A DEATH IN COLOMBIA
Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
It takes particular skill to write a thriller for the stage. Playwrights can’t rely on chase sequences or camera angles or other cinematic tricks as screenwriters can. Their task becomes all the more difficult if the stage thriller they’re writing is to unfold in real time on a single set with only a handful of characters. Add to the above a political theme, and you’ve got a doozy of a writing assignment.
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BROADSWORD: A HEAVY METAL PLAY
Thursday, June 30th, 2011
Sixteen years ago, four young New Jerseyans dreamed of a heavy metal stardom that would transport them far away from the Podunk town of Rahway. Then, as these things happen, their lead singer got a too-good-to-resist offer of a solo career and the remaining three were left to pick up the pieces. Now, a decade and a half later one of the the foursome is dead (or at the very least presumed dead), and his surviving bandmates have reunited for his memorial.
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A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS
Sunday, June 12th, 2011
“Attention must be paid to such a person,” declares Linda Loman at the end of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece Death Of A Salesman, eulogizing a husband who woke up one morning to find that the thirty-four years he’d spent as a traveling salesman had been for naught.
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YEAR ZERO
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
In fact, our very first glimpse of Vuthy in Michael Golamco’s Year Zero is of a shaggy-haired, hugely bespectacled teenager rapping about his life to said skull. “Everywhere I look, all I see is ghosts,” he syncopates to the prerecorded beats of a cassette tape. “All around me up in here, all I see is ghosts.”
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100 SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW
Friday, May 27th, 2011
Matters of love, sex, faith, and family are explored with utmost originality in Kate Fodor’s engrossing, deeply moving 100 Saints You Should Know, now getting an impeccable West Coast Premiere at the Elephant Theatre Company under the inspired direction of Lindsay Allbaugh.
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THREE DAYS OF RAIN
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Tony-winning playwright Richard Greenberg might well have called his fourteenth play Sins Of The Fathers, so heavily do the sins (or at least the perceived sins) of Walker Janeway’s parents continue to weigh on the life of this angry young man in Three Days Of Rain, now getting a pitch-perfect revival at South Coast Repertory, the same theater that world premiered it in 1997.
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THE TRAVELING LADY
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011
No one wrote more affectionately or accurately about the plain folk of Middle American than Horton Foote. In plays and movies like Tender Mercies, The Trip To Bountiful, and To Kill A Mockingbird, Foote returned home to those small towns where everybody knows your name—and your business … and your life is all the richer for it.
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FIFTH OF JULY
Friday, May 20th, 2011RECOMMENDED
Lanford Wilson’s Broadway hit Fifth Of July gets an intimate staging by the esteemed The Production Company, and while I can’t confess to being a fan of the play itself, there are good reasons for those who are to catch its latest revival.
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