Kpfa - Bay Area Theater

KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “Tiny Beautiful Things,” based on the book by Cheryl Strayed, at San Francisco Playhouse through March 7, 2020. Text of review: The writer Cheryl Strayed hit the best-seller charts in 2012 with her memoir, Wild, the story of a trek she took over the length of the Pacific Coast Trail in 1995. It was her second book. Her first, Torch, a novel had been published six years earlier to good reviews and little national notice. But it was in 2010, struggling as a free lance writer, that she was offered the job – not really a job because there was no pay involved – to take over an advice column, Dear Sugar, for the Rumpus on-line literary magazine, which she then wrote for two years. Those columns were collected in the book, Tiny Beautiful Things, which has been adapted by Nia Vardalos into a theatre piece now at San Francisco Playhouse through March 7th directed by Bill English. After a brief opening in which Cheryl gets the gig, the rest of the play consists of questions