Bold Girls. The four Irish women in Rona Munro’s evocative, elliptical Bold Girls try to carry on in the equivalent of a war zone, doing their best to shelter and care for their children, filling their lives with humdrum chores and small diversions. All four characters are strongly delineated and…
The lobby hero of the play’s title is Jeff, a security guard for a Manhattan apartment building, and the title — as you might guess — is ironic. As Lobby Hero opens, Jeff is engaged in conversation with his supervisor, William. The two men could not be more different. Jeff…
By some miracle, Ireland’s long agony seems to have ended with the current power-sharing agreement between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, a former commander in the Irish Republican Army. This deal, achieved in the last days of Tony Blair’s government, may be the British prime minister’s best and most enduring…
Dead Man Walking. We are one of the last Western nations to retain the death penalty, but you don’t hear much about it these days. Where executions were once front-page news, they’re now relegated to single paragraphs far back in the paper — if they’re mentioned at all. In an…
There it is. The last, ear-punishing note of the very last song, and the cast comes onto the stage for the curtain call. First the lesser characters form a smiling line that prompts a couple of people in the audience to stand up. Then the bigger fish rush forward and…
According to Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, major changes occur when members of Charles Schultz’s well-loved Peanuts gang reach their teens: Pigpen becomes a sex-obsessed, homophobic jock; Lucy’s in a psych ward because she set the little red-haired girl’s hair on fire; Linus, having been forcibly deprived…
Dead Man Walking. We are one of the last Western nations to retain the death penalty, but you don’t hear much about it these days. Where executions were once front-page news, they’re now relegated to single paragraphs far back in the paper — if they’re mentioned at all. In an…
Watching Mall*Mart, the Musical! at Curious Theatre Company is almost a schizophrenic experience; the two acts seem part of different productions. The first act details the life of one Walt Samson, a stand-in for Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, and shows his rise to wealth and prominence, as well as…
The genre is familiar. There’s a woman alone in a house on an island off the coast of Maine; a thunderstorm batters the windows. The woman is packing. She has set out three boxes: one labeled Trash; one, Remains to Be Seen; the last, Perpetual Care. The pale face of…
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is one ugly family that’s gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday. What almost everyone except Big Daddy himself knows is that he’s dying of cancer. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son…
I always get a little worried when I hear that a theater is premiering the work of a local playwright. On principle, I applaud it — absolutely. How’s a writer to learn stagecraft and dramaturgy without collaborating with actors, directors and tech people? And how can a city have a…
Set in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were vying for the presidency, Senator Joe McCarthy was busy with his anti-Communist witch hunts, and America was humming songs from South Pacific, Oklahoma! and The King and I, Red Herring is a piece of wit that exists on several…
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is one ugly family that’s gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday. What almost everyone except Big Daddy himself knows is that he’s dying of cancer. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son…
Richard Rodgers was an astonishing musical talent, and for decades the soul of that entirely American creation the musical comedy. To some extent, he revolutionized the hitherto fluff-filled form by taking on such themes as racism (South Pacific), wife-beating (Carousel), the abuses of monarchical power (The King and I), and…
We are one of the last Western nations to retain the death penalty, but you don’t hear much about it these days. Where executions were once front-page news, they’re now relegated to single paragraphs far back in the paper — if they’re mentioned at all. Most of us go about…
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is one ugly family that’s gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday. What almost everyone except Big Daddy himself knows is that he’s dying of cancer. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son…
Most fictional characters in mental institutions struggle to get out, but when Dana Fielding, the artist-protagonist of The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, arrives in one after a suicide attempt, she settles right in. Battered by the response to her latest exhibit, a couple of negative reviews and a general sense…
This is one ugly family gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi Delta home to celebrate the patriarch’s 65th birthday, and almost everyone in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but Big Daddy himself knows that he’s dying. There’s Big Mama, operating in an acute state of denial; son Gooper, accompanied by…
A House With No Walls. There’s a special category of pundit: the black conservative, those darlings of the Republican Party who profit hugely by attacking other African-Americans. The protagonist of Thomas Gibbons’s play is a more thoughtful and credible version of this kind of talker, a brilliant historian named Cadance…
One of the perils of an English education is that it leaves gaps. While I and any of my old school friends could discuss Shaw, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf at some length — and on a more contemporary note, I’d be happy to talk your ear…
Though it has sad and even bitter undertones, Pure Confidence is essentially a comedy. The central figure is one we recognize from myth and folklore: the trickster — in this case, a jockey named Simon Cato who has an almost magical ability with horses. Small in stature, he’s big in…
House With No Walls. There’s a special category of pundit: the black conservative, those darlings of the Republican Party who profit hugely by attacking other African-Americans. The protagonist of Thomas Gibbons’s play is a more thoughtful and credible version of this kind of talker, a brilliant historian named Cadance who…
