Photo courtesy Marin Theatre Company.
Marin Theatre Company has kicked off its 2022-23 season with a bang, leveraging a collaboration with Tam High School’s Conservatory Theatre Ensemble and the prose of Scottish playwright David Greig for Dunsinane, a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” that runs through Oct. 16.
Sam Hurwitt, a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright who reviews theater for the Marin Independent Journal, among others, writes that “Greig tells a different story that conveys both the senselessness of war and the umbrage of a nation dealing with an outside force presuming to impose regime change. Siward (played by Aldo Billingslea) may be the ostensible hero of the story, but he’s out of his depth.” The play is directed by MTC Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis.
“Billingslea plays Siward commandingly as a forthright, principled and friendly soldier flummoxed by his inability to impose peace among the Scots,” Hurwitt writes for the IJ. “The new king Malcolm is decadent and capricious but also cunning and subtle in his way, always coaxing Siward not to be so bluntly literal-minded. Josh Odsess-Rubin’s Malcolm exudes an oily sort of charisma, imbuing every noncommittal “mmm” with layers of meaning.
MTC continues its season Nov. 25-Dec. 18 with its latest dive into its “yearslong exploration of the oeuvre of award-winning African American playwright August Wilson with Two Trains Running.”Once again set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, this play explores the neighborhood’s fate through the lens of a diner slated for demolition.
For the third play of the season, the theater company returns to stalwart MTC playwright-in-residence Lauren Gunderson, whose MTC works spans the multi-play Christmas at Pemberley series and the widely hailed The Catastrophist, her solo play based on a Wired magazine piece of the fascinating tale of Nathan Wolfe, Gunderson’s husband. This time around, it’s Justice (Feb. 16-March 12), a musical about Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with music by Bree Lowdermilk and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan. It came to be when Sean Daniels, the Arizona Theatre Company’s artistic director, reached out to Gunderson about creating a play about Justice O’Connor. Gunderson ultimately came up with a production about her and the woman who became one of her trusted colleagues, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and turned it into a musical, according to the Chronicle.
The third play of the season is the West Coast premiere of Where Did We Sit on the Bus? (May 4-28), Brian Quijada’s one-person musical play investigating where Latinos fit in an American racial history narrative that too often poses a false dichotomy of Black or white. Satya Chávez, who wrote some of the show’s compositions, stars, and Matt Dickson directs, the Chronicle reported
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