Yes, I’ve Paid the Price
At its heart, Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn is a play about four women sitting around talking about feminism. As Aurora Theatre Company’s Bay Area premiere demonstrates, however, it’s a heck of a lot more entertaining than that sounds. Catherine (a marvelously self-assured Marilee Talkington) is a hotshot feminist academic writing about pop culture—torture porn, reality TV, you name it—but she’s returned to her home town to take care of her mother after a heart attack. Lillian Bogovich’s upbeat and eager-to-please Alice seems pretty spry and would much rather wait on her daughter than vice versa.
Caught in the Net
Local playwright Kathy Rucker’s self-produced drama takes you backward in time through a cyberstalking tragedy. My review of Crystal Springs is on KQED Arts.
Old-Fashioned Politics
A new political drama at TheatreWorks already seems sorely outdated. My review is on KQED Arts.
Return to ReOrient
It’s been a while since Golden Thread’s last ReOrient festival of short plays about the Middle East. The festival had been going on an almost annual basis since 1999, but after its 10th anniversary in 2009 the company went on a producing hiatus, reemerging last year for the world premiere of Adriana Sevahn Nichols’s Night over Erzinga. But now the festival’s back in a big way, with two programs of short plays (the second batch for two shows only toward the end of the fest) and a forum of panel discussions at Z Space.
Revolutionary Collaborators
It doesn’t matter how much I talk about The Hundred Flowers Project; there’s no way I can adequately capture the dueling senses of chaos and exquisitely crafted architecture that make up Christopher Chen’s play, which in its own way is as ambitious as the mammoth theatrical project that the characters in it are creating—one that, of course, is also called The Hundred Flowers Project. In fact, the more I talk about it the less I feel I ought to, because so much of its magic lies in the unexpected places it goes in Crowded Fire Theater and Playwrights Foundation’s world premiere production, dazzlingly staged by Desdemona Chiang with a superb cast and exquisitely coordinated technical elements.
Good Bad King
Marin Shakespeare Company gave Shakespeare’s King John a rare staging–perhaps the first production in Marin–and I reviewed it in today’s Marin Independent Journal. And I didn’t even mention that he’s my 26th-great-grandfather! No conflict of interest there, no sir.
Live Through This
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #92: Honey Brown Eyes, SF Playhouse, September 27.
Show #90: Night over Erzinga, Golden Thread Productions, September 18.
Prospero’s Bots
I wrote up Jon Tracy’s steampunk reinvention of The Tempest for today’s Marin Independent Journal, and you can see what I thought of it over yonder.
