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.
Angst at the Picnic
In some ways the play is as perplexing as its title. The latest world premiere from Crowded Fire Theater, Amelia Roper’s She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange (a title I’m completely incapable of reading without singing it to the tune of Beck’s “Where It’s At”), features four people sitting around in a park making awkward small talk for 75 minutes. They’re two investment bankers and their spouses, and there’s some material in the play about financial shenanigans and the consequences thereof, which is a timely topic but touched on only elliptically. Instead there’s a lot of forced smiles, bizarre non sequiturs and existential dread. They’re almost all strangely childlike, like confused grade schoolers perplexed by the world around them.
That’s Not Okay
An argument about household chores between an upper-middle-class married couple escalates into grade-school name-calling before they settle down and turn their attention to the pressing topic of an usually large amount of semen found in their teenage son’s underwear. That in turn gets them into a long debate about whether it’s normal to masturbate in class—or, for that matter, at work—and then the husband, an adjunct professor, gets back to work on his book manuscript by snorting a large amount of cocaine.
Revolutionary Collaborators
It doesn’t matter how much I talk about The Hundred Flowers Project; there’s no way I can adequately capture the dueling senses of chaos and exquisitely crafted architecture that make up Christopher Chen’s play, which in its own way is as ambitious as the mammoth theatrical project that the characters in it are creating—one that, of course, is also called The Hundred Flowers Project. In fact, the more I talk about it the less I feel I ought to, because so much of its magic lies in the unexpected places it goes in Crowded Fire Theater and Playwrights Foundation’s world premiere production, dazzlingly staged by Desdemona Chiang with a superb cast and exquisitely coordinated technical elements.
Assassin Nation
That Stephen Sondheim has picked some perverse subjects for his musicals shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone, given that one of his most beloved classics concerns a certain serial-killing barber who provides the secret ingredient for his neighbor’s meat pie shop. But a musical about the various people who have killed or attempted to kill the President of the United States from John Wilkes Booth down to John Hinckley Jr.? Now that’s really pushing the boundaries of good taste.
I’ll Fly Away
Sleepwalkers Theatre’s entire current season is devoted to 28-year-old playwright J.C. Lee’s This World and After trilogy, which got off to an intriguing start with This World Is Good back in August. The current production, Into the Clear Blue Sky, doesn’t have any of the same characters, but it shares many themes and other elements with the first play. There’s talk of apocalyptic events, which in This World were speculation about the future and in Clear Blue Sky are a vaguely defined status quo—and a completely different doomsday scenario than the one outlined in the previous play in any case. Both plays are very much about the relationship between a brother and a sister, one of whom leaves the other behind in a dramatic fashion, and in both cases there’s a brooding mom who communicates mostly in monologues through letters read aloud (this time it’s not her fault because she’s the one left behind).
Jerry Agonistes
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #97: Jerry Springer the Opera, Ray of Light Theatre, September 17.
