stage matters / By William Kowinski

The Fest Begins!

Hollywood comes to Blue Lake, Korbel goes to pot

(June 19, 2008)  This year’s Mad River Festival starts this Saturday with an appearance by Hollywood’s Tim Robbins and several other members of his L.A.-based theatre group, The Actors’ Gang, who are coming to receive the international Prize of Hope. Denmark’s Institute of Popular Theatre has been giving this award since 1987 mostly to European ensembles, but in 2005 it was presented to Dell’Arte. This year the Denmark organization asked Dell’Arte to select another U.S. winner and present the award here.

Dell’Arte chose The Actors’ Gang for its “powerful combination of contemporary immediacy, public engagement and great theatrical craft.” Plans are for the award to alternate annually between Denmark and Blue Lake.

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Most of us know Tim Robbins as an actor in such popular films as The Shawshank Redemption and Bull Durham, but he’s also directed two of the more intriguing political films to come out of Hollywood in the ‘90s or since: the all-too-prophetic Bob Roberts (1992) and Cradle Will Rock (1999), the latter about a forgotten moment in 1930s America when musical theatre and social awareness came together and were quickly forced to go their separate ways.

Robbins and friends started The Actors’ Gang in 1981, and have adapted, created and performed some 70 plays since, including their current production based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Let’s hope they enjoy their visit enough to bring a production up here.

The event Saturday begins at 6 p.m. with a catered dinner and a speech by Tim Robbins in the Carlo Theatre. Seats are limited and admission is pricey ($75 to $150, since it partly a fundraiser). But beginning at 8:30 p.m. the event moves out back to the amphitheatre where The Joyce Hough Band will perform and the award will actually be presented. Admission to the outdoor component is $15. The whole event will also be streamed on the Internet. [Ed. note: Go to northcoastjournal.com - streaming starts at 7:30 p.m.]

Then, the following week, the Festival begins with its theatrical centerpiece — Korbel IV: The Accident, the latest installment of Dell’Arte’s local soap opera, on the amphitheatre stage. The saga of the Dugan family in the mythical (but strangely similar to Blue Lake) North Coast town of Korbel began in 1994. So before describing the new play, here’s a primer on the story so far, based on Michael Fields’ recollections:

Korbel I: The Funeral was centered on the funeral of the Dugan clan’s matriarch, Dorothy, who in financial despair had committed suicide. Flashbacks revealed the truth about her son Terry, a transsexual Lesbian. Her other son, Tommy, was a logger “who was missing many of his body parts due to logging accidents, and was incapable of doing certain things,” though evidently that didn’t include fathering a child, because…

In Korbel II: The Wedding, Tommy had to get married in order to keep his child, but elsewhere the Southern Korbel Unorganized Militia (SKUM) was planning a disruption. Meanwhile there was a fight at the wedding, and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms invaded (“We had people rappelling off the roof at Dell’Arte”). “Where’s Tommy Dugan?” the ATF demanded, and in a response that Fields says was stolen from the Spanish Baroque playwright Lope de Vega, but which most of us remember from Spartacus, several members of the cast — beginning with a 7-year-old boy — proclaimed: “I’m Tommy Dugan! I’m from Korbel!” Then, Fields recalls, members of the audience spontaneously repeated it themselves: “I’m Tommy Dugan! I’m from Korbel!”

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