It’s About Time
When the San Francisco Playhouse moved into its cushy new digs at the former Post Street Theatre, its new main stage was clearly more capacious than its old one. But it was leaving behind not one stage but two at its erstwhile home above the Shelton Theatre, and one interesting question was what would become of the company’s Sandbox Series of small-scale world premieres on its second stage. One show in the series, Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, was originally scheduled for shortly after the move, but was quietly shelved.
We’re a Happy Family
“Happy families are all alike,” Leo Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina; “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Two classic examples are on display at two Berkeley theatres, both of which are celebrating their 20th anniversary seasons right now, albeit in different ways. Shotgun Players are in the middle of a whole season of commissioned world premieres, while at Aurora Theatre it’s old home week, bringing back key artists from throughout the company’s history. But the plays they’re doing depict two houses, alike in comfortable wealth, that have both been unhappy a very long time.
Southern Dialectic
The Apotheosis of Pig Husbandry is an unwieldy name for a play. But it’s just about right for a scholarly treatise, which is what the object of the same name is within the world of William Bivins’s “agricultural noir” play on SF Playhouse’s Second Stage.
