An August Ensemble
Marin Theatre Company kicks off its 50th season with August: Osage County.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
The Queen Anne Bible
MTC’s Anne Boleyn radically reenvisions “the harlot queen” as the mother of the Anglican Church.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Not at All Austen-tatious
Livermore Shakes production of Sense and Sensibility captures Jane Austen’s wry humor.
Read my review in the Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area News Group papers. Read more
A Fracking Shame
Shotgun Players has doubled down on its commitment to new plays lately. Last year’s 20th-anniversary season was entirely made up of commissioned world premieres, and after an impressively solid production of Tom Stoppard’s Voyage this spring, Shotgun unveils another commission. The Great Divide is a modern take on Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, updated to focus on current hot-button environmental issues. The playwright is Adam Chanzit, whose play Down to This closed in a Sleepwalkers Theatre production in San Francisco the same weekend this show opened in Berkeley.
Stages of Grief
It’s hard enough dealing with grief when you understand what happened, and why and how it happened, but when what’s happening to someone you love is completely incomprehensible, it’s mighty hard to get your mind around it and resign yourself to anything. For whatever reason, plays all over Berkeley depict families dealing with highly unconventional versions of loss.
Is She Weird?
Aurora Theatre Company celebrates Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday with his lesser-known Summer and Smoke rewrite, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Y’all can head on over to today’s Marin IJ to see what I thought of it.
It’s Not Easy Being Queen
As acclaimed as he is for original works such as Shotgun Players’ The Death of Meyerhold and The Forest War, what’s particularly fascinating about local writer-director Mark Jackson’s work is his treatment of classic texts, from inventive stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for Shotgun and Strindberg’s Miss Julie at Aurora to dizzying choreography-oriented desconstructions such as Juliet at San Francisco State and his Three Sisters riff Yes, Yes to Moscow at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Somewhere in between are his adaptations, which bear the unmistakable mark of his strong visual and highly stylized approach while remaining much more of a conversation with the original work than a reinvention of it.
