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
Encore the Dragon
It’s your classic boy-meets-dragon love story. It’s also a stunning Bay Area introduction to the work of Baltimore-based playwright Jenny Connell Davis.
My review of The Dragon Play at Impact Theatre is on KQED Arts. 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
Squiddily Diddling
Playwright Steve Yockey has had plays produced locally by Magic Theatre, Climate Theater and Marin Theatre Company, but it’s good to see that he keeps coming back to Impact Theatre, the pizza-parlor basement company that introduced him to the Bay Area with 2007’s Cartoon. The Fisherman’s Wife, which opened last weekend, is Yockey’s fifth production and third world premiere with Impact.
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.
