Second Row Center

First, let me tell you about a show I saw last week, then let me say a few words about where I saw it.

“Trailer Park Gods” is an original play by Nayia Kuvetakis, a recent UC Berkeley graduate. So, actually, are most of the members of Faultline Theater, a San Francisco-based company made up of recent Berkeley theater majors, all fueled by a passion for creating fresh new plays, by emerging playwrights, telling effective stories that speak to a new generation of theatergoers. Trailer Park Gods is a strong example of just that: good, effective storytelling from a fresh voice.

Taking the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone, Kuvetakis has left the names and the bare bones of the myth, but has refashioned it into a modern tale of desperate people yearning to feel powerful and loved in a landscape where powerlessness and abandonment are the norm. In this version, Demeter, played with fire and focus by Sarah Nowicki, is not the goddess of nature of the original myth, but a near-destitute mother with a green thumb whose grown bitter after losing her central valley farm in the recession. She blames a lot of people for her troubles, including her ex-husband Zeus, but mostly she blames her brother-in-law Hades, Paul Rodrigues, who years earlier abandoned the farm, taking her life-savings with him. After being thrown in jail, Hades essentially dropped from the Earth, leaving Demeter to raise her smart, studious daughter Persephone alone in a trailer park, surrounded by various hardscrabble folks all dreaming of a better life while doing little to make it happen.

After Hades returns to town, he avoids Demeter’s wrath while re-establishing a bond with the teenage Persephone, played indelibly by Amanda Farbstein. After years spent taking care of her mother, working an afterschool job to make payments on their trailer, Persephone finds herself powerfully drawn to Hades, a man she’s been raised to hate for the last several years of her life.

The cast is first-rate, with some riveting, real performances, and the script, while perhaps a tad loose and work-shoppy, is packed with strong ideas, crisp dialogue, and clever observations about the myths we tell ourselves and each other to get by. Director Emma Nichols keeps the pace clipping, and keeps the actors on fire, though sometimes the sudden tone-shifts in how each character speaks and relates to each other seem a little out-of-key and ever-so-slightly confusing.

Small matter, that.

Trailer Park Gods, flaws and all, is still one exciting piece of theater, an absorbing story of real people who’ve lost control of their own lives, and must summon what power they have left, be it the power of anger, hope, love, hate – or simple perseverance.

Now let’s talk about the theater space itself.

Lets face it. Part of the experience of going to the theater is in actually going to the THEATER, the physical brick-and-mortar edifice which contains the stage on which the theatrical performance of the moment is being staged. There is an element of theater in the very act of walking into such a place, and that includes what happens inside the lobby before and after the show.

PianoFight, in San Francisco’s tenderloin area, is a brilliant fusion of social club, bar and restaurant, and theater. There’s food and drink and a spacious area to socialize with friends before and after the show, and with two theaters, there is always a new show about to start at PianoFight, which gives local theater artists a place to hone their craft for an audience eager to see something new, and then have a beer and talk about it with friends.

Is there a place in Sonoma County for a venue like Pianofight? I think there is. The question now is, who’s going to make that happen?

Trailer Park Gods runs through May 16 at Pianofight. www.pianofight.com.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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Whatever else one says about “Point Break Live!,” you have to agree there aren’t many other live entertainments where the audience is doused with water, beaned by flying sandwiches, robbed at gunpoint by guys wearing Richard Nixon masks, and . . . um . . . spattered with blood.

Fake blood, but yeah, blood.

Welcome to “Point Break LIVE!” an astonishingly weird, loose-limbed spoof of the iconic, 1991 cult-hit B-movie starring Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze and Gary Busey. “Point Break Live!” – or PBL to its fans – was conceived written by Jaime Keeling in 2003.

Today, twelve years after its initial debut, this giddy over-the-top “extreme theater” extravaganza of coarseness and crudity is still going strong. On the first Friday of every month, the cast of the long running L.A. production brings the show up to San Francisco, unleashing PBL at the South-of-Market DNA Lounge.

The show’s story is more-or-less that same as the movie.

A young FBI agent, and former college quarterback named Johnny Utah infiltrates a ring of beach-dwelling daredevils who rob banks by day and surf waves by night. Known as “the ex-presidents,” they commit their crimes wearing rubber masks of Nixon, Reagan, Ford and Carter. The ring is led by the guru-like Bohdi (Swayze, in the film, Sam Snowden on stage). Bohdi lives by the principle, “If you want to experience the ultimate, you have to pay the ultimate price.”

The movie was full of car chases, surfing scenes, skydiving heroics, and number of epic explosions and barrages of gunfire, all recreated in Point Break LIVE! in deliciously low-tech ways that frequently spill over into the audience.

During the surfing scenes, for example, the actors douse the crowd with super soakers and sun block. During the wildly funny gunfights, fake blood cascades into the air in all directions, including up, so watch out if you’re in the balcony. During the famous meatball sandwich scene, in which Johnny Utah’s partner Pappas (James Cotner) delivers the crowd-pleasing line, “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass-end of rhino!” actual meatball sandwiches are hurled into the seats. Experienced PBL visitors come prepared with ponchos and rain slickers, and believe me, you’ll need one.

It’s not exactly classy, but it’s fun, it’s high energy, it’s inventive and it’s endlessly clever. Though the cast-members are all trained actors, the Keanu Reeves character is a member of the audience, chosen by the audience. Once selected, the Keanu-of-the-night delivers his lines from cue cards wielded by his perky handler and part-time stunt double, played with sassy charm by Christi Waldon.

The actors are quite good. Some of them rappel onto the stage from the balcony or dangle from cables during the skydiving scenes. In some ways, the cast is like an expert clown troupe in a three-ring circus, juggling a whole lot of balls at once while delivering lines with audacious glee and loose-but-effective comic timing.

While at times it all seems more like a Saturday Night Live sketch on steroids, uppers, and a bottle of Jack Daniels than it resembles a more traditional piece of theatrical craftsmanship, that barely matters. The unrestrained joy and pure ballsy outrageousness of the thing, ultimately turns Point Break Live! into something unique, and truly memorable. To paraphrase Bodhi, “If you want to experience the ultimate night of theater, you have to pay the ultimate price!” In this case, that price includes getting spattered with blood.

Trust me. It’s worth it.

“Point Break Live!” runs the first Friday of the month at DNA Lounge. in San Francisco at 7:30pm and 11:00pm. Dnalounge.com

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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Music has a way of reaching out like no other art form. In times of stress it calms our nerves. It gives us strength when we are struggling. Then again, it also has a way of reaching into our souls and tearing us into sad little pieces.

Two new Marin County shows, neither a traditional musical, each use music in unexpected ways to tell stories about tough, resilient people battling impossible odds.

One is just so-so. The other is a must see.

“The Way West,” now playing at Marin Theatre Company, is Mona Mansour’s intriguing but mostly unsatisfying examination of how self-delusion and optimism can make us feel like the heroes of our own stories, even when we’re not. Mom, played with forceful enthusiasm by Anne Darragh, just won’t let anything get her down. Her Central California home is being foreclosed upon. She has a mysterious illness. She keeps driving her car into things. But as long as she can pick up a ukulele and sing songs about the early pioneers – those plucky survivors who made it through on sheer grit and optimism – then she’ll get by.

Her daughters aren’t so sure.

Manda, a high-earning grant writer, is appalled at her mother’s ambivalence in the face of looming disaster, and Meesh is just looking for the next E-bay scam to earn a few dollars of her own. Mom’s friend Tress has taken what little is left of her friend’s money to invest in a cutting-edge weight loss business, something to do with magic water selling for 500 bucks a bottle.

From this rather promising theatrical set-up, directed with a wobbly sense of pace by Hayley Finn, a rather rocky and rambling story unfolds, one that frustrates as much as it entertains. The songs are a nice diversion, and the performances are likable across the board. But like the less fortunate pioneers Mom loves to sing and talk about, the ones abandoned along the way or eaten by the others, this amiable failure of a play just doesn’t have what it takes to make it through to the end.

That brings us to James Baldwin’s marvelous “The Amen Corner” presented by AlterTheater of Marin.

In “The Amen Corner,” Gospel music underscores the roiling emotions lurking under the surface of a small storefront church in Harlem, 1953. Directed with fierce attention to emotional detail by Jeanette Harrison, this production unfolds, with minimal props and set pieces, in a cramped corner the Body Kinetics health club in San Rafael, a setting that lends an appropriate sense of urban place to the story.

Sister Margaret, played sensationally by Cathleen Riddley, is the impassioned shepherd of a small flock of believers. She leads by example as much as by the fire of her sermons. When her long-estranged jazz musician husband Luke suddenly appears, Margaret fears he might pull their son David from God’s path.

She never suspects that its her congregation, gradually incited by what they’ve learned about their leader’s past, who she should be wary of. Insightful and lyrical, with beautiful writing and strong supporting performances anchoring the rising drama, “The Amen Corner” is sensitively insightful and powerfully moving.

It’s long, with two intermissions, but like a good old-fashioned gospel tune, it’s worth the time, and impossible to get out of your head.

“The Way West” runs Tuesday–Sunday through May 10 at Marin Theatre Company.

“The Amen Corner” runs Tuesday–Sunday through May 17 at Body Kinetics, and Saturdays at the Smith Rafael Film Center.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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There may be more-than-one theatrical franchise of musical plays that started out as a line of greeting cards showing nuns saying vaguely racy things, but if there is, it’s not anywhere as famous or as popular as the “Nunsense” shows by Dan Goggins.

The first one appeared off Broadway in 1985. The show, in which the Little Sisters of Hoboken put on a fundraiser to bury the four dead sisters who are taking up space in the freezer – they died of botulism – was a mostly plotless assemblage of nun characters with funny names performing goofy nun-themed comedy sketches, some involving puppets, bingo games, or ballet dancing, all of it wrapped up in some truly catchy songs like “Nunsense is Habit forming,” “Holier Than Thou,” and “We’ve Got to Clean Out the Freezer.” It all pokes gentle fun at Catholicism while also being one-hundred-percent pro-faith, pro-God, and pro-nun, especially nuns who make jokes about death, leprosy and the Apostle Peter.

Since its debut, “Nunsense” has been performed all over the world, and miraculously, has given birth to several sequels and spinoffs, two of which are currently being performed by different theater companies in Sonoma County.

“Nunsense: the Mega Musical,” is essentially a rewrite of the original show, with some new musical numbers and a few additional onstage characters. Running through May 3rd at the Sonoma Community Center, in Sonoma, and produced by J Love Productions, the shiow’s highlights include Abbey Chamber’s soaring rendition of “I Just Wanna Be a Star,” Sister Robert Anne’s bittersweet lament about missed opportunities, and Nora Chambers’ outrageous performance of “The Dying Nun Ballet,” as interpreted by the convent’s resident novice Sister Mary Leo, who always wanted to be a ballet dancer. Also very funny is “So You Want to Be a Nun,” performed with commitment and excellent comic timing by Julia Holsworth as Sister Mary Amnesia, who can’t remember anything ever since a crucifix fell on her head. In the song, she sings a duet with a nun puppet, who appears to be possessed. Eventually Sister Mary Amnesia recalls her former life as a country Western Singer and secret millionaire.

That’s the funny thing about the Little Sisters of Hoboken.

They all seem to have secrets, and were all once been performers. Even the Reverend Mother was once a tightrope walker, and still yearns to be in the spotlight.

That’s more or less the point of “Nunsense II, the Second Coming,” running through April 26 at the Raven Theater Windsor. The very first sequel to the original, Second Coming finds the sisters back on stage for a thank you show, after everything worked our favorably enough the first time. The dead sisters have been buried, and now the only problem is that Sister Mary Amnesia, played in Windsor by Cindy Brillhart-True, might have once been a Franciscan. And having been revealed to be a millionaire, the Franciscans now want her back.

There is even less plot than the original, and the songs aren’t quite as catchy or as funny, but there is still plenty of entertainment value in seeing the Little Sisters again, all of them still wrestling with their secret desires to be famous. Sister Robert Anne, here played marvelously by Jeanine LaForge, is especially eager to prove herself, to great comic effect.

The Windsor cast, all of whom have played these roles before, bring an extra dash of confidence and character-development to their parts, which is saying something with material this light and fluffy and essentially pointless.

That said, even the Reverend Mother would agree that laughing, especially laughing at ourselves, is definitely never a sin.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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I love puppets.

It’s a secret that only a certain number of people know about me, but in my late teens, I was a professional puppeteer. It’s true. I had my own company – a puppet company – and we toured around Southern California doing, you know, puppet shows.

That was a 35 years ago, but as a guy who knows what its like to bring an inanimate object to life, I still appreciate the sheer difficulty of putting puppets on stage in a theatrical production. Which brings us to the The Independent Eye’s dreamlike staging of William Shakespeare’s epic tragedy “King Lear,” running Fridays and Saturdays through April 26 at the Emerald Tablet art gallery in San Francisco.

This is “King Lear” as a puppet show.

Which makes more sense than it sounds.

The puppets themselves, to begin with, are breathtaking. Eerily beautiful works of art, these old fashioned hand-puppets are amazing to see, and in the hands of Sebastopol theater artists Elizabeth Fuller and Conrad Bishop – Bishop built the puppets himself – they pop to life in mesmerizing ways. These are not the fluffy, cutesy-bootsy kind of puppets you might see in a children’s show, which is good because King Lear is not some fluffy, cutesy-bootsy Shakespeare play.

The story is well known.

The aging monarch Lear, who impulsively hands the rule of his kingdom over to his daughters, somehow believes he is still in control of his kingdom and his destiny, but his greedy family members have plans of their own. It isn’t pretty. Eye gouging is involved. King Lear, after all, is a tragedy about weak-willed people becoming puppets to their own desires and to each other, helpless in the cruel hands of fate. Clearly, none of Shakespeare’s works is better suited to the puppet show treatment than this.

Bishop, in flowing white hair and a crown of leather braid, plays the increasingly frail and frustrated Lear. Fuller, in full clown makeup and red nose, is Lear’s faithful fool. All of the other characters are played by puppets, voiced and manipulated by Bishop and Fuller.

At times, the way this talented twosome manipulates those puppets, the blank faces coming alive with no more than a tiny adjustment of angle, is nothing short of genius. The sound design by Fuller is also amazing, constructed entirely from Fuller’s own voice, transformed through a vocal processor into a soundtrack of haunting reverberations and otherworldly music.

But for all its visual and auditory glory, the production – as currently constructed – is frustratingly confusing and hard-to-follow at times. Though Bishop easily ranks as one of the best, most heartbreaking Lear’s I’ve ever seen, his performance is hampered by the need to play scenes against puppets he’s voicing himself – with not a lot of vocal variation from one puppet character to another – all of which adds to a strangely muddled flow in the proceedings.

At times it’s hard to tell which character is speaking when.

In other shows I’ve seen by the Independent Eye, such as their adaptations of “The Tempest” and “Frankenstein,” a troupe of four or five performers An additional puppeteer or two would allow others to play several of Bishop’s puppet characters, freeing Bishop to engage and interact as Lear unencumbered. A performance this good deserves nothing less.

In the end, how much you enjoy this eerie Lear may depend on your ability to ignore the problems, and simply surrender to the strange, lush beauty of it all.

“King Lear” runs Friday and Saturday through April 25 at The Emerald Tablet. Independenteye.org.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB

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Something kinky has been taking place lately in the world of mainstream entertainment. Sadism and masochism are now to romantic comedy what romance and comedy use to be to romantic comedy. From the 2002 movie Secretary to 2011’s three-novel series 50 Shades of Grey (released as a movie earlier this year), many of our favorite new “love stories” are disturbingly, conspicuously twisted.

Standing somewhere between those two examples is David Ives’ Tony-winning 2010 stage play “Venus in Fur,” now running at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Winner of the Tony for Best Play and Best Actress, Venus in Fur stands as a career high-water-mark for Ives, who’s best known for work like All in the Timing and Lives of the Saints, both collections of short one-acts. Ives’ work, by and large, has tended to sacrifice plot in the service of playing with language. Few playwrights are as masterful and entertaining with words and sentences as is Ives. But as an inventor of compelling stories, he’s always been a little lacking. Perhaps that’s the reason he’s chosen to adapt so many classic tales by other people when tackling full-length plays, works like Piere Corneille’s “The Liar” and Moliere’s “The Misanthrope.”

With “Venus in Fur,” Ives fuses his best instincts into one show, fashioning a language-rich play about a playwright-director who’s just completed an adaption of the 1870 novel Venus in Furs, by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

And here’s where it gets kinky.

Sacher-Masoch is the gentlemen for whom the term “masochism” was named, and Venus in Furs is the novel that brought the concept of sadomasochism into public awareness.

At Main Stage West, Anthony Abate plays Thomas the playwright, who has been auditioning actresses for the part of Vanda, an aristocratic woman who spontaneously takes a sex-slave and learns to mistreat him in degrading ways. As Thomas is about to leave his New York office, with the role of Vanda still uncast, in walks an actress whose name is also Vanda (mysterious!), played by Rose Roberts, who’s pretty much astonishing from start to finish. Vanda is a hot mess of an actress, dropping F-bombs left and right, desperate to audition though she’s three hours late, clutching a bag of props and costumes and a copy of the script she’s somehow gotten her hands on – despite the fact that almost no one has read it but Thomas and his producers.

It is difficult to describe what happens next without spoiling the delicate series of revelations and red-herrings Ives incorporates into his gradually intensifying – and frequently hilarious – if not exactly plot-heavy story. The audition quickly turns into a battle of wits, sexuality, and gender assumptions. Thomas is surprised when that Vanda seems to have memorized the entire script, and as the audition commences, he reluctantly reads the role of the sex-slave to Vanda’s dominatrix. Sacher-Masoch’s soft-porn story-within-the-story – which Vanda eventually eviscerates with her dead-on critical analysis – eventually overlaps onto the intensifying power-play taking place between director and actress.

There’s a bit of smoke-and-mirrors going on in Ives’ script, which would have little story at all were it not for the story within the story, but Ives’ work the smoke and mirrors well enough that few will notice that not much actually happens.

But then, what does happen is extremely entertaining and even a little thought-provoking, thanks largely to director David Lear, who adds a few bold additions to Ives’ original vision. Ultimately, this uneven but highly intelligent play has lots to say about what men and women think about men and women. Funny, thoughtful, and painfully to-the-point, Venus in Fur is so good it hurts.

“Venus in Fur” runs Thursday–Sunday through April 25 at Main Stage West. Mainstagewest.org.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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One thing about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that surprises a few newcomers is that only about four or five of the eleven shows they do each year are by William Shakespeare. The festival mixes things up a lot, adding original shows, historical classics, world premieres, musicals and American standards. This year – with four shows open already and more to come as the year unfolds – two non-Shakespeare shows are already clear hits.

Such is the case with Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls,” a show so popular that no high school and community theater company in the nation can resist taking a crack at it. Everyone knows it.

But forget what you think you know about “Guys and Dolls.”

Director Mary Zimmerman, a card-carrying theatrical magician of the highest order, is known for tackling impossible source material like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci, and Kipling’s The Jungle Book. This year, she’s taken on the herculean task of making Guys and Dolls look fresh, fun, and significant – and she’s done it.

Behind a mostly bare stage occupied at all times by a wooden table and a portable scale model of New York City, a massive wall occasionally opens up revealing windows that display various scene-setting images like palm trees or sewer grates. Other scene elements roll off and on – or bounce on, in the case of several dozen beach balls that appear in one scene set in Havana, Cuba – but the real razzle-dazzle in this Guys and Dolls is the superb cast.

As the confirmed-bachelor and gambler Sky Masterson and the engaged-but-marriage-phobic Nathan Detroit, Jeremy Peter Johnson and Rodney Gardiner are forces of nature, bringing stellar voices and magnificent character work to what could have been nothing but easy-to-phone-in cliché’s. In the hands of such inventive actors, these two cartoonish characters – affable criminals caught in the magnetic pull of love – become richly detailed human beings.

The entire cast follows suit, somehow turning these broadly drawn people into folks with real emotions roiling under their skins, and the result is a “Guys and Dolls” that has more than just dynamite singing and dancing and a fluffy, superficial plot – this one has real heart.

And that brings us to “Fingersmith.”

Sarah Waters’ bestselling Victorian crime thriller became the novel to read about ten years ago, fueled by its daring combination of Dickensian detail and heart-pounding lesbian sex. With a sprawling cast of characters, public hangings, Victorian pornography, and that aforementioned girl-on-girl bedroom action, Fingersmith might not sound like an obvious choice for a Shakespeare Festival.

So it’s a good thing OSF likes to break rules.

This world premiere commission from playwright Alexa Junge brings with it enormous buzz and huge audience awareness.

And it pays off.

The story – about which little can be revealed – is set in two very different households in 1861 Londonl. Sue Trinder is a pickpocket who’s grown up in the makeshift “family” of the amiable Fagin-like criminal Mrs. Sucksby. When a legendary conman named Gentleman pulls Sue into his scheme to swindle a mentally frail heiress, things, to say the least, take a few unexpected turns.

Directed by OSF artistic director Bill Rauch, the story clips along with pacing and polish, its shape-shifting cast augmented by some delightful stagecraft, including boats and carriages sailing or clip-clopping along on a rotating stage. Alternately moving and scary, hilarious and engaging, “Fingersmith” will keep you guessing to last surprise, in a show so full of surprises you’ll lose count.

It’s a must see.

For the full schedule and information about this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, visit the website at www.osfashland.org

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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Every year in spring, when people hear me talking about the shows that just opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, they get confused.

“Wait . . . what? Just opened? You mean LAST year! Last SUMMER, right? The Shakespeare festival is in summer.”

My response is usually along the lines of, “Yes, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs in the summer. But it opens in February. And it closes in October.”

It’s true.

Each year, OSF produces eleven shows between the Spring and Fall, beginning with four shows that open toward the end of February. These are in their two indoor theaters. In June, the big outdoor theater opens too, and that’s when tourism in Ashland is at its highest. But Sonoma County theater fans who prefer smaller crowds do take the six-hour drive up to Ashland before that, and for those willing to do so, there are some very good new shows waiting for them: a world premiere adaptation of a gothic novel, a classic American musical, and two shows written by Shakespeare himself.

I’ll talk about the Shakespeare shows today.

Listen tomorrow for my reviews of the other two.

Playing in the Angus Bowmer theater, “Much Ado About Nothing” kicks things off with a comedic bang. ‘Much Ado’ is, after all, a comedy. But William Shakespeare had a way of writing comedies with plots that often veered close to the teetering edge of becoming tragedies. “Much Ado About Nothing” is one of those, with a story that ventures so far into dark and dangerous territory it becomes difficult, bordering on miraculous, actually, for some directors to ease the production back away from that brink, back into the realm of lightness and love and humor.

With ‘Much Ado,’ director Lileana Blain-Cruz works that kind of miracle by making actual sense of certain plot turns that usually baffle the directors put in charge of making Shakespeare’s various merry mix-ups make sense.

Did that make sense?

Blain-Cruz sets the action in a modern-day version of that Messina, a world that includes such things as toe socks and exercise equipment. But the show still carries elements of an ancient fairytale with plenty of European splendor. The story involves several characters being tricked into and out of love, for good reasons and bad. The cast is spectacular, and they do a good job of giving believable underpinnings for actions that often seem unlikable or unforgivable. The emotions are rich and nuanced, the comedic elements beautifully carried out, the language is crisp and clear, and the climax is believably bittersweet, with just the right touch of hope and happiness.

One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime was “Pericles,” a play that has not felt much love for over the last hundred years. Maybe it’s because this epic high sea adventure is not exactly simple or cheap to produce, what with its rapidly changing scenes, flipping like a slide show from exotic islands to ocean storms to shipwrecks to more exotic islands to brothels and palaces and graveyards and jousts and sacred temples to resurrections and battles and tricks and riddles and pirates and kidnappings and, ultimately, the timely arrival of one very helpful goddess.

In this case, she’s on a trapeze.

Sort of. Not exactly. Anyway, it’s cool.

Gorgeously directed by Joseph Haj, the play-that-can-no-longer-be-staged has been turned into that rarity of a theatrical event: a magical, richly emotional play that is, form it’s acting to the unchecked loveliness of its visual presentation, pretty much perfect.

For the full line-up of shows in Ashland visit osfashland.org

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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It’s a striking coincidence.

You don’t have to be the writer of stage thrillers to see it.

Maybe it’s the work of some devious theatrical conspiracy.

How else to explain two shows opening in the North Bay the same weekend, each one a play about people writing a play about people writing a play. And just keep things interesting, one of these self-referential theatrical endeavors is a musical.

“[Title of Show],” and yes, that’s the title of the show, was written in 2004 by Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, who proposed to the New York Musical Theater Festival that they be allowed to write a musical about the process of writing that very same musical. Eventually, with the addition of two actresses named Susan and Heidi, “[Title of Show],” with brackets, did actually appear in the festival, followed by an off-Broadway run and after a period when it looked like the show’s life was finally over, it ended up on Broadway. And yes, all of that is in the show, too.

And now, it’s in San Rafael, presented by Marin Onstage at Belrose Theater, this loopy, tuneful love story to the creative process is directed by Carl Jordan, and features Fernando Siu and Phillip Percy Williams as Jeff and Hunter, and Abbey Lee and Amanda Morando as Susan and Heidi. Justin Pine appears too, as Larry, the guy at the piano, because evidently every would-be playwright has his own accompanist hanging out in the corner of his apartment, just in case inspiration strikes.

It really is a show about the creation of the show it’s about, which gets a little weird at times, as we watch the writers writing the show in front of us. At one point, Jeff asks Susan why she hasn’t said anything in a while, and she responds by saying, “Because this is the first line you’ve written for me to say in a while.”

The songs are, for the most part, all about writing songs, but also – and this is why “[Title of Show]” is such a great show – the songs get to the heart of what it’s like to try and create something: the insecurities and doubts, the discoveries that come out of nowhere, the thrills and joys of hitting the mark when you finally do.

Energetically and sympathetically performed by the entire cast, who bring their own unique personalities to the characters indelibly established by the original Jeff, Hunter, Susan and Heidi, this is a show for anyone whose ever dreamed of doing something really hard, and knows the heartache of failure and the sheer, ecstatic wonder of success.

There’s one more weekend.

And running through April 5th is Spreckels Theater Company’s production of “Deathtrap.” Written by Ira Leven and directed with nastiness and glee by David Yen, ‘Deathtrap’ is a two-act, five-character play about a blocked playwright discover a two-act, five character play called “Deathtrap.”

There is little I can say about it without spoiling the many surprises, so let me just say that the cast of five drive the play with mounting energy, balancing the mounting tension with plenty of authentic comedy. Some of the murder weapons hanging on the wall are a little conspicuously rubbery and non-threatening, but everything else in this show is sharp, loaded, and entertainingly lethal.

And there you have it: Two shows about people creating shows.

You should consider showing up for one for both.

You won’t regret it.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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Well, Monday night was a good night for North Bay theater people.

At the 39th annual San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Awards, a batch of Sonoma County theaters were honored, with some very talented actors, directors and theater artists walking the steps up to claim awards for their work in 2014.

Winners included Denise Elia-Yen for her snappy portrayal of Annie Oakley in Spreckel’s Performing arts Center’s brilliantly presented production of “Annie Get Your Gun.” Other North Bay actresses who picked up awards included Abbey Lee, honored for her outrageous portrayal of an oversexed gangster’s moll in “Victor/Victoria,” and Rebekkah Pearson for playing the title role in “Thoroughly Modern Mille,” both of those shows at 6th Street Playhouse. 6th Street saw a few more of its artists win awards: Anthony Guzman and Evan Attwood both picked up wins for “Thoroughly Modern Mille,” and for the same show Joseph Favalora was honored for his choreography.

And back to Spreckels, Mary Gannon Graham was awarded for her splendidly goofy turn as a wacky modern day witch in “Bell, Book and Candle,” and Jeff Coté picked up a win for the title role in Gene Abravaya’s “The Book of Matthew (Liebowitz).” Oh, and Janis Wilson won for musical direction of “Annie get Your Gun.”

Main Stage West, in Sebastopol, also saw a few wins, beginning with singer-songwriter Si Kahn, for best original music for his show “Mother Jones in Heaven.” Also honored were Tyler Costin for his fine work in “Vanya and Sonja and Masha and Spike,” and for Albert Casselhoff, for his sound design on “T.I.C. (Trenchcoat in Common).”

And for Cinnabar Theater, the love continued with wins for Mary Chun, for her musical direction of last year’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” with the entire cast of “Of Mice and Men” winning for best ensemble.

And speaking of love, local actor, writer, director Dezi Gallegos, who’s just nineteen, picked up a special award, the first ever Annette Lust Award, given to young theater artists who show incredible promise and potential.

His acceptance speech, promising to find the next young dreamer and help them follow their passions, had the audience crying and cheering.

That’s just a few of the winners in the North Bay. For the full list, go to the Cristics Circle website at S-F-B-A-T-C-C dot.org, standing, of course, for San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle.

And while we’re celebrating the art of theater, let me just mention two upcoming shows about the art of theater, in one form or another. Opening this weekend, down in San Rafael, is a little thing called “[Title of Show], in brackets.” It’s a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical, and when they invite two talented women to join them, it becomes a show about four people creating a musical about four people creating a musical, and then there are songs. Songs about writing songs.

As it so happens, the cast of four were ALL nominated for awards Monday night, for previous works, and two of them, including the aforementioned Abbey Lee.

It runs March 13-28 at Belrose theater, presented by Marin Onstage, marinonstage.com.

The show sounds like a blast, as does “Deathtrap,” opening in a couple of weeks at Spreckels performing arts Center. It’s the story of dueling playwrights who might just be trying to kill each other.

It runs March 20 through April 5.

Who knows, maybe next year these shows will be picking up awards of their own. And either way, as was recently stated, theater awards are just a party game. Getting to make theater, that’s the real party.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

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