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.
The Language of Love
The Language Archive is easily summarized by one bit of breezy irony: A linguist can’t find the words to save his marriage. Fortunately there’s a lot more to Julia Cho’s play, which debuted at South Coast Rep in 2009 and now makes its Bay Area debut courtesy of Symmetry Theatre. Curiously, it’s the second play about a linguist who studies dying languages to play Berkeley in less than a year, after Madeleine George’s Precious Little at Shotgun Players last fall.
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.
Inquiring Minds
A recent transplant to San Francisco from Georgia by way of New York, playwright Lauren Gunderson has taken the Bay Area by storm. Her full-length local debut was last year’s rolling world premiere of her revenge comedy Exit, Pursued by a Bear, and she has shows in the works with seemingly half the theatre companies in town, including Crowded Fire, SF Playhouse, Shotgun Players and Impact Theatre. Now Symmetry Theatre Company, a local outfit devoted to creating more stage opportunities for female Equity actors, gives us the Bay Area premiere of Gunderson’s play Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight
