Tiny Alice Caps a Huge Season for MTC

For Marin Theatre Company Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, this week's debut of season-capper Tiny Alice represents over a decade’s worth of artistic ambition.

An infamously polarizing work of theater, Edward Albee’s gothic thriller premiered on Broadway in December 1964 to wildly divergent response, ranging from outrage to admiration. The New York Times called it “tightly constructed, elegantly written and (most surprisingly) defiantly funny," while a harsher critic deemed it a “homosexual nightmare.” Esteemed American theater critic, playwright and producer Robert Brustein called it a “hoax."

For his part, Minadakis describes Tiny Alice as “generations ahead of its time… It’s the type of play that has its own rules.”

It is also, clearly, a work that burrowed itself into Minadakis’ imagination quite some time ago. In an interview, he described the long road to tonight’s premiere.

“I’ve been working on doing a production of this show for 11 years,” he says. “I tried to do it in two other cities, but was never confident that I could get the right cast together. Finally, out here, I felt like we had the acting community and the audience to bring it to life.”

Certainly, Minadakis’ confidence in MTC’s ability to carry off such a challenging production has something to do with the critical and commercial success of the theater, which has flourished under his leadership over the past several years.

With a string of well-reviewed and well-attended productions under his belt, he says, “we’ve gotten to know our audiences well enough finally to say ‘Let’s do it,’” referring to this production of Tiny Alice.

But what is it about Albee’s play that makes it such a challenge?

To begin with, Minadakis explains, “it’s the size of a Shakespeare play but has only five actors. They really need to have imagination to carry this story, and that’s not easy to find.”

Indeed, two of the play’s five characters are known only as Lawyer and Butler, while the entire work is densely loaded with religious and spiritual symbolism. All five actors cast in the show are veterans of the MTC stage, and do a heroic job of bringing the play to life, according to Minadakis.

But entertainment has evolved in the decades since the play first premiered, so while the play's unconventional structure and metaphysical underpinnings may have been anathema to the conservative culture of mid-Sixties America, today’s audiences have been conditioned to accept and even enjoy ambiguity through genre-busting works like Lost, the X-Files, and the films of David Lynch or Oliver Stone.

“The play really requires audiences to have a broad mind," Minadakis says. "The more well-read they are, the more they’ll understand. In many ways, the Bay Area is the perfect place to tell this story."

If Minadakis appears comfortable with taking an artistic gamble or two, he has good reason to be: under his direction, the Marin Theatre Company’s profile continues to rise through a combination of successful productions, a knack for identifying new American talent, and an enthusiastic base of supporters.

The 2010-2011 season, in particular, has been chock full of highlights, beginning with the season-opening West Coast premiere of In the Red and Brown Water. That production – one third of the Brother/Sister trilogy by Tarell Alvin McCraney – was part of an innovative collaboration with A.C.T. and the Magic Theatre, an experience that Minadakis calls “amazing.”

He singles out an outdoor performance of the In the Red and Brown Water that MTC mounted in Marin City as one his most memorable of the season; McCraney himself flew out to California to see it.

The theatre’s eye for talent has also been validated in a major way this year: 9 Circles, the Bill Cain play that won the MTC’s 2010 Sky Cooper New Play prize and had its world premiere here in October of that year, recently was awarded the 2011 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, given annually to the best new American play produced by a regional theatre outside New York City.

On the organizational side, Minadakis shares that an MTC board member gave a large gift to support “artistic risk-taking and an operating reserve,” a gesture indicating a high degree of confidence both in his artistic and management skills.

“It’s thrilling to know that there are people here in Marin that care enough about the theater to do something like that,” he says of the gift.

Looking forward to 2011-2012, Minadakis hopes for a season as rich and complicated as the one that he’s about to complete, “We want everything we do to challenge people on multiple levels. You can’t define the season by the plays that we choose, but they’re all high-quality and thought-provoking.”

The 411: Tiny Alice continues previews tonight through Sunday and opens Tuesday, June 7. It runs through June 26. Click here to buy tickets or call 415.388.5208 for more information.