the critics weigh in on our new theatre

We think our new theatre is fantastic, but don't take our word for it.  The whole Bay Area is abuzz with the news of the opening of our new theatre.   Here are reprinted some of the articles and reviews from local papers and magazines covering the new theatre.

Aurora Moves to New Home

by Jean Schiffman
Callboard, October 2001

If ever there were a Little Theatre That Could, it is Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. Founded by esteemed local actor/director Barbara Oliver and colleagues in 1992 at the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club, it attracts loyal patrons and the cream of the local talent crop.

The actor-driven company, which stages fine-tuned productions of classic and contemporary plays, outgrew its 67-seat campus-side venue so quickly that it was only a matter of time before new quarters were mandatory.

That time has come. Billing itself as the "ultimate intimate theatre experience," the Aurora's new, custom-designed space in downtown Berkeley ensures the company's trademark intimacy while expanding its artistic options.

"We can do plays with more actors!" exults Artistic Director Oliver. The new thrust stage, 15 feet by 30 feet, is five feet wider and eight feet deeper than the old one. "We'll be able to expand our education program," she adds, "bringing two or three classes to a performance instead of one. And we can start the Family Initiative Plan, which encourages older people to bring groups of younger people to the theatre."

Opening night is November 1 when Shaw's Saint Joan, starring Emily Ackerman and with Oliver directing, launches the new 2081 Addison Street space. The Aurora debuted with a very successful production of Candida by Shaw, so Oliver thought to open the new space with Saint Joan, a Shavian work of a very different kind.

Audiences will enter through a double glass door and walk down a passageway that was once a no-man's-land between a Berkeley Repertory Theatre storage area (now the Nevo Education Center) and the Kress Building. Arriving at the lobby, with its concession bar and ticket booth, patrons will actually be in what was most recently the back portion of Kaufman's Fabrics. A window on the north wall of the lobby now opens up the virtually landlocked space, as does some added skylights.

The house's layout is designed by renowned local theatre architect Gene Angell. Berkeley's Jim Novosel, who specializes in historical remodeling of old buildings, was the main architect for the space, which has an industrial look--cement and red steel. Like the City Club configuration, the stage allows all 150 patrons gratifyingly close to the playing area. Sixty dazzling stage lights (bolstered by $85,000 worth of equipment) is a major upgrade from the previous 12. Below the 26-foot-high ceiling is a catwalk; designers will no longer have to stand on ladders to hang lights.

Other technical improvements include a mezzanine storage area (with a single-person elevator); $90,000 worth of sound equipment (a sizeable portion of which was donated by Meyer Sound); a downstairs scene shop (but no loading dock); offices upstairs and down; and an additional storage area off the fire exit.

Actors, previously resigned to changing costumes in the hallway, will now have several small dressing rooms and a greenroom (also designed by Angell), plus a secret passageway at the back of the house for exits and entrances.

"Everything's going on at once here," remarked a preternaturally calm Novosel two months before opening. "When you're dealing with an old, old inner-city building, nothing's perfect." Whenever workers opened a wall, they were likely as not to uncover "things they didn't anticipate," he added. The inner part of the building was constructed between 1910 and 1953; the entryway belongs to a 1905 building (part of Berkeley Rep's property), which had to be seismically braced. And meeting city building codes was a contractor's nightmare.

The capital project will end up costing about $2 million, according to Producing Director Tom Ross. By late summer, the company had raised $1.2 million including $220,000 from the city of Berkeley and $100,000 from the Alafi Family Foundation. The company is selling 150 chairs to patrons at $2,500 apiece and hopes to double last year's subscription total of 1,600.

The Aurora, which has signed a 40-year lease on the space, operates under a Tier 3 Actors Equity Bay Area Theater contract on an annual budget of $7000,000. The company produces a five-show season, which this season includes, in addition to Saint Joan, Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek; Knock Knock by Jules Feiffer; The Entertainer by John Osbourne; and Benefactors by Michael Frayn.

"We're excited to be part of the great synergy of the Addison Street arts district," says Ross, noting the burgeoning of restaurants and arts venues on the block. For Aurora, not least of the perks will be popping next door to borrow the occasional prop from its very friendly neighbor, Berkeley Rep.

A reception and open house will be held October 15, 6 to 8 p.m. St. Joan previews begin October 26 with the opening on Nov. 1. Dedication of the stage to Barbara Oliver will take place later this year. For information, call (510) 843-4822.

Jean Schiffman is a regular Callboard contributor.

Aurora's new season set to open on time in new theater

by Chad Jones
Oakland Tribune, October 25, 2001

In the theater world, the idea of 150 seats doesn't sound like much. But for Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company, 150 seats present a whole new world.

Formed in 1992 by friends Barbara Oliver, Dorothy Bryant, Marge Glicksman, Richard Rossi and Ken Grantham, the Aurora has won a hard-earned reputation as the Bay Area's pre-eminent literary theater.

In a tiny 67-seat room in the Berkeley City Club, the Aurora spent nine seasons creating intimate, verbally charged evenings for small but almost always sold-out audiences.

When the Aurora's 10th anniversary season opens Thursday,Nov.1 with George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, the audience will still be small, but nearly twice its usual size.

The new season finds the Aurora in a brand-new 150-seat theater in downtown Berkeley. Situated in the back part of what was for years a fabric shop, the new Aurora Theatre occupies two floors and a basement for a total of 5,000 square feet.

Artistic director Oliver and producing director Tom Ross conduct a tour through the nearly finished space, gingerly avoiding carpet layers, electricians, painters and lingering construction workers just putting up the green main entrance doors on Addison Street.

Ross points out that the theater's 150 seats that surround the performance area on three sides are the same ones that fill Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. He also motions to the window of the stage manager's booth high above the stage and notes that this marks the first time in Aurora history that the stage manager will actually be able to watch the play. In the Berkeley City Club's cramped quarters, the stage manager was stuck in a corner behind a screen watching the action on a small video monitor.

Oliver, who is also directing "Saint Joan," points out a whimsical touch by architects Gene Angell and James Novosel. The steel girders that jut out of the walls on the periphery of the theater have had their edges sculpted into the masks of tragedy and comedy.

Nestled in the burgeoning downtown Berkeley arts district that has already welcomed Berkeley Repertory Theatre's new Roda Theatre and will soon feature Berkeley Rep's Nevo Education Center and the Berkeley Jazz School, the Aurora's move has not been without difficulty.

The original budget of $870,000 was quickly bumped up to $1.2 million, but then the building, which was zoned for retail and not for public assembly, was found to need considerable seismic retrofitting. When that added more than a million dollars to the budget, the landlord nearly pulled the plug on the entire project.

"The City of Berkeley helped us out a lot," Ross says. "We received a grant of $70,000 then another of $150,000 and then a loan of $350,000. The idea of a downtown arts district is great, but when it comes right down to it, the reality is that most of these old buildings need all kinds of work."

A capital campaign has done fairly well, with about half of the $2 million raised. But between the dot-com crash and the events of Sept. 11, fund raising has become increasingly difficult.

"I'm confident the money will come," Ross says, "but we're about a million short. Before Sept. 11 we were averaging about 12 new season subscriptions a day but now we're doing about one a day."

But the Aurora's subscription base is still strong at 2,000, and with the additional 83 seats, that number is expected to rise as the season progresses with "The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek" by Naomi Wallace, Jules Feiffer's "Knock Knock," John Osborne's "The Entertainer" (which Ross will direct) and Michael Frayn's "Benefactors."

"People tend to think that once a theater is open there's less financial need," Ross says. "I can assure you that is rarely the case."

Oliver had originally wanted to christen the new space with a world premiere play commissioned by the Aurora, but the work was not yet ready. She turned to Shaw, whose "Candida" opened the Aurora's first full season nearly 10 years ago.

"Saint Joan," which won the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature, is arguably Shaw's best play, Oliver says, and has special relevance in our newly re-configured world.

"At its core, the Joan of Arc story is about deeply held religious beliefs, about patriotism, about intellectual pragmatism," Oliver says. "It's also about the church and the secular world joining together to confront a maverick who seems unstoppable."

For Oliver, recent weeks have been a challenge in many ways. She's building a theater, raising funds and trying to create art.

Tempers have flared and technical difficulties - try rehearsing without electricity - have presented problems. But she says "Saint Joan" will begin previews tonight and open on schedule.

"Our sound designer Jim LeBrecht has been through this process before and he says that opening a play in a new theater is like having a 400-pound gorilla down there on the stage with you," Oliver says. "The gorilla is all the stuff that has to be broken in and all the things that can go wrong. In the middle of all this, I can tell you the image of a 400-pound gorilla is absolutely right."

Countdown to opening
Aurora Theatre will inaugurate new space with 'Saint Joan'

by Steven Winn
San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 2001

The seats still weren't in, wires spilled from the walls in alarming tangles and a plush layer of sawdust covered the technical booth floor. With public previews of "Saint Joan" just a few weeks off at the Aurora Theatre in downtown Berkeley, it was chaos as usual in the countdown to opening a new performance facility.

Barbara Oliver, the company's snowy-haired founder and artistic director, smiled serenely as she led a tour through the construction wreckage. Sidestepping some rubble, she happily noted the installation of lighting fixtures in a dressing room. At 74, Oliver projects the settled optimism of someone whose life in the theater, as an accomplished actor, director and artistic director, has ridden a tide of happy surprises.

Producing director Tom Ross, 47, pointed out a door where the actors might sneak out to smoke. "I've never been more nervous in my life," he said.

Ross was referring not to the smokers' exit, but rather the $900,000 still to be raised, in wary economic times, to cover the Aurora's $2.2 million construction bill. Project costs nearly doubled with an unanticipated seismic retrofit of the converted fabric store, adjacent to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the city's burgeoning arts district.

Even without the daunting financial concerns, Oliver and Ross would probably make a similar impression as opening night approaches. Aurora partners since 1992, when Ross joined the year-old company at the Berkeley City Club, the two perform a natural balancing act, her twinkling high spirits played off against his constitutional angst. The classic masks of Comedy and Tragedy carved into the exposed metal beam ends at the new theater might be seen as a touch of construction typecasting.

Not that Oliver would ever be viewed as some larky lightweight. The growth and flourishing of the Aurora, which she co-founded with playwright Dorothy Bryant, director Richard Rossi and actor Ken Grantham, is one of the singular success stories in Bay Area theater in the 1990s. This week's opening of George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan," in a meticulously conceived house seating 150 on three sides of the stage, is a testament to their vision of literate theater performed in an intimate setting.

"The focus," Oliver said, "was always on the language and ideas."

A decade of intelligently mounted Shaw, Pinter, Conor McPherson and other contemporary writers has richly fulfilled that aim. Ross, who began directing several years into his tenure, staged an especially eloquent account of Pinter's "The Homecoming" in 1999.

It all began with what Oliver assumed would be a one-shot production of Bryant's "Dear Master," a delectable play-in-letters about Gustave Flaubert (played by Grantham) and George Sand (Oliver). Gratified by a critical and box- office hit, Oliver went on to plan a first season and solicit subscribers. She was so cautious about it, she recalled with a laugh, that she kept all the checks in a drawer for months, intending to return them if she couldn't sell at least 50 percent of the seats in advance.

Filling seats was rarely a problem during the Aurora's years at the City Club. The charming but technically limited chamber space accommodated 67 patrons in two cramped rows.

Now, with more than twice the seating capacity in the new "plush industrial" theater, Oliver and Ross have worked hard to preserve the close audience-to-art connection. Even with four rows of seats and a stage 50 percent larger than the City Club floor, patrons and players will remain in tight proximity. Multiple entrances -- including one via a "secret passageway" -- will recall the City Club's lively traffic patterns. Lighting, sound, backstage facilities and public spaces are all dramatically improved.

The new season is studded with plays the company could never have attempted before, from the 19-character "Saint Joan" (performed by nine actors) to Jules Feiffer's farce "Knock Knock" and John Osborne's music-laced "The Entertainer. " But at heart, as Oliver and Ross stress, the new Aurora is meant to signal business as usual.

"I love the closeness to the audience," Oliver said. "I can see them laugh, and I can see them sleep. Those are both very important things for an actor to know."

New dawn for Aurora

by Karen D'Souza
Mercury News, November 1, 2001

When someone asked her recently how things are going at the Aurora Theatre Company these days, Barbara Oliver blushed.

Not because the company she founded 10 years ago on shoestrings and pluck hasn't earned a reputation as one of Berkeley's best.

Not because the theater's new space, a 150-seat house in the heart of downtown, isn't the height of urban chic.

The otherwise unflappable 74-year-old turned beet red because she had just broken one of the theater's brand-new doors. She'd been trying to get into the bathroom and the door snagged, so she yanked it -- right off its hinges.

"I thought, `Oh, dear, I broke the theater,' '' the white-haired dynamo confessed over lunch at a nearby bistro. "And we haven't even paid for it yet.''

Oliver will christen the new space tonight with "Saint Joan.'' The George Bernard Shaw masterpiece is a quintessential choice for this company, which has made its name as a theater steeped in language and ideas. At its old home in the Berkeley City Club, special effects and production values always were beside the point.

It was the text that took center stage, in a small house where the audience and the actors were only a few feet apart. Indeed, actors often had to trample over theatergoers' toes to make an entrance.

"Intimacy,'' Oliver says simply. "There's always been something very personal about seeing plays at the Aurora.''

Whether the Aurora will uphold this tradition in its new home remains to be seen. The new, 5,000-square-foot space is certainly eye-catching, marked by exposed brick and high ceilings. Aubergine and mauve are the operative hues. But it's twice as big as the old place.

Oliver assures, however, that "we've tried to keep the old feeling with the new theater. I think the audience will be pleased.''

Chaos was in the air last week as saws buzzed and technicians scrambled. There wasn't a minute to waste if the theater was going to be ready for opening night.

Seeing the $2.1 million dollar facility slowly coming into its own has been a nerve-racking experience for the staff. It certainly didn't help matters when the building, a former fabric store near the corner of Addison and Shattuck, had to undergo an unanticipated seismic retrofit and the renovation price tag doubled.

Still, "I tell you, I just went in there and saw the seats getting put in, and tears started to well in my eyes,'' producing director Tom Ross recalls, running around nailing down last-minute details.

The new space marks a turning point in the company's history, acknowledgment that the Aurora has become a major player on the Bay Area theater scene. To mark the occasion, Oliver has filled the new season with plays such as "Saint Joan'' that never would have fit into the old space.

The best thing about the new theater may be its location, in the heart of the city's burgeoning arts district. Berkeley Rep, with its two theaters, sits next door. The Shotgun Players will soon move in a few blocks away. There are chi-chi galleries and upscale cafes in every direction.

"It's very exciting,'' says actress Emily Ackerman, who plays the lead in "Saint Joan.'' "I think this move will definitely raise the company's profile. We'll get more exposure.''

Even Oliver can't quite believe it's really happening. After all, she only founded the company so she could cast herself in shows (roles often dry up when actresses start approaching her age). It all started with a small-budget production of Dorothy Bryant's "Dear Master,'' a play about George Sand's relationship with Gustave Flaubert. (That's why Oliver dubbed the theater Aurora, a nod to George Sand's real name).

"Sometimes I think just getting us here, to this place, has been such a remarkable experience,'' she says happily. "If I die tomorrow, I wouldn't care.'