Sex and Death
Sometimes, no matter how avant-garde a play’s language or structure may be, it can be reduced to a simple thesis statement. Basil Kreimendahl’s Sidewinders, for example, now premiering with the Cutting Ball Theater, boils down to “Binary gender distinctions are overrated.” And Diana Amsterdam’s Carnival Round the Central Figure, produced by Symmetry Theatre Company at Live Oak Theatre, declares in no uncertain terms that people should accept death as part of life and not pretend it isn’t happening.
Hello, Foxes!
Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes may be set in 1900, but the subject matter has something to say to the present day, being essentially about the rich screwing over common folk (and each other) to become even more rich. A new-money family on the rise in the South, the Hubbards are so hungry to make a profit that they’re willing to stoop to pretty much anything to make it happen. Having married into a cotton plantation, they’re wooing a northern cotton mill to come to town and stand to make millions on the deal, but they need the investment of sister Regina’s estranged, terminally ill husband to make it happen.
The Hard Sell
Gender equality in the business world is a vitally important, touchy subject that warrants a lot of discussion and exploration and rectifying, onstage and off. Jennifer Wilson’s And That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of is a play about that topic, and that at least is a good thing. The one-hour show is a first-person account of Wilson’s attempt to get ahead in the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of venture capital in the late 1980s. An independent production under the aegis of Diaspora Productions, LLC, it’s directed by Jennifer Welch, producing artistic director of Tides Theatre, a fledgling theater company that’s taking over the space that SF Playhouse just moved out of.
