Joseph's Bengal Tiger prowls the SF Playhouse stage
The last time San Francisco Playhouse produced a play by Rajiv Joseph -- Animals Out of Paper in 2009 -- the young playwright was becoming one of the hottest writers in the country. TheatreWorks produced his The North Pool in 2011, just as his Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was preparing to bow on Broadway in a starry production that featured Robin Williams as the titular caged beast.
Joseph, with his Tony Award and Pulitzer nominations, has fully emerged as an American playwright of note and his work is back at San Francisco Playhouse to launch a new season, the second in the stellar theater on Post Street.
In Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Joseph has crafted a challenging war/ghost story that wrestles with the very notion of god (or, if you prefer, God).
Cal Shakes' lukewarm take on Winter's Tale
On a refreshingly brisk autumn night, California Shakespeare Theater's A Winter's Tale aimed to tell a sad story with a happy ending. "A sad story is best for winter," or so we're told by a young boy not long for this earth.
Even by Shakespearean standards, this is a strange play, with its jarring shifts in tone, unexplained fits of jealousy, interference by the gods and living statuary. In other words, it's a director's dream – here's a wacky play that needs lots of interpretation and massaging to make it work for a modern audience.
Cal Shakes previously closed the season with A Winter's Tale in 2002 with a massive production in which the audience moved around to accommodate the shift in action from Sicilia to Bohemia. Director Lisa Peterson hauled out screaming teenagers, a school bus and an all-out rave before audience members headed back into the theater proper for the moving, if fantastical, finale.
This time around, we get a wildly different Tale directed by Patricia McGregor, who returns after the triumph of last season's Spunk.
In praise of Anthony and Sharon and Lorri and Spike
If you spend any time at all going to theater in the San Francisco Bay Area, you soon see that we have some extraordinary homegrown talent populating our local stages. That's not empty boosterism – rah, Bay Area! – but something nearing actual fact – rah, working Bay Area actors in it for the long haul! In just the last month or so, Marin Theatre Company, TheatreWorks, Aurora Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theater and Magic Theatre have opened their seasons with at least one dazzling, shake-your-head-in-wonder performance by a Bay Area actor.
Now Berkeley Repertory Theatre gives a triple scoop of local actor goodness in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the local premiere of Christopher Durang's Tony Award-winning comedy.
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.
What you should know about Impact’s What Every Girl Should Know
The first thing to know about Impact Theatre's What Every Girl Should Know, a one-act play by Monica Byrne, is that it's a gripping play about matters physical and spiritual. It's also very well produced by director Tracy Ward and an excellent cast of four. This is a play set in 1914 but feels, rather sadly, of the moment because, it seems, there will always be people (old, white men mostly) who want to keep other people (women, mostly) as ignorant as possible, especially when it comes to their own bodies and – heavens forfend – sex.
Byrne's drama is set in the tight confines of Room 14, a four-bed dorm room at St. Mary's, a Catholic girl's reformatory on New York's Lower East Side. The year is 1914, and the church is the ultimate power for the occupants of Room 14.
Personal is political in Aurora’s fiery Revolution
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company opens its 22nd season with Amy Herzog's smart, moving drama After the Revolution, an ambitious play that juggles American history, the cost of political idealism and how one generation affects another – for good and ill – in a tight-knit family.
This is the same Herzog whose 4000 Miles was so good at American Conservatory Theater earlier this year (read my review here), and this play, which predates 4000 Miles, also features the character of Vera Joseph (who is based on Herzog's own grandmother).
Bonnie & Clyde live (and die) by the Shotgun (Players)
Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that Berkeley's Shotgun Players are reviving the myth of gangsters Bonnie and Clyde. The celebrated criminals storm the Ashby Stage on the run from the law and nearing the end of their bloody, well-chronicled run of robberies and murders across the American south. They enter an abandoned barn to take cover. He's got a pistol in each hand and she's wielding -- what else? -- a shotgun. She is, it turns out, a true shotgun player.
British playwright Adam Peck's stage version of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not really anything like the revered 1967 movie version except for the basic facts of the story.
TheatreWorks' shining Desert Cities
I sort of fell in love with Jon Robin Baitz more than 20 years when I saw his The Substance of Fire at the Magic Theatre. He was an astoundingly intelligent playwright crafting dramas that felt of another time and from a writer well beyond his years.
Baitz has continued to turn out compelling dramas over the decades, but it was his stint in Hollywood that seemed to really recharge his theatrical battery. After a not-so-great experience in the world of network television, Baitz wrote what might be his best play yet, Other Desert Cities, which receives its local premiere from TheatreWorks.
I reviewed the play for the Palo Alto Weekly, an excerpt of which follows.
Good People is good theater at Marin Theatre Co.
There's something to be said for a play that is simply good. Not earth shattering or even profound. It may not take the form of drama in new and exciting directions or reinvent the notion of entertainment, but a good play does indeed entertain.
David Lindsay-Abaire is a smart, funny, compassionate writer who makes good plays (and happens to have a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf for the play Rabbit Hole). They have depth and feeling and almost always a good laugh or two (or three). His most recent arrival in the Bay Area is Good People, a slice-of-life comedy/drama receiving its local premiere as the season-opener for Marin Theatre Company.
And here's what's really interesting: not only is the play about something – choices, luck and the American class system – but also manages to be heartfelt, thoroughly entertaining and, at times, even a little unsettling.
Looking at the stars: Cal Shakes fans flames of Wilde's Winderemere
If you want, as Oscar Wilde did, to make cogent and funny points about men and women, husbands and wives and the notion of good people vs. bad people, what better way to do that than by putting Danny Scheie in a dress and letting him unleash his inner Dame Maggie Smith?
Scheie's performance as the Duchess of Berwick in the California Shakespeare Theater's production Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first major theatrical it, is one of many pleasures in director Christopher Liam Moore's beguiling production.
To Sirs with love: Pinpointing Pinter at Berkeley Rep
What pure theatrical pleasure it is to spend two hours in the baffling world of playwright Harold Pinter with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart as our guides. These two fascinating craftsmen, under the direction of the equally astute Sean Mathias, are a show unto themselves in the choices they make, the characters they draw and the relationships they forge with each other and with the audience. No Man's Land may be about some sort of limbo between the vibrancy of youth and the incapacity of old age (or, more simply, between living life and just waiting for death), but in truth, it's a masterful workshop in which gifted thespians practice their craft.
Pinter's play itself is an enigma (as so many Pinter plays seem to be). What is actually going on? Well, two older gentlemen, Hirst (Stewart) and Spooner (McKellen) have met at a pub near London's Hampstead Heath and have returned to Hirst's well-appointed home for a few (dozen) nightcaps.
Earnest delights at Stanford Summer Theater
How nice to report that Stanford Summer Theater launches its 15th anniversary season with a crackling good production of Oscar Wilde's masterwork, The Importance of Being Earnest directed by Lynne Sofer.
I reviewed the show for the Palo Alto Weekly. Here are a few excerpts.
Orinda hills, young lovers captivate in Cal Shakes’ Romeo and Juliet
What's immediately striking about California Shakespeare Theater's Romeo and Juliet, the second show of the season, is the apparent absence of a set. When the company last dipped into this romantic Shakespearean tragedy (in 2009 – read the review here), director Jonathan Moscone erected an enormous, cement-looking wall scrawled with graffiti to evoke the mean streets of Verona. For this production, director Shana Cooper and designer Daniel Ostling have opted for minimalism to glorious effect.
Ostling has built no walls, only platforms of rough wood, leaving the full beauty of the gold and green Orinda hills to dominate the sightline until the sun sets and Lap Chi Chu's lights help give the open space on stage some architectural form (the columns of light stretching into the sky to convey a tomb are especially, eerily effective). With so much space to fill, you'd think this cast – also minimalist with only seven actors playing all the roles – might have trouble filling it, but that turns out not to be the case. Somehow the epic feel of the landscape only trains more attention on the flawed, flailing, ferociously romantic people at the heart of this oft-told tale.
Divine Sister act raises holy, hilarious hell at NCTC
Clutch your rosary beads and get ready to laugh. New Conservatory Theatre Center's The Divine Sister by Charles Busch (a national treasure, even if the entire nation isn't quite aware of it yet) is the funniest thing you'll see on a stage this Pride Season
Director F. Allen Sawyer and his spot-on cast – some in drag, some in habits, some in miniskirts, some in full-body black latex – are having a blast with Busch's wry and wily send-up of ever movie ever made featuring nuns. From Soeur Sourire and her guitar-strumming hit "Dominique" to Roz Russell riding holy herd on Hayley Mills in The Trouble with Angels, this show doesn't miss a reference.
A wildly Happy homecoming at TheatreWorks
In his wildly cynical, angry, sad and, ultimately, happy new play Wild With Happy, playwright/actor (and former San Franciscan) Colman Domingo is doing several admirable things. In telling the story of a 40-year-old man who has just lost his mother, he is telling a modern fairy tale in which the mother – so often long dead and gone in such tales – is the driving force. And he's pushing hard against the enormous cultural boulder that goes by various names – cynicism, snark, realism – but is really just the absence of hope.
In its West Coast premiere from TheatreWorks, Wild With Happy is a light farce until it isn't.
Actors put some life in SF Playhouse’s Party
If you've seen a Mike Leigh movie, the conversational rhythms and that true-to-life quality of nothing happening/everything happening will seem familiar on stage in Abigail's Party, a play Leigh devised in 1978 with the help of his actors (Leigh is famous for improvising scripts). Though not nearly as substantial or illuminating as some of Leigh's best movies – Life Is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Another Year – Abigail's Party has some delightful gin-soaked moments as an older couple and a younger couple mix it up Virginia Woolf-style under the wary (and woozy) eye of a neighbor who would probably rather be anywhere but this party.
At San Francisco Playhouse, director Amy Glazer and her quintet of actors is working wonders with the subtext in Leigh's script, finding laughs that perhaps Leigh never even knew about.
Stunning Arcadia returns to ACT
The ideas are as big as the heart in Tom Stoppard's glorious Arcadia, a play that seems only to get better with time.
When American Conservatory Theater Artistic Director Carey Perloff first directed the play in 1995 at the Stage Door Theatre, the production and the play came off beautifully and with more warmth than the chilly 1995 production at New York's Lincoln Center. But now that Perloff has revived the play at the Geary Theater, it's like switching from an cozy, old-fashioned living room TV to high-def, widescreen wonder.
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.