Drama Backstage
The latest of several new Stuart Bousel plays premiering at the EXIT this year is about, by and mostly for theater people.
Our Stars, Ourselves
Marissa Skudlarek’s Pleiades reimagines the mythological star-sisters as 1970s debutantes discovering feminism.
Nostalgia in the Time of Facebook
Writer-director-producer Stuart Bousel labels his new play The Age of Beauty “an experiment in conversation,” and indeed the entire play is made up of conversations between different pairs of women, broken up by short monologues by other women characters who don’t appear in any of the dialogues. The women in the dialogues are all members of the same circle of friends from college in Tucson, Arizona, some of them living now in San Francisco and others in New York.
Not for Love or Money
Cyndi Lauper sang that “money changes everything,” but Susan Sobeloff’s debut play Merchants seems to indicate that Lauper may have been selling money short. Money doesn’t just change everything—it is everything. It’s the only thing worth talking about.
San Francisco Values
I was born and raised in Berkeley, where most people can be safely assumed to be pretty liberal, and nothing sets my teeth on edge more than the belittling portrayal of the place I grew up as some kind of wacky radical madhouse, the view embodied in terms like “Berserkeley” or “San Francisco values.” My native Bay Area may make a mockery of itself on occasion—hometowns do that sometimes—but I’m always mighty sensitive about anything coming along to make it look silly.
Don’t Cockpunch the Messenger
“The god came back. Shortly afterward, the world ended.” That’s what Lauren Spencer tells us as the narrator and sometime bartender in Hermes, a new play playing at the Exit Theater in a No Nude Men production directed by Sleepwalkers Theatre artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp. Spencer says this several times, in fact, handling the poetic repetition with grace and sparkling intelligence.
