The Ubuntu Theater Project is the most politically engaged theater company in the Bay Area, but if you like your theater to come with answers then Ubuntu will thwart you at every turn. Their latest, the world premiere of Lisa Ramirez’s Down Here Below is a rousing reworking of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths from which it takes both spiritual and aesthetic inspiration. Painting a despairing picture of the clearing of one Oakland homeless encampment (a close approximation of Snow Park at Lakeside and Harrison), Ramirez’s play—with a cast of twenty and running just 65-minutes—is both epic and swift.

Rather than telling us what to do, or how to feel, or mapping out some Quixotic plan for the future, Ramirez gives us people and lots of them. You walk into Ubuntu’s new theater (a nice slice of unused warehouse space in FLAX art and design) and suddenly you’re in a crowd, as if every homeless person in Oakland just kind of emerged out of nowhere.

Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt have a long-standing relationship with Chekov’s The Three Sisters. Their devised Yes Yes To Moscow (which Jackson directed and Wilmurt starred in) was an eighty-minute comic romp, an inversion of the play’s signature wish — “We must go back to Moscow!” — that somehow worked itself around to a striking wistfulness that was, well, Chekhovian. And Wilmurt’s cabaret show, Olga, imagines the most sisterly of the three sisters as a game chanteuse, entertaining soldiers and yes, wishing to leave her provincial home and conquer the big stage that is Moscow and the world. It’s ending is also striking and wistful, so again Chekhovian.

One might say that KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF! kicking off the Shotgun Players’ 28th season is the third of the Jackson-Wilmurt Sisters, the last of the trilogy, or maybe the third of the quartet, or merely the unruly middle child of the quintet, who knows? Maybe we just need to slip them a copy of Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard. Whatever its final position, DD TRIPLE KILL is both less contained and successful than its predecessors, but also — and this is what you should care about — more aesthetically and philosophically urgent. We’ll also add alert to the future. That too is Chekhovian, the other, less recognized one, but the one you get here and the one you should want.

Schnitzler isn’t a great playwright, but he’s sharp, fascinating, and worth our time. In league with Chekhov and Freud, he’s another turn-of-the-century doctor (the 19th to 20th variety) who saw a corrupt world and gave it back to us with poison and a smile. He was a sophisticate who knew all the secrets and got a kick out of most of them, especially the bad ones. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is an updating of Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story and the movie’s best moments catch the frosty morality at play in his work.

And despite Cutting Ball’s many content warnings, there is a distant morality present in La Ronde, though not one that would ever announce itself as such. The play is a series of sexual liaisons: A hooks up with B; B hooks up with C; C hooks up with D and so on until, say about, ten letters in when we return to A all over again, each coupling a failure if you believe in happily ever after or even a week or two of fun. Everything is distant, including Schnitzler’s judgments, and his accusations of social and personal hypocrisy come in whispers and jokes. You have to sidle up to him and you never know if you’re going to get a gentle hand on the shoulder or a punch to the face. And that’s all part of the fun.

This is the second half of my conversation with dancer, choreographer, provocateur Keith Hennessy at the Atlas Cafe on the last day of February, 2019. As we continued to talk, we touched on the notion of happiness, what it means for an artist to be a brand, and again the workshops coming up at SF MOMA, de(composition). Perhaps, most importantly, we started to wrestle with some ideas of what it means to be a political artist and create political work. Hennessy’s answers are clear, complex, tricky, and maybe, as a practical matter impossible to do unless you’re Keith Hennessy—maybe. CLICK TO LISTEN.

On the last day of February I had a conversation at the Altas Cafe with dancer, choreographer, teacher, and provocateur Keith Hennessy about his upcoming workshops at SF MOMA, de(composition). The workshops will take place on March 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th. They’re presently filled, but there’s a waiting list and some spots should open up. We talked about what it means for Hennessy to run these workshops at SF MOMA and many other issues, including Hennessy’s recent pieces (future friend/ships and Sink), his 2012 epic at YBCA, Turbulence, and the arts culture in the Bay Area. This is part one of a two-part interview. CLICK TO LISTEN.

In her Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman trashes Ovid with the same tenacity that Shakespeare in Love does to Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, turning the ghost of real art into a pretty looking meal for haute bourgeois hicks. But what else would we expect of the Berkeley Rep, a theater that’s been aiming down for at least seven years and possibly a decade. Paying for these tickets is to feel the waste of contemporary capitalism, where everything is pre-packaged, even wild desire.

What you get here is the façade of art, pretty and beguiling on the outside, but as an experience utterly disposable. As it unfolds before you, know that every last moment of it is designed to shock and awe you into not caring, to sitting back in your chair and embracing the willful madness of experiencing nothing. That’s really not something we should be clapping for.

The Aurora Theater in Berkeley is the King of dressing up junk in well-acted, well-designed productions. If steady competence alone were a virtue, the Aurora would ascend to the heavens to lounge with Shakespeare and Aristophanes. And yet somehow here they are producing The Creditors, August Strindberg’s nut fest of betrayal and revenge, tempting the Gods with the real thing.

And let’s just say the real thing destabilized the Aurora’s well-oiled machine and was a welcome surprise to the opening night crowd. As you might guess, it’s more fun to see a great play in an imperfect production, than a bad play in which the acting, direction, and design are without fault.

One of Ubuntu theater’s great successes is how they treat social justice as a theatrical project, a real art. Each play is a provisional response to a never-ending problem. There is not one truth, but many. There is not one situation or conflict, but multiple fronts. There is no solution, only the fight that continues from production to production.

And that brings us to their latest battle, three hours and twenty-minutes of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war, epic, Mother Courage And Her Children. Under Emilie Whelan’s vigorous, though up-and-down, direction, the company makes a radical case for Brecht, testing the limits of his vision, what ambitious theater can do, and what Ubuntu can accomplish. Not everything is successful, but it is fascinating and bracing and unusual.

With ACT’s new production of Edward Albee’s Seascape we have a fairly obscure work by a major playwright, despite the fact that it won the Pulitzer in 1974. The play’s mood is gentle and comic with few hints of the acid-in-the-face histrionics of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, and his late-career, screech-fest, The Goat. And so we should ask, or at least wonder, what’s in this for new Artistic Director Pam McKinnon in her first directorial outing for her first year on the job.

There’s a touch of King Lear in all fathers. They begin in our lives as resplendent Gods and end their lives, at least before us, diminished, humbled, confused, and defiantly human. They are well suited to the needs of drama and two new plays, Campo Santo’s production of Bennett Fischer’s Candlestick at the Costume Shop and Lauren Yee’s King of the Yees at the SF Playhouse give us not just fallible fathers, but San Francisco ones as well.

And it is their daughters, not without their own troubles, who must contend with the humanity of these men and the ways their souls have seeped into their memories of a radically changing city. Look away and both the fathers and the San Francisco that they knew might vanish.

Paradise Square is the unwitting product of the crisis of authorship in American theater. In many ways what the musical is about is beside the point, though its plot and aspirations are telling to say the least. In its seriousness, it obliterates any possibility of artistic ambition, wildness, freedom, and scope. Its goal is to parrot conventional sensibilities and give them a high culture sheen of political and social importance. There’s no author here, only a producer selling the idea of high-quality creativity.

There must be a better way to sum up 2018 Bay Area Theater than flying away from the scene of the crime, but since I’m actually on a shaky Jet Blue flight on the eve of the New Year I’ll have to accept the situation. And accepting the situation is what this list is about: the situation of the country, the situation of a theater and performance culture that is too often automated and soulless, and, most depressingly, the situation of a great art form that still manages to gather sizable audiences, but to rather aesthetically and politically questionable ends.

There were moments of fire and passion and real insight in 2018, but over and over again they felt like dying stars in distant galaxies. These five stars burned the brightest and in many ways all of them were Black Swans, miracles of happenstance, the outliers of an increasingly dark age of false outrage, preening conformity, and aesthetic timidity. Yet, if you pay attention, there was always an individual—the playwright, the director, the choreographer, an actor, and in the case of our best production of the year, a company (albeit German but brought to us by the engaged presenters at Cal Performances) that just refused to accept the world in its present state.

Of all the theater companies in the Bay Area, the Shotgun Players, under founding artistic director Patrick Dooley’s guidance, is the most keen to the notion that theater is an occasion, that each performance is a gamble and a celebration of the play and the community that comes to see it. And it makes sense that Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia would represent a tantalizing bet for them. At his best, Stoppard is all about celebrations and Arcadia with its dual time periods (1809 and the present) is an attempt to feel the joy of the past in our fallen present.

You never know what you’ve got until you’ve reached the end and sometimes even a long time after that—it’s true of performances, of books, even the mundane work of the day. We never know the true state of things until the last breath is drawn, you close your eyes, and the lights go out.

That’s one way you could think about Big Dance Theater’s mysterious and often-beautiful 17 C, conceived by Annie-B Parsons, and co-directed by Parsons and Paul Lazar. The importance of waiting until the end, to staying in a state of flux, to seeing what happens: it’s an interesting life lesson and a theatrical one, too.

One of Mansour’s sharpest insights is that the drama of the Aunt and the Nephew is fluid and has few rules. Rather delightfully, it is also a source of joy, exactly what we expect and want from family. So when we first meet She (The Aunt) and He (The Nephew) we immediately get the sense that not only do these two people get a kick out of each other, but also that they’ve always gotten a kick out of each other. They want to be together and that’s a real pleasure to experience.

There’s something distasteful about rank ambition and its stench is all over the Aurora Theater’s production of Simon Block’s stage adaption of Jonathan Safran Foer’s kind-of-celebrated, first novel, Everything is Illuminated. The whole enterprise is what we might call anxious for significance.

Men in Boats is as an incredible failure of imagination. The actual story of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 trip down the Colorado River is stirring and complex, a moment in history worthy of investigation, critique, celebration, whatever your game. Yet you can’t get to any of that without a real vision or philosophy of history. And a real vision would never reduce these complex people to stick figure goofballs.

What we get from Men on Boats is an illusion of real engagement and experimentation. It’s selling radical critique, revisionist history, feminist ideals, and theatrical invention, but it’s all packaging without soul or sense or care, just idle gestures to make us feel that something has happened.

Sometimes you see a play and you just want to make up some rules. Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview has certainly garnered a lot of controversy and audiences and critics have been fairly tight-lipped about what actually happens in the Berkley Rep over the course of Drury’s 100-minute dissection of, I guess the best way to put it is, race and perception.

That’s the first trap of the evening and you should both enjoy and resist it.

There are a lot of problems with Shelia Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone With Salad and, interestingly enough, many of them touch on what we might call the limits of representation. Or just simply, what can you get away with in the theater. The talented but undisciplined Callaghan wants to get away with everything and director Susannah Martin, quite savvy at staging difficult texts, does her best to make that possible in a game but ungainly Shotgun Players production.

Girl is a kind of beautiful abstraction that takes the last girl trope of slasher films and subjects it to a philosophy of violence. Of course we know the situation: after all the terror and killing is done, there’s always a girl with lovely brown hair struggling to escape, to claw her way back to something approaching a normal life, or any life at all. Her moment is always some combination of the smutty indifference of the snuff film and a survivor’s religious transcendence. Kate and Fauxnique choose transcendence (with snuff lurking at a distance) and the effect is, at times, stunning.

If An Enemy of the People is a battle about truth, both play and production relentlessly pursue its aesthetic correlative: how to depict reality. Today, Ibsen’s realism has become—in a greatly diluted form—ours. By embracing aggressive, non-realistic staging techniques, Ostemeier re-imagines Ibsen’s most radical goals of representing the world, and in fact demands that his production make us feel the shock of it, the shock of what is actually in front of us.

You should run to the Ubuntu Theater Project’s Hamlet, because what you’ll see for the first two hours of this three-hour production is an incredibly clear, passionate, at times deranged, epic staging of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. Its anger seems ripped from the streets and placed right on stage, but not in a didactic or direct way. Sometimes clarity is oblique and attacks us from behind. But what’s in front of us burns with an intensity so ridiculous that parts of it will make you cry.

Almost everything in Sweat is a product of subject matter and situation. Only at the edges of the drama do we get anything close to human imagination. You see glimpses of life in some of the minor characters: the drunk Jessie who just wants a kiss on her birthday; Evan, a parole officer with a surprisingly humane and realistic view of the world; and Brucie, Cynthia’s drug addled ex, who may be the most interesting character on stage and certainly the freest.

Thrust to the side of the primary story, these bit players have some room to breathe. And because of that they’re kind of fascinating. Or put another way: the further the play gets away from the central drama, the more it roils with actual life.

I can’t help but think that there’s another play lurking in Oslo, nastier, more alive, less fair-minded, and memorable enough to force the most jaded of us to care. Because right now, in this Oslo, what we care about are negotiations. They could have been between East Timor and Australia, or a couple of boys trading baseball cards. There’s a way in which the Israelis and Palestinians are incidental to the entire experience.

What I’m going to say about Cutting Ball’s Uncle Vanya is completely unrealistic and unfair, but the problem here is rehearsal time and how theaters produce work. The production feels like a very well-rehearsed first draft, where everything was attempted and nothing rejected. You wonder what might have happened if they had spent an equal amount of time with a scalpel, paring closer and closer to the bone until every effect was either excised or found its way into the blood of Chekhov’s stunning play. There are pleasures here, but not enough discipline for real and sustained success.

Given the title of Charles Slender-White’s sly, beautiful immersive dance receiving its world premiere at CounterPulse for his company FACT/SF, you can’t help but think of a trip to heaven, but that’s a mistake of perception, of climbing stairs and finding yourself in the rafters looking down. death politely brushes aside those easy clichés of the afterlife. This is not going to be about our experience, our feelings, or our fears. It’s about souls that are radically different than ours.

English playwright debbie tucker green’s dirty butterfly, receiving its Bay Area premiere with Anton’s Well Theater Company under Robert Estes astute direction, tries to radically represent two contrary modes of consciousness: the hazy symbolism of our imaginations and the horrid state of being alert to every aspect of reality.

The whole effect is hypnotizing. Young Jean Lee places us in a position where we, the jaded non-churchgoing audiences of San Francisco and New York, wish for some aspect of a religious service. What’s nice is that she reminds us that with that wish comes responsibilities, morals, and an acceptance that we aren’t the center of the world.

Those familiar with Lucas Hnath’s work know that it’s a real possibility that his Part 2 could challenge or even surpass Ibsen’s original. Both playwrights share a moral complexity and outrage that might come down to a simple equation: when it comes to people anything can happen.