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The words were sometimes garbled, but the body's language was not. Les Écailles de la Mémoire (The Scales of Memory), a fiery collaboration between Senegal's all-male Jant-Bi and Brooklyn's Urban Bush Women, shouted, chanted, and danced about anger, pain, and love, always with an Africa-grounded sensibility.

It's more than slightly ironic that the men of Jant-Bi are more familiar to Bay Area audiences than the all-female Urban Bush Women, who have uncovered African American cultural traditions for more than 20 years. Read more »

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In a humble Southwestern bar tended by a chatty waitress (Lorraine Olsen), three pairs of customers on the edge of nowhere discuss the past and future with a certain growing desperation. Coronado, though the title of the play, isn't exactly the setting. It's one of the up-and-coming towns in the area, referred to in passing as not a bad place to be — something to aspire to, maybe. Read more »

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A title like Tragedy: a tragedy has, you might think, promises to keep. But what exactly are they? The repetition already flags, and flogs the futility in the gesture, announcing amusingly this post-tragic age. Instead, a sardonic scene suggests itself, nothing summing up the post-tragic like the daily litany of tragic stories on the news. Read more »

PREVIEW There is something to be said for staying put. For one thing, you become part of a community. Anne Bluethenthal may have grown up in Greensboro, N.C. — not the easiest place when she was a kid if you were shy and Jewish — but she has been living and working in the Mission for more than 20 years. In one of her earliest pieces in San Francisco, Fish Can Sing, she paid tribute to Milly, the girl who walked away when the other kids threw stones at her. When Bluethenthal posits that the personal is political, she knows whereof she speaks. Read more »

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Even for a company as committed to keeping on the move as ODC/Dance, debuting five world premieres in two programs is pushing the envelope of what is creatively possible — not only for in-house choreographers Brenda Way and KT Nelson, but also for the performers who have to learn the stuff.

ODC's dancers are up to the challenge. They are fast; they are athletic; and they luxuriate in their own physicality. They are gorgeous as individuals and as an ensemble. Daniel Santos speeds up a turn as if he's being unspooled. Read more »

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It's hard for a contemporary reader to fathom why — indeed, it was probably hard for many non-Eire readers to fathom even then — but when Edna O'Brien's debut novel, The Country Girls, came out in 1960, she was considered a disgrace to all of Ireland. Priests burned it in churchyards and denounced it from the pulpit. Read more »

PREVIEW The first time I discovered feminism wasn't just for white women who ate organic produce, I was eavesdropping on one of my mom's phone calls. She was going off about some ex-boyfriend and a few "lazy-ass mothafuckas" before declaring that neither her mother, nor her mother's mother, nor her mother's mother's mother had taken any bullshit and she didn't plan to break the chain now. Put in those terms, my 10-year-old brain started to think that the word feminism might just apply to every woman I knew who had the nerve to survive in my Fillmore neighborhood. Read more »

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Planet Mamet is normally a very manly-man's world, where alpha males growl, snap, and try to steal one another's bones. Women either similarly play rough or become obstacles to the overweening guy-versus-guy competition. Ergo, Boston Marriage is an anomaly: seldom staged since its 1999 premiere, this is a most atypical David Mamet play in that the characters are all female, the language florid, and the tone giddy — even, well, campy.

It probably seems more so than hitherto in John Fisher's Theatre Rhinoceros staging. Read more »

New York playwright Theresa Rebeck has made a name for herself railing against the shallow, self-absorbed depravity of people. Read more »

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Over Feb. 14 to 16, Yannis Adoniou and Tomi Paasonen's oddly named offspring, Kunst-Stoff, celebrated its 10th anniversary. The company had its first performance during the dot-com bubble at what was then San Francisco's most in venue, Brady Street Theater — where you couldn't find a parking place but did get some of the edgiest performances in town. You wouldn't dare miss Kunst-Stoff's total concept theater, in which multimedia reigned to suggest high-tech, futuristic fantasies. Read more »