In Search of Lost Time
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #107: Sticky Time, Crowded Fire, October 29.
I’ll Fly Away
Sleepwalkers Theatre’s entire current season is devoted to 28-year-old playwright J.C. Lee’s This World and After trilogy, which got off to an intriguing start with This World Is Good back in August. The current production, Into the Clear Blue Sky, doesn’t have any of the same characters, but it shares many themes and other elements with the first play. There’s talk of apocalyptic events, which in This World were speculation about the future and in Clear Blue Sky are a vaguely defined status quo—and a completely different doomsday scenario than the one outlined in the previous play in any case. Both plays are very much about the relationship between a brother and a sister, one of whom leaves the other behind in a dramatic fashion, and in both cases there’s a brooding mom who communicates mostly in monologues through letters read aloud (this time it’s not her fault because she’s the one left behind).
Lock Up Your Teenagers
When I heard that Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman was going to be helming Romeo and Juliet this year, the tag lines started to write themselves in my mind (“never was a story of more whoa”–that sort of thing). Although Impact specializes in new plays, Hillman’s own stagings for the company each year have been fast-paced productions of Shakespeare (or other classics like John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore).
