Posts tagged The Shotgun Players
Shotgun's 'KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF! Is Urgent

Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt have a long-standing relationship with Chekov’s The Three Sisters. Their devised Yes Yes To Moscow (which Jackson directed and Wilmurt starred in) was an eighty-minute comic romp, an inversion of the play’s signature wish — “We must go back to Moscow!” — that somehow worked itself around to a striking wistfulness that was, well, Chekhovian. And Wilmurt’s cabaret show, Olga, imagines the most sisterly of the three sisters as a game chanteuse, entertaining soldiers and yes, wishing to leave her provincial home and conquer the big stage that is Moscow and the world. It’s ending is also striking and wistful, so again Chekhovian.

One might say that KILL THE DEBBIE DOWNERS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM! KILL THEM OFF! kicking off the Shotgun Players’ 28th season is the third of the Jackson-Wilmurt Sisters, the last of the trilogy, or maybe the third of the quartet, or merely the unruly middle child of the quintet, who knows? Maybe we just need to slip them a copy of Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard. Whatever its final position, DD TRIPLE KILL is both less contained and successful than its predecessors, but also — and this is what you should care about — more aesthetically and philosophically urgent. We’ll also add alert to the future. That too is Chekhovian, the other, less recognized one, but the one you get here and the one you should want.

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Shotgun's 'Arcadia' Takes Up The Drama Of Those Who Come Last

Of all the theater companies in the Bay Area, the Shotgun Players, under founding artistic director Patrick Dooley’s guidance, is the most keen to the notion that theater is an occasion, that each performance is a gamble and a celebration of the play and the community that comes to see it. And it makes sense that Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia would represent a tantalizing bet for them. At his best, Stoppard is all about celebrations and Arcadia with its dual time periods (1809 and the present) is an attempt to feel the joy of the past in our fallen present.

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Shotgun's 'Women Laughing Alone With Salad' Defies Its Own Sense Of The World

There are a lot of problems with Shelia Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone With Salad and, interestingly enough, many of them touch on what we might call the limits of representation. Or just simply, what can you get away with in the theater. The talented but undisciplined Callaghan wants to get away with everything and director Susannah Martin, quite savvy at staging difficult texts, does her best to make that possible in a game but ungainly Shotgun Players production.

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The Best of Bay Area Theater in 2017

In 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.

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