Arts & Events

THURSDAY, OCT. 29 -more-

“I can’t believe you’d use that ugly, demeaning term, biological!” snaps Jess (Kendra Lee Oberhauser)—“a walking case of nurture over nature” and the white-clad bride-to-be—at her mentor and self-adopted mother, Gender Studies Department Chair Dede (Gwen Loeb), who is, in fact, her biological mother. Dropping the ugly term again, Dede lets her own first-generation feminist Mom (Jan Zvaifler) have it: “You forgot to mention, biology is unfair!” -more-

There have been movies about waitresses and grocery check-out clerks; now, finally, that overlooked retail figure, the bagger, is represented in Ready, Set, Bag!—a new documentary by Oren Jacob of Piedmont, Chief Technical Officer at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, his wife Justine and a few colleagues from Pixar, set to have its world premiere next Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Elmwood on College Ave. near Ashby, and 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Cerrito, on San Pablo in El Cerrito. -more-

Before a backdrop painting of hills with a few houses and a road in the distance, nine Shaker women file out, greet the audience with a bright chorale and set about confessing their sins to each other: “I slept late last Thursday” ... “I was angry at the hens” ... “I was prideful of my new apron”—a lot of confessions of the tiniest peccadillos open As It Is in Heaven, Arlene Hutton’s play, at Actors Ensemble of Berkeley. -more-

“No man’s worth losing your brain over.” The only one who doesn’t lose it, though, in the course of William Bivins’ The Afterlife of the Mind, put on by Virago Theatre Company at the Ashby Stage, is Harry, famous (and terminally ill) philosopher, who is all brain—literally. -more-

Abstract painting has been with us for about a century. At times it has descended into mere decoration or design or “color-field” painting with its thesis that painting addresses only the eye. Abstract painting, however, even more than figuration can communicate what philosophers have called the Sublime. -more-

Halloween has gone from Trick-or-Treat to Superstore, apple bobbing to Exotic Erotic. -more-

THURSDAY, OCT. 29 -more-