Letters Entertain You
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Les Waters reunite to bring to life the lifelong correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. My review of Dear Elizabeth at Berkeley Rep is up at KQED Arts.
Portrait of the Artist as an Egomaniac
British-born director Les Waters has been a consistently outstanding artistic presence at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for the last eight years as associate artistic director for the company. He’s now been named the new artistic director of the prestigious Actors Theatre of Louisville, home of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, so his latest production at Berkeley Rep is also his last as a staff member. At least he’s going out in style, with a superb production of Red, John Logan’s play about legendary abstract expressionist painted Mark Rothko.
Going to Moscow?
The luminous playwright Sarah Ruhl has been a frequent visitor to the Bay Area, and to Berkeley Repertory Theatre in particular, where director Les Waters helmed her breathtaking Eurydice and Glickman Award-winning In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), which went on to become her Broadway debut. Now, just as Actors Ensemble of Berkeley is giving her mammoth Passion Play its belated West Coast premiere across town, Ruhl and Waters are reunited at Berkeley Rep with Ruhl’s new version of Anton Chekhov’s 1901 classic Three Sisters.
Girlfriend Is Better
Let’s just get this out of the way at the outset. It’s inevitable that Berkeley Rep’s latest world premiere, Girlfriend, is going to be compared to the one that opened the theater’s season: the Green Day pop-punk opera American Idiot, which opened on Broadway this week to enthusiastic reviews. They’re both new rock musicals based on iconic albums, but while the huge spectacle of American Idiot uses all the songs in order without dialogue and leaves you to glean a vague story between the lyrics and the way the propulsive songs are staged, the much more intimate Girlfriend doesn’t bring some perceived implicit story on Matthew Sweet’s best-known album to life. It’s just the achingly sweet, funny love story of two boys fresh out of high school.
Concerning Strained Devices
Oy vey, this play. There’s a lot of interesting subject matter in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s world premiere of Naomi Iizuka’s Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West about the introduction of photography to Japan in the 1800s, but what we get of that is told rather than illustrated, emerging in expository lectures between characters or direct address. It’s staged by Les Waters with a surfeit of style, but what’s being told isn’t really a story so much as various scenes with Americans in Yokohama in the late 19th and early 21st centuries holding forth on photography or Japanese culture, a bit like a series of blog ruminations converted into dialogue and monologue.
Old Year, New Blog
Top Ten Theater Productions of 2009
Although I started 2009 reviewing theater for one paper and ended the year reviewing for another, when I look over the list of the 108 shows I saw over the course of the year to determine my top ten, I realize that none of my favorite shows are ones that I actually reviewed. Those respective papers have space, money and geographical constraints, and it just happened that there was no overlap between the shows in my review docket and those in this year’s top ten.
