Be mindful of Aurora’s Trouble
If only playwright Alice Childress could see Margo Hall's performance in her 1955 play Trouble in Mind now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company.
Hall has long been one of those Bay Area actors you go out of your way to see, whether she's directing, acting or writing. Somewhat unbelievably, Hall is only just getting around to making her Aurora debut, but what a debut! Hall plays Wiletta Mayer, a successful African-American actress on the Broadway stage. Wiletta isn't biter exactly, but she's learned how to play the race game in order to succeed in her chosen field. She's hardened, and this is especially evident when she's instructing a Broadway novice (Jon Joseph Gentry as John) before they begin rehearsals on a new play with a mostly black cast that's bound to court controversy because it's an anti-lynching screed.
Entering heavenly Pastures
Spectacular things are happening at the Bruns Amphitheater – on stage and off.
At long last, California Shakespeare Theater is getting a performance venue worthy of its status as one of the Bay Area's foremost theater companies. Improvements to the Bruns include a new box office, new landscaping and, most importantly, a beautiful new 7,850-square-foot building to house its food operations and some spectacular bathrooms (if you ever used the bathrooms in the old endlessly "temporary" facility, you'll appreciate just how spectacular these new facilities really are).
The improvements aren't quite done yet, but they're already upping the ante on the Cal Shakes experience – and just in time for Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone's 10-year anniversary with the company.
So many things to celebrate ̶ not the least of which is the world-premiere production on the Bruns stage.
No equivocating: this is good theater
Marin Theatre Company's Equivocation is enormously enjoyable theater.
I liked Bill Cain's play last summer when I saw it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and I still like its muscular, hugely entertaining theatricality. The Marin production, directed by Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, is more intimate but just as rewarding.
The cast boasts some of the Bay Area's finest – Anna Bullard (the lone woman in the cast), Lance Gardner, Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker, Andy Murray, and Charles Shaw Robinson – as they crawl around J.B. Wilson's scaffolding set that reminds of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Where else would you want to set a story of William Shakespeare, or Shagspeare as he's called in the play?
As Cain's play imagines Will attempting to write a piece of propaganda theater for bonny King James (and his henchman, Sir Robert Cecil) and discovering that what he writes has to be the truth or nothing, something very interesting happens. Cain's immense knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and British history coalesce into a drama that feels recognizably human yet epic in its scope and more than just a little bit contemporary.
Truce is out of sight
You could describe Marilee Talkington in a number of ways, starting with the fact that she is going blind. She is partially sighted, visually impaired, visually handicapped, sensorily challenged; she has low vision or no vision. She has been called Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Helen Keller. And those are only a few of the descriptions that come up in Talkington's compelling 90-minute solo show Truce at San Francisco's Noh Space.
After seeing the show, other descriptions that come to mind: dynamic actor, intriguing writer and astonishingly deft performer.
Duct tape and yuks: holding comedy hostage
How strange it is to see two wildly different comedies at two different theaters and find they have something in common: plot twists that involve the restraining of characters by tying them down with duct tape.Since when did that become an element of slapstick? Has someone alerted Abbott and Costello?At the SF Playhouse, more than half the cast spends the second act bound to chairs with duct tape and plastic wrap (with extra cling, no doubt) in Stephen Adley Guirgis’ Den of Thieves. And down in Palo Alto at the Lucie Stern Theatre, the TheatreWorks production of Sunsets and Margaritas by José Cruz González also hauls out the sturdy gray multi-use tape to restrain a major character. One more instance of this and we’d have ourselves a trend (apparently a trend only requires a trio of appearances).