Miss Bennet If You’re a Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune
The overlooked Bennet middle sister gets her moment in Pride and Prejudice sequel.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Spencer for Hire
Lauren Spencer is an actor to Keep an Eye On. Check out
our interview on Theatre Bay Area! Read more
The Queen Anne Bible
MTC’s Anne Boleyn radically reenvisions “the harlot queen” as the mother of the Anglican Church.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
The Kids Are All Doomed
SF Shakes takes Romeo and Juliet out for a walk in the park.
Read my review in the Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area News Group papers. Read more
Marital Mindbender
Local playwright Christopher Chen borrows from fabulist Italo Calvino to create a dizzying web of fantastical fragments about marriage.
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.
A Maze Amazes
Just Theater is back with not one but two plays in rep, and the first one, A Maze, is pretty freaking remarkable. You can read my review on KQED Arts.
Women on the Verge
Our Practical Heaven is a sentimental journey oddly devoid of emotion. It features three generations of the women of a family congregating at the paradisiacal beach house of the eldest to birdwatch and lounge around on the beach. Grandma Vera’s husband has recently died, and her daughter Sasha is absurdly surprised that her mom didn’t follow him into the grave. Also there are Sasha’s daughters, twentysomething Suze and teenage Leez, plus another woman Sasha’s age, Willa, and her daughter Magz. But the young’uns are in a world of their own, texting each other about what idiots their moms are, and the mothers don’t seem to think much about them either.
Don’t Cockpunch the Messenger
“The god came back. Shortly afterward, the world ended.” That’s what Lauren Spencer tells us as the narrator and sometime bartender in Hermes, a new play playing at the Exit Theater in a No Nude Men production directed by Sleepwalkers Theatre artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp. Spencer says this several times, in fact, handling the poetic repetition with grace and sparkling intelligence.
