Greek Play in Berkeley

Rae invited me to this free Greek play happening in Berkeley last week. Since my Saturday schedule was open, I decided to go. I haven’t been to a play like this in a long time, if ever. The only memories I have of watching anything remotely similar were when I was living and studying in Paris, France. That quarter, I took a class on French theatre, a class which required us to go to a number of plays running in and around Paris. One fond memory I had was taking an SNCF train to the burbs of Paris with Supriya and a couple of other students to see a play. On the way back, I didn’t have the money to pay for the train ticket, so I hid at the bottom of the seats to avoid the dreaded, “controlleurs de billets!” Those guys are like fierce hounds if you don’t have a ticket! They aren’t quite like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade — No ticket! — but they are pretty close! Luckily, they never appeared on our train and I was spared!

The play was held at John Hinkel Park in North Berkeley. At the park, there was a nice, wooded amphitheater where the production was held. In a way, it reminded me of Frost Amphitheater at Stanford, albeit smaller and cozier.

The Shotgun Players were the troupe who were showing off their latest production, Iphigenia in Aulis, a story about choices or, as they write, “the twists and turns of our life’s path are forged by the choices we make at every little juncture of our day.” This play was a tragedy by our good friend Euripedes and was written during the Peloponnesian Wars. I’m not about to become a theater critic (yet), so I’ll let more accomplished reviewers help you out with the plot and criticism:

More reviews of the play are available from the Shotgun Players web site.

The night’s performance began with a short vaudevillian prelude sequence, where the characters hammed up the events leading up to the main action. Throughout the night, it was interesting to observe the actors’ facial expressions, some of which were hidden, but not completely, through masks. Although we were seated pretty far from the front of the action, we were still able to see their expressions fairly clearly. Fortunately, I also had my D30 with me, along with Eric’s 70-200mm f/2.8L lens, which made for some absolutely beautiful shots. I was very pleased with the results of this set up, which I shot primarily at ISO 800 wide-open at f/2.8. Everything was taken handheld or braced on my knees and body. The shade from the trees prevented harsh shadows from intruding too much on the scenes and provide a consistent exposure reading throughout the evening. I did wish I could have been a little closer during certain scenes, but I was happy sitting where I was for the most part and can’t complain.

There were certainly a lot of people at the event, filling the amphitheater up quite nicely. Everyone was seated on blankets or thermarest pads, with wine, cheese, and other munchies to snack on during the play. I had went with Rae and her friends Susan and Bart. Steven Wang was supposed to come too, but he never showed up. Bart ran into a couple of his friends at the show as well. He definitely could double as a local Berkeley history scholar! On the way back, he was pointing out the stories behind all these buildings in and around the town. It was definitely neat to hear the backstory to the places we’d walk by on a daily basis… if we were Berkeley students, that is!

The play was very fun and engrossing. It was a little difficult to understand what was happening at the beginning, but it became much more comprehensible as time went by. Before too long, I knew exactly what was happening and even had those Greek names down pat! Well… almost down pat! Iphigenia in Aulis has been running for about a month and runs until August 12. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It’s free too!

Following the play, we dropped off Bart before going to a Japanese restaurant to meet Rae and Susan’s friend, John Wang, along with his friend, Steve, for dinner. John was a California boy all the way who recently moved to the East Coast for life and work. Given that he worked at a company designing SatComm devices, I asked him about today’s feasibility of having a personal SatComm device to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the world. He told me that this is probably not going to happen anytime soon, unless you have a lot of money on your hands or can carry a lot of equipment. So… I guess I’ll be doing dial-up, Internet cafes, or snail mailing my updates on any ’round the world trip that I undertake in the future! For the rest of the evening we talked about the normal things that all twenty-somethings seem to talk about: relationships, weddings, people from college, work, fun, and life.

Click the link below to see all the photos from the Iphigenia in Aulis and the rest of the evening’s events.