REVIEWS
"it's a voyage worth
taking." — Robert Hurwitt, The
San Francisco Chronicle
"I felt like I was
watching a world-class soccer team or a pack of Navy seals execute
a critical mission. The story-telling is all strategy, just like
a crack military operation." — Chloe Veltman, lies
like truth
"entertaining and well-executed"
— Tracey Taylor, berkeleyside.com
"Voyage by
Tom Stoppard at Shotgun Players is a beautifully produced ...
Its direction by Patrick Dooley, is flawless and fluid down to
the set changes." - John A. McMullen II, The
Berkeley Daily Planet
PREVIEWS
Shotgun Players
taking on Tom Stoppard's 'Utopia'
Interview with Patrick Dooley by Robert Hurwitt
Sunday, March 18, 2012 - The
San Francisco Chronicle
In a producing coup by the
fearless Shotgun Players, the biggest, chewiest drama by the greatest
living playwright of the English-speaking world lands at the snug
Ashby Stage in Berkeley. Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of
Utopia, a deep-focus portrait of 19th-century Russia percolating
with revolutionary characters and ideas, unfurls in three dialectically
driven parts across seven and a half hours. This is the first
West Coast staging of the 2007 Tony Award winner for Best Play.
Part One, Voyage, runs this month and next, followed
by Shipwreck in 2013 and Salvage in 2014, when the entire trilogy
will be presented. Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley is
exhilarated and a little addled by the prospect of getting Voyage’s
23 actors onstage at the 118-seat Ashby (several will do double
duty as stage managers). But he adores the play’s “lovers,
dreamers, and idealists” based on real characters, who remind
him of the Occupy movement protesters. “They may be awkward
and stumbling and embarrassing, but they want to move the center
and change the world.” - San
Francisco Magazine
