As Pluck Would Have It

“MOXIE” IS A SLANG TERM for determined fortitude that isn’t much used these days, unless you’re a local theater lover. Then you know it’s the name of a young company founded by four talented women—Jo Anne Glover, Liv Kellgren, Jennifer Kraus and Delicia Turner Sonnenberg —and dedicated to bringing us new and offbeat works centered on female themes. They’re Encinitas-based, but jumped from venue to venue until settling into Diversionary in October for their first full season of five plays, one of them a co-production with their host company.

So far, the Moxie track record is excellent. Their 2004 offering of Kimberly Akimbo was such an award-winning success they reprised it, and this season’s first two plays, Liz Duffy Adams’ post-apocalyptic Dog Act and Charles L. Mee’s witty romance, Limonade Tous les Jours, clicked with critics and audiences.

Next up is Kirsten Greenidge’s Gibson Girl (April 14-30), about two 14-year-old girls raised as twins but with different skin colors and dispositions. Their father deserted, and their mother’s trying to bring him back to help straighten out matters. Turner Sonnenberg is directing and says she fell in love with the play at a Bay Area reading.

“It raises a lot of questions about skin color within the black community and about black female beauty as defined by the men in the play, as well as by the women,” she says. “What is the skin color of the ideal African-American girl, light or dark? Who gets to decide this? Who is the black ‘Gibson Girl’?”

Yet, she adds, “Greenidge isn’t attempting to write a ‘black experience’ play. At its core is a mystery: What is the difference between the two girls? Is it just their skin color, or is it something more?”

BRITISH PLAYWRIGHT SARAH KANE crammed much controversy and torment into her 28 years before hanging herself in 1999. She first became prominent as an actor and director, then began writing and turned out several works that provoked everything from lavish praise to vicious condemnation for graphic treatments of such topics as rape, war crimes and mental illness. Kane was considered a prime force in England’s “in-yer-face theater” genre.

We’ll get our first local non-university production of a Kane play when Al Germani’s Lynx Performance Theatre does her most-lauded script, Crave (April 14–May 14), in which four characters have mysterious, interwoven relationships. It’s not surprising Lynx would tackle such a challenge, since Germani has specialized in superb productions of dense, dark works by lesser-known playwrights.

“This one’s gonna be wild,” he says. “I’m kinda returning to my roots of experimental performance theater.”

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »