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.
Shift Happens
The New Settlers would like to show you their compound before a cosmic rift splits reality asunder and they cross over to build a New America on the other side. Welcome to Mugwumpin’s latest collaboratively developed theater piece puts you right in the thick of…something. I give you the full report at KQED Arts.
Tesla Foiled
It’s hard to imagine what Future Motive Power would have been like if the ensemble Mugwumpin hadn’t managed to obtain use of San Francisco’s Old Mint to stage it in. It’s not that the Mint has anything to do with the story of inventor and electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla being told in the collaboratively devised performance piece, but so much of the experience is defined by the interactive experience of the crowd moving through the historic building’s basements and vaults at the prompting of the actors that one wonders what people would get out of it in a traditional theater space.
We Need This
The San Francisco performance ensemble Mugwumpin went through a rebirth in the last year after the departure of cofounder Denmo Ibrahim, with a bunch of new members brought into the company and a new structure to the season, in which a series of thematically related one-shot site-specific performances culminate in the creation of the year’s full-length theatrical production. This inaugural season was designated the Year of Possessions, a topic explored from multiple angles in the spellbinding patchwork that is the season centerpiece, This Is All I Need.
