William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida's Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.
Top Bay area actor Brian Shea is going to be back on the boards after a year-and-a-half hiatus. Shea, who has three times won CL's Best of the Bay award will be appearing in The Santaland Diaries, After Hours at American Stage. The show will run December 2 – 28, with showtimes at 10:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Shea hasn't been on stage since October 2007, when he had a small part in American Stage's Othello. Congratulations to American Stage artistic director Todd Olson for rescuing one of the area's finest actors from an undeserved oblivion.
And here's word on the new theater season about to begin at Bob Devin Jones' Studio@620. (The Wild Party, which played at the Studio a few weeks ago, was a freeFall, not a Studio production.) First play on the schedule (Nov. 6-7) is James Leo Herlihy's Terrible Jim Fitch, about a violent small-time crook who tries to explain himself to the girl hustler he's just brutalized. Appearing in the play are Tom Stovall and Hersha Parady. Then (Dec. 4-14) the Studio offers John Walch's Circumference of a Squirrel, performed by Gavin Hawk. The one-man show is about Chester, an odd rodentophobe who recalls how his father's irrational hatred of squirrels ultimately affected every aspect of his, and his son's, lives. With the Studio's theater series, combined with American Stage's new After Hours program and the recent appearance of freeFall, there's a small surge in Bay area theater underway. Considering the vastness of the Bay area metropolis, it's surely about time.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2008.