Imaginary discomfort rules at Berkeley Rep
The first time I head the title for the new play by Daniel Handler, the San Francisco writer behind the popular Lemony Snicket books, I was confused. Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit is the title, and it wasn't the Snickety-y subtitle that perplexed me. It was the notion that comfort could be imaginary. Isn't comfort comforting no matter where it comes from? You can receive comfort from an external source (a parent, a pet, a narcotic) or you can just imagine comfort (memory, dream, hallucination), but as long as you are comforted, job done...at least for a little while, right?
Uneasy comedy, drama (+Rat Wife!) in Aurora's Erik
There's a profoundly creepy core to Little Erik the new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1894 Little Eyolf by Mark Jackson, one of the Bay Area's foremost theater artists. That creepiness is the best thing about the 80-minute one-act now at the Aurora Theatre Company. Though even in its brevity, the play can't quite command its shifting tones.
Ibsen's Eyolf probably won't be found on any of his best-of compilations, but Jackson...
Ramping up the teenage angst in Crowded Fire's Truck Stop
The whole time I was watching Lachlan Philpott's Truck Stop, a Crowded Fire Theater production at Thick House, I was working myself into a state of anxiety imagining being the parent of a teenage girl. How do you fight the global objectification of women and instill a sense of self-worth that comes as much from intellectual, spiritual, emotional places and not just the physical and sexual, which it seems is all the world cares about if you're watching TV or movies, reading magazines or listening to music.
Love and loathing in Berkeley Rep's football drama
A critic's personal feelings or attachment to a subject are often irrelevant when it comes to writing about a particular play. But in the case of Berkeley Repertory Theatre's world premiere of X'x and O's (A Football Love Story), I feel I have to disclose a strong personal bias. I loathe football. LOATHE it, and have all my life. That's my dad and my brother's territory. I'll be in my room canoodling with stereotypes and listening to Broadway cast albums. Sports in general have never interested me much, but no other sporting activity do I actively detest and strenuously ignore as much as loud, violent, overblown football.
Porn, feminism and laughs in Aurora's Rapture
There's an observation about Internet porn in Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company that is at once hilarious and trenchant. A college woman encapsulates the ease of access to porn this way: "Once you get directions from Google Maps, it seems such a hassle to unfold an actual map."
Generational differences and technology come into play a lot in Rapture, a crackling season opener for the Aurora. Gionfriddo is a smart, feisty writer who knows her way around a joke that always contains more than a laugh. She tackles the gargantuan issue of feminism and its evolution into the 21st century and comes through with a stage full of surprising, complicated characters having passionate, always intriguing discussions.
Crowded Fire saddles up comic Horses
There's something very sly at work in She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange, the world-premiere from Amelia Roper with Crowded Fire Theater at the Thick House. From looking at the vivid, sharply designed set by Maya Linke, with its paper sculpture trees and angled artificial grass, it's clear this is not going to be just any walk in the park.
But that's exactly how the play starts: a Sunday in a suburban Connecticut park...
Shrew you, shutdown! The Taming gets it right
The word factions is uttered in a way that makes it sound like the filthiest word you can imagine. And, in these tense government shutdown days, it actually is. But when James Madison says the word, you feel it whistling through the centuries like an airborne bomb that keeps exploding every time political idiocy allows factions (it's such an easy word to say with loathing) to hijack democracy.
The world premiere of San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson's The Taming couldn't come at a more volatile time. Our government just happens to be in the middle of a crisis that was anticipated, according to Gunderson's play, by our founding fathers. The wise Mr. Madison did his best to avert the power of the special interests, but he compromised to keep our fledgling country steady and strong, at least to start.
Just Wilde over Aurora’s Salomania
If only a 94-year-old scandal were sensational in ways we no longer understood, we could look back and wonder what all the fuss was about and why the media underestimated the taste of the general public and why the general public was so content to be constantly underestimated.
Alas, not much has changed since the early 20th century criminal libel suit that American dancer Maud Allan brought against British newspaper publisher Noel Pemberton-Billing after he described the interest in her dance piece Vision of Salomé as the "cult of the clitoris." That was the headline he used in his paper, the Vigilante, to describe the moral reprobates who were attracted to Allan's version of the play by Oscar Wilde, which had been banned since Wilde's very public downfall.
What we learn in Mark Jackson's fascinating and at moments electrifying new play Salomania is that the media, though their aims may be occasionally true, are a pawn in larger political games and panderers to public taste, which they help shape.
Time gets Sticky in experimental show
I was enthralled by the form and baffled by the content. That, in a nutshell, is my reaction to the world premiere of Sticky Time, an experimental new work from writer/director Marilee Talkington. A co-production of Crowded Fire Theater Company and Talkington's own Vanguardian Productions, Sticky Time is a wild hour of theater.
I will not begin to pretend that I understood any of it. In plain fact, I did not. When I got home, I read the program, and the thoughts of dramaturg Laura Brueckner and science advisor Andrew Meisel were very interesting – all about the nature of time, which is an interesting blend of science and philosophy – but in the moment of the show, I strained to understand but failed.
Truce is out of sight
You could describe Marilee Talkington in a number of ways, starting with the fact that she is going blind. She is partially sighted, visually impaired, visually handicapped, sensorily challenged; she has low vision or no vision. She has been called Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Helen Keller. And those are only a few of the descriptions that come up in Talkington's compelling 90-minute solo show Truce at San Francisco's Noh Space.
After seeing the show, other descriptions that come to mind: dynamic actor, intriguing writer and astonishingly deft performer.