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.
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.
