Everything begins provisionally. Perhaps in all our lives, but absolutely in death, choreographer Charles Slender-White’s sly, beautiful immersive dance receiving its world premiere at CounterPulse for his company FACT/SF. The piece begins off-handedly. A few friendly ushers lead us up some stairs to the top of the theater’s risers where a small picture box theater has been constructed—it’s as if the world before us has narrowed, focused in on one fragile moment. The eighty minutes that follow are both shocking and formally brilliant. You will want to see it again.

‘death’ runs through October 13 at CounterPulse in San Francisco. For tickets and information click here. Click here for full review.

debbie tucker green’s dirty butterfly is a nightmare about nightmares. The play oscillates between the dreamily poetic and lacerating realism. At 65-minutes it could be longer, but it’s always fascinating. Anton’s Well gives this difficult play a more than credible production with three strong performances. The play and the production are not perfect, but they’re alive and vibrant. And that’s what we should want.

dirty butterfly runs through October 7 at the Waterfront Theater in Berkeley. For tickets and information click here. Read the full review here.

As a playwright Dominique Morriseau has happy feet, constantly shifting back and forth between contrary dramatic styles and ideas. The first act hovers uneasily between conceptual daring, sitcom antics dressed up as everyday life, and dabs of Brechtian commentary between the scenes. The second act is organized like an August Wilson play, a series of vignettes that delay the drama to deepen our sense of the world from which it eventually emerges. No one should ever say that some balance between these four couldn’t work; it’s that Morriseau hasn’t the skill, talent, or daring to pull it off.

‘Detroit’ runs through October 7 at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley. For tickets and information click here. For the full review click here.

Guillermo 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 shaky ending scenes. Go for the first long scene and stay to think about the last two.

‘Kiss’ runs through September 30 at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley. For tickets and information click here. For full review click here.

Cal Shakes’ 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.

Full Review. Tickets and Information.

The problem with the San Francisco Mime Troupe is that they put on awful productions of awful plays in a style that we might call, passably professional. Professional, because everyone involved in the production knows what to do. Lines are memorized, cues are hit, the musicians play the right notes, the whole enterprise moves along with the precision of a Swiss watch, and yet every year, every summer, it’s a disaster in the park. A disaster of art, thought, time, civic engagement, progressive politics, an indictment of the spirit of the Bay Area that this is what passes for politically engaged, left-wing theater.

Their latest outing is Seeing Red, a time travel comedy bereft of energy and ideas. I suppose there are bits of labor history that some of their audience is unaware of, but that’s what Wikipedia is for. These free shows in the park seem more and more costly every year. We should demand more of fifty-year institutions or shut them down for the good of the republic.

‘Seeing Red’ runs until September 9 in various Bay Area Parks. For times and dates click here.

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.

Info and tickets. 

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.

Info and tickets.

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.

Full Review. Info and tickets.

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.

Full review. Info and tickets.

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.

Full review. Info and tickets.