Trail and Error
The westward migration, the video game, the stage play:
My review of The Oregon Trail is in the Oakland Tribune and other Bay Area News Group papers. Read more
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
Encore the Dragon
It’s your classic boy-meets-dragon love story. It’s also a stunning Bay Area introduction to the work of Baltimore-based playwright Jenny Connell Davis.
My review of The Dragon Play at Impact Theatre is on KQED Arts. Read more
Get Hapa
Christopher Chen’s latest play, Mutt, has a few superficial similarities with
Warrior Class, Kenneth Lin’s drama that played TheatreWorks last year. Both center on Asian-American politicians that represent the Republican Party’s best hope for an Obama of its own. But what the two plays do with that subject matter is very different, and thank goodness for that. Chen’s play is a satirical comedy rather than a drama, for one thing, but it also takes on race politics in America in a much more direct and satisfying way, appropriately enough for a play whose subtitle is Let’s All Talk About Race! Read more
Choppy Choppy
Berkeley’s Impact Theatre has a taste for blood, particularly in its Shakespeare productions but also in the new plays that make up most of its fare. So it’s hardly surprising that its latest assemblage of short plays, Bread and Circuses, is themed around violence as entertainment. In fact it’s really an appreciation of Impact as a company, with most of the shorts written by playwrights who’ve done full-length works with the theater in the past, including
Steve Yockey, Lauren Yee, Prince Gomolvilas, Lauren Gunderson and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. 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
As Twere a Careless Trifle
What’s a young San Francisco hipster to do with a fancy degree and no motivation to get a real job? Well, how about invade a small, obscure and presumably defenseless island nation?
Through the Cracks
Who hasn’t wondered what his or her life would be like if, well, everything were different? It’s the sort of reflection that nobody really indulges in when everything’s going well, but that tends to consume one’s mind when one’s life seems to be going nowhere. That certainly describes the siblings in Lauren Yee’s new play Crevice: Liz is a jobless 27-year old Ivy League grad who recently caught her fiancé cheating on her and now never leaves the couch (a strikingly similar situation to that of a character in Kim Rosenstock’s dark comedy Tigers Be Still, but that’s a very different story). Rob, 29, is supposedly an actor but hasn’t worked in years, and both of them are still living with their mom, waiting for something to happen. And something does. Liz and Rob get a taste of what might have been when they slip through a crack in the floor into a parallel world in which their every wish has come true, and that’s not necessarily good news.
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.
