Student Affairs
On the surface, Julie and Valerie seem to have nothing in common. As played by Lauren English in Kenn Rabin’s play Reunion on SF Playhouse’s intimate Stage 2, Julie is fretful, earnest and painfully introverted, while Alexandra Creighton’s Valerie has an assured sexpot strut and an air of always posing, always performing, even in as close as she gets to normal conversation. The two of them went to the same high school, and were both in the drama program, though you don’t get the sense that they really knew each other. Val was the glamorous popular girl who took the lead in all the school plays, and Julie was too shy even to audition for them. Still, the two are inextricably linked, because they both had sex with their high school drama teacher.
Homeric Undone
After creating a propulsive contemporary take on George Orwell’s Animal Farm for Shotgun Players’ summer show last year, this summer writer-director Jon Tracy followed it up with The Salt Plays, Part 1: In the Wound, a stunning, kinetic, poetic riff on the Trojan War that both was and wasn’t an adaptation of The Iliad. And if that wasn’t ambitious enough, Tracy followed his Iliad up this December with–what else?–his Odyssey, following his cold-blooded, business-suited strategist Odysseus on his long-delayed voyage home to his waiting wife Penelope.
The Drums of War
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #93: The Salt Plays, Part One: In the Wound, Shotgun Players, September 11.
Ethnical Difficulties
It’s funny that the night after I saw The Breach, in which racist imagery is offered up as an exhibit of the continuing harmful legacy of slavery, I’d see a show that’s also critiquing ethnic stereotypes, this time by gleefully reveling in their very offensiveness. Impact Theatre’s world premiere of Enrique Urueta’s Learn to Be Latina is an often screamingly funny show offering a heaping helping of “oh no he didn’t,” plus what’s no doubt the most priceless glory hole moment I’ve ever seen on stage.
