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Recently I was lucky enough to land at an international theater festival in Wroclaw, Poland, jostling elbows with a transnational mix of theater folk on the occasion of the 13th annual European Theatre Prize, this year awarded to the great Polish director Krystian Lupa. It was an eye-opening glimpse at some awesome theatrical muscle rarely if ever seen in the Bay Area, or even the United States. Read more »

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Even when times are shaky in San Francisco, it's a fine time to head to PlayGround. Read more »

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Not long ago, before newspapers themselves were an endangered species, survival among journalists at the country's leading papers was already a Darwinian proposition, especially for people of color. Read more »

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At the poetic heart of acclaimed playwright Octavio Solis's aching, wild, and poignant new drama, Lydia — receiving a beautifully cast and memorable West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre Company under the direction of MTC's Jasson Minadakis — is a mysterious connection between two very differently challenged and empowered young women: the severely brain-damaged Ceci Flores (Gloria Garayua) and her family's new undocumented Mexican maid, Lydia (Adriana Gaviria). Read more »

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He has come, he says, to take American Jewry into the 21st century. Some members of the suburban synagogue that just hired Sam Isaac, charismatic tax attorney and single father turned rabble-rousing rabbi and spiritual visionary, are thrilled. Others, not so much. Between those two poles, and across 12 fully fledged characters, solo performer extraordinaire Charlie Varon takes us on a steadily dramatic, extremely witty, and thought-provoking ride through what he pictures as a transformative moment in Jewish identity. Read more »

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In what maybe can only be considered a sign of the times, bad attitudes abound in two lean productions on either side of the Bay this week. The first comes courtesy of Dostoevsky, badass of 19th-century Russian literature, whose rascal Raskolnikov (an excellent Tyler Pierce) stalks feverishly across Berkeley Rep's Thrust Stage in a bracingly focused new adaptation of Crime and Punishment by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus. Read more »

PREVIEW Don't get too cozy at home this weekend. Two Harold Pinter domestic dramas (if so prosaic a term can apply to the psychological warfare underway in them) are opening, and each ranks among his most stingingly taut, darkly hilarious, and downright creepy works. So take a pause for Pinter, the late and great, and unsettle the nest a bit — beginning with TheatreFIRST's offering of Old Times, an eerie 1971 three-hander (featuring a rare opportunity to see the excellent L. Peter Callender on something other than the largest of local stages). Read more »

PREVIEW In 2006 Kara Davis and Bliss Kohlmyer Dowman founded project agora as an umbrella organization under which they could present their own choreography. Strong and experienced performers — Davis with Kunst-Stoff and Janice Garret and Dancers; Kohlmyer Dowman with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Robert Moses' Kin — the two got to the point where realizing other choreographers' dances became less attractive and creating their own work grew more compelling.

For With (& Without) Words, Davis went solo. Read more »

PREVIEW In Europe, French dancer-choreographer Jerome Bel's work has earned him the nickname of the "pope of anti-dance." While it's true that Bel has a tendency toward pontificating on contemporary performance theories, and his work — minimalist in terms of movement, maximalist in terms of embracing the ordinary human body — stays far outside the parameters of what dance audiences might expect, he is anything but anti-dance.

He lives and breathes dance — the relationship between performer and choreographer, the persona and the person, the meaning and Read more »

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Tennessee Williams was notoriously afraid of going insane — the fate of his sister Rose, a presence haunting several of his greatest plays — and in the latter half of his career, the great American dramatist wrestled mightily with a slump in his fortunes, depression, and addictions to pills and alcohol. Read more »