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Theater: Raging 'Bul'
Tag-team directors ride 'Bulrusher' to glory

by Lee Brady

Bulrusher is well named; it attacks the audience like a horned beast and rushes along like a raging river. Playwright Eisa Davis—niece of Angela Davis, who created some sped-up drama in her time—throws in elements of history, geography, semantics, sociology and the kitchen sink, in this too-long (but never boring) evening of theater.

It's a play that needs two directors and Ellen Sebastian Chang and Margo Hall keep the story involving—even as poetic speeches threaten to drown the characters. This would be a shame even though we recognize them as stereotypes: sensitive woman who runs a whorehouse, a hunky logger, a horny adolescent boy, a young girl on the slippery edge of womanhood and a stranger who comes to town.

The superb acting ensemble helps us believe. Louise Chegwidden is Madame, a woman who wants to leave Boonville but is tied to her past. Chegwidden's Madame is forceful in taking care of business, but a little girl when it comes to deciding between D. Anthony Harper's Logger and Terry Lamb's Schoolch. Harper carries off his role as the only black man in town without a trace of the subservience that the period (1955) would lead you to expect, while Lamb, in spite of his disapproving glares and monosyllabic speeches, creates a solid rival. Cole Smith takes Boy to the limit as his guitar-plucking, beer-drinking, lovesick and charmingly innocent character admits: "I ain't got much to offer a girl but my sexuality."

Kirya Traber, as the title character, is overloaded with poetic monologues. As a baby, Bulrusher was rescued from the Navarro River where her mother had left her to drown. She's clairvoyant and can read the future by "reading" water. But she is also a young girl who is overjoyed when the Logger's niece, Vera (Jahmela Biggs), comes into town. Vera's from Alabama and brings cultural references that are new to Boonville. She knows a lot about the world but she, too, has to learn about love. Davis introduces the possibility of a lesbian affair and then backs off as Vera tells Bulrusher: "When I first met you I wanted to touch you all over...but when I kissed you, our lips were cold." The two young girls are mirrors for each other, not lovers.

Lisa Clark's set is rustic and well used, with the continuous action moving from an onstage river to Madame's comfortable front porch rockers, to Schoolch's kitchen table, to Bulrusher's rusty old pickup and finally, to the Apple Festival stage where it all winds up.

Bulrusher, overflowing with humanity, love, poetry and conflict is, almost, too much of a good thing.

• • • •

Dyke Garrison's Thirst resembles a cat endlessly chasing its own tail in his story of the Gaven family and their medical advisers. Bonnie (Sheila Balter) is an alcoholic whose liver is failing; Brian (Will Marchetti) is her husband who isn't used to failure of any kind; Diane (Jeannette Harrison) is their only child, a lawyer without a legal precedent for the emotional crisis she finds herself in; Dr. Robert Thomas (Craig Jessup) is a high-profile transplant surgeon and Ruth Ann Shapiro (Erica Smith) is his empathetic nurse/counselor.

In scene after scene these characters talk about life and death without ever bringing it home. Should a daughter give up a part of her liver to save a mother who has destroyed her own (and who may well do so again)? How about a husband's duty? How can a woman allow anyone to undergo major surgery unless she can promise herself that she'll not take another drink? And how can she do that if she has no control over her drinking?

Other issues covered are the controlling father, the angry but submissive daughter, and a mother who, even when inebriated, is smarter than either—or seems so since the playwright has given her smart and sassy lines. "My mind is a dangerous territory," she cracks wise, "don't go there alone!" Meanwhile, father and daughter argue until they reach a compromise only to find that now the situation has changed and they have to start the process all over again.

Thirst, directed by Ann Brebner, brings up important medical and moral questions, and the play discusses them thoughtfully—if not dramatically.

NOW PLAYING

Bulrusher runs through Oct. 21 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley; 510/841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org.

Thirst runs through Oct. 7 at Art Works Downtown, 1337 Fourth St., San Rafael; 415/454-2787, www.altertheater.org.