Love doth evade Marin's Shakespeare in Love
The Bay Area finally gets to see Shakespeare in Love on stage thanks to Marin Theatre Company, and while the cast boats some of the Bay Area's best actors – Stacy Ross, Lance Gardner, Megan Trout, Mark Anderson Phillips, L. Peter Callender – the production flails under the direction of Jasson Minadakis.
Freedom, dreams clash in Aurora's Safe House
There are several ways to interpret the title of Keith Josef Adkins' Safe House now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. One way sees cobbler Addison Pedigrew, a free man of color in Kentucky, aiming for his version of the American dream: a thriving shoe making/repairing business run out of his home to support his Aunt Dorcas and his brother, Frank, so that they can be truly free to thrive and expand their families. The other way, according to Frank and Dorcas, is to provide shelter and assistance to fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Both co-exist, but not easily in this 2014 drama, which takes much of its first act to really get going.
Faith, choices, colonialism collide in Marin's gutsy Convert
p>For someone who kills zombies in her day job, Danai Gurira sure knows her way around a compelling drama. Best known as the kick-ass, Katana-wielding Michonne on AMC's "The Walking Dead," Gurira is also a playwright, an impressive one as it turns out based on her Bay Area debut with The Convert now at Marin Theatre Company.
This is a good, old-fashioned historical drama – three acts and nearly three hours – about the soul-crushing damage of colonialism and missionary zeal. What's interesting is that The Convert is the second play to open in the Bay Area recently specifically addressing the colonizing of Africa by Europeans.
Cal Shakes sculpts a vital, vivacious Pygmalion
When real life comes in and smacks Prof. Henry Higgins across the face, it's a wonderful thing to see this brilliant yet stunted man consider, perhaps for the first time in his life, that kindness may have worth akin to genius.
The force representing the real world – a world of messiness and emotion and connection – takes the form of Eliza Doolittle, an extraordinary young woman who is the intellectual if not social equal of Higgins and his superior when it comes to living life as most of humanity experiences it.
One of the great things about the California Shakespeare Theater production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is how balanced it is.
Cal Shakes' lukewarm take on Winter's Tale
On a refreshingly brisk autumn night, California Shakespeare Theater's A Winter's Tale aimed to tell a sad story with a happy ending. "A sad story is best for winter," or so we're told by a young boy not long for this earth.
Even by Shakespearean standards, this is a strange play, with its jarring shifts in tone, unexplained fits of jealousy, interference by the gods and living statuary. In other words, it's a director's dream – here's a wacky play that needs lots of interpretation and massaging to make it work for a modern audience.
Cal Shakes previously closed the season with A Winter's Tale in 2002 with a massive production in which the audience moved around to accommodate the shift in action from Sicilia to Bohemia. Director Lisa Peterson hauled out screaming teenagers, a school bus and an all-out rave before audience members headed back into the theater proper for the moving, if fantastical, finale.
This time around, we get a wildly different Tale directed by Patricia McGregor, who returns after the triumph of last season's Spunk.
Looking at the stars: Cal Shakes fans flames of Wilde's Winderemere
If you want, as Oscar Wilde did, to make cogent and funny points about men and women, husbands and wives and the notion of good people vs. bad people, what better way to do that than by putting Danny Scheie in a dress and letting him unleash his inner Dame Maggie Smith?
Scheie's performance as the Duchess of Berwick in the California Shakespeare Theater's production Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first major theatrical it, is one of many pleasures in director Christopher Liam Moore's beguiling production.
Take it on faith: see Marin's Whipping Man
If Matthew Lopez were a miner, he could brag that he uncovered a rich mineral vein of enormous wealth, both cultural and commercial. But Lopez isn't a miner. He's a playwright, and though there are similarities to be sure, what Lopez brings to the surface in his fascinating play The Whipping Man is a mostly untold chapter of American history with deep spiritual resonance.
Lopez, whom Bay Area audiences met earlier this year when his play Somewhere ran at TheatreWorks, is a young playwright of note. The Whipping Man is the play that first brought him notice, and it receives its Bay Area premiere courtesy of Marin Theatre Company and co-producer Virginia Stage Company and in association with San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.
Annie Baker's brilliant, reflective Circle Mirror
At once the antithesis of drama (nothing's happening!) and a complete exposure of the theater's guts and bones, Annie Baker's has a particular genius for creating simplicity of the most complex variety.
Earlier this year, the Aurora Theatre Company got the unofficial Annie Baker Bay Area Festival off to a strong start with her Body Awareness about sexual politics in the small university town of Shirley, Vermont. Then SF Playhouse dazzled with the low-key but brilliant The Aliens, also set in the fictional Shirley, about three unlikely friends, music, death and growing up.
Now Marin Theatre Company in a co-production with Encore Theatre Company conclude the Bay-ker Area Fest with what has become her most popular play, Circle Mirror Transformation. Even more than the previous two Baker plays we've seen so far, this one feels even less like a play and more like an actual experience – something carefully captured in the real world and observed within the artful frame of a proscenium stage.
Gettin’ to the git in Cal Shakes’ glorious Spunk
Zora Neale Hurston writes with zest and zeal. She can move from joy to anguish in a second and still find her way back to hope. All of this is readily apparent in California Shakespeare Company's production of Spunk at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. Sharp and spirited and brimming with talent, these three Hurston stories, adapted for the stage by George C. Wolfe, are poetry and drama and jubilation and as much stirring music as you're likely to hear in 90 minutes in the foggy Orinda Hills.
Wolfe honors Hurston by making sure the audience knows these are short stories – not plays – being brought to life so that we, as a group, can appreciate Hurston's rich, beautiful and musical language. Each of the three stories includes narration of some kind, so the evening never strays from its literary roots. But this is no storytime theater. This is theater that moves. And sings. Boy, does it sing.
Stravinsky and the sadness of a puppet Soldier
As the weary soldier trudges down the road home, you see the weight of his exhaustion as well as his excitement to see his mother and fiancée in his every step. The remarkable thing is that this soldier – who goes by the name of Joseph – is a Bunraku-style puppet. All that extraordinary expression is coming from his puppeteer, Muriel Maffre, the San Francisco Ballet star who retired in 2007.
Along with Aurora Theatre Company artistic director Tom Ross, Maffre is the co-director of The Soldier's Story, a theatrical fusion of music, dance, puppetry and storytelling that carries a melancholy charm for its brief 75 minutes. Much of that charm comes from Maffre, who also dances the role of the King's daughter, who falls under Joseph's spell.
It's easy to succumb to this Tale.
Seven Guitars, ably played
Marin Theatre Company's beautiful production of August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the third I've seen, and it amazes me how similar and how different those productions have been. The first was in 1995 when American Conservatory Theater hosted the Broadway-bound version of the show as part of its season. The distinctive thing about that night of theater was the overwhelming wash of lyrical language that poured from the stage. For 3 ½ hours. I called it "indulgent" and "overly long" in my review for the Bay Area Reporter, but I also called the writing "lucid and full of gorgeous natural rhythms." Of Viola Davis' performance as Vera, of whom I wrote, "One of the play's best scenes occurs early in the first act when Vera gives Floyd every reason she can think of why she won't take him back. She does take him back, of course, but her aching, shattering litany – brilliantly delivered by Davis – is probably the truest torch song that was never sung on stage."
The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre produced Seven Guitars in 2003 under the direction of the late Stanley Williams, and by then the show had been trimmed to a more manageable three hours, and in my review for the Oakand Tribune, I commended the ensemble (seven characters, hence the title) when they were able to "revel in the beats and rhythms of Wilson's almost-musical writing."
And now Marin Theatre Company, tackling its first August Wilson play, enters the fray with special attention to the music.
IPH... a picture paints a thousand words
One general problem I have with Greek tragedy is that I’m not Greek and, most days, not terribly tragic. I’ve experienced, a time or two, the feeling of catharsis that can come from being immersed in godly and ungodly troubles. Fiona Shaw as Medea comes to mind, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s The Oresteia had its acutely emotional moments.