East Bay author Lucia Berlin’s vivid short stories come to life
The stories are stray glimpses of a life. In some pieces, a teacher and single mother of four sons is getting her alcoholism under control. In others, it’s out of control. Sometimes she’s working other jobs. Some of the stories are in first person, others in close third. One of them is told from the point of view of another character in the room with her. In some stories she’s called Lucia, other times Lucille, Carlotta or Mrs. Bevins.
But they’re all semi-autobiographical tales by the late Lucia Berlin, brought to life in theatrical form by Word for Word.
As the name implies, Word for Word is a theater company that specializes in performing short stories verbatim, with actors bringing descriptions and inanimate objects to life along with the dialogue. Founded by co-artistic directors JoAnne Winter and Susan Harloe in 1993, it’s been a program of San Francisco new work laboratory Z Space ever since both entities began around the same time, and both celebrate their 25th anniversary this year.
“For the first few years of Z Space’s existence we were the most public part of it, because Z Space was largely at that time about development and wasn’t producing,” Winter recalls.
The opening show of the anniversary season, “Lucia Berlin: Stories” consists of the short stories “Her First Detox,” “Emergency Room Notebook 1977,” “Unmanageable,” “502” and “Here It Is Saturday.” Largely set in Oakland and Berkeley,
the stories all come from “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a collection released in 2015, nine years after Berlin’s death in 2004 at the age of 68.
One of the charter members of Word for Word, a group of women that have formed the company’s artistic core since the beginning, Jeri Lynn Cohen plays the autobiographical Lucia Berlin character that goes by different names in different stories.
“She herself is such an interesting character,” Cohen reflects. “She’s so multifaceted, she had an extraordinary life. But there’s a way she engages with kind of the underbelly of society, these drunks that hang out in front of the 7-Eleven. These
characters are so funny, sad and beautiful. There’s humor and pathos at the same time. And it’s all done without judgment.”
“Lucia Berlin is a masterful storyteller, and we really fell in love with the language,” says Winter, who’s co-directing the show with charter member Nancy Shelby. “Lucia had an amazing life, a big chunk of which was spent in the Bay Area, so a lot of the stories we read took place in Oakland and Berkeley.
“And also the stories center around this autobiographical character who is a single mother raising four boys on her own, trying to be an artist, holding down jobs, so we all recognized that. But this woman was also at the same time struggling with alcoholism, and it was this situation I’ve never seen depicted in literature quite like this. And to have this extraordinary woman character, as you can imagine, was really attractive for us in Word for Word, which
is a largely female company.”
“It’s clear that when things got rough for her, her friends came through,” Cohen says of Berlin. “Particularly after she got sober, they supported her talent and they had a place for her. It was because of her friends that she ended up with a good job at the University of Colorado. She really found a place to flourish as a writer and a teacher.”
Berlin’s spirit of perseverance has a special meaning to the company now bringing her words to life.
“I cannot think of Word for Word and my 25 years with them without thinking about the sisterhood of these middle-aged white women loving to read, creating theater and carrying each other through life, death, birth, illness. We’ve really been through a lot, and we’re still here.”