Nostalgia in the Time of Facebook
Writer-director-producer Stuart Bousel labels his new play The Age of Beauty “an experiment in conversation,” and indeed the entire play is made up of conversations between different pairs of women, broken up by short monologues by other women characters who don’t appear in any of the dialogues. The women in the dialogues are all members of the same circle of friends from college in Tucson, Arizona, some of them living now in San Francisco and others in New York.
San Francisco Values
I was born and raised in Berkeley, where most people can be safely assumed to be pretty liberal, and nothing sets my teeth on edge more than the belittling portrayal of the place I grew up as some kind of wacky radical madhouse, the view embodied in terms like “Berserkeley” or “San Francisco values.” My native Bay Area may make a mockery of itself on occasion—hometowns do that sometimes—but I’m always mighty sensitive about anything coming along to make it look silly.
