Return to ReOrient
It’s been a while since Golden Thread’s last ReOrient festival of short plays about the Middle East. The festival had been going on an almost annual basis since 1999, but after its 10th anniversary in 2009 the company went on a producing hiatus, reemerging last year for the world premiere of Adriana Sevahn Nichols’s Night over Erzinga. But now the festival’s back in a big way, with two programs of short plays (the second batch for two shows only toward the end of the fest) and a forum of panel discussions at Z Space.
These Are the People in Your Neighborhood
As company-in-residence at Exit on Taylor, the avant-garde Cutting Ball Theater strikes an odd contrast with the Tenderloin District right outside its doors. Inside, challenging works by Ionesco, Beckett or Will Eno may compete with the hollering of heavily lubricated voices outside, and walking down the street to BART or one’s car from the show can be an obstacle course of homeless people, drug dealers and their customers.
Mismatched Mishmash
Longtime American Conservatory Theater actor Steven Anthony Jones opens the first season he’s programmed as the new artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the Bay Area’s foremost African-American theatre company, with a double bill of two one-act plays that have almost nothing to do with each other. The show also marks the theater’s opening in its new home at 450 Post Street, formerly the Post Street Theatre and Theatre on the Square, after several nomadic years.
