Shotgun Players opened their ambitious 25th anniversary season this spring with a decidedly ambitious approach to Hamlet seven actors have their names randomly drawn each night, each having memorized most of the show's script, playing different roles in different combinations nearly every time. Performances of this "Hamlet Roulette" have continued through the season, with Shotgun's company of actors doing a three-play repertory cycle in August, after adding in productions of The Village Bike and Grand Concourse. Now, following the premieres of the two final plays of the season, Caught and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, this Friday marks the launch of the full, five-play repertory cycle, in which Wednesday to Sunday through the third week in January, the company will be doing a different play nearly every night.
That also means the sets have to change almost every day, sometimes twice in one day with matinees. As company member Kevin Clarke tells SFist, "A heroic team of tech folk dismantle and rebuild them every day."
As with Hamlet, designers have kept things fairly spare for this reason Chronicle critic Lily Janiak noted in her review that the discomfiting tone of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? works rather well in a room without furniture.
But it's the actors who are doing something pretty heroic here, especially for as small a non-profit operation as Shotgun is. They've now had six months to delve into multiple plays and characters, and energy has remained high at the theater throughout.
Founding Artistic Director Patrick Dooley says the concept of doing a full repertory season goes back to the company's daunting undertaking of Tom Stoppard's three-part Coast of Utopia, which they did in repertory in 2014, using a core group of actors who did marathon performance days in which they performed all three plays over eight plus hours. “I love the idea of working with a core group of artists," Dooley says. "Actors often spend their entire careers as hired guns. They rarely get the chance to have an artistic home. The three years we spent creating the Coast of Utopia trilogy awakened us to the personal and artistic benefits of creating work over an extended period of time with a core ensemble. No one dreaded those big three-show days. With excitement and adrenaline, everyone rose to the challenge. The audience felt it. The actors felt it. The shows were better.”
And for the next eight weeks of Shotgun's "RepFest," the company is offering various package deals on tickets for multiple plays, and theatergoers under 25 should know about their $5 ticket deal $5 tickets can be reserved for any Thursday night show, or you can show up to the box office on the day of any performance and purchase a $5 ticket if any seats remain.
All five plays will be performed according to this schedule from November 25 to January 22.
Shotgun Players is located at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley steps away from Ashby BART
