Some articles about Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Crimes of the Heart, call it tragi-comic. That is a mistake. The comic part is true enough—great hilarity pops up with delightful regularity—but the action doesn’t rise to level of Hamlet, say, with bodies strewn about the stage at the final curtain, or the grim visage … Continue reading “Crimes of the Heart” at International City Theatre
Little Fish Theatre is on a roll when it comes to plays centering on women. August saw the double bill of Rapture, Blister Burn, Burn and The How and the Why, two deeply resounding plays superbly performed by veteran actors. Now the company has doubled down with a world premiere of a new play by … Continue reading “The Ithaca Ladies Read Medea” at Little Fish Theatre
According to Merriam –Webster, a “parable is a short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson.” What John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize winning, Tony award winning play, Doubt, has to teach, leaves an audience pondering long after the curtain call. Set in a Catholic school and the adjoining church in The Bronx, New York … Continue reading “Doubt, A Parable” at International City Theatre
The secrets in Sarah Treem’s intriguing intellectual drama, The How and the Why, reveal themselves with tantalizing slowness. Into the office of an academic busy at her work, a young woman enters softly, tentatively. We eventually learn that her name is Rachel (Natalie Beisner), and the academic is Zelda (Mary Wickliffe), an evolutionary biologist. It … Continue reading “The How and the Why” at Little Fish Theatre
Playwright Gina Gionfriddo makes feminist theory dramatic in her cunningly titled play, Rapture, Blister, Burn, now running at Little Fish Theatre. Smart people with the not-terribly-unusual angst of modern-day, everyday life, deal with regret, ennui, alcoholism and desire couched in terms of the ancient conundrum of gender, its dynamics, expectations and reality. Three college chums … Continue reading “Rapture, Blister, Burn” at Little Fish Theatre
By 1985, the United States and Russia had stockpiled of over 60,000 nuclear weapons. The United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India and South Africa had nearly a thousand more. Pakistan and North Korea joined the nuclear club soon after. A generation of Americans grew up under the threat of annihilation, taught to cower, to “duck … Continue reading “A Walk in the Woods” at International City Theatre
Table Manners (now in production at Little Fish Theatre), the first play of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, The Norman Conquests, is a six-character comedy that takes place entirely in the dining room. The other two plays are Living Together, which is set in the living room, and Round and Round the Garden, in the garden. The … Continue reading “Table Manners” at Little Fish Theatre
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a most unusual play. It is generally accepted into the Shakespearean canon despite questions about its authorship. Scholars have quibbled about the play for centuries and there seems to be a consensus that the Bard was responsible for writing at least the last half of the play, with the first … Continue reading “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” at Long Beach Shakespeare Company
Peter Shaffer’s Sleuth premiered at the Music Box Theatre in New York in 1970 and closed nearly three years later after 1,222 performances. While it was still running in New York, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco produced it with Ken Ruta and Peter Donat in the leads. I saw that production when I … Continue reading “Sleuth” at Little Fish Theatre
The thing of it about short plays, plays of around ten minutes duration, is that they pack into those precious few moments a wealth of human drama with its sorrow and slapstick, grief and joy. If one loves a particular little playlet, it ends too quickly. If one doesn’t really care for it, well, it … Continue reading “Pick of the Vine” at Little Fish Theatre
Paul Myrvold's Theatre Notes 