Best
of Bay Area theater in 2010
sfgate.com
High: "The
Brother/Sister Plays." The remarkably original voice of young
playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney opened the 2010-11 season on an
exceptionally high note in an unprecedented three-theater West Coast
premiere of his spare, poetic trilogy of life in a bayou housing
project with mythic overtones. Taken individually - Ryan Rilette's
haunting staging of "In the Red and Brown Water" at Marin
Theatre Company, Octavio Solis' intensely moving "The Brothers
Size" at Magic Theatre and Mark Rucker's rich production of
"Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet" at American Conservatory
Theater - they would top many a Top 10 list. Taken together, they
blended into one of the most unforgettable events of the decade.
Low: Deaths of Quentin Easter and Stanley E. Williams.
Just when the embattled Lorraine Hansberry Theatre had finally found
a new home, and a good one - the high-profile former Post Street
Theatre/Theatre on the Square - the theater community was shocked
and saddened by the deaths of its co-founders in April and July.
Artistic Director Williams and Executive Director Easter had built
one of the premier African American arts companies in the state.
Whatever the fate of their 30-year-old company, the loss of two
of the region's more forceful arts advocates and producers will
be felt for a long time to come.
Most improved: The Marsh. Now operating on both sides of
the bay, with its multi-performance-space home in the Mission District
and new, improved theater in Berkeley, Stephanie Weisman's "breeding
ground for new performance" has been generating so many long-running
hits it's hard to figure out where she'll find room for new ones.
But she does. With Dan Hoyle's "The Real Americans," Ann
Randolph's "Loveland" and Don Reed's "East 14th"
running all year, and spaces set aside for youth theater, classes
and works-in-progress series, resident directors David Ford and
Charlie Varon keep developing new solo shows, a remarkable number
of which join the roster of long-running hits.
MVP: Stacy Ross: Ever since her local debut in
the early '90s with a succession of irresistible ingenues for the
California and San Francisco Shakespeare festivals, culminating
in a memorably sexy-smart-vulnerable Viola ("Twelfth Night"),
Ross has been a magnet for savvy theatergoers from ACT and Berkeley
Rep to the Aurora and SF Playhouse, and from Marin Theatre Company
to San Jose Rep. She's earned that trust with enough unfailingly
well-honed performances to make her a go-to girl for Shaw as well
as Shakespeare, as her back-to-back "Mrs. Warren's Profession"
and Lady Macbeth this summer proved once again, and in everything
from Greek tragedy to sex farce and from outrageous black comedy
("Killer Joe") to heartbreakers ("Rabbit Hole").
But what about musicals? Her villainous Other Mother meltdown aria
is the high point of SF Playhouse's current "Coraline."
Oedipus el Rey: Gritty, fierce, tersely poetic
and fueled by the naked vulnerability of two passionate lovers who
may be the only people in the world who don't know that they are
mother and son, Luis Alfaro's riveting modern barrio retelling of
Sophocles' "Oedipus" burned up the stage at the Magic
Theatre in February. The spare intensity of Loretta Greco's world
premiere staging helped turn up the heat.
Scapin: A generous gag-fest of rib-tickling clowning,
eccentric dance, groaners and spoofs ancient and up to date, Bill
Irwin's madcap take on Molière's popular farce was as much
a hilarious gloss on the nature of theater as it was true to its
cobbled-together origins. Pound for pun, ACT's season opener was
the funniest show of the year.
Compulsion: Virtuosic, compelling performances
from Mandy Patinkin and Hannah Cabell drove Oskar Eustis' sleek,
multifaceted staging of the semifictional tale of a Jewish writer's
obsession with safeguarding what he sees as the real story of Anne
Frank's diary. Rinne Groff's smartly told foray along the thin line
between idealism and fanaticism got Berkeley Rep's new season off
to a strong start.
The Real Americans: Dan Hoyle's latest magnetic
solo piece of indelibly etched multi-character "theater journalism"
- which ran all year and has been extended into February at the
Marsh - takes him outside the Bay Area's "liberal bubble"
to find out what the rest of the country is thinking. The results
aren't pretty but, as staged by Charlie Varon, make for riveting,
eye-opening, hilarious and challenging theater.
The Salt Plays: Last summer Jon Tracy's drum-driven
two-play Homeric epic electrified Berkeley's John Hinkel Park with
"In the Wound," his vigorous, large-cast depiction of
the senseless cruelty and machinations of humans and gods in a long
drawn-out war. Now he's enlivening Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage
with the small-cast but no less inspired "Of the Earth,"
a provocatively inventive contemporary retelling of Odysseus' long
attempt to go home.
A Delusion: Stories blended with ruminations, folk
and jazz electric violin and video imagery in Laurie Anderson's
latest mesmerizing performance collage, presented on both sides
of the bay (by Stanford Lively Arts and Cal Performances). With
darker themes of the decline and death of her mother penetrating
her impish humor, the tension between the playful and the somber
gave the piece a poignant weight.
Or,: Playwright Liz Duffy Adams creatively mashed
up the aura of hope and change of the 1660s, 1960s and 2008 in a
hilariously brilliant concoction of Restoration comedy and other
forms to tell the story of Aphra Behn's (real) transition from English
spy to first female professional playwright. Greco gave it a staging
as refreshingly inventive as the script at the Magic.
Olive Kitteridge: Word for Word scored with two
of the interlocked stories from Elizabeth Strout's novel, about
the flinty title character's later years in small-town coastal Maine,
deliciously delineated tales that seemed perfectly made for its
style of performing short stories verbatim. Tour de force depictions
by Patricia Silver and Nancy Shelby highlighted Joel Mullennix's
production at Z Space.
Habibi: As hard to pin down as it was riveting,
Sharif Abu-Hamdeh's cleverly disjointed Mission District tale of
Palestinian American father-son conflict, intercut with a lecture
on art (and cultural identity) theft, kept breaking the fourth wall
to increasingly meaningful effect. Omar Metwally's smoothly orchestrated
stagings enhanced the Intersection and Campo Santo world premiere.
Mary Stuart: Playwright-director Mark Jackson cut
a lot of romanticism and much subtlety to turn Schiller's long-popular
Elizabethan royal-showdown drama into a thoroughly gripping contemporary
political thriller for Shotgun Players. Beth Wilmurt and Stephanie
Gularte personified the stripped-down, high-stakes, war-on-terrorism
duel between modern versions of Elizabeth I and her dangerous prisoner-cousin,
Mary Queen of Scots.
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