Beauty isn’t always pretty. Richard Wright’s 1940 masterpiece Native Son—among the most important and powerful American novels ever published—has been alternately praised and condemned, drawing kudos and criticism for the very same things—mainly, the brutal honesty, realism and shocking violence of Wright’s supremely crafted depiction of life as a poor, undereducated black man in mid-century America.…

Love, sex, acting and mathematics. It’s all a messy business. Two new plays explore the sloppy intersection of sexual attraction and artistic (and/or scientific) pursuits. In Lauren Gunderson’s surreal 2010 drama Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight (Marin County’s Ross Valley Players), the real-life du Châtelet, an 18th-century physicist and sometime lover of French…

‘Good sex is like downhill skiing,” says Dr. Ruth Westheimer early on in Main Stage West’s engaging, surprise-packed solo-show Becoming Dr. Ruth. “Both require instinct, good movement and a willingness to take risks.” That description, apparently, applies to Westheimer herself. Throughout the unexpectedly rich script by playwright Mark St. Germain, the true details of Dr. Ruth’s…

Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews debuted off Broadway in 2012. The popular play, now running at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre, potently throws together three very different Jewish family members, just after the burial of their grandfather. Daphna (Emily Kron) is intensely religious, but her two wealthy cousins, Jonah (Brady Morales-Woolery) and Liam (Dean Linnard), are less so.…

Most stories that appear to be about death and dying prove to be all about life and living. They just use the inevitability of death to cast comparative light and shadow on the many joys and pitfalls of being alive. In Jane Anderson’s deliciously rich drama The Quality of Life, playing at Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater, four…

Victorian England produced some spectacularly bloody and murderous literature. Some was written and published, some began as the stuff of urban legend before being translated for the stage or to the cheap and popular ‘penny dreadful’ magazines that were filled with stories of the macabre, the sensational, the bloody, the mysterious. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock…

The unpredictable combustible power of people eating dinner together is prominently featured in two notable stage plays currently running in the North Bay. Marin Theatre Company’s August Osage County, directed by Jasson Minadakis, is a solid, well-performed, but oddly distant and frequently unsatisfying staging of the 2008 Pulitzer winner from Tracy Letts. Usually presented with…

One cannot grow up in Sonoma County without gaining at least some awareness of who Jack London was, that he wrote books about wolves and dogs, and that his home is now a state park a mere 30-minute drive from Santa Rosa. This year, the county marks the centennial of London’s 1916 death with numerous…

It’s been 12 years since Stephen Walsh last played Tony the grape grower, in the classic Frank Loesser musical ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ at Cinnabar Theater. And to employ an over-picked cliché, in his second run of the show at Cinnabar, Walsh has only gotten better, deeper and rich—like a really, really good, well, you…

When the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973—making most abortions legal in the United States for the first time—the decision marked the end of a very long road. But in Lisa Loomer’s remarkable new play Roe, running through Oct. 29 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the playwright shows that the landmark Supreme Court decision is…