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'Body Awareness' review: Tap to lesbian funny bone
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/03/DDR31N0OVK.DTL
Body Awareness: Comedy. By Annie Baker. Directed by Joy Carlin. Through March 4. Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. 95 minutes. $30-$48. (510) 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org.
It's Body Awareness Week at little, liberal Shirley State College in tiny Shirley, Vt., and the fervent lesbian feminist professor who organized it isn't happy about the female nude photographs displayed in the student union for the occasion. Even worse, in Annie Baker's hilarious "Body Awareness" at the Aurora Theatre, the highly suspect male photographer is a guest in her house. And her partner is considering posing for him.
A lot more is about to go wrong for Amy Resnick's delightfully dogmatic academic Phyllis and Jeri Lynn Cohen's no less politically correct but perhaps perilously more open-minded partner, Joyce. But much more goes right in director Joy Carlin's fine-tuned production that opened Thursday as the anchor of the Aurora's annual Global Age Project new plays festival.
The Bay Area's first look at one of New York's hottest young playwrights - not counting its developmental work at the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival - is, appropriately, the play that made her the toast of Manhattan in '08. Nothing about it feels overdue. Baker's quick-witted skewering of progressive pretensions has aged like a fine wine, whetting the appetite for SF Playhouse's staging of Baker's "The Aliens" next month.
Not that wine or any form of alcohol is allowed in Phyllis and Joyce's stylishly austere home. The clean lines of fine woodwork in the set provide deft counterpoint to the stew of touchy issues Baker treats with loving irreverence. This is, after all, a comedy about lesbianism, political correctness, the dreaded "white male gaze" of the photographer, possible child exploitation and Asperger's syndrome.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/03/DDR31N0OVK.DTL#ixzz1lVwM30PY
David Allen
Joyce (Jeri Lynn Cohen, rear) and partner Phyllis (Amy Resnick) share a moment.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/03/DDR31N0OVK.DTL#ixzz1lVwYDyQU