George and Martha — Sad, Sad, Sad
The booze and barbs flow in Shotgun’s stylized new take on Virginia Woolf.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Family Reunion of the Dead
Shotgun Players presents an unforgettable Eurydice.
Read my review on KQED Arts. Read more
In Soviet Russia
Being called in for an unexpected meeting with your boss is nerve-racking, especially in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. My review of The Letters at Aurora Theatre Company is on KQED Arts.
Gant, Get It Out of My Head
Edward Gant brings his traveling Victorian freak show of heartbreak to Shotgun’s Ashby Stage. My review is on KQED Arts.
Solo Plus Five
Monologist Josh Kornbluth brings along another actor and a live band, but Sea of Reeds is still pretty much a monologue. You can read my reviewon KQED Arts.
Mother’s Way
It’s an exhausting week, with five openings back-to-back in five days. The first of them is Mark Jackson’s staging of Marin Theatre Company’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh’s often hilarious, aching and brutal portrait of a needy and manipulative elderly mother and her resentful 40-year-old daughter/caretaker. My review is in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
A Cesspool to Celebrate
There have been umpteen zillion variations and adaptations of Woyzeck, assembled from unsorted fragments that author Georg Büchner left when he died in 1837 at the age of 24. The Shotgun Players production under the direction of local auteur Mark Jackson uses a high-profile musical version from the year 2000, adapted by Ann-Christin Rommen and Wolfgang Wiens with a concept by original director Robert Wilson and songs by Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan that Waits later recorded on his 2002 album Blood Money.
Is She Weird?
Aurora Theatre Company celebrates Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday with his lesser-known Summer and Smoke rewrite, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Y’all can head on over to today’s Marin IJ to see what I thought of it.
It’s Not Easy Being Queen
As acclaimed as he is for original works such as Shotgun Players’ The Death of Meyerhold and The Forest War, what’s particularly fascinating about local writer-director Mark Jackson’s work is his treatment of classic texts, from inventive stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for Shotgun and Strindberg’s Miss Julie at Aurora to dizzying choreography-oriented desconstructions such as Juliet at San Francisco State and his Three Sisters riff Yes, Yes to Moscow at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Somewhere in between are his adaptations, which bear the unmistakable mark of his strong visual and highly stylized approach while remaining much more of a conversation with the original work than a reinvention of it.
