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.
What Are They Building in There
Aaron Loeb’s latest play in San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series of second-stage world premieres, Ideation is a suspenseful and hilarious business-world thriller. You can read my review on KQED Arts.
Social Class, Pursued by Abaire
David Lindsay-Abaire tackles the class divide in Good People at Marin Theatre Company, and if you get past the slow first act you’re in for a treat in the second. You can read my review in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Stood Up Comedy
I went to see Waiting for Godot at Marin Theatre Company, and the headliner didn’t even bother to show! That’s just rude. Despite a promising cast, I wasn’t wild about this one, and you can head over to today’s Marin Independent Journal to find out why. So, shall we go? Yes, let’s go.
Children of Godot
It’s the first time kids have been in a Marin Theatre Company show in well over a decade, so what’s the youth-friendly vehicle in question? Annie? Oliver!? Peter Pan? Of course not. It’s Waiting for Godot! I have an article in today’s Marin Independent Journal about all the logistics of having minors in a major cast, so let’s go take a look. Well, shall we go? Yes, let’s go.
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.
Rephrasing Cain
If crime doesn’t pay, it’s not for lack of trying. Though it’s a quick and pulpy read, hardboiled crime writer James M. Cain’s 1935 novella Double Indemnity gives some of the same moral lessons as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s literary classic Crime and Punishment—that murder, no matter how carefully planned or covered up, has a tendency to hound the perpetrators to the ends of the earth.
