The Book of Cain
Playwright Bill Cain has explored Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot in his hit play Equivocation and Iraq War atrocities in 9 Circles, both at Marin Theatre Company last year (and Circles is also playing now at San Jose’s Renegade Theatre Experiment), but his world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre is more nakedly personal. How to Write a New Book for the Bible is a beautifully touching account of his mother Mary dying of cancer, in a strong staging by Kent Nicholson with an entirely nonlocal cast. Cain’s narrative device for the play is as if he, the author, is just making it up as he goes along, with his family members occasionally chiding him from inside the story that he’s not telling it right. “Just don’t make me foolish, Billy,” Mary tells the playwright. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
