Engineer's Daughter

go see this

Chelsea Knight

March 1 - Chelsea Knight at the Wattis.  As part of their year of programming that grapples with the practice of the great Andrea Fraser, the Wattis is hosting a "performative lecture" tomorrow night by NYC video and performance artist Chelsea Knight that promises to be totally rad.  She will be taking on the persona of an artist giving an artist talk and will be featuring clips of her past work.  Where fact ends and fiction begins, and vice versa, might be completely subjective.

 

Mica Sigourney by Robbie Sweeny

March 1 - The News: Queer Exceptionality at SOMArts.  For those who prefer their performance art with a gay cabaret twist, check out The News instead.  Every month a select group of local artists gathers at SOMArts to present new work, with each piece no longer than 10 minutes.  Tomorrow night writer Emily K. Holmes is the guest curator and has asked Mia Satya, John Cartwright and Mica Sigourney, Minji Sohn, Kiyan “Kiki” Williams aka Mx Sula, and wild card KVNDRY SINGS to consider the theme of queer exceptionality.  

 

Luisa Frasconi and Lauren Spencer

Through March 12 - Mechanics of Love at Crowded Fire.  Dipika Guha's inventive new play doesn't pretend to offer any ultimate answers about love, but her characters certainly try their best to figure things out.  Fairzi's husband Glen has a memory condition and keeps eloping with other women when he forgets he's married, but without any rancor Faizi invites the latest one, the ballerina Francesca, to live with her and Glen as a sort of personal assistant.  A genial mechanic named Georg further complicates matters, as does the fact that Glen's affliction appears to be catching...

 

Tyrone Mitchell Henderson and Tim Kang

Through March 27 - Aubergine at Berkeley Rep.  What began as a short play about food written by Julia Cho several years ago for Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor is now an exceptional full-length production that remains intimate even as it examines mortality and generational differences.  Cho manages to perfectly balance the hard stuff with a sharp sense of humor, but I guarantee there will still be a few tears as Tim Kang's Ray comes to terms with imminent death of his father, a Korean immigrant to the States.  Food remains a strong theme throughout the play too, and many of my favorite moments involved the characters describing Proustian memories of meals past.  Highly recommend, but do not attend hungry.

show 350

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kage no kuruma

 

Not to be confused with some recent horror movies that share the same title (and boy do they look awful), Yoshitaro Nomura's 1970 film The Shadow Within is a thriller that relies on well-developed suspense rather than any cheap jump-scares, and the director truly earns the spectacular reveal at the end.  Working with his frequent collaborator, crime novelist Seicho Matsumoto, Nomura expertly draws the viewer into the tale of a married man who falls into an affair with a single mother only to become convinced her young son is out to murder him.  Our first glimpse of the boy is an evocatively backlit shot that obscures his features, and his motives become only more shadowy to the protagonist as the film gradually progresses from drama into something more sinister.  A therapist would have a field day.

agenda 02.24.16

The Tearoom
Mechanics of Love at Thick House
KALX
Aubergine at Berkeley Rep
Chelsea Knight at the Wattis

demotic

Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.  March 13, 2008.

go see this

Wendy vanden Heuvel

Through February 24 - Selkie at Z Space.  The selkie myth has been close to my heart since I was a wee lass, and Sarah Shaefer does it artful justice in her new play that expands the story while remaining true to its roots.  I do have to attach a trigger warning for a scene depicting graphic selkie coercion, but the actors are mesmerizing in their roles and the wooden pier of a set beyond extraordinary.    Mix in exuberant movement and a splash of Florence + the Machine and stir.

 

Ruibo Qian

Through March 5 - The Nether at SF Playhouse.  The virtual and the physical, online and off blur together in Jennifer Haley's gripping detective story set in a near future where the internet has become a fully immersive (and barely regulated) experience called The Nether.  Haley's script tackles complex questions of morality and identity with impressive clarity, and while the subject matter is disturbing as heck the play never descends into cheap sensationalism thanks to incredible performances from the small cast.  Days later I'm still turning the play over and over in my head.

 

Anastacia McCleskey, Anthony Wayne, Jacqueline B. Arnold

Through March 13 - Mighty Real: A Fabulous Sylvester Musical at Brava.  A true disco queen and San Francisco icon, Sylvester is the kind of fiercer-than-fierce individual that inspires characters in other musicals (ahem Kinky Boots) so it's about time he got one of his own.  The supremely gifted Anthony Wayne brings him back to glorious life, and Anastacia McCleskey and Jacqueline B. Arnold as Sylvester's long-time back-up singers Izora Amstead and Martha Wash almost steal the spotlight too.  Read the excellent biography by Joshua Gamson, and see this show here before it heads to Broadway in 2017.

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la femme d'à côté

 

Perfect for any lingering post-Valentine's Day malaise, François Truffaut's The Woman Next Door is a steamy tale of forbidden, doomed obsession, the kind of story that the French do best.  Fanny Ardant and Gérard Depardieu star as the former lovers who find themselves living in neighboring houses just outside of Grenoble ten years after their affair and now married to different partners.  At first they pretend nonchalance, but of course that disintegrates fairly quickly.  Véronique Silver is also wonderful as Madame Jouve, owner of the town tennis club and something of an all-seeing oracle for the film, and Truffaut's New Wave sensibilities are still very much in effect here in the early '80s in what would be his next-to-last film.  I loved his extended shots, the exaggerated fades from scene to scene, the drah-ma.

agenda 02.17.16

The Nether at SF Playhouse
Selkie at Z Space
Clue
KALX
Portal

posthumous

Berkeley.  December 30, 2006.