Tag: Vol. 30 No. 32

When The Water Turns Clear, ETA Creative Arts Foundation. In Mark Clayton Southers’s new play, a young African-American widower fights to claim a better future for himself and his ten-year-old son, Andre. Jesse has been working in a white man’s grocery store for years but is treated with little respect. Encouraged by his uncle Reese […]

The Seagull, TimeLine Theatre Company, at the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall Theatre. Seldom have artists been portrayed less flatteringly than in The Seagull, which presents us with a vain grande dame of the Moscow stage, the popular but uninspired novelist on whom she dotes, and her literary son, Konstantin, who seethes […]

Consumed by Poe, Hi-Volt Theatre Company, at the Performance Loft. This deliberately disjointed compilation of seven stories by Edgar Allan Poe fragments each into bits that are consecutive but not contiguous. This clumsy treatment loses momentum and turns Poe dull–an unpardonable sin. Included are the well-known paranoid fantasies “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” […]

You Got Engaged?!, Aardvark, at the Performance Loft. Having recently gotten engaged, I looked forward to this “farcical fairy tale.” In his program note, playwright Vincent Bruckert rhapsodizes about his own engagement, claiming that he’d “never spent such joyful time with friends or learned more valuable lessons from family.” Somehow, these feelings and lessons never […]

Blind Faith, Smilin’ O Productions, at Acme Theater. This rip-roaring production of Sean Farrell’s new play, crisply directed by Andrea J. Dymond, is in every sense, as one audience member remarked, “the hottest theater in town!” Notwithstanding 90-degree heat inside Acme’s tiny second-floor space, this tale of two women meeting for a “treatment”–an ambiguous term […]