San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Immigrant family life as sketch comedy
The myriad pressures on the children of immigrants come to a boil in Killing My Lobster’s latest.
In “My Parents Came to America and All They Got Was a Kid Who Does Comedy,” sketch comedy writers Ela Banerjee, Ariana Chow-Smith, Abas Idris, Molly Sanchez and Akaina Ghosh, led by head writer Dominique Gelin, roast stereotypes to delicious effect: the compulsive saving of plastic bags and expecting superhuman feats of your children. Then there’s white-bread Americans, who can’t even learn how to say the names of their friends or pick a supposed partner out from a lineup.
A highlight is Banerjee’s brilliant “Star Wars Baba,” which rewrites the end of “The Empire Strikes Back” to imagine what would have happened if one of the character’s immigrant parents had barged in. “My Parents Came to America and All They Got Was a Kid Who Does Comedy”: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Sept. 1-3. Through Sept. 10 at PianoFight Oakland, 1540 Broadway, Oakland. $16-$42.50. www.killing mylobster.com
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