Sometimes nothing much happens in a play, or at least nothing surprising, but the journey its characters take feels so authentic, so palpably representative of the human condition, that audiences are likely to cherish the passing minutes.
Such is the case in Magic Theatre’s Bay Area premiere of Los Angeles playwright Julie Marie Myatt’s 2009 play “The Happy Ones.”
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At the beginning of San Francisco-based playwright Octavio Solis’ riveting new drama, “Se Llama Cristina,” premiering at Magic Theatre, a couple is slumped in a drug-induced stupor at a Formica table in a bare, seedy room.
Surfacing, they’re so wrecked they don’t even know their own names, let alone where they are and why, and who the other person is. The man is horrified to see a needle sticking out of his own arm and drug paraphernalia on the table.
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In Magic Theatre’s “Another Way Home,” when a middle aged couple arrives for visiting day at Camp Kickapoo to see their teenage son, Joseph, they’re greeted with cold hostility.
Joey, who activates the events of the play, is sullen, hateful and, as portrayed by Daniel Petzold, weirdly jumpy, with a glazed, manic look in his eyes. Apparently the kid’s been like this for a long time. He’s been treated for ADD, depression and other conditions.
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As Sharr White’s intense, compact new play, “The Other Place,” proceeds, mysteries deepen.
Why is Juliana, a middle-aged research scientist, consulting a doctor; is it true, as she is convinced, that she’s inherited the brain cancer that runs in her family?
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The themes of exile and alienation resonate in Luis Alfaro’s new play, “Bruja,” a modern adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy “Medea” set in San Francisco’s Mission district. Loretta Greco directed the world premiere now at the Magic Theatre.Every character is struggling to establish an identity in America.
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The clipped, repetitive banalities exchanged by the middle-aged couple in the first half of Scottish playwright Linda McLean’s “Any Given Day” recall, in some ways, the dialogue in the mid-20th-century plays of Eugene Ionesco or Harold Pinter. “Jackie wouldn’t come in the dark,” says Bill.“No no,” says Sadie. “She couldn’t come in the dark.”“Don’t worry.”“We couldn’t open the door in the dark.”“No.”“Not once it’s dark.”
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So apparently there are a bunch of years in the life of Jesus that are unaccounted for, when he was a teenager. Playwright Lloyd Suh, whose dysfunctional-Korean-family comedy “American Hwangap” was such a hit for the Magic Theatre three seasons ago, let loose his imagination to create a theatrical explanation for those missing years.
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In “Annapurna,” New York playwright Sharr White’s world premiere at the Magic Theatre, the ups and downs of a middle-aged couple’s interactions are condensed into the space of a single day. Ulysses (Rod Gnapp) and Emma (Denise Cormier) haven’t communicated in 20 years, not since she left him, without explanation, in the middle of the night with their 5-year-old son in tow.
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Who’s in town Tony Award-winning playwright and V-Day founder Eve Ensler delivers her first talk based on her upcoming book, “Congo Cancer.” Proceeds from the evening benefit V-Day and Grace Cathedral. [7 p.m., Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., S.F.; www.vday.org]Lectures
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Private investigator Lili (a luminous Lauren English) is a lovelorn lesbian. Her dysfunctional sister, Mary (Maggie Mason, charmingly hyperactive), who imagines herself as Joan of Arc, is on the lam. Their mother, Eleanor (a powerfully focused Lorri Holt), is missing in action, but we know where she is: on a solitary wilderness expedition to reinvent herself.
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