wall turns out to be a translucent scrim.

The audience gasped in delight at the chance to see the duplicitous Gustav in action. That one moment is terrific and I won’t soon forget it, but the rest of the production is too much of not enough. It’s a nice staged reading with costumes and lights, which in the case of Strindberg’s The Creditors is worth your time but not his. He’s asking for an engagement with the world and that’s a type of theater the Aurora rarely aspires to.

’The Creditors’ runs through March 3rd at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley. For tickets and information click here. For the Full Review click here.

The PastJohn WilkinsFebruary 27, 2019The Aurora Theatre, August Strindberg, 'The Creditors'Comment

'Everything is Illuminated' Is An Awful Mix Of Ambition And Moral Failure

There’s something distasteful about rank ambition and its stench is all over the Aurora Theatre’s production of Simon Block’s stage adaption of Jonathan Safran Foer’s kind-of-celebrated, first novel, Everything is Illuminated. The whole enterprise is what we might call anxious for significance.

You feel it in the forced nature of the writing, the way it wants to bully you into acknowledging the importance of what you’re witnessing. On a simple level, Block and Jonathan Safran Foer never miss the opportunity to let us know that even though the character Jonathan Safran Foer is a writer in the making in Everything is Illuminated, the book Everything is Illuminated and by extension the play Everything is Illuminated is actually the proof of his future greatness. In other words, the greatness of what we’re witnessing as we watch the play.

We could call it a literary case of circular reasoning, but it feels more like circular insistence, or wish fulfillment, or simply quite suspect. Whatever the case we should resist.

‘Every is Illuminated’ runs through December 16 at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley. For tickets and information click here. For the Full Review click here.

The PastJohn WilkinsDecember 4, 2018Jonathan Safran Fower, 'Everything is Illuminated', The Aurora TheatreComment