Bluebeard In the Wings: Local Troupe Pushes Boundaries in Original Play

Open is not what anyone would call a “well-made play,” the sort of rigorously structured, character-driven construction popularized by Ibsen and Shaw that makes play-going so gratifying to most play-goers.

Based, so loosely as to be unrecognizable, on the unlovely legend of Bluebeard, who murdered and eviscerated wife after wife, Open features a homeless woman with a shopping cart, a spoiled princess, a king in diapers who wails for his baby bottle, several “horses” (sculpted horse heads, actually, romping across stage), and a lineup of prostitutes in a Wild West brothel – only the prostitutes are cute puppy dogs trained to roll over and beg.

“We push expectations about what you see in theater,” says Amy Sass, who wrote and directed the performance for Ragged Wing Ensemble. “We don’t do drawing-room comedies. If we did a drawing-room comedy, people would be rolling on top of each other, or the walls would break down.”

Open, a theatrical event that, by its very nature, will enchant some people and infuriate others, exemplifies what the eight-year-old theater company is all about – plays growing out of myths and folktales developed collaboratively by directors, cast and crew, and filled with movement, dance and acrobatics, and strong visual compositions.

“We use large visual elements, puppets, masks, rigging,” says Anna Shneiderman, one of three company directors, along with Sass and Sass’s husband, Keith Davis. “Pageantry you could call it.”

“We say we’re visually stimulating and physically adventurous,” Sass says.

runs through June 11.

The troupe, which performs at Central Stage, an out-of-the-way space on Central Avenue in Richmond just past the El Cerrito city line, has close ties to El Cerrito because Sass and Davis, who are married, live in town, and because both are part of the drama department at , a private elementary and middle school in El Cerrito.

In fact, according to the school’s head, Katherine Dinh, “They pretty much are the drama department.”

“She really built the program,” Dinh says of Sass, who came to the school eight years ago, joined by Davis shortly afterwards.

At Prospect Sierra, Dinh says, the arts are part of the core curriculum. “Every student takes drama and music and visual arts,” she says. In 2007 the school built its own arts building, the Founders Center for the Arts.

Sass and Davis put on two major productions a year, ranging from a rock opera “Romeo and Juliet” to sagas such as “Beowulf” and “The Odyssey.”

The results, Dinh says, are “extremely mind-blowing, extraordinary productions. You wouldn’t believe they were middle school students.”

Dinh, who catches all of Ragged Wing’s professional productions, understands that her theater teachers are more avant-garde than most middle school departments, which often stick to Broadway classics. But Prospect Sierra can handle it, she says. “Though they definitely do tune it down for our audience.”

Across town, at Central Stage, Ragged Wing is tuning it up. “Open” is their largest production to date, featuring a crew of 20, including 10 onstage plus two musicians.

The show began with Sass’s “seed of an idea” about Bluebeard, and was fleshed out by the ensemble in November. “We took the different themes from that seed and riffed on it,” Sass says. Members of the ensemble wrote personal stories based on the theme, and held workshops. Sass used the results to produce the final script.

The performance, Shneiderman says, is about “women who are mass murdered and decapitated by a man. What does it mean to be dismembered in our contemporary 2011 life? Money takes people apart, sexism, power, oppression.”

Past productions have been equally edgy, though originally they were often based on Shakespeare plays or avant-garde scripts devised in the 1960s and early 1970s by such cutting edge troupes as Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre, Sass says.

“Plays that came out of that generation have always been interesting to me,” she says. The group was also influenced by the rural Vermont troupe Bread and Puppet Theater. Shneiderman worked there, and Sass went there on a “pilgrimage,” she says.

Past Ragged Wing productions have included Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the Open Theatre’s The Serpent by Jean Claude van Itallie, and Persephone’s Roots, an original script performed last summer at Codornices Park in Berkeley. The troupe hopes to mount an annual summer production there.

Ragged Wing came together a decade ago when Sass and Davis, who were already a couple, met Shneiderman, who lived in Chicago, at a theater camp for teens in Berkeley. They clicked.

After a performance, Shneiderman recalls, they would think, “Wow, this is the best work we’ve done all year. Why are we just doing this for the kids? We should do it professionally.”

Shneiderman had as little interest as her new partners in traditional theater. “Myself, I’ve always been a theater person, but I’ve never really liked plays,” she says. “I’m not that interested in realism. The point of doing theater for me is creating magic onstage.”

Shneiderman does her magic act in Oakland as well as on the Central Stage, running the theater program at a charter school at Envision Academy as well as the Ragged Wing Youth Ensemble. The Youth Ensemble brings together students from several schools in the East Bay to develop and perform their own productions. The ensemble’s second show, In Between, featuring six short works, opens May 24.

All this is pretty ambitious for a company that runs on a budget of about $30,000 a year. But even more is in store.

Although its three directors, Sass, Davis and Shneiderman, have been with the company from the start, the players and crew have changed. Now, Ragged Wing hopes to create “a set company of artists who will stay,” Sass says.

They also hope to focus on creating their own works collaboratively with that company, “finding different ways to develop a community. It may take a couple of years before we say, ‘This is our process,’ ” Sass says. “It’s very exciting.”

They hope to grow the company to the point where it’s large enough to apply for grants. And, Shneiderman says, much as they love their unadorned space on Central Avenue, Ragged Wing would like to find its own space.

“It’s a tough place to sell out,” Sass says of the current location, which is hidden in a small complex of industrial buildings.

Ragged Wing has high hopes. Sass envisions having “a wonderful theatrical space” with classrooms and a gallery, “an arena in which the community can come and participate in a high level of theater and art.”

“That’s a big dream,” she says.

But consider the troupe’s name. “Ragged Wing” comes from the myth of Icarus, the lad who flew so high on wings of feathers and wax that the sun melted the wax and he plummeted.

“Your wings may be ragged,” Shneiderman explains, “but give it a try. Our tagline is, ‘Don’t look down.’ ”

Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly reported that Ragged Wing Ensemble staged a show called Persephone's Bees at Live Oak Park last summer. The production's title was Persephone's Roots, and it was performed in Codornices Park. The article has been corrected.