Be-handle with care: lost in Spokane
What did Spokane, Washington ever do to Martin McDonagh? The London-born, Ireland-identified playwright famously wrote six plays, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Inishmaan, in a year and then moved on to film. His short film, Six Shooter, won an Oscar, and he was nominated again for his screenplay to In Bruges (which he also directed).
Then the fiercely talented McDonagh returned to the stage with his first play set in America. A Behanding in Spokane, which ran on Broadway in 2010, is clearly a McDonagh play, what with the desperation, the black comedy and the flying body parts. But this is minor McDonagh, and, in fact, Behanding is a pretty lousy play.
Rough neighborhood, extraordinary theater
You may think you know the Tenderloin – drugs, poverty, violence, crime – and certainly those impressions are valid, but Cutting Ball theater's world-premiere Tenderloin challenges audiences to think more deeply about the neighborhood, its history, its significance and even its beauty. Director and head writer Annie Elias and her team of actor-journalists – Tristan Cunningham, Siobhan Doherty, Rebecca Frank, Michael Kelly, Leigh Shaw, David Sinaiko and David Westley Skillman (who is not in the show) – spent more than a year collecting interviews, conducting workshops and shaping a theater piece out of the real life happening on the other side of the theater walls.
Extraordinary Day dawns at the Magic
Linda McLean's Any Given Day, now having its American premiere at the Magic Theatre, is theater for grown-ups. There's nothing fanciful or sensational about. It's basically duet conversations in two acts and less than 90 minutes. But the richness of McLean's language, seemingly so simple yet so precise in defining the characters and their relationships to each other and to the world.
The pain and sadness is palpable in these people, yet so are the passing moments of joy and kindness and good humor. McLean's world is full of the kind of emotional upheaval you only get to see when you spend time with people and see what's really happening with them under their reasonably calm, reasonably functional exterior selves. To catch glimpses of the real turmoil underneath is an astonishing achievement, and that's what McLean and this powerful production manage to accomplish.
Othello: not a fan but a grudging admirer
When faced with the prospect of seeing another production of Othello, I usually gird my loins, wipe my nose with a strawberry-embroidered hanky and settle in for a show I know I'm not going to like much. As a theater critic, I suppose I'm not supposed to have a bias for or against certain plays, but that's really nonsensical when you think about it, especially plays you've seen over and over and over again. I've been doing the theatrical criticism thing for almost 20 years now, and I've seen Desdemona choked (and choked and choked again) a number of times, in good productions and bad. And I've never really been moved by the play. Certain performances made an impact, but more on an intellectual than emotional level.
Perhaps I should have skipped the latest Othello at Marin Theatre Company, but the prospect of seeing two actors I admire greatly, Aldo Billingslea and Craig Marker as Othello and Iago respectively, was too much to resist. I have to say I'm glad I saw the production because these two formidable local talents do not disappoint.
Past imperfect in ACT's Maple and Vine
Dwelling in the past, as so many human beings come to find, causes nothing but frustration and disappointment. The same is true for Jordan Harrison's play Maple and Vine now at American Conservatory Theater.
Harrison is the talented young writer last seen in the Bay Area with Finn in the Underworld at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2005 and Act a Lady at the New Conservatory Theatre Center in 2009. His Maple and Vine premiered about a year ago at the Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville, Ky., and it's a more interesting play than it is a good one. The play purports to be about the quality of life now compared to the 1950s, but it really ends up being about how far people are willing to go to save a relationship.
Act 1 is pretty much all set up...
Subtle brilliance in out-of-this-world Aliens
When Annie Baker made her Bay Area debut with Body Awareness at the Aurora Theatre Company, I was impressed by the arrival of an intriguing, intelligent and compassionate new voice on the American theater scene (other folks who had seen Baker's work were already well aware of this). But it turns out that with Body Awareness Baker was only getting warmed up.
Baker's The Aliens is now running at SF Playhouse, and its brilliance is deceptive. The play seems so very simple. Two 30something slackers have nothing better to do than hang out in the staff break area behind a cafe called the Green Sheep in Baker's fictional Shirley, Vermont. Their shiftless idyll is interrupted by 17-year-old Evan Shelmerdine, a new busboy at the cafe who insists, in his halting way, that the slackers can't slack off her. This area is only for staff.
Happily, the slackers – KJ the poet and lyricist and Jasper the aspiring novelist – don't listen to Shelmerdine but instead draw him into their exclusive little club.
The Aliens is an absolutely astonishing play.
Berkeley Rep’s pulsating Red
You've heard that insulting phrase, "As exciting as watching paint dry." Well in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Red, you do watch paint dry, and it's surprisingly exciting.
This is one of those new American dramas that arrives at the local regional level lauded with awards and high expectations. John Logan's drama won a passel of Tony Awards, including Best Play, so it wouldn't be surprising if audience members showed up with minds made up one way or the other – oh, this is going to be good because the people in New York (and London) say it is; or, oh, there's no way this can actually be good because it has received too much praise.
It's the kind of artistic situation about which painter Mark Rothko, the subject of Logan's play, would have a definite, probably loud, opinion.
Writing a play about a volcanic talent like Rothko can't help but tame him in some ways.
Living history and meeting cute
In which there are reminiscences of an eighth grade field trip to Alcatraz and links to a feature story and a review relating to the TheatreWorks production of Now Circa Then, a romantic comedy at TheatreWorks by Carly Mensch.
Let’s give Impact’s Titus a big, bloody hand
Anna Ishida has a scream to remember – the kind of scream that startles your unborn children. She could supplant Jamie Lee Curtis as the Queen of Scream, but until then, she's wreaking bloody havoc in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, this season's revitalized Shakespeare project at Berkeley's Impact Theatre.
Artistic Director Melissa Hillman is particularly adept at trimming a Shakespeare play to its most vital parts and shooting it through with a kind of energy that tends to surprise anyone who has forgotten that, in the right hands, Shakespeare can be lean and mean.
Forget Leap Day – it's Purim, biotch!
The year always goes by so quickly. March 7 and 8 – next week, people – is Purim already. Where does the time go?
If you haven't made your festive Purim plans, you should go see The Whole Megillah 2: Uncut, a co-production of The Hub at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and sketch comedy troupe Killing My Lobster. For a second year, the Lobsters, with help from The Hub's Dan Wolf, lampoons all things Purim while adhering to the Purim tradition of telling tales from the Book of Esther, otherwise known as the Megillah.
I interviewed Wolf and Lobster Creative Director Andy Alabran for a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
Feeling burned by ACT's Scorched
Wajdi Mouawad's drama Scorched is a riveting, affecting and thought-provoking play – in its last 30 minutes. To get there you have to spend more than two hours slogging through layers of back story, stilted acting and rigid dialogue (the translation is by Linda Gaboriau).
You have to ask yourself, is the slog worth it? I'll have to let you know...
Brian Copeland enters a compelling Period
There's nothing unusual about the following statement: Brian Copeland is a funny, funny man. He has proved that time and time again over the course of his stand-up career and his TV work. We started to see more of Copeland in his extraordinarily successful solo show Not a Genuine Black Man, which ran for more than 700 performances then became a book. Though about something serious – the extreme racism of San Leandro in the 1970s – the show offered abundant laughter and gave audiences the unique experience of dealing with real-world problems in a funny and theatrical way.
Copeland takes that notion a step further with his new solo work, The Waiting Period. Like his previous show, this one is co-developed and directed by David Ford, and it has sprung to life at The Marsh in San Francisco. But unlike his previous outing, this is no comedy. Far from it.
Music soars in Cutting Ball’s Tontlawald
Darkness. Voices. Chanting. Then drumming and clapping.
The opening of Cutting Ball Theater's Tontlawald is electrifying. The sheer power of joined voices, unamplified, is undeniable and extraordinarily beautiful.
In John Bischoff's stunning arrangements, the vocal music in this world-premiere production emerges as the star of the show. Performed by the seven-member ensemble, the music, which ranges from Sarah Hopkins' "Aboriginal Song" to a delicious slice of Mozart's The Magic Flute to doo-wop and barbershop quartet sounds, is reason enough to see this fitfully engaging, ultimately disappointing exercise in experimental storytelling.
High art, grim lives shaded in ambitious Tree City
Tree City Legends leaves you moved and somewhat perplexed. My experience with Dennis Kim's play as directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph was equal parts fascination and confusion.
There are so many creative partners on this project, it's no wonder the thing feels not only like an art installation but also like an entire museum unto itself. You have art, video, performance and music. You certainly can't fault the creative team for lack of imagination or multimedia ability. But you can fault the creative team...
Arresting cop drama keeps Steady in Marin
I can't imagine what it was like to see Keith Huff's A Steady Rain when it was on Broadway almost three years ago starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as two Chicago cops navigating a tricky moral and ethical path through their demanding jobs. Was it possible to say anything but the two mega-watt movie stars flattening vowels to the best of their pretend Midwestern abilities? Was Huff's taut two-man play even visible underneath the star power?
The answer is: probably not. And that's OK. The play, as seen in its West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre Company, is an engaging, sturdily built vehicle to showcase two contrasting actors.
ACT's Perloff aims Higher
This is the season for artistic directors sharing their writing with their audiences. Tony Taccone at Berkeley Repertory Theatre has actually done it twice this season with Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup and the current Ghost Light.
Now American Conservatory Theater's Carey Perloff is sharing her fourth full-length play as a special non-subscription production at the Theater at the Children's Creativity Museum (formerly Zeum). In both cases, the artistic directors are making bold moves to put their work out there -- a brave gesture, to say the least. And they've both wisely handed over the directorial reins to trusted cohorts. In Taccone's case it's Jonathan Moscone and in Perloff's case, it's ACT Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker.
Four hot bodies heat up Aurora’s Body Awareness
Drama in the small college town of Shirley, Vermont, is much like it is anywhere: small, intimate and, for the people involved, earth shattering.
Playwright Annie Baker, one of the theater world's most acclaimed and buzzed-about writers, has a particular skill in writing about the lives of ordinary people. She's acutely aware of the comic absurdity and the fissures of sadness and anger that clash continually and cause tremors, both minor and majorly damaging.
Baker is a humane and very funny writer, and the Bay Area is finally getting a taste of her talent in the Aurora Theatre Company's utterly delightful production of her Body Awareness. In true Aurora form, the production gives us a meaty play and performances by a quartet of Bay Area actors that defy you to find a false moment in this up-close and intimate space.
Dating sharp, funny, creepy Becky Shaw at SF Playhouse
The humor is in direct proportion to the discomfort in Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, now in its West Coast premiere at SF Playouse.
If David Mamet were good at anything other than provocation and crisp dialogue, he might write something as entertaining and as distressing as Becky Shaw, a smart, incisive and very funny play that, despite its lack of focus, makes for a beguiling evening of theater.
By lack of focus I mean that Gionfriddo doesn't delineate protagonist or antagonist. Even though the title of the play belongs to one character, the playwright's aim seems much broader – like how power works between family members, between men and women and between the seemingly weak and the seemingly strong. She's interested in highly functional dysfunctional people, which is to say, just about everybody.
Moscone, Taccone illuminate history in Ghost Light
Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone have found the courage to stay out of what they call "the suck drawer."
The phrase comes from Ghost Light, the play Moscone and Taccone conceived together and that Taccone wrote and Moscone directed and it has to do with the life of an artist – the life of anyone, really – and the effort to create work and, ultimately, a life that is true and uniquely individual.
I expected Ghost Light, a co-production of Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where Taccone is artistic director) and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the play had the first leg of its world premiere last summer, to be about grief and the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. It is about those things. How could it not be, seeing as how it deals primarily with the effect of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone's assassination in 1978, when his son Jon was 14 years old.
Making a musical Garden grow
The Secret Garden will always hold a special place in my heart. It was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. And because I was there with friends who had friends in high places, we got to go backstage afterward. On my first day in New York, just after my first Broadway show, I got to stand center stage of the St. James Theatre and stare out into the empty theater. Amazing experience.
We got to go backstage, where I met Alison Fraser and, almost by accident, Rebecca Luker. Also go to see Mandy Patinkin pitch a fit because he didn't want to meet people, dammit, between shows. That was interesting.
I'm thinking about The Secret Garden because I just saw TheatreWorks' second production of the show.