Vampires are trendy right now, but they’ve been around in one form or another — seductive, repellent, take your pick — for centuries, because the idea of a dead creature that maintains some form of vitality by sucking human blood is so resonant and evocative. It’s a kind of immortality,…

Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow is about the impending death of a character she calls Woman, a woman of spirit and passion trapped in a miserable marriage in rural Ireland. The story isn’t linear, but pieces of the protagonist’s life emerge through the dialogue. Her mother was given to volcanic…

Art. Yasmina Reza’s cool, witty, much-celebrated and much-performed play is ostensibly about art, but it’s more about friendship. At the center of the action is an all-white painting, purchased by Serge, a dermatologist, for a huge sum of money. Perhaps he feels a genuine affinity for the piece, perhaps he’s…

Art. Yasmina Reza’s cool, witty, much-celebrated and much-performed play is ostensibly about art, but it’s more about friendship. At the center of the action is an all-white painting, purchased by Serge, a dermatologist, for a huge sum of money. Perhaps he feels a genuine affinity for the piece, perhaps he’s…

Charles Morey adapted The Ladies Man from a farce by Feydeau — pretty loosely, by Morey’s own account. In the original, Tailleur des Dames, the beleaguered protagonist is guilty of adultery; Morey, surmising that the more puritanical American audience wouldn’t empathize with an adulterer, makes his hero the victim of…

The power of The House of the Spirits, playwright Caridad Svich’s take on Isabel Allende’s celebrated novel, lies in the accumulation of images, actions and passionate words that the play pours out into the audience, as well as the bitter sadness at its heart. Consider the scenes separately, and they…

Art. Yasmina Reza’s cool, witty, much-celebrated and much-performed play is ostensibly about art, but it’s more about friendship. At the center of the action is an all-white painting, purchased by Serge, a dermatologist, for a huge sum of money. Perhaps he feels a genuine affinity for the piece, perhaps he’s…

The 39 Steps is uninhibitedly silly — a romp, a trifle, a takeoff on a 1930s Hitchcock film (which, in turn, was based on a novel by John Buchan) The plot, which didn’t make much sense in the previous versions, has something to do with an attempt by foreign spies…

There’s far more playing area than there is room for the audience: We’re seated on a few rows of chairs at each end of the space, while the wide floor between is marked out like a Pacman game. On the opposite wall from where I sit, a screen shows a…

Only Buntport would think of putting a play about the melancholy Czech author Franz Kafka — his biography intertwined with scenes from his story, Metamorphosis, about the man who woke up to find he’d been transformed into a beetle — on ice. Only Buntport would come up with the perfect…

I’d been enjoying Cavalia all along, but the moment that won me over completely came during the second act, in a piece called “Carousel.” To an exotic beat that sounded rather like Ravel’s “Bolero,” a group of robed people rode white horses through misty silver light, the white-lit outline of…

I wasn’t interested in the discussion about the uses and abuses of cell phones in Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone. To begin with, the theme is dated. Most people don’t use their phones to talk these days; they’re too busy checking e-mail, playing games, counting calories, perusing their calendars…

When I first attended a Buntport Theater Company production and found six people in the audience — myself and my friend two of them — I’d never have predicted that the troupe would make it ten years. Other smart and talented companies have fallen by the wayside, but the six…