Marital Mindbender
Local playwright Christopher Chen borrows from fabulist Italo Calvino to create a dizzying web of fantastical fragments about marriage.
That’s Not Okay
An argument about household chores between an upper-middle-class married couple escalates into grade-school name-calling before they settle down and turn their attention to the pressing topic of an usually large amount of semen found in their teenage son’s underwear. That in turn gets them into a long debate about whether it’s normal to masturbate in class—or, for that matter, at work—and then the husband, an adjunct professor, gets back to work on his book manuscript by snorting a large amount of cocaine.
Embarrassment of Riches
Boy, this was a hard year to reduce to a Top Ten. When I look over the list of the 117 shows I attended in 2012, eight strike me as shoo-ins for the list, and then there are fifteen other shows vying for the remaining two slots. Mind you, that’s a good problem to have; there really was a lot of good theater in the Bay Area this year—and, of course, some so-so and not very good theater as well. And of course there’s not any inherent virtue in the vast theaterscape of 2012 being reducible to a list in the first place, so maybe I should quit my kvetching, suck it up, and get to it. Although I’m restricting myself to ten, these shows aren’t ranked or numbered and are listed in chronological order.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking
What exactly is being communicated, and how is it different from what’s being said? For that matter, why’s it being said the way that it is? These questions underlie a lot of the conversations in Precious Little, the latest show at Shotgun Players, but they’re questions that could as easily be asked of the intriguing, entertaining and elusive play itself. It’s written by Madeleine George, a New York playwright whose work I’m not familiar with, but I’m delighted to see that another one of her plays is titled Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England. She’s also from Amherst, Massachusetts originally, just like Circle Mirror Transformation playwright Annie Baker—or like Emily Dickinson, for that matter.
How to Shame Your Dragon
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #31: Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Asian American Theater Company and Crowded Fire Theater, April 1.
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.
