George and Martha — Sad, Sad, Sad
The booze and barbs flow in Shotgun’s stylized new take on Virginia Woolf.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Costuming Shakespeare
Local designers open up about designing costumes for Shakespeare productions.
Read my article for Theatre Bay Area. Read more
Two People, Three Relationships
Megan Trout and Mark Jackson play two closely intertwined people living three different lives.
Read my review on KQED Arts. Read more
Putting the Nick Back in Antigone
Shotgun Players’ Antigonick is the third bold new interpretation of Sophocles’ ancient tragedy Antigone to be produced by a Bay Area theater in the last couple of months.
Read my review on KQED Arts. Read more
Here an Antigone, There an Antigone
Three Bay Area companies adapt the same Greek tragedy at the same time.
Read all about it in my Theatre Bay Area magazine feature. Read more
In Soviet Russia
Being called in for an unexpected meeting with your boss is nerve-racking, especially in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. My review of The Letters at Aurora Theatre Company is on KQED Arts.
Bonnie and Clyde’s Barn Dance Jamboree
Bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow have been objects of popular fascination since their heyday of the 1930s—a sexy young couple whose crime sprees were blown up into folklore even while they were active, and were then gunned down in their prime by law-enforcement officers in the course of, you know, enforcing the law. From the classic 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde to the Serge Gainsbourg/Brigitte Bardot pop song of the same name released that same year, they’ve been elevated to the level of mythic figures, like their fellow American outlaws Jesse James and John Dillinger.
Mother’s Way
It’s an exhausting week, with five openings back-to-back in five days. The first of them is Mark Jackson’s staging of Marin Theatre Company’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh’s often hilarious, aching and brutal portrait of a needy and manipulative elderly mother and her resentful 40-year-old daughter/caretaker. My review is in today’s Marin Independent Journal.
Fire in the Home
How far would you go along to get along? Find out when Mark Jackson directs a new translation of Max Frisch’s 1958 play The Arsonists at Aurora Theatre Company. My review‘s at KQED Arts.
Embarrassment of Riches
Boy, this was a hard year to reduce to a Top Ten. When I look over the list of the 117 shows I attended in 2012, eight strike me as shoo-ins for the list, and then there are fifteen other shows vying for the remaining two slots. Mind you, that’s a good problem to have; there really was a lot of good theater in the Bay Area this year—and, of course, some so-so and not very good theater as well. And of course there’s not any inherent virtue in the vast theaterscape of 2012 being reducible to a list in the first place, so maybe I should quit my kvetching, suck it up, and get to it. Although I’m restricting myself to ten, these shows aren’t ranked or numbered and are listed in chronological order.
