Night + Day

Tuesday
March 30
New to You From the outset, new play-reading series 5x5 upsets theatrical convention. The very first play, Toni Press-Coffman's Two Days of Grace at Middleham, tackles Shakespeare's Richard III, rewriting Richard himself as not bad but merely misunderstood. The Tucson-based Press-Coffman is just one in a recent series of Shakespeare revisionists: Witness the spate of scholarly tomes, and films like Baz Luhrmann's MTV-styled Romeo & Juliet, Tom Stoppard's witty spinoff Shakespeare in Love, Kenneth Brannagh's forthcoming musical Love's Labor Lost, and the soon-to-open 10 Things I Hate About You, a high school version of The Taming of the Shrew. Press-Coffman asserts that the politics of Shakespeare's time warped his portrait of Richard, and that the uncertain politics of Richard's time allowed for the murderous clashes that made the original famous; see how persuasively she makes that case tonight. Production company First Seen kicks off the series, which runs Mondays and Tuesdays through April, with Two Days, followed by Cary Pepper's The Maltese Frenchman (Monty Python meets Dashiell Hammett) and Pure, a parlor game about sex written by P.A. Cooley Show creator Dean Backus. Tonight's reading begins at 8:30 p.m. at the Studio at Theater Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St. (at South Van Ness), S.F. Admission is a suggested donation of $5; call 861-5079.