Maids of New Orleans
Oakland native
Marcus Gardley returns with a potent gumbo of Lorca, New Orleans and powerful women at Berkeley Rep. My review is on KQED Arts. Read more
A Classic with Spunk
Spunk is a bit of a departure for California Shakespeare Theater. It was just a decade ago that then-new artistic director Jonathan Moscone started adding modern classics to the company’s steady diet of Shakespeare—plays by Wilder, Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett and Coward. And then the adaptations of classics: David Edgar’s Dickens; Amy Freed’s Restoration comedies; Octavio Solis’s Steinbeck stories; Amanda Dehnert’s Shakespeare rock musical. Now Cal Shakes looks beyond dead white men for its latest presentation of an adapted classic: Spunk, George C. Wolfe’s acclaimed 1989 adaptation of a trio of short stories by seminal Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, three very different portraits of struggling African-Americans in rural Florida and big-city Harlem.
