Lucia
Berlin: Stories
From A Manual for
Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
 |
| Jeri Lynn Cohen |
Each of five stories by an author who once claimed,
“Everything I write is autobiographical” offers independently a glimpse of one
salient moment in her rollercoaster life. When presented together, the five provide a
heart-warming, inspirational journey from heart-breaking depths to her victory
over alcohol addiction. As a short-story
writer, Lucia Berlin was only marginally known and read during her lifetime;
but eleven years after her death, a compilation of her life’s stories was
published as A Manual for Cleaning Women,
hitting the New York Times bestseller
list in its second week. It is from that
book -- which went on to sell more than all her previous books combined -- that
the team members from Z Space’s Word for Word have chosen five stories to
present as a new work entitled Lucia
Berlin: Stories.
 |
| Members of the Ensemble of Lucia Berlin: Stories |
Told in the company’s unique manner of theatrically staging
the written words right off the book’s page with sentences often pieced
together in sequenced phrases by several actors in passing, Lucia Berlin: Stories is powerfully
narrated by an exceptional cast who convey with humor, pathos, care, and
empathy the author’s total story through these five pieces. Nancy Shelby and JoAnne Winter direct this
eight-person ensemble through a constant maze of complicated, constant changes
in scenes, characters, and motifs. And
always the story reigns supreme as sentences and paragraphs flow seamlessly
from one actor to the next, each relating the story as if reading from the
book’s page.
With all its dependence on the words of the story, Word for
Word opens Lucia Berlin: Stories with
a powerful, silent sequence (choreographed by Christy Funsch) as a woman lashes
out in an alcohol-induced rage, is arrested and bound, and is transferred to a
cell of some sort. She and the cast
around her – all of whom figuratively mime her chaos and capture – are dressed
in grey-striped outfits (designed by Michelle Mulholland) that could serve as the wardrobe for either prison or a
mental institution, both of which we will learn our heroine will often frequent
as this and the other stories progress.
The loss of control, the desperate need for another drink, and the agony
of the alcohol’s consequences are all captured in these first couple of minutes
– all to be repeated in more graphic sequences as we learn more details of her
life.
 |
| Jeri Lynn Cohen |
Jeri Lynn Cohen is Carlotta in the first story, “Her First
Detox,” and will also be known as Lucille and Mrs. Bevins in the stories to
follow; but her “Everywoman” is clearly always the author, Lucia. Ms. Cohen is nothing short of brilliant as
she conveys the anxiety, the deviousness, and the deceit as well as the
good-naturedness, generous spirit, and boundless ingenuity of a woman who is drunk
more often than not. She is a mother of
four who somehow makes breakfast for them at 7 a.m. after sneaking out at 4
a.m. to walk one-and-a-half miles to be the first in line to buy a four-dollar
bottle of cheap vodka at 6 a.m. (from the story “Unmanageable”). In “Emergency Room Notebook,” she is an
emergency room attendant who kibitzes with her co-worker about good-and-bad
deaths/smart-and-dumb suicides in between also comforting families of the newly
dead or patiently once again listening to the fake screams of the woman known
as Marlene the Migraine – all done before she frantically dashes to the parking
lot for a giant swig from a bottle of booze.
Throughout each of these stories, Ms. Cohen conveys a woman who is not a
demon, who could be someone we all know, but who definitely has a monstrous,
pervasive problem that consumes much of her life and effects the lives of kids
who must hide her keys and wallet in order to keep her safe and hopefully sober
(not).
 |
| Indiia Wilmott, Norman Gee, Jeri Lynn Cohen, Gendell Hernández & Ryan Williams French |
One of the most important aspects of Lucia Berlin’s works
and this cast’s depictions is to put a face of humanity on those we often pass
quickly in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, or
on Any/Every Street throughout the Bay Area.
Those we see as just another drunk are in these stories real people with
names, quirks, heart, and humor; and they are a community of people the rest of
us mostly want to forget. Yes, there are
the moments when they are rolling and reeking in their own wretched situations
as is shown in several of the stories (like a bone-chilling chain-gang-like
opening of “Unmanageable” where a line-up of the intoxicated chant in grunts
and groans while stomping their feet in a dance of desperation). However, we see the chumminess and the
camaraderie that “Lucia” has with her fellow lovers of the bottle in scenes
like a very funny incident in the story “502” where her abandoned car rolls
into the inhabited Chevy Cosair of Ace, Champ, Little Ripple, and Horatio
– guys who may be drunks like she but who are also people that any of us just
might like if we got to know them.
The myriad of roles the other eight members of this ensemble
play to fill in the details of Lucia’s stories range from street drunks to her
kids, from doctors/nurses to grieving/wailing Gypsies, from jail warden and
neighborhood cop to inmates in a prison.
The variety of accents, demeanors, personalities, ages, and sexes each
person is asked to assume (often for only a few seconds) is astounding; and the
orchestrated movements, shifts, and transformations occur without a word
dropped from the continuous flow of the story’s narration among the nine
ensemble members. Cassidy Brown, Ryan
Williams French, Norman Gee, Gendell Hernández, Delia MacDougall, Indiia
Wilmott, and Phil Wong are together an ensemble extraordinaire – each bringing
well-calculated, naturally appearing nuances and particulars to the many
persona they inhabit.
 |
| Cassidy Brown, Jeri Lynn Cohen, Norman Gee & Phil Wong |
Lest anyone doubt, there is a happy ending in perhaps the
unlikeliest of locales and situations.
Amidst the otherwise daily boredom, putrid smells, and cramped quarters
(six to a cell meant for two) of a prison, the evening’s finale “Here It Is
Saturday” is an uplifting look at a now sober-for-good Mrs. Bevins (aka
“Lucia”) teaching a writing class to an eclectic class of felons, men whose
lives are made just a bit brighter by a woman whom they know has traveled some
of the same alleys and inhabited some of the same cells they have. The final image of the evening is still
somber and sobering, but the message is one of a heroine who conquers her
demons and touches many lives during both the difficult journey and at its
conclusion.
Nine movable, stackable boxes are the principal set design
of Oliver DiCicco, Naomie Kremer, and Jacqueline Scott; but in their simplicity
comes a plethora of scenes and uses – all becoming part of the constant dance
this cast performs in telling a total story that is always on the move. Particularly powerful is the video
accompaniment to many of those scenes as designed by Naomie Kremer -- never any
more impactful than a stark sidewalk and its wavering cracks as Lucia makes her
4 a.m. trip and back to the liquor store.
Jim Cave’s lighting casts the patterns, spots, and shadows that further
bring these stories to life, while the jazz score composed by Marcus Shelby
both honors the love of jazz Ms. Berlin is said to have as well as mirrors the
tension, the loneliness, and the occasional triumphs of Lucia and her fellow
characters.
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| Members of the Ensemble |
While each of the five stories serves its part in telling
Lucia’s overall journey, “Emergency Room Notes” is one that perhaps could be
either eliminated or shortened without doing much damage to her overall
story. It is easily a stand-alone, often
very funny look at emergency rooms and the people who work there, with the
final note that even people who are saving others’ lives have issues themselves
(in this case, drinking). But for the
total two-and-a-half-hour Lucia Berlin:
Stories (including intermission), this particular story is one of the
longest without adding elements quite as essential as do the others.
To a long line of Word for Word, uniquely and successfully
related stories that jump from page to stage now joins the world premiere of Lucia Berlin: Stories. For all of us who harbor stereotypes about
the drunks in the street or about those drunks in the office, home, or school, Lucia Berlin: Stories is a must-ingredient
of our recovery plan.
Rating: 5 E
Lucia Berlin: Stories
continues through March 11, 2018 in production by Z Space’s Word for Word at Z
Below, 470 Florida Street, San Francisco.
Tickets are available at http://www.zspace.org/.
Photos by Julie Schuchard
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