Category Archives: Theater

Can I get a witness!! Looking for e pluribus pluribus with George Emilio Sanchez’s “XIV” at Dixon Place

With XIV, my favorite experimental constitutionalist bruthrr George Emilio Sanchez is crashing a brown, brooding and bold biography into the broader American histories of other fights for equal rights. XIV offers an incisive and often intimate look at the never ending challenge that is our country’s constant separations of equality in a show that continues this weekend and next at Dixon Place.

Paul Swan is Dead & Gone

A composite of quite ordinary gestures that combine to make something novel, much in the way the entire play uses old poses in service of a show much more than an aesthetic or expressionistic dance.

The Verisimilitude of the Mad Ones

I’m not sure I would call Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie a play, as such, if only because a play suggests an exterior blueprint which is then built or enacted by a group of performers and designers. The Mad Ones appear to build out – they start with what is generally interior, a collection of tiny behavioral tells that shape human intention, and construct around it.

The Children Will Show How It’s Done

Since it’s often hard to explain a good piece of theater – as Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces, which had its all-too-brief North American premier two weeks ago at the Skirball Center, certainly was – we might as well start with everything this show is

William Burke’s Containers: VARIATIONS ON THE MAIN

It’s not so much a communing with the dead as an un-containing of the self, casting meaning into the void, hoping perhaps to receive some echo of that meaning back, in the shape of a hug, or song, or strip of tin foil torn from the wall.