Mama Medea, Here We Go Again
One month after becoming a new dad, what could possibly be more appropriate than unveiling my new Medea play? Well, pretty much anything would be more appropriate, I guess, but I am undeterred!
The Quality of Mercy
Dance Dance Revolution in the Chinese Land of the Dead? That’s Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s 410[GONE] at Crowded Fire Theater. KQED Arts has my review.
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.
Outside the Wall
It turns out that after the end of the world, people are a lot like they are right now. Or at least that’s how it appears in The Nature Line, the last chapter in J.C. Lee’s trilogy This World and After. Sleepwalkers Theatre has devoted its entire season to the world premiere triptych, starting with This World Is Good last August and continuing with Into the Clear Blue Sky in April. Now the company finishes up with this play, in a sharp staging by Mina Morita.
Homeric Undone
After creating a propulsive contemporary take on George Orwell’s Animal Farm for Shotgun Players’ summer show last year, this summer writer-director Jon Tracy followed it up with The Salt Plays, Part 1: In the Wound, a stunning, kinetic, poetic riff on the Trojan War that both was and wasn’t an adaptation of The Iliad. And if that wasn’t ambitious enough, Tracy followed his Iliad up this December with–what else?–his Odyssey, following his cold-blooded, business-suited strategist Odysseus on his long-delayed voyage home to his waiting wife Penelope.
The Drums of War
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #93: The Salt Plays, Part One: In the Wound, Shotgun Players, September 11.
