Trinity Rep opens the new year with a play that is epic indeed: Marcus Gardley’s Black Odyssey, which transposes Homer’s story of Ulysses’ decades-long journey to come home from the Trojan War onto an African American Second Gulf War veteran, swept off a transport ship on his way back from a tour of duty. Co-directed […]
When you enter to take your seat for Wilbury Theatre Group’s production of Futurity, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve passed through the curtains into a slightly shifted dimension. Instead of a play, a chalkboard on stage advertises live music – “tonight at 7:30!” – played by “The Algorhythms.” Brien Lang, Futurity’s director, explained […]
Going to the theater is always a communal experience. Even in a movie theater — who’s never experienced a time when fellow audience members applauded at the end, or cheered for a good line? And how much more communal is the experience when you and the people you’re packed into the seats with are sharing the […]
The Gamm opened their season last week with Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Fred Sullivan, Jr. It’s a strong, albeit thoroughly traditional, production of the play; designer Patrick Lynch’s beautifully set-dressed and very Victorian sitting room is the first thing the audience sees and it sets the tone for the show […]
Telling people that I was going to review the Wilbury Group’s production of Mr. Burns, I got a few variations on the same response: “Maybe I don’t know a lot about theater – the only Mr. Burns I know is the one on ‘The Simpsons!’” That is, in fact, the one. Anne Washburn’s play, subtitled […]
There’s a lot going on in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, currently opening the season at The Gamm. A viewer unfamiliar with the play might expect the poetry or the landscape design history from a story set in a country house in the early 19th century, but they might not expect it to contain quite so much […]
There’s a moment in The Fantasticks where Henry, an old Shakespearean actor, puts on his doublet to recite. “It’s torn, I know – forget it,” he says, asking El Gallo (and the audience) to remove, in their imagination, “10 pounds of road dust from these aged wrinkled cheeks.” In the Contemporary Theater Company’s current production, […]
If you’re anything like me, you read the Odyssey back in school and remember maybe a little about Odysseus’s wife Penelope. It’s not a spoiler for Epic Theatre’s production of The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s stage adaptation of her own novella, to say that director Kira Hawkridge takes inspiration for her stage pictures from Penelope’s most […]
Describing MAC to someone else makes it sound like little more than the nth in a line of gimmicky reworkings of Shakespeare, or of Macbeth specifically. The Scottish Play as a two-person show with close-up card magic! Don’t let that deceive you. The play reduces to a two-hander with ease, and having the major characters […]
It’s a testament to the feats achieved by NASA in the past few years that parts of Stuart Wilson’s one-man show It’s a Spaceship Now, premiered in 2013, already feel dated. The Mars rover? Old news – we have color photos of Pluto now! On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt that our sense of […]