Cal Shakes gets terrifically Tempest tossed
On a day when terrible things were happening in the world, being immersed in William Shakespeare's The Tempest was sweet balm, especially as performed by the fine actors of California Shakespeare Theater's "All the World's a Stage" tour of the show, which, in classic traveling players mode, is being performed in senior centers, homeless shelters, federal prison, rehab centers and the like. It's hard not to agree with Caliban when he says, "Hell is empty. All the devils are here." But dark notions of revenge, which so inform the play itself, are soothed by virtue, and Prospero's exquisite speech, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” is practically heartbreaking in its beauty.
Flames lick the American dream in Aurora's Detroit
There's a particular kind of fear that grips those who have all the things we're "supposed" to have – jobs, houses, marriages, ideals. The fear, of course, is not in the having of it all but in the potential loss of it all (or even in part). That brutal terrain shaped by anxiety is the real setting of Lisa D'Amour's Detroit, now receiving its Bay Area premiere from Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company.