There are few memorable lines or riveting exchanges in Beautiful Thing. Instead, playwright Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 work graced off-Broadway six years after it premiered in London, uses everyday, off-the-cuff banter to explore the budding romantic attraction between two teenage boys. And rather than wallow in adolescent angst, the Theatre…
Just when it seems like her “choreopoem” might devolve into a smallish, rancorous debate, Ntozake Shange’s heroine/narrator steps to one side of her story and conjures — as only a born poetess can — feelings that are both lacerating and sublime. Brimming with dialogue that’s at once startling and seductive,…
In this age of simplistic moralizing, hypersensitivity and polarized opinion, it seems that only an obtuse fable with Hallmarky lyrics is considered worthy of the label “deep.” Gone, sadly, are the days when composers of crowd-pleasers like South Pacific (which enjoyed an initial Broadway run of 1,925 performances), Carousel (890…
If Richard Nixon had been able to hire Luigi Pirandello as his spin doctor, the American public might have regarded Watergate as little more than a mirage in the vast political desert. But the Italian dramatist (and occasional fascist) died some forty years before the disgraced president was forced from…
Like a silky musical riff that beckons with the promise of discovery, Side Man pays homage to a bygone artistry that championed purity of devotion over shameless self-promotion. Centered around four jazz musicians, Warren Leight’s memory play abounds with soulful passages in which a young man tugs at the dark…
As the Acoma Center’s house lights dim, a techno-musical display fades to shadowy silence. Then a young man appears at the edge of the stage and, draped by a backdrop of thousands of stars, stares straight ahead while a disembodied voice intones, “What’s your history?” A few scenes later, the…
For at least the past hundred years, Irish-born playwrights have made it a habit to explode national myths by spinning stranger-than-fiction yarns of their own. Drawing his inspiration from the years he spent on the Aran islands thirty miles off Galway’s west coast, John Millington Synge tried to evoke the…
The group of Denver natives and Southern Methodist University graduates that formed HorseChart Theatre Company a few seasons back made it their mission to produce plays that “do not make a spectacle of the obvious.” While past productions have tested edgy boundaries and occasionally transported theatergoers to seldom-seen territory, the…
A few weeks before he was supposed to send his newly written play to a Seattle theater company, Robert Lewis Vaughan experienced a sudden change of heart. The Colorado Springs native (now a New Yorker) says that he had a “gut feeling” that he should submit the drama, which is…
An opera based on a Russian silent film would seem the sort of artsy endeavor that invites dismissive sneers from musical and movie buffs alike. But with its abundance of artful understatement, a score that out-lilts most songfests and a touching story that examines age-old questions with modern frankness, Bed…
The rough conversation and odd behavior permeating War might prove a tad disconcerting for those whose image of Ireland is of modest pastel houses and gently rolling cobblestone streets snuggled together under clouds of cottony mist. Billed as “a contemporary, slice-of-life comedy,” Roddy Doyle’s work simmers with everyday discontent, vulgar…
The thunderous applause that typically greets a successful Broadway opening can hardly compare to the joyful noise made by children anticipating that Babe, the Sheep-Pig is about to get under way. And once the play begins, the peals of laughter and murmurs of delight that greet the beautifully costumed characters…
Megan is a New York actress who, in addition to not having worked in six months, discovers that she has an overwhelming need “to love and be loved.” Past her ingenue days but not yet matronly enough for prime time, the former Broadway performer must decide whether to take a…
Dearly Departed. Most of the characters in David Bottrell and Jessie Jones’s off-Broadway hit behave as if they belong in a sketch on The Carol Burnett Show, and some of their collective yokeling is reminiscent of Hee Haw cornpone. And heaven knows that the two-hour exercise in escapism — welcome…
Midway through Act Two of The Laramie Project, a pair of performers reenact one of the 200 interviews they conducted with the people of Laramie, Wyoming, after the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was robbed, beaten, bound and left for dead on a remote rail fence…
Seven months after Arthur Kopit’s father suffered a stroke, National Public Radio commissioned the author of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad to write a play for NPR’s Earplay series. While Kopit longed for a deeper understanding of his father’s altered…
Atticus Finch is perhaps the only resident of Depression-era Maycomb, Alabama, who believes that it’s possible to live by high-minded principles. He doesn’t merely espouse empty eloquence — the Southern lawyer accepts “payments” of turnip greens, hickory nuts and firewood from a dirt-poor farmer who desperately needs legal help he…
1776 winds up being more — and less — of a history lesson than audiences might expect. Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s award-winning musical, which premiered on Broadway more than thirty years ago, is an enjoyable retelling of the events that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence…
The African Company Presents Richard III recounts events that, four decades before the Civil War, prompted the nation’s first African-American theater group to perform a Shakespearean tragedy next door to the Manhattan auditorium where a white company’s version was in production. Despite threats of civil unrest and objections from an…
Years before playwrights decided that raw emoting was preferable to shaded feeling and thought, Harold Pinter masterfully exploited the ambiguities of modern communication. Like Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot was described by one critic as a collection of “wordless meanings and meaningless words,” Pinter delved into the notion that…
He had already written Othello to explore the jealous impulses that precipitate a great man’s tragic downfall, fashioned As You Like It to teach a few comic lessons about the strangely similar romantic yearnings of courtiers and country types, and penned a historical series about the Wars of the Roses…
Although most people might think of Romeo and Juliet as a lusty, melodramatic love story, Shakespeare’s play is more a tragic tale about the sometimes catastrophic clashes between parents and children. After all, the two lovers aren’t thwarted by bouts of jealousy, sexual incompatibility or even Romeo’s refusal to share…
