In the opening scene of Central Works longtime playwright Patricia Milton\u2019s latest light comedy, \u201cAfter Happy,\u201d oil company owner Brenda (Jan Zvaifler in a silky kimono and bedroom slippers) is pacing fretfully because the company-sponsored community event, the upcoming pirate festival, has suddenly lost its pirate queen. A replacement must be found.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Hurricane Happy recently wreaked havoc. Back then, Brenda\u2019s climate-change-activist niece, Katherine (an intense and perfectly tuned Lauren Dunagan), left town.<\/p>\n
Now she\u2019s back, in debt to her flighty and wealthy auntie for $26,000, and needing something from her, but we\u2019re not sure exactly what it is until the end of the 70-minute play.<\/p>\n
We do know that she wants Brenda to turn the family company in a green direction, as she says.<\/p>\n
Brenda\u2019s husband is off presumably saving a forest in Liberia while actually scamming its inhabitants. He has over time managed to destroy the oil company\u2019s reputation. But Brenda is in denial, will only admit that the rep is \u201csomewhat tarnished\u201d \u2014 after all, her company isn\u2019t a big, important one, just \u201clittle baby oil,\u201d so there\u2019s nothing to worry about, she argues, in terms of public and legal threats.<\/p>\n
In any case, Brenda, fixated on replacing her pirate queen, seems impervious to any real issues facing the company, not to mention the bigger, central issue: climate change.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s up to Katherine and the fierce friend she\u2019s brought along, Steph (an oddly low-key and low-energy Rezan Asfaw), to make things right.<\/p>\n
Milton eventually ties up all the loose ends neatly, but along the way, there\u2019s a surplus of anxious chatter and not as much wit as in some of Milton\u2019s previous comedies.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s delightful about Milton\u2019s works in general is that she writes most if not all the characters for women, and many for older women at that.<\/p>\n
Central Works, entirely dedicated to new works (this one\u2019s number 79), knows how to stage a play in one room of the charming Berkeley City Club: by decorating a single wall with thematically appropriate knick-knacks and artwork and placing only a few key pieces of furniture in the miniscule three-quarters-in-the-round playing area.<\/p>\n
And longtime company director and lighting designer Gary Graves knows how to block the actors with just the right amount of movement and with careful attention to audience sightlines.<\/p>\n
Still, \u201cAfter Happy\u201d is overly talky and underly physically active, and the humor doesn\u2019t match the heights of Milton\u2019s \u201cEscape from the Asylum\u201d in 2022 and \u201cAccused!\u201d in 2024.<\/p>\n
Standing by for world premiere number 80 \u2026<\/p>\n
Central Works\u2019 \u201cAfter Happy\u201d continues through March 29 at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $35 to $45 at\u202fcentralworks.org.<\/a><\/p>\n The post Review: \u2018After Happy\u2019 brews a climate storm, then gets swept up in a hurricane of dialogue<\/a> appeared first on Local News Matters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the opening scene of Central Works longtime playwright Patricia Milton\u2019s latest light comedy, \u201cAfter Happy,\u201d oil company…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-202881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}