From the Artistic Director

WHAT A DELIGHT to welcome Culture Clash back to the Bay!

As I was programming this season, my first at this beautiful theatre, I wanted to make sure the work we are sharing together includes artists like Jocelyn Bioh, Suzan-Lori Parks, and The Avett Brothers, who are new to Berkeley Rep (and in the case of the Avetts, new to theatre entirely!). It was equally important to me to honor the deep relationships that Berkeley Rep has forged over the last 50 years with artists including Mark Wing-Davey, Michael Mayer, and Sarah Ruhl. Lisa Peterson is part of that grand extended family, but also someone with whom I have had the privilege of collaborating many times during my decades at New York Stage and Film. She was one of the people I reached out to as I was planning this first season, and she told me of the work Culture Clash was doing to update their seminal piece Culture Clash in AmeriCCa for these complicated times.

It’s no surprise, really, that we turn to our clowns to help us make sense of the world as it spins ever more rapidly in ways we struggle to understand. Sixteenth-century Italians had commedia dell’arte’s Arlecchino and Pantalone sending up their societal and political structures; Lear had his Fool to illuminate for him the absurdities of his behavior; and we have Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and Tina Fey to whom we turn for escape, information, and entertainment.

Culture Clash sits within that grand tradition of satirists whose work allows us to see ourselves, our community, our country in new ways. And while Richard and Ric and Herbert are lauded all over the country, they also are so specifically Californian, their work born from the histories and the people of the Central Valley, the East Bay, the Mission District. They have been making work all along this coast for decades, and I am proud to welcome them back to Berkeley Rep.

Buckle up!!

Warmly,

Johanna Pfaelzer