Encore the Dragon
It’s your classic boy-meets-dragon love story. It’s also a stunning Bay Area introduction to the work of Baltimore-based playwright Jenny Connell Davis.
My review of The Dragon Play at Impact Theatre is on KQED Arts. Read more
Angst at the Picnic
In some ways the play is as perplexing as its title. The latest world premiere from Crowded Fire Theater, Amelia Roper’s She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange (a title I’m completely incapable of reading without singing it to the tune of Beck’s “Where It’s At”), features four people sitting around in a park making awkward small talk for 75 minutes. They’re two investment bankers and their spouses, and there’s some material in the play about financial shenanigans and the consequences thereof, which is a timely topic but touched on only elliptically. Instead there’s a lot of forced smiles, bizarre non sequiturs and existential dread. They’re almost all strangely childlike, like confused grade schoolers perplexed by the world around them.
