2017 theater in review: Reflections on a powerful year
If you're a theater fan, 2017 was a very good year. If you're an American, depending on your point of view, 2017 was a terrifying year. Quite often, it seemed, the theatrical stage and the national stage were in direct conversation.
Delight and loss dance through Magic's Waltz revival
Any of us would be lucky – beyond lucky – to be as loved as Paula Vogel's brother Carl. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (who, after nearly 50 years as one of the country's preeminent playwrights, will see her first Broadway opening next month with Indecent) wrote The Baltimore Waltz a year after Carl died of complications from AIDS. This is her tribute to him, a love letter from sister to brother, but she accomplishes this with such offbeat originality, whimsy and heart that there's no room for sentimentality or feeble clichés about love and loss.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Magic Theatre has revived The Baltimore Waltz 25 years after hosting its West Coast premiere.
Slow, thoughtful Silence at the Magic
In Naomi Wallace's And I and Silence now at the Magic Theatre we meet two interesting women, Dee and Jamie, who became friends while in prison. Both are in for nine-year stints, and as their bond intensifies, they begin to train one another for a life after prison – a life that will include the two of them together. As lovers? As friends? Not quite clear. But given that Jamie is black and Dee is white and their release will occur in the late '50s, there are all kinds of complications to contemplate.
Rather strangely, the flashback scenes to the prison feel...
Magic's Five Minutes misses the mark
I loved Linda McLean's Any Given Day so much that I proclaimed it my favorite show of 2012 (read my review here). And that makes it all the harder to convey just how much I disliked her world premiere Every Five Minutes at the Magic Theatre.
Turning on a paradigm in Magic's HIR
The last time Taylor Mac was in town, he gave us the five-hour Lily's Revenge with glitter, drag queens, a cast of 40 and so much dazzling theatricality that we were able to withstand his absence in the following three years (read my Lily's Revenge review here)
Mac has continued to wow audiences in shows like his two-man outing with Mandy Patinkin or La Ma Ma's acclaimed The Good Person of Szechwan, but the Magic Theatre was able to lure him back to present the world premiere of something entirely different than Lily's Revenge. This time out, Mac is the playwright of HIR (pronounced like "here"), a fairly traditional two-act, two-plus-hour play that seems like a sitcom filtered through Mac's gender-fluid, ragingly intelligent, funny and passionate artistry.
Sam Shepard feels a Holy song coming on
The new year begins with an intriguing, nearly under-the-radar collaboration. American Conservatory Theater and Campo Santo have jumped into the ring formed by Magic Theatre and dubbed Sheparding America, a far-ranging celebration of Sam Shepard that promises to flare for years to come.
Co-directed by Campo Santo's Sean San José and ACT's Mark Rucker and performed in the near-round at ACT's Costume Shop, Holy Crime: Rock 'n' Roll Sam Shepard is an amalgam of Shepard texts with an infusion of live music. The prologue and epilogue come from 1969's Holy Ghostly and the big chunk in the middle comes from 1972 Tooth of Crime (which Shepard revised in 1997).
The best part of the 85-minute show is...
Wonky tone buries Magic's Buried Child
By all rights, the Magic Theatre's season-opening production of Buried Child by Sam Shepard, the man who helped build the Magic's national reputation during his 12-year stay from the mid-'70s into the early '80s, should be a triumph. Continuing the five-year Sheparding America celebration of the writer's work, the production should be a potent reminder of just how electrifying, unsettling and beautiful Shepard's writing can be.
This is not that production.
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.
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.
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.
2012 flasback: 10 to remember
One of the things I love about Bay Area theater is that picking a Top 10 list is usually a breeze. My surefire test of a great show is one I can remember without having to look at anything to remind me about it. The entire list below was composed in about five minutes, then I had to go look through my reviews to make sure they were all really this year. They were, and it was a really good year.
Magic camps it up with Another Way Home
Director Meredith McDonough's production of Another Way Home, a world-premiere play by Anna Ziegler, at the Magic Theatre, is so sharp, so expertly performed and executed it may take a while to realize that the play itself is a fragment that doesn't amount to much or really even make much sense. There's a play in there I'd like to see, but it's not the one that Ziegler has delivered.
Like John Guare did in Six Degrees of Separation, Ziegler has a well-heeled Manhattan couple address the audience directly as if whatever story they're about to relate has had little effect on them beyond another story from the "anecdote jukebox." They're speaking from the other side of the events that comprise the action of the play, and that distance is a chasm that the drama only occasionally bridges in the play's short, 75-minute running time.
Magic between a tricky spot and The Other Place
There's a slippery quality to Sharr White's The Other Place, the drama opening the Magic Theatre season. The first half of this 80-minute one-act is especially slick as we try to gain our bearings, but White and director Loretta Greco keep tilting the playing field. Just when we think we know what's really going on in the story of a brilliant scientist's life, along comes new information or a trip to the past that reconfigures what we thought we knew.
Memory is a tricky, tricky thing. How accurate or trustworthy are our memories? That's a question that Juliana Smithton should be asking herself, but she's not, because she doesn't know anything's wrong.
Magic time, or what's all the Bruja-ha?
Sometimes names are facts. Like now – there's magic at the Magic Theatre.
The play is Luis Alfaro's world-premiere Bruja, and it's extraordinarily powerful. Even better, it has one foot very firmly grounded in the real world, and the other somewhere else that's hard to describe, but rather than being some twinkly netherworld, this supernatural zone can be dangerous. And deadly.
Being an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, you know this experience wont' end happily. But what you might not know is that Alfaro, who scored at the Magic two years ago with his award-winning Oedipus el Rey, is going to make you care and he'll freak you out a little, maybe a lot.
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.
2011 in the rearview mirror: the best of Bay Area stages
Let's just get right to it. 2011 was another year full of fantastic local theater (and some nice imports). Somehow, most of our theater companies has managed thus far to weather the bruising economy. May the new year find audiences clamoring for more great theater.
1. How to Write a New Book for the Bible by Bill Cain
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Directed by Kent Nicholson
Only a few days ago I was telling someone about this play – my favorite new play of 2011 and the most moving theatrical experience I've had in a long time – and it happened again. I got choked up. That happens every time I try to describe Cain's deeply beautiful ode to his family and to the spirituality that family creates (or maybe that's vice-versa). Nicholson's production, from the excellent actors to the simple, elegant design, let the play emerge in all its glory.
Magic sends tingles through Chafee’s Body
"Once you start to ask," Eleanor says, "there are more questions than answers." Not a surprising statement in a play whose title, Why We Have a Body promises an answer to an implied question. And as Eleanor warns us, once those questions start forming, the answers, they keep multiplying.
Claire Chafee's wonderfully enigmatic play is back at the Magic Theatre to open its 45th anniversary season with a look backward before heading into a season of newer plays. Body is being called a "legacy revival" because it was a huge hit for the Magic in 1993, running for six months and winning a passel of awards. What a welcome return it is.
In the nearly two decades since the play's premiere, it has lost nothing in its sense of humor, sense of mystery and sense of, well, sensuality.
Chafee's is an intellectual world – people living in their heads, in their pasts (the phrase "when I was a child" crops up a lot), in a perpetual state of perplexity – but that world is sliced through by a sharp comedy derived from family fractures and psychological scars.
What’s up, glitter Lily?
Sitting at the computer, hands on the keyboard, I’ve been staring at the screen wondering where to begin describing and opining about The Lily’s Revenge at the Magic Theatre.
Adjectives don’t quite do it justice – much the way that a photograph of an oil painting never really captures the essence and vibrancy of the original work. And the usual critical jabber – Don’t miss it! Theater event of the spring! Unforgettably unique! – seem paltry as well.
It’s not that Lily, the brainchild of writer/performer Taylor Mac, is a landmark work in the canon of Western theater or the reinvention of the art form as we know it. But it’s something really special – a completely absorbing communal experience that turns out to be more than the sum of its abundant parts.