- OTHER MEDIA
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- review in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
- of Beauty and the Breast
- and Guns and Ammunition
- by Karen McKevitt
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- The annual festival features new plays by local women playwrights.
The word diva probably conjures more images of Bette Midler or drag
queens than a group of earnest local female artists, but then, what's art
if it can't throw preconceptions into question? We caught only two of eight
festival acts. Liebe Wetzel and Lunatique Fantastique presents their latest
found-object puppetry show, Beauty and the Breast. This charming
and heartbreaking piece follows a purple bra through her journey with breast
cancer, where seemingly ordinary objects like gardening tools suddenly
transform into doctors, and plucked rose petals represent hair lost to
chemotherapy. LunFan excels at creating sympathetic characters -- imagine
crying over a leopard-print bra. Beauty is also an artistic leap
for the company -- the object manipulators themselves have become characters
instead of remaining "invisible" under black clothes and hoods.
As LunFan experiments in this new terrain, its challenge will be not to
lose its uniqueness -- actors cannot elicit the same kind of audience response
and emotions that objects can.
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- Switching back to actor-centered theater, Sarah McKereghan's Guns
and Ammunition may remind you of your last family reunion from hell.
But this reunion takes place in a hospital waiting room, as the female
relatives of a man who was shot in a robbery await news of his predicament.
The stress prompts the women to figuratively litter the stage with dirty
laundry and petty resentments. If you can relate to these women, witnessing
their fights is akin to listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, which
is probably a testament to McKereghan's writing and Carol Flanagan's spot-on
performance as the classic loudmouthed, overbearing mother-in-law, a diva
in her own mind.
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