Miss Bennet If You’re a Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune
The overlooked Bennet middle sister gets her moment in Pride and Prejudice sequel.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Old School Oppression
Tarell Alvin McCraney is back with a heartbreaking coming-of-age drama at Marin Theatre Company.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
A Lad, Two Lasses and a Lasso
WONDER WEDNESDAY
Marin Theatre Company’s Lasso of Truth seems like it was pretty much made for me. It’s a play about the creator of Wonder Woman (and his wife and their lover), as well as the cultural legacy of America’s favorite superheroine. And yeah, I’m pretty much in the bag for that one from the start. But at the same time I’m a pretty tough room, because I know things about Wonder Woman, to put it mildly. I’d pretty much have to, writing about her past adventures every week.
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.
And Then There’s Maud
San Francisco playwright/director Mark Jackson started a fruitful relationship with Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company with his 2006 production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. While Shotgun Players across town has premiered many of Jackson’s own works as a writer/director, his work with Aurora up till now has been strictly as a director, focused on inventive stagings of classics such as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and a new adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Now Aurora has commissioned a new play that goes right back to Salome with Salomania, about onetime San Franciscan dancer Maud Allan.
