Author name: Marie Bonfils

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.

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.

“Smudge” is a new show now playing at Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET). It was written by former “Daily Show” writer

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.