Peeling the Onion of Truth
Christopher Chen’s Caught at Shotgun Players keeps peeling the onion of untruths.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Tell Me of Your Dreaming
Cal Shakes goes back to the Golden Age of Spanish drama with Life Is a Dream.
What’s Going On
Scottish playwright Linda McLean’s back with another disturbing play at the Magic, and it’s a weird one.
If You’re Happy and You Know It
Walter Wells is happy. Way, way too happy. So happy that you know that playwright Julie Marie Myatt has it in for him in The Happy Ones at Magic Theatre. KQED Arts has my review.
Roll Away the Stoners
Playwright Lloyd Suh made a big impression in 2009 with American Hwangap, his hilarious world premiere comedy at Magic Theatre about a Korean-American family dealing with the abrupt return of the father and husband who abandoned them many years before, come back to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was easily my favorite new play I saw that year. Now Suh’s back at the Magic with another world premiere, and this one couldn’t be more different. Jesus in India is pretty much what the title implies—a play about Jesus in India. Suh takes on the subject of Jesus’s “lost years” between being born in a manger and the loaves and the fishes and the cross and the hey. So this is Jesus as a teenager, running away from home to go get stoned in India. Oh, and he joins a punk band.
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.
