Plays about death understandably are not very popular. True, the occasional one does stimulate some thoughtful discussion among theatergoers. And when given national exposure, such as the kind Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box attained when Paul Newman directed a made-for-TV version of the drama several years ago, plays about death…
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is an ideal microcosm of the contemporary Broadway musical. It’s based on a story written by someone else (the complete text may be found in the Book of Genesis, Chapters 37 through 50); it borrows from several popular musical genres (including calypso, country-Western and…
Thirty years ago, Richard Schechner created the Performance Group in New York, an avant-garde company whose shows were riveting because of their carefully rehearsed spontaneity. What was important in Schechner’s productions was the unpredictable series of events that took place between actor and audience, and the art form he created…
Give Barbara Walters credit. Or maybe it’s Sigmund Freud who deserves the accolades. While we’re at it, let’s not forget the hordes of celebrities now clamoring to publish their memoirs or autobiographies. All of them must be taken into consideration when attempting to explain the contemporary worship of every famous…
When A Chorus Line first splashed onto the Broadway stage in 1975, its creator, Michael Bennett, was routinely hailed as a genius, an innovator, and the best and brightest choreographer on the American musical scene. Some even felt that he was heaven-sent. At the heart of his more successful shows…
“But what I really want to do is direct!” reads a T-shirt popular among actors. Even though performers always aspire to creative control, playwrights were actually the theater’s first “directors.” It was only when productions began to tour (and plays were thereby wrested from a writer’s clutches) that actors began…
The term “Orwellian” is often used to refer to situations in which authority figures like police or even employers poke their noses into people’s private concerns, root out potentially incriminating information and then use that knowledge to manipulate somebody. To many people, that might constitute blackmail. To others, it’s simply…
Maybe it’s because it touches on hot-button issues that haven’t yet vaporized, as so many talk-show topics do. Maybe it’s because it’s a two-character play that’s relatively easy and inexpensive to produce. Or maybe it’s because David Mamet–always a perennial favorite among theater companies–wrote the Obie-winning drama. For whatever reason,…
In 1965 a young African-American actor, Douglas Turner Ward, produced two one-act plays he had written, Happy Ending and Day of Absence. The double bill enjoyed a successful fourteen-month run off-Broadway, and its triumph precipitated Ward’s creation of New York’s Negro Ensemble Company, where he continues to serve as artistic…
Outstanding theater programs have a way of thriving in the face of adversity. Nowhere is that more true than in academia, where the general rule for arts programs is that you either have state-of-the-art facilities populated by meager talent or talented performers forced to toil in substandard conditions. In the…
The always opinionated George Bernard Shaw once challenged the so-called Father of Modern Drama, Henrik Ibsen, to explain “if he can, why the building of houses and the raising of families is not the ultimate destiny of mankind.” All this despite the fact that Shaw never reared a child of…
How did you respond in school when you were told by the teacher that the day’s learning was going to be “fun”? Did you imagine that you’d be entertained by Spandex-clad song-and-dance specialists? Were sing-alongs what you envisioned when a math lesson was on tap? No, even though education and…
Veteran Madison Avenue ad exec Marshall Karp moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and garnered modest success writing for such TV shows as Amen, starring Sherman “George Jefferson” Hemsley, and Baby Talk, featuring Connie Sellecca and George Clooney. Four years before he devoted himself to such Hollywood shlock, though, he…
The one-act play is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Shakespeare evidently never wrote a one-act play to encapsulate his feelings and thoughts, even though his world may have seemed smaller to him than our modern, global network of communications does to us. Relying mostly on his knowledge of human nature, the…
What did it all mean? That was the lingering question many audience members pondered one recent Saturday afternoon after Cirque du Soleil loosened its formidable grip on their collective imaginations. Holding the sell-out crowd spellbound with a captivating performance of its current touring show, Quidam, the Montreal-based troupe received two…
Classical theater, like classical music, is often regarded as something that must be tolerated, if rarely enjoyed. Many theater-goers routinely endure an entire evening of, say, Shakespearean drama or Wagnerian opera, dutifully applauding a performance more out of respect for its standing as a classic than for its ability to…
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, an old woman has left the impersonal confines of a city hospital for the warmth of her remote cabin so that she might die quietly. Grace Stiles (Judy Phelan-Hill), a lifelong mountain dweller, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the ninety-year-old recluse…
The first act of Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child might have you wondering if the playwright wrote his drama shortly after watching the cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At many points in Shepard’s story, it seems as though an ectomorphic, sledgehammer-wielding psychopath might leap out of the shadows, screaming,…
If you’re like most people, chances are there’s a situation from your past, oft-told at small gatherings, that has always seemed worthy to you of dramatization. “After all,” you say to yourself after having regaled a cozy audience of acquaintances with your oddly funny, slightly embellished tale, “people keep telling…
“I want to yell things in newspapers,” one character says in Leslie Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians. The granddaughter of a prominent minister who fled his native Armenia for freedom in America, she intends to tell anyone who will listen that her people’s suffering–which remains palpable today–has been ignored by humankind…
By the time the curtain falls on David Mamet’s Oleanna, you’re likely to have changed your mind several times about whose side is more “right” in the two-character drama. You’re also bound to gain new insight into a misunderstood, sometimes-maligned playwright. To begin with, the play examines political correctness, sexual…
Shouldering the tools of his trade, a gaunt figure walks on to the stage, opens his artist’s easel and begins to paint. He dons a hat emblazoned with burning candles that set his canvas aglow, while a backdrop reflects dual self-portraits of the man’s face. In this first moment of…
