Trekking gently through O'Neill's nostalgic Wilderness
Can we agree that Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! is warm and wonderful...and weird? The sepia-tinted 1933 play is a rare light work from tragedian O'Neill, though its fantasy elements – the family O'Neill wished he had growing up rather than the more nightmarish version he depicted in Long Day's Journey Into Night – lend it a rather sad underpinning.
It's almost as if O'Neill strayed into Kaufman and Hart territory long enough to write the four-act play about...
Cutting Ball pumps energy into vivid Dream
What a rare treat to have had two productions of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream on local stages this year. First there was California Shakespeare Theater's production (read my review here), and now we have a brisk, streamlined version from Cutting Ball Theater and its resident playwright, Andrew Saito at the EXIT on Taylor.
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.
Uneven tone tilts ACT's Monstress double bill
Two of the Bay Area's most interesting theater artists, Philip Kan Gotanda and Sean San José, were asked to adapt a short story from Lysley Tenorio's 2012 collection Monstress for American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater as part of the company's San Francisco Stories initiative and the New Strands play development and commissioning program.
The results make up the double bill Monstress now at the Strand, and while both plays...
Performances make Dogfight musical sing
There are two very good reasons to see the musical Dogfight at San Francisco Playhouse. The 2012 stage adaptation of the 1991 movie starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor has its moments (mostly thanks to the emotional score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), but what really makes it connect are the lead performances by Jeffrey Brian Adams as a U.S. Marine with more depth under his gruff military exterior than even he may realize and Caitlin Brooke as a San Francisco waitress/folk singer who is smarter, stronger and more compassionate than anyone the Marine has ever known (or probably ever will know).
Ferocious Lotus unfolds a lovely Crane
The Ferocious Lotus world premiere of JC Lee's Crane is the kind of theater that makes me happy. Here's a small company taking a step up with its first solo production. They're tackling a notable playwright (Lee's work has been seen locally at Impact Theatre and Sleepwalkers Theater and he's a writer for ABC's "How to Get Away with Murder" and HBO's "Looking"), and with a small budget in a small theater (NOHspace), they're making something beautiful.
Cal Shakes closes with apocalyptic King Lear
When California Shakespeare Theater ended the 2007 season with a heavy, industrial-looking King Lear, opening night was a cold one in the Bruns Amphitheater (read my review here). Eight years later, Cal Shakes once again ends the season with another heavy, industrial-looking Lear, but opening night was one of the rare ones when you could have worn short sleeves throughout (most of) the 2 1/2-hour tragedy. There's just something delicious about...
Flying high in Aurora's Mud Blue Sky
There's easy comedy and titillation to be had in choosing to explore the lives of flight attendants. You could blithely whip up a story detailing the lives we imagine those high-fliers live, with their easy access to great cities, hot coworkers and the occasional randy passenger. That story might be fun, but in truth, the days of "coffee, tea or me" are long past, and flying is a grind for everyone, from passengers to crew, and that may actually be the more interesting story.
Marisa Wegrzyn's Mud Blue Sky, now in an extended run through Oct. 3 at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company, tries to have it both ways.
Marin Theatre Co. meditates on Ruhl's poignant Boy
The plays of Sarah Ruhl are mightily appealing in their intelligence, sensitivity, beauty and depth. From Dead Man's Cell Phone to Eurydice (now at Shotgun Players) to In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, Ruhl makes the ordinary extraordinary and gives poetic voice to thoughtful, troubled lives that have a great deal to offer.
Now making its West Coast debut at Marin Theatre Company, Ruhl's The Oldest Boy is in some ways very conventional.
Crazy about Guirgis' Riverside at ACT
There's a crackling vitality on stage the Geary Theater as American Conservatory Theater opens its 49th season with Stephen Adly Guirgis' Between Riverside and Crazy. The play is this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, which doesn't necessarily guarantee it will be an interesting play, but if you've seen any of Guirgis' previous work – produced locally by San Francisco Playhouse and Custom Made Theatre Company – you know that this is a muscular, compassionate and deeply interesting writer.
If Riverside isn't as gritty as some of his other work, it more than makes up for that with its fresh approach to the classic American dream-type play.
Sisters count in SF Playhouse's 1 2 3
The three daughters of domestic terrorists – activists, as the eldest girl insists on calling them – have moved so often and changed their names so many times they can't really remember who they are exactly. The easiest thing to do is simply number themselves. 1 will be the eldest. 2 will be the middle child and 3 will be the baby.
When we meet these three smart, malleable children, in the world premiere of Lila Rose Kaplan's 1 2 3, they are in a new town about to head to a new school. Again.
Cal Shakes scares up big laughs in vivacious Vep
How appropriate to go (high) camping under the stars in the Orinda hills with the California Shakespeare Theater. One doesn't think of Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep as a play for the great outdoors, but now-former Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone and his dynamic actor duo make a strong case for Ludlam being funny anywhere.
As swan songs go, Moscone picked a doozy, if only because he leaves them laughing.
A toast to Champagne and her wily Poon
Just when it seems all the colorful characters are fleeing San Francisco, along comes an Oasis of (fake) tits and glitter. Yes, Oasis, the new South of Market nightclub, has defied the real estate odds and become a haven for performers of all stripes, including impresario D'Arcy Drollinger, a co-owner of the club along with drag legend Heklina and several other partners.
Drollinger has to be one of the most interesting people working in Bay Area theater.
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.
The delights of TheatreWorks' time-twisting Triangle
In the wake of my review of TheatreWorks' world premiere musical Triangle someone tweeted a link to the review and suggested that the show could make it to Broadway. I have some thoughts about that.
Cal Shakes dreams a Dream under the stars
There's so much talk about nature and stars in Life Is a Dream that it seems perfectly natural to be sitting outside on a temperate summer night watching Pedro Calderón de la Barca's 1635 play about thwarting destiny and connecting to the deepest truths of human existence.
California Shakespeare Theater's production of Dream, a beautiful if thorny play, offers the chance to see a work that is all too rarely performed.
Shout to the top with Shotgun's Girls
Would that Caryl Churchill's 1982 play Top Girls was something of a dated relic in its details of the horrors, tribulations, indignities and injustices suffered by women through the ages. Things may have changed in the 33 years since the play's London debut in the era of Margaret Thatcher, but they haven't changed enough. The play, now being given a sterling production by Shotgun Players feels deeper and more relevant than ever.
It's fascinating to see Top Girls in such close proximity to a much more recent Churchill play, Love and Information ...
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.
Fractured tales confound in ACT's Love and Information
Confounding and captivating in equal measure, American Conservatory Theater's debut production in the newly renovated Strand Theater certainly lives up to its title. Caryl Churchill's Love and Information sounds like a generic title for just about anything in our short-attention-span world, on or off line, and that seems to be part of the point.
More like a curated collection of scenes and short films than an actual play...