Fire in the Home
How far would you go along to get along? Find out when Mark Jackson directs a new translation of Max Frisch’s 1958 play The Arsonists at Aurora Theatre Company. My review‘s at KQED Arts.
Accidents Will Happen
There’s such a thing as being accident-prone, but when your body is covered with scars from freak incidents like falling on picket fences (and you’re not a stuntman for a living), you’ve got to start looking at something other than chance. That’s the trouble with Evan in Disassembly, the latest of several plays by Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey to play Impact Theatre (and its first Yockey world premiere all its own, after 2009’s simultaneous premiere of Large Animal Games with Dad’s Garage in Atlanta).
I’ll Fly Away
Sleepwalkers Theatre’s entire current season is devoted to 28-year-old playwright J.C. Lee’s This World and After trilogy, which got off to an intriguing start with This World Is Good back in August. The current production, Into the Clear Blue Sky, doesn’t have any of the same characters, but it shares many themes and other elements with the first play. There’s talk of apocalyptic events, which in This World were speculation about the future and in Clear Blue Sky are a vaguely defined status quo—and a completely different doomsday scenario than the one outlined in the previous play in any case. Both plays are very much about the relationship between a brother and a sister, one of whom leaves the other behind in a dramatic fashion, and in both cases there’s a brooding mom who communicates mostly in monologues through letters read aloud (this time it’s not her fault because she’s the one left behind).
Till the End of the World
Sleepwalkers Theatre is devoting its whole season to the world premiere of This World and After, a trilogy by East Bay playwright J.C. Lee that takes place before and after an impending apocalypse. You wouldn’t know catastrophe’s a-coming from the first installment in the trilogy, This World Is Good, which Sleepwalkers is currently performing at San Francisco’s small Phoenix Theatre in the heart of the theatre district.
