San Francisco
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GLORY GLORY GLORIA I don’t know if Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has ever worked in a Manhattan publishing house but he sure knows his way about the workplace. In Gloria, he paints an extraordinary portrait of the workings of an office whose conflicts revolve around some writers with their own agendas, a sense of emotional intensity on…

REBIRTH Which walls are worse? Those that keep people out or those that keep people in? Playwright Rogelio Martinez seemed to have this question in mind when he wrote Born in East Berlin, which is being given its world premiere at the Creativity Theater thanks to San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series, and it is this…

GREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon of Great American Novels, and you also have an appetite for ambitious or unusual theater projects and, in particular,…

LOST IN AUSTEN All of Jane Austen’s novels are built on the same premise. A woman meets and marries an eligible man after a series of usually comic difficulties. But Austen extracts a remarkable amount of drama, comedy, and human interest from her domestic tales through her witty, ironic prose and her shrewd but forgiving…

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF SATIRE Has it really been 40 years since Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 was first presented? The biting satire is so topical — containing cross-dressing, gay relationships, and patriarchal and colonial rule — that one would think it just arrived on the scene. It’s every bit as entertaining, contemporary, and downright…

DOES  GROUNDHOG DAY  BEAR REPEATING? At the center of San Francisco Playhouse’s first regional premiere of Broadway’s Groundhog Day the Musical is the brilliant, perfectly cast Ryan Drummond, playing local TV news weatherman, Phil. This arrogant, uncaring teaser must relive Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney until he learns to care about other people. This musical adaptation of the…

ON THE BORDERLINE What do a Latino cop, a black vet in the Bronx, a Saudi Arabian without a country, a gay pagan goat rancher, and a homeless HIV-positive man have in common? Dan Hoyle. SF’s own master storyteller is back with a new show, Border People, one he has crafted from a series of…