All Over the Map

Alexander Dinelaris, whose new play Red Dog Howls is making its world premiere at L.A.’s El Portal Theater, has a rather lofty aim: to create the next great American play. “At its best, American drama is unrelenting and powerful; emotion is thrown around because that’s who we are as a country,” he says.

Red Dog Howls tells the story of Michael (played by Matthew Rauch), who discovers his Armenian heritage after encountering his long-lost grandmother (played by stage legend Kathleen Chalfant). With that heritage also comes the legacy of a violent genocide that claimed the lives of over 1.6 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, including a large portion of Michael’s own family. The playwright was baffled last October by the failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a resolution recognizing the nearly 100-year-old Armenian genocide as actually having occurred. “Because of politics, the United States Government is forced into a subdued position on this issue,” he says, referring to the anger the Armenian resolution caused within Turkey, a strategically important U.S. ally in the war in Iraq. “This is a people who have wanted expression and relief and they haven’t been able to get it.”

While director Michael Peretzian’s parents lived through the Armenian genocide, they never discussed it with their son. “What my parents didn’t want to talk about was the fact that they survived,” Peretezian says. “For some reason, they were allowed to live and the neighbor next door to them was slaughtered.”

— Z.S.

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Gordon Greenberg’s first exposure to the 1978 musical Working, based on the famed nonfiction book by Studs Terkel, was not the show’s short-lived Broadway production, but when the then-13-year-old aspiring actor performed the role of the newsboy at the famed theatrical camp Stagedoor Manor. While that character no longer exists in the drastically revised, 90-minute version of Working that Greenberg is directing at Sarasota’s Asolo Rep, that teenage experience was the inspiration for this production. “It really left a deep impression on me, and a lot of the moments that touched me then remain the same now,” he notes.

Greenberg began working with the show’s co-creator, Stephen Schwartz, eight years ago, and the long-aborning result is a “down to the bones” staging which uses only six actors (plus an on-stage stage manager) — and where the actors will change their costumes in view of the audience. Moreover, a great deal of work has been done on the libretto; among the changes were turning a telephone operator into an Indian technical support person, and transforming an older business mogul into a 28-year-old hedge fund manager. “Stephen gave me free reign to go back to the original book,” he says. “So I brought him a big stack of index cards and I spread them all out over his living room and I said, ‘How about this?’ And then he reshuffled them and said, ‘How about that.’ And I reshuffled them, again and said, ‘How about this and that?'”

Moreover, the score has been greatly altered — with Schwartz happily cutting one of his own tunes — and two new songs added by In the Heights composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Stephen and I both wanted an updated sensibility, and Lin has this great ebullient enthusiasm,” he says. “Lin has really done some amazing work for us in the midst of this pretty explosive month for him.”

Greenberg admits it isn’t easy to define the finished product. “It’s now a cross between a play and a song cycle,” he notes. “But the question of the piece remains the same as it did 30 years ago: ‘What do you work for?’ We all have the same desire for resonance, to have an impact on the world.”

— S.L.

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Tim Supple’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which began its North American tour earlier this month at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco, is not your father’s Shakespeare. For one thing, the show boasts a cast of actors from many parts of India, speaking many different languages — a choice that might seem like it would further complicate Shakespeare’s intricate text. Not so, says Supple: “India is a multi-lingual society, so it seemed totally natural to do the show in a mixture of languages and I find it refreshing and liberating.”

Supple’s production, which has previously been seen in both England and India, also incorporates a physicality that might seem unexpected. “Indian theater has many profoundly different physical personalities that bring a great variety of expression to this play,” says Supple. “These actors have a stronger connection to the body and that alleviates some alienation that the language might have.”

But that’s not the only reason Supple cast Indian performers. “Shakespeare stands on the cusp between the ancient and modern theater. We mostly look to our Shakespeare performances to illuminate the realist side, but we’re not so good at connecting with the ritualistic aspect,” he says. “These Indian actors are, because their traditional theater is much more stylized and emblematic than ours.”

— T.F.