Rug Shop Othello Leaves Us Wanting Moor
Ubuntu Theater Project presents the first of several Othellos this summer.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Razing la Raza
Ubuntu Theater Project’s Más is a stirring, sobering story of ethnic studies under attack.
Read my review in the Mercury News. Read more
Putting Labor Back into Labor Day
Ubuntu Theater Project’s Waiting for Lefty is a powerful reminder of what Labor Day is all about.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Seven Against Illyria
A magnificent seven local actors–all female–take on Shakespeare’s ever-durable comedy Twelfth Night. My review is on KQED Arts.
Branded for Life
Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo is a project that’s been in the works for four years. A coproduction of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, the Central American Resource Center, and Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Placas was conceived as a serious examination of Salvadoran-American gang violence in San Francisco amid nationwide anti-immigrant hysteria. Playwright Paul S. Flores interviewed gang members, parents and intervention workers while working on the piece. The resulting play now premiering at the erstwhile Lorraine Hansberry Theatre at 450 Post Street (which will become the new SF Playhouse this fall) feels very much like it’s designed to educate, with a nuanced view of the social pressures of gang culture but also a lack of dramatic subtlety and tendency toward melodrama.
A Fracking Shame
Shotgun Players has doubled down on its commitment to new plays lately. Last year’s 20th-anniversary season was entirely made up of commissioned world premieres, and after an impressively solid production of Tom Stoppard’s Voyage this spring, Shotgun unveils another commission. The Great Divide is a modern take on Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, updated to focus on current hot-button environmental issues. The playwright is Adam Chanzit, whose play Down to This closed in a Sleepwalkers Theatre production in San Francisco the same weekend this show opened in Berkeley.
Fathers and Sons
It’s a remarkable coincidence: In the last couple of weeks both Berkeley Repertory Theatre and American Conservatory Theater have opened plays about sons grappling with their memories of their fathers, both prominent Bay Area figures of the 1970s. Ghost Light at Berkeley Rep is a fictionalized play based on California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone contending with the specter of his father, the assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Humor Abuse is Lorenzo Pisoni’s one-man show about growing up as a baby clown in San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus under the unrelenting tutelage of his father, Pickles founder and clown Larry Pisoni (who thankfully is still around and was in the audience opening night).
Live Through This
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #92: Honey Brown Eyes, SF Playhouse, September 27.
Show #90: Night over Erzinga, Golden Thread Productions, September 18.
