Brain Meets Brainin to Birth New TAC season

Last February 2, Rubicon Theatre Company closed out its first-ever partnership to launch the national winter tour by The Acting Company, the veteran New York ensemble co-founded in 1972 by John Houseman via the first dramatic graduating class of The Juilliard School. Exactly 10 months later, RTC and TAC – the latter of which served as a springboard for the careers of some 400 actors, including Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, Rainn Wilson, and Jeffrey Wright – once again join forces in Ventura at RTC. There they will polish up another pair of plays in repertory, this time collaborating on two new productions; a world premiere adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations by Nikki Massoud and directed by TAC’s Producing Artistic Director Devin Brain (December 2-21), and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by UCSB professor and LaunchPad Founder Risa Brainin (December 3-21). 

As before, starting in January the productions will then tour numerous other cities (currently 16), playing in rep with the same multi-talented nine-person cast.

“It was a very fruitful collaboration before,” Brain said during a break from tech rehearsal. “Rubicon is ideal in a partnership, as a theater where we can actually spend some time, which we cherish. The shows were really helped by their time in Ventura.” 

Putting Dream together with Expectations highlights similarities between the two works, even though the English classics were written nearly 300 years apart. 

“Both are coming-of-age stories at their core,” Brain said. “They’re about young people really struggling to find out who they are, what their place is in the larger society and community – on top of which is that they’re both love stories. People think of Dickens as Scrooge or dying orphans or chimney sweeps – various horrifying elements of Victorian era London. But the novel and our stage adaptation are both very funny and actually quite sweet. He rewrote the end of his novel after some negative feedback from his editors, which really makes it end in something long-lasting. That matches Dream, which is also a story about young love and how it is not always a smooth path.” 

What they also have in common, Brain said, is providing a challenge to the company players, who have already spent eight weeks in rehearsal prior to arriving at RTC, serving the mission that is hard-wired into the group’s name: The Acting Company. What makes that an even more difficult endeavor is that the same cast – nine actors this time around – perform in both productions, including many of them playing several roles in at least one of the plays. 

“These shows really lift up the virtuosity of the performer,” Brain said. “Some of these actors are carrying between four and six roles per show. With Great Expectations, which we commissioned, the playwright was excited by the idea of watching different characters live in the same bodies in a single night. Many of the doublings are very intentional.” 

The Miss Havisham role is played by the same actress who portrays Mrs. Joe, with all of the ramifications of the divergent characters. 

“You get to watch that actress embody both the highest levels of class and society and one of the lower levels,” Brain said. “Nikki was particularly interested in focusing on the trauma and transformation that connects a lot of these characters. You’re seeing the character transition over time, and seeing as well that all of these characters can exist within a single body. And she’s made it feel contemporary so that it’s recognizable to anyone that has ever engaged with the myth of the American dream… Those barrier lines between the class structures are as impermeable now as they were back then. You see how love (and ambition) can be toxic in all (their) different parts.” 

Lest anyone be leery of seeing either or both of the shows because of the Elizabethan and Victorian turns of language, Brain took pains to dissuade just concerns.

“These are very visceral retellings of these stories,” he said. “Sure, there’s beautiful language in them, but they are hilarious and heartfelt in a way that I think is going to be a great night out at the theater.”

This year’s RTC-TAC collaboration is part of Rubicon’s Winterfest, which boasts a number of ancillary events. Wilson is joined by RTC regulars Joe Spano and Sylvie Davidson for a December 7 benefit reading of a new work called Better Angels, written and directed by Dakin Matthews. Broadway veterans David Burnham and Jennifer Leigh Warren star in Rubicon Christmas Memories in a benefit concert with youth of RTC education programs on December 12, and a Tiny Tots concert takes place December 13.  

Visit www.rubicontheatre.org.