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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreThose 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.
Read MoreThe aesthetic failure of plays like Detroit 67 strikes a double blow. One, it reduces and harnesses the real world to mere sensation, empty emotions, and false gestures of importance; and two, in doing so it blinds us from worlds and thinking that we need to confront and understand. Sometimes there is nothing worse than good intentions gone wrong.I’d like someone to defend this play. If you feel like it, I’d love for you, unknown person, to challenge this review.
Read MoreThe challenge Gotanda poses here is sharp and his ending beautiful, both the writing and the pared down lavishness of Michael Socrates Moran’s staging; nonetheless, the beginning of the play is uncertain both in tone and content.
Read MoreGuillermo Calderón’s Kiss isn’t a great play, but it’s a sharp one. In the Shotgun Players’ excellent production in association with Golden Thread Theater you’re going to feel the sting of its anger despite its loose and shaky ending scenes.
Read MoreWhat shines is how this flawed, four-hour journey into political mayhem hints at and kind of achieves some of the nervy, assaultive flair of continental auteurs such as Thomas Ostermeier or Ivo van Hove. I can’t remember a production with so much go-for-broke acting on the Cal Shakes stage, or really any of the major Bay Area stages.
Read MorePlaywright Phillip Kan Gotanda, Artistic Director of the Ubuntu Theater Project Michael Socrates Moran and I got together to talk before the opening of Gotanda's new play for Ubuntu, Pool of Wonder: Undertow of the Soul. We talked about theater audiences, producing, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, the presence of violence in Gotanda's work, and a few hopes and dreams for the American Theater. In the end, Gotanda can't resist recreating a sound effect from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. CLICK TO LISTEN
Read MoreNo one could guess how terrific and awful Vietgone is, perhaps the most unbalanced play in terms of quality I’ve seen in some time — or ever for that matter.
Read MoreThese days, when complicity has become such a potent, possibly criminal question(in our government, businesses, and private lives), TheatreFirst’s two-program collection of seven one-act monologues, Between Us, presents a group of men and women who got in the way.
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