A Good Case for Staying Home
The big selling point of San Jose Rep’s season opener, The Death of the Novel, is not that it’s a world premiere. The draw also isn’t that it’s a new play by Jonathan Marc Feldman, the screenwriter of Swing Kids, the unintentionally hilarious movie melodrama about the oppressed swing subculture of Nazi Germany (best summed up by the teary little boy yelling “Swing heil!” as his brother is carted off by the Gestapo for doing the Lindy Hop). No, the big deal about this play is that it stars Vincent Kartheiser, best known for playing the weaselly little shit Pete Campbell on Mad Men (and the entirely different weaselly little shit Connor on Angel before that).
But We Regress
French playwright Yasmina Reza seems particularly interested in how small things become blown out of proportion. In her ubiquitous play Art, the close friendship between three men is threatened when one of them buys an expensive painting that another one thinks is crap. The Unexpected Man depicts two strangers on a train obsessing over the coincidence that one of them is reading a book that the other one wrote. And in God of Carnage, her 2006 comedy now making its Bay Area debut at San Jose Repertory Theatre, two couples meet to discuss an incident of playground violence between their sons, but their pleasant and civilized chitchat gradually gives way to chaos and savagery.
Trophy Lives
When people see a very wealthy, much older man married to a very attractive, much younger woman, they figure they know what’s up: He’s just with her because she’s hot, and she’s just with him for the money, whatever he spends on her and whatever she stands to inherit when he dies. It looks less like a romance than a mutually beneficial transaction. Philip Kan Gotanda’s new play at San Jose Rep, Love in American Times, doesn’t necessarily undermine that perception, but it explores the phenomenon in a fascinating way.
