A place to play

March 17, 5:30 PMSF Theatre ExaminerLance Gardner

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Time for actors to have some real fun!

In the world of professional theatre, actors often work six days a week. Actors Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers mandates at least one day off. Each theatre is free to choose any day of the week, but 97% (I'm talking, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, fictional percentages here) of the time that day is Monday. So where does an actor go on his or her day off? To the Playground of course!

On Monday, Playground celebrated the closing of their fifteenth season. Under the Artistic direction of Jim Kleinmann, Playground is an organization devoted to promoting the development of emerging local playwrights. This is the farm fresh, organic, locally grown cuisine of the theatre world. The writers pool is comprised of about two dozen local playwrights who are given a topic around which they must compose a ten minute play. Of those submitted, six are chosen, and one Monday a month from October to March, presented at Berkeley Repertory Theatre as script in hand staged readings acted and directed by the cream of the SF Bay Area crop.

Monday night's topic was, "Adaptation of a Fairy Tale". Among the offerings was Molly Rhodes's, The Most Incredible Thing, a verse play in which a princess's lady in waiting digs up the least suitable suiters for her mistress in order to set the stage for her own declaration of love. Ron Campbell put a tongue in cheek Sci-Fi twist on things when he had the lazy Rip Van Winkle escape the nagging of his wife by setting off a mere three seconds into the future in, The Experiment. Aaron Loeb's All Thumbs, was a mix-and-match tale overflowing with laughs, of a miller and his cookie baking wife who are kept safe from the lurking Cavity Creeps by Peter Pan. Humor abounds even after the narrator accidentally steps on and kills their daughter, Thumbelina, but the play takes an honest turn to playing on the heart strings as the make believe dissolves and the characters come down to earth to face the realty of the loss of life and of innocence.

A staged reading doesn't offer the glitz and the glam of some of the big fat productions that pop up around town (and let's face it, falling chandeliers and rotating stages are pretty cool). What Playground does offer is the satisfaction of knowing that the people on stage, behind the scenes and behind the words are your neighbors, they are the people next to you on BART or in line with you at Peet's. They are the parents of your children's classmates. They are your community. This type of gathering is a fundamental aspect of human existence. Even in the most remote locations on the planet, people come together in the dirt to sing and dance, make music and tell stories. Every tribe has their Playground, and Bay Area, this is yours.

-There are no more Monday night readings this season, but you can see the favorites fully staged in the upcoming Best of Playground Festival, May 7-31 at the Thick House in San Francisco .