Arts And Entertainment

TUESDAY, OCT. 3 -more-

From an Ohlone woman’s menage with a zoot-suited Coyote, through a Japanese ex-houseboy and his picture bride eating pickled plums while awaiting relocation, a pair of Cain-and-Abel brothers who end up as Black Panther and strung-out Vietnam vet to the hip-hop kid of an interracial couple who bought a fixer-upper amid the drive-bys, the Shotgun Players’ premiere of Marcus Gardley’s Love is a Dream House in Lorin employs a cast of 30 to play 40-some characters that personify the story of the South Berkeley district in something like the narrative style of a WPA mural, all chromatic persona and event, motifs overlapping in time and space, recurring in gesture and song. -more-

The Oakland Opera Theater opens this Friday its third Philip Glass opera—the compelling dance opera Les Enfants Terribles. This final opera of his trilogy based on the work by French artist Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles has been described by Glass as Cocteau’s “tragedy”: -more-

FRIDAY, SEPT. 29 -more-

Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is one of the most influential and iconic of Spanish films. Set “somewhere on the Castillian plain” in 1940, just after the Spanish Civil War, Erice’s film conjures a remote village where the echoes of war and repression resound in the lives of an increasingly fragmented family. -more-

Even today, 30 years after his death and nearly 100 years since he first stepped before a motion picture camera, Charlie Chaplin is still one of the most recognizable people in the world. The dandified Tramp, with his brush mustache, ill-fitting clothes, wicker cane and derby hat, is an iconic figure, but one whose familiarity has to some extent undermined his art. Chaplin today has become something of a two-dimensional figure, a static icon that means little to those born in the decades since his heyday; he exists as a fully formed entity, a known quantity, and is therefore just as easily ignored, an image from the past that no longer requires our attention. -more-

On the wall was chalked:/They Want War./The man who wrote it/Has already fallen. -more-