Spare Stage: Current Show

With
Aaron Murphy	as John
Frannie Morrison	as Carol

Robert Avila's Review in the Bay Guardian Online:

True to the mission implied in its name, Spare Stage offers dramatic purity en lieu of flashy stage concepts in this beautifully calibrated, consistently stimulating production of David Mamet's 1992 two-hander, about a university professor (Aaron Murphy) and the female undergrad (Frannie Morrison) who accuses him of sexual misconduct. The action takes place exclusively inside the small office where John, on the verge of gaining tenure and simultaneously closing a deal on a new house, meets with his failing student Carol, a young woman who, ironically enough, seems lost by the concepts her professor deploys in his lectures on the social underpinnings of higher education (insights he recycles from his recently minted book, which is naturally the assigned reading).

What begins as a condescending tutorial by the distracted prof soon turns into a vaguely prurient extracurricular exercise and, then, a table-turning power struggle as the initially introverted and stumbling Frannie returns with serious and highly articulate charges of impropriety throwing John's tenure and world into jeopardy. Now it's his turn to try to explain and justify himself. The power struggle throughout is grippingly played by the remarkably potent team of Murphy and Morrison, who, under the shrewd direction of Stephen Drewes, lock into a dynamic battle of wills where minute changes in posture can say as much about the cloaked, institutionalized nature of power as anything in Mamet's precise and heightened dialogue.

In his 1992 play Oleanna, Mamet presents the power struggle between a university professor and one of his female students, who accuses him of sexual exploitation and, by doing so, places his chances for tenure in jeopardy. The play's title, taken from a folk song, refers to a 19th-century escapist vision of utopia. In 1994, Mamet adapted Oleanna into a film, which he directed. It starred William H. Macy and Debra Eisenstadt. Director Stephen Drewes comments, “Oleanna knocked my socks off when I first encountered it nearly twenty years ago, and the intervening years haven’t diminished its impact. In fact, it may be even more timely today, as our economy forces us to question more and more the actual value of higher education. The student’s responsibilities to the institution are taken for granted, but what does the institution owe the student? What, is short, do we actually get for our money?”
	David Mamet (Playwright). David Mamet is a prolific writer of plays about the darker side of the American experience, where profound truths emerge from what at first seem the most mundane conversations. His best known work includes Duck Variations (1972), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1975), American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988). His play, Race, about race and ethnicity, opened in New York in late 2009 and was the first new play to recoup its investment in the 2009-2010 Broadway season. Mamet also has made a name for himself as a Hollywood screenwriter. Among his films are House of Games, The Untouchables, Hoffa, and Wag the Dog, for which he was co-winner of the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.
	Stephen Drewes (Director). A fifth-generation San Franciscan, Drewes began his career in 1970 as an actor at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Since then, he has performed over forty roles with such companies as the Magic Theatre and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He holds an MA from UC Berkeley in Dramatic Art and an MFA in Directing from Brandeis University. Drewes accepted his first professional directing assignment in 1975 for the Peoples Theatre in Cambridge, MA, and has since directed over 80 productions in every genre from children's theatre to grand opera. He has been a member of the faculty at Boston University, Middlebury College and Colgate University, and was Artistic Director of the Publick Theatre in Cambridge, MA, where three of his productions won Boston Critics Circle Awards for Directing. Drewes has taught and directed extensively, published theatre and cabaret criticism, and has been the recipient of grants from the Packard Foundation and the California Arts Council. For three years he was the Resident Stage Director for the Pocket Opera. Drewes taught at City College of San Francisco from 1988 to 2008.
	Aaron Murphy (John) co-founded Spare Stage with Stephen Drewes in 2008, performing in productions of Here, Private Eyes, Afterplay, and Ashes to Ashes, as well as producing The Unexpected Man which received three BATCC awards. Recently he has performed in Arms and the Man and To Kill a Mockingbird (Center Rep), A Doll’s House (Willows), and Doubt: a Parable (Drama Association at Rossmoor). Other credits include Seven Days (SF Playhouse), Gaslight (Hapgood), Doubt: a Parable (Interplayers), Glengarry Glen Ross and Betrayal (Actors Ensemble of San Francisco), Uncle Vanya, Hedda Gabler, The Real Inspector Hound, the Homecoming, and American Buffalo. In the October he will perform in 444 Days with Golden Thread Productions. He earned his BFA in Acting at UC Santa Barbara. The production of Oleanna is a milestone in his collaboration Stephen Drewes, which began in 1993.
	Frannie Morrison (Carol). A recent graduate of the theatre program at San Francisco State University, Frannie Morrison is a member of the “Do It Live!” troupe, SFSU grads whose goal is to “vandalize the classics.” Morrison was one of the “Juliets” in the Mark Jackson production of the play by the same name that reimagined the Shakespeare classic using seven different Juliets. At SFSU, she played the title role in Medea, directed by Kimberly Johnson. She appears in the indie film, Prep School, now in post-production.