King Richard’s Limp
Impact Theatre’s Richard III is unusually slow for either the company or the play.
My review is in the Oakland Tribune and other BANG papers. Read more
The Anguish of the Battlecock
Ever wonder what goes through the head of a cockfighting rooster? Wonder no more!
My review of Impact Theatre’s Year of the Rooster is in the Contra Costa Times. Read more
Troy, Troy Again
Impact Theatre goes way back to the Trojan War in its latest high-octane staging of Shakespeare. My review is on KQED Arts.
Out of the Woods (and into the Bar)
Impact Theatre gets gender-bent with an As You Like It where Celia’s a dude, them Dukes are double dutchesses, the melancholy Jaques is a female hipster, and the forest of Arden is a Northern California bar. I give you
a full report over on KQED Arts. Read more
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.
Girl Anachronism
American theater started as a criminal act. The first play performed in English in the colonies was Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe, a satirical stab at the English throne performed in rural Virginia in 1665. As Shakespeare’s contemporaries could attest a generation before, the Puritans were no fans of theater. Performing plays was a crime under their governance, and so was breaking the Sabbath—so this play performed in a tavern on Sunday was doubly forbidden, even disregarding any treasonous content. The show was reprised in a command performance in court, where it was judged harmless.
“Light” Could Be Brighter
Marie Curie notwithstanding, the contributions of women to the field of science is an oft-neglected topic, so it’s generally a good thing when something like the 2009 movie Agora or Karen Zacarías’s play from that same year, Legacy of Light, comes along to set the record straight about great female scientists of history.
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).
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.
