The essential failure of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles—the story of an angry cyclist and his passive-aggressive relationship with his testy, suspicious grandmother—is its lack of direction and absence of coherent plotting, along with characters who, with one exception, start off being largely unlikable and reveal themselves so slowly that by the time we see something admirable,…

As theatergoers, we occasionally attend plays we never previously liked—and end up changing our minds by the end. Maybe exceptional acting somehow assists the script in transcending its limitations, or the directing cleverly alters the show to make some powerful social statement, finding some new way to show us something we’d not noticed in previous productions. For me,…

SWIMMERS (Marin Theatre Company) Rating: ★★★★½ (Out of five) Swimmers, by Rachel Bonds, is a gorgeously poetic play about that specific form of crushing loneliness that can only be felt in the presence of other people, and it’s beautifully performed by a large company of 11 actors. Presented by Marin Theatre Company and directed with detailed precision…

People hide things. We bury our sins, secrets and hidden thoughts down deep, or we simply disguise them behind a mask of pretense. Theater is the ultimate exercise in pretense as art, and in two first-rate plays, those secrets are uncovered in very different ways. Click ‘Here‘ to read the full review in the North…

I am, in a moment, going to talk about spelling, as in spelling bees, as in ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,’ a musical that is currently running in two different productions in the North Bay. But first, let me delve further into the disciplines of vocabulary with a few stage-related definitions. I’d like…

As the 2016 Oregon Shakespeare Festival kicks off its season with four shows (and seven more to open between now and late summer), the trend this year seems to be shows that challenge up the norm, fiddle with audience comfort-levels, and defy tradition. But that’s not true for every show, and frankly, that’s kind of nice.…

Ultimately, despite the talent, craft, and ingenious artistic contributions of the cast and crew, and regardless of the boldness, beauty or flat-out genius of a show’s concept, whether or not the thing works is ultimately a matter of taste. What you think is brilliant I might find to be a well-intentioned mess,  and what your neighbor…

In Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s boldly beautiful fantasy-drama ‘The River Bride,’ projections are used to dazzling effect, creating sunrises and sunsets, starry skies, and rain-soaked jungles. Projections play also a significant part in Christopher Liam Moore’s equally bold – but far less consistently satisfying — staging of Shakespeare’s gender-bendy Twelfth Night. Amongst Shakespeare’s most popular and…

“Love is for the bold! You have to be willing to risk everything!” So exults Belmira, an impetuous young bride-to-be, in an evocative early scene in Marisela Treviño Orta’s stunning The River Bride. It’s easily the best new show in a strong current batch of four that just opened the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland (where…

‘There is never an easy time to do something that has never been done before.” True enough. In author-playwright Mary Spletter’s world premiere, Arches, Balance and Light, those words are more than just encouraging advice offered to a determined young pioneer; they form a kind of philosophical spine to a play that, in its own right,…