Private Parts
I should have known this play was trouble from the start. The scene looked inviting enough when I walked into the Phoenix Theatre to see Pardon My Invasion. Fred Sharkey’s set is a nicely detailed living room or home study with a desk with a typewriter and a bottle of booze, with more reinforcements above the fireplace. But as soon as the play begins to the strains of the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” (appropriately licensed, I’m sure), we see that the woman sitting at the typewriter wears a fedora down over her eyes while she bangs out her manuscript. This is a very bad sign. She’s writing a lurid potboiler of a detective novel in a ludicrously overblown style that would put Mickey Spillane to shame (and Mickey Spillane has no shame).
Inquiring Minds
A recent transplant to San Francisco from Georgia by way of New York, playwright Lauren Gunderson has taken the Bay Area by storm. Her full-length local debut was last year’s rolling world premiere of her revenge comedy Exit, Pursued by a Bear, and she has shows in the works with seemingly half the theatre companies in town, including Crowded Fire, SF Playhouse, Shotgun Players and Impact Theatre. Now Symmetry Theatre Company, a local outfit devoted to creating more stage opportunities for female Equity actors, gives us the Bay Area premiere of Gunderson’s play Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight
