There are rugs everywhere, hanging from the walls like ancient tapestries, in huge piles behind the audience, as if the world we’ve entered were smothered in an abundance of treasure -- a perfect setting for Othello.
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Blank Map, created and performed by a temporary collective of queer African-American performance artists and produced under the aegis of the dancer, choreographer, and provocateur Keith Hennessy, apparently had a fraught birth.
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In Penelope Skinner’s world, experience has nothing on desire. Desire confounds and obliterates without even trying. And we should celebrate her and Shotgun's production for recognizing that.
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Stacy Ross’s Benedick is as strange and magnetic a performance as you are likely to get this year. Dressed as a man, in a tight, striped jacket and floppy hair, she resembles, moves, and behaves like Michael Jackson.
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Summer is the season where you dream of nothing happening, and yet, strangely, it is also the season for radical transformations.
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Joseph Moncure Marsh’s The Wild Party is a singular piece of American poetry, a lurid, epic written in a jazzy doggerel verse. Andrew Lippa's musical version catches the beauty of Marsh's trash aesthetic and forces us to hum along. That's nice.
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Watch Carl Lumbly’s face in SF Playhouse’s production of Red Velvet, and it seems as if you can read hundreds of distinct variations of despair, hope, and dismay on it.
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There have been too many corpses in San Francisco recently -- the bullet-ridden bodies of Alex Nieto and Mario Woods -- killed in strange and discouraging encounters with the police. Paul Flores understands why, kind of.
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The strangest and most unnerving aspect of Edgar Oliver’s beautiful solo performance, Helen & Edgar, is that he seems to be living his childhood all over again, as if it were a boa constrictor strangling any chance at real life.
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Plays are written and felt, not designed. And that's always a crucial problem with Mary Zimmerman's work.
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