SF Playhouse is all in with their take on Tony Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist David Henry Hwang‘s Chinglish: stylish set and lighting, excellent direction, and a strong ensemble cast. While there’s plenty of comic moments in Hwang’s sardonic commentary on language barriers and the effects of those miscommunications, there’s also thoughtful observations...
Review: S.F. Playhouse’s ‘Chinglish,’ Directed by Jeffrey Lo, is plump to bursting with jokes about what gets lost in translation
The best comedic writers are like symphony composers. They prick and pique your ears. They establish conditions that make you crave exactly what they’re going to give you — tonic chord, development, discord, resolution — with the perfect number of rat-a-tat beats preceding a ker-splat punch line. One more syllable, and the whole thing would...
Review: LIKE HEAVEN at The Bridge Initiative, written by Elaine Romero
Since its founding in 2014 by Tracy Liz Miller and Brenda Jean Foley, The Bridge Initiative has been a consistent and ardent champion of diversity and community-building. As a women-led artistic collective, they have stayed true to their vision ~ “an equitable industry where women and other groups who have historically been denied access...
Review: Mashuq Mushtaq Deen’s FLOOD at KC Rep
KCRep long-awaited debut at Copaken runs through February 19th. Friday night saw the debut at the Copaken theatre of Mashuq Mushtaq Deen‘s Flood, an absurdist tragicomedy making its first appearance on stage courtesy of the KC Rep. This reviewer has always been a fan of absurdist theatre, so it was with considerable excitement that...
The Climate Crisis and Theater — A Playwright’s Perspective
Do we feel the environment breakdown in our gut? Will people looking back see art that conveyed the existential threat of the emergency? Back in 2005, author and environment activist Bill McKibben wrote a piece called “What the Warming World Needs Now is Art, Sweet Art” in which he wondered why the climate crisis...