Mother’s Way
It’s an exhausting week, with five openings back-to-back in five days. The first of them is Mark Jackson’s staging of Marin Theatre Company’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh’s often hilarious, aching and brutal portrait of a needy and manipulative elderly mother and her resentful 40-year-old daughter/caretaker. My review is in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Maybe I’m Just Too Behanding
Bay Area audiences have become familiar with the devilish and often bloody-minded wit of Martin McDonagh over the last decade or two, largely thanks to excellent productions of the London-born Irish playwright’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. But Berkeley Rep’s had no monopoly on McDonagh by any means, as his plays have been staged by Magic Theatre, TheatreWorks, Wilde Irish and Cal Performances, among others. Now SF Playhouse gets into the act with the regional premiere of A Behanding in Spokane, which debuted on Broadway two years ago.
Provoking Eire
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #42: The Cripple of Inishmaan, Cal Performances, May 6.
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.
