Shotgun's Black Rider dances with the devil
Thirteen years ago – such an appropriate number of years – American Conservatory Theater made some sort of deal with the devil to get The Black Rider onto the stage of the Geary Theater. Now Berkeley's Shotgun Players revive this decidedly adult fairy tale under the guidance of director Mark Jackson, and the results are heartily satisfying.
Bouncy around here: Shotgun's Virginia Woolf howls
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is famous for being, among other things, a night in the life of a querulous quartet, a four-part marital slugfest, a boozy broadside in four parts. In other words, four actors fighting, lashing out, drinking and suffering. All of that is present and accounted for in director Mark Jackson's production concluding Shotgun Players' 25th anniversary season. But it feels like there's another character here.
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...
Trickle down theory: parallel lives in Now for Now
I've never seen anything quite like Now for Now, the new theatrical work devised and performed by Mark Jackson and Megan Trout now at Z Below through July 26 (time is short – go see it). As two dynamic and acutely interesting theater people, Mark Jackson and Megan Trout make for an intriguing combination on paper and, happily, that intrigue (and a whole lot more) extends to the work they have created.
Sharp edges in Shotgun's dance-theater Antigonick
It's a museum piece come to life, a poem that dances, a classic that feels ultra-modern. Shotgun Players' Antigonick is all that and more, including somewhat baffling and exhausting.
You don't go into a Mark Jackson show expecting theatrical pablum. Jackson has long been one of the Bay Area's most interesting theater makers – intelligent, audacious, boundary pushing and always, always interesting. He tends to merge varying styles of theater, often very physical, but always in service of storytelling and emotion.
Dear Comrade: No love posted in Aurora's tense Letters
After hosting three cabaret performances, the Aurora Theatre Company's rehearsal/black box/office space (the Dashow Wing, to be specific) known as Harry's UpStage at last beings life as a playhouse. The first play in the space, John W. Lowell's The Letters, a tense, 75-minute two-hander about abuse of power and the triumph of smart people.
Director Mark Jackson is known for his kinetic, dynamic productions, but this time out he's confined to one small office...
Bonnie & Clyde live (and die) by the Shotgun (Players)
Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that Berkeley's Shotgun Players are reviving the myth of gangsters Bonnie and Clyde. The celebrated criminals storm the Ashby Stage on the run from the law and nearing the end of their bloody, well-chronicled run of robberies and murders across the American south. They enter an abandoned barn to take cover. He's got a pistol in each hand and she's wielding -- what else? -- a shotgun. She is, it turns out, a true shotgun player.
British playwright Adam Peck's stage version of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not really anything like the revered 1967 movie version except for the basic facts of the story.
Marin offers a real beauty of a Queen
Watching Joy Carlin work her magic Mag Folan in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the epitome of theatrical delight. Here you have one of the great Bay Area actors offering a sly, darkly humorous, even compassionate portrayal of a woman who could easily be described as a nightmare. Carlin, like the character she's playing, appears to be a lovely older woman. But perhaps unlike Carlin, Mag is something of a sociopath. And that's a trait she's passed along to the youngest of her three daughters, Maureen, played with sinewy gusto by Beth Wilmurt.
That mother-daughter relationship is the crux of Beauty Queen, and the source of its humor, its drama and its horror. Director Mark Jackson's production for Marin Theatre Company etches that relationship with realism and a savory dash of melodrama.
Feeling the heat at Aurora’s Arsonists
My first encounter with Swiss playwright Max Frisch was in college when my Drama as Literature class read his Biedermann and the Firebugs, a 1953 radio play that was expanded into a stage play in 1958. The subtitle of that version was the clunky "a learning-play without a lesson." Alistair Beaton delivered a new translation to London's Royal Court Theatre in 2007 with the much zippier title – The Arsonists – and a subtitle: "a moral play without a moral." Happily, that's the version now on stage at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company under the customarily energetic direction of Mark Jackson.
The time is now, and Frisch's take on the wishy-washy morals of the privileged middle class is as astute as ever.
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.
A creature features in Aurora’s stunning Metamorphosis
You've heard that old trope about intense pressure turning a lump of coal into a diamond. Well what if that kind of pressure is applied to a human being? In Franz Kafka's opinion, the pressure of modern society will turn a person into, well, something horrific. Perhaps a cockroach or some other loathsome vermin, but a monster nonetheless. It's a sad and scary vision, one that is realized to its fullest potential in the Aurora Theatre Company production of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Director Mark Jackson is something of a name brand in the Bay Area. You know his shows are going to be original, compelling and rigorously produced. He's a writer/director (occasionally actor) whose work you simply do not miss. The world of Kafka would seem to be a playground for Jackson's mighty theatrical imagination, and it's true. Jackson's Metamorphosis is as unsettling as it is poignant, as beautifully performed as it is fun to watch.
The Companion Piece or “I glove you whore”
You could throw a lot of adjectives at The Companion Piece, a world-premiere creation by director Mark Jackson, actor Beth Wilmurt and their crew: wily, zany, exciting, perplexing, silly and utterly beautiful. You could throw a lot of words, but they don't quite create the picture of just what the Companion experience is.
To begin with, it's all about entertainment – the old-fashioned, shtick-'em-up vaudeville kind of entertainment. Pratfalls, hoary jokes and razzmatazz. The 80-minute show is bookended by a pasty-faced vaudevillian with spit curls and routine that sputters like a rickety but reliable old car. He does magic. He sings. He says things like, "Do you have a mirror in your pocket? I can see myself in your pants." And then he's done and trundles up to his dressing room alone.