Woody Weingarten

Zev Rattet of Marin County shares a hug with Korean actress and influencer IU during a backstage visit on her “2024 IU Hereh World Tour” stop in Oakland, July 30, 2024. The 77-year-old Rattet is a K-drama superfan who earned the nickname “Grandpa Uaena” for his fixation with IU and her talent, and his story has been amplified on Korean media. (Framegrab from video via Zev Does KDrama/YouTube)

Zev Rattet in a partial framegrab from video talks about his favorite K-dramas of 2025. At 77, the Marin County retiree runs his own YouTube channel dedicated to Korean television dramas. (Zev Does KDrama/YouTube)

The white-haired Rattet, who cherishes the slightly reverent title IU’s official fan club bestowed on him, “Uaena Grandpa,” has in effect become a mascot whose fixation with the singer-actress and her talent has been retold and retold on Korean media. He impishly explains that Bernadette, his French wife of 43 years, “banned” photos of her from the main floor of their Fairfax home. “She thinks I’m going to run away with IU, but I just think of her as a granddaughter.

Uaena, the name of IU’s official fancafé, basically translates as “you love me,” and IU, singer-actor Lee Ji-eun’s stage name, means “I and you,” which symbolizes the closeness she wants to create with her audiences.

Rattet, a computer programmer who retired in 2018, a year after he started becoming a devotee of K-drama, has turned into a non-stop storyteller — charming, breezy, light-hearted. Some of his brief monologues and videos meander playfully, filled with not only run-on sentences but run-on paragraphs.

“I noticed IU a year and a half into watching, in a K-drama called ‘Hotel del Luna,’” he begins an interview with Local News Matters. “She was the star. I fell in love with her character, so I started looking for dramas she was in. In one, ‘You Are the Best,’ in episode 36 of a 56-hour drama, she sings toward the end of the story. I loved her music.”

Because of that, he searched out other K-dramas with her singing and soon became the oldest fanboy in Uaena. Those actions eventually brought him Korean celebrity — along with his YouTube channel, Zev Does Kdrama, which features videos of “the hug,” of him gushing about IU and her work, of scenes from K-drama, of him being interviewed, and of him cooking Korean dishes — plus a shot of the back of a hoodie that reads “I love IU … and my wife.”

Meeting his idol

After Rattet started posting “something every day, to keep IU in everybody’s consciousness,” her fans and staff kept telling her to check him out. She made contact, inviting him to sit way up front when her tour took her to Oakland. “She sent me an invite online,” he relates. “I dressed the same way I was dressed when she ‘discovered me.’ All through the concert, people waved at me because they recognized me from my channel. Backstage, she hugged me, something the Korean people normally don’t do. She was so gracious, so warm, so humble. She embodies qualities, like being kind, that I really admire. Meeting her was one of the high points of my life.”

Korean officials clearly were interested in publicizing the cross-cultural aspects of Rattet’s enthusiasm. Last year, they offered him “a roundtrip business class ticket to Korea by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (to join) a subgroup with people from all over the world. It was great.”

Rattet became curious about Asian shows on Netflixin 2017, initially watching Japanese films. “But I didn’t feel connected,” he says, “so then I tried Chinese, but they reminded me of American TV. Then I found Korean, which were emotionally honest and culturally engaging. The quality of acting, the production, the story, and the music were all spectacular.

“‘Oh, My Ghost’ was the first one. I was hooked almost immediately. Every time I watched one, I wanted to watch another. I usually describe them as a 16-hour movie, although the length varies. But each story is complete, with an opportunity for character development. I’m closing in on 400 now; I crossed the 300 mark a year ago. That totals 5,600 hours, but I re-watch each one an average of two or three times, which makes it 15,000 hours. My wife’s on her 143^rd, approximately 2,300 hours.”

They’re not all dramas, he notes, despite the K-drama rubric. “I also watch comedies, thrillers, rom-coms.” He views Korean movies as well, and, just for variety, popular animated American films that feature a female action trio, K-pop Demon Hunters.

Endless stories, boundless enthusiasm

Rattet never seems to get bored by his mainstay, K-drama, which we can’t say about his checkered occupational life. Before becoming a programmer, he was a daily newspaper reporter, a training materials designer, president of a software company in Kentfield, an insurance agent, and founder of a publishing company.

A former hippie who’d overcome childhood polio, Rattet describes his life as “non-standard.”

Nowadays, only because he can’t watch K-drama 24/7 on each of 365 days annually, he fills out his retirement by “taking bicycle rides, cooking on what I call Wok Wednesday, having Friday neighborhood get-togethers in my driveway, going on walks with my wife, and spending an hour every day doing something for my channel. And I go to gym every Saturday with my wife and watch K-drama while exercising. I had a knee replacement a few years ago, but I have no serious illness. I expect to live to 114.”

Right now, Rattet’s immersed in “When Life Gives You Tangerines,” a new K-drama on Netflix starring IU in two mother-and-daughter roles.

He sighs, after watching her, remembering another character trait of IU’s he found he liked some time ago.

“I have to mirror her humbleness,” he says.

Woody Weingarten

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Susan (Tina Traboulsi), who’s blind, listens to ex-cop Carlino (Rob Garcia) lie about his crooked motives in Wait Until Dark. Photo by Robin Jackson.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Wait  Until Dark, a theatrical thriller that’ll run through Dec. 14, proves that nothing can replace live theater. You’re not in front of a two-dimensional movie screen but, instead, you’re right there, close to the characters, close to the scary action, possibly gripping the edge of your seat until the suspenseful drama ends. You’re watching a play that’s often dimly lit or totally blacked out on purpose, nervously expecting the main character, who’s blind, to suddenly be attacked or killed.

The audience at the Barn in Ross, packed with white-haired ladies at a matinee, is kept in the dark, so to speak, as long and as much as the protagonist is.

Superb direction by Carl Jordan and solid acting by a cast of six Ross Valley Players keep the intensity going throughout, overcoming a complicated, dated 2013 script that’s a rewrite of the original 1966 Broadway version.

Jordan ensures that the play’s stereotypical characters aren’t quite caricatures but that their pawn-like movements from the pens of writer Frederick Knott and adaptor Jeffrey Hatcher are followed.

In contrast, Tina Traboulsi is so realistic as Susan, a newlywed who hasn’t adjusted yet to sightlessness caused by an auto accident, you might feel a desire to reach across the stage to keep her from stumbling over furniture that was moved, to protect her from the danger of three intruders who separately enter her apartment without her knowledge, permission, or desire.

Sporadic humor, almost all of it intended, may break through the tension from time to time,

A leather-gloved Roat (David L. Yen) leaves no fingerprints while searching for a valuable doll. Photo by Robin Jackson.

although Susan’s paranoia starts early and builds geometrically as each character enters the stage. She, naturally, suspects everyone, including her husband, of lying to her or plotting something even more evil.

Rob Garcia portrays Carlino, an ex-con, ex-cop involved in a non-theoretical conspiracy with just enough likability to make his otherwise menacing demeanor tolerable.

Portraying a snarly, leather-gloved criminal, whom Susan and you may both believe wouldn’t blink at the need to dispose of someone in his way, is David L. Yen as Roat.

David Abrams inhabits the personality of Mike, who may not be so dead-set on killing — or getting caught.

Coco Brown and Diora Silin, who alternate each performance of Gloria, play a troubled teen who repeatedly drops into Susan’s basement apartment to avoid a mom who entertains a string of men, and Benjamin Vasquez (Susan’s disappearing hubby, Sam) fill out the cast of the murder mystery.

A mysterious doll with something valuable hidden in it becomes the taut focal point of the climax of Wait Until Dark, which was made into a 1967 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin with different plot points.

It takes almost no time for costumes and furniture that could have existed in the World War II era to quickly pull the audience into the basement digs in Greenwich Village. Gifted sound cues by Billie Cox and equally perfect lighting designed by Frank Sarubbi pinpoint a noir atmosphere that cinematic classics from director Alfred Hitchcock and Hollywood power couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall honed.

The plotline may take place in 1944, with occasional references to such past-their-sell-date items as malt-flavored milk mix Ovaltine and radio soap opera heroine Helen Trent, but two hours of intensity in Ross are definitely here and now.

Wait Until Dark will play in the Barn at the Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through Dec. 14. Tickets: $30 to $45. Info: 415-456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.

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Dana Hunt (center) discusses with Tajai Britten (left) and Jonathen Blue his possibility of gay sex. Photo by David Minard. 

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Perhaps unexpectedly, since the play’s about growing up black and gay, whites in the audience of Bootycandy made up a plurality. But it made no difference. Boisterous laughter frequently erupted from every seat during the opening weekend matinee at the California Theatre of Santa Rosa.

The comedy, which details homosexual intimacy, employs f-bombs and nearly every other curse word you’ve ever heard. It’s belly-shakingly funny.

The top-notch, five-member cast, four of whom are dark-skinned, delivers about 1,738 laughs in less than two hours on the Left Edge Theatre stage (don’t count; you’d probably miss a bunch of gags that way). But, in addition to multiple over-the-top slapstick segments, the audience gets to see black culture through some serious lenses based on a dozen autobiographical sketches playwright Robert O’Hara theatrically threaded.

It takes some time, though, for the Big Reveal to tie the sketches together and transform what initially seems disjointed into something complex but a good deal more linear. In keeping with the offbeatness of the show, no backdrop exists for the actors to play off ­­(or is necessary for the bawdy coming-of-age story) but scene changes are brought to life by substituting chairs, costumes, and props.

Tajal Britten skillfully portrays Sutter, O’Hara’s alter ego, who grows from an awkward kid obsessed with Michael Jackson into a semi-mature playwright. Jonathen Blue, meanwhile, stops the show with an exaggerated, hysterical portrait of a minister who passionately preaches about supposedly wayward choirboys.

Jonathan Blue (right ) provides big laughs in ‘Bootycandy.’ Photo by  David Minard. 

Dana Hunt, Lexus Fletcher and Shanay Howell, who each deserve an award for superlative clowning, fill out the ensemble cast in multiple roles that range from a pudgy male rape victim to a lesbian named Genitalia who goes through a “non-commitment ceremony” that spotlights such smart lines as “wherever you go, I will not follow.”

Director Serena Elize Flores makes sure the sometimes subversive and provocative two-act play zips along so fast that audience members leave with the sensation that it’s much shorter than it actually is.

Because the plotline is thin, the vignettes risk being labeled stereotypical and racist. That viewpoint, however, discounts the text also containing more than a few wonderfully crafted, expository lines like “All chocolate cakes ain’t the same.”

Although the playwright has adeptly fleshed out his male characters, he was somewhat stingy with the women’s personalities.

Bootycandy begins with a dude clad only in white briefs and white socks. It ends with a touching moment with an Alzheimer’s-afflicted octogenarian grandma craving baby back ribs, a poignancy that’s diluted because it’s followed too closely by a wonderfully comic dance performed by the actors after their bows.

Bluenoses and children should stay home. Most everybody else should see this show.

Bootycandy will play at the Left Edge Theatre stage in The California, 528 7th St., Santa Rosa, through Nov. 23. Tickets: $22 to $44. Info: (707) 664-7529 or info@leftedgetheatre.com.

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Steve Budd’s face shows how he feels in Oy, What They Said About Love. Photo by Michael Prine Jr.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Steve Budd, in Oy, What They Said About Love, is committed — to not being committed.

Throughout the amusing and heartbreaking 70-minute solo performance at The Marsh Berkeley, he desperately wants to find The One, his beshert, his soulmate.

And he does. Momentarily.

The 50-year-old’s relationship is at best tumultuous — on and off, on and off again, on and off once more. From Kenya to Boston. From ultra-hot to icy.

The Oy in the title should be a dead giveaway: Budd’s clever one-man show is Jewish-oriented.

In it, he sings snippets of Hebrew songs and prayers, occasionally inspiring some audience members to do an impromptu unison sing-along. He also tosses in a handful of words that might not be familiar to every theatergoer. Like schmutz (dirt), traif (non-kosher), and shiksa (non-Jewish female).

The Oakland-based actor/writer/storyteller/standup comic embodies his own being and that of his wannabe wife, a strikingly beautiful Black émigré from Africa. She’s everything he desires in a woman — except she’s not Jewish. She’s willing to convert, however, and wants to have “Einstein kinky-haired kids” with him. Going from one tribe to another wouldn’t be a big deal, she submits.

Budd, a white-haired guy who knows exactly how to comedically utilize his rubbery body and face, explores commonalities and differences in relationships, and why his fail while others succeed. He also illustrates his bumpy journey by morphing himself into the personas of both genders of friends he’s interviewed.

He depicts, for example, Connor and Sarah (an interfaith couple who met at a Halloween party) on an escape trip to Canada, a visit to an Emergency Room because of an ear infection, and a heartfelt, long-withheld utterance of “I love you.”

He shows Gaby finally accepting Matt as her partner, after having met not cute but on Craigslist, by lowering her expectations.

He exquisitely describes folks through their own words. “He does not know how to blow his nose quietly,” for instance.

He also details his mother’s death. And switches the om chant to one emphasizing the word mom.

Steve Budd’s relationship crumbles. Photo by Michael Prine Jr.

The monologist’s acting chops have evolved enough so there’s no need for props or costumes or a set. The stage, indeed, is barren except for a chair and two undecorated blocks on which to sit. Infrequent lighting changes and recorded music do add some atmosphere.

Budd’s journey — directed by Mark Kenward and Kenny Yun —is at once funny and agonizing. And he displays it all while wearing a simple shirt with hoodie, darkish trousers, and old-fashioned black-and-white sneakers.

But, oy, he weaves his own written words into a narrative so real that it’s easy for the audience to visualize each character in his theatrical stockpile.

Oy, What They Said about Love will run at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, through Oct. 25. Tickets: $25 to $35; reserved seating $50 to $100 (plus a convenience fee of $3 a ticket). Info: 415-641-0235 or www.themarsh.org.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.

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Gabrielle Maalihan and David Siniako are awestruck as they enter a new universe in “The Motion.” All photos by Jay Yamada.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

The Motion, a new sci-fi dramedy, provides laughable and challenging theater while occasionally making audience members believe their brains are about to explode.

In a good way.

Obie-winning playwright Christopher Chen crams about eight tons of material into 105 intermission-less minutes at the Ashby Theater in Berkeley. He explores, for example, morality, memory, identity, emotions, science, and animal welfare vs. animal rights.

Oh yeah, and love.

What’s dubbed a “metatheatrical sci-fi fable” is a five-character production with each of the Shotgun Players’ actors trying to out-superb the others as they try to figure out what it means to be human. The backdrop, the first of several universes that are explored, is a debate stage.

Dr. Alan James (played by David Siniako), “a humane doctor,” implies that critters have souls. To buoy his support of a ban on animal-testing, he describes in gory detail the vivisection of a bunny.

Dr. Sarah Matthis (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) counters with facts, leading with the notion that 44% of testing does “no harm to animals of any kind” and attempts to show that most experimentation is on lower forms. “Fish are used to study cancer,” she reports, and “worms are used to test Alzheimer’s.” She declares that animals are sentient creatures that shouldn’t be mere tools in scientific research by humans. Along the way, she quotes 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant and cites an illustration of not knowing who to toss overboard when there are five people in a lifeboat that safely holds only four.

Matthis’ alternately cocky and insecure anti-ban partner, Prof. Neel Serrano (Soren Santos), believes the key to settling the debate is by determining how to eliminate suffering. A ban, he warns, might “halt most medical experimentation in its tracks”

Gabrielle Maalihan and Soren Santos provide a love undercurrent.

Prof. Lily Chan (Gabrielle Maalihan), perhaps the most susceptible to emotions and thereby the most vulnerable debater, admits at one point that she has “this thing where I can’t allow myself to be happy.” In a crisis, she simply feels “so helpless.”

Moderator Jack Donovan (Erin Gould) futilely tries to keep the lid on the debate, circling back to the initial question when everything starts flying off the rails, with participants either talking over each other or flirting. He gets to deliver many — but by no means all — of the laugh-lines.

James, white-bearded, distinguished, and nattily attired, tries swapping one-upmanship lines and concepts with Sarrano, but ends up angrily blurting out, “Please stop interrupting me.”

After loud claps of thunder and blinding lightning flashes, the four debaters are transported to an alternate world in which they are momentarily trapped behind invisible walls. Reading each other’s thoughts, a concept that frightens all of them, is but a first step in a journey that leads to them evolving in other places where they learn to live in the present with AI as a sidekick.

To make the presentation immersive, audience members get to vote on how the debate affected them.

Playwright Chen is popular in the Bay Area. His works have been produced and developed by such companies as the American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Rep, Magic Theatre, and SFPlayhouse,

Erin Mei-Ling Stuart (left), Gabrielle Maalihan (center) and David Siniako brave a bitter-cold snowstorm.

Artistic director Patrick Dooley founded the Shotgun Players in 1992 in, the website says, the basement of a pizza parlor with “20 eager actors and a bucket of black paint.” Their aim: “to make great, affordable theater.” In the following 12 years, the players performed in 44 different spaces before finding their permanent home on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley.

In a post-show conversation after an opening week matinee of the world premiere, audience members cheerfully dove deeper into the morality issues — politely debating one another and, now and then, ignoring TDooley, who was moderating the half-hour bonus.

During the conversation, he suggested that perhaps the audience might want to consider what the play’s characters and they, as well, have learned about themselves. In the program, he advises theatergoers to retain “a spirit of thoughtfulness and wonder. Stay open. Stay curious.”

Both he and Chen make it virtually impossible to do otherwise.

The Motion will run through Oct. 12 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $23 to $80. Info: 510-841-6500, ext. 303, or boxoffice@shotgunplayers.org.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.

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Wine leads to the release of some inner Big Scary Animals at the Masquers Playhouse. From left are Kim Saunders (Rhonda), Joseph Walters (Donald), David Zubiria (Clark), and Duane Lawrence (Marcus). Photo by Mike Padua.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

It’s easy to forget that human beings are critters — unless you’re seated in the Masquers Playhouse in Point Richmond watching Big, Scary Animals. Then you can’t ignore our baser behaviors and instincts.

If you have any sense of humor at all, you’re apt to spend much of the 90-minute comic drama by Matt Lyle laughing out loud at the dialogue and feral antics of four Homo sapiens, Until the playwright’s “truth bombs” abruptly smack you between the eyes.

The hidden biases and contradictions of each character either ooze or explode in unexpected ways at unexpected moments.

The plotline is simplistic and predictable: A middle-aged, straight white couple relocates to Dallas in 2015, “a simpler time,” to be closer to their granddaughter. But they’ve unintentionally bought into a “gayborhood.”.

Midway through, all hell breaks loose when a polite dinner conversation with their gay black and Latino next-door neighbors deep dive into sensitive subjects — race, sex, sanity, the N- and C- words, and gun control, among others. Director Gabriel A. Ross milks all the bathos possible while ensuring that no potential laugh-line is downplayed.

The entire ensemble cast is superlative, with Kim Saunders standing out as Rhonda, a naïve Christian “cracker” whose inner big, scary animal can be triggered by a single action and a single glass of wine, and David Zbiria as Clark, a flaming, hysterically funny, Latino homosexual whose common sense eventually erases his emotional spasms. Duane Lawrence inhabits the character of Marcus, a serious black college professor whose secrets are bursting to be revealed, paralleling the inner angst and problematic memories of Joseph Walters as Donald, whose wife repeatedly labels him as stupid.

Consoling Joseph Walters (Donald, center) are Kim Saunders (Rhonda) and Tristan Rodriguez (Ronnie). Photo by Mike Padua.

Two others — Natalie Ford as Sophia, a 20ish black “slut” who tries to use her psych-major tools at inappropriate times, and Tristan Rodriguez as Ronnie, the straight couple’s “troubled” son who’s gently being seduced by Sophia — do the most with under-developed roles.

The audience at a Sunday matinee rocked the small theater with laughter and expressed its consummate pleasure during a 30-minute Talk-Back session afterward. One theatergoer summed up the show this way: “It was heavy butreally funny.” Another said, “My eyes are still wet.”

The director, meanwhile, said he thought one takeaway from the provocative show should be, “There’s a good chance that you have something in common with the person you despise.”

Big, Scary Animals will run at the Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Sept. 28. Tickets: $30 to $35. Information: 510-232-3888 or info@masquers.org.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.

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Don (Howard Swain, center) reacts to livestream comments projected above in Eureka Day at the Marin Theatre while (from left) Suzanne (Lisa Anne Porter), Carina (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), Eli (Teddy Spencer), and Meiko (Charisse Loriaux) look on. Photo by David Allen.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

To call Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Thursday appearance before the Senate Finance Committee’s three-hour hearing contentious would be a monumental understatement.

Multiple Democrat and Republican senators charged him with making non-logical, false, and misleading claims about vaccines. The Secretary of Health and Human Services futilely struggled to pull answers out of his back pocket.

Humor: Absent.

Eureka Day, a play that also tackles the chasm between vax and not vax, uses satire to make you laugh louder and longer than you’ve ever done before in a theater during a single scene.

Laughter: Infectious.

Also contagious in the 105-minute play is a 15-student outbreak of mumps that ultimately triggers a debate about whether to mandate vaccinations at a private, progressive Berkeley elementary school where white privilege blankets the place.

A five-member executive committee keeps trying to reach a mandatory consensus when consensus is light years away.

The fast-paced comedy, which debuted in 2018 at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, is being partnered by that company at the Marin Theater in Mill Valley — despite the Aurora having to cancel its current East Bay season because of a money drain.

The Marin production’s being directed masterfully by Josh Costello, Aurora’s artistic director who also held the reins for the original version.

A caveat: The hilarious scene, featuring livestream comments projected on the rear wall of the set, is abruptly followed by an incredibly heavy change of pace (even though it’s sandwiched by many other moments that are less funny yet still quite amusing).

Each of the five main actors in the ensemble cast is phenomenal.

Howard Swain, who’s transcended so many roles in so many Bay Area venues that if you blink, you might find he’s already booked for 17 more, becomes Don, school executive committee leader with tangled white hair and white beard who desperately quashes potential squabbles. On occasion, he’ll read an indecipherable bit of prose or poetry to the others in a hopeful but valueless teaching moment.

Swain is in the minority, a performer who wasn’t plucked out of the original for this rendition. Ditto Leontyne Mbele-Mbong (Carina).

Eli (Teddy Spencer) embraces Meiko (Charisse Loriaux) amid emotional and intellectual turmoil. Photo by David Allen.

But the other three main characters — Charisse Loriaux (Meiko), Lisa Anne Porter (Suzanne), and Teddy Spencer (Eli) — are all vets of the original show. Clearly, the time between the first production and the revival hasn’t in the least diminished their mastery of their parts. Their range of emotions, their skill at showing feelings with a nuanced look or gesture, their ability to have learned about four zillion words from the script without blowing any, all that may have honed their chops.

One lady leaving the first row could be overheard to put it succinctly: “The cast is perfect!”

Another perfect fit is the jazz between scenes (unless, of course, you’re as anti-jazz as one character is anti-vax).

Eureka Day, which won the 2025 Tony for best revival for its Broadway run, has been performed in Austria, South Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The playwright, Jonathan Spector, a Berkeley boy, has made a few changes since his first effort. However, he’s kept everyone on stage skirting issues and being afraid of saying anything that another exec committee member might take offense at — and he’s inserted tons of swearing and characters interrupting and talking over each other like most real folks do.

That noisy writing strategy might resemble David Mamet’s style but Spector’s is funnier.

Eureka Day will run at the Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through Sept. 21. Tickets: $38 to $89 (plus $6 handling fee). Info: 415-388-5208 or www.marintheatre.org.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.

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L-R, Marsha von Broek, Mary Katherine Patterson and Helen Kim are funny in “Into the Breeches,” onstage at Masquers Playhouse in Point Richmond through Aug. 3. (Mike Padua via Bay City News)

By Woody Weingarten

Insert amateur thespians into a modernized World War II version of a Shakespeare play with an all-female cast and what do you get?

A possible hit for the play-within-a-play — and a barrelful of big laughs for the Masquers Playhouse audience in Point Richmond.

L-R, Katharine Otis and Dana Lewenthal appear in Masquers Playhouse’s production of the comedy “Into the Breeches,” onstage through Aug. 3 in Point Richmond. (Mark Decker via Bay City News)

Katharine Otis does far less schtick and thereby gets fewer guffaws as Maggie Dalton, but she ably leads the cast as the wife of the absentee director (he’s off to the front, as are most of the women’s mates). She’s sensitive but bold, brandishing a cerebral weapon for her personal, newly spawned battle to get women equal pay (and, in the process, rid herself of being labeled her husband’s parrot).

The individual jokes, not incidentally, take a back seat to a farcical scene about walking like a man that features codpieces.

There’s a smirk hidden in the “Into the Breeches” title: King Henry V’s battle cry was, according to Willie the Shakes, “Once more, into the breach.” Here, the play on words implies women climbing into men’s trousers.

Mostly upbeat, the charming play by George Brant (with many added references to East Bay locations that trigger wild applause and shouts of “yay”), also delves adroitly if superficially into issues of race, sexual discrimination, misogyny and family separation.

The full cast is skillful: Dana Lewenthal plays a narcissistic but forgiving diva Celeste Fielding, who opts to play Cinderella rather than having to inhabit a character her own age; Alana Wagner as Ida Green, a Black costume designer who aims to snap a racial barrier; Helen Kim as Grace Richards, a newcomer to town who’s terrified her husband wouldn’t approve of her acting; Mary Katherine Patterson as June Bennett, a bike-riding ingenue who wants to become a symbol of patriotism and war efforts; and Chris Harper as Winifred’s board president husband, Ellsworth, who prefers to block progress but folds under pressure.

L-R, Gregory Lynch and Alana Wagner appear in Masquers Playhouse’s fun production of “Into the Breeches.” (Mark Decker via Bay City News)

The Masquers production is a bit quirky. Some of the props on the spare set are covered in material (looks like sheets) that’s removed only when the particular item is needed.

Director Marilyn Langbehn manages to neatly balance its comedy and heart.

Theatergoers appreciated the perfection of the recorded WWII music playing between scenes and the two acts. After the play, one patron said, “I came with trepidation because I’m not a fan of Shakespeare, but I shouldn’t have worried because the short excerpts didn’t get in the way of my enjoying all the comedy.”

And a woman in the first row said she enjoyed the show because the actors were “real people” who acted like real people.

“Into the Breeches” runs through Aug. 3 at the Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $15 $35 at www.masquers.org. 

Contact Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and author of four books, at voodee@sbcglobal.net, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com.

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