At the beginning of British playwright Lucy Prebble’s “Enron” — onstage in an OpenTab Productions presentation — the major players in that great corporate debacle of the early 21st century gather at a reception. They are: Kenneth Lay (known as “Kenny-Boy” to George W. Bush), CEO of the Houston-based energy company; President Jeffrey Skilling; and soon-to-be Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow.
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On opening day at Dolores Park, during the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s latest political comedy with music, “For the Greater Good,” Troupe stalwart Velina Brown — playing a super-patriotic military officer — belted out a heartfelt song with all her usual gusto. As the audience cheered, a woman behind me said to her companion, “But we’re not supposed to like her!” He replied, “It’s so hard not to!”That comment speaks to the excellent acting all around in the six-member cast. But it also speaks to a slight sense of disorientation: Who is the hero and who is the villain here?
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Three almost-proscenium-sized picture frames, stacked asymmetrically upstage — plus a pile of chairs initially heaped in the center — comprise the design for “The Scottsboro Boys.”
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The characters in Kate Fodor’s 2007 play “100 Saints You Should Know” — onstage in a Theatre Rhinoceros production in The City — are desperately seeking ... something elusive.Former hippie and Deadhead Theresa, now a cleaning woman, is spiritually lost; a single mother and high school dropout, she wonders if religion might offer hope.Her caustic, cynical teenage daughter, Abby, suspects she herself might be inherently bad.Grocery delivery boy Garrett, friendless and naive, fears he’s gay.
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From early on in the SF Playhouse production of local playwright Kenn Rabin’s new play, “Reunion,” it’s clear the central character Tom is not the “sexually violent predator” he has been labeled by the system. He served his prison term, but is now incarcerated in a mental institution for psychiatric evaluation.
Tom believes there’s only one way for him to get out: if Valerie, the woman who, 10 years ago, accused him of raping her, recants. She was his high school drama student at the time, but he insists she seduced him.
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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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If Tennessee Williams had been born black, he might have written a play like Christina Anderson’s “Good Goods,” receiving a stellar West Coast premiere by the ever-adventurous Crowded Fire Theater.Anderson’s script is so dense — and the dialogue so melodiously thick — that it takes a while to grasp the nuances of the various relationships among the characters in Good Goods, which is a dry-goods store in a small, blue-collar Southern town. There’s high-strung Truth (David E. Moore), longtime shop manager and protege of the original shop owner, Mr. Good.
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Flaco, a Puerto Rican kid in New York, was molested by his psychotic mother, but no one believed him when he told them. Larry, a groundskeeper in Central Park, watches for years as an upper-middle-class father and older brother bully the younger brother, trying to make him “act like a man.”Ian, a New Yorker from Manchester, England, was so severely abused in his youth, physically and emotionally, by his alcoholic Irish father that he can’t contain his inner rage.Timmy, a preteen in the South Bronx, was criminally neglected by his junkie mother.
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Eli, the gay, teenage protagonist in erstwhile local playwright-actor Daniel Talbott’s new drama “Slipping,” onstage at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, is indeed “slipping.” Or, more accurately, he has already slipped — into a morass of masochism followed by cruelty mixed with self-pity and rage. Raised in the hip Bay Area, Eli is suddenly relocated, after his father’s death, to Iowa, where his mother has a new teaching job. There, he feels like a misfit, with his turquoise Mohawk, tattoos and penchant for photography instead of video games.
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The gasp-and-guffaw-inducing surprises come fast and furious in British-born, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane,” the first of his many lauded and mordant comedies to be set on this side of the pond.Rest assured there are no buckets of blood in this latest play by the author of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Pillowman,” the film “In Bruges” and much more. (In his “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” produced a few years ago by Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the stage was literally awash with the gory stuff.)
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It’s hard not to judge PlayGround’s seven 10-minute plays — chosen from 177 written by 36 selected writers — according to how well they fit the short format. Onstage at Thick House, the offerings are part of “Best of PlayGround 16,” the 16th annual festival presented by the group dedicated to developing new local voices for theater. Even though some of the pieces may evolve into longer plays and go on to be produced at regional theaters, this year’s batch seems less compelling, less ideally tailored to the required length, than last year’s group.
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Dear Reader,Please forgive me — there is very little I can tell you about “White Rabbit, Red Rabbit,” a solo play by young Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour and read by a different local actor at every performance here at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.The participating actors, as per Soleimanpour’s instructions, do not see the script before the performance begins. They are told a few things in advance, including: Be prepared to impersonate an ostrich and pronounce the author’s name correctly.
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“We got a future,” migrant farmworker George assures his companion, the mentally disabled hulk Lenny, in “Of Mice and Men”: “A couple of acres and some pigs ... a rabbit hutch ...”
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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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For starters, the set — layers of clutter and grime beneath a slanted skylight (by designer Eileen Diss) — is auspicious. Tom Lishman’s surround-sound effects, of thunderous passing underground trains and cooing pigeons, are equally carefully considered. The stage is awash in an appropriately dismal gray light (by Colin Grenfell). Surely this British production of Harold Pinter’s 1960 absurdist tragi-comedy “The Caretaker” onstage at the Curran Theatre will be one for the ages.So it is.
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