Dramatic Shaker Chair unseats expectations
three stars Stirring

Marion loves her new chair. It’s a beautiful wood straight back with woven seats. It’s a copy of a Shaker chair, and though she finds it beautiful, Marion admits that the chair isn’t very comfortable.

“The Shakers didn’t believe in sitting around,” she tells us. “There was no procrastination…I should get up and do something.”

That simple call to arms — “get up and do something” — kicks off Adam Bock’s The Shaker Chair, a co-production of Berkeley’s Shotgun Players and San Francisco’s Encore Theatre Company now at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley.

Bock had hit shows with both companies (Swimming in the Shallows with Shotgun, Five Flights with Encore) when he was living and working in the Bay Area. He’s a hot-shot New York playwright now. His The Thugs won an Obie earlier this year, and his current show, The Receptionist, is an off-Broadway hit.

The Shaker Chair is an older work that had its premiere in 2005 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, and of Bock’s work we’ve seen here, it’s the least developed.
Bock is a wonderful, intriguing writer, and all his strengths are evident in Shaker, but the the play never quite fulfills its initial promise.

Marion (Frances Lee McCain), the new chair owner, is, effectively, asleep. She, like so many of us, enjoys a certain complacency in her comfortable life. Drama happens around her, not to her.

Her sister, Dolly (Nancy Shelby, below), is an emotional mess as a result of marital strife with her husband, Frank (a smiling, menacing Will Marchetti, below with Shelby), and turns to Marion for solace.

Marion’s best friend, Jean (Scarlett Hepworth), is an activist unafraid to commit crimes or resort to violence in the name of her good cause. Jean’s current fixation is a sewage-spewing pig farm polluting the nearby countryside and mistreating its pigs.

“There’s no reverence!” Jean shouts. “In the powerful, without reverence, there’s nothing to protect the weak.”

Perhaps stirred by her Shaker chair and the Shaker believe that “if your life is shaken you will be awakened,” Marion joins forces with Jean and her young activist-terrorists (Andrew Calabrese and Marissa Keltie) for a pig farm mission in the wee hours of the night.

Exhilaration, uncertainty and horror follow as Marion is forced to decide just how awake — just how shaken — she wants to be in the name of doing the right thing and working outside the system.

Bock writes in a hyper-natural style with short clipped fragments of sentences that approximate and exaggerate human speech. Director Tracy Ward has her actors _ all of whom are superb _ talking over each other through much of the show’s brisk 70 minutes.

A key piece of action shifts the play into its final moments, and that’s when The Shaker Chair wobbles. Bock’s attempt at Pinteresque unease fused with his own sense of hope doesn’t have the impact it should.

The Frank-Dolly subplot, ostensibly meant to represent those of us with little regard for anything outside our own jumbled lives, diffuses the clean line of Marion’s story. We need more time with this interesting woman — so beautifully limned by McCain — who has, in later life, stumbled into the courage to make radical change.

The Shaker Chair continues through Jan. 27 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley (directly across from the Ashby BART station). Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $20-$30. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org or www.encoretheatrecompany.org

Sure Adam Bock misses his friends in the Bay Area. But the Canadian playwright, who moved from San Francisco to New York about five years ago, really misses the food.

“Food in San Francisco is so yummy,” he says. “It’s just not the same in New York. I don’t know what it is about the Bay Area — maybe all that produce or the fact that people there like to eat so much.”

Still, Bock is hardly complaining. While in the Bay Area, he had to have a day job to supplement his career as a playwright (he assisted a typographer). But in New York, he’s been able to make a living solely from his writing.

In fact, he’s something of a hot commodity. Last year, his play The Thugs, about office temps who suspect someone might be killing people in their building (but no one will talk to them because they’re temps), won an Obie Award.

And his current off-Broadway show, The Receptionist, has been extended through the end of the month.

As much as he loves New York, Bock, 46, has not forgotten his Bay Area peeps. Encore Theatre Company, for whom he wrote the award-winning Five Flights, and Shotgun Players, for whom he wrote the award-winning Swimming in the Shallows, are teaming up to produce Bock’s The Shaker Chair.

“I love it,” Bock says, “because it’s my two gangs. Totally excellent.”

The play previews tonight and opens Saturday at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage.

Commissioned by New York’s Playwrights Horizons and premiered at the Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville, Ky., in 2005 (seen at left), The Shaker Chair is unusual in that it stars three middle-age women.

“I looked at the Playwrights Horizons audience and saw a lot of older women,” Bock explains. “I thought maybe I’ll write a play with an older woman. Or maybe three older women. Then I thought, `Who do I know like that?’ And (I) thought of my mom and my aunt, both of whom are activists, so I decided to make one an activist. I had also been reading `Anna Karenina’ and was interested in the sister, Dolly, so I decided to put her in, too.”

The title, The Shaker Chair, came to Bock in a flash. He knew that would be his title — if not why it was his title.

“I started researching the Shakers, and they’re like activists,” Bock explains. “To them, procrastination is a sin. That’s when the activist thing came together. How big should your circle of concern be? As big as your family or larger? That’s an important and interesting question for me. How much are we responsible for and how open should we be?”

Bock also admits that Shaker chairs are beautiful objects (and yes, there is a Shaker chair in the play).

“The Shakers don’t really make the chairs much anymore,” Bock says. “The Shakers are a small group now. They were big in the 1800s, made all these beautiful communities where everything they did was beautiful and simple. Their artwork is unbelievable. Every action is a prayer. How they tended animals mattered, how they mowed the lawn mattered, what kind of clothes they wore mattered. It was all simple, beautiful, useful.”

The Shakers also believed in separating men and women and being celibate.

“There’s definitely strangeness involved with the Shakers, too,” Bock says.

The notion of simplicity is one that has appealed to Bock for a while. In Swimming in the Shallows, for instance, one of the main characters is searching for simplicity. In his own New York apartment, Bock says he’s also aiming for simplicity.

“I keep it as clear as I can,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in Japanese art, negative space and stuff like that. To be honest, it’s discouraging to see how much crap we have.”

In his quest to remain crap-free, Bock will focus his attention on upcoming projects, which include a screenplay deal with producer Scott Rudin (one of his potential topics is “a woman who wants to get rid of all her stuff”) and the production of his play The Drunken City at Playwrights Horizons. Bay Area actor Cassie Beck (the co-artistic director of Crowded Fire Theatre Company) will be in the cast when that show opens in March.

Drunken is about three women who get engaged at the same time, and during one of the bachelorette parties, one of the engaged ladies kisses a man who is not her fiance.

“You know how in a play, if someone’s drunk, we assume they’ll tell the truth?” Bock asks. “Well, I decided to have everybody drunk, and these girls are funny, funny, funny.”

The Shaker Chair continues through Jan. 27 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave,. Berkeley. Tickets are $20 to $30. Call 510-841-6500 or visit www.shotgunplayers.org or www.encoretheatrecompany.org.

We can claim Adam Bock as a San Francisco playwright, but that’s really not quite accurate.

The talented writer basically used the Bay Area as a way station between his native Canada and the greener pastures of New York. But it must be said, the pastures were pretty green in San Francisco, where Bock made a splash with the man-in-love-with-shark comedy Swimming in the Shallows with Shotgun Players (done in the basement of Theatre Rhinoceros) and most especially with Five Flights, a production of Encore Theatre Company at the Thick House.

Well, let’s all celebrate the fact that “San Francisco” playwright Adam Bock won an Obie Award last Monday for his play The Thugs. (The Obies, in case you don’t know or barely care, are the Village Voice’s awards for off-Broadway shows.)

The Thugs, we have discovered through some diligent Googling, is about temps in a law office who suspect some of the firm’s employees are being murdered or something even more sinister.

The New York Times’ Jason Zinoman described the play as, “a delightfully paranoid little nightmare that is both more chillingly realistic and pointedly absurd than anything John Grisham ever dreamed up. ”

Message to Adam: congratulations. Message to Bay Area theater companies: please produce The Thugs. We hear it’s only an hour.