Don’t spoil two houses.

Is a German expression used when two objectionable individuals get together as a couple. It sums up Shakespeare’s THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

ASSISTED LIVING opened at ACT Theatre this Friday. It seems to follow the fashion these days, dictated by simple demographics, of writing plays and movies about baby-boomers retiring.

This show reminded me of Barack Obama’s Coming of Age auto-biography, but with all due respect to one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had, Riding in Cars is a whole lot funnier.

Life imitated art, when the theater address was not in the GPS; and the theatre was located in the former INS immigration jail. As I had visited it almost daily, when a friend of mine was incarcerated for an interminable nine weeks, I was inundated with memories of unsuccessful legal action.

Whipping Man affected me the same way the movie Shindler’s List did. It dealt with profound evil, but with enough humor and humanity to make it watchable.

Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them by A. Rey Pamatmat opened at Seattle Public Theatre on Friday. It tells the tale of two minors, age 12 and 16, who have been abandoned by their father to fend for themselves, after the death of their mother. Complicating the situation is the gay boyfriend of the 16-year, whose fundamentalist mother throws him out of the house, after she ferrets out that he is actively gay.

Love’s Labour’s Lost could be entitled Lust’s Labour’s Lost, because its central theme is that the expressions of love may be just as self-indulgent as lust and that is advisable before marriage distinguish between hormonal love and husband material. To emphasize the self-indulgent nature of men, the director of Seattle Shakespeare’s current production of LLL, Jon Kretzu, opens the play the morning after a party of the Bright Young Things of the 1920’s immortalized by Evelyn Waugh in numerous novels including Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited.

One of the truly distressing things about American Shakespeare productions is that they are usually staged as fossilized productions, set in the era in which they were written. Drawing loosely on the plot, power-dynamics and characters of Much Ado about Nothing, Paper Bullets, by John A. Ellis, is set in contemporary Hollywood.

Hippiecrit-Theatre off Jackson Solo Performance Festival

I want to change the world, I just don’t feel like it.

Written and performed by Bhama Roget, Hippiecrit was the opening performance of Theatre off Jackson’s Solo Performance Festival, and the opening line was one of the funniest one liners in the history of comedy

A husband’s nightmare-bickering with the ghosts of two wives.

Theatre 9-12 opened Noel Coward’s 1941 Play, Blithe Spirit on Friday night. Directed by Charles Waxberg, the play concerns one of Coward’s favorite themes: wittily bickering married couples, and how second marriages fall into some of the same traps as first marriages.