Berkeley Rep bets on stories that TV can’t tell
As nonprofit theaters across the country grapple to recoup their pre-pandemic subscriber numbers, Berkeley Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Johanna Pfaelzer believes one way to lure audiences back is to tell stories that Netflix couldn’t — stories that come alive only on a stage.
The company’s 2024-25 lineup, announced Tuesday, April 16, leans into visual spectacle, the enlistment of the audience’s imagination and the particular joy of being changed by a narrative in the company of others.
The season gets rolling in autumn with two plays about immigration. Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson’s hip-hop musical “Mexodus” (Sept. 13-Oct. 20) uses live-looping to conduct audiences through the undertold history of the southbound line of the Underground Railroad, whereby enslaved people escaped to Mexico. Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” (Nov. 8-Dec. 15), set in a Harlem salon, makes a comic symphony out of the bickering and gossiping among West African beauticians and their customers, all as a wedding — and an unforeseen identity crisis — loom. Berkeley Rep Associate Artistic Director David Mendizabal directs the former, Whitney White the latter.
“There’s no way to think about this coming fall and not think about the stakes of our election,” Pfaelzer told the Chronicle. “Because we’re in Berkeley, we are meant to look straight into the face of the political challenges of our moment.” These immigration narratives, she went on, accomplish that “without losing the sense of wonder in theatrical storytelling, without losing the sense of joy within these populations.”
In between, the company mounts the West Coast premiere of “The Matchbox Magic Flute” (Oct. 18-Dec. 8), compressed from the Mozart opera by myth conjurer and spectacle maestro Mary Zimmerman (“The White Snake,” “Metamorphoses”) down to 10 singers and five instrumentalists.
The company ushers in the new year with a new play, in the form of “The Thing About Jellyfish” ( Jan. 31-March 9), adapted by Keith Bunin from Ali Benjamin’s novel about a 12-year-old whose best friend has drowned. “It’s about how we wrestle with loss, with grief, with being a small person in a big, big world — and that can be as a child or as an adult — with what those early deep friendships do in shaping our sense of ourselves in the world,” Pfaelzer said.
Up next is a response to a question Pfaelzer said she’s fielded from audiences since she assumed her role in 2019: “Is there a place in your version of Berkeley Rep for classic theatrical literature?”
“Uncle Vanya” (Feb. 14-March 23) is her way of saying, “Yes, I see you.” Conor McPherson (“The Weir,” “The Seafarer,” “Girl From the North Country”) adapts Anton Chekhov’s tragicomic play set on a Russian estate where everyone loves the wrong person. Hugh Bonneville of “Downton Abbey” plays the title role, and Simon Godwin directs.
“Conor’s adaptation has this real sense of present-tense muscularity,” Pfaelzer said. “It doesn’t feel fussy or fusty at all.” Although she identifies as “a new play gal,” Pfaelzer professed love for the seminal Russian modernist.
“I tend to be so plot-driven,” she explained. “And Chekhov demands that we sit in character and situation and forces us to trust that story emerges from that.”
Spring proceeds with “Here There Are Blueberries” (April 5May 11) by Moisés Kaufman (“The Laramie Project”) and Amanda Gronich. The work of documentary theater, which Kaufman also directs, tells the true story of a photo album from Auschwitz that gets mailed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The images don’t depict prisoners; they show Nazis — some highranking, some clerical — going about their daily lives with pride and merriment. The piece puts the audience in the place of an archivist-qua-sleuth as she figures out who made the album, why, what the photos might mean now and whether her institution can responsibly display them. “There’s a sense at our museum that we should focus on the victims, not on the perpetrators,” one character says.
A second world premiere, “The Aves” (May 2-June 8, 2025) by Jiehae Park (“Peerless”), rounds out the season. Directed by Knud Adams, the play begins with an elderly man and woman on a park bench, only to become much less straightforward.
Pfaelzer said producing world premieres was a priority for her. “I feel real responsibility, both for myself but also institutionally, to be bringing new theatrical stories into our shared lexicon,” she said. This one, she went on, is about aging and identity and how different people move through life phases at different speeds.
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