New Cal Shakes Board President Paul L. "Buddy" Warner

California Shakespeare Theater today announced the election of San Francisco attorney Paul “Buddy” L. Warner as President of the Board of Directors. Mr. Warner, who joined the board in 2010, replaces outgoing president David Goldsmith, who served five one-year terms.

“My goal is to build on the important work done by David and his predecessors which has assisted our professional staff in making Cal Shakes a nationally recognized theater company,” said Mr. Warner. “Cal Shakes will continue to present the highest quality performances of both Shakespeare and the classics. We will also continue and expand our Artistic Learning program which provides a valuable theater learning experience to many underserved communities in the Bay Area”

Mr. Warner is a partner with Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP, with a practice specializing in commercial litigation and trials. He is the author of numerous articles on civil procedure, class actions, arbitration, and legal ethics and tactics, and was named one of the Top Attorneys in Business Litigation by Super Lawyers 2004-2011. Mr. Warner lives in Berkeley, and also sits on the board of Tehiyah Day School. He and his wife Jodi are long-time Cal Shakes supporters who, according to Mr. Warner, “have not missed a production since Cal Shakes moved to Orinda in 1991.”

“I am so grateful for the steady and sure guidance that outgoing President David Goldsmith provided over the past few years — a period of national economic turbulence,” commented Managing Director Susie Falk. “Cal Shakes has emerged with a renovated home, and greater organizational and financial stability, We are now poised for our next chapter of growth, and I am thrilled that Buddy will be at the helm with his significant board experience, professional expertise, and irrepressible enthusiasm for the organization. I know our board is in excellent hands.”

The 2012 slate of officers and their cities of residence are as follows:

• President: Buddy Warner, partner with Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP (Berkeley)
• Vice-President: Kate Stechschulte, architect (Berkeley)
• Vice-President: Alan E. Schnur, Ph.D., founding partner of Schnur Consulting Group (Orinda)
• Vice-President (ex-officio): Jonathan Moscone, Artistic Director (Oakland)
• Vice-President (ex-officio): Susie Falk, Managing Director (Berkeley)
• Secretary: Jean Simpson, retired educator and civic worker (Piedmont)
• Treasurer: Jay Yamada, civic leader (San Lorenzo)
• Immediate Past President: David Goldsmith, business consultant/health care management, (Orinda)

Newly-elected members of the Cal Shakes’ Board include:

• Ellen Dale is a long-time civic leader whose passion for the arts was instrumental in the creation of Cal Shakes’ permanent home at the Bruns Amphitheater in 1991, and most recently in the 2010 capital campaign to renovate the site. A native San Franciscan, Ms. Dale graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Psychology. She and Joffa, her husband of 45 years, have lived in Orinda since 2000 in a home designed by their daughter. Prior to 2000, they lived in Moraga for 28 years where they raised their three children.

• Erin Jaeb is a commercial photographer with a background in fashion, beauty and architecture, and a current emphasis on fine art photography. She serves as artistic director for the marketing materials of her family-owned business, Emerald Packaging, Inc., one of the largest produce packaging suppliers in the United States. Ms. Jaeb, her husband, and their three children make their home in Oakland, CA. 
• Marshall Kido holds a B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University, has worked in the banking industry in California since 1977, first with Home Savings of America, followed by eight years as Area Sales Manager for Citibank. He currently serves as the Division Segment Manager at City National Bank in Walnut Creek.

Additional members of the Board are:

• Terry Bush, Director, Q Builders (Walnut Creek)
• Michael Cedars, M.D., Plastic Surgeon, Alta Bates-Summit Medical Center (Orinda)
• Phil Chernin, Certified Public Accountant (Lafayette)
• Joshua Cohen, Attorney, Wendel Rosen Black & Dean LLP (Walnut Creek)
• Ed Del Beccaro, Managing Director, Grub and Ellis (Danville)
• Joseph DiPrisco, Ph.D., author/educator (Berkeley)
• Sonetta Hanson, yoga instructor and clothing designer (Orinda)
• Tony Kallingal, Vice President/Region Manager, Mechanics Bank (San Ramon)
• David Lawrence, retired, Private Client Services Manager, City National Bank (San Ramon)
• Richard E. Norris, Partner, Archer Norris (Walnut Creek)
• James Roethe, Arbitrator/Mediator, J. Roethe ADR Services; former General Counsel of Bank of America, and partner Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman (Orinda)
• Michael Ross, Adjunct Professor, University of California and University of Virginia Schools of Law (Orinda)
• Michelle Runyon, Vice President, Wealth Advisor, Wells Fargo Private Bank (Orinda)
• John Ruskin, Vice President, Jones Lang LaSalle Americas, Inc. (Lafayette)
• Sharon Simpson, civic leader (Orinda)
• Frank Starn, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, U.S. Pharmaceutical, McKesson Corporation (Lafayette)

Photo of Philippa Kelly by Jay Yamada.

Our very own Resident Dramaturg Philippa Kelly will be the featured speaker at the Commonwealth Club of California—the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum—on Tuesday, March 13, in conversation with Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone. The talk is titled “Only Connect—Dramaturgy and Shakespeare’s Living Theater,” and will address The King and I, Dr. Kelly’s 2011 memoir of Australian life as seen through the lens of King Lear, and how theater can connect us to universal themes. ’Love, death, the human will to connect, the failure to do it—these big themes are at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays. How do we make such themes “live” on the stage today?  Kelly considers this question as dramaturg, author, and Australian.

The event will take place at 6pm at the San Francisco Club Office (595 Market St.). Tickets cost $7 for students, $8 for Cal Shakes patrons (using the coupon code “AskPhilippa”) and Commonwealth Club members, and $20 for the general public; they are available via the Commonwealth Club’s website. Check their online schedule for future broadcast times.

Bay Area sculptor and theater professional Michael Cook, a resident designer and production manager for eight years during the early days of our company—then called Berkeley Shakespeare Festival—is paying homage to the artists he calls the “unsung heroes” of theater. His sculpture exhibit, Berkeley Shakespeare Festival: Memories of the Early Years is a series of 40 busts of the directors, set designers, stage managers, sound and lighting technicians, costume designers, graphic artists, and stagehands who brought Shakespeare to the stage in those years in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park and then, as we became the California Shakespeare Festival, to our current home, the Bruns Amphitheater in the Orinda hills. Included in the collection are likenesses of such luminaries as inaugural Artistic Director Dakin Matthews; original Bruns architect Gene Angell; San Francisco Chronicle critic Rob Hurwitt; Jim Reber (who started San Jose Rep); actors Robert Sicular, Nancy Carlin, Howard Swain, James Carpenter, and Julian Lopez-Morillas; and many others.

The installation is on display through January 30 at Addison Street Windows Gallery (2018 Addison St, Berkeley, in the windows across the street from Berkeley Rep and Aurora Theatre), and can be viewed 24 hours a day from the sidewalk. The exhibit is sponsored by the Civic Arts Program of the City of Berkeley, in cooperation with the Civic Arts Commission. Cook now teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he is also the resident scenic and lighting designer for the Performing Arts department, the manager of the in-house theater, and much more. In 2006, Cook was honored with the Freeman Award from the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in Danville.

In the months leading up to our 2012 Main Stage season, we’ll be profiling the creative minds behind the season’s productions—The Tempest, Spunk, Blithe Spirit, and Hamlet—in our e-newsletters. For this season’s kick-off installment, we’re featuring actor and Oregon Shakespeare Festival favorite Michael Winters, making his Cal Shakes debut as the sorcerer Prospero in Jonathan Moscone’s season-opening production of The Tempest. What follows is the full transcript of Cal Shakes’ email interview with Mr. Winters. To sign up for our email newsletter, click here.

You’ve done your share of Shakespeare at OSF, Seattle Shakespeare, and elsewhere. What have been your favorite Shakespeare roles so far, and why?

Right now my favorite Shakespeare role I’ve gotten to do is the one I’m in the middle of doing now—Falstaff. I did Part 2 of Henry IV at Ashland last summer and am on my way to PlayMakers Rep in North Carolina to do the part in a compilation of Parts I and II. It’s such an exhilarating role, rich and various, especially if you get to do the second part. It seems the character was so popular that Shakespeare expanded on him a great deal in Part II, taking him all sorts of places that he didn’t have time and space for in Part I. He just gets more and more human—sweet, sour, boisterous, clever, vulnerable, dangerous, overwhelming, and unforgivable—as the plays go on. Huge challenge, huge satisfaction. As real and inimitable as a character in a play can get. I got to play King Lear several years ago, also an immense challenge but so much more stressful, dark, and despairing. Physically much harder, but again, unlike anything else you ever get to do in a character. I also had a ball playing Lucio in Measure for Measure many years ago. Such an unregenerate slime bucket but, again, alive as can be— and very funny.

Have you done The Tempest before? Can you share some early thoughts on your role as Prospero at Cal Shakes?

Yes, I played Prospero just two year ago here at the Seattle Shakespeare Company. I loved that as well and really look forward to another crack at it. The concept of that production was, for me, very compelling, and one of the reasons I’m so excited to do it at Cal Shakes is that I know Jonathan’s production will be completely different and provocative so it’ll be like starting from scratch, but I already sort of know the words. I guess Prospero is kind of a mini-Lear, emotionally at least: a total rage-aholic, still nursing, feeding a grudge against his brother over all the years he’s been on the island, letting that hatred and resentment corrupt his mind and the ways he deals with his, what—children? subjects?—Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel. The miracle of his cure, his healing, is very moving to me, courageous, humbling. Quite beautiful. And such terrific language.

In 2000 you were awarded the Fox Fellowship by TCG, to study in Britain and then hold a workshop on the language of Shakespeare. How has that experience affected your craft, and your life?

The Fox Fellowship, which I was so lucky to get, gave me an opportunity to study with David Hammond for two weeks at University of North Carolina, followed by two months in London where I worked with Mark Wing-Davey and Michael Langham for several weeks each, and went to the theater virtually every night. The whole experience was a dense and lively mix of study, discussion, activity, and theater-going that gave me a renewed energy for my work, and new ideas about how to approach it. Perhaps the most practical outcome of the whole process was that it led to the production of King Lear that I was in, directed by Mark and produced by PlayMakers Rep, where I had worked with David. My original project proposal was to learn more about speaking Shakespeare, but the heading was so general that it left lots of leeway for all kinds of learning in many areas. I’ve always been grateful for the kick start it gave me for the next phase of my working life.

What’s the first piece of theater you ever saw? Alternately (or in addition), what was the first piece you saw that really made you think, “I want to be a part of this”?

I remember seeing a production of HMS Pinafore that the local high school did when I was 8 or 9 that is probably the first theater experience I can recall. There was also a music-tent summer theater that produced road-show musicals in Cleveland; I saw a production of West Side Story there when I was in junior high school that I remember sent chills up my spine. It simply jangled my suburban world and made me aware of other places, other lives, other possibilities that I don’t think I have ever managed to shake. I don’t recall then thinking ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what I want to do with my life,’ but subconsciously it must have had that kind of effect. It’s odd that both those memories are about musicals, since that’s not the road I eventually ended up on. My first Shakespeare memory, in fact, is from the same junior high period, when we were bused into the Cleveland Playhouse to see Macbeth and all I remember of that was the buzz on the way home that we could see Lady M’s bra through her nightgown. Not very elevated. This was the time of my life though, when I had one of those extraordinary teachers who seem to shove you into a room where you meet the rest of your life. That’s probably my first real conscious step. She directed the school plays and was passionate, fun, supportive, eager, and serious. She’s really the one to blame….

What or who inspires you right now? Any particular writers, music, current events, people, et cetera?

I’m afraid I’m so old-school. Shakespeare still inspires me the most. Endless possibilities—endless. There are plays I think I’m just tired of and then I’ll see a production, or be in one, that amazes me all over again. I love watching they way actors and directors solve all the old questions, the moment-to-moment mysteries of the plays. Never get tired of that. Also crave any chance to do Chekhov, Shaw, and Tom Stoppard, any time; they all thrill and challenge me. Like I said: retro. I am also in love with movies, can’t get enough, they inspire and move and excite me. Almost any kind, old or new, foreign or domestic. They open my mind, make me consider things I might not otherwise. I try to keep up on politics and current affairs, but I’m afraid they tend to be the opposite of inspiring for me.

And finally, if you could have appeared any play in history, what (and/or where, and/or with whom directing or sharing the stage with you) would it be?

I’m nothing if not consistent … I want to see a Shakespeare in the Globe or Blackfriars. How briskly did they speak it? Did they really do them in two hours’ time? What did they sound like? What did they consider good acting? How would their perception of ‘real’ acting compare with ours? Did Burbage rant? Did Armin speak more than was written down? How did audiences really respond? Did they understand everything? How much did they participate and how did that affect the way the plays were performed? All that stuff.

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Amid the hurry and flurry of the holiday season just past, Bay Area media outlets were busy crowning the year’s best creative achievements. We’re proud to say that our productions made most critics’ top-ten lists for 2011.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, critic Robert Hurwitt named Jonathan Moscone‘s production of Candida, by George Bernard Shaw, among the year’s ten best, calling it “buoyantly nuanced, exquisitely designed, and unexpectedly suspenseful.” Hurwitt also gave this year’s Bay Area acting MVP nod to Rod Gnapp, who played Baptista in our The Taming of the Shrew this season. On his theater blog The Idiolect, independent critic Sam Hurwitt, a.k.a. Hurwitt the Younger, included Amanda Dehnert‘s brand-new play, The Verona Project, as one of his favorite 2011 productions, “entirely new and electric, with a touch of magical realism, witty dialogue, fiendishly clever storytelling devices, and some awfully catchy pop-rock songs”; one of his two MVPs was Verona‘s Julia, actress Arwen Anderson. Critic Chad Jones gave Shana Cooper‘s production of The Taming of the Shrew a prominent place on his Theater Dogs top ten, admitting that it was a tough call between that and our Candida but ultimately falling for how “leads Erica Sullivan and Slate Holmgren brought not only humor to this thorny comedy but also a depth of emotion I hadn’t ever experienced with this play.” And Cooper’s Shrew “packed a punch” according to KCBS‘ list of the Bay Area’s best arts and culture in 2011.

Accolades must also be given to Cal Shakes Artistic Director Moscone, whose production of Clybourne Park at A.C.T. made it onto every single list mentioned above!

Read the Chronicle‘s Top Ten list here.

Read The Idiolect‘s Top Ten list here.

Read the Theater Dogs Top Ten here.

Read KCBS’ Best Ofs here.