Catholic Reform School Girls in Trouble
There have been a number of dramas exposing the abuse of “fallen” young women in the Magdalen Asylums of Ireland, such as the film The Magdelene Sisters or the play Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan that Wilde Irish did at Berkeley City Club in 2004. Monica Byrne’s new play What Every Girl Should Know takes place in a variant of that setting—this time it’s a Catholic reformatory in New York City circa 1914—but everything about it suggests that this is a very bad place where nothing good could possibly happen.
As Twere a Careless Trifle
What’s a young San Francisco hipster to do with a fancy degree and no motivation to get a real job? Well, how about invade a small, obscure and presumably defenseless island nation?
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.
High School Confrontational
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #109: The Chalk Boy, Impact Theatre, November 5.
Accidents Will Happen
There’s such a thing as being accident-prone, but when your body is covered with scars from freak incidents like falling on picket fences (and you’re not a stuntman for a living), you’ve got to start looking at something other than chance. That’s the trouble with Evan in Disassembly, the latest of several plays by Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey to play Impact Theatre (and its first Yockey world premiere all its own, after 2009’s simultaneous premiere of Large Animal Games with Dad’s Garage in Atlanta).
Lock Up Your Teenagers
When I heard that Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman was going to be helming Romeo and Juliet this year, the tag lines started to write themselves in my mind (“never was a story of more whoa”–that sort of thing). Although Impact specializes in new plays, Hillman’s own stagings for the company each year have been fast-paced productions of Shakespeare (or other classics like John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore).
