Berkeley Rep series sets action in — where else — Berkeley
Berkeley Repertory Theatre debuts a new audio series exploring various locations of and characteristics of the city it calls home — with the help of some famous writers.
“Place/Settings: Berkeley” is a 10-episode audio series featuring short 10-15-minute stories created by writers/performers including Eisa Davis, Philip Kan Gotanda, Daniel Handler, Aya de León, Adam Mansbach, Richard Montoya, Itamar Moses, Kamala Parks, Sarah Ruhl and Sean San José.
Each story is set in a Berkeley location that is significant to the author. Famed Asian American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda’s “night fishing,” for example, imagines a supernatural experience of sorts for an aged man in Tilden Park. Sean San Jose’s “For the Record” imagines a memorable night full of iconic songs music at Leopold’s Records on Durant Avenue.
Listeners are invited to write their own Berkeley stories (100 words or less), which will be shared on the Berkeley Rep site as well on Berkeleyside, which is a sponsor of the series.
Here is the complete lineup of stories in the series, according to Berkeley Rep:
• “The Fundamental Kiss, With Overtones,” by Eisa Davis, corner of Oxford and Center: A young oboist kisses a pianist on a street corner. At long last! But the kiss unlocks pressures, expectations, dreams, and fears. Can we learn to live with uncertainty? To ask for what we need?
• “night fishing,” by Philip Kan Gotanda, an imaginary dried-up lake in Tilden Park: On a chilly autumn night, an old fisherman makes his way to the lake in the dark. He casts a line…and reels in the ghost he’s been seeking.
• “The Black Mass Sonata, by Daniel Handler, The Musical Offering Café: Bored, lost, and lonely, a teenager stumbles into a café. While eating a cup of soup, he hears a wondrously inscrutable sonata, and begins to sense that being lost might not be such a lonesome condition after all.
• “West Berkeley West Indian,” by Aya de León, Franklin School: How do you find your people in middle school — especially when you don’t quite fit the mold? A girl experiments,
assimilates, adapts, and journeys towards genuine self-love and community.
• “20 Weeks,” by Adam Mansbach, Alta Bates: Hope, fear, excitement, and a dizzying array of possibilities unspool across an expectant dad’s imagination, as he and his partner navigate medical uncertainties and rediscover each other as almost-parents.
• “Suicide on Telegraph,”
by Richard Montoya, Robbie’s Coffee House and Diner on Telegraph Ave.: It’s 1959, and tobacco smoke snakes across the bustling café from its prized corner table, where artists and students debate political treatises, muse on philosophy, and share thrilling new poetry.
• “The Slide,” by Itamar Moses, the slide in Codornices Park: A neighborhood
park — its playground, sloping hillside, and basketball court; its tunnel to a rose garden and many paths — bears witness to a boy, growing up and growing old.
• “The Third Sphere,” by Kamala Parks, North Berkeley BART: Straddling the worlds of her divorced parents, Yasmine doesn’t feel fully at home in either. Desperate to see her best friend in San Francisco, she embarks on the voyage across the Bay alone, exhilarated at her newfound independence.
• “The Character Actor,” by Sarah Ruhl, Berkeley Repertory Theatre: From a perch beyond this life, an actor observes as a group of masked people finally return to the courtyard of Berkeley Rep — to the theatre, the place we made to gather, breathe together, and share the stories that remind us of our humanity.
• “For the Record,” by Sean San José, Leopold’s Records on Durant Ave.: Sometimes music becomes indelibly linked to specific memories, invoking the people with whom we shared them. Songs by Isaac Hayes, Peter Tosh, Stevie Wonder, the Doors, the Knight Brothers, and Patti LaBelle conjure a deep friendship, one that began on a hot night in 1986 outside Leopold’s Records.
DETAILS » Access is $10, free to subscribers; those who purchase tickets receive a fold-out map from New Yorker magazine illustrator and cartoonist Tom Toro; tickets and more information at www.berkeleyrep.org.