The challenge Gotanda poses here is sharp and his ending beautiful, both the writing and the pared down lavishness of Michael Socrates Moran’s staging; nonetheless, the beginning of the play is uncertain both in tone and content.
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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 loose and shaky ending scenes.
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What shines is how this 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.
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Playwright Phillip Kan Gotanda, Artistic Director of the Ubuntu Theater Project Michael Socrates Moran and I got together to talk before the opening of Gotanda's new play for Ubuntu, Pool of Wonder: Undertow of the Soul. We talked about theater audiences, producing, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, the presence of violence in Gotanda's work, and a few hopes and dreams for the American Theater. In the end, Gotanda can't resist recreating a sound effect from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. CLICK TO LISTEN
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No one could guess how terrific and awful Vietgone is, perhaps the most unbalanced play in terms of quality I’ve seen in some time — or ever for that matter.
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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.
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The fascinating American playwright Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, receiving its Bay Area premiere at Center Rep in Walnut Creek under Markus Potter’s scalpel-sharp direction, captures a strange quality about ethical thinking -- it helps to not have any. Ethics, that is.
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There are scenes in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew that belong in a terrific play about Detroit auto workers.
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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.
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Part of the pleasure of Star Finch’s gothic shocker Bondage is the way Finch catches the destabilizing force of simply being neither black nor white. As William Carlos Williams memorably summed it up, "the pure products of America go crazy."
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