George Heymont

During the recent Bay One Acts Festival, a fascinating two-character play by Christopher Chen that was originally produced by Instrumental Theatre made a deep impression on me. Directed by Paul Cello, A Game starred Ariane Owens and Charisse Loriaux as a lesbian couple cleaning out the house belonging to one...

Those who pass through the San Francisco's Tenderloin District know it as one of the nation's grittiest concentrations of single-room occupancy hotels (many of which are filled with a mixture of drug addicts, seniors living on fixed incomes, and Vietnamese immigrants). At any hour of day or night, life on...

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, stop what you're doing right now and click here to order tickets to FWD: Life Gone Viral, the wickedly brilliant new comedy that is scheduled to run through June 10 at The Marsh (but which I suspect will be extended...

As most of my friends know, I have always been a very heavy dreamer. Sometimes when I describe a particular dream sequence they look at me as if I'm crazy.

How can I blame them? If I could film my dreams, either they would fascinate people or someone would lock...

Harvey Weinstein's recent battle to secure a PG-13 rating for Bully was a classic example of film industry power brokers attacking the messenger instead of heeding the message. Whatever crude language may have been included in the original edit of the film was language being spewed by kids who feel...

When Godfrey Reggio's wordless documentary, Koyanisqaatsi: Life Out of Balance, was first released in 1982, much more attention was focused on Philip Glass's score and Ron Fricke's cinematography than the ecological message contained in the film. Since then, the globalization of catastrophic news, combined with cable media's need to incite...

Born in 1879, Rudolf van Laban studied sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and established a choreographic institute in Zurich at the age of 45. In 1928, he published Kinetographie Laban, which has since evolved into labanotation and become the primary tool for documenting a choreographer's creations...

When Richard D'Oyly Carte asked William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan to write a short comic opera in 1875, he had no idea they would be making history. Following the success of Trial By Jury, The Sorcerer, and H.M.S. Pinafore, the three men formed a producing partnership known as the...

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, has a curious distinction. Not only was the event the most thoroughly documented disaster in history, many of the observers, survivors (and even some of the victims) filmed the destruction as it happened before their horrified eyes.

Storytelling is one of man's oldest art forms. In its simplest form, it involves a parent telling a story to a child who might be sitting on the adult's lap or lying in bed, about to go to sleep. However, when storytelling takes place among adults strange things happen.

As...

What do science museums have in common with animation? They give people insight into structure and possibility. One reason I've always loved industrial tours is that they give people a chance to witness the actual mechanics of various manufacturing processes, whether they involve brewing beer or constructing airplanes.

In January...

The other night, as I was sitting at the computer, I was distracted by the sound of low voices chanting and sudden bursts of light from flash cameras. Having forgotten that it was Good Friday, I looked out the window and saw what looked like a gold-plated canopy bed slowly...

The word "stupid" first entered the English language in 1541. Today, T-shirts proclaiming "I'm With Stupid" are proudly worn by thousands of people.

In his essay entitled The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Maria Cippola stressed that, "A person is stupid if they cause damage to...

April is a month filled with historical markers. It begins with April Fool's Day (which is celebrated here in San Francisco with the annual St. Stupid's Day Parade). For Americans, April contains the deadline for filing one's income tax returns. This year, April 15 also marks the passage of 100...

In 2003, a superb Canadian documentary named The Corporation was based on a simple finding: the behavior of many corporations matches the character traits attributed to a psychopath in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In fact, during its filming the documentary's screenwriter, attorney Joel Bakan, wrote a...

How an animal listens is a direct function of how well it is able to hear. Baleen whales rely on a very low-pitched, or infrasonic type of sound which can travel great distances, allowing some whales to communicate across vast regions of ocean.

Toothed whales use echolocation as a highly...

I had a dream. It wasn't a prophetic dream, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. Nor was it a nightmare. Instead, it was a rather stupid dream in which some Republican jackass kept demanding that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival produce a certificate of authenticity before Congress...

Ballet fans will want to get their hands on a copy of Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, a thrilling new documentary by Bob Hercules that chronicles the history of the Joffrey Ballet since its founding in 1956 by two gay men who, at the time, were lovers. This powerful film...

Many writers tense up at the sight of a clean piece of paper or a blank computer screen. For columnists, however, the challenge is always clear. Although the subject matter of any particular column might be clearly delineated in one's mind, the trick is to find the key -- or...

Over the past few years, a great deal of local gay theater has been dishearteningly mired in bad writing, lax direction and amateurish acting. I recently attended the GuyWriters Theatre Company's production of seven short comedies under the umbrella title Eat Our Shorts 4 -- Love And Other Disasters and...