Tag: Vol. 35 No. 26

Charles Newell’s minimalist revival dispenses with chunks of dialogue, a realistic set, and intermission, offering a swift, concentrated take on Tennessee Williams’s sad and angry masterwork. Sound and light shifts suggest the fretful memory of the narrator, Laura’s brother Tom, who often remains onstage eavesdropping on searing scenes he’ll later painfully recall–though the spare set […]

Following playwright Stephen Belber’s own stage directions, this production cleverly alternates live performance with video sequences–a blend that works well, thanks in part to video artists Colby Hanik and Aaron Covich. Together technological innovation and fine acting give dramatic power to what might otherwise be a rather slack, overlong play. A troubled man in his […]

“I was born four times,” says Rachel, the protagonist of this work created by the talented young Albany Park Theater Project. Twice she was born into life in an unheated basement with a swarm of siblings, all of them under the draconian rule of a religion-obsessed father, and twice into the sanctuary of an affectionate […]

Hatred is the subject of this feisty sketch show, Triplette’s fourth. Roommates offstage, the three women turn head games into heady humor by exploiting the power dynamics of everyday and only-on-stage situations: a hungry grocery shopper clashes with a free-sample attendant, a woman grows jealous of her shadowy “understudy for life.” In one sequence they […]

As in Wilford Leach’s acclaimed 1981 production, later a film, director William Osetek soft-pedals Gilbert and Sullivan’s operatic score. But if you neutralize the music, you must dial up the comedy–and Osetek’s uninspired staging offers merely a bland story about silly, inept pirates sniffing around maidens in Victorian England. Die-hard G & S fans will […]

Somewhere in Lydia R. Diamond’s overlong, overwritten theatrical exercise is a powerful play. She interweaves the stories of Saartjie Baartman, the 19th-century “Hottentot” displayed like a circus animal for five years to European “polite” society, and Sara Washington, a present-day feminist academic offered a lucrative book deal to write Baartman’s biography. But in our era […]