SF Bay Area playwright updates Dickens classic for Trump era

PUBLISHED: May 9, 2019 at 9:29 a.m. | UPDATED: May 10, 2019 at 11:40 a.m.

Burlingame playwright Geetha Reddy’s new theatrical take on “A Tale of Two Cities” has been a long and tangled saga in itself.

A co-production of Berkeley theater companies Shotgun Players and TheatreFIRST getting its premiere at the Live Oak Theater, “Far, Far Better Things” started as a retelling of the Charles Dickens novel through the lens of its main female characters: Lucie Manette, the angelic object of everyone’s affections, and fierce and merciless revolutionary Madame Defarge.

“I was really wrestling with Dickens and Dickens’ language,” Reddy recalls. “Dickens was writing it at the time that he had this teenage girl hidden away and was also having a very messy public split from his wife. So there’s a lot of his own animus and idealization towards women in that book in particular, although he’s amazing on so many other issues of justice and characterization.

“I really wanted to find a way for those two women characters to come together and to see if that was even possible for people who are divided across both their two cities, their socio-economic divide and their ideas about what justice meant.”

Over time Reddy’s story shifted entirely from the original setting amid the French revolution to modern-day America, its characters no longer straight out of Dickens but more explorations of the original archetypes.

“The play looks at the tensions between two single working mothers, one of whom works for the other one as a nanny,” she says. “They’re both women of color, and they kind of have a shared tragedy. And the play looks at a lot of issues of violence and economic justice, and how women can or cannot cope with those.”

There are many reasons why the earlier concept of the play morphed into something entirely different.

“I started writing it before the 2016 election,” Reddy says. “Like a lot of people, I thought Clinton was going to win, and I was really thinking we’re going to be entering a new era of feminism. And then after the election I was like, I’m not going to write a play about a bad revolutionary woman feminist. I’m just not going to do that. For a long time I really wanted to write the play using only the words in the book. I think it would work for a different play, but for this idea—particularly because the women are so flatly written—there was no way to do it without writing in the parts that are missing. And Shotgun Players kept saying, ‘We would really like to see more Geetha and less Dickens.’”

That’s not the only classic Reddy’s adapting this year. In November she unveils a new one-actor adaptation of the ancient Indian epic “The Mahabharata” for Oakland’s Ubuntu Theater Project and actor J Jha.

“I had been writing back and forth with J Jha,” Reddy recalls. “He brought it up to me, and I was like, ‘I just do not want to do another adaptation. And then I started having ideas for it, and I was like, ‘Damn it! I have to do it!’”

Jha is at the center of that project in more ways than one.

“‘The Mahabharata’ was always narrated, so the idea of having who is actually doing the speaking being central, and really bringing it into the present in a way, makes it feel more present and alive,” Reddy says.

Both projects may be adaptations, but any resemblance ends there.

“‘Far, Far Better Things’ is very naturalistic. It’s literally a living room play,” Reddy says. “And ‘Mahabharata’ is much more magical and a different writing style altogether. I understand the theatrical desire to do an adaptation, because I think it does draw its own audience in a lot of ways. But for me as a writer, I have to make it into something new for it to make sense.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.