The Reader recommends Woyzeck on the Highveld at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Handspring Puppet Theatre transposes George Buchner’s tale of alienation and murder from 19th-century Germany to South Africa during the apartheid era, using artfully crafted puppets and resonant projected animations to create what Tony Adler calls “a mournful, gorgeous progress through the lumpen tragedy.”
Meanwhile, Adler laments that the progress through Goodman Theatre’s Sweet Bird of Youth can’t be as satisfying. Director David Cromer seems to have been overwhelmed by Tennessee Williams’s 1959 play, which leaves “no one and nothing” to rein in its “unmitigated, excessive Williamsishness.” Adler finds Mary-Arrchie Theatre’s Geography of a Horse Dreamer indulgent and I Love Lucy Live on Stage pointless.
David Lindsay-Abaire’s new play, Good People, suggests that he may yet prove himself worthy of the Pulitzer Prize he won back in 2007, for the awful Rabbit Hole. Still, Justin Hayford says only the last half hour is truly gripping.