Last year, Actors’ Reading Collective, a Marin County-based company of actors and directors, presented a staged reading of English playwright Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman.” During an intense moment, one character grabbed a knife and slashed at another. With no props, as is normal for a staged reading, that knife was mimed—but, says actor Sheila Devitt, “You could hear an audible gasp from the audience.” She adds, “I was playing a secondary character, and I gasped, too.”
That’s just how convincing a staged reading—actors on book, sometimes just static in chairs or at music stands, usually wearing their own clothes, miming everything—can be.
ARC, presenting its “Out of the Box” series July 1 through Aug. 26, was established during the pandemic when actors brought together by James Carpenter gathered on Zoom to read plays aloud. Now its 30 or so members and a few dozen contributing players are offering public monthly readings of contemporary “Shakespeare-adjacent” plays in Marin Shakespeare Company’s small indoor venue in downtown San Rafael.
ARC is one of several local groups doing public staged readings. Across the Bay, director Andrea Gordon hooked her Rainbow Zebra Productions to the bandwagon of San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, known for world premieres, and is presenting free readings of new work by well-established playwrights with local connections through Dec. 9.
Other companies, such as 3Girls, which focuses on plays by queer-identified women, hold staged readings of new works. The Marsh, run by Stephanie Weisman, books staged readings and works-in-progress on Monday nights in San Francisco’s Mission District, and other theaters such as San Francisco Playhouse intermittently present staged readings of new work.
At the recent Sunday night launch of Rainbow Zebra’s series, playwright Michael Lynch sat in a back row as actors on the Magic’s second stage read “Crows Landing Gently, Gently,” his drama about a romance between a religiously devout, sheltered 16-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man. The actors sat on stage. One read the stage directions. Gordon (full disclosure: she’s a longtime theater colleague) directed. There was one rehearsal the afternoon before the performance, plus phone conversations with the individual actors about their characters.
Among the six plays on the lineup, “Crows Landing” is one of only two written by a man. Gordon’s aim is to highlight work by women, especially older playwrights who create roles for older women. For the current series, she solicited playwrights whose work she has known and loved here in the Bay Area as far back as the 1970s and 1980s, ranging in age from 55 to 94.
Laurel Ollstein, whose “Pandora” retells the myth from a feminist perspective, is July 21. Julie Hébert’s “Entangled,” a relationship play involving two female scientists and a handyman, is Aug. 26. Lynne Kaufman’s “The Next Andy Warhol,” a romantic comedy, is Sept. 23; Ken Narasaki’s “Spoiled,” about a dysfunctional Japanese-American family, is Oct. 14, Andrea Gordon’s “My Lunch with Babs,” an homage to “My Dinner with André,” is Nov. 18 and Lee Brady’s “Appointment in Mendocino,” a family drama, is Dec. 9.
Gordon directs most of the readings.
Local playwrights have long gathered informally to read each other’s works, but to present a reading for an unbiased audience is especially helpful, observes Gordon. Audience talkbacks afterward give playwrights new perspectives, and audiences like to feel present at the inception of something fresh and exciting.
In the case of ARC, its current focus is on plays that fit well with Marin Shakes’ summer outdoor amphitheater series under the artistic directorship of Jon Tracy. The lineup fell into place easily, says Devitt, a spokesperson for the company along with actor David Sinaiko. Devitt noted that the plays the collective chose to read together for their own pleasure during the pandemic tended to be scripts with heightened language in various styles.
“Out of the Box” includes: “Into the Breeches!” by George Brant, set during World War II and involving an all-female production of “Henry V”, on July 1; “Malvolio,” by San Francisco native Betty Shamieh, a comic sequel to “Twelfth Night” on July 21, “Compleat Female Stage Beauty” by Jeffrey Hatcher, about what happens when theatrical gender barriers are breached in the 17th century, on Aug. 12; and “Buzz” by Susan Ferrera, about the first woman to direct at the Royal Shakespeare Company, on Aug. 26.
ARC’s readings are preceded by three rehearsals. This summer’s actors include in-demand locals Stacy Ross, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong, Phil Wong, Jomar Tagatac and others. Directors are Sinaiko, Marcia Pizzo, Amy Kussow and Luisa Sermol.
For audiences, actors and directors, who, as Gordon says, are temporarily freed from blocking and able to focus on the heart of the material, a once only staged reading is a special event. It allows all those involved, including the audience, to focus on character development, relationships—the human condition, as Devitt says.
Still, staged readings do not preclude a hunger for the Full Monty. ARC’s first full production, Annie Baker’s “The Antipodes,” is slated for November, and Gordon plans to produce and direct Lanford Wilson’s “The Mound Builders” in 2025, a longtime dream of hers.
“It’s fleeting,” says Devitt, of staged readings. “Of course, all theater is fleeting. We go in, we have a live experience and we have our memory of it. It doesn’t exist in tangible form after that. There’s something exciting about the ephemeral nature of that. Each of these stories is one night only—simple, unadorned, beautiful.”
Actors’ Reading Collective “Out of the Box” readings are at 7 p.m. July 1, July 21, Aug. 12 and Aug. 26 at 514 Fourth St., San Rafael. Tickets are $25-$100 at arcstream.org.
Rainbow Zebra Productions readings are at 7 p.m. July 21, Aug. 26, Sept. 23, Oct. 14, Nov. 18 and Dec. 9 at the Magic Theatre, Buidling, D, Fort Mason, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco. Tickets are free. Visit facebook.com/magictheatre.