Trophy Lives
When people see a very wealthy, much older man married to a very attractive, much younger woman, they figure they know what’s up: He’s just with her because she’s hot, and she’s just with him for the money, whatever he spends on her and whatever she stands to inherit when he dies. It looks less like a romance than a mutually beneficial transaction. Philip Kan Gotanda’s new play at San Jose Rep, Love in American Times, doesn’t necessarily undermine that perception, but it explores the phenomenon in a fascinating way.
Things Fall Apart
Some days it’s all you can do just to hold it together, and sometimes every day is like that. That’s the feeling one gets from Minneapolis playwright Allison Moore’s latest comedy, Collapse, which plays Aurora Theatre in a National New Play Network rolling world premiere that will subsequently play Curious Theatre in Denver and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas in different productions. Collapse was one of the plays read last season as one of the finalists in Aurora’s Global Age Project new works initiative, and is the second GAP play to go on to a main stage production at the theater.
Send in the Clones
Not quite an hour in length, Caryl Churchill’s two-actor one-act A Number isn’t nearly as well known as some of the British playwright’s older works such as Top Girls and Cloud 9, but it’s a marvelous, compact gem in its own right.
