The writings of San Francisco playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb have always been a balance of the weird, the wondrous, the sensitive, and the cynical. Nachtrieb likes to test artistic and cultural boundaries, daring his audience to surrender its expectations. He likes happy endings, but he also likes to subvert them and stand them on their heads. In…
Visually inventive and sensitive to a surprising degree, writer-director Mary Zimmerman’s surprisingly rich ‘Treasure Island’ — adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel — literally rocks the boat, employing a stunningly well-engineered stage that swings back and forth like a ship rolling on the ocean. That’s just one of many surprises awaiting audiences, young and old,…
Colorful costumed fish appear to swim across the stage (with the help of clever roller-skate shoes). Seagulls fly and mermaids swim (thanks to ‘Peter Pan’ style rigging). Huge waves splash and crash, octopus women grow to six times their normal size (using massive screened projections) and six-foot strands of seaweed bob and wiggle in time to the music (dancers dressed…
For several years, the lack of strong roles for women has been the talk of the theater world, lighting up blogs and theater-related websites. The issue has inspired debate, discussion and outcries of gender inequity. It has even provoked a spate of incendiary protest art like Courtney Meaker’s ‘That’swhatshesaid,’ in which the author compiled into one outrageous solo piece all of the…
The Bible, as anyone knows who’s ever opened it, is fairly bursting with sex. From Old Testament stories of kings and concubines, to New Testament tales of reformed prostitutes and virgin mothers, sex is pretty much everywhere. But who knew how big a role sex played in the creation of the longest lasting and best-loved…
QUESTION: When is a play not a play? ANSWER: When it’s a concert. Plays, generally speaking, have plots. And concerts, generally speaking, um . . . don’t. That’s the argument some have made against the rise (and strange popularity) of so-called “jukebox musicals,” the cutely coined nickname for stage shows consisting primarily of a catalog of songs…
(This review originally appeared in the North Bay Bohemian) Two commanding dramas—one a classic, one destined to be—are now playing in the North Bay. Each is worth discovering. In 1948, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons became his first critical hit. Not an easy show to pull off, Miller’s ingeniously unfolding post-WWII drama gets a solid, emotionally truthful…
War is not just about bombs and bullets and blood. It’s also about politics and position and power. Playwright Donald Margulies is not particularly interested in either the politics of war or the gory details of modern warfare. From his Pulitzer nominated play ‘Collected Stories’ to his Pulitzer-winning play ‘The Dinner Party,’ Margulies has always…
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,…
North Bay Stage and Screen 