The adventurous Mugwumpin’s new production, “The Great Big Also,” has a lot going for it: an intriguing title; an eight-member ensemble with all the requisite vocal, movement and emotive skills; a potentially rich premise; and an imaginative setup. Read More

Occasionally actors appear in roles they seem born to play. Such is the case in Central Works’ “Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor.” It’s an adaptation, by the small company’s longtime resident playwright Gary Graves, of a story told by one of the characters in the 19th-century Russian novelist’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” Read More

It’s understandable that the stellar literary theater company Word for Word decided to stage “The Last Stand” and “Gold Star” in choosing among the linked short stories that comprise “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” Siobhan Fallon’s acclaimed book about life at Fort Hood, a military base in Texas. In “The Last Stand,” a young male soldier, Kit, has just returned home from more than a year in Iraq, wounded, to find that his wife is about to leave him. Read More

When local playwright Tanya Shaffer first imagined “The Fourth Messenger,” a musical world premiere opening in previews today in Berkeley, she was on a meditation retreat. She found herself thinking of the moment centuries ago when, according to legend, Siddhartha Gautama sat under the bodhi tree and refused to get up until he was enlightened. Various forces tried to lure him away, a scene Shaffer suddenly pictured as a highly theatrical song and dance of the temptations. Read More

You may think you don’t know what a “manic pixie dream girl” is — that’s the title of Katie May’s new play, a PlayGround-commissioned world premiere at the tiny Costume Shop — but you do. Think Annie Hall. Think Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Think Zooey Deschanel. Apparently the term was coined by a film critic. As explained during the course of this short, crisp and devilishly entertaining comedy, it refers to the generically adorable, free-spirited girl-woman who shows up in movies to rescue the brooding, troubled male and teach him about the joys of life. Read More

Sometimes it’s possible to be captivated by a play about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances — a play in which nothing particularly dynamic or transformative happens, and in which the dialogue is not particularly profound or lyrical or clever. Such was the case for me with New York playwright Amy Herzog’s “4000 Miles,” which premiered at Lincoln Center in 2011. Its success here is in large part due to American Conservatory Theater’s flawless production by a four-actor ensemble under the direction of Mark Rucker. Read More

There’s an undeniable charm to Theatre Rhinoceros artistic director John Fisher’s latest work, “Slugs and Kicks.” Set in the 1980s, it’s a sweet coming-of-age comedy, rather than specifically a coming-out-of-the-closet play, as one might expect from our oldest LGBT theater. Narrator Rory (Ben Calabrese), a virginal college student at the mythical Purgatoria State University in “a long, Western state,” is studying acting. Read More