God and Mammon
John Patrick Shanley has written a lot of plays. He’s best known for 2004’s Doubt, a Parable, which won him a Pulitzer, Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, and a bunch of other awards, but he’s been cranking out plays since the early 1980s. He’s also the screenwriter of such films as Moonstruck, Congo and Joe vs. the Volcano, and I will defend the latter as easily his greatest work. I start with this list of his credentials because when I saw his latest play, Storefront Church at San Francisco Playhouse, my take-away was that this guy isn’t really a playwright.
Tales to Astonish
Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus at Magic Theatre is a spellbinding, dizzying play in which it doesn’t matter a whit that it’s made up of three people standing around telling their stories. KQED Arts has my review.
This Must Be the New World
Only in New York… or maybe Walnut Creek: Center REP is doing Yussef El Guindi’s cross-cultural romantic comedy Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World. My review is up on KQED Arts.
It’s a Motherfucker
The San Francisco Playhouse gives Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat its West Coast premiere, and it’s a motherfucker of a show. I reviewed it over at KQED Arts, where I had to be a bit coyer about the name. I did, however, get to say “there’s a veritable fluffload of profanity in the show.”
Oranges Are Blue
Whatever anyone expected from the first season longtime ACT actor Steven Anthony Jones programmed as artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, San Francisco’s most venerable African-American theater company, it probably wasn’t a British play for one African-American and two Caucasian actors. But race and racism come up an awful lot in Blue/Orange, Joe Penhall’s 2000 play that played Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre back in 2005.
Declined Intervention
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #105: The Sunset Limited, SF Playhouse, October 16.
