CLAY SERA SERA

Hey, folks, check out The Colour Room, now streaming on Amazon Prime. It's a drama about the early career of the wonderful Clarice Cliff, a working-class factory girl in the north of England who became one of the most renowned ceramic artists of the Art Deco '30s.

 

Her work is distinctive, not only for the vivid colors on her hand-painted pieces, but the abstract geometrical shapes she pioneered for everyday household items like cups, plates, teapots and creamers.

 

The movie is long on atmosphere — those giant kiln chimneys belching smoke into the sky day and night — and cheerworthy in the way the audacious young Clarice rises above her station painting pottery on an assembly line at the Wilkinson company to become one of the company's top designers. 

 

And while her work confounds most of the stodgy male board members, she perseveres by rallying her fellow "paintresses" to produce her line and market it to an enthusiastic demographic of women. (Not unlike the Girl Power motif of the Barbie movie!)

 

 But beyond that, the movie was nostalgic for me (or possibly triggering), since my first summer job out of high school was painting bisque ware on the line at the funky Metlox Potteries factory in Manhattan Beach. Company designs were stamped on the pieces, which we girls had to paint in, not only in preordained colors, but in a precise number of brush strokes. Mess up, and your work was relegated to the (dreaded) seconds store. 

Not all that creative, except that it prompted me to start drawing a comic strip about my adventures in the working world, which I just dug out to look at for the first time in (ahem) 50 years.

 

In the strip, I called it Hotbox Pottery because it was always sweltering in the workplace in summer, with the kiln roaring away. The paint room was a couple of rooms away, but the bisque grading department, where my mom worked, adjoined the kiln room and was blistering in all seasons; the foreman handed out daily rations of salt tablets to keep the work force up and running.

The owner's initials were ES (Evan Shaw, who had bought the company from its original founders), so we always referred to him as Ebenezer Scrooge for his miserly policies. But looking back, it wasn't such a bad place to start my working life, earning my own paycheck (such as it was ), and doing my own banking. Except for the heat, painting pottery was more fun than slinging burgers at McDonald's or any kind of retail job where I'd have to confront a cash register.

 

Sadly, nothing I painted is ever likely to turn up on Antiques Roadshow (unlike Clarice Cliff). We never got to paint any of the cool Atomic '50s designs; most of our work was the prosaic Rooster or Fruit Basket patterns. Still, newcomers were allowed to sign and keep their first successfully painted plate, which I still have. And in retrospect, I'm pleased to think I had some connection, however tenuous, to what I realize now was the fabled Mid-Century California art pottery scene. 

 

Who knew?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORD PLAY

 SCS stages smart, witty story of the actors who saved Shakespeare

You couldn't imagine a better production to capture the spirit of this pivotal Santa Cruz Shakespeare season than The Book of Will. Lauren Gunderson's contemporary play about the creation of the First Folio of Shakespeare's texts is all about the power of words — to inspire and excite, to celebrate and educate, to comfort and heal. And it provides the perfect vehicle for outgoing Artistic Director Mike Ryan to hand over the company reins to incoming AD Charles Pasternak, playing the two real-life actors whose persistence, against all odds, preserved Shakespeare's splendid words for all time.

Ryan and Pasternak play John Heminge and Henry Condell, two Elizabethan actors, friends and colleagues of the recently deceased Will, who hatch a scheme to collect and transcribe all the scribbled-down versions of Shakespeare's play texts they can find to produce a single, official volume of his work in print. This is no easy task. Complete playscripts were rare in this era; normally, actors only copied out their own parts to learn, partly to save on time and the expense of materials like parchment and ink, and partly to prevent other companies from stealing a complete script and producing their own versions. Not that it worked very well, as companies who only had a few scenes of a play to work with cheerfully made up the rest.
 

This point is made painfully clear in the very first scene as a young actor from a rival company (Mariana Garzon Toro) energetically murders Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech with some random improvised filler. Heminge and Condell, of the King's Men theatrical troupe, and celebrated actor Richard Burbage (played with bombastic verve by Rex Young) gather in a tavern run by Heminge's daughter, Alice (winsome and spirited Allie Pratt) to bemoan the evident deterioration of Shakespeare's plays in performance some seven years after the author's death. Some ardent players like Burbage have memorized entire plays as written, but their generation is aging out, to be replaced by their less-well-schooled heirs.

It's Condell who first proposes the crack-brained idea of collecting Will's plays into a single volume, in his own authentic words — while people still remember what they are. Heminge, who has also become the troupe's business manager, is more tentative, cost-wise. But the enthusiasm of not only Condell and Alice, but Condell's amiable wife, Elizabeth (Paige Lindsey White) and Heminge's own wry, stout-hearted wife, Rebecca (Amy Kim Waschke) convince him of the urgency of preserving Will's thrilling words.

It all comes home to Heminge in a deeply moving late-inning monologue about the power of words to express the inexpressible and give vent to the otherwise unbearable burden of heartbreak.

The supporting cast is terrific, as usual. Young doubles in the role of the publisher, Jaggard, who's been blithely profiting off  the sale of bastardized version of Shakespeare's plays. Ben Jonson (a suitably flamboyant David Kelly), Shakespeare's friend and rival, makes a guest appearance.

Director Laura Gordon is also an actor (she was Prospero in last season's The Tempest),  and her staging makes the most of all the comedy and dry wit, as well as the more subtle, poignant moments in the plot. And for us grumpy traditionalists who pine to see Shakespeare performed in Elizabethan-style dress once in awhile, B. Modern's costumes evoke the period while retaining an unfussy, lived-in aesthetic.

Believe it or not, this is the 10th anniversary of Santa Cruz Shakespeare (emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of the well-beloved Shakespeare Santa Cruz), and the company's 8th season in the lovely Audrey Stanley Grove up in Delaveaga Park. We have Mike Ryan to thank for shepherding the company through these most tumultuous times to bounce back stronger than ever, even now, when the pandemic and its ongoing aftermath continues to wreak havoc in the arts. With Charles Pasternak at the helm (who acted as co-Artistic Director with Ryan this season, before stepping into the job full time next year), we can expect the festival to continue to build on its impressive past while eagerly embracing the future.

Top photo: Kevin Lohman

Above: R. R. Jones

LOVE CRAFT

Complicity, not compliance, highlights spirited SCS offering

There's a telling moment near the end of Santa Cruz Shakespeare's current production of The Taming Of the Shrew. It occurs in the climactic speech by Kate, the designated "shrew," delivering her manifesto on the state of her consciousness after having been "tamed" by her new husband, Petruchio, and it involves the tiny alteration of one single word.

In the line that has given feminists fits at least since the "Women's Lib" '70s, Kate declares,  "I am ashamed that women are so simple." Except, here, director Robynn Rodriguez swaps out the word "women" and replaces it with "people," which, coupled with the rest of Shakespeare's verse, "To offer war when they should kneel for peace," seems less like a call for female subservience to men than an observation on the regrettable human instinct to lash out in the face of any perceived opposition. Kate advocates for the gentle art of compromise — in love, in marriage, in society in general — as a means of achieving one's goals. Which are, in the case of Kate and Petruchio, individually, and, finally, together, the subversion of social conformity in pursuit of a more authentic life.

This SCS production gives us an exhilarating pair of non-conformists on this collision course. Boisterous Petruchio (M. L.  Roberts) has come to town to snag himself a rich bride and expand his own substantial properties. Katarina (Kelly Rogers) is a caustic young woman whose wealthy father, Baptista (Derrick Lee Weeden) has decreed that his pretty and obedient youngest daughter, Bianca (Yael Jeshion-Nelson), can't be wooed or wed until her older sister, Kate, is married off. To this end, Bianca's many would-be suitors conspire with Petruchio to woo Kate and clear their path to Bianca.

 But what begins as a business proposition levels up as soon as Petruchio gets his first look at his quarry — and feels her first verbal sting.  In Kate, he recognizes a fellow iconoclast, despite their different approaches; he cheerfully flaunts the rules of polite society to declare his plan to "wive it wealthily in Padua," while she resorts to waspish sarcasm. Profoundly unhappy in her domestic role from which there is seemingly no escape, she's so used to being mocked for her sharp tongue and unvarnished opinions, she assumes Petruchio's attentions are another cruel joke and launches a preemptive verbal strike in self-defense.

Roberts gives us a roistering, irreverent Petruchio, antic enough to wear a suit of Harlequin motley to his own wedding, yet seriously delighted to find in Kate a temperament so well matched to his own. (Kudos to Pamela Rodriguez-Montero's costumes that aren't rooted in any particular time or place, but are consistently true to the comic and narrative undercurrents in any given scene.) Rogers' Kate is an uncut gem of wit and passion whose only outlet is anger. In sparring with Petruchio, she is not so much "tamed" as liberated from the habit of mistrust. Even his most ridiculous commands — his insistent that the sun is, in fact, the moon, for example — become a test not of Kate's compliance to his whims, but her complicity in his vision of a less conventional and more rewarding alliance. It takes her awhile to learn to trust the one person who understands and values her, but there's great fun and blossoming joy in her discovery that they are kindred spirits, and that their best escape from restrictive social conventions is each other.

Scene-stealing Patty Gallagher shows off her flair for physical slapstick as Petruchio's loyal servant, Grumio (in one scene, she stands, er, gallops in as his horse),  and Sofia K. Metcalf's Tranio is our stalwart guide, helping to keep track of the busy plot; he disguises himself as his scholarly young master, Lucentio, while the real Lucentio (Junior Nyong'o) disguises himself as a humble tutor to Bianca in order to court her in secret.

On the night I went, there was also a special guest appearance by Jewel Theatre Artistic Director and founder Julie James in a featured role as both a hapless tailor, and a scornful widow who foolishly attempts to match wits with Kate. The lively ensemble keeps the action fast and funny right through to the spirited finale that will have you cheering for the art and craft of love.

Photos by RR Jones