Gibson In the Park

I remember being in a production of William Gibson’s play, Dinny and the Witches, in John Hinkel Park in Berkeley in 1965. Our director was Aida Brenneis, the mother of my classmate Lisa. Their family lived near mine on top of Grizzly Peak. The story I heard was that our families became friends when my father, a plastic surgeon, was called on to rebuild their son’s face after a messy bike accident. At the time, I had never met a person named Aida. Her mother, also named Aida, was a descendant of Giuseppe Verdi, the composer of the opera Aida.

Aida was a trained thespian and a skilled director of children, so she undertook that summer to keep her daughter and friends busy and out of mischief with this play. It included a few songs, but wasn’t really a musical. I was cast as one of the witches, Ulga. She is described as “very ugly but also very vain,” “the death witch [who] hates humans. She is very efficient.” In our production, the witch actresses were supposed to double as “devil-made, whorish, beautiful young women.” I refused to play this role, and it was handed off to someone else. I don’t remember my reasoning at the time, but suspect it included disbelief that I could pass for beautiful, unwillingness to pay a whorish person, and my as yet unrecognized butchness.

The stage was an amphitheater in the wilds of Berkeley. As active young people, we stayed warm enough to avoid frostbite. Aida gave us very effective training in projecting our voices to be heard in the last rows. The father of a cast member was a composer, and he composed music for our handful of songs.

I remember none of my lines in the play, and only one line that was directed to me: “Ulga, don’t be vulga.” I do remember some snatches of the songs, and one performance in which my prop pistol was not in the cauldron where it was supposed to be, so I had to use a pretend gun. I blamed myself and the prop master for that bobble, but the show went on.

I remember performing the next year in a Garfield Junior High School production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I was Feste, the jester, so I got to sing a few songs. We performed in modern dress, and I accompanied myself on a borrowed autoharp. I became good friends with my classmates who played Maria and Malvolio, since we had so much dialog together to rehearse and memorize.

I remember a few years ago when an all-women performance of Twelfth Night by the Cal Shakes came to San Francisco. Hearing the old lines warmed my heart, and I might have sung along with their Feste, except that they used different music. Having learned and played the part made me feel connected to the play.