Get Hapa
Christopher Chen’s latest play, Mutt, has a few superficial similarities with
Warrior Class, Kenneth Lin’s drama that played TheatreWorks last year. Both center on Asian-American politicians that represent the Republican Party’s best hope for an Obama of its own. But what the two plays do with that subject matter is very different, and thank goodness for that. Chen’s play is a satirical comedy rather than a drama, for one thing, but it also takes on race politics in America in a much more direct and satisfying way, appropriately enough for a play whose subtitle is Let’s All Talk About Race! Read more
Ubu Victorious
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi can be an irritating classic. A seminal avant-garde work that informed later movements such as Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd, Ubu famously set off a riot at its 1896 premiere in Paris with its first line: “Merdre,” a mutated French cuss word with an extra letter, often translated as “Pshit” or “Shittr” in English (“Tashit” in the new Cutting Ball Theater version). The titular Father Ubu says that phrase over and over in the play, along with other nonsensical oaths such as “By my green candle!” The humor is scatological and often silly, the plot—such as it is—meandering. An absurd parody of Macbeth with stray elements of other Shakespeare plays, it features the childish and gluttonous Father Ubu murdering the king of Poland to seize power, and then killing all the other nobles and taking all their money.
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.
Well Hello, Dali
I’ve had to take a break from the blog the last couple of weeks for a wide assortment of reasons, but I do have a review in today’s Marin Independent Journal, of AlterTheater’s production of Jose Rivera’s References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot.
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).
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).
Ethnical Difficulties
It’s funny that the night after I saw The Breach, in which racist imagery is offered up as an exhibit of the continuing harmful legacy of slavery, I’d see a show that’s also critiquing ethnic stereotypes, this time by gleefully reveling in their very offensiveness. Impact Theatre’s world premiere of Enrique Urueta’s Learn to Be Latina is an often screamingly funny show offering a heaping helping of “oh no he didn’t,” plus what’s no doubt the most priceless glory hole moment I’ve ever seen on stage.
