It’s All About Aphra
Aphra Behn enjoys a comeback in Liz Duffy Adams play.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
A-Plus Is for Aphra
Although based in New York, Liz Duffy Adams is certainly an honorary San Francisco playwright by now, having debuted several plays with Crowded Fire (One Big Lie, The Listener) and the Glickman Award-winning Dog Act with Shotgun Players. Now she’s back with Magic Theatre’s West Coast premiere of Or, (the comma is part of the title), a comedy that debuted at the Women’s Project in New York last year. Having tackled gods and post-apocalyptic landscapes in previous plays, this time Adams takes as her subject the long-neglected Restoration-era writer Aphra Behn, England’s first female professional playwright.
