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Theater
Engagement by Alienation
Bertolt Brecht, in devising his enduring brand of political theater, developed a signature technique -- historification: never referring directly to what he wanted to criticize, but instead using historical settings and characters in order to give the audience the intellectual distance necessary to see things clearly. In the case of "Mother Courage" it's the Nazi's role in starting World War Two in Germany that's the target (the play was written between 1939 and 1941) and the action is set during the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648,) a war cemented in Europe's collective memory rather like the Civil War is in ours. More
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Theater
Who’s Your Dada?
The first ten minutes of "Travesties", written by Tom Stoppard, is particularly disorienting, but in a way that turns out to make sense later (if that makes any sense). The main character, Henry Carr, an elderly, loquacious, senile English gentleman, rolls around on a stark stage in an antique wheelchair, dressed in a fez-like hat and richly embroidered robe, rambling on about his reminiscences of living in Zurich in 1917. More
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Theater
It Only Hurts the First Time
Billed as a “send-up of 70's porn, cheerleader rivalry and high school heartbreak,” and a “silly, fun, porntastic romp,” this uneven theatrical confection has a colorful and peripatetic provenance: it’s the San Francisco premier and latest incarnation of an off-Broadway piece which started out as a 2001 New York Fringe Festival production which was a musical rendition of a 1978 blockbuster porn film that was evidently trying to break new ground by attempting to have a “real plot” and “real actors.” More
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Theater
Between the Coyotes and the Crickets
In "True West", the Chekov’s Gun device is not a loaded gun per se, but the two main characters themselves -- they’re both loaded guns. The whole time, you’re kept guessing which one will shoot first, and which will die first, because from the git-go, you know someone’s gotta die. More
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Theater
Best Viewed Up Close
Sarah Kraft and Ed Purver are nothing short of modern day performance archaeologists, scavenging for inspiration in the rubble of fairy tales, games, riddles, and newsy tidbits. Their much-lauded 2002 performance, Woods for the Trees, was an incisive mash-up of commentary on war, technology, the ogre of personal and spiritual isolation, and the ever-creepy parable of Hansel and Gretel. The pair’s latest concoction, Remote, leaves behind a similar bread crumb trail of clues, questions, and eerily premonitory vignettes about the human condition in the MySpace era. More
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Theater
Get It While You Can
Five minutes into "Love, Janis", and I’m totally like “Whoa. Dude. The 60s.” Unlike many of you out there, I was around then and still remember a lot of it, like hearing Janis on the radio every day, along with Jimmy and Aretha and Carlos Santana and Sam and Dave and the Doors and the Mamas and the Papas and a lot more, all on the same station. I can honestly say that "Love, Janis" made me remember what acid flashbacks (or at least what we thought were acid flashbacks) felt like. More
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Theater
Meat, Murder, and the Rest
It’s an inarguable fact -- food and sex go hand in hand. You can’t, after all, envision a successful seduction sans the edibles, or an orgiastic Roman bacchanal without the proper libations, could you? That’s why we have so many foreign films in which scenes of voluptuous passion are paired with images of exotic feasts and savory larders, and why we have so many websites devoted to the fetish known as sploshing (if you aren’t familiar with the term, look it up) And if food and sex go hand in hand, meat is the ne plus ultra of primal urges, a truth that playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb has ingeniously captured in “Hunter Gatherers". More
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Theater
A Comic Gag That Hasn’t Lost Its Edge
Bad manners, lowly comic gags, and jejune slapstick humor never looked as good as they do in Jeune Lune’s ribald contemporary adaptation of Molière’s "The Miser". A 1668 play about a simpering curmudgeon whose notorious love of gold keeps everyone, including his two children, at bay, "The Miser’s" economy of language is wryly complemented by its skinflint protagonist’s scrimping and churlishness. More
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Theater
Blowing the Dust off the American Classic
Few classic plays lend themselves well to modern interpretations, no matter how true to the iconic original, and Tennessee Williams is the American exemplar of this very basic dramaturgical principle. Williams' motley cast of vituperative viragos, silver-tongued Southern cads, and slinky but invariably histrionic temptresses has made for oodles of overacted, hair shirt renditions -- histrionic poetry screamed aloud rather than whispered without the understated moodiness and tragic-comic ambivalence that Williams might have intended. More
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Theater
A Fresh Rejoinder to Experimental Drama
The stage is dark and the atonal rhythms of a mildly eerie soundscape float out to the audience before a wash of light spatters, turn by turn, four performers slumped against the walls, who each utter a phrase that's either cryptic or equivocal, before the action commences. From my personal experience with theatre, this is the kind of enigmatic kickoff that could precede either a poorly rendered performance piece, or a fresh rejoinder to experimental drama. Thankfully, Campo Santo's production of Haze -- a loosely connected series of aphoristic vignettes by four contemporary authors -- went for the latter. More
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