Sparkletts Drama

1. Something's Afoot. It's too early to declare a winner, but 2004 could become one of local theater's best seasons in years. In the past two months, we've had a host of quality productions: comedy, drama, classics, cabarets. The bar's been raised.

One sign of theatrical health: extended runs. Lamb's added many performances for Hamlet, as did Cygnet Theatre with Fully Committed, and 6th @ Penn should have extended Kimberly Akimbo, one of its best shows ever, but overscheduling didn't permit it.

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, a bit less lightweight than meets the eye, could run quite some time in Old Town. Based on acting alone, Linda Libby, Shana Wride, and Bernard Baldan made the Rep's Women Who Steal worthy of greater audiences (an enterprising local producer would be wise to mount a Libby/Baldan comic vehicle, soon).

Another sign of health: we've had four Shakespeares since New Year's. In theater, January's usually the blandest month, breeding the soft and safe, if it breeds. Nowadays we're lucky to get two Shakespeares a year. Count the ways: Hamlet at Lamb's; Macbeth at Sledgehammer; Richard III at UCSD; and Henry IV, Part I, by Richard Baird's Poor Players (a young company -- led by a gifted actor -- to watch). Each production had flaws, but strengths too -- and four Shakespeares by March???

2. How They Did It: Guest director Daniel Fish staged Sarah Dart Ruhl's Eurydice at UCSD. The pace lagged in spots, the acting was a mite technical, but the production, overall, was unforgettable.

Melpomene Katakalos's sleek set included a rear wall, 25 feet wide by 16 feet tall. Flanked by black I-beams, it was composed of 504 Sparkletts water containers. With the bold simplicity of ancient Greek architecture, the wall looked, at various times, like a piece of sculpture, or precise rows of glistening nubble, or a tapestry of bubble wrap.

In the play, when Eurydice dies and "falls" into Hades, the wall explodes. The plastic containers cascade down, bounding across the floor, flopping in crazy piles. The effect was extraordinary -- from elegant order to sheer chaos -- something, in this day and age, film companies cartoon with computer graphics.

Katakalos's Hades became the reverse image of the world above. The containers made movement sluggish (Eurydice and Orpheus danced on earth; now she trudges below). Under Jason H. Thompson's evocative lighting, the bottles could be boulders, or blocks of shaved ice, or -- shoving metaphors aside -- mounds of Sparkletts jugs. These could be empty or full. If the latter, the water might be Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness.

"We worked from details to the big picture," says Katakalos (whose first name, Melpomene, is the Greek muse of tragedy). She, Fish, and Ruhl met last October during auditions. Having the author on the scene can be a boon or a bane. The most useful playwrights approach theater as a collaborative process. Sarah Dart Ruhl "was great," says Katakalos. "She didn't dictate, she reacted" and made valuable suggestions.

Rather than "impose a predetermined mold" onto Eurydice, the three began from scratch. As they read the script, they asked how individual moments felt. They noticed that Eurydice's always looking for water. Was it symbolic? "No," said Ruhl, "she's just thirsty."

"And that," says Katakalos, "sent us down the bottle path." At one point Eurydice goes looking for water in a public place. But where? How about a cooler? "Daniel's all about finding a moment, not creating it." He liked the idea and mentioned how Pina Bausch intensifies an object through multiple uses. What if, Katakalos mused, there were literally millions of bottles?

They also studied Eurydice's fall into Hades: how to make it visual -- and honor the script, which says the set doesn't add anything. The transformation, the fall, must come from what already exists onstage. They brainstormed possible contexts: bottles on the ceiling? A shelf? Nah. A wall...that crumbles! Great! But how many bottles? And where to get them? Ruhl liked the idea a lot but added, "How do you do it?"

Enter Brad Powers. The technical director of the La Jolla Playhouse and UCSD Theatre has been e-mailing his friends, "You'll never guess what I'm doing for this show." He and Katakalos experimented with mini-walls -- sticks and rows of AA batteries -- watching how they fell, intrigued by the physics of the challenge. Too many slid sideways. To make the effect work, they realized, the stage must tip forward, from back to front, at least a foot.

Powers devised a mechanism, a large trap that tilted the wall toward the audience. Now, where to find at least 1000 bottles? After many calls to distributors, Powers got an okay from the Sparkletts factory of Santa Ana. He backed a 24-foot Budget Rent-a-Truck up to their loading dock. The company loaned UCSD over a thousand -- "free!" exclaims Katakalos.

She originally wanted an 800- to 1000-container wall. But, as the first test showed, that was way too many. It wasn't just the erratic spillage (they tumbled everywhere, out into the audience). The stacking, like lining up endless strings of dominoes, took seven people over three hours. After many attempts, and arduous restacking, they found that 504 bottles actually behaved when tilted forward: "We had way more control than I thought," says Katakalos. Six people -- passing each container hand-to-hand, like sandbags for a flood -- could rebuild the wall in an hour and a half. They tested it 12 times.

The containers were a loan to UCSD. Each had an imperfection. During performances many cracked, some even shattered. But that was okay with the company. All the bottles have since gone back to Sparkletts -- to be recycled.


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