Mark Jackson

Inspired by sources as diverse as Euripides, John Dryden, Roxane Gay, and Chelsea Fagan, JENNY JENNY GO GO GO follows Jenny on a wild night on the eve of her arranged marriage to Alexander, itself a ruse by her father, August, to get her and her mother, Clarice, to Aulis, where Jenny is actually meant to be sacrificed to gain fair winds for a war on Troy. There’s a dance club with a scar-faced Fury, a man who lives in the sand on a beach awaiting his drowned mother’s transformation into a sea creature, a talking deer with an arrow lodged in its jaw, and an awakening for Iphigenia after 2500 years of
privilege and obedience. And no, she will not die in the end.

Some doubling is possible in casting.

Joie makes bank in the tech industry. Her husband, Freddie, wants to write a great novel about human responsibility. His sister, Andi, hopes one day to teach Freddie’s novel in her high school English class. On a weekend getaway to the new home Joie and Freddie have built in the mountains north of San Francisco, their handicapped son, Erik, is lured into the river by the Rat Wife and drowns. Freddie and Andi find out they’re not actually brother and sister. Andi’s hopeful suitor, Bernie, is as surprised as anybody when everything turns upside down, including San Francisco itself. Freely adapted from the basic scenario of Ibsen’s "Little Eyolf," this new play grapples with the unsolvable mysterious forces that bind marriage, family, class, nature, and technology to our deepest hopes and wishes.

This play was written with generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and English Theatre Berlin.

PRESS:

“A savage and free-wheeling adaption… It’s the best play the Aurora Theatre Company has produced in some time. Ibsen was a master at giving his supposedly respectable audiences a taste of their own trash, and Jackson has the same nasty impulse here to skewer the bourgeoisie on the corpses of their children… Jackson forces us to take account of how we mis-perceive the world. The symbolic elements of Little Erik aren’t there as an aesthetic, but rather as a strategy to a more forceful realism and accounting of the world.” – KQED.ORG

“A sound of river currents crash in the background as a woman looks chillingly beyond the audience... It is the stillness of moments like these that are filled with a dramatic musical hum that gives the entire play a memorable hypnotic power… The story and the excellent acting captivated the audience for the entire show. The issues that the play deals with are timely and reasons alone to watch the play.” – THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN

“Unsettling yet absorbing… Jackson brings forth the central issues of Ibsen’s original with keen psychological insight. Marriage and mortality, ambition and narcissism, incest, parenthood and social responsibility swirl through this heady, intensely focused production… LITTLE ERIK is concerned with cold truths, and Jackson keeps them coming, right up to the play’s seismic coda.” – SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

“LITTLE ERIK tackles a slew of weighty themes, from guilt to technological dependence. And Jackson uses his vast experience as a playwright and director to plumb each with the tenacity that has earned him a reputation as one of the Bay Area's most intelligent auteurs… The most inventive strength of Jackson's LITTLE ERIK lies not in its commentary about anger or betrayal, of which there is plenty. Rather, it's in the production's ability to convincingly characterize a Bay Area fueled by a dependency on technology.” – EAST BAY EXPRESS

“Taut and at times brutally frank… It plays out in a mix of realism, mysticism and caricature, and of dramatic tension and social satire that varies from engrossing to confounding. …A richly nuanced and uncomfortable study in class prejudice and injustice… Jackson has raised the bar in terms of Freddie and Andi’s mutual attraction, to riveting effect.” – SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Jackson, always a theatrical adventurer, from THE DEATH OF MEYERHOLD to NOW FOR NOW, smacks all the cobwebs out of Ibsen's text with a vividly contemporary take on the fractured family drama… Jackson's adaptation astutely sharpens the edge of the play… There is no denying that you walk away from the theater wrestling with the issues that shape all of our lives.” – SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

In 1895, Maud Durrant moved from San Francisco to Berlin, Germany, to study music. Shortly after, her brother killed two girls in the belfry of a church. Their mother told Maud to stay in Europe and change her name, lest the scandal ruin her career. Now going by Maud Allan, she became a major celebrity in Great Britain as a dancer and society personality. In 1918, in the weariest depths of WWI, she was accused by a British MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, of being a lesbian, sadist, and German sympathizer as evidenced by her having played the title role in a private production of Oscar Wilde’s "Salome." Against the advice of friends in high places, Maud sued Billing for libel. He then used the case as a platform to promote a conspiracy theory involving a secret German book listing the names of 47,000 traitors to England, all held under the thumb of homosexual German agents. While soldiers continued to fight and die in the mud of France, people back home read the latest on the salacious events of the trial. Salomania uses this true story to ask how people deal with anxiety in times of incredible change. How can a society allow itself to be both hysterical and “civilized” at the same time, and expect to function either well, morally, or respectably?

Recipient of the 2011 Edgarton Foundation New American Plays Award

Published in THREE PLAYS, Exit Press, 2012. Available on Amazon.

PRESS:

“Salomania, written and directed by Mark Jackson, is a spectacular play in all senses of the word. Reeling between the trenches of World War I and an uproarious courtroom drama as funny as it is disturbing, it spins out a staggering constellation of questions relating theater and war, art and politics, beauty and brutality. In each character's personal tragedy, it offers something in the way of answer… Fantastically entertaining throughout and studded with scenes of profound relevance and philosophical weight, Salomania is a brilliant play as substantial as it is well composed.” – SFApeal.com

“Maud Allan has long deserved a play of her own, and she gets a brilliant one in Mark Jackson’s Salomania. Directed by the playwright in its world premiere by Aurora Theatre Company, it’s an incisive courtroom drama… An intriguing biography of an exceptional woman, and an instructive look at an era not unlike our own… Deftly staged… The trial scenes are riveting, but some of the finest moments in Salomania happen outside the courtroom. An encounter between a bitter soldier and a war widow is haunting... Salomania is sensational.” – San Francisco Examiner

“Mark Jackson has shown his genius again in Salomania at Aurora Theater Company… His ability to stage epic drama in Aurora’s contained theatre space, and to keep our attention rapt during long periods of immobile conversation, is worth the price of admission… Jackson’s depiction of soldiers in the trenches is realistic and wrenching… The staging is inventive and extraordinary.” – Berkeley Daily Planet

Lulu has brought home a fellow named Jack. She’s never met him before. But she senses he’s not the average customer. He asks only to talk with her, and that she share with him stories about her life. They are soon joined by Martha, a romantic artist obsessed with Lulu. Together, the three of them play a very odd getting-to-know-you game, enacting scenes from Lulu’s life. In the end, their true motives come out, and each must answer: What kind of love do you believe in? What does it cost? Who pays? This adaptation of "Lulu" turns the original inside out, using the famous scene between Lulu and Jack the Ripper as a framework to reimagine Frank Wedekind’s extraordinarily insightful and theatrical play about women, men, economics, love, desire and death.

This play was written with generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and English Theatre Berlin.

In the attic of an old apartment building, in a lesser neighborhood of a large American city, Mrs. John makes a fateful deal with the unlucky Paulina Piperkarcka. For a small sum of money, Paulina’s baby will be Mrs. John’s, whose husband has always wanted a child. Meanwhile, another plot is developing between the former theatrical director, Harold Hassenreuther, and the young idealist, Erika Spitta, who now wishes to be an actor. As they debate what sort of person deserves to appear in tragedies on stage, the tragedy of Mrs. John, her husband, her brutish brother with the perpetual nosebleed, and the wayward Paulina, continues to play itself out in the rooms and stairwells of the crumbling old building. This American adaptation of Gerhardt Hauptmann’s 1911 “city tragicomedy,” about the pressure of economic conditions on people’s good sense, is only the second version of the play in English.

This play was written with generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and English Theatre Berlin.

This adaptation of Mary Stuart streamlines Schiller’s original text, rendering it the taught political thriller it always was but with a contemporary momentum. Schiller’s drama of two powerful women caught within the machinations of a largely male political system remains a timely, potent and surprisingly personal warning about the abuses of justice in the face of national anxieties over security, terrorism and the potential for war. What do we do when our system of justice, our sense of morality, and our personal desires don’t meet eye to eye?

Published in THREE PLAYS, Exit Press, 2012. Available on Amazon.

PRESS:

“Director Mark Jackson's radical adaptation is as stark, direct and unornamented as the corporate walls of Nina Ball's set, and as cruel as a conspirator's smile. Jackson has stripped more than an hour, maybe a dozen characters and a lot of romanticism from Schiller's overstuffed text… The essence of the broader stakes remains, with sharper currency, in the riveting verbal duels, plots and jockeying for power… A shocking splatter of gore, the startling appearance of a mirror, a stately transformation of Ball's set – Jackson uses everything, along with surveillance videos and Jacob Petrie's slyly shifting lights, to enhance the focus on the queens… It's a thoroughly gripping modern political thriller.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Characters enter, they talk, someone leaves. That's it. The few times (you can count them on one hand) they actually touch each other are so shocking it's electric. But the electricity is real: The dialogue, semi-adapted for modern times, shines — and the actors carry a charge… The compelling character conflicts and parallels with our own time make the dramatic tension, in a story whose outcome we already know, nothing short of intense.” – SF Weekly

“A claustrophobic immorality play, a paranoid thriller… Jackson sets the play in the present, but his production feels unsettlingly atemporal… Mary Stuart is a chilling piece… Mark Jackson's stark vision looks and feels Orwellian. It works for 1568, 1800 or 2010 but on the Ashby Stage, it feels frighteningly intimate.” – The Daily Californian

Named "Best Production of 2009" in the East Bay Express annual reader's poll, this adaptation of Goethe’s "Faust, Der Tragödie Erster Teil" focuses the action on the triangle between Faust, Mephistopheles, and Gretchen. In language that makes Jazz between classical and contemporary elements, and drawing on Goethe’s own eclectic theatrical sensibility that ranges freely between the classical, modern, post-modern, pop, comic, tragic, absurdist, and surreal, FAUST Pt1 highlights the original’s underlying theme of responsibility. The play evolves from existential comedy to passionate tragedy, ending on the blasted heath of a question that leaves it to the audience to write part two. How deeply are we willing to look into our personal actions and how they impact the world outside of ourselves?

Published in TEN PLAYS, Exit Press, 2010. Available on Amazon.

PRESS:

“This Shotgun Players world premiere showcases Jackson's breathtaking range of gifts. One of the Bay Area's most consistently inventive stage auteurs, Jackson is often hailed for his highly stylized fusion of expressionist techniques with balletic movement as well as his boundless sense of ambition. Here he co-directs, writes and stars… It’s a two-hour theatrical adventure that's as intellectually rigorous as it is bold and hot-blooded... Jackson is riveting.” – San Jose Mercury News

“An exhilarating experience… This is a funny Faust, but an intellectually stimulating, startlingly bloody and emotionally gripping one as well… Jackson pulls us in with his rigorously stylized focus, using exaggerated gestures and pauses to layer Goethe's satire on philosophy, politics and religion with the comedy of Faust's intellectual arrogance… Stark, funny, sobering and provocative, this is a Faust for our times.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Tightly written and beautifully constructed… There are moments of stark beauty and incomparable emotion… Huge praise must go to Jackson… His performance as Faust is breathtaking… He shows a tremendous range in his character development, eliciting both revulsion and empathy throughout... Jackson's adaptation leaves many of the story's conclusions to the audience. And that may be what works best of all in this story – it plays across the mind for quite awhile after the final blackout.” – Contra Costa Times

Sam, an unemployed man living in present day big city USA, has always wanted to be either a genius or an actor, but can’t seem to make it at either pursuit. When through a series of misunderstandings Sam’s wife believes he is contemplating suicide, a variety of entertainment, social, and political groups descend upon him in the hopes that he will take his life in the name of their causes. Sam’s opportunistic neighbor, Albert, takes over as Sam’s agent and barters for the best deal, turning Sam’s suicide into a major, multi-media, money-making event. In the end Sam chooses life over a lucrative death. But his decision comes too late – the national and global consequences of his strange and swift rise to fame have already taken their shocking toll. Freely adapted from "The Suicide," Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 Soviet-era satire, this new adaptation turns a spotlight on contemporary American values and the hypocrisy at work in a modern national character that values celebrity over sense, spectacle over substance, and money before compassion.

Published in TEN PLAYS, Exit Press, 2010. Available on Amazon.

PRESS:

“A truly transcendent comedy… But writer/director Mark Jackson has more up his sleeve than easy yuks… America’s obsession with fame and fortune spins absurdly, riotously out of control. Along the way, Jackson pokes fun at every American archetype… Altogether, this show is a delight.” – San Francisco Examiner

“Fast, funny and densely satiric, it's also strikingly designed, brilliantly performed, and directed by the author with the sharp, eclectic inventiveness that marked his stagings of Oscar Wilde's Salome at Aurora, his own extended The Forest War for Shotgun and his breakthrough The Death of Meyerhold in 2003.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“American $uicide strongly affirms Jackson's position as one of our most ambitious playwrights and directors. The play is at once a savage diatribe against the debilitating impact on the individual of this country's throwaway, media-saturated, dumbed-down culture, while at the same time an exercise in careening physical farce…. Jackson succeeds in making us feel like the characters in his play: giddy and hyperventilating and high.” – SF Weekly

GOD'S PLOT relays a little known episode in America’s history: the 1665 performance of Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe, the first known play to be produced in the future USA. After performing their play in a Virginia Colony tavern, the artists were taken to court for blasphemy. The ensuing scandal involved art, politics, religion, land fraud, false identity, entrepreneurialism, and the spirit of independence. Add to this a young Puritan woman, Tryal Pore, whose forward thinking and unholy music complicates matters further. With humor, music, and theatricality, GOD'S PLOT tells a striking story of the origins of our national character.

Published in THREE PLAYS, Exit Press, 2012. Available on Amazon.

PRESS:

“GOD'S PLOT is a complex yet seemingly effortless hybrid. Nods to Shakespeare, pokes at theatrical process (and vanity) comfortably mingle with critiques of Puritan society and allusions to today's moral conundrums. It's a largely comic evening of serious ideas… This crisply staged Plot is an adventuresome delight.” – Variety

“Each of Jackson's ten characters, played by a compelling cast, is complex, full of foibles and desires… It's a bold and effective choice by Jackson to frame the play through the perspective of Tryal Pore, precisely the kind of person history tends to leave out. When she calls out her parents for pretending to be religious in public, or castigates her lover for failing to treat her in accordance with his lofty ideals, she does so with all the righteous force of an underdog giving history's fat cats their long-due comeuppance.” – SF Weekly

“This provocative piece grapples with a tangle of issues, from the love of spectacle that dominates both theater and religion and narcissism of the artist to the price paid for heroism in a cowardly time. But perhaps the most potent theme is the long and storied history of protest in this country… The palpable sense of patriotism generated in the play's closing moments leaves a lump in your throat.” – San Jose Mercury News

An Author is interrogated by a childhood friend, whose work and name the Author ran off with in the post-WW2 chaos of Germany. After fifty years of living in the margins, the old friend finally kidnaps the now famous Author to exact his revenge by particularly theatrical means. What begins as a puzzling interrogation with questions of death and childhood quickly evolves into a debate between conflicting values of political awareness and personal desire, before then turning a sharp corner when the interrogator unleashes a play performed by three children dramatizing the Author’s “true” origins. Neither a biography of Heiner Müller nor an attempt to represent his work, Who Is Heiner Müller Or the End of History (ab)uses the famous East German writer with a psycho-mystery-thriller-comedy about death, identity, amnesia, cynicism, world politics, and revenge.

This play was written with generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and English Theatre Berlin.