(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 8/24.)

Since the work of the legendary French director Ariane Mnouchkine is virtually unknown in Britain[http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/aug/10/ariane-mnouchkine-life-in-theatre], one is grateful to Edinburgh for bringing us this epic example. Based on a little-known Jules Verne novel and "half-written by Helene Cixous" with the aid of the Théâtre du Soleil company, it is many things at once: a tribute to silent movies, an adventure story, an illustration of the creative process, an account of the perennial tension between visionary dreams and private greed. Even if I found its four-hour length a little energy-sapping, it explains why Mnouchkine is a theatrical phenomenon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/aug/24/les-naufrages-fol-espoir-review

(Mark Brown’s article appeared in the Telegraph, 8/23.)

Michael Boyd’s 10-year leadership of the Royal Shakespeare Company (which comes to an end this autumn) has often been characterised by a refreshing openness to original reinterpretations of the Bard’s works. Seldom can it have spawned one so distinct, and so accomplished, as this rendering of the great poem The Rape of Lucrece, performed in song and music by Camille O’Sullivan and Feargal Murray.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival-reviews/9495332/Edinburgh-Festival-2012-The-Rape-of-Lucrece-Royal-Lyceum-review.html

(Lyn Gardner’s article appeared in the Guardian, 8/21.)

There is a moment towards the end of this double-bill of plays by the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón when a table begins to shake. A scale model of the notorious Villa Grimaldi, the largest of the 1,200 detention and torture centres created by Pinochet's military dictatorship, teeters and blazes blood-red. The glasses on the table smash to the ground.

It's an appropriate image for these plays, which examine the shards of memory that stab at the heart of a nation nable to forget. Lives have been shattered; the divisions are still painfully sharp. In the programme, the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti is quoted saying: "Forgetting is filled with memory."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/aug/21/villa-discurso-edinburgh-theatre-review

(Feingold’s article appeared in the Village Voice, 8/22.)

"I wasn't born a conversationalist, you know," Dolores (Hallie Foote) tells her lawyer husband, Robert (Devon Abner), early in the first of the three one-acts that make up Horton Foote's Harrison, TX (Primary Stages). "I gritted my teeth and forced myself to converse."

She might, to some degree, be speaking for her author. Foote, who died three years ago at age 92, spent much of his career enshrining, in a long series of plays, the conversation of Texans who were not born conversationalists, and who often might have preferred to remain silent.  Swatches of sudden taciturnity streak his texts; the conversations they interrupt, as flat and repetitive as the surrounding landscape, encase the interlocking histories of seemingly innumerable families, through multiple generations. Harrison, Texas, the midsize town where the bulk of Foote's oeuvre takes place, has become a locale so familiar to New York theatergoers over the decades that the more attentive could probably draw you a map of the town or forecast its weather—which, like its dialogue, is mostly dry, with occasional spells of ferocious heat or unexpectedly violent storms.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-08-22/theater/the-texas-three-step-harrison/

(Robert Hurwitt’s  article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, 8/8.)

When silence is this eloquent, it must be an Annie Baker play. In "Circle Mirror Transformation," which opened Marin Theatre Company's 46th season Tuesday – in a luminous co-production with Encore Theatre Company – the sounds of silence percolate through an acting class to comic, dramatic and revelatory effect.

It's been a great year for, and with, Baker in the Bay Area. The hot young New York playwright made her local debut with terrific productions of "Body Awareness" at Aurora Theatre in February and "The Aliens" at SF Playhouse in March. "Circle" completes the trilogy of Baker's "Vermont Plays" that have been produced elsewhere (a fourth, "Nocturama," has yet to receive its world premiere).

http://www.sfgate.com/performance/article/Circle-Mirror-Transformation-review-3773144.php