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I was just in Baltimore for a conference on the New Drama movement in Russia — not so much a movement, as it turns out, as a new and diverse post-Soviet generation of theater artists carrying forward, reassessing and reinventing the form. The work on display over an eventful weekend was quite varied and, on the whole, an intriguing sampling of the restive theatrical activity being generated under the New Drama label. The take-home point: Russia is a hotbed of serious work to which attention should be paid.Read more »

THEATER José Sarria is many things: performer, activist, trailblazer, legend, Latino, diva, tenor ... So just how many José Sarrias are there? In the latest meta-theatrical reclamation-and-floorshow from playwright-director John Fisher (Medea: The Musical, Combat; Ishi: The Last of the Yahi) you'll meet several but get no strict count. Read more »

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THEATER I don't know from reclaiming rituals, but when I saw the gangling guy in the deer mask and beige unitard prancing around the stage once more, I knew the vernal equinox could not be far behind. Herald of this new season is none other than writer-performer Dan Carbone, a long-cherished and uniquely committed Bay Area talent who remarkably has eluded actually being committed. Read more »

THEATER Leave it to a small and scrappy low-to-no-budget theater company to revive, at just the right time, Dario Fo's We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! Fo, Italy's esteemed latter-day commedia dell'arte rabble-rouser — the first clown (who really is a clown) to win a Nobel Prize — crafted this gem in inspired response to another period of social-economic bullshit, the tumultuous mid-1970s, when Italy was suffering the brunt of the "stagflation" resulting from an oil-triggered worldwide downturn. Read more »

THEATER It's difficult enough to want to perform in San Francisco without the added hardship of not quite fitting into someone else's concept of "performance." And the unclassifiable Dan Carbone must surely be one of the hardest acts to shoehorn into a hapless festival curator's vision. Read more »

THEATER From the mouths of babes come some pretty hefty words in Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson's initially darkish, ultimately feel-goody new comedy: congenial, altruistic, pertinacious, solipsism. But it's the way they sound in the mouth of his protagonist, 57-year-old first-grade teacher Sydney (a thoroughly disarming Julia Brothers), that gets our attention. They're new to her too for the most part, at least in daily use. Read more »

THEATER Up to around 8:30 p.m. on Dec. 12, Thrillpeddlers were having a very good year. One of 2009's Goldie recipients, the city's connoisseurs of Grand Guignol–style fresh flesh were riding a remarkable wave of success with their inspired revival of Pearls over Shanghai, by San Francisco's storied Cockettes, when an altogether different current overtook them.Read more »

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THEATER It's the fall of 2001. The Americans have arrived. The Taliban is, for the moment, displaced. A young Afghani woman named Alya (Sara Razavi) stands in a burka, holding a suitcase. She's met by her older sister, Meena (Nora el Samahy), returned from England to fetch her. Meena wears a headscarf but leaves her face proudly, fearlessly uncovered. She speaks of the freedoms ahead of them, the chance to study, even to talk to men. Alya is scandalized and fascinated.

The two sisters go on to engage in petty quarrels, teasing. Read more »