#GetGhandi at Z Below

Many years ago over the course of five years or so, I saw a number of Anne Galjour’s plays. They had a real mystery to them and it felt as if she were discovering and shaping new worlds right before us, or at least ones we rarely see. One piece ended with a young girl imagining herself in the middle of a dance floor, enveloped in a sea of light. That moment had the quality of a dream storming into reality. I’ve never quite forgotten it and have always thought that Galjour was an artist with a special feeling for theatrical form.

#GetGandhi, her self-proclaimed “radical feminist comedy,” seems the work of an altogether different artist, say an alternate Anne Galjour whose only notion of drama is 1980’s television sitcoms, and bad ones at that. Instead of a play that is restless, searching, and alert to new possibilities, #GetGandhi is merely a concept drowning in cliches.

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4.48 PSYCHOSIS AT ANTON’S WELL

There are two important points to make about Anton’s Well’s production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. The first is that it’s a pleasure to see a young theater company stake out an aesthetic philosophy, to essentially say: This is what we do and this is how we’re going to do it. In the bland world of Bay Area Theater, that’s a cause for celebration.

The second point is a bit more damning. Though you can understand why Artistic Director and Founder Robert Estes would be attracted to the late, avant-garde shock master Sarah Kane, the best you can say of her work is that it doesn’t require much attention. Reaction, maybe, but for a writer so interested in brutality, it’s amazing how little Kane’s plays demand that we think, engage, and concentrate.

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VIETGONE AT ACT

Vietgone possesses a kind of conceptual genius that makes you feel that Qui Nguyen has found a more fluid and expressive form of American playwriting. And then he blows all that brilliance with some truly dreadful writing — weak-minded parodies, sitcom tripe, and post-modern juvenilia.

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BETWEEN US AT THEATREFIRST

These 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. The problem is that none of the plays on display here.

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THE BIRTHDAY PARTY AT ACT

Pinter 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. ACT's by-the-numbers production of his first hit, The Birthday Party, shows how limited that revolution was. There are moments, but nothing can compensate for Pinter's lack of dramatic and philosophical force. The void is empty.

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The PastJohn WilkinsComment