Contemporarily Like Achilles
There have been many, many plays about Homer’s Iliad and about the Trojan War in general. In the last few years alone, we’ve had The Salt Plays Part One: In the Wound at Shotgun Players and War Music at American Conservatory Theater. And that’s not even getting into the plays dealing with the aftermath of the war: recently we’ve had Odyssey plays from Shotgun, Central Works, and We Players, The Trojan Women at Aurora, and an upcoming Elektra at ACT. That’s partly a testimony to the timeless resonance of the stories the Greeks told in the first place, and it’s certainly only the tip of the iceberg as classical adaptations go (we’ve also seen plenty of Medeas, Oedipi and Phaedras), but it also attests to the human need in times of war to try to explore what drives people throughout history to strive to slaughter each other en masse.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
The Drums of War
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #93: The Salt Plays, Part One: In the Wound, Shotgun Players, September 11.
