Show #32: Den of Thieves, SF Playhouse, March 13.
Stephen Adly Guirgis has been good to SF Playhouse. The provocative 2006 West Coast premiere of Our Lady of 121st Street and 2007 production of Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train were standout hits of past seasons, so the Bay Area premiere of a new Guirgis play...
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Show #31: Juliet, San Francisco State University, March 12.
In between his highly stylized professional shows such as his recent Faust Part 1 and Macbeth at Shotgun Players, playwright/director Mark Jackson returns frequently to his alma mater San Francisco State to direct students in the theater department, as he did last year with...
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Show #30: Handless, Ragged Wing Ensemble, March 5.
Ragged Wing Ensemble’s new play Handless is based on the folk tale “The Handless Maiden,” and it’s very true to the meandering form of fairy tales, full of twists and turns and quests, which is another way to say that it’s two and a half hours...
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Show #29: Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, March 3.
Oy vey, this play. There’s a lot of interesting subject matter in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s world premiere of Naomi Iizuka’s Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West about the introduction of photography to Japan in the 1800s, but what we get...
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Show #28: Mirrors in Every Corner, Intersection for the Arts, March 1.
When you walk into Intersection for the Arts to see Mirrors on Every Corner, the new play by 25-year-old playwright Oakland native Chinaka Hodge, it looks more like a gallery exhibit than a stage set. Evan Bissell’s art installation and set design run...
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Show #27: An Anonymous Story by Anton Chekhov, Central Works, February 28.
Let’s get this out of the way first. An Anonymous Story by Anton Chekhov isn’t one of Chekhov’s plays. Like most Central Works plays, it’s by company co-director Gary Graves in collaboration with the cast and crew. It is, however, based on a...
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Show #26: Don’t Feel: The Death of Dahmer, Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory & 1 1 11ArtGroup, February 27.
In the program notes for Don’t Feel: The Death of Dahmer, director Eric Wilcox describes some of the concerns he had about the one-man show about “corpse-fucking cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer written and performed by Evan Johnson: “Why...
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Show #25: The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, Brava! for Women in the Arts, February 26.
Postponed from artistic director Raelle Myrick-Hodges’s inaugural season last year at Brava! for Women in the Arts, the West Coast premiere of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles was finally unveiled at Brava! last Friday to an enthusiastic opening-night crowd that guffawed...
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Show #24: The Caucasian Chalk Circle, American Conservatory Theater, February 24.
Director John Doyle previously came to American Conservatory Theater to kick off the national tour of his acclaimed stripped-down Broadway staging of Sweeney Todd, in which all the instruments were played by the actors. Now he’s back at ACT taking a similar tack with...
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Show #23: Pearls over Shanghai, Thrillpeddlers, February 21.
Pearls over Shanghai opened in June of last year as part of Thrillpeddlers’ Theatre of the Ridiculous Revival and had just kept going ever since, playing to sold-out houses and extending its run repeatedly, most recently to August. It’s been a phenomenal success for the San Francisco...
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