SF Playhouse explores Art on stage on film
The Bay Area theater scene has been short on excitement, understandably, these last seven months. So it's beyond thrilling news when a theater company, in this case San Francisco Playhouse announces a new play on an actual stage with actors acting together on a set that has been designed and lit, with nary a Zoom square to be seen.
Vietgone plays with language, history at ACT
Bold, irreverent, and laugh-out-loud funny, Qui Nguyen's Vietgone, at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, can also be frustratingly scattershot and amateurish.
Sisters' paths diverge in Crowded Fire's You for Me for You
Sort of an Alice in Wonderland for our topsy-turvy times, Mia Chung's You for Me for You takes us through a very specific lookingglass: a refugee's experience attempting to flee North Korea.
Like any good leap of imagination, this one begins grounded in reality.
Simple command: Catch Caught. Now.
Watching Christopher Chen's new play Caught in its sublime Shotgun Players production is, in a word, disorienting, and that's a good thing. Even clever folk who think they have it all figured out and are hip to what's going on in this mind-twisting play will experience something new here, and it may not be apparent until they leave the theater. Your trust in what is real, what is true (a major theme of the play), will likely have been somewhat shifted. The absurd things that happen to us on a regular basis and all the things we assume are true suddenly seem challenging and connected, as if we've stepped into a Chen play ourselves.
Uneven tone tilts ACT's Monstress double bill
Two of the Bay Area's most interesting theater artists, Philip Kan Gotanda and Sean San José, were asked to adapt a short story from Lysley Tenorio's 2012 collection Monstress for American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater as part of the company's San Francisco Stories initiative and the New Strands play development and commissioning program.
The results make up the double bill Monstress now at the Strand, and while both plays...
Life, death and a '70s groove in Magic's Happy Ones
At first the music is loud and fun. Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" seems like the perfect audio accompaniment to a grown-up birthday party scene set in a Garden Grove, Califorina, suburban home, where the swimming pool gleams and the neighbors all swing with martinis well in hand.
Then there's silence. Tragedy strikes, and the SoCal dream life has no fitting accompaniment...until it does, and that sound comes from another part of the planet – Vietnam to be exact. There's a smattering of Creedence, of Paul Simon and Randy Newman. And when the good-time music returns, in the form of Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime," but the "living the dream" moment has passed, and it's time for new songs and new chapters.
That's the story of The Happy Ones, an achingly beautiful play by Julie Marie Myatt now at Magic Theatre.