Caught in the Net
Local playwright Kathy Rucker’s self-produced drama takes you backward in time through a cyberstalking tragedy. My review of Crystal Springs is on KQED Arts.
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).
Sex and Death
Sometimes, no matter how avant-garde a play’s language or structure may be, it can be reduced to a simple thesis statement. Basil Kreimendahl’s Sidewinders, for example, now premiering with the Cutting Ball Theater, boils down to “Binary gender distinctions are overrated.” And Diana Amsterdam’s Carnival Round the Central Figure, produced by Symmetry Theatre Company at Live Oak Theatre, declares in no uncertain terms that people should accept death as part of life and not pretend it isn’t happening.
Tales to Astonish
Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus at Magic Theatre is a spellbinding, dizzying play in which it doesn’t matter a whit that it’s made up of three people standing around telling their stories. KQED Arts has my review.
Baker’s Quarter-Dozen
For someone whose work was unseen in the Bay Area before this year, East Coast playwright Annie Baker is suddenly all over the place: Body Awareness at Aurora in February, The Aliens at SF Playhouse in March, and now Circle Mirror Transformation at Marin Theatre Company. I reviewed the latter in the Marin Independent Journal, conveniently readable right over here.
Through the Cracks
Who hasn’t wondered what his or her life would be like if, well, everything were different? It’s the sort of reflection that nobody really indulges in when everything’s going well, but that tends to consume one’s mind when one’s life seems to be going nowhere. That certainly describes the siblings in Lauren Yee’s new play Crevice: Liz is a jobless 27-year old Ivy League grad who recently caught her fiancé cheating on her and now never leaves the couch (a strikingly similar situation to that of a character in Kim Rosenstock’s dark comedy Tigers Be Still, but that’s a very different story). Rob, 29, is supposedly an actor but hasn’t worked in years, and both of them are still living with their mom, waiting for something to happen. And something does. Liz and Rob get a taste of what might have been when they slip through a crack in the floor into a parallel world in which their every wish has come true, and that’s not necessarily good news.
Who Watches Big Brother?
I reviewed Josh Costello’s adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother for today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Head over there to read all about it before the review expires or becomes otherwise unlinkable. (Short version: I liked it. It’s good. Go see it.) Read more
Accidents Will Happen
There’s such a thing as being accident-prone, but when your body is covered with scars from freak incidents like falling on picket fences (and you’re not a stuntman for a living), you’ve got to start looking at something other than chance. That’s the trouble with Evan in Disassembly, the latest of several plays by Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey to play Impact Theatre (and its first Yockey world premiere all its own, after 2009’s simultaneous premiere of Large Animal Games with Dad’s Garage in Atlanta).
Curiouser and Curiouser
There’s something mighty strange going on at the Berkeley City Club. The latest play by Central Works has a very different feel from other collaboratively created pieces the company has done in the past. Some of that feeling is inevitable because A Man’s Home… is based on Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and the German-Czech author’s atmosphere of labyrinthine bureaucracy and foreboding pervades his work so much that anything like it is now called “Kafkaesque.” But no doubt much of it as well comes from the unfamiliar aesthetic of writer/director Aaron Henne, who’s new to the company.
