Let Loose in the PlayGround
PlayGround celebrates its 20th annual Festival of New Works.
Read my feature in American Theatre. Read more
She’s So Quirky
You’ve scoffed about the romantic comedy wish-fulfillment archetype, now see the play! Katie May’s “graphic novel play” Manic Pixie Dream Girl is playing at ACT’s new Costume Shop Theater, and I wrote it up for the KQED Arts Blog. Head over there to read all about it.
Lazzi Come Home
Truffaldino Says No isn’t really a commedia dell’arte play, nor an adaptation of one. It is, however, about commedia stock characters, and what happens when one of them decides that he doesn’t want to be a guy who keeps doing the same thing over and over anymore.
Student Affairs
On the surface, Julie and Valerie seem to have nothing in common. As played by Lauren English in Kenn Rabin’s play Reunion on SF Playhouse’s intimate Stage 2, Julie is fretful, earnest and painfully introverted, while Alexandra Creighton’s Valerie has an assured sexpot strut and an air of always posing, always performing, even in as close as she gets to normal conversation. The two of them went to the same high school, and were both in the drama program, though you don’t get the sense that they really knew each other. Val was the glamorous popular girl who took the lead in all the school plays, and Julie was too shy even to audition for them. Still, the two are inextricably linked, because they both had sex with their high school drama teacher.
Love Bites
An old colleague of mine from the good old days of the East Bay Express, Daniel Heath has done pretty well for himself since he took up playwriting five years ago to join the PlayGround pool of one-act writers. Last year PianoFight produced his Choose Your Own Adventure-style audience-voted sex comedies, Fork Off Down Your Own Forking Adventure Which You’ve Forked: FORKING! and A Merry FORKING! Christmas, and this December the Climate Theatre will unveil his rock musical update of a Restoration comedy, The Man of Rock.
