Masters and servants

For me, the most exciting Bay Area theater event of the year was Piccolo Teatro di Milano's performance of Goldoni's Arlequino (The Servant of Two Masters) at Cal Performances. In selecting this I feel like a bit of a traitor to the remarkable work being done by local companies, but this production of the great Italian director Giorgio Strelher's staging was one of those rare opportunities to see true masters in a form (here commedia dell'arte), working at the highest level. Watching the remarkable Ferruccio Soloeri's amazing comic timing, physical gymnastics, and completely absurd logic was like seeing Bugs Bunny torment Elmer Fudd live – never mind the fact that behind the traditional leather mask Soloeri is 75 years old, and has been playing the role for 42 years.

Some noteworthy local performances included Crowded Fire's Slow Falling Bird, Project Bandaloop's recent Float!, Traveling Jewish Theatre's Blood Relative, ACT's The Overcoat (imported, but lovely), and, by all reports, Shotgun Players' Cabaret, which is next on my list of things to see.

Ben Yalom Artistic director, foolsFURY Theater

Top 10 local stage events

(in alphabetical order)

Bat Boy, Ray of Light Theatre

Blood Relative, Traveling Jewish Theatre

Blue/Orange, Aurora Theatre Company

The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?, American Conservatory Theater

I Am My Own Wife, Best of Broadway

No Exit, Cutting Ball Theater

One Big Lie, Crowded Fire Theater Company and Playwrights Foundation

One Window, Erika Shuch Performance Project and Intersection for the Arts

The People's Temple, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Z Space Studio

San Francisco International Arts Festival

Karen McKevitt Bay Guardian critic

How I learned to love the Russians

For four years as an elementary school student in post-revolution Iran, I spent every morning in the school courtyard in Mashad chanting, "Death to the Russians!" with my fists high in the air. At the age of 11 I stood at the edge of the Caspian Sea for the first time and looked across the end of the world and knew that the Russians were out there on the other side concocting strange plots to carry out the assassination of all that was sacred and real. Cut to San Francisco's Project Artaud Theater, the summer of 2006 and my first encounter with St. Petersburg's physical theater performance ensemble the AKHE Group. To describe the AKHE Group is to thread that impossible needle, to demand the voice of God, to explain smoke. To suggest it is a theater of lunacy seems trite and riddled with pretense, a facade to be toppled over the bones of antiquity. AKHE is the lack of philosophy, the absence of beauty, a hero catapulted over the tyranny of convention, a hallucination, a mute horse, the world of silence, a goat grazing on the hem of the Madonna. Two men and one woman, tearing themselves to pieces in a dream of laughter and tears, calling on us all to dislodge ourselves from the binds of human drama, politics, social causes, and the mundane plight of civil pettiness, and kneel and warm our hands one final time, again and again, over the ashes of the human spirit.

Ali Tabatabai Nanos Operetta