Gotta Get That BART Cop
So a guy decides never to go out again after the LAPD Rodney King beating because it’s just not safe and finally emerges just in time for the Oscar Grant shooting by BART police. My review of Chasing Mehserle is up on KQED Arts and has already pissed at least one guy off in the comments.
The River Rolls Deep
There’s almost no point to reviewing The River. It’s not that kind of play. A world premiere play by Richard Montoya of Culture Clash, The River is a tribute to Luis Saguar, the late cofounder of Intersection for the Arts’ resident theater company Campo Santo, written for and performed by that company. As such, it’s an intensely personal project and ultimately feels very much like an in-joke. Maybe you had to have been there, you had to have known him, to understand what the heck is going on here.
In Tree City It’s a Pity
When Intersection gave up its Valencia Street home a year ago to move into the Chronicle building downtown, it also gave up its dedicated performance space. Since then it’s had to get creative about reimagining and reinventing its space. Last year’s Nobody Move was staged in a basement meeting room, and for Tree City Legends the Intersection office itself has been transformed into a theater, with the action taking place on all sides and amid the audience. Tanya Orellana’s set has walls full of windows with bare lightbulbs in them, and a stack of cinderblocks filled with candles. A screen up front shows Joan Osato’s video projections of trees, rippling water, cathedrals and Felix the Cat, and from time to time we can see through it to a live band set up for a recording session. Written by Dennis Kim, Tree City Legends is a world premiere developed with Intersection, its company-in-residence Campo Santo, Youth Speaks’s theater company the Living Word project, and Ictus.
Playing Against the House
Everybody in Nobody Move is on the move. More specifically, they’re on the run. Gambler Jimmy Luntz is in hiding because he panicked and shot the thug who came to lean on him for bad debts. Booze-soaked Anita has been framed to take the fall for her recent ex-husband’s embezzlement scheme. The two of them meet on the road, and from then on they wait together for their respective trouble to catch up with them.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
Shining Mirrors
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 together, with a mural on the rear wall of one Mission family and a side wall of framed portraits and short ruminations on race and identity from other families around the neighborhood. The seats are obscured by two rolling dividers displaying large photos of the flattened Nimitz Freeway right after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and what looks like the shiny new Mandela Gateway apartment complex across the street from West Oakland BART. A card table with hands dealt sits in the middle of the room, and a baby bassinet hangs low from the ceiling in the corner.
