Family Reunion of the Dead
Shotgun Players presents an unforgettable Eurydice.
Read my review on KQED Arts. Read more
Catholic Reform School Girls in Trouble
There have been a number of dramas exposing the abuse of “fallen” young women in the Magdalen Asylums of Ireland, such as the film The Magdelene Sisters or the play Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan that Wilde Irish did at Berkeley City Club in 2004. Monica Byrne’s new play What Every Girl Should Know takes place in a variant of that setting—this time it’s a Catholic reformatory in New York City circa 1914—but everything about it suggests that this is a very bad place where nothing good could possibly happen.
A Two-Hour Tour
Let’s get the title out of the way first. The word “posh” supposedly derives from an acronym for “Port Out, Starboard Home,” indicating the most desirable accommodations aboard ships from England to India and back. Merriam-Webster, for one, doesn’t buy that etymology at all, but in any case that’s the relatively simple explanation for the seemingly abstruse title of foolsFURY Theater’s collaboration with playwright Sheila Callaghan, Port Out, Starboard Home, now premiering at San Francisco’s Z Space before moving to La Mama in New York in November.
Mourning Sickness
God’s Ear is a curious concoction. The 2007 play by New York writer Jenny Schwartz is now at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage in a lively staging by dance theater artist Erika Chong Shuch. The plot, such as it is, would make you think it’s an examination of grief, but really it’s much more an examination of language—the triteness and insufficiency of it, the way it often feels like it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say something.
