Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, showing through August 28 at the Underbelly as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, takes place sometime in the near future. Global warming has caused sea levels to massively rise, and the remaining humans live in rickety stilt houses perched atop skyscrapers. The performance’s opening sequence shows our hero, Alvin Sputnik, at the bedside of his love, Elena. He sings her a simple song on his ukulele as her soul (a point of light) flies out the window and into the ocean. Alvin is despondent, until he sees an ad on television calling for volunteers […]
Category: Theater Reviews
Postcards from the Fringe: Blind Summit Theatre’s ‘The Table’
by Marianne Moore
At Blind Summit Theatre’s The Table, showing at Pleasance Dome through August 28 as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a puppet explains the basic principles of Japanese tabletop puppetry. Pacing back and forth on the white table serving as his stage — as his entire world—the nameless puppet demonstrates, and everyone can see, how he is operated by three puppeteers—one for head and left hand (Mark Down, who also performs the voice), one for rump and right hand (Sean Garratt), and one for the feet (Nick Barnes). All three are on stage, fully visible, dressed in unassuming black. There […]
At Odds with the Family: Aurora Theatre Company’s ‘The Metamorphosis’
by Marianne Moore
The most heartbreaking moment in David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson’s theatrical adaptation of The Metamorphosis (at the Aurora Theater, in its first professional American production) is at the beginning, when Gregor’s sister Grete (Megan Trout) discovers that Gregor’s shoes are still on the carpet. It is past seven o’ clock; Gregor should be long gone to work. The family stops short; they had just finished setting three tidy places for breakfast. They stare at the shoes in shared astonishment, bordering on horror. Even before Gregor’s repulsive transformation, his family is accustomed to eating without him. They are happiest when […]
Remixing Chekhov: Theatre Movement Bazaar’s ‘Anton’s Uncles’
by Cristóbal McKinney
Anton’s Uncles is what its director Tina Kronis calls a “movement score.” Distilling and adding new material to Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya — a century-old play about the members of a country estate frustrated by their guests, a stuffy professor and his enthrallingly beautiful wife — Anton’s Uncles amplifies that play’s themes of hope and unsatisfied desires. Co-writers Kronis and Richard Alger strip Chekhov’s play of realism, retaining a skeletal plot and then, like decoupage, decorate it with a boisterous concoction of poetry, dance, music, and spectacle. As subtext and metaphor eclipse verisimilitude, Uncles skirts unintelligibility. But to an audience […]
Family Moments: Hand2Mouth Theatre’s ‘Everyone Who Looks Like You’
by Cristóbal McKinney
The first thing to know about Everyone Who Looks Like You, a piece exploring family by the award-winning Hand2Mouth Theatre from Portland, Oregon, is that is has no plot. Written by Alex Huebsch, Marc Friedman, and Maesie Speer, with material provided by Hand2Mouth’s company members, the play is structured around a sequence of monologues, vignettes, music, and dance concerning each member of a fictional family, one composed from anecdotes, surveys, and improvisations – the result of more than a year’s worth of workshops. The resulting performance is a borderline cavalcade of nostalgia and chagrin. Though sometimes anemic from lack of […]
What to Make of Memories? Pig Iron Theatre’s ‘Chekhov Lizardbrain’
by Cristóbal McKinney
It’s easy to see why Pig Iron’s Chekhov Lizardbrain, running for a very limited time this weekend in San Francisco at Z Space, was named one of the New York Times’ top theater events of 2008. The performance vivisects a human mind (no small feat) while drawing the audience into a strange and gripping voyage through the “menagerie of human possibility.” Successfully experimenting with style and substance while retaining heart, Lizardbrain leaves one wandering out of the theater feeling transformed. The play, devised by Robert Quillen Camp and the entire Pig Iron production team, concerns Demitri, an autistic man who […]
Strange Transformation: Shotgun Players’ ‘Care of Trees’
by Marianne Moore
How do you tell the story of a woman’s transformation into a tree? What does that even look like, especially on stage? Does it happen by degrees — does she begin by becoming something more pliable, like a strand of ivy or a sapling, or an artichoke? Playwright E. Hunter Spreen, in Care of Trees (at Shotgun Players’ Ashby Stage through June 26), tells the story of budding arboriform Georgia Swift (Liz Sklar) by showing the distance Georgia must travel from her partner, Travis Dekalb (Patrick Russell), in order to fulfill her destiny. Illness becomes the metaphor (or the medium) […]
Tennessee Williams’ Bird-Girl of Glorious Hill: Theater Review
by Marianne Moore
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a lesser-known work by Tennessee Williams being staged by the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, is the story of Alma Winemiller, the odd, intelligent daughter of the Episcopalian rector in the town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi. When the play opens, Alma’s attempts to fit in are driving her frantic, while even her most modest pleasures (organizing a cultural club, feeding the birds in the town square) make her an object of ridicule. Her father, Reverend Winemiller (played by Charles Dean), suffers continually under the burden of his mad wife and the scandal of her sister’s […]
Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and Other Plays by Will Eno: Theater Review
by Marianne Moore
In Lady Grey (in ever lower light), one of three new short plays by Will Eno performed together by San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theatre, the title character never introduces herself. The only person mentioned by name in the piece is a little girl named Jennifer — because according to Lady Grey (Danielle O’Hare) “a story needs a girl, and a girl needs a name.” As the piece develops and we learn of Jennifer’s difficult day at show-and-tell, we come to think of Lady Grey as the name given to a collection of verbal tricks designed to protect and conceal Jennifer. […]