What’s Going On
Scottish playwright Linda McLean’s back with another disturbing play at the Magic, and it’s a weird one.
Sing the Boys Back Home
Magic Theatre doesn’t do musicals often, but by golly it’s doing one now. My review of Arlington is on KQED Arts.
The Quality of Mercy
Dance Dance Revolution in the Chinese Land of the Dead? That’s Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s 410[GONE] at Crowded Fire Theater. KQED Arts has my review.
Tales to Astonish
Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus at Magic Theatre is a spellbinding, dizzying play in which it doesn’t matter a whit that it’s made up of three people standing around telling their stories. KQED Arts has my review.
You Don’t Know Abulkasem
Invasion! is a puzzling play. Written by Tunisian-Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri and translated from the original Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, it touches upon themes of youth culture, anti-Islamic xenophobia, language, and identity, but in a fragmented, scattershot way that almost but not quite comes together to form a rough mosaic portrait. But of what? If anything it’s of the mysterious Abulkasem, and he’s ultimately unknowable, apocryphal, based on faulty premises. But even if it’s hard to know what to make of it when all’s said and done, Crowded Fire Theater’s sharp West Coast premiere makes the saying and doing tremendously entertaining along the way.
