Bum Phillips (Gary Ramsey) is more anti-hero than hero in the opera being his name currently playing at the Ellen Stewart Theatre (La MaMa). The apparently iconic Houston Oilers football coach has to endure the same struggles heroes have always experienced (Ulysses, Antigone, and that lot) but the stakes in the strife seem lower and the return home less glorious….
Codependent and cramped in a fantasy of intimacy, Kali (Christina Bennett Lind) and Todd (Richard Saudek) wage a dangerous battle of wits and words and take no hostages in the revival of Bryony Lavery’s “Stockholm” the One Year Lease Theatre Company production currently running at 59E59 Theater B. There is little healthy fabric remaining in the marriage of Kali and…
“…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.” ― Kathleen Winter, Annabel Five writers, three directors, and six actors collaborate (conspire?) in five short scenes to tackle the sticky business of becoming in the Women’s…
“Hope comes in the doing, not in the waiting.” – Jean-Paul Sartre Cradeau, Inez, and Estelle – three war-weary Parisian compatriots – bear transgressions that serve as tropes for the horrors of the events surrounding World War II. Critics often have claimed that Sartre’s “No Exit” is not a war play; however, given the date of authorship and the autobiographical…
Channeling a more introspective and agonized June Cleaver, Sara Jane (Alexandra Silber) has an on-the-surface pleasant dialogue with all that is beyond theatre’s conventional fourth wall. In “Arlington,” currently playing at the Vineyard Theatre, that includes directly engaging the audience and the Pianist (Ben Moss) who appears behind an upstage scrim and not only accompanies Sara Jane’s non-stop singing but…
“Yes, all who can call at least one soul/ Theirs upon this earth; /But any who cannot must creep tearfully/ Away from our circle.” – From “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich von Schiller, 1785 Soteriology, trying to figure out what it means to be a savior, is a difficult business and for the savior it is often a messy business….
Despite the early protestation of playwright Jonatha Brooke, the aft end of the title of her “My Mother Has 4 Noses” is a trope; indeed, ‘4 noses’ is a well-developed and quite brilliant extended metaphor for not only the four seasons of the life of Brooke’s mother Darren Stone (“Stoney”) Nelson; the short phrase is also a metaphor for Stoney’s…
“With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate/Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool/Be angry, and dispatch.” —Cleopatra, Act V, scene II Cleopatra knew the allure of the asp, the Egyptian cobra. Its venom, its bite, was – in her opinion – a rather dignified and relatively humane way to administer capital punishment offering “sleepiness and heaviness without spasms of…
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.” I Corinthians 13:8 (NIV) Sans a singular protagonist, sans a singular antagonist, sans clear conflicts, therefore sans plot, Caryl Churchill’s “Love and Information” depends on a singular trope to provide focus and interest…
“[Charlotte’s] come back to me. There’s nothing more right.” – Philip Graves to Mirabel in Scene Nine Bereavement makes for a strange bedfellow. It joins battle with the bereaved and insists on skirmishes with denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and (ultimately) acceptance of the death of the loved one. These incursions into the life of the bereaved are not…