By Ande Jacobson
March, written by Sharyn Rothstein, marks the end of an era as the little Dragon roars one last time in its cozy Palo Alto home. Starting as a group of nomadic thespians in 1999, Dragon Productions Theatre Company settled into its Alma Street space in 2006. After this production seven seasons later, Dragon will be moving to Redwood City to usher in the 2013 season, but first let us look at the finale to 2012. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Dragon Productions Theatre is known for presenting avant-garde works, but where do they come from? Their current production of playwright Colette Freedman’s “Sister Cities” has an interesting genesis. Inspired by her best friend Jill Gascoine’s claim that she was retiring from the stage and would only act again if she could play a corpse, Freedman set out to write a play built around a dead body. Of course she couldn’t have a corpse as a central character without a compelling back story, including something about the corpse’s family and how the death occurred. Drawing from her own experience and recalling her aunt who had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”, she wove ALS into the story as well. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Tennessee Williams is acclaimed by critics and his colleagues alike as one of America’s greatest playwrights with works including “The Glass Menagerie”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and his groundbreaking 1948 Pulitzer Prize winner, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, which is Dragon Productions’ current show. Arthur Miller wrote in Regarding Streetcar, his 2004 introduction to New Directions Books’ edition of “Streetcar”, that it was Williams’ “writing itself that left one excited and elevated” as he described his own experience when first seeing the play in 1947. Continue reading
A Good Reed Review 