We look at Cal Shakes’ preparations to stage “Black Odyssey.”
California Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Eric Ting empathizes with traditionalists. If they’re devoted to an artist’s original intention — to the extent that we can establish what that is — it’s because they love the art.
“Which is so great and genuine and true,” he says in an interview in his West Berkeley office. “I have such deep respect for that.”
At the same time, he says, “I don’t think anybody wants to become a kind of dusty relic.”
That even goes for Homer, whose “The Odyssey” gets an African American riff on Homer’s epic in the West Coast premiere of Marcus Gardley’s “Black Odyssey,” which begins previews Wednesday, Aug. 9, under Ting’s direction.
“I think ... when we make something, that our desire would be that it would always feel vivid and relevant and immediate and real,” says Ting. “I don’t think you get into theater unless you have a deep, deep obsession with being present.”
In the two seasons Ting, 44, has had the job, that thinking has guided his approach to the artist that gives his company its name, with a production of “Othello” that made extensive use of live video, as well as director Desdemona Chiang’s “As You Like It,” which envisioned the Forest of Arden as a contemporary urban homeless encampment. It also informed Lisa Portes’ take on Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” last month; all cast members were people of color, and the actor playing a character with a limp has a disability herself.
Some Cal Shakes audiences reacted adversely to the nontraditional “Menagerie.” “I think the challenge is because we’ve so long been this thing,” — a company dedicated to Shakespeare in the superrich and predominantly white Orinda hills — “to make that change, you almost have to push further than you’d necessarily normally do,” Ting says.
“We get in trouble for that from time to time,” he adds, without going into specifics. But he remains undeterred. “I’m going to keep pushing,” he says, building on the work of his predecessor, Jonathan Moscone, whom Ting credits with seeing “beyond Shakespeare,” for putting the Bard “in dialogue” with other writers.
Today that includes not just other dead white guys but also contemporary writers like Gardley. He adapts frequently, usually using his source material as a jumping-off point. To make a story “live on forever” in adaptation, he says over the phone, “you should just take those little bits that resonate with you. I mostly added my own life experiences” to “Black Odyssey.”
That includes resetting the play, after its world premiere at Denver Center Theatre, in Gardley’s hometown of Oakland. It originally took place in Harlem, where he was living at the time of writing, but “the more I wrote about Harlem — and because the piece is so much about home — I couldn’t stop thinking
about my home, which is Oakland.” Cal Shakes’ production also features new vocal music, drawing on traditions from Yoruba chants all the way to James Brown, composed by Linda Tillery and Molly Holm. J. Alphonse Nicholson, who plays Ulysses, a Gulf War veteran on a long journey home, works as a street musician when he’s not an actor; his drumming, on plastic buckets and all manner of containers, gives the show “its heartbeat,” says Ting.
Gardley “talks about the show as jazz, and that’s, like, the scariest thing for an artistic director to hear,” jokes Ting. But at the same time, Ting sees parallels. “‘The Odyssey’ is also nonlinear,” its episodes not dissimilar from wide-ranging solos. “The story that (Gardley) is referencing invites the kind of journey that he’s crafted.” Audiences who already know “The Odyssey,” Ting hopes, will only get more out of Gardley’s take. Even character names offer Easter eggs: Poseidon is Paw Sidin (Aldo Billinglea); Athena is Aunt Tina (Margo Hall).
In its millennia of history, “The Odyssey” has been adapted more, and more wildly, than “The Glass Menagerie” has, but the reactions and questions from Cal Shakes audiences regarding Portes’ production mean that as Ting prepares to mount “Black Odyssey,” notions of equity and inclusivity in storytelling remain paramount for him.
At Cal Shakes, he says, “We believe that the theater, in its most exquisite form, should belong to all of us in the way that storytelling belongs to all of us. Stories are a human tradition. They’re not a tradition of any one culture.” They’re “part of what teaches us how to be human.”
They also outlast us, which for Ting means that once a play is a classic, it’s strong enough to endure a new take here, an adaptation there. His approach is a kind of theatrical Hippocratic oath: “Are we going to do something that harms the original storytelling?”
For many, including lighting designer Xavier Pierce, the most salient quality of “black odyssey” isn’t harm, but healing. “When we crossed the water,” he says over the phone of his ancestors, “we were broken up, and we’re always trying to get back to that.” The play reminds him that “your lineage is not just in America. It’s in Africa, and the people that you come from are kings and queens, not just slaves.”