Noah Johnson is Renegade Theatre’s latest test subject.
By Michael J. Vaughn
Entering their sixth season, you might expect the theatricos at Renegade Theatre Experiment (RTE) to consider a name change. But despite the longevity and consistency, the name still fits, says artistic director Sean Murphy, in some very important ways.
“We’re still not that far off the fringe,” he says. “We want to do work that excites us – edgy works. A lot of people are risk-averse; they want to see something that they’re already familiar with, comfortable with. Seeing something completely unknown is a risk, but you could discover something wonderful.”
The latest discovery-in-waiting is Noah Johnson, a 1992 play by Jon Bastian that takes on war profiteering in the Civil War. Its title character works for an undertaker, who cleans up the battlefields of that messy conflict (for both sides) and doesn’t seem averse to spreading about body parts so he can inflate the numbers.
In these days of Halliburton and the secrecy surrounding returning military coffins, says Murphy, Bastian’s work “seems very appropriate.” The play will be directed by Jenn BeVard, a Stanford grad who will depart in the fall to pursue an MFA in Chicago.
It was another college – Santa Clara University – that gave birth to RTE in 2001, when a group of seven SCU theatre grads (including Murphy) became concerned that they might not end up actually using their degrees, and decided to create a forum of their own.
“It was a Mickey Rooneyish thing to do,” says Murphy, who supports his own theatre life with a high-tech day job at Sunnyvale’s Juniper Networks. He notes that most of the people who work on RTE productions are in the same boat – and that one recent show even had a physicist on board.
Noah Johnson is actually the first production of the company’s ’07-’08 season, which had to adopt its unusual July-February calendar from the beginning when it made use of Bellarmine Preparatory’s school theatre. They have since moved to San Jose’s Historic Hoover Theater – which gives a similar priority to school-centered productions – so they chose to keep the calendar the same.
RTE discovered Noah Johnson through one of its previous playwrights, Thomas Jacobsen, but had to wait a few years, says Murphy, until it gained the technical capabilities to put it on. The larger scale of its productions, he says, along with a growing audience base, indicate that the company, though still an Experiment, has certainly been a successful one. Ticket Info: Renegade Theatre Experiment, Noah Johnson, Jul. 13-28, Historic Hoover Theater, 1635 Park Ave., San Jose, $10-$20, (408) 351-4440http://www.renegadetheatre.com/.
*This Article appeared in Volume 7, Issue 07 of The Wave Magazine.
