You know the story: A young woman, a bit too obsessed with who’s cool and who’s not, sets out to make the world a better place by fixing up her friends with the perfect boyfriends and girlfriends. She gets it all wrong. Feelings are hurt. She’s especially mistaken in regards to who she belongs with…

There’s a line that comes about halfway through Edward Albee’s classic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Unlike so much of the rest of Albee’s brutal and brilliant drama, it’s not a line full of anger or recrimination, or witty humor, or caustic observation. As such, it stands out like a whisper in a rainstorm.…

Among William Shakespeare’s many lofty histories – for hundreds of years the Bard’s best attended plays (till the 1800s came and his tragedies took their place in theatergoers’ hearts) – Henry IV, parts one and two have lost much of the love Elizabethans felt for them. If they are performed today at all, it is…

‘We have sinned!” exclaims a desperately guilty character early on in A Little Night Music, adding, “And it was a complete failure!” “In our show, that line is worth the ticket price,” proclaims Craig Miller, director of 6th Street Playhouse’s production of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical. “It’s my favorite moment in the show,” Miller says.…

Well, it’s spring, and the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival has kicked off its 2017 season with four new shows – out of an eventual total of eleven —the majority of them playing for the next nine months in Ashland, Oregon. The First Four include a frisky stage adaptation of the film ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ and…

It snowed last night in Ashland, Oregon, where the temperature outside ultimately dropped to a low of 20 degrees. Meanwhile, on stage inside the Angus Bowmer Theater, the temperatures and blood pressures were increasingly high, as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival kicked off its 2017 season with a vigorous, high-energy, decidedly weird staging of William Shakespeare’s…

Ideas don’t get much bigger than the nature of democracy or the theory of relativity. But two local theater companies are successfully wrestling those brain-busting subjects into highly enjoyable, stage-sized entertainments. 1776, the seldom-produced 1968 musical by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards (Spreckels Theatre Company), combines an enormous cast, clever projections and elaborate costumes to…

‘Kooky” is a word often ascribed to people who are offbeat and unusual to an uncomfortable degree—people like playwright Clare Barron, whose effectively oddball drama You Got Older just opened at Left Edge Theatre. Also new is 6th Street Playhouse’s Buyer & Cellar, a one-actor exploration of the eccentricities of Barbra Streisand, another routine recipient of the “kookiness”…

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…