Event

Velma

Vain, naive, beautiful Velma knows what she wantseverything! But postwar Los Angeles is an emotional minefield for a single mother following her own path.
She is ahead of her time, studying yoga with a guru, eating a vegetarian diet, and getting divorced decades before divorce becomes "acceptable." She is a working single parent in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of breadwinning fathers and stay-at-home mothers.
Told from the perspective of her oldest son, Mike, "Velma" is a comic but disturbing portrayal of a compelling woman, the men she loves, and the children she bears. Tough, fragile, self-deluding, she's in over her head.
"Velma," written and performed by Mick Renner, was developed in collaboration with David Ford and a small group of theatre artists in San Francisco and Berkeley. David Ford says, "Mick the writer sets big challenges for Mick the actor, and Mick the actor meets them again and again." Mick plays a wide range of charactersa woman of 25, a child of 7, a grandfather of 65, a boy of 11, a man of 22, and morebut issues of age and gender disappear in his commitment to the theatrical moment.
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Mick has appeared in more than 60 plays: including Claudius in "Hamlet" at the Berkeley Repertory Theater; Pericles in "Pericles," Stephano in "The Tempest," and Thersites in "Troilus and Cressida" at the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival. He played Hugo in the Bay Area Critic's Circle award-winning production of "Mary Barnes" at the Eureka Theater. He was producing director of Power Mad Productions in Berkeley from 1977 to 1980.
"Velma" makes use of autobiographical elements, and the story is true to history. Some individual scenes, however, are recreated from hints, suggestions, and second-hand reports

Velma
by Mick Renner
Berkeley, CA
74 minutes
SOLO PERFORMANCE, FOR PEOPLE OVER 13, MATURE CONTENT, COARSE LANGUAGE