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.
Ill Communication
As opposed to the similar portmanteau “Spanglish,” which simply refers to speaking a blend of Spanish and English, the word “Chinglish” has a very specific connotation of amusingly garbled English badly translated from Chinese, especially on signs in China reposted mockingly on the internet. To take two examples mentioned in David Henry Hwang’s play Chinglish, now being given its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, a disabled-accessible restroom is labeled “deformed man’s toilet” or the dry goods pricing department becomes “fuck the certain price of goods.” If the latter example seems especially incomprehensible, as the American protagonist Daniel explains in the opening monologue, under the simplified writing system imposed by Chairman Mao, the characters for “dry” and “to do” were merged.
Old Year, New Blog
Top Ten Theater Productions of 2009
Although I started 2009 reviewing theater for one paper and ended the year reviewing for another, when I look over the list of the 108 shows I saw over the course of the year to determine my top ten, I realize that none of my favorite shows are ones that I actually reviewed. Those respective papers have space, money and geographical constraints, and it just happened that there was no overlap between the shows in my review docket and those in this year’s top ten.
