We’re Hir Because We’re Hir
It’s interesting that this past week Facebook finally allowed users to choose a gender identity other than simply male or female, because there’s been a little mini-trend of new plays in the Bay Area that directly confront the binary conception of gender identity. In October the Cutting Ball Theater premiered Basil Kreimendahl’s Sidewinders, an absurdist Western homage to Waiting for Godot fixated on androgynous anatomy and identity. Now Magic Theatre has premiered Taylor Mac’s pitch-black comedy Hir, featuring a transsexual character who, though born physically female and taking testosterone, identifies as a third gender entirely, using the pronouns “ze” and “hir.” It’s an encouraging trend, even if I don’t think much of the plays themselves.
Tales to Astonish
Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus at Magic Theatre is a spellbinding, dizzying play in which it doesn’t matter a whit that it’s made up of three people standing around telling their stories. KQED Arts has my review.
If You’re Happy and You Know It
Walter Wells is happy. Way, way too happy. So happy that you know that playwright Julie Marie Myatt has it in for him in The Happy Ones at Magic Theatre. KQED Arts has my review.
Roll Away the Stoners
Playwright Lloyd Suh made a big impression in 2009 with American Hwangap, his hilarious world premiere comedy at Magic Theatre about a Korean-American family dealing with the abrupt return of the father and husband who abandoned them many years before, come back to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was easily my favorite new play I saw that year. Now Suh’s back at the Magic with another world premiere, and this one couldn’t be more different. Jesus in India is pretty much what the title implies—a play about Jesus in India. Suh takes on the subject of Jesus’s “lost years” between being born in a manger and the loaves and the fishes and the cross and the hey. So this is Jesus as a teenager, running away from home to go get stoned in India. Oh, and he joins a punk band.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
Bond of Brothers
I reviewed this in today’s Marin Independent Journal, so by all means go see what I had to say about it.
