Risk Is Its First Name
The Cutting Ball Theater’s experimental play festival Risk Is This is coming up this weekend, and I talked to artistic director Rob Melrose about it for the Marin Independent Journal. The feature is up on the IJ website for your perusal if you wanna read all about it.
Witch’s Brujaja
Playwright Luis Alfaro dazzled Magic Theatre audiences two years ago with Oedipus el Rey, his lyrical barrio gangster update of Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. It was hardly his first go-round with the Greeks; his 2003 play Electricidad explored the Electra tale in the same modern setting. Everyone knows Greek tragedies come in threes, so now Alfaro completes his trilogy of sorts (drawing from three completely different story cycles in different eras of classical mythology) with Bruja, a new version of Euripides’ Medea set among recent Mexican immigrants in San Francisco’s Mission District. This world premiere reunites Alfaro with Magic producing artistic director Loretta Greco, who directed his Oedipus and now helms Bruja.
In Tree City It’s a Pity
When Intersection gave up its Valencia Street home a year ago to move into the Chronicle building downtown, it also gave up its dedicated performance space. Since then it’s had to get creative about reimagining and reinventing its space. Last year’s Nobody Move was staged in a basement meeting room, and for Tree City Legends the Intersection office itself has been transformed into a theater, with the action taking place on all sides and amid the audience. Tanya Orellana’s set has walls full of windows with bare lightbulbs in them, and a stack of cinderblocks filled with candles. A screen up front shows Joan Osato’s video projections of trees, rippling water, cathedrals and Felix the Cat, and from time to time we can see through it to a live band set up for a recording session. Written by Dennis Kim, Tree City Legends is a world premiere developed with Intersection, its company-in-residence Campo Santo, Youth Speaks’s theater company the Living Word project, and Ictus.
Playing Against the House
Everybody in Nobody Move is on the move. More specifically, they’re on the run. Gambler Jimmy Luntz is in hiding because he panicked and shot the thug who came to lean on him for bad debts. Booze-soaked Anita has been framed to take the fall for her recent ex-husband’s embezzlement scheme. The two of them meet on the road, and from then on they wait together for their respective trouble to catch up with them.
