Two Against Thebes
African-American Shakespeare Company and the Cutting Ball Theater each reinvent Antigone.
Zip It, Gumshoe
A Killer Story is a strange case. It has the trappings of a hardboiled detective yarn, but instead of snappy dialogue what you have is competing, overlapping monologues that are less about the case in question than the idea of the case—or rather the idea of detective work in general. Our gumshoe’s not big on details. It’s a show at the Marsh Berkeley, a hub for solo theater pieces, but this one’s a play written for a cast of three, even if they all tell their separate versions of the same story as if they’re performing three solo shows at the same time.
Shift Happens
The New Settlers would like to show you their compound before a cosmic rift splits reality asunder and they cross over to build a New America on the other side. Welcome to Mugwumpin’s latest collaboratively developed theater piece puts you right in the thick of…something. I give you the full report at KQED Arts.
A Cesspool to Celebrate
There have been umpteen zillion variations and adaptations of Woyzeck, assembled from unsorted fragments that author Georg Büchner left when he died in 1837 at the age of 24. The Shotgun Players production under the direction of local auteur Mark Jackson uses a high-profile musical version from the year 2000, adapted by Ann-Christin Rommen and Wolfgang Wiens with a concept by original director Robert Wilson and songs by Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan that Waits later recorded on his 2002 album Blood Money.
And Then There’s Maud
San Francisco playwright/director Mark Jackson started a fruitful relationship with Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company with his 2006 production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. While Shotgun Players across town has premiered many of Jackson’s own works as a writer/director, his work with Aurora up till now has been strictly as a director, focused on inventive stagings of classics such as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and a new adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Now Aurora has commissioned a new play that goes right back to Salome with Salomania, about onetime San Franciscan dancer Maud Allan.
Fractured Fairy Tale
Cutting Ball cut its teeth (or, I suppose, its ball) on experimental theater, so the only real surprise about the company dabbling in ensemble devised theater is that it hasn’t done it before. Codirected by associate artistic director Paige Rogers and Annie Paladino, the commissioned world premiere Tontlawald is inspired by the work of Poland’s Teatr Zar, which came to the city last year as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival (although this piece has been in the works a few years longer than that).
Stages of Grief
It’s hard enough dealing with grief when you understand what happened, and why and how it happened, but when what’s happening to someone you love is completely incomprehensible, it’s mighty hard to get your mind around it and resign yourself to anything. For whatever reason, plays all over Berkeley depict families dealing with highly unconventional versions of loss.
Vamping the Vampire
He may be long in the tooth, but he never gets old. The big daddy of all vampires, Count Dracula is one of those characters that everyone knows, and his story has been told time and time again, never quite in the same way. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has been adapted hundreds of times for every imaginable medium. According to the program, Center REPertory Company’s production at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts uses the earliest stage version by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, but this is balderdash. Some scenes remain from the 1927 play that starred Bela Lugosi on Broadway in the 1920s and Frank Langella in the 1970s, leading to their respective Dracula movies*, but the bulk of it has been so radically rewritten for this production that it’s bizarre to see no adaptor credited.
We Need This
The San Francisco performance ensemble Mugwumpin went through a rebirth in the last year after the departure of cofounder Denmo Ibrahim, with a bunch of new members brought into the company and a new structure to the season, in which a series of thematically related one-shot site-specific performances culminate in the creation of the year’s full-length theatrical production. This inaugural season was designated the Year of Possessions, a topic explored from multiple angles in the spellbinding patchwork that is the season centerpiece, This Is All I Need.
