And They Have a Plan
Impact Theatre goes out with a bang…and an alien invasion.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
A Midsummer Night’s Sequel
Shakespeare is a hard act to follow.
Read my review of Demetrius Unbound in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Through the Cracks
Who hasn’t wondered what his or her life would be like if, well, everything were different? It’s the sort of reflection that nobody really indulges in when everything’s going well, but that tends to consume one’s mind when one’s life seems to be going nowhere. That certainly describes the siblings in Lauren Yee’s new play Crevice: Liz is a jobless 27-year old Ivy League grad who recently caught her fiancé cheating on her and now never leaves the couch (a strikingly similar situation to that of a character in Kim Rosenstock’s dark comedy Tigers Be Still, but that’s a very different story). Rob, 29, is supposedly an actor but hasn’t worked in years, and both of them are still living with their mom, waiting for something to happen. And something does. Liz and Rob get a taste of what might have been when they slip through a crack in the floor into a parallel world in which their every wish has come true, and that’s not necessarily good news.
Lock Up Your Teenagers
When I heard that Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman was going to be helming Romeo and Juliet this year, the tag lines started to write themselves in my mind (“never was a story of more whoa”–that sort of thing). Although Impact specializes in new plays, Hillman’s own stagings for the company each year have been fast-paced productions of Shakespeare (or other classics like John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore).
Anonymous by Chekhov by Graves
Let’s get this out of the way first. An Anonymous Story by Anton Chekhov isn’t one of Chekhov’s plays. Like most Central Works plays, it’s by company co-director Gary Graves in collaboration with the cast and crew. It is, however, based on a novella by Chekhov, as was Central Works’ 2004 play The Duel. Nor is the anonymous narrator truly anonymous: he goes by a couple of different names in the story, but we first meet him as Stepan, a servant in the house of a St. Petersburg government functionary named Orlov.
