Arden Admirers
Marin Shakespeare Company celebrates its 25th year with the ever-popular As You Like It–in period dress, no less!
Read all about it in my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Render Unto Cesare an Audience
Central Works does nothing but new plays developed collaboratively between the cast and creative team, most but not all of them written by company codirector Gary Graves. Every show is either a premiere or a revival of one of the group’s previous original plays. Its latest show, The Lion and the Fox, is a relative rarity—a sequel, or rather a prequel, to another Graves play from past seasons, Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s not quite without precedent: In 2012 the company presented its first trilogy, Richard the First, the middle part of which was Graves’s 2003 play Lionheart.
Country Matters
Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Texas-style? Sure, why not? My review of Marin Shakespeare Company’s broad-as-a-barn C&W adaptation is up on the Marin Independent Journal‘s snazzy new website. Hie thee hence to check it out.
Medea Mogul
The tragedy of Medea is one of the best-known tales in Western culture, handed down from Greek myth and the ancient play by Euripides. Medea, who betrayed her own family to help the sailor Jason steal the Golden Fleece, married him, and had his children, finds herself thrown aside when Jason has the opportunity for a more advantageous marriage, and gets her vengeance on her fickle husband by killing her own children. More than a story, it’s become a familiar cultural touchstone. It’s been turned into a psychological complex and become the basis for countless adaptations, including Luis Alfaro’s Bruja at Magic Theatre just last year.
Richard in Thirds
William Shakespeare wrote plays about all the other Richards that served as kings of England, and even wrote trilogies about a couple of Henrys, but Richard the First, called the Lionheart? Forget it. The bard was more interested in the troubled reign of Good King Richard’s little brother, King John (who, full disclosure, is supposedly my 26th-great-grandfather–oh, how the mighty have fallen). Heck, there are even a couple plays about the Lionheart’s father, Henry II, though those came much later (James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter and Jean Anouilh’s Becket). Richard, meanwhile, has been reduced to that guy who comes riding in at the end of many versions of Robin Hood, though he’s in The Lion in Winter too.
The Man Who Loved Women
Congressman Roy Armstrong loves women. As he’s quick to tell anyone who asks, being raised by a working-class single mother gave him a profound respect for women, and he’s made trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment the chief focus of his political career.
If This Luau Hath Offended
Robert Currier dreamed up a Hawaiian-themed Midsummer at Marin Shakes, featuring hulu fairies in long johns, and I dutifully wrote it up for today’s Marin Independent Journal. Hie thee hence to read all about it.
Maybe This Time
This production of Cabaret by Independent Cabaret Productions/Shakespeare at Stinson hits Larkspur this weekend after a run at Fort Mason, and my review is there to welcome it in today’s Marin Independent Journal. So click on the link to check it out before it dissolves into the deepest recesses of the web.
After Him, the Deluge
Mesmeric Revelation…Before Edgar Allen Poe has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poe. The second play that Los Angeles writer/director Aaron Henne has created with Berkeley’s Central Works, Mesmeric Revelation… is named after an 1844 Poe short story that’s almost entirely in dialogue, a metaphysical conversation about the nature of God, matter, consciousness and reality with a client in an induced mesmeric trance. But the show isn’t at all based on the Poe story, although there are a few nods to it in subject matter and stretches of dialogue. Instead it’s set shortly before the French revolution, focusing on the man who came up with mesmerism in the first place.
Curiouser and Curiouser
There’s something mighty strange going on at the Berkeley City Club. The latest play by Central Works has a very different feel from other collaboratively created pieces the company has done in the past. Some of that feeling is inevitable because A Man’s Home… is based on Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and the German-Czech author’s atmosphere of labyrinthine bureaucracy and foreboding pervades his work so much that anything like it is now called “Kafkaesque.” But no doubt much of it as well comes from the unfamiliar aesthetic of writer/director Aaron Henne, who’s new to the company.
