Oh Pioneers
If there’s a lesson to be learned from Mona Mansour’s new play about the limitations of the pioneer spirit, it’s that pluck and optimism will only take you so far.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Marital Mindbender
Local playwright Christopher Chen borrows from fabulist Italo Calvino to create a dizzying web of fantastical fragments about marriage.
Live, Die, Fail
Marin Theatre Company gives us the cheery tale of the untimely deaths of the Fail sisters.
My review of Failure: A Love Story is in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Pageant Nation
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A left-wing blogger and a right-wing congressional aide wake up in a hotel room in various levels of undress, with no idea how they got there. The door is locked and their cell phones are gone. It turns out they’ve been abducted by an immaculately poised Georgia beauty queen who wants them to help her rewrite the United States Constitution.
Drama at the High School
I went to check out Conservatory Theatre Ensemble, the drama program at Tam High, and holy gosh, what’s going on there had my head spinning. You can read all about it in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Richard in Thirds
William Shakespeare wrote plays about all the other Richards that served as kings of England, and even wrote trilogies about a couple of Henrys, but Richard the First, called the Lionheart? Forget it. The bard was more interested in the troubled reign of Good King Richard’s little brother, King John (who, full disclosure, is supposedly my 26th-great-grandfather–oh, how the mighty have fallen). Heck, there are even a couple plays about the Lionheart’s father, Henry II, though those came much later (James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter and Jean Anouilh’s Becket). Richard, meanwhile, has been reduced to that guy who comes riding in at the end of many versions of Robin Hood, though he’s in The Lion in Winter too.
Accidents Will Happen
There’s such a thing as being accident-prone, but when your body is covered with scars from freak incidents like falling on picket fences (and you’re not a stuntman for a living), you’ve got to start looking at something other than chance. That’s the trouble with Evan in Disassembly, the latest of several plays by Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey to play Impact Theatre (and its first Yockey world premiere all its own, after 2009’s simultaneous premiere of Large Animal Games with Dad’s Garage in Atlanta).
