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
Altered Shepard
AlterTheater revives Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love in a San Rafael storefront, directed by the play’s original Old Man, where it will run in repertory with Marisela Treviño Orta’s The River Bride. My review is in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Homer Invasion
For some reason The Odyssey has been getting a lot of theatrical attention around the Bay Area this year. This summer Stanford Summer Theater performed a new piece called The Wanderings of Odysseus. In December Jon Tracy will follow up his Iliad adaptation for Shotgun Players, The Salt Plays 1: In the Wound, with his Odyssey riff Of the Earth. And right now Berkeley’s Central Works tackles the story from the vantage point of the faithful wife who waited 20 years for her husband to come home.
