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.
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.
