Unlikely couples fuel comedy—Stan and Ollie, Oscar and Felix, Ralph and Alice—more. But beyond that, they fuel drama—Butch and Sundance, Holmes and Watson, Sir and Norman, Romeo and Juliet. The best parings are those in a script that blend comedy and drama. Such a script is the new play, Early Birds, by Dana Schwartz, which … Continue reading “Early Birds” at Moving Arts
With the houselights still up, in a theatre with seats configured on a slant, a pleasant, smiling, thirtyish man enters in replete with a MacBook and ear buds, hops into an armchair and types. House lights fade, stage lights come up, and this voluble, energetic man addresses the audience. He says he is the playwright. … Continue reading “Death and Cockroaches” at Chalk Repertory Theatre
At lights up, a firmly erect young woman walks a seemingly set number of paces in half light from stage right to center, turns and walks back off as her light fades. Mystery tickles the audience at the outset of Steve Apostolina’s eighty-five minute wonder, Forever Bound. The playwright takes his time in revealing the … Continue reading “Forever Bound” at Atwater Village Theatre
One has to reach back to ancient Greece and the dawn of drama to fully understand Daniel Talbott’s intense, cathartic one-act play, What Happened When. Drama in the time of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides had the civic purpose of educating the populace by displaying examples of moral and behavioral excess that brought ruin on principal … Continue reading “What Happened When” at Echo Theater Company
Open Fist is excellent in producing a show of what they call pop-ups, that is, really short plays that are serious, comic, and deeply thought provoking. The sketches express the currents of social and political reality. Last year, the company produced Welcome to Your Alternative Reality, which dealt with the angst of the incomprehensible advent … Continue reading “One Year Later” at Open Fist Theatre Company
deLEARious is a madcap musical mash-up, a tortured, zany comedy that runs three story lines (with subplots) all at the same time. First you have a playwright, played, in a cunning piece of casting, by playwright Ron West, a one-man powerhouse who also collaborated on the book, music and lyrics with Phil Swann. And he … Continue reading “deLEARious” at Open Fist Theatre Company
Playwright Tom Jacobson’s new play, Walking to Buchenwald, now in production at Open Fist Theatre Company, is thematically complex, weaving together the stories of an elderly couple and their adult child and her long time partner, as they take a trip to Europe. The play is set in the current time after a presidential election … Continue reading “Walking to Buchenwald” (Die Damen) at Open Fist Theatre Company
The Echo Theater Company mounts a unique program, Nevertheless, She Persisted, five world-premiere short plays by female writers that explore the treatment of women in today’s political climate. Commissioned by Echo Theater for the Echo Associate Company, “a group of young actors who, over the past year, volunteered with the Echo: acting in readings or … Continue reading “Nevertheless, She Persisted” at Echo Theater Company
Angsty times we live in these days, with Donald Trump in the White House. Some of my more conservative friends still cheer him on. One of my oldest friends thinks that his speech in Poland was magnificent. If it was, he was delivering words some one else wrote. No crime certainly, politicians have speechwriters. But … Continue reading “Welcome to Your Alternative Reality” at Open Fist Theatre Company
The Cake, Bekah Brunstetter’s superb new play, is a ninety-minute wonder spiked with moments of high hilarity as well as scenes of ripe emotion that sear the heart. In present-day Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Della (Debra Jo Rupp in a performance of purest gold) runs a bakery based on the premise of strict adherence to tried … Continue reading “The Cake” at Echo Theater Company
