Talk and Talk and Talk About a Revolution
Shotgun Players is taking on The Coast of Utopia,Tom Stoppard’s mammoth trilogy about the budding Russian intellectual life of the mid-19th century, planting seeds for the revolution that will come much later. Having done chapter one, Voyage, last year, Shotgun now presents part two, Shipwreck, in repertory with a limited revival of Voyage. My review‘s up on KQED Arts for the intrepid explorer.
Zombie Jamboree
We always knew this day would come. Suddenly, zombies are everywhere, oddly concentrating their infestation on small theater companies in San Francisco’s theater district. The good news is that if the plays they’re in are to be believed, they seem to be mostly harmless.
Girl Anachronism
American theater started as a criminal act. The first play performed in English in the colonies was Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe, a satirical stab at the English throne performed in rural Virginia in 1665. As Shakespeare’s contemporaries could attest a generation before, the Puritans were no fans of theater. Performing plays was a crime under their governance, and so was breaking the Sabbath—so this play performed in a tavern on Sunday was doubly forbidden, even disregarding any treasonous content. The show was reprised in a command performance in court, where it was judged harmless.
It’s Not Easy Being Queen
As acclaimed as he is for original works such as Shotgun Players’ The Death of Meyerhold and The Forest War, what’s particularly fascinating about local writer-director Mark Jackson’s work is his treatment of classic texts, from inventive stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for Shotgun and Strindberg’s Miss Julie at Aurora to dizzying choreography-oriented desconstructions such as Juliet at San Francisco State and his Three Sisters riff Yes, Yes to Moscow at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Somewhere in between are his adaptations, which bear the unmistakable mark of his strong visual and highly stylized approach while remaining much more of a conversation with the original work than a reinvention of it.
Tragedy, a Comedy
For some reason Berkeley’s getting its fill of Anton Chekhov adaptations lately. Last month Central Works did its own stage version of Chekhov’s novella An Anonymous Story, and Berkeley Rep just announced its next season including the West Coast premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s new Three Sisters translation next spring. Right now Shotgun Players is doing the West Coast premiere of another adaptation of a different classic Chekhov play: Emily Mann’s update of The Seagull called A Seagull in the Hamptons, which debuted in 2008 at McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey, where Mann is artistic director and has adapted other Chekhov plays in the past.
