Arts Listings

Robert Ernst, cofounder of ’70s-’80s Berkeley experimental performance cooperative The Blake Street Hawkeyes and writer, director, teacher, musician and actor, has a new play, Catherine’s Care, onstage for two more weeks in San Rafael. 

Ernst’s play—in which he performs as a musician in a three-man band backing the constant action onstage—is the story of an older country woman from the Border States and her confinement, against her will, in a care facility, spun out in her dreams, her squabbles with the head nurse, her private anguish and considerable humor. It’s told in the latest edition of Ernst’s celebrated performance style, as directed with choreographic precision and imagination by Jon Tracy and performed by a talented four-player ensemble. 

“It’s a little like combining film acting with stage,” said Ernst. “When the audience is this close, everybody can see the smallest expressions.” 

Ernst became a big part of the local cultural scene in the ‘70s, after he arrived with playwright John O’Keefe from Iowa, where both had been involved with the famed Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and where Ernst cofounded a performance group inspired by Polish Theatre Lab’s Jerzy Grotowski’s ideas. 

Ernst and O’Keefe worked with The Magic during its Berkeley days, and when founder John Lion parted company with the troupe, “he kept the warehouse that had been the scene shop for storage, and let us live and work there. Our wonderful, eccentric landlord never figured it out! [Clown] Dave Shine joined us from Iowa. [Mime and author] Leonard Pitt, another Grotowski connection, was just up the street. It was our whole world—I seldom had to travel much, just from cafe to cafe, and often just on Shattuck.” 

From 1975 until the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, Ernst was resident in Blake Street, mainly doing solo performances and teaching workshops. He kept the warehouse into the 1990s, “but the earthquake did us in; the advanced legacy of Reaganomics didn’t help either.” 

Then “love brought me to Marin,” where he now resides, “and I was driving all the time back to the East Bay, the city, down the Peninsula, wherever I was working,” wearing his different hats as playwright, teacher, and, increasingly, actor in demand with professional companies like ACT and touring shows. 

Jeanette Harrison of Alter (short for Alternative) Theater called him up two and a half years ago, but Ernst was committed to projects and couldn’t perform with the brand-new troupe. “I told Jeanette about the play, then a solo piece for an actress with band, and she shepherded it through a long—and continuing—development, including staged readings at a rocking chair store and Z Space in the city. And got us grants. It’s from the experience of having my own mother in a care facility. Catherine isn’t my mother, but a lot of the situations are the same.” 

Ernst teaches as guest artist at Marin’s Tamalpais High and in SF’s Mission High for the California Young Playwrights Project through the Magic. “It took me 20 years to realize the Bay Area isn’t a theater town, but a place where artists meet. I don’t know what it is, the mountain, the latitude ... Catherine’s Care’s a bit dark—the essence of life is a kind of tragedy—so the audience is unsure when to laugh. But the other night we had a bunch of college kids in to watch, and they had no problem knowing when to laugh.” 

CATHERINE’S CARE 

7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 18. $20 (pay what you will Thursday, Feb. 8). 1557 Fourth St., San Rafael (Central San Rafael exit).www.altertheater.org (415) 454-2787. Free parking.