Strangers Will Make You Uncomfortable
Scottish playwright Linda McLean returns with an eerie, elliptical portrait of a life in five scenes.
Fire in the Home
How far would you go along to get along? Find out when Mark Jackson directs a new translation of Max Frisch’s 1958 play The Arsonists at Aurora Theatre Company. My review‘s at KQED Arts.
The Hoarder of Love
Chicks dig Anatol, and Anatol digs chicks. Exactly why the ladies are drawn to the title character of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Anatol is a bit of a mystery. As played by Mike Ryan in Aurora Theatre Company’s production, he’s a very average guy, not notably attractive or charismatic. He’s fickle, jealous, easily flustered, weak-willed and peevish. He is, however, monomaniacally devoted to romance—the kind of guy who wins women over simply by laying it on thick and not giving up until they give in. He convinces himself that he’s madly in love with each one, whether or not he’s already madly in love with someone else. Anatol loves not wisely but too prolifically.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
The Right Kind of Trouble
Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind feels both very much of its time and ahead of it. First presented off-Broadway in 1955, a month before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, it’s full of the energy of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the sense that something has to change.
