Drama

This coming weekend sees three shows hit the floorboards, with another in the wings. From Cloverdale to Windsor, and back to Healdsburg.

Fair warning that this is the sort of play to which audience members will want to bring tissues. It is not a fluffy play by any means, forcing its audience to listen carefully and think deeply about difficult topics.

The Raven Players’ offerings begin as soon as Thursday, July 31, with the performance of one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, "Two Gentlemen of Verona," at the newest Raven venue, Bacchus Landing. While it’s technically not part of the Raven Players’ season, it fits the playbill nonetheless.

The arts did not beckon when Ron Nash was a young man—far from it. “I was in trouble mentally in high school. I was angry, angry, angry,” he said. He even got kicked out of school, but his athletic ability—he was a hurdlers champion in track—earned him a scholarship to college.

Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is a play with deep Bay Area roots. Originally commissioned by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre and first performed in 2018, it won the 2019 San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Original Script and Theatre Bay Area’s Will Glickman Award for best new play to premiere in the Bay Area. It's now at Healdsburg's Raven Theater, until Sept. 21.

:Every Sunday matinee we do a post-show discussion with the audience, so they get a chance to make comments and ask questions of the actors. We saw there were a lot of people who were quite moved and quite touched by the play. So the opening weekend could not have gone better, as far as I’m concerned," said director Steven David Martin.

'Two Gentlemen of Verona' is one of Shakespeare’s earlier works. I’ve always thought it was one of the Bard’s easier plays to follow, written before he got all “Shakespeare-y.” It’s the tale of besties Valentine and Proteus whose friendship is tested by, of course, a woman.

Even those who haven’t read the book or watched the movie probably know the plot: Francesca Johnson (Katie Watts-Whitaker) is a disillusioned Italian war bride now stuck in an Iowa farmhouse with a stereotypical American farmer (Matthew T. Witthaus) as a husband. Her husband and the kids have gone to the fair, leaving Francesca alone for four days... Entanglements ensue.

Andrew Lloyd Webber bought the stage rights to the 2003 Richard Linklater/Mike White film starring Jack Black and joined with playwright Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey!) and lyricist Glen Slater (The Little Mermaid) to bring the tale of Dewey Finn’s transformation of a group of prep school students into rock stars to Broadway as a musical. It's now at the Raven Theater in Healdsburg.

It’s that time of year when critics look back and attempt to encapsulate an entire year’s worth of productions into one easy-to-read list of the “best of” the year. Why? Because ...