Ubuntu Theater Project — Reviews

Ubuntu's 'Mother Courage' Dares, Soars, And Falters All At Once

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.

Ubuntu's 'Hamlet' Is Epic, Crazed, And So Full Of Life That You'll Cry

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.

Interview with Phillip Kan Gotanda and Ubuntu Artistic Director Michael Moran

Playwright 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

The Best of Bay Area Theater in 2017

In these end days of the year and perhaps the country, we might ask, just to while away the time, what we want from our American plays.

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