Peeling the Onion of Truth
Christopher Chen’s Caught at Shotgun Players keeps peeling the onion of untruths.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Don’t Call Agents—They’ll Call You
“For the most part, you actually can’t get an agent, you are gotten by an agent.” Five playwrights talk about their experience with (or without) agents in
my latest feature for Theatre Bay Area. Read more
Marital Mindbender
Local playwright Christopher Chen borrows from fabulist Italo Calvino to create a dizzying web of fantastical fragments about marriage.
The Fall of Bay Area Theater
The sheer volume of great theater going on around the Bay Area can be daunting. I’ve picked out a
few likely standouts to get you started. Read all about ’em on KQED Arts. Read more
Get Hapa
Christopher Chen’s latest play, Mutt, has a few superficial similarities with
Warrior Class, Kenneth Lin’s drama that played TheatreWorks last year. Both center on Asian-American politicians that represent the Republican Party’s best hope for an Obama of its own. But what the two plays do with that subject matter is very different, and thank goodness for that. Chen’s play is a satirical comedy rather than a drama, for one thing, but it also takes on race politics in America in a much more direct and satisfying way, appropriately enough for a play whose subtitle is Let’s All Talk About Race! Read more
Hundred Flowers Wins Glickman
Yesterday I met up with fellow critics Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News, Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle, Rob Avila of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Chad Jones of Theater Dogs to pick this year’s Glickman Award winner for the best play to premiere in the Bay Area last year.
Embarrassment of Riches
Boy, this was a hard year to reduce to a Top Ten. When I look over the list of the 117 shows I attended in 2012, eight strike me as shoo-ins for the list, and then there are fifteen other shows vying for the remaining two slots. Mind you, that’s a good problem to have; there really was a lot of good theater in the Bay Area this year—and, of course, some so-so and not very good theater as well. And of course there’s not any inherent virtue in the vast theaterscape of 2012 being reducible to a list in the first place, so maybe I should quit my kvetching, suck it up, and get to it. Although I’m restricting myself to ten, these shows aren’t ranked or numbered and are listed in chronological order.
Revolutionary Collaborators
It doesn’t matter how much I talk about The Hundred Flowers Project; there’s no way I can adequately capture the dueling senses of chaos and exquisitely crafted architecture that make up Christopher Chen’s play, which in its own way is as ambitious as the mammoth theatrical project that the characters in it are creating—one that, of course, is also called The Hundred Flowers Project. In fact, the more I talk about it the less I feel I ought to, because so much of its magic lies in the unexpected places it goes in Crowded Fire Theater and Playwrights Foundation’s world premiere production, dazzlingly staged by Desdemona Chiang with a superb cast and exquisitely coordinated technical elements.
