Killing My Lobster sends up San Francisco

“Funny can mean different things to different people.” Perhaps no tagline better describes the fluctuations of sketch comedy than that of veteran gagsters Killing My Lobster. And they should know, since they’ve been dishing up their irreverent brand of short-attention span comedy since 1997. Even if, as a performance format, sketch comedy isn’t really your thing, the variables built into its basic equation -- rotating writers and cast members, wacky themes, and the unique juxtaposition of the ludicrous with the everyday -- ensure that, like the weather, if you don’t like something, just wait 10 minutes, and you will probably be rewarded with something you do.

The blink-and-you-missed-it one-night run on Saturday of “Killing My Lobster Takes it to the Streets,” at Stagewerx naturally included the weather in their microhood-specific roundup of familiar, Bay Area moments.

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Play is a powerful tool in almost every human society. The dynamics of play are found in most forms of human interaction as well as in the foundations of problem-solving and analysis. Play provides a learning-by-doing environment that is difficult to replicate in a classroom. Plus, high-minded assertions aside, play provides something even harder to quantify but no less vital to our development — a vehicle for joy. 

Since 2006, the Come Out & Play Festival crew has been throwing festivals of interactive games, from New York to Amsterdam to San Francisco, providing a space for players of all ages to gather and game. Read more »

A singular marathon

Preparing for a marathon of theatre is similar to preparing for any other kind. Of paramount importance: lots of rest, good hydration, comfortable layers.

This year’s test of my theatre-going tenacity, clocking in at 11.5 hours, came courtesy of the ever-ambitious Cutting Ball Theater, who, with translator Paul Walsh, have been preparing for this event for years: the production of a five-play cycle of August Strindberg’s “chamber plays,” written in the last years of his life. After a year-long series of staged readings, and creation of an archival website, the Strindberg cycle debuted in repertory on October 12, including four all-day marathons of the entire cycle of which I attended the first (the last will play this Sunday, November 18). 

Here's the play-by-play:

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Adventures in 'pataphysics

Well, pschitt! Although Alfred Jarry -- schoolboy playwright, raconteur, and progenitor of 'pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions” -- died 105 years ago of decidedly prosaic malady tuberculosis, his outré influence lives on. Adopted and championed by generations of outsider artists, avant-garde writers, and revolutionary thinkers, the self-styled “Pere Ubu” gave artistic anarchy a nexus during his lifetime, an iconic figurehead after.

Last weekend, the four-day Carnivàle Pataphysique, part commemoration and part investigation, gave amateur pataphysicians, situationists, and conceptual artists a free zone to mingle, to expound, and to congeal, over lectures, concerts, puppet shows, and other unique performative opportunities in and around the practically imaginary stronghold of “North Beach,” a land where strip clubs and surrealists collide.

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TAP Light Production’s “The Ballad of Michele Myers” goes for the jugular

The genre of the spoof slasher storyline is one always ripe for mining come Halloween season, and this year in the absence of The Primitive Screwheads annual offering, Raya Light and Todd Pickering stepped up to fill the void with their collaborative “The Ballad of Michele Myers.” A cheeky blend of high camp and low blows mixed into a frothy, bloody cocktail of makeovers and machetes, “Ballad” satiates that unique craving for slutty Nancy Reagan costumes, updated Aretha Franklin covers, and buckets of stage blood. Plus it gives trans-folk a misunderstood serial killer to call their very own. You’ve come a long way, baby!

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Zombie Vixens From Hell and Love in the Time of Zombies offer food for thought and brains for dinner

The living dead are kind of obnoxious. They’re dead, but unlike dead people you might actually want to hang out with for awhile if they happened to be around (Josephine Baker, Hunter S. Thompson) the only truly remarkable thing about them is their inability to lie down and stay put like respectable dead people do. Read more »

Putting the glad into Gladiator

You are a warrior. Sheathed in armor of the finest corrugated paper pulp and armed with the righteousness of a hundred possible causes (pick one, any one), you grab your war hammer, fashioned perhaps from a couple of paper towel tubes and an empty case of 21st Amendment Brew Free or Die, and hie thyself to Dolores Park for the grand melee.

The last-gasp October sun beats down hot on the sloping hills of the park, which are covered in defiantly bared flesh and picnic supplies, while blimps slowly drift across the impossible blue of the afternoon sky. A gladiatorial spirit vibrates through the giddy ether, doubtlessly carried over from the Giants and 49ers games being played just a couple of miles away. It’s a good day to do battle. It’s a good day for Boxwars.

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