Ostensibly eschewing the technology of communication, Dan (Michael Yavnieli) and Jeff (Jeff LeBeau) engage in what proves to be a marathon for gamers par excellence as they reunite at an undisclosed location in “present time adjacent” at a small table. Friends for twenty-five years, these two remaining members of a post-high school foursome of friends engage in exactly the type…
San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas had a long-standing professional and personal relationship with “West Side Story” composer Leonard Bernstein making the June 10, 2014 release of the live recording of the first-ever concert performance of Mr. Bernstein’s complete score for the iconic musical quite significant. Equally significant is the recording itself. Mr. Tilson Thomas and the San…
EJC Calvert’s new play “Commit,” currently running at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ, is a dark comedy written in three acts. Each act carefully dissects the vicissitudes of the human condition, in particular the abilities of humankind to commit themselves to a variety of relationships despite their prolific and sometimes unsettling flaws. Three creatures appear in the titles and…
Suggested by a work by Keith Walker, Shirley Lauro’s 1991 “A Piece of My Heart” attempts to celebrate the lives of the women who served in the Vietnam War as enlisted soldiers, nurses, entertainers, and other volunteers. Under director Betsy Aiello Sanders’ steady hand, the talented ensemble cast of the Speranza Theatre Company tackles Ms. Lauro’s script and brings it…
“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (“Here must all distrust be left behind; all cowardice must be ended.”) – Dante Alighieri, “The Divine Comedy,” Canto III, line 9 of “The Inferno” One would think that with Dante Alighieri, Goethe, John Milton, Kurt Weill, T.S. Eliot, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner (among others) in the house, nothing but a good time would be…
“All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players:/They have their exits and their/entrances; /And one man in his time plays many parts.” – Jacques in “As You Like It” Act II, Scene VII (William Shakespeare, 1600) In Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Jacques solves the eternal question of whether art imitates life or life imitates…
There is a great deal of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan in his rollickingly funny “The Rivals” the comedy of manners he wrote for Covent Garden and where it first appeared in 1775. Riffing the sham chivalry and sham romance of his day, Sheridan drew from his life experiences to develop a roster of comedic characters with absurd conflicts that spin…
“Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few.” – Winston Churchill “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” – William Shakespeare, “Henry V” Long distance truckers are indeed a band of brothers and sisters whose escapades on America’s interstate highways place them among the few. And consumers in the…
“And indeed there will be time/To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”/Time to turn back and descend the stair,/With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—“ From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) The connections playwright David Rudkin draws between T. S. Eliot’s fictional character J. Alfred Prufrock…
Two couples trying to discover who they are as dyadic entities. Four individuals attempting to discover who they are in their unitary states. Oddly, the lives of the couples parallel one another and even more curious, each individual has a doppelganger. These four – coupled in twos – collide on one rainy night in a flat in the midst of…