A.C.T. – Repeat Performances

March 21, 2018

Love’s Uncertainty Principle

Heisenberg’s principle provides a mathematical equation for the impossibility of predicting both the position and momentum of a particle precisely. It’s a concept that, with its discovery, immediately splashed over into everyday parlance. As a metaphor, what could more accurately describe life? Or, as Simon Stephen’s play asserts, love? Heisenberg, now at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater, is the British playwright’s complex tribute to love. Complex because neither the two characters...

Categories: theater

March 8, 2018

Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone” at The Strand

Vietgone, the 2015 play by Qui Nguyen, recently opened at A.C.T,’s Strand Theater. Like many of the productions given at this intimate house with its ultra-contemporary feel, the play is edgy and transformative, attempting to showcase a wider perspective on the community in all its dazzling diversity. And like many of the performances presented, Vietgone is intriguing and entertaining, even as it steps outside the strictures of classical theater. Vietgone is a...

Categories: theater

January 17, 2018

Carey Perloff’s farewell: Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party”

In response to a description of the landlady at the house where I was renting a room in Exeter in the southwest of England, an English friend told me, “We have a tradition of eccentric landladies.” The landlady in The Lavender Hill Mob flashed into my mind, though she didn’t have a lot in common with my landlady. Even so... In Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which opened last week in an A.C.T. production at The Geary Theater in San Francisco, the odd landlady...

Categories: theater