ACT Zooms into a new era with Warcraft
Credit creative directors and designers who are working to turn Zoom into a dynamic theater space. American Conservatory Theater kicks off the fall theater, such as it is, with a production that amply demonstrates how effective Zoom can be as a play space. In Love and Warcraft by Madhuri Shekar is a co-production with Alaska's Perseverance Theatre, and it's a remount of a production made last spring, at the start of quarantine, with members of ACT's MFA Class of 2022 under the direction of Peter J. Kuo.
G-L-O-R-I-A! Gloria fascinates, frightens at ACT
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Gloria is a fascinating play. It's a lively workplace comedy until it's an unsettling workplace drama. There's a sheen of satire to it but also reality and heart. There's a bracing boldness to it that makes its two hours fly by, and its path is never exactly what you think it will be.
Life, death and more fill Will Eno's Wakey, Wakey at ACT
Will Eno is one of the most interesting playwrights in the theaterverse. He's weird and brilliant, funny and deeply humane. Because there can be an oblique and highly theatrical quality to his work, he has often been compared to Beckett, but for me, I feel more Thornton Wilder (somewhere between The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town). He wrestles in creative and insightful and surprising ways with what it is to be alive and how we're all connected by the knowledge that none of us is getting out of here alive and that we could all probably be doing better when it comes to being aware of our lives as we're living them.
Cricket tests history in ACT's feisty Testmatch
You could say that Kate Attwell's Testmatch, the world premiere play at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, is about cricket. You could also say it's about untangling the gnarly knots of history. But the impact, especially in the savvy way Attwell has constructed the play, comes from its emphasis on the deep interconnection of everything to everything.
Churchill is tops in ACT's Top Girls
The mind of Caryl Churchill is an extraordinary place to spend an evening. Happily, this theater season, the Bay Area will see an abundance of Churchill, beginning with American Conservatory Theater's season-opening Top Girls from 1982.