What 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 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.
Read MoreThe fascinating American playwright Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, receiving its Bay Area premiere at Center Rep in Walnut Creek under Markus Potter’s scalpel-sharp direction, captures a strange quality about ethical thinking -- it helps to not have any. Ethics, that is.
Read MoreThere are scenes in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew that belong in a terrific play about Detroit auto workers.
Read MorePinter was the revolution that mid-century audiences wanted — and for almost 60 years he, along with Samuel Beckett, has stood for an ongoing theatrical revolt against conventional meaning.
Read MorePart of the pleasure of Star Finch’s gothic shocker Bondage is the way Finch catches the destabilizing force of simply being neither black nor white. As William Carlos Williams memorably summed it up, "the pure products of America go crazy."
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThere’s a simple understanding that to experience the epic, we have to identify with its opposite -- the lost traveller (Odysseus), the scared child (Huckleberry Finn), the harried bureaucrat (Joseph K.).
Read MoreI’m guessing, but one of the main reasons A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life are such great works of art is that their heroes are shattered, and they must put themselves back together in the coldest time of the year.
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