Playwright Alan Ayckbourn, prolific British author most well known for Absurd Person Singular and the trilogy The Norman Conquests, has a fascination for witty characters who feel they are missing out on something and are driven more or less crazy by that realization, something like Noël Coward for the looney bin. Comic farce about mental […]
Find a piece of French culture right here in Providence during the French Film Festival. Kicking off its 19th year, the French Film Festival in Providence will run 19 films at the Cable Car Cinema on South Main Street over several days from February 20 to March 2. It’s an eclectic assortment of selections designed […]
“Despite all of the multi-layered wit, much of the play depends upon non-verbal communication by the cast.” — Epic Theatre’s Tribes at Theatre 82 The challenge of a play about tribal affiliation is that literally any arbitrary characteristic can be yanked out of thin air and turned into a criterion in order to draw a circle around […]
When renowned masked puppet workshop Big Nazo produces visionary ghosts, no thin airy shoals are these. Charles Dickens prefaced his classic 1843 novella, “I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, […]
If the children of Scientologists in their youthful innocence performed a stage musical in the mode of a Christmas pageant about their religious movement that has driven people to bankruptcy and suicide, complete with cheesy cardboard props and scenery, the result would presumably be this black humor extravaganza. The satire consists largely in simply exhibiting […]
Mixed Magic Theatre delivers Othello in its classic form Shakespeare was a rather good playwright. We tend to forget that amidst modern interpretations of the sort done by Kenneth Branagh or Joss Whedon. Trinity Rep a few years ago put on Hamlet as if it was an episode of Downton Abbey. One film version of […]
Summers are all-too-brief periods into which are packed memories of events that later may only dimly be remembered and even more dimly understood, no matter how much people are changed by them: Breakfast with Curtis is a film about such a summer. Providence native Laura Colella serves as director, writer and cinematographer of a visually […]
Doubt as a philosophical concept has a bad reputation in traditional religion, and its advocates have tended to be heretics and apostates. Voltaire, one of history’s most famous agnostics, said, “Doubt is disagreeable but certainty is ridiculous.” Rarely has that aphorism been more eloquently expressed than in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt: A Parable, a […]
Epic Theatre Company offers a black comedy by Martin McDonagh Cutting off hands evokes numerous metaphorical allusions beyond inherent squeamishness, ranging from the Gospel of Matthew to Llamas with Hats, but it’s puzzling what playwright Martin McDonagh intends by introducing us in his opening scene to Carmichael (Dave Pizzelli), who has not only been looking […]
Obscure for all of his life and only slightly less obscure for decades after his death in 1937, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, like one of his fictional creatures, quietly waited under the earth of Swan Point Cemetery in Providence for an auspicious time when the author’s reputation, if not the author himself, would re-emerge. Presciently […]