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Thunderbird Theatre's 'Aaah! Rosebud!' spoofs 'Citizen Kane'
Sam Hurwitt
Not every theater company gets a mayoral proclamation when it comes to town for a two-day run. For a small comedic troupe doing a "Citizen Kane" spoof involving zombies, Olympic curlers and an evil sled, it's probably safe to say it's unheard of. But to greet the Thunderbird Theatre Company when it moves its new play "Aaah! Rosebud!" from San Francisco to Berkeley, Mayor Tom Bates has declared Sept. 21 to be Thunderbird Theatre Day in his city.
It helps that the playwright, KFOG news director Peter Finch, knows people.
"I had met the chief of staff of the mayor of Berkeley, so I e-mailed him and said, 'We've got this theater company. It's the first time it's been in Berkeley. Do you want to do a mayoral proclamation?' " says Finch, who's making his playwriting debut.
Before it crosses the bay, however, the comedy premieres Aug. 23 at New Langton Arts, which has hosted the Thunderbird's past few fall shows: last year's Greek myth remix "Release the Kraken," 2005's Elvis superhero adventure "Las Vega-Nauts" and the 2004 pirate comedy "Lusty Booty."
The Thunderbird Theatre Company came together in 1998 when four friends from college and the Chico theater scene met at a Clement Street cafe, the Blue Danube, and decided to start a troupe dedicated to original comedic works.
"We moved to San Francisco, started running into each other on the street and said we've got to get together and do theater," says Bryce Allemann, who's married to fellow co-founder Kathy Hicks.
"Finally, Martin Chavira, one of the co-founders of the Thunderbird, said, 'That's it! We're not going to talk about it anymore. We're going to do it.' "
Their first show was the pulp-fiction parody "Collected Works of Frank Cullen," which ran at the now-defunct Jewel Theatre on Geary Street that August. They've been doing a show or two a year ever since, such as "Los 7 Magnificos," a "Magnificent Seven" takeoff pitting masked Mexican wrestlers against villainous Quakers, and "Rocket Girl," a musical melding "All About Eve" and "Flash Gordon."
Finch's first experience with the Thunderbird was as an actor in "Lusty Booty," written by core company member Jason Harding, who plays Kane in "Aaah! Rosebud!" It was when they were both in the next year's "Las Vega-Nauts" (co-written by Harding) that the idea came up for Finch, known for his "Fog Files" radio segments, to try his hand at playwriting.
"I'd give Jason a ride home after the show and we'd talk theater," Finch says. "One time he said, 'You should try writing a show,' and that planted the seed."
People tend to complain about spoilers, not just for the latest Harry Potter book or the episode of "Lost" they've got on TiVo but haven't watched yet, but even ancient Greek tragedies they've had millennia to catch up on. So if you've somehow managed to remain uninformed about who on earth Rosebud is in the 1941 Orson Welles classic, you might want to skip ahead a few paragraphs.
Charles Schulz blew the big surprise for a lot of kids in a 1973 Peanuts comic strip in which Linus is watching "Citizen Kane" and Lucy says, "Rosebud was his sled." Any reader who hadn't seen the movie yet yelled along with Linus, "AAUGH!" Others may have been tipped off by a line in the Julie Brown song "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun."
As indicated by the tagline for "Aaah! Rosebud!" - "Behind every great man there is an evil sled" - the Thunderbird isn't too worried about spoiling the surprise at this point.
"The premise of the movie is that this reporter spends the whole movie on this quest to find out what this mogul's dying words meant," Finch says. "I thought, wouldn't it be funny if the first guy he went to said, 'Oh, it was his sled! Everybody knew that. He wouldn't shut up about it; he'd go on and on.' Then I just kind of took it from there, worked in zombies and the great sport of curling."
By then, Finch had a pretty good sense of the group's whimsical sense of humor, and he'd written the piece with the Thunderbird style and frequent cast members firmly in mind.
"I think one of the best things about it was that it had a lot of the elements that just keep coming up in Thunderbird shows," Allemann says. "There's the breakout musical number for no apparent reason in the middle of the show."
"And the bad disguises that manage to convince the other characters," Harding adds. "We've had apes dress up as nurses."
Finch also appears in the show in a number of roles, though the group points out that he had to audition like everyone else. Every now and then, the actor a part was written for will wind up losing it to someone who just nails it in auditions.
Director Dylan Russell is a newcomer to the Thunderbird, though she's directed for a number of other local companies, so she pored over DVDs of past performances to get a sense of the Thunderbird style and how the company members work in the small, black-box space at New Langton.
"The plays work on so many different levels, within whatever genre they're spoofing," Russell says. "They have so many deeper jokes operating on so many levels of cultural literacy. 'Release the Kraken' had all these in-jokes to 'Clash of the Titans' and 'Star Wars' and 'Clerks.' I met with the sound designer this weekend to talk about music for certain scenes, and she put in this joke that only musicians will get. It has to do with how she's writing the end of the song."
"It's like loading a comedy shotgun," says Harding, who's been with the company since its third show. "Some people get the jokes and others don't, but it's OK because you're reloading and you're going to shoot them again. My favorite laugh is the one person out of a 13-show run who laughs at one joke, and that's the only person to ever laugh at it because you wrote that joke specifically for that one guy."
Of course, the hope is that the majority of jokes will hit home in what promises to be the "Citizen Kane" of evil-sled-zombie plays.
"If the audience laughs half as hard as we're laughing," Finch says, "we're going to be in good shape." {sbox}
Aaah! Rosebud! Runs Aug. 23-Sept. 8 at New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom St., San Francisco. It then plays Sept. 21-22 at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., Berkeley. $20-$25. (415) 289-6766, www.thunderbirdtheatre.com .
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