(By Pat Craig, Correspondent)    TheatreFirst’s production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” the first in its intimate new digs at the Berkeley City Club, begins with the crackle and intensity of a wildfire and ratchets up from there. “There ain’t no good guys. There ain’t no bad guys,” the old song says. “There’s only you and me [...]

(By Rachel Swan)    TheatreFIRST czar Michael Storm wrote in a recent email: “You will NOT see this from me again. Mark my words.” He was responding to a reviewer’s genuine adulation (“I have no idea how you balance artistic directing with acting, but I’m endlessly impressed”). It would be a shame if he did, indeed, give [...]

By Pat Craig Correspondent Posted: 10/10/2011 05:23:50 PM PDT “Hanging Georgia,” a new play about the fiery relationship between painter Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, roils and explodes across the stage like a Texas lightning storm. Sharmon J. Hillfinger’s play — getting its world premiere by Oakland’s TheatreFirst and the BootStrap Theater Foundation of San [...]

By Pat Craig, Correspondent. The war is over for Jenny Sutter. She comes home minus most of her right leg and filled with nightmares that leave her screaming and flailing through the night. But Jenny (Omoze Idehenre) isn’t quite ready to go home to her mom and her kids, and she certainly doesn’t want to [...]

Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic. Monday, May 30, 2011. “Give me something to believe in,” the wounded soldier says she used to cry as a child at night, as she searched for God in the cracks in the ceiling of her Barstow home. It’s the degree to which she gets her wish that makes Julie [...]

Three years ago, when her play received its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Julie Marie Myatt explained that: “I began writing Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter in 2006, with several questions in mind: questions that I still have, that have not been answered as we premiere this play in February of 2008. As a [...]

With the endgame in sight, TheatreFIRST imagines a veteran’s homecoming. By Rachel Swan. With the Iraq War winding down, it’s likely we’ll see a whole spate of theatrical works about veterans coming home. Many of them will fall in the vein of Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, a play that dramatizes the horrors of post traumatic [...]

By Pat Craig Contra Costa Times Correspondent AT TIMES, TheatreFirst’s production of “Grapes of Wrath” has the rhythm and feel of a jazz piece — not in the music, although there’s plenty of that, but in the music of the words and how they’re delivered by the eight actors in this captivating piece. In his [...]