Podcast appearances and mentions of ron severdia

Two shows hit North Bay stages whose titles audiences may recognize from their somewhat better-known film adaptations. First up is Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre’s presentation of Sideways, author Rex Pickett’s re-working of his 2004 novel which was adapted by filmmaker Alexander Payne into the multi award-winning film. Adapting Pickett’s tale of a weeklong road trip/bachelor party through Central California wine country to a small, intimate stage would seem to be a bit of a challenge, but director/set designer Argo Thompson and his Left Edge team – in collaboration with Pickett – make it work. It’s well cast with Ron Severdia as Miles, a frustrated, unpublished author who’s sunk so low as to steal money from his mother to pay the rent and Chris Ginesi as Jack, Miles’ best friend and groom-to-be who’s a whirling dervish of positivity and testosterone. Jack sees the trip as his last chance to score before settling down. Miles just wants to get out of LA and escape into his own viticulturally-devised world. Their plans go a bit awry after meeting a couple of tasting room managers. Maya (Maureen O’Neill) seems to have an interest in Miles while Terra (Jazmine Pierce) has Jack thinking his upcoming nuptials may be a mistake. If you know the film or novel, then you know the play. If you’re wondering how a story set in so many places can be fit onto a small stage, Thompson has designed a multi-functional set that easily transforms from a dingy apartment bathroom to a classy tasting room to a cheap motel room to a restaurant dining room, and all with minimal transition time. Which is good, because the show feels a bit long. The pace should pick up a bit as the run gets rolling but the show could be streamlined a bit. Pickett has retained all the best scenes and lines of dialogue and there are plenty of laughs, but some scenes ran on and others seemed extraneous or repetitive. Payne changed the ending a bit in his Oscar-winning film script, but the play retains Pickett’s original conclusion. I think Payne was right. The ending as written seems a bit too pat with everything tidily wrapped up with a tone that is very different from the rest of the story. Ah, but the rest of the story is so well done with the cast doing wonders with Pickett’s characters. Severdia and Ginesi are excellent in capturing the essence of male friendship and fraternal love when you can go from hugging your best friend one minute to punching him in the mouth in the next. O’Neill is quite effective as a weary divorcee whose scabs from marital wounds are picked fresh by Miles’ and Jack’s behaviors. Pierce does well as a free spirit who does not respond well to Jack’s machinations. Even the ensemble (Kimberly Kalember, Angela Squire and Mark Bradbury) get their moments as they take on all the other characters whose paths Jack and Miles cross from Miles’s mom to an effete tasting room manager. One needn’t be a student of oenology to enjoy the Left Edge Theatre production of Sideways, but a glass or two of the stuff in the lobby beforehand (and at intermission) wouldn’t hurt – just don’t try to match the amount of drinking that seems to be going on on-stage. In the vernacular of the Sommelier, it’s a full-bodied show that induces sufficient laughter to allow for proper aeration of its complex properties. This critic found Sideways well-balanced with just the right blend of humor and heart but with a finish that’s just slightly off. Sideways plays through October 1st at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 2pm. For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com

Ron Severdia chats with professor David Crystal about Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation, his Hamlet Quarto discovery, Shakespeare's Words, and his love for "Twitterrhea".

As theatergoers, we occasionally attend plays we never previously liked, and end up changing our minds by the end. Maybe the acting and directing somehow assist the script in transcending its limitations, altering the show to make some powerful social statement, finding some new way to show us something we’d not noticed in previous productions. For me, Yazmina Reza’s acclaimed dark comedy God of Carnage has always been such a play. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it, and its 2009 Tony award for Best Play continues to perplex me. Still, I am quite willing, eager even, to be proved wrong. As a theater writer, and a theater fan, nothing is more exciting than being proved wrong. Which brings us to Left Edge Theater’s rambunctious new staging at Luther Burbank Center. Unfortunately—though I did enjoy a number of things about the production—its intermittent pleasures were not enough to change my view that Reza’s satirical stab at modern social relationships is poorly constructed, lacking in true insight, and ugly to a fault. And no, graphic onstage vomiting—though entertaining in a way, and very well done here—does not qualify as a social statement. Though it is pretty funny. The idea of the play certainly has merit. Two pairs of suburban parents meet to discuss a playground scuffle between their two eleven-year-old sons. After initial attempts at civility, the convivial conversation quickly devolves into caustic verbal attacks, vitriolic blame slinging, blatant displays of marital discord, some abusive treatment of inanimate objects, and general drunken mayhem. The point, such as it is, is that civilization is a fairly weak and flimsy construct. Though we have become domesticated by the artificial constraints of society, we are all just one step away from the kind of brutal behavior that defined our warring, primitive ancestors. That’s hardly a fresh message. From ‘Lord of the Flies’ to ‘The Hunger Games,’ the subject has been pretty fully excavated. Heck, anyone who watches a Donald Trump speech might come to the same conclusion. That’s all right, in and of itself. Theater and literature repackage old messages all the time. The goal, though—one would hope—is to do it in a way that is fresh and clever, or at the very least, fun to watch. As the parents of the young victim, Ron Severdia and Melissa Claire exude varying levels of passive-aggressive hostility from the get-go. Heather Gordon and Nick Sholley, the parents of the attacker, convey palpably miserable frustration. Overall, despite their efforts, the script does not allow these characters any of the likability necessary for audiences to identity with these people, a vital factor in effective satire. Under Argo Thompson’s lean, unfussy direction, the four-actor cast clearly works hard to keep things light, playing their characters’ essential repugnance slightly over the top, straining hard to make the most of the jokes Reza has buried in her script’s quicksand of verbal meanness. But there are few real opportunities for levity here, and despite a few inspired moments of physical comedy—including the aforementioned vomiting scene and its messy aftermath—all that’s left for the actors is to illuminate the moments of dark humor in the dialogue. Thompson’s direction does bring a bit of a fresh perspective to the material, depicting the characters’ abrupt slide into bad behavior, not as a shocking surrender to primal savagery—as portrayed in other productions—but as a goofy, tantrum-tossing, sulking-and-pouting eruption of childishness. That’s a smart directorial choice, but it’s just not enough to balance out the bland cynicism of Reza’s viewpoint, or to change my mind that God of Carnage, even when reasonably well done, has worse problems than not being very funny. Sadly, it’s just not that good of a play. ‘God of Carnage” runs Fridays and Saturdays through April 2, at Luther Burbank Center. Details at www.leftedgetheater.com I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB

It has been said that there is nothing less dramatic or more lacking in entertainment value than watching a writer write. In the clever comedy-drama ‘Seminar,’ presented at Wells Fargo Center by Left Edge Theatre, playwright Theresa Rebeck—the mastermind behind such stage hits at The Scene and television’s Smash—deftly transports her patented hard-edge comedy style from the worlds of stage-and-screen to the land of the literarily engaged. By never showing us a writer in the act of writing, but rather showing us a quartet of authors in the act of defending and describing their work, Rebeck shows them at the vulnerable core of who they are. And it’s a blast. Mostly. If anyone could really determine a great novel or a lousy novel by just reading the first who pages, then maybe I should only be watching the first ten minutes of a play before rendering my own opinion as to its overall worth. That’s not possible, of course, and for a playwright as adept as Rebeck to take such lazy shortcuts, actually showing us people in the act of recognizing a literary work’s excellence by it’s first several paragraphs, is disappointing. Thankfully, the value of ‘Seminar’ lies in its entirety, not in one or two false moments, and on the whole, ‘Seminar’ is outstanding. “Don’t defend yourself,” intones Leonard, early in the play. Played by actor Ron Severdia with a mix of weary resignation, playful, grinning antagonism, and vicious, sociopathic bloodlust, Leonard is an esteemed author-turned-teacher-for-hire, and he doesn’t like it when a writer defends herself after he’s criticized her. “If you’re defending yourself,” he tells a whole group of young writers he is in the middle of eviscerating, “then you’re not listening.” Directed by Argo Thompson with a strong ear for the rapidly shifting rhythms of intellectual debate and literary double-speak—though with a conspicuous tendency to have his entire cast perform facing and rarely to each other—Seminar follows a bunch of would-be writers who pay a Leonard $5000 apiece to give them a private class, “critiquing” their writing—and everything else about them. Rose Roberts, as the Jane Austen-loving Kate—who rents the New York apartment where the classes take place—is at the top of her game, and as her variously talented classmates, Jacob de Heer, Devon McConnell, and Veronica Valencia give strong, appealing performances in a play in which every character has something great to do, alternately required to be torn apart, or to learn the fine art of tearing apart others. As Leonard gleefully pronounces, “Writers, in their natural state, are as civilized as feral cats.” This entertaining exploration of artistic egos under pressure is a bit over-cooked at times, but on the whole is as deliciously fierce, ferocious and funny as a pack of wild animals. And like a wild animal, it doesn’t always behave itself. “Seminar” runs Friday through Sunday through November 28, at Wells Fargo Center for the Performing Arts, presented by Left Edge Theatre. www.leftedgetheatre.com

Ron Severdia sits down with actor Ben Crystal to discuss playing the title role in Hamlet in original pronunciation.