Peeling the Onion of Truth
Christopher Chen’s Caught at Shotgun Players keeps peeling the onion of untruths.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
A Better Mousetrap
Shotgun Players plays ubiquitous Agatha Christie whodunit with just enough camp to make its flaws into virtues.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Solo Times Four
The Bay Area is blessed with more than its share of terrific solo theater artists, and new ones are coming out of the woodwork all the time. I hadn’t had a chance to check out Thao P. Nguyen’s work before now, but I feel awfully fortunate to have managed to catch her one-woman show Fortunate Daughter at Impact Theatre last weekend. A story about trying to figure out how to come out as a lesbian to her supportive but still fairly traditional Vietnamese family, FD debuted at the New York Fringe Festival last year, directed by W. Kamau Bell, and then enjoyed a sold-out run at StageWerx helmed by Martha Rynberg, who also directs it here.
Doomed to Repeat It
This week I’m back at Marin Shakes, this time seeing The Complete History of America (abridged). I wrote it up for the Marin IJ, so you can read it over there.
Oh That Norman
The Norman Conquests isn’t your standard trilogy. The plays in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedic 1973 triptych don’t happen one after another but all at more or less the same time with the same characters in different areas of the same house: Round and Round the Garden in the garden, Table Manners in the dining room, and Living Together in the living room. Ackbourn crafted them in a rotating fashion, writing the first scene of the first play, then the first scene of the second play, then the first scene of the third, before proceeding to the second scene of the first play, and round and round between the three plays until they were all finished. That’s more or less how the action plays out, too. Some events in any two plays are clearly happening simultaneously, while other scenes fill in the gaps of time the other plays skip over. The idea is that you can see them in any order, and that’s more or less true. (I wouldn’t recommend starting off with Living Together, but more on that later.)
