It’s Not About Art
Yasmina Reza’s ever-popular Art is really about the nature of friendship.
Read my review in the East Bay Times. Read more
A Candid Date with the Candidate
As satire goes, The Totalitarians is blunt, broad and messy in more ways than one.
And Then There’s Maud
San Francisco playwright/director Mark Jackson started a fruitful relationship with Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company with his 2006 production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. While Shotgun Players across town has premiered many of Jackson’s own works as a writer/director, his work with Aurora up till now has been strictly as a director, focused on inventive stagings of classics such as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and a new adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Now Aurora has commissioned a new play that goes right back to Salome with Salomania, about onetime San Franciscan dancer Maud Allan.
Female Shavianism
From Mrs. Warren to Joan of Arc, George Bernard Shaw adored his strong women characters, and was fierce in his condemnation of the gender inequality in Victorian society. His 1895 play Candida takes an interesting approach to this concern, using the situation of one man in love with another man’s wife to explore which gender really holds the power in a traditional married household.
Stages of Grief
It’s hard enough dealing with grief when you understand what happened, and why and how it happened, but when what’s happening to someone you love is completely incomprehensible, it’s mighty hard to get your mind around it and resign yourself to anything. For whatever reason, plays all over Berkeley depict families dealing with highly unconventional versions of loss.
Old Year, New Blog
Top Ten Theater Productions of 2009
Although I started 2009 reviewing theater for one paper and ended the year reviewing for another, when I look over the list of the 108 shows I saw over the course of the year to determine my top ten, I realize that none of my favorite shows are ones that I actually reviewed. Those respective papers have space, money and geographical constraints, and it just happened that there was no overlap between the shows in my review docket and those in this year’s top ten.
