April on the Theater Pub Blog

The way the calendar for April 2015 shook out, I ended up writing 3 posts on the SF Theater Pub blog instead of my usual 2. Here's the links:

• I interviewed Thrillpeddlers' Artistic Director, Russell Blackwood, about his company and their Paris-themed burlesque musical revue Jewels of Paris. I loved that when my editor received the Jewels of Paris press release, he took one look at it and said "this is definitely an assignment for Marissa!"
• Continuing the "Parisian avant-garde" theme, and tying in with Theater Pub's experimental April show, I wrote about the French playwrights' collective Outrapo -- the Workshop of Potential Tragicomedy -- and my attempts to get in touch with the Outrapistes when I was an exchange student in Paris in 2007.
• On the last day of April, I wrote about how my political beliefs and my tastes in theater aren't always 100% congruent; sometimes I feel like a bad feminist when I don't like a play that has a message I agree with... or when I enjoy a play that I know is politically iffy. This practice of reducing a work of art to its sociopolitical message seems pretty common in the two locales where I spend most of my time: in the SF Bay Area, and online. I yearn for criticism and conversation that explores other dimensions of works of art.