Good “Fences” from Good Neighbors
Cal Shakes’s Fences brings maternal power to a tale of fathers and sons.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Lady Windermere’s Fan Club
A stunning local cast makes a sparkling Oscar Wilde classic a must-see at Cal Shakes. You can read my review over on KQED Arts.
LaBrutality Beneath the Surface
Neil LaBute is known for unflinching depictions of human cruelty, so what happens when he takes on race in the American heartland? This Is How It Goes. My review is up on KQED Arts.
A Classic with Spunk
Spunk is a bit of a departure for California Shakespeare Theater. It was just a decade ago that then-new artistic director Jonathan Moscone started adding modern classics to the company’s steady diet of Shakespeare—plays by Wilder, Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett and Coward. And then the adaptations of classics: David Edgar’s Dickens; Amy Freed’s Restoration comedies; Octavio Solis’s Steinbeck stories; Amanda Dehnert’s Shakespeare rock musical. Now Cal Shakes looks beyond dead white men for its latest presentation of an adapted classic: Spunk, George C. Wolfe’s acclaimed 1989 adaptation of a trio of short stories by seminal Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, three very different portraits of struggling African-Americans in rural Florida and big-city Harlem.
Things Fall Apart
Some days it’s all you can do just to hold it together, and sometimes every day is like that. That’s the feeling one gets from Minneapolis playwright Allison Moore’s latest comedy, Collapse, which plays Aurora Theatre in a National New Play Network rolling world premiere that will subsequently play Curious Theatre in Denver and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas in different productions. Collapse was one of the plays read last season as one of the finalists in Aurora’s Global Age Project new works initiative, and is the second GAP play to go on to a main stage production at the theater.
