KPFA - Bay Area Theater

This encore podcast with Jeannie Sakata was first posted on July 16, 2018.

Playwright and actress Jeanne Sakata in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Jeanne Sakata is the author of the play “Hold These Truths” which played at TheatreWorks Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, July 11 – August 5, 2018, and is now available streaming through November 3, 2020. For more information on how to watch, go to the TheatreWorks website.

Jeanne Sakata is an actress who has appeared on several TV shows and films, and on stage at both ACT and Berkeley Rep.

Hold These Truths is the true true story following Gordon Hirabayashi, a Japanese-American student who fought internment to a relocation camp during World War II. This Northern California premiere celebrates the human spirit as it chronicles Hirabayashi’s journey from college in Seattle all the way to the Supreme Court, and eventually to a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Directed by Lisa Rothe, with Joel de la Fuente starring as Hirabayashi,

Hold These Truths made its world premiere in 2007 at East West Players in Los Angeles. In 2012, the solo play made its Off Broadway premiere at Epic Theatre Company starring Joel de la Fuente, and received a 2013 Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance. Since its world premiere, it has gone on to play throughout the nation including theatres in Boston, Honolulu, Washington, D.C., Portland, and many others.

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Kathleen Turner, star of “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” discusses her work in this 2014 interview with host Richard Wolinsky.

Kathleen Turner first broke into Hollywood legend big time with her first film role, that of the ultimate noir blonde in the 1981 film Body Heat. She followed that up with several other successful roles, including Romancing the Stone, Prizzi’s Honor, The War of the Roses, the voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and more recently as a frequent guest on such TV series as The Kaminsky Method, and Mom.

Starting in 2012, she began portraying the great Molly Ivins in a stage play, “”Red Hot Patriot: The Kick Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. Kathleen Turner was interviewed in the office of artistic director Tony Taccone when her one-woman show hit Berkeley Rep in the late winter of 2014 to 2015. This interview aired on KPFA on November 24, 2014 and has not aired since.

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Delroy Lindo, noted actor and theatre director, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded November 2008.

Delroy Lindo is a giant of American theatre, film and television. After two early film roles, he debuted on Broadway in Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys in 1982 and earned a Tony nomination for his role as Harold Loomis in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, directed by August Wilson.

He has carved an impressive career in film, appearing in such movies as Get Shorty and Cider House Rules and in television, where he is currently a regular on The Good Fight. He has appeared in four films directed by Spike Lee, Crooklyn, Malcolm X, Clockers and the new Netflix film, Da 5 Bloods.

In the fall of 2008, he directed a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Berkeley Rep, and in this interview he discusses his direction of the play, his career and his affinity for the work of August Wilson. The interview originally aired on KPFA on November 14, 2008.

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This podcast originally posted on May 31, 2020. At the time, Laurel Ollstein’s play “Pandora” was scheduled to stream in early June, but was postponed due to the power of the Black Lives Matter movement. It will now stream Friday, September 24, 2020, starting at 6 pm, and will continue until Monday, September 28, 2020 at 6 pm, through the TheatreWorks Silicon Valley website.

Laurel Ollstein, whose latest play, “Pandora,” will be streaming on the theatreworks.org website, is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

Laurel Ollstein is also the author of “They Promised Her the Moon,” which was produced at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley and shut down prematurely due to the pandemic. She has been a theatre and television actress, short story writer and director over the course of her career, and worked with Tim Robbins’ Actors Gang in Los Angeles for fifteen years.

This latest project is a theatrical retelling of the myth of Pandora, the first human woman in Greek Mythology, who was said to have opened a box which allowed all the ills of the world to escape. The production, recorded in Zoom toward the end of May, 2020, is a workshop reading featuring actors from the Bay Area and beyond, and is directed by Giovanna Sardelli.

Special thanks to Richard Lavin for his post-production assistance.

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Playwright Terry Baum, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in December 2014, just prior to her solo show, HICK: A Love Story, The Romance of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, co writtten by Pat Bond, played at the Berkeley City Club the following month.

Since those performances, the play has been performed around the country, most recently at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in September 2019. where it was selected to have a run at an off-Broadway theatre.

Terry Baum is the author of several other plays, and was the founder of Lilith, a San Francisco women’s theatre collective, in 1974. She ran against Nancy Pelosi for Congress in 2004 as a write-in candidate, and ran for Mayor of San Francisco as a Green Party candidate in 2011.

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