What’s Going On
Scottish playwright Linda McLean’s back with another disturbing play at the Magic, and it’s a weird one.
Ellen’s Honored
I can’t quite believe this, but the humble staged reading of my very first play, Ellen’s Undone, in the SF Olympians Festival made Marissa Skudlarek’s list of 2013’s Most Memorable Theater Moments on the San Francisco Theater Pub blog! I’m amazed and honored. But it’s really a testament to the great work that director Mina Morita and actors Maggie Mason and Armando McClain did in bringing my talky script to life. Not a bad end to a dizzying experience.
Off-key Pitch
It’s always baffling to me when someone ascribes a poor review of a show to some kind of preexisting personal grudge on the part of the critic. On the one hand, I understand it: When you don’t want to consider that criticism of your work or the work of someone you love might be valid, you look for any reason you can possibly think of to discount it. The critic just doesn’t understand, the critic must have been having a bad day, or the critic must have it in for you. Either of the first two might be valid, although not nearly as often as people want to think, but the third is just nonsense. And it’s by far the one I hear most when someone writes in to complain about a review. In fact, someone recently commented on my review of Chance saying that if I described a freestanding nonfolding chair as a folding chair, it must be because I was lying to try to scare people off from the show.
I can’t speak for all critics everywhere, and thank goodness I don’t have to, but I never, ever go to a show with the intention of trashing it. It just doesn’t happen. I go to a lot of theater—sometimes 120 shows a year—and yet there are a lot more shows that look interesting that I can’t possibly get to, because I’m just one man and I have to spend some time at home with my lovely wife and our lovely dog. So I have to choose carefully what I go to see, and I’m not going to pick something that I have no reasonable expectation that I’ll enjoy. Life’s too short for bad theater. Obviously, despite my best efforts to pick stuff that looks good, I’m going to see some clunkers from time to time. It’s an occupational hazard. But I always want them to be good, and if I give a show a poor review it’s always because I had hopes for it and am disappointed that it wasn’t better. Why would I go somewhere with the intention of having a bad time? It doesn’t even make sense.
Nobody would want the above to be an intro to a review of their show, because after all that you know it’s not going to be a terribly positive one. But I thought of this anew when I went to see Central Works’s Pitch Perfect, because from time to time a play is just going to rub you the wrong way. I was in a perfectly good mood when I went to see the show, it’s a company whose work I follow and find interesting, and the actors are all people I like. But within 10 minutes after the play began, I was wishing I hadn’t come.
It’s a Shame About the War
It’s clear as soon as you enter the theater at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts that Center REPertory Company is taking a fanciful approach to Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 romantic comedy about people with dangerously lighthearted notions of what it means to fight in a war.
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.
