Justice Incarnate
Steven Anthony Jones plays Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Read my interview on KQED Arts. Read more
Hard Luck in Harlem
The first season that longtime American Conservatory Theater actor Steven Anthony Jones has programmed as the new artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre has been an interesting mix for San Francisco’s most venerable African-American theatre, from an odd pairing of one-acts—a broad slapstick bit of 1960s agitprop with a tense new Brazilian thriller—to a new version of LHT’s traditional Christmas pageant, to a drama about the British psychiatric system. Now the season closes with a trip back to the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression and Prohibition with Blues for an Alabama Sky, a 1995 melodrama by Pearl Cleage.
Oranges Are Blue
Whatever anyone expected from the first season longtime ACT actor Steven Anthony Jones programmed as artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, San Francisco’s most venerable African-American theater company, it probably wasn’t a British play for one African-American and two Caucasian actors. But race and racism come up an awful lot in Blue/Orange, Joe Penhall’s 2000 play that played Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre back in 2005.
Mismatched Mishmash
Longtime American Conservatory Theater actor Steven Anthony Jones opens the first season he’s programmed as the new artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the Bay Area’s foremost African-American theatre company, with a double bill of two one-act plays that have almost nothing to do with each other. The show also marks the theater’s opening in its new home at 450 Post Street, formerly the Post Street Theatre and Theatre on the Square, after several nomadic years.
Ruination and Redemption
Suddenly there’s a small Lynn Nottage festival going on in the Bay Area, with two of the acclaimed contemporary playwright’s works running simultaneously on two sides of the bay: Ruined at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s production of Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine at Fort Mason’s Southside Theater (across the hall from, and formerly part of, Magic Theatre).
