Rhode Island Theatre and RIPE
Motif Columnist , Terry Shea, sits down with us at MoTiv to discuss the state of RI’s local theater scene.
Threepenny for Your Thoughts
I feel like I’m in the right place when I see a Wilbury Group production. I cheered “U-S-A!” at The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and I cried honest and unashamed at Lungs. Even with an unforeseen venue swap from the Butcher Block Mill to Trinity Church midseason, Wilbury didn’t break stride. As such, The […]
Dysfunctional Comedy Masterfully Executed in Gamm’s Beauty Queen of Leenane
The Gamm Theatre creates an exquisite balance between darkness and comedy in their staging of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. McDonagh was in his mid-20s when he wrote this play – his first – over the course of a mere eight days. He showed wisdom well beyond his years in tackling the complex […]
Next Gen Theatre Explores Intimacy
All This Intimacy reminds us that connecting with other people in this day and age is easy; however, it does take more than physical contact and a few casual conversations to develop and secure real intimacy. At first blush, All This Intimacy appears to be a Neil Simonesque comedy with several intertwined relationships. However, after the initial jokes, […]
Mixed Magic Theatre Meets The Zoo Story’s Challenge
Edward Albee’s startlingly beautiful and disturbing debut, The Zoo Story, gets few airings, despite its notoriety. Professional productions are prohibited, which leaves this challenging one-act to academic and amateur settings. To further narrow the possibilities for production, The Zoo Story is not your typical community theater fare, and often needs to be paired with similar Absurdist shorts […]
The King and I: Charming Springtime Theater from the Ocean State Theatre Company
It is anyone’s guess how much of The King and I is based on a truthful or, at least, objective account. Anna Leonowens, the real life English governess, was accused of embellishing and sensationalizing her story when she first published it in 1869. Rodgers and Hammerstein, finding Margaret Landon’s 1944 book on the subject was […]
Head South and Give an Ear to God’s Ear
This is an interesting time for Rhode Island theater, as the seemingly isolated and disparate companies proliferating the Ocean State are beginning to form some interesting collaborative partnerships. Aside from the Rhode Island Performance Exchange (an informal communal gathering of the state’s performing entities, pro and amateur alike) there is the newly formed Rhode Island […]
Cranston Artists’ Exchange Celebrates Its Own Community with “Our Town” Play
While Our Town is a Pulitzer Prize winning classic, its simplicity belies its depth. The Artists’ Exchange, under the mature direction of Rich Morra, reminds us of the messages Thorton Wilder intended. The play is set in the early 1900s, yet as always with well-written stories, there are universal truths that are everlasting. Of course, there are […]
Straight White Men at Brown University
Named, “the most adventurous playwright of her generation,” by the New York Times, Obie Award winning director and playwright, Young Jean Lee, explored a new discourse in her work-in-progress Straight White Men at Brown University on Saturday night. Presented by Brown TAPS and Sock and Buskin, Lee’s project is set in the conventions of a […]
Social Creatures at Trinity Rep
Trinity Rep’s new horror play about society is interesting and ambitious. It challenges us to think about what trade-offs we make in order to be members of society, but shies away from ever making us truly horrified by the results. The apocalypse has come and people have organized into two groups: those living inside and […]