By Robert Simonson
24 Nov 2009

Berkeley Rep's American Idiot star John Gallagher, Jr.
photo by Kevin Bern

Theatrical tremors from the Bay Area of California send shock waves to New York City. What makes the region so special?

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Much of the cultural history of the United States can be read as an artistic skirmish for supremacy between the two coasts.

New York had theatre; L.A. had movies. New York had punk rock; California birthed the surf sound. Gotham gave the world the bebop of Charlie Parker; California furnished cool jazz of Gerry Mulligan. When artists grow tired of the grind of Manhattan, they typically retreat to sunny SoCal, while West Coast habitues weary of Hollywood come to the East for a recharge.

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An increasing number of high-profile Broadway productions first saw the light of day on stages in the San Francisco Bay Area. Current examples include Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room and Carrie Fisher's one-woman show Wishful Drinking, both of which had stagings at Berkeley Rep before coming to New York. Another Berkeley Rep premiere, American Idiot, was recently announced to be Broadway-bound. Berkeley also gave Gotham the heralded Stew musical Passing Strange, which played both Off-Broadway and Broadway (and was adapted into a Spike Lee film). Meanwhile, San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, the Bay Area's most prominent theatre company, concluded in October a production of the London hit Brief Encounter, which will continue on to a full U.S. tour, ending in New York City's St. Ann's Warehouse. This is not to mention recent, traditional Broadway tryouts of musicals like Legally Blonde and Wicked, first seen by San Francisco crowds.

Why's it all happening right now? Hard to say, according to some. "I can't really articlulate a strong reason for it," said Les Waters, who is directing In the Next Room and is an associate artistic director at Berkeley Rep. "Luck? I don't think we're thinking, 'Let's do this one. It will go to New York.' I don't think we're cunning or clever enough or cynical enough to be able to do that."

Others contend, with a slight sniff, that this is nothing new: The Bay Area has been sending out quality theatre for some time now. "I think the Bay Area has a long history of sending out shows that become part of the national public conversation," said Rob Hurwitt, who has covered theatre in the area for 30 years, the last 17 at the San Francisco Chronicle. "And many of those show may never go to New York."

	Carey Perloff
	photo by Kevin Berne

Carey Perloff, the artistic director of ACT, ticks off the many reasons why Northern California is such a very fertile place to make theatre: "There's a really engaged audience, a pretty robust sense of adventure, and a strong philanthropic base. So in spite of the economic crisis, the theatre community here has continued to do ambitious, exhilarating work, and some of that has found a longer life."

Still, when pressed, Bay Area theatre pundits admit that their number of national successes has risen sharply in the last few seasons. A lot of that has to do with the rise of Berkley Rep. Always a respected nonprofit, it has, on the strength of Passing Strange and American Idiot, become one of the most prominent companies in the country.

"I think we really did consciously set out to enlarge the number of people who were exposed to our work, and to forge some relationships that might facilitate that," said artistic director Tony Taccone. "We didn't sit down and say we need to have one show a year go to New York. That was not part of the plan. Certainly, with building the Roda Theatre — which is our second stage out here, and is much more a state-of-the-art space, if you will — that enabled us to think in a different way about what kind of shows we could do and what kind of shows could possibly move. There was that, and we embarked on an ambitious new play program. Our goal is to hire 50 writers over ten years to write new plays for us. At any given time there are like ten writers writing things for us."

The new theatre allowed Berkeley to consider staging the technically demanding Passing Strange, the success of which, in turn, attracted the creators of American Idiot. The play program, meanwhile, produced Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, which had its first mounting at Berkeley.

Wishful Drinking did not begin at Berkeley, but at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, where Fisher herself largely took charge of the production. After that, Taccone was brought in to help stage and reshape the text. The version subsequently seen at the Rep (twice) is the one currently on view on Broadway.

Perloff thinks it's only natural that the Bay Area should produce such a varied array of work. "It's interesting that there isn't really a 'Bay Area aesthetic,' the way there is in, say, Chicago. So, there's a pretty wide range of work happening in the various theatres around the Bay Area. One thing we've found at ACT is that it's a relatively small town, so interdisciplinary collaborations are really possible — we work with amazing dancers and musicians and composers who are excited about collaborating across boundaries. That is relatively unique to the Bay Area. It's not a town that cares a lot about TV stars or commercial stuff, so there's a chance to develop more interesting work with a wide range of artists."

	Tony Taccone
	photo by Kevin Berne

Of course, those artists — who mainly live in New York or L.A. — have to want to come. But Taccone doesn't consider that a problem; there are plenty of local attractions. "The weather. Sausalito. San Francisco at night." He laughs. "I'm being flip, but I'm not. The Bay Area's always had more than a dash of romance about it. I think the rhythm of work out here has a feeling of possibility. There's a different psychology here. It's known as the place where people who are part of 'the other' flee to. You can think in a different way, work in a different way. It's not radically different, but there's definitely a spirit of openness, and that's attractive to artists. There's definitely less pressure. I'm from New York, and I choose to live here. I think it's hard to make theatre in New York."

"I think the sense out here that we are outside the huge intense media focus of New York and the intense showbiz focus of Los Angeles has helped," observed Hurwitt. "You're free to experiment, free to explore."

The Bay Area audience is another key lifeline between the two coasts. "Oskar Eustis," the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York, noted Hurwitt, "said that he feels when a show is workshopped here or has its first production here, that — as opposed to other areas of the country — he can rely on the audience reaction as being more analogous to a New York audience reaction. ...We have an audience out here that is interested in and excited by new work."

Taccone agrees. "The audience is really bright. People [in New York] feel that if they open a show at Berkeley Rep, they're going to get a real read on how their audience is going to react. People are really involved in the world in a serious way."

"It's an extremely engaged, alive, progressive, intellectually active town," adds Perloff. "People care about the arts. There's a lot of coverage, a lot of appetite for a wide variety of work. Audiences read a lot about the work, are hungry for dramaturgy, blog a lot, chat a lot, turn up for discussions, want to know more. It's not a jaded, cynical audience, and it's not an audience waiting to be told what to like by the New York Times."

Of course, these days, the New York Times ends up liking the Bay Area stuff anyway.

Maria Dizzia and Hannah Cabell in In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) at Berkeley Repertory Theatre
photo by Kevin Berne