If Bay Area theatergoers don’t know Michael Gene Sullivan by now, they must not be paying attention.
As an actor, the San Francisco native is a frequent and outstanding presence on prominent stages all around the Bay, from TheatreWorks Silicon Valley to Marin Theatre Company. As a playwright, he’s written most of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s yearly activist musical comedies since 2000, and other local companies have produced his plays such as “The Great Khan” at San Francisco Playhouse.
And yet Sullivan’s most successful play, his adaptation of the influential George Orwell novel “1984,” is only now making its official Bay Area premiere with Aurora Theatre Company, 20 years after he wrote it.
The Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles premiered the play in 2006, directed by that company’s artistic director, stage and screen star Tim Robbins. Since then it’s been translated into six languages and been performed all over the country and the world.
“I’d sent it to different theaters in the Bay Area, and nobody was really interested,” Sullivan says. “Even though I’d been writing for the Mime Troupe for a few years, I think the theaters in the Bay Area really very much saw me as an actor. Which is great, because it means they cast me. And it also means I couldn’t even get them to read it, even after it was published. For a long time I was just like, well, I guess I’m going to be an actor in the Bay Area and a playwright everywhere else.”
Los Altos Stage Company did do a small-scale production of Sullivan’s “1984” in 2018. Sullivan says he was unable to see that production because he was acting in a show at Aurora at the time, George Bernard Shaw’s “Widowers’ Houses,” and all the performances overlapped.
Orwell’s depiction of a totalitarian government of constant propaganda and surveillance has become long embedded in the cultural conversation, with its terminology such as Big Brother and thoughtcrimes becoming part of everyday political discourse.
“I was writing shows for the Mime Troupe, and after I’d written ‘Veronique of the Mounties,’ which took place in a police state, I realized I was writing a lot of stuff that was inspired by ‘1984,’” Sullivan recalls. “And so I decided to write an adaptation to get it out of my head.”
Sullivan’s intimate adaptation is framed as an interrogation of protagonist Winston Smith, in which the events are re-enacted by his interrogators.
“When I was writing it, I was thinking of different spaces in the Bay Area, like the Magic (Theatre), but very much the Aurora,” he says. “I wanted the audience, while they’re watching this interrogation happen right in front of them, to be able to look past that interrogation and see other audience members also watching it, and nobody’s doing anything. To get the sense that the community is watching this happen in their name.”
Accustomed to addressing current events and issues in his Mime Troupe shows, Sullivan wrote his “1984” in response to what was going on in this country at the time, in 2003.
“The reason I was writing all these things was because of the War on Terror and this huge propaganda tsunami that had been pushed across the United States,” he says. “And to simply say anything, to question any of that, was akin to treason.
“When the news came out about Abu Ghraib and all the black sites where we were torturing people, I realized that something that wasn’t being talked about was that these people who were the torturers were walking amongst us. That might be the person you’re on the bus next to. And they were told that they were good Americans. So I wanted to make ‘1984’ not just about Big Brother, but really about the society that accepts this.”
After its 2006 premiere, the Actors’ Gang took “1984” on national and international tours and has since revived it several times. Its most recent revival in 2019 featured Robbins himself as antagonist O’Brien of the Ministry of Truth.
Meanwhile, the play has been translated into six languages and has been performed in countries from Spain to China.
“We did a Russian translation, and there’s a director that had directed it in the United States and wanted to open it in Russia,” Sullivan says. “She sent it to a producer, I think in St. Petersburg, and the guy emailed her back and said, ‘I love this. I cannot do this show. Putin would have me killed.’ So we did a Ukrainian translation, and the play for the past five or six years has been running in Kiev, Ukraine. It’s running now. And after this most recent war started, I sent them an email and said, ‘I want no more royalties from you guys. You keep the money.’”
Much like the novel that inspired it, the play resonates differently in different places and different times.
“When I first wrote it, it was very much about the Patriot Act and the idea that you should be spying on your neighbors,” Sullivan says. “Remember when they were trying to get librarians to report what books people were taking out? Now it’s more about straight propaganda and doublethink that relies upon and reinforces the ignorance of people who are not evil, but the information they’re being given is crap. I want people to see that this is the world around them. This is not where we could be; this is where we are. And we need to push back against it constantly, to reclaim and reestablish the truth as a valuable thing.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘1984’
By Michael Gene Sullivan, based on the novel by George Orwell, presented by Aurora Theatre Company
When: Nov. 10-Dec. 10
Where: Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley (also streaming Dec. 5-10)
Tickets: $20-$65; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org
