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.
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.
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.
This is the time: Anna Deavere Smith at Berkeley Rep
If you've ever seen a show by our foremost docudramatist, Anna Deavere Smith, you know the power she has over an audience. She conducts extensive interviews on her chosen topic, then she re-creates portions of those interviews an a cannily crafted show that is theatrical in its presentation and righteous in its political and emotional power. She makes her audience think, feel and converse for days (and beyond). Now, with Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, The California Chapter at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, she is going even further. She's turning her show into a full-blown seminar.
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...
TheatreWorks delights with devilish Angels
Boredom, desire and champagne make for a potent cocktail in Noël Coward's 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, now receiving a lively production from TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Director Robert Kelley delivers an elegant outing for this zesty comedy that keeps its focus on two live wire ladies – Jane and Julia, best friends since grammar school.
Women rock the Night at Cal Shakes season opener
Last year, California Shakespeare Theater offered an off-season touring production of Twelfth Night that featured an all-women cast and made stops in prisons, homeless shelters, senior communities and the like. It was a stripped-down, wonderful production, and apparently its impact was strong enough that outgoing artistic director Jonathan Moscone (he bids adieu in August after he directs The Mystery of Irma Vep) decided to pull the play into the company's 41st season.
With a different director (Christopher Liam Moore), this is a very different Twelfth Night but with two key returning players and one overriding concept.
Empty Nesters explores a grand marital canyon
A marriage heads over a cliff, literally, in Garret Jon Groenveld's The Empty Nesters, a co-production of PlayGround and Virago Theatre Company and part of PlayGround's 19th annual Festival of New Works.
Luckily, the cliff in question is on the western rim of the Grand Canyon, and there happens to be a popular tourist spot called Skywalk that allows visitors to make a u-shaped jaunt on a glass walkway, with the canyon floor more than 3,000 feet below them.
One man, two guvnors & 102 belly laughs
Francis Henshall may be one sandwich short of a picnic, as they say, but that's one of many reasons One Man, Two Guvnors is so much fun. Francis' hunger literally drives the first act's zaniness, and truth be told, once that hunger is satisfied, the farce loses a bit (but certainly not all) of its oomph. Thankfully there's a perky skiffle band on stage to keep things bouncing along.
Oh, if only all adaptations could be this fun. When playwright Richard Bean decided to pull Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century comedy into a specific time and place in the 20th century – Brighton, England, 1963 – he did so with an eye to heightening and broadening the comedy from its Venetian origins.
Hooked from the start on Yee's Hookman
Leave it playwright Lauren Yee to bring clear definition to the sub-genre "existential slasher comedy." That's exactly what her Hookman is, a fascinating world-premiere play from Encore Theatre Company that draws laughs from teen speak and the usual first year of college tropes but blends in a rich and disturbing examination of loss, responsibility, maturity and what it is to be a young woman in the 21st century.
Is the man with the hook a real serial killer?
Aurora's Fifth of July more cherry bomb than firework
It's easy to imagine how, in 1978, Lanford Wilson's The Fifth of July was remarkable for several reasons. It featured a loving gay couple at the center of its family-friend-reunion plot and didn't make a big deal about it. That's not what the play is about, but the couple and their relationship are as important as any other on stage. Also, the play wrestles with the repercussions of the 1960s anti-war movements and how all that passionate activism evolved, and in many cases, dissipated into the '70s.
Some have compared Wilson to Chekhov, and it's easy to see why...
Trials, tribulations in powerful Passes at Berkeley Rep
Some houses leak when it rains. For Shelah, the deluge inside is almost as severe as the one outside, and that's just the water. The metaphorical flood – of tragedy – has only just begun.
Tarell Alvin McCraney's Head of Passes, a co-production of Berkeley Repertory Theatre and New York's Public Theater, takes its cue from Job, the world's most famous sufferer and faith questioner. This time out, the one who will pray on bended knee and shake her fist at God is Shelah, the matriarch of a family whose Louisiana home sits where three forks of the Mississippi River come together in a wetlands area known as Head of Passes.
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.
SF Playhouse's Stupid Bird f##king soars
In Aaron Posner's Stupid Fucking Bird, an energizing riff on Chekhov's The Seagull, a playwright laments that what he's written is just another play where nothing real happens. You can't really say the same thing about Posner's play.
Bird doesn't change the world, as the fictional playwright at one point says that theater should aim to do, but it does rattle the theatrical cage and clears away some musty clouds that hover over business as usual. It's irreverent, gutsy, funny and even moving – everything you want Chekhov to be but so rarely find in his productions.
Berkeley Rep's tart and tangy Tartuffe keeps the faith
Faith is one of the most valuable and powerful things human beings have to give away, and anyone who takes advantage of that faith with anything less than sincerity and devotion qualifies as the most heinous of villains. That's why Molière's Tartuffe is so damn funny...and dark...and unsettling.
The oft-banned 1667 satirical comedy has had a long history of production and controversy over the last 350 years, and director Dominique Serrand's new production – a co-production of South Coast Repertory (where it opened), Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. – add an admirable chapter to the play's history.
Sublime stories from Word for Word and Alice Munro
Any celebration of Alice Munro merits attention, but when that celebration comes from Word for Word, the ever-astonishing local company that transforms short fiction into brilliant theater with complete fidelity to the original text, attention must not only be paid but also reveled in and savored.
Word for Word brought a Munro story to life in 1999 ("Friend of My Youth"), and the intervening years have brought more acclaim for the Canadian writer and a Nobel Prize for literature. Now that she is rightly revered for her masterful prose, Munro is given a full Word for Word evening in Stories by Alice Munro: "The Office" & "Dolly," a sort of career bookend.