Ten esteemed writers take listeners on an aural adventure to meaningful places around Berkeley.
Berkeley Repertory Theatre announced today that all 10 episodes of the audio series Place/Settings: Berkeley are now available. Place/Settings: Berkeley premiered on January 12 with one episode released each week. Now listeners can enjoy the entire series all in one sitting. Each episode runs approximately 10-20 minutes.
Ten revered writers, each with deep ties to Berkeley, have all crafted a story around a place or a setting within the city of Berkeley that is significant to them. Celebrated New Yorker illustrator Tom Toro has created a physical fold out map that will be mailed to each ticket buyer. Place/Settings: Berkeley is free to 2021 Berkeley Rep 7-Play subscribers and $10 for others.
The Fundamental Kiss, With Overtones
By Eisa Davis
Set at the corner of Oxford and Center
A young oboist kisses a pianist on a street corner. At long last! But the kiss unlocks pressures, expectations, dreams, and fears. Can we learn to live with uncertainty? To ask for what we need?
night fishing
By Philip Kan Gotanda, read by Steven Anthony Jones and BD Wong
Set at an imaginary dried-up lake in Tilden Park
On a chilly autumn night, an old fisherman makes his way to the lake in the dark. He casts a line…and reels in the ghost he’s been seeking.
The Black Mass Sonata
By Daniel Handler, read by Lance Gardner
Set at The Musical Offering Café
Bored, lost, and lonely, a teenager stumbles into a café. While eating a cup of soup, he hears a wondrously inscrutable sonata, and begins to sense that being lost might not be such a lonesome condition after all.
West Berkeley West Indian
By Aya de León
Set at Franklin School
How do you find your people in middle school – especially when you don’t quite fit the mold? A girl experiments, assimilates, adapts, and journeys towards genuine self-love and community.
20 Weeks
By Adam Mansbach
Set at Alta Bates
Hope, fear, excitement, and a dizzying array of possibilities unspool across an expectant dad’s imagination, as he and his partner navigate medical uncertainties and rediscover each other as almost-parents.
Suicide on Telegraph
by Richard Montoya
Set at Robbie’s Coffee House and Diner on Telegraph Ave.
It’s 1959, and tobacco smoke snakes across the bustling café from its prized corner table, where artists and students debate political treatises, muse on philosophy, and share thrilling new poetry.
The Slide
by Itamar Moses
Set at the slide in Codornices Park
A neighborhood park – its playground, sloping hillside, and basketball court; its tunnel to a rose garden and many paths – bears witness to a boy, growing up and growing old.
The Third Sphere
by Kamala Parks read by Denmo Ibrahim
Set at North Berkeley BART
Straddling the worlds of her divorced parents, Yasmine doesn’t feel fully at home in either. Desperate to see her best friend in San Francisco, she embarks on the voyage across the Bay alone, exhilarated at her newfound independence.
The Character Actor
by Sarah Ruhl directed by Les Waters read by Charles Shaw Robinson
Set at Berkeley Repertory Theatre
From a perch beyond this life, an actor observes as a group of masked people finally return to the courtyard of Berkeley Rep – to the theatre, the place we made to gather, breathe together, and share the stories that remind us of our humanity.
For the Record
by Sean San José
Set at Leopold’s Records on Durant Ave.
Sometimes music becomes indelibly linked to specific memories, invoking the people with whom we shared them. Songs by Isaac Hayes, Peter Tosh, Stevie Wonder, the Doors, the Knight Brothers, and Patti LaBelle conjure a deep friendship, one that began on a hot night in 1986 outside Leopold’s Records.
Place/Settings: Berkeley is free to 2021 Berkeley Rep 7-Play subscribers and $10 for others. View more information and listen to Place/Settings: Berkeley here.