#play-analysis

#play-analysis

Under the ABS challenge system, a team begins each game with two challenges. If a player gets an umpire's call overturned, their team retains the challenge. In effect, this means a team has unlimited challenges until they get two wrong.

MarcAurele knew he had to strike while the iron was red-hot, so he got to writing, and in just three short weeks he was bringing the show to life, complete with a number that explored the inherent musicality of that bike scene and another that featured a chorus lauding 'gay hockey players with big butts' as if they were singing a church hymn.

Molochnikov, who is 33, tall, and good-looking in the Jonathan Groff vein, greeted the audience the night I saw Seagull, personally thanking us for coming to see what he called 'my story.'

I started in stand-up because it felt like the most direct way to connect with people. There's no filter. You go on stage, and you find out very quickly if something works. That shaped everything for me. It forced me to be honest. If you're not honest, the audience knows. That idea still drives how I work today.

The thing is an almost-four-hour-long continuous explosion - actors dancing, grappling, and hurling furniture; the director present onstage ripping pieces out of the set; paint and blood and flowers and feathers everywhere.

Manic Street Creature is gig theatre in its purest form. Kirsty Patrick Ward (The Rat Trap) directs a story about a musician breaking onto the London scene, told as a musical set. Olivier Award-winner Maimuna Memon (Standing at the Sky's Edge) leads a tour-de-force about young love, creative ambition and mental health.

From our millennia-later perspective, it's also remarkable that a culture that didn't count women as citizens - or even, truly, as full people; Aeschylus's Oresteia turns on the divine judgment that a mother isn't really a parent to her child but simply a vessel for the male's seed - created such staggering expressions of female wrath and righteousness on its stages.

I landed Oct. 5, and we started work Oct. 6, so it was like jump straight in. And when it's your day off, it's like, 'OK, I just need to shop and clean and relax.' Nearly six months in, the actor is slowly familiarizing himself with New York neighborhood by neighborhood, including the West Village, which he says he recently explored with his girlfriend.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. The concept I stick to - my core principle - is simple: I write in plain English, and only when I actually have something to say.

So another word about tickets. They did finally announce single-game tickets were going on sale, but only for games though June. It's not enough to keep season plans limited to those requiring fans to buy more tickets than they can use, feeding the secondary markets which the Mets also get a cut of, but "make-your-own-plan" fans like me who've reliably occupied seats for decades,

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

Seeing this remarkable movie reminded me that we cannot look away from real-life tragedies

10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.

The Shitheads is part period piece, part family drama and part allegorical epic. It unfolds at some time in prehistory (10,000 - 50,000 BC, to be exact). Nomadic hunter-gatherers coexist with a family of cannibalistic cave dwellers who justify their eating habits by dehumanising their human prey. Hunter-gatherers are 'shitheads', they say - inferior, stupid, without expansive interior lives. One of these cave-dwellers, a straight-talking fighter named Clare (Jacoba Williams - Vera), meets Greg (Jonny Khan - Statues), an endearing, simple-minded gatherer.

Worries, fears, hang-ups, and desires are translated through highly skilled puppetry, as interview scenes cast puppet couples talking about their sex lives. Written by Mark Down of Blind Summit, a cohort of exceptional makers and puppeteers expanding the definition of a puppet, this collaboration with the UK's National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles pulls from real-life conversations to get puppets talking dirty.

The short version: Hannah was married to Andrew, and Anna was married to Ryan. Then Anna and Andrew slept together and both marriages blew up. Then, six years after that, just as Andrew was finishing the manuscript of a novel closely paralleling his breakup, he found out that Hannah had beat him to the punch: Her book about a marriage-destroying affair (subtitled "A Memoir [kind of]") would be published nine months before his.

We've seen Robert Icke's Oedipus as a political thriller on Broadway last fall, Shayok Misha Chowdhury's revival of the choral Gospel at Colonus at Little Island in the summer (if you missed that, I recommend a tape of the 1985 production on YouTube), and now, Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place at the Shed, a version of Antigone turned into a bourgeois family drama.

When Palo Alto Players Artistic Director Patrick Klein learned that a stage version of Dan Brown's 2003 bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code was out in the world, he had to know more. Trekking out to Houston's Alley Theatre last fall for their production provided clarity, leading to his own company's regional Bay Area premiere. How can this dense novel become something to see on stage?