And They Have a Plan
Impact Theatre goes out with a bang…and an alien invasion.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Splatter Duo
Impact Theatre often has something stirring in its pizza parlor basement in the summertime, in between the company’s actual seasons. This time it’s a cinephile side project of a few Impact regulars under the moniker “p.d. and the bug” (an entity that’s also credited with directing the show). Dreamed up by Sarah Coykendall, Mike Delaney and Cassie Rosenbrock, Splathouse Double Feature is a loose adaptation of two beloved old B-movies (or D-movies, really) from Fairway International Pictures: the 1963 thrill-killer exploitation flick The Sadist and Eegah, a 1962 flick in which a giant caveman meets some teenyboppers who just want to rock and roll. Mind you, these are greatly abbreviated adaptations—the whole show is only 80 minutes, including intermission.
Choppy Choppy
Berkeley’s Impact Theatre has a taste for blood, particularly in its Shakespeare productions but also in the new plays that make up most of its fare. So it’s hardly surprising that its latest assemblage of short plays, Bread and Circuses, is themed around violence as entertainment. In fact it’s really an appreciation of Impact as a company, with most of the shorts written by playwrights who’ve done full-length works with the theater in the past, including
Steve Yockey, Lauren Yee, Prince Gomolvilas, Lauren Gunderson and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Read more
Troy, Troy Again
Impact Theatre goes way back to the Trojan War in its latest high-octane staging of Shakespeare. My review is on KQED Arts.
Out of the Woods (and into the Bar)
Impact Theatre gets gender-bent with an As You Like It where Celia’s a dude, them Dukes are double dutchesses, the melancholy Jaques is a female hipster, and the forest of Arden is a Northern California bar. I give you
a full report over on KQED Arts. Read more
As Twere a Careless Trifle
What’s a young San Francisco hipster to do with a fancy degree and no motivation to get a real job? Well, how about invade a small, obscure and presumably defenseless island nation?
A Tighter Titus
Titus Andronicus is William Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, and for centuries it was also generally considered to be his worst. Although the playwright’s contemporaries loved it, it wouldn’t regain popularity until after Word War II, when all the play’s hand-chopping, child-killing, rape, decapitation and cannibalism no longer seemed as outlandish as it once did. In the age of the slasher flick, Titus’s Grand Guignol elements are once again its primary selling point.
Lock Up Your Teenagers
When I heard that Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman was going to be helming Romeo and Juliet this year, the tag lines started to write themselves in my mind (“never was a story of more whoa”–that sort of thing). Although Impact specializes in new plays, Hillman’s own stagings for the company each year have been fast-paced productions of Shakespeare (or other classics like John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore).
