Go Grumpily into That Good Night
An elderly misanthrope goes through her pre-suicide to-do list at the EXIT.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Holiday Treats, Hold the Chestnuts
Looking for new ways to ring in the holidays in the theater? Look no further than
my seasonal roundup on KQED Arts! Read more
Drama Backstage
The latest of several new Stuart Bousel plays premiering at the EXIT this year is about, by and mostly for theater people.
Once More into the Fringe
I checked out 10 and a half consecutive hours of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, and boy is my everything tired.
Read my review on KQED Arts. Read more
Nostalgia in the Time of Facebook
Writer-director-producer Stuart Bousel labels his new play The Age of Beauty “an experiment in conversation,” and indeed the entire play is made up of conversations between different pairs of women, broken up by short monologues by other women characters who don’t appear in any of the dialogues. The women in the dialogues are all members of the same circle of friends from college in Tucson, Arizona, some of them living now in San Francisco and others in New York.
Everybody’s Helen
So five Helen of Troys walk into a bedroom… My DIVAfest writeup is up on KQED Arts.
These Are the People in Your Neighborhood
As company-in-residence at Exit on Taylor, the avant-garde Cutting Ball Theater strikes an odd contrast with the Tenderloin District right outside its doors. Inside, challenging works by Ionesco, Beckett or Will Eno may compete with the hollering of heavily lubricated voices outside, and walking down the street to BART or one’s car from the show can be an obstacle course of homeless people, drug dealers and their customers.
The Gods Must Be Crazy
There are plenty of companies that I follow because I feel I should keep informed about what they’re doing for one reason or another, and there are other companies that may be a little more under the radar of some of my colleagues but that I follow simply because I enjoy what they do.
Agnes of Crom
Shakespeare, schmakespeare—and don’t even talk to me about Neil Simon. (Seriously, just don’t.) I think we all know by now that what the Bay Area really needs is more plays about Conan the Barbarian.
