Leon Gertzen woos Diana Dorel Gutierrez in Rough and Tumble's
production of "Candide" at the Berkeley City Club. Photo by Sharon
Wharton
Rough and Tumble? More like Few and Far Between.
Founded in 1994, the Rough and Tumble theater company aimed to produce comedy from ancient times to the present, all with some sort of highly theatrical bite.
But unlike most theater companies, Rough and Tumble operates in its own time frame and doesn’t necessarily subscribe to the notion of a season. With that in mind, it’s probably not all that unusual that R&T hasn’t produced a show in, oh, about 16 months.
“Our goals were always different from a lot of companies,” says founding artistic director Cliff Mayotte. “We never had a desire to produce a season or have subscribers. We always wanted to produce plays when we felt they were ready to be produced. The plays we do have a long gestation period. We workshop, we tinker. We’re not getting rich doing this, so we want to make sure that, creatively, we’re being satisfied, challenging ourselves and creating something an audience can get behind.”
This week, R&T opens Len Jenkin’s adaptation of Voltaire’s “Candide” at the Berkeley City Club, with Mayotte directing a cast that includes Louise Chegwidden, Carolyn Doyle, Janet Keller, Eowyn Mader and Stewart Evan Smith.
“We stretch the patience of our supporters to the limit,” Mayotte says. “Here’s how it goes. We do a show, we get great audiences. Then we say, `See you next year!’ That partly has to do with the way we work and partly because we all have full-time jobs. Most of us are parents now. In any given rehearsal, there will be kids under 10 in the room with us.”
Mayotte is the chair of visual and performing arts at Lick-Wilmerding High School, a demanding job he’s had for eight years, which explains why R&T shows are often during winter break or summer vacation.
The core R&T group is eight members (four remain from the very beginning), with a smaller group of “really good friends,” which is to say company members from the past, people they’ve worked with regularly but can’t commit the time to be an official company member.
The group has changed, of course, during the last 14 years. But in some fundamental ways it remains the same.
“In some ways, this company is exactly what we set out to create,” Mayotte says. “One of our goals was not to rush work just for the sake of getting up there. Our motto used to be: `I don’t need to do theater a lot but I have a need to do it well.’ That’s the focus we’ve had since the beginning and it helps us keep the process right out front.”
Even though the R&T process is a slow one, there’s always something in the pipeline. Mayotte commissioned Andy Bayiates, the main writer of the Neo-Futurists’ “43 Plays for 43 Presidents,” which was R&T’s last production, to write a something on the topic of “A History of Human Stupidity.” And, amazingly, it will be only a 90-minute play.
“We’re going to try to lay out what stupidity is, actually try to define it and go through the great historically boneheaded things, the genuinely stupid things our society has committed. There will even be a `Holy Wars Hoedown,’” Mayotte explains. “It’s great to think about a show that is very much written with our company in mind, part commedia dell’arte, vaudeville. We’re hoping to open that next June or July.”
As a theater maker, Mayotte says he finds the Bay Area theater community quite supportive.
“There’s a real understanding of how the food chain works,” he says. “The little theaters couldn’t thrive the way they do without acknowledgement from the big theaters. We make each other’s work possible. They support our work, we support theirs. Artists can start out small and end up big. That’s a flow that really happens.”
To read more about R&T’s “Candide” and its relationship with jazz artist Phillip Greenlief, visit www.TheaterDogs.net.
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