A Night to remember as Cal Shakes opens season
Spring and early summer 2013 may well be remembered as the Great Montoya Surge.
In April, Richard Montoya – one third of the legendary San Francisco-born comedy trio Culture Clash – premiered a play with Campo Santo called The River (read the review here), and it was funny and brash and heartfelt and messy and pretty wonderful. It had to do with, among other things, death and immigration, and it made you crave more Montoya work.
We didn't have to wait long. Montoya's American Night: The Ballad of Juan José opened the California Shakespeare Theater season Saturday on a night so warm and beautiful under the stars in Orinda you wonder why every play can't be done outdoors (how quickly we forget those freezing cold, windy, foggy nights when nary a star is visible).
Shotgun’s dramatic attack of the clones
p>When playwright Lauren Gunderson arrived on the Bay Area theater scene, she arrived in a big way. First, she blew everyone away with her comedy Exit, Pursued by a Bear and then she proved to be incredibly prolific, with seven plays debuting in two years. Her By and By, having its world premiere at Shotgun Players, is one of three new plays she'll open this year in the Bay Area.
The play, a sort of humanistic/science fiction exploration of what human cloning might really be like, is a great example of why a Gunderson script is so appealing. Delving into the serious implications of creating human beings outside the natural order, Gunderson has one character express it this way: "God is pissed off because you're messing with his shit." And later in the play, she has another character say in chilling tones...
Magic reaches a dark, rhythmic Terminus
Safe to say you're not going to see anything like Mark O'Rowe's Terminus, the aptly named conclusion to Magic Theatre's 46th season. If you saw O'Rowe's last show at the Magic, the extraordinary Howie the Rookie 13 years ago, you'll know to expect vivid, visceral language delivered in monologues. That seems to be O'Rowe's specialty, along with depicting the rougher edges of Dublin with a strange sort of compassion and a gift for elemental storytelling that grabs hold and won't let go.
While Howie operated in a familiar street thug/crime world setting, Terminus is something altogether different. Like one of his three characters in the play, O'Rowe pushes himself out on a precarious limb and leaps. There's a distinct criminal element here as well, along with descriptions of violence that are somehow more vivid and horrific than if we were actually seeing them, but there's also a supernatural, even spiritual, aspect to the play that is remarkably moving.
Sweet melancholy pervades Berkeley Rep's Elizabeth
You would never, ever expect to see a production of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In what has become a staple of community theaters everywhere, a man and a woman sit at a table and read letters from a binder that tell the story of their characters' slowly evolving love story over many decades. It's sweet, it's conventional, it's incredibly cheap to produce. Unless the two actors were Rita Moreno and David Sedaris, this epistolary play would be the antithesis of a Berkeley Rep production. All this talk of Love Letters because there's a new two-person, letter-driven love story on the theatrical block: Sarah Ruhl's Dear Elizabeth, now at Berkeley Rep.
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.
Berkeley Rep's Pericles: Prince of Tyre-less theatrics
There's a rough beauty to director Mark Wing-Davey's Pericles, Prince of Tyre now on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust Stage. The industrial look of the bi-level set by Douglas Stein and Peter Ksander indicates that this will be a utilitarian telling of this dubious Shakespeare tale – dubious only because we don't really know how much (if any) of the play the Bard actually wrote.
From the giant crane that hoists everything from crystal chandeliers to pirates' nets to the goddess Diana, to the sliding metal doors that bang and clang during scene transitions, this is a production that revs and lurches like an engine that could use a little more tuning
But that's not to say that this re-imagining of Pericles by Wing-Davey and Jim Calder isn't entertaining or even, at times, quite captivating.
Campo Santo's wild ride on a raging River
Some rivers run with water. This one is a torrent of words – some really extraordinary words.
Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts' world premiere of The River, a dazzling fusion of poetry, comedy, satire, loss and beauty, heralds the welcome return of Culture Clash's Richard Montoya, who has become a powerful theatrical force. Montoya's American Night: The Ballad of Juan José was a triumph at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and has gone on to be produced around the country. Bay Area audiences will get a second helping of Montoya when American Night opens the season for California Shakespeare Festival in June.
What's so exciting about Montoya's voice is...
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.
Crowded Fire's Bereaved hawks drugs! nudity! absurdity!
You know you've got your audience right where you want them when they're laughing at the rape fantasy being played out – rather graphically and violently – on stage. It's easy to imagine an audience sitting in wide-eyed horror as the scene, which also involves black face, goes to some surprising places.
But by this point in Thomas Bradshaw's The Bereaved, a Crowded Fire Theater production at the Thick House on Potrero Hill, we've come to expect the outrageous, the politically incorrect, the shocking.
Life, death and a '70s groove in Magic's Happy Ones
At first the music is loud and fun. Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" seems like the perfect audio accompaniment to a grown-up birthday party scene set in a Garden Grove, Califorina, suburban home, where the swimming pool gleams and the neighbors all swing with martinis well in hand.
Then there's silence. Tragedy strikes, and the SoCal dream life has no fitting accompaniment...until it does, and that sound comes from another part of the planet – Vietnam to be exact. There's a smattering of Creedence, of Paul Simon and Randy Newman. And when the good-time music returns, in the form of Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime," but the "living the dream" moment has passed, and it's time for new songs and new chapters.
That's the story of The Happy Ones, an achingly beautiful play by Julie Marie Myatt now at Magic Theatre.
Take it on faith: see Marin's Whipping Man
If Matthew Lopez were a miner, he could brag that he uncovered a rich mineral vein of enormous wealth, both cultural and commercial. But Lopez isn't a miner. He's a playwright, and though there are similarities to be sure, what Lopez brings to the surface in his fascinating play The Whipping Man is a mostly untold chapter of American history with deep spiritual resonance.
Lopez, whom Bay Area audiences met earlier this year when his play Somewhere ran at TheatreWorks, is a young playwright of note. The Whipping Man is the play that first brought him notice, and it receives its Bay Area premiere courtesy of Marin Theatre Company and co-producer Virginia Stage Company and in association with San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.
At SF Playhouse, pretty is as Pretty does
I've come to learn that when a Neil LaBute play or movie crosses my path, I detour around it, ignore it or make an immediate donation to a women's support or LBGT organization. LaBute is a really good writer – his ear for dialogue is impeccable, and his ferocity for storytelling is admirable. I just rarely like what his characters have to say or where his stories end up.
That said, LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty, now at San Francisco Playhouse, marks the first time I've left one of the writer's play and not wanted to bash my head against the wall on the way out. Sure, there are traces of misogyny, homophobia and racism (mostly coming from the mouth of one classic LaButian male character). But what's interesting here is that LaBute is being provocative in the name of evolution, of self-actualization, of emotional growth.
Fallaci fascinates at Berkeley Rep, even if her play doesn’t
Oriana Fallaci was a fascinating, riveting person in real life, a crusading, eviscerating journalist whose intensity often made her part of the story. In journalist and playwright Lawrence Wright's world-premeire play Fallaci at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Fallaci lives again, and true to form, she's a compelling personality whose intelligence, drive and complicated emotional life provide an abundance of drama.
As played by Concetta Tomei, Fallaci may be dealing with illness by shutting herself into her New York apartment, but she's still ferocious and prickly.
ACT's Metaphor: a bright balloon that pops
It seems there are two plays battling it out in American Conservatory Theater's world premiere of Dead Metaphor by Canadian plawyright George F. Walker. Three of the characters are broadly comic – one foot in the real world, the other in a dark comedy of extremes. And the other three characters are just plain folks, getting by as best they can with anger, fear and desperation causing storms on a daily basis.
Both of those plays are pretty interesting, at least in Act 1. The comedy is especially biting as the three exaggerations – a politician running for reelection (the marvelous René Augesen getting to show of a real flair for biting comedy), her increasingly agitated husband (a grimly funny Anthony FuscoTom Bloom) acting erratically because of fatal tumor bearing down on his brain.
Wrestling affections in Impact’s As You Like It
p>Shakespeare didn't drop any F-bombs in his comedy As You Like It, but that doesn't stop Impact Theatre. There are lots of non-Shakespeare asides in this highly edited, streamlined version from director Melissa Hillman, but purists shouldn't despair. Such contemporary additions are usually thrown in during scene transitions or to punctuate a joke that has already landed. And they're a hell of a lot of fun, as is the entire 2 1/2- hour show.
Hillman and Impact often draw from the Shakespeare well, but rather serving the plays up straight, they're turned into potent cocktails, with some darker and bloodier than others. With As You Like It, Hillman and her game cast are reveling in relationships. Some of the more Shakespearean touches in the show – like the characters of Jaques the grump and Touchstone the clown don't fare as well because they're too much on the periphery and don't fit in to the gender-bending love stories jumping through hoops in the center ring.
Yo, Mofo! SF Playhouse tips a mighty fine Hat
[warning: this review does not hide or disguise the word "motherfucker" in the title of the play at hand]
The comedy, the intensity and all that rough language keeps things skittering right along in the San Francisco Playhouse production of The Motherfucker with the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis. The play is this rush of plot and character and language, then the sadness and despair lands. It takes Lionel Richie and the Commodores to underscore it, but man oh man is it there.
In so many ways, Gurigis' Hat is about growing up, about taking yourself and the world you live in seriously enough to find purpose and pursue it with as much discipline as you can muster. The grown-ups in the play, let it be said, don't do such a good job on the discipline part, although most of them have (or find) some degree of purpose.
Aurora's Heaven falls well short
There's a lot to like in the world premiere of Anthony Clarvoe's family drama Our Practical Heaven at Aurora Theatre Company. Laughs come frequently, the production itself – full of light and space – is lovely and the six women in the cast are all quite interesting.
If only there were more snap, both dark and comic, in Clarvoe's play.
Magic's Se Llama Cristina or What's in a name?
There are moments when Octavio Solis' darkly poetic writing leaves me breathless. Take this passage from his world-premiere play Se Llama Cristina as two lovers are driving down a lonely highway. The driver looks at his sleeping passenger and says: "And your head is leanin' against the window and the passing cars light up your face like a Hollywood starlet. Famous, then not. Famous, then not."
Truth be told, there are also moments when Solis' writing leaves me befuddled, and that happens, too, in Se Llama Cristina. But confusion and mystery is part of the foundation – albeit rocky a rocky one – on which this intriguing drama is built.
Marin's Godot and the impression we exist
I suspect Samuel Beckett knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote Waiting for Godot and left more questions unanswered than answered. The less specific you are, the more your audience members project their own business onto the characters and their situation.
The world Beckett creates could be the depressed past or the post-apocalyptic future. He could be writing about God and religion or about the hell of human existence. His main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, could be clowns or tragic figures or both. It's all up for discussion, open for interpretation. Everything is symbolic or nothing is symbolic and just is what it is and the population has increased. And that's the genius of Beckett and the joy of his most famous play.
The current production at Marin Theatre Company...
ACT's 4000 Miles a journey worth taking
How do you make a hug between grandmother and grandson a high point of a play without making it corny or sentimental? That's the trick playwright Amy Herzog and director Mark Rucker pull off in the compelling drama 4000 Miles now at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater.
The moment comes fairly early in this 90-minute one-act after 21-year-old Leo (Reggie Gowland) has surprised his 91-year-old grandmother, Vera (Susan Blommaert) by showing up in the middle of the night after completing a cross-country bicycle trip from Seattle to Manhattan.