Audio series bottles Berkeley’s wonders
Theater company introduces weekly episodes by local writers
When playwright Philip Kan Gotanda set out to write an audio short story about Jewel Lake for Berkeley Rep’s “Place/ Settings,” the Tilden Nature Area reservoir lived only in his imagination. He had never been there before.
“I happened to be reading Berkeleyside at the moment,” he recalls, of getting approached by Berkeley Rep about the new series, whose first episode premieres Tuesday, Jan. 12. Gotanda was struck by an article on the Berkeleycentric nonprofit news site about the danger that the lake would dry — and what that would do to visitors’ memories of the lake.
“I hadn’t been there, but certainly the image was very potent for me,” says Gotanda, a founding father of Asian American theater, a filmmaker and a professor at UC Berkeley. “So I immediately began to see, as a lake dries up, what might be found, in terms of remnants of things: toys, a baseball? In my case, there was a son who may or may not have committed suicide there. The father — this is a very mythic world — goes there and fishes every day to try and catch his son.”
Gotanda made his first journey to the lake in late December, ducking under and climbing over branches, tiptoeing around mud, amid creatures’ ribbits and chirps.
“It’s very close to the lake I imagined,” he says, surveying the wintry scene. “It’s pondish. It’s dark, and it seems almost haunted. It’s got a lot of, at this time of year, dead foliage and murkiness. To me, the idea that one might fish in here and pull out an old bicycle, a baseball glove or, in the case of my own thoughts, a dead body of a son who may or may not have drowned, may or may not have committed suicide — one could imagine it. If one wanted to.”
Gotanda’s “night fishing” is one of 10 weekly episodes in the “Place/ Settings” series. Each is grounded in a specific site in Berkeley, penned by a writer with strong ties to the city, with most authors performing their own pieces. Campo Santo cofounder Sean San José writes about Leopold’s Records on Durant Avenue. Itamar Moses of “The Band’s Visit” writes about the slide in Codornices Park. Drummer, 924 Gilman founder and BART station planner Kamala Parks writes about North Berkeley BART.
All ticket holders get mailed a paper map of the 10 sites, drawn by New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro, a native of El Cerrito who worked in Berkeley Rep’s box office for 3 ½ years ( where he once, to his shame, unwittingly held up a “hold on a sec” index finger to Mandy Patinkin) before he got a playwriting residency there as part of its Ground Floor program.
“The concept behind the map is: What is Berkeley in ourselves?” he says by phone from Portland. “Maybe we can’t visit these places during the pandemic; maybe we can’t actually be there in person, but how does Berkeley live in our minds, in our souls, through the stories the plays tell?”
Toro recalls his time in the city when he and his friends “would go into Berkeley whenever we wanted to very ostentatiously buy a CD from Amoeba Music.” It also later became the place where he met his wife, the theater director Marissa Wolf.
For Daniel Handler, who writes about Musical Offering Café for “Place/ Settings,” Berkeley was so cool when he was growing up that just being a Berkeley High student gave you instant cred; it almost went without saying that you were politically aware and artistic.
“Seeing a band play? They were probably Berkeley High students,” says Handler, the author of the “Lemony Snicket” series and the playwright of Berkeley Rep’s “Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit.”
Parks says her relationship to Berkeley is complicated — which is perhaps reflected in her choice to center her story, “The Third Sphere,” on a BART station, i. e., a ticket out of town.
“You have great appreciation for a place that made you,” she says of her childhood home. “All these things happened that were really amazing and seemingly very cuttingedge.” But when she worked for the city as a transit planner, “I was really disappointed that Berkeley people were very like, ‘ I don’t want bus stops in front of my house. I don’t want those people hanging out in front of my house.’ I’m like, ‘ Those people?’ ”
For Gotanda, moving to Berkeley from San Francisco over a decade ago was a chance to make an “Act 2” in his life — a chance to escape the constant grind of the artist’s life, a chance to take better care of himself, a chance to shift from the artist’s inward lens to the teacher’s outward one.
“I was too focused on my writing career,” he recalls. “It’s almost a conSantiago
scious decision you make that you’re not always here. If you’re a writer, this idea that no matter where you are, what time it is, you’re actually working on a number of stories inside your body at various levels. You’re actually removed. I’m very aware that I’m doing that. For Diane ( Takei, his wife), I think it’s been a challenge for her to know that I’m not always quite here.
“When you teach, you flip the lens. It’s no longer about you. It’s rather about them. If you do that, I felt, as it were, lighter. That’s a very big switch, and I think it has reinvigorated my life.”