Best Available
Jonathan Spector
Shotgun Players
What happens when we get to peek behind the curtain of a well-respected, nonprofit theater that is currently looking for a new artistic director after the former one suddenly resigned under mysterious circumstances? To answer that question for a hypothetical theater company – the City Repertory Company – acclaimed, Oakland-based Jonathan Spector (of Broadway-bound Eureka Day fame) first interviewed dozens of theater makers before writing his latest play, Best Available, now in a world premiere production by Shotgun Players. What quickly becomes evident is finding the “best available” means wildly different things to the City Rep’s board chair, the managing director, the most generous donor, the search committee members, the interim artistic director, the A.D. candidates, and even to the box office staff. The scene-by-scene revelations, the behind-curtain politicking, and the promises made/promises broken combine for a wild ride on the theater’s rotating stage, with an overall Shotgun stage production that at times feels like a live-airing of a TV sitcom.
Dressed exactly alike in suit and tie, Dave (Dave Maier) and Dan (Steve Price) are a TwiddleDee/TwiddleDum pair of jargon-spouting, hyper-active consultants who are leading the Board of Directors – actually us as audience – through a visioning exercise to determine what the next Artistic Director looks like (but adding quickly not how looks in race, sex, gender, or age). To get there, board members imagine what first their own and then the Rep’s obituary will some day say.
Between his drinks, cigars, and bragging about his latest new abode, Board Chair Bill (also Steve Price) blasts in full bombastic fashion that he wants an Artistic Director who is someone “big and b-b-b-bold.” But he does not want any more Tom Stoppard on the Rep’s stage – an annual favorite of the past A.D., Gary, whom he and everyone else tries to avoid talking about but cannot help bringing up. Bill’s ideas of ‘big’ include the likes of a loud-mouthed, heavy accented Romanian (another role for Dave Maier) who produces plays in the forest with no props, no costumes, and only one candle as lighting; a 48-year-old white guy (Austine De Los Santos as Brad) from the suburbs who believes his privileged background is perfect to help bring diversity to the theater; and an uber-rich, early master mind behind Google (Storm White as Jacqueline) who never goes to the theater (she did see Hamilton) but wants to “see if I can build a better mousetrap” at City Rep. Each of these candidates (as well as a later, surprise one that certainly meets Bill’s expectation of “b-b-b-bold’) makes their case to the Search Committee through truly bold videos created by sound designer Ben Euphrat.
The elderly Dolores (firm-minded, determined Denise Tyrrell) – a past Board member still very much in control given she is the company’s largest donor – has ideas of her own for the new Artistic Director (including her own obsession for Tom Stoppard). She has made a pact with the current Managing Director, Helen (an intense, extremely expressive Sarah Mitchell) to bring back the recently departed Associate Artistic Director, Maya (a reserved but still passionate Regina Morones) as Interim A.D. in order to manipulate the selection process so that Maya will eventually become the Selection Committee’s choice. As Dolores explains to Maya, “I’m sorry to tell you it’s not going to be a fair and legitimate process.”
As an Interim A.D. and Executive Director team, Maya and Helen quickly pledge that there will be no top-down between them, and “no going behind each other’s back.” And while both pledge to bring in new audiences and new sources of funding, Maya’s desired route is first-and-foremost through engaging the community and Helen’s is through pleasing big donors. Maya wants to put fewer, more diverse plays on stage; Helen wants to keep the 8-play schedule and to seek a Broadway-bound, juke-box musical as the avenue to rescue the theater’s sagging budget. That pledge not to “go behind each other’s back” (not).
And so, let the search for the new Artistic Director begin in full swing. Nina Ball has designed a stage on a rotating platform across whose diameter is a drawn curtain. As the stage turns and turns, paired, sidelines conversations; formations of new liaisons; meetings of a sometimes-warring search committee, and gatherings of drink-tipsy board members and donors appear from behind the scenes and quickly twirl by.
Jon Tracy directs the pace with a fast clip and seamless scene changes. He also sculpts the script’s pervasive humor to play out in manners so tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top to be sometimes not that funny and to be distracting of a scene’s more serious intent. The many scenes that do spin past us in the two-hour, fifteen-minute show (plus intermission) begin to feel by the evening’s end a few too many and in need of some edits here and there.
The periodically appearing scenes that in many ways work best both from a director’s and the actors’ standpoints involve the three box office staff members: Bex (Austine De Los Santos), Caroline (linda maria girón), and Ariana (Storm White), each actor who also takes on other roles including that of an interviewed candidate. As the theater’s, young, frontline staff, we get a good look how they soothe worried patrons, how they solve real-time callers’ problems (including a sudden dog bite and a needed rabies shot), how they put a best face on troubled times, and how they also can deliver (in hilarious unison) the company line on its latest announcements. We also see how they are often ignored as nameless entities by the powers to be within the theater whose tickets they sell. But it is these three who figure out together a truly authentic, ground-breaking way to bring affordable theater to their community. In many ways, the playwright helps us to see it is within these three true lovers of theater – and perhaps others like them – that the true hope of the local theater world’s future and survival lies.
Jonathan Spector certainly also embeds with the script a sense of the difficult decisions facing contemporary, nonprofit theaters. Who does the local theater serve and in what order: the loyal (and shrinking in numbers) subscribers, the potential and often younger single ticket buyers, the governing board of directors, the most generous donors (who often fund at least 60% of the budget), the actors and staff, or the community at large?
Each of these constituents gets a direct or indirect voice within Best Available, and each has a unique perspective of who/what should be first priority is seeking what is ‘best available’ for City Repertory Company. However, the often farcical, sitcom approach that both script and director take in presenting these perspectives sometimes wears thin in this initial Shotgun Players production and overall weakens the important messages and good intents of Best Available.
Rating: 3 E
Best Available continues through June 16, 2024, in a world-premiere, two-hour, fifteen-minute (plus intermission) production by Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, CA. Tickets are available at www.shotgunplayers.org or by calling the box office at 510-841-6500. A live-streamed performance is available June 6.
Photo Credits: Ben Krantz
