George and Martha — Sad, Sad, Sad
The booze and barbs flow in Shotgun’s stylized new take on Virginia Woolf.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
A Better Mousetrap
Shotgun Players plays ubiquitous Agatha Christie whodunit with just enough camp to make its flaws into virtues.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Putting the Nick Back in Antigone
Shotgun Players’ Antigonick is the third bold new interpretation of Sophocles’ ancient tragedy Antigone to be produced by a Bay Area theater in the last couple of months.
Read my review on KQED Arts. Read more
Ubu Victorious
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi can be an irritating classic. A seminal avant-garde work that informed later movements such as Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd, Ubu famously set off a riot at its 1896 premiere in Paris with its first line: “Merdre,” a mutated French cuss word with an extra letter, often translated as “Pshit” or “Shittr” in English (“Tashit” in the new Cutting Ball Theater version). The titular Father Ubu says that phrase over and over in the play, along with other nonsensical oaths such as “By my green candle!” The humor is scatological and often silly, the plot—such as it is—meandering. An absurd parody of Macbeth with stray elements of other Shakespeare plays, it features the childish and gluttonous Father Ubu murdering the king of Poland to seize power, and then killing all the other nobles and taking all their money.
Kreepy Kritters
It’s a madhouse. When you enter the Exit on Taylor to see Cutting Ball Theater’s world premiere of Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night by the company’s new resident playwright, Andrew Saito, there’s all kinds of unnerving behavior going on. There’s a legless old man in a wheelchair (David Sinaiko) hollering at people in a gravelly voice. Growling sounds pervade Cliff Caruthers’s sound design. An unstable-looking young man (Wiley Naman Strasser) is praying at the foot of a bed in the second floor of Michael Locher’s unnerving two-story set, with grungy brown walls and a white tile-lined staircase. A glamorous young woman (a magnetic Felicia Benefield) uses the bed to straddle some guy, a man in a suit (Drew Wolff) looks around fretfully, and people generally mill around in a volatile daze like inmates in an asylum.
Dont Be Absurd
The Cutting Ball Theater is big on the avant-garde classics, and now it unveils a new translation of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs that can be hard to sit through. My review‘s in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Tis the Season to Be Melancholy
The Cutting Ball Theater is marking the centennial of August Strindberg’s death in a very big way, performing all five of the seminal Swedish playwright’s Chamber Plays together in repertory for the first time in any language. They’re all in new translations by Paul Walsh, three of them commissioned by Cutting Ball, and all newly published as a book by Exit Press. The plays are split into three separate bills that have been rolled out gradually since October 12, allowing one double bill to get on its feet before opening the next, but last weekend and this coming, final weekend all five plays are performed in all-day marathons from noon to close to midnight.
Bitter Swede Symphony
The Cutting Ball Theater is performing all five of August
Strindberg‘s Chamber Plays in rep (the first time it’s been done in any language), and I tell you all about it in today’s Marin Independent Journal, reporting back on the first installment, The Ghost Sonata. I will say that it makes me awfully jazzed to see the rest of them. Read more
