It is a shock to the senses, entering the turn-of-the-century transformation underway at John DeSotelle Studio. A wooden jungle of beams and antique furniture consumes the black box space, a testament to the low-budget ingenuity of set designer Brian McManimon. The 1920’s tenement replica is immersive to say the least, a clever imagining of Clifford Odets’ masterpiece about a poor…
The first red flag of Live Source’s “Bohemian Lights” (currently at HERE Arts Center) came during the curtain speech. The audience was informed of the cultural significance of the show they were about to see, as if to preemptively warn us we’re imbeciles unable to fathom the genius about to ensue. The play, adapted from the Ramón del Valle-Inclán script…
“Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” Revelation 1:17b-18 In her challenging and remarkable performance piece “Hard Rain,” currently running at 59E59 Theater B, Barb Jungr alludes to the often cryptic nature of Bob Dylan’s lyrics. There…
You remember that kid from high school? The one who was totally obsessed with Broadway, who had written their own play, with a near encyclopedic knowledge of playwrights, musicals, and Tony Award nominees? Well, Michael Mitnick has written a show about him; and his name is Kyle Sugarman. The play opens in heart rending fashion as a young Kyle’s father…
What Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” did for the complacency of the 1960s, Walter Mosley’s “Lift” attempts to do for the beginning of the twenty-first century. These important plays collectively challenge the racial, cultural and class consciousness of the American landscape. “Lift” uses the trope, here an extended metaphor, of the…
When Ed Kilgannon (played with powerful panache by Peter Cormican) stretches out on his favorite chair in his Buffalo, New York home, he is not simply snoozing; the head of the Kilgannon clan is doing his best to hide from the matrix of disturbing truths that threaten the fabric of his nuclear and extended Kilgannon-Jablonski families. And he is hiding…
Plays about the making of plays or the making of movies ought to adhere to the conventions of the genre being dramatized. Playwright Mike Bencivenga fails to accomplish this important writer’s task in his new “Billy and Ray” currently running at the Vineyard Theatre. This play about the collaboration between Billy Wilder (Vincent Kartheiser) and Raymond Chandler (Larry Pine) on…
“The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks and make your home on the heights, you who say to yourself, ‘Who can bring me down to the ground?’” Obadiah 1:3 Obadiah tried to warn Edom to repent of its pride, its inexorable hubris – but to no avail. The nation had…
“Kleider machen Leute” (Clothes people make.) – Gottfried Keller In mufti, with all the typical theatrical trappings stripped away, “Big: The Musical” becomes just small enough to really understand the characters in this iconic musical, clearly relate to their conflicts, and share in and relate to the stories these child and adult-sized conflicts spin. In its current run at the…
“Give me my flowers/While I yet live/So that I, I, can see the beauty/That they bring.” – James Cleveland In 1994, just before the Thanksgiving turkey is carved and served, Calvin (Larry Powell) packs his things, says good-bye to Eva (Sharon Washington) and his sister Tonya (Sheria Irving) and leaves his Pittsburgh house and home. Sexually abused by his stepfather…