“Her hair is Harlow gold, her lips sweet surprise / Her hands are never cold, she’s got Bette Davis eyes.” (Donna Weiss, Jackie DeShannon) Jessica Sherr has those Bette Davis eyes along with remarkable Davis lookalike hair and lips. This actor utilizes all of these assets to create a winning retrospective of Bette Davis’ personal life and career. The 1939…
The eleventh annual Fresh Fruit Festival launched its All Out Theatre offerings with Patrick Thomas McCarthy’s “sExtOrtiOn” a complex, multi-layered drama which tackles morally ambiguous themes with a stunning cast portraying equally morally ambiguous characters. In some ways this is an odd “place” for the Festival to begin: the gay characters in this interesting ninety-minute play are neither likable nor…
“Regret that will make you want to set back the clock. And change things— “ (Jenny Glover) In a re-telling/re-imagining of Robert Heinlein’s 1958-1959 short story “All You Zombies,” B. Walker Sampson’s “My Machine Is Powered by Clocks” tackles weighty concepts using a treasure trove of rhetorical schemes and tropes. The artful syntax of parallelisms, juxtapositions, and antitheses (schemes) are…
Reality collides with fantasy in Jonathan Tolins’ new play “Buyer & Cellar” resulting in a near-nuclear reaction of comedy, sentimentality, and sheer brilliance. Some rich and impressive collaboration has ignited the stage of the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater with the opening of Jonathon Tolins’ new play aptly titled “Buyer and Cellar.” First is the combination of the fascinating, well structured script…
“By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new “concept,” a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime.” – Jacques Derrida, “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42…
“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 18) Globally, it is an easy time to quit. It is an easy time to quit believing in equality under the law; to quit believing in justice; to quit believing in freedom, equal pay for equal…
At the interval of the Saturday June 22nd performance of Tennessee Williams’ “The Two-Character Play,” a seemingly perplexed patron approached a member of the house staff at New World Stages and asked if she could “go into one of the other theatres because this play is not my cup of tea.” The staff person informed her she could only re-enter…
The new play “Rantoul and Die” is playwright Mark Roberts’ debut with the Amoralists and one can only hope that this outstanding collaboration is only the beginning of a long relationship. This latest production now playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre strikes a perfect chord in the harmony between script and actor while still completely supporting the theatre company’s mission…
In the new play “Charles Ives Takes Me Home,” playwright Jessica Dickey tackles an old theme of parent child conflict choosing to elaborate on the relationship between a professional violinist father and a strong willed, sports minded, basketball playing daughter who are both consumed with their individual passion. The twist lies in the introduction of a third character, the composer…
There are only five more opportunities to see “Bunty Berman Presents” presented by The New Group at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row through Saturday June 1, 2013. Ayub Khan Din’s new musical counterpoints traditional Bollywood music and dance with its more traditional Euro-American cinematic counterparts as it carefully unfolds the story of film producer Bunty Berman (Ayub Khan Din)who…