The Call of the Wild
She’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf all rolled into one.
My review of Ragged Wing Ensemble’s REDWOLF is in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Catholic Reform School Girls in Trouble
There have been a number of dramas exposing the abuse of “fallen” young women in the Magdalen Asylums of Ireland, such as the film The Magdelene Sisters or the play Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan that Wilde Irish did at Berkeley City Club in 2004. Monica Byrne’s new play What Every Girl Should Know takes place in a variant of that setting—this time it’s a Catholic reformatory in New York City circa 1914—but everything about it suggests that this is a very bad place where nothing good could possibly happen.
It’s About Time
When the San Francisco Playhouse moved into its cushy new digs at the former Post Street Theatre, its new main stage was clearly more capacious than its old one. But it was leaving behind not one stage but two at its erstwhile home above the Shelton Theatre, and one interesting question was what would become of the company’s Sandbox Series of small-scale world premieres on its second stage. One show in the series, Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, was originally scheduled for shortly after the move, but was quietly shelved.
Ethnical Difficulties
It’s funny that the night after I saw The Breach, in which racist imagery is offered up as an exhibit of the continuing harmful legacy of slavery, I’d see a show that’s also critiquing ethnic stereotypes, this time by gleefully reveling in their very offensiveness. Impact Theatre’s world premiere of Enrique Urueta’s Learn to Be Latina is an often screamingly funny show offering a heaping helping of “oh no he didn’t,” plus what’s no doubt the most priceless glory hole moment I’ve ever seen on stage.
