Blind Date
Goodman Theater

For as long as historical dramas have been written, their authors have struggled with the task of conveying the context of the events depicted to audiences who may be too young to remember them, too old to remember them accurately, or weren't paying attention while they transpired—all within the increasingly abbreviated performance time dictated by the fashion of the day.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Equivocation
Next Act Theater

Milwaukee’s Next Act Theater reveals the many sides of William Shakespeare in Equivocation by playwright Bill Cain. The play is set in 1606 London, where Shakespeare has been summoned to write a commission for the king. Then things get complicated – far too complicated, if Shakespeare is to be believed.

Bill Cain is a graduate of Northwestern University, and a man of many talents: he is a Jesuit priest (according to the program notes), and the founder of a Shakespeare company in Boston.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Gruesome Playground Injuries
Underground Collaborative

Milwaukee’s newest theater company, The Constructivists, chose to open its doors with a play by one of the nation’s newer playwrights, Rajiv Joseph. Although better-known for his Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo, which played on Broadway, Joseph also wrote Gruesome Playground Injuries. It is this play that The Constructivists selected to perform in the intimate, black box theater called the Underground Collective.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2018
Delta in the Sky with Diamonds or Maybe Not
Theater 54 - Shetler Studios

A play by June Daniel White called Delta in the Sky with Diamonds or Maybe Not is playing at Theater 54 at Shetler Studios, produced Off-off-Broadway by Boogla Nights Productions. It concerns a woman, Delta, recently deceased, who meets God and finds that for some inexplicable reason he has a plan to use her to save the world. It seems that she must get Lyle, a living former rock star, and Hollywood, a living waitress, together as partners. The future of the world depends on it. It’s not clear why this should be the case.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Hinter
Steep Theater Company

Calamity West's Hinter begins with the last of five murders, walks us through the police investigation and then flashes back to acquaint us with the events leading up to the crime itself.

Audiences may cry "foul" at the playwright's refusal to reveal whodunit by the end of the thriller, but those listening closely will have gathered enough information to speculate on the identity of the villain(s) whose motives may lie in individual perversion, opportunistic deception or spectral miasma, but whose culpability leaves everyone with, literally, blood on their hands.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Or Current Resident
Theater for the New City

Naturalism isn’t my favorite style, but with theaters trying to outdo each other to be avant-garde, it’s refreshing to find a conventional, naturalistic production of a new script. I speak of Squeaky Bicycle Productions’ production of Or Current Resident, by Joan Bigwood, presented at The Theater for the New City. It’s squarely in the tradition of the American drama’s theme of family. From Eugene O’Neill through Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, to Sam Shepard, American playwrights have been obsessed with family.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Black Pearl Sings!
Stackner Cabaret

Black Pearl Sings! is based on a remarkable true story. Playwright Frank Higgins was inspired by the real-life relationship between legendary singer/guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) and Harvard folk musicologist John Lomax, who helped petition for Ledbetter's release from prison. However, in the playwright’s version, both the musicologist and singer are female. Higgins attempts to broaden the focus to encompass women’s issues in the early 1930s.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Native Gardens
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

On one side of the stage is the Butleys’ bright D.C. patio furnished for dining, looking in on a tastefully appointed home, and surrounded by a small white cement arc walling in a feast of colorful flowers. On the other side, a mess of a closed off threshold and dead foliage in beds of throw-away ornaments clutter under an imposing oak tree with overhanging brown leaves. This set reveals the action: a clash.

The Butleys welcome new neighbors Pablo Del Valle, an immigrant Chilean of a powerful law firm, and pregnant wife Tania for wine.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Balls
59E59 Theaters

As a modest player myself, and a frequent fan of the major tennis championships, I’ve been currently suffering my annual frustration at the elusive, wee-hours-of-the-morning, live telecasts of the Australian Open matches now underway in the distant time zone of “The Land Down Under.”

But relief has arrived right here in Manhattan, thanks to the fascinating production of Balls, now gracing the stage of the 59E59 Theaters right here in the Big Apple. Balls was recently developed and premiered by Houston's famed Stages Repertory Theater.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Traitor
A Red Orchid Theater

You see, there's this play about a doctor who discovers pollutants in his home town's main tourist attraction, but his brother's the mayor—yes, it's that one!

Of all Henrik Ibsen's so-called "problem plays," An Enemy of The People, his fable of the individual's duty to oppose criminal deception engendered by popular complacency, has proved most protean in its applicability to cultures worldwide throughout the ages.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Good Fight, The
Edgewater Presbyterian Church

When even African-American essayist Booker T. Washington declared European women—in particular, those of England's urban centers—to be exploited under the law to a degree exceeding the men of his own country, who could dispute the need for their immediate enfranchisement?

Making a case for women's right to vote in nations encumbered by several more centuries of oppression than ours, however, often mandated civil disobedience—and suppression thereof—of a severity approaching violence.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Spark
Flat Irons Building

When a play's synopsis begins, "Well, there's these three sisters," we immediately think of Chekhov, but the women of the Glimord clan are a long way from the bored, pampered, upper-class Misses Prozorov.

For one thing, they live in rural North Carolina—not in a swanky country-club mansion, but a shabby frame house in need of repair, just off Highway 40 (dubbed "Tobacco Road" for its surrounding landscape). For another, their father was no decorated general, but a hard-drinking wastrel who abandoned their late mother to a lifetime of toil in the fields.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Freud's Last Session
Odyssey Theater

Leading debunker of God meets famed Christian thinker in Freud’s Last Session, Mark St. Germain’s intellectual drama now on the smallest of the Odyssey’s three stages in West Los Angeles. The two-character play, first produced by the Barrington Stage Company, imagines a meeting in 1939 between Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner) and C.S. Lewis (Martyn Stanbridge). Freud was living in London after having fled the Nazis; Lewis was a Cambridge don (and the author of numerous books on theology and mythology, including “The Chronicles of Narnia.”)

Author St.

January 2018
Date Reviewed:
Willard Manus
Russian Transport
Studio Theater

In the thick of a Wisconsin winter comes a surprising play that literally “transports” the audience to a modest Brooklyn flat, inhabited by an immigrant family. The foursome consists of two Russian parents and two teens. They are reaching for – but failing to achieve – the American Dream. The husband’s car company is failing, and the older teen is forced to turn over his earnings to pay the rent.

This is the world of Ericka Sheffer’s Russian Transport , produced by the reliably excellent Rennaisance Theaterworks.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Comedy About a Bank Robbery, The
Criterion

Many audience members and London critics liked this both-literally-and-figuratively-slapstick farce better than I did. The premise and action of The Comedy About a Bank Robbery are funny, true. But if you know anything about the real America shown in cops-and-robbers movies, this take-off on the same is not only silly but jejune. I had a hard time getting past the Minneapolis manager of the bank-to-be-hit who speaks with a Deep Southern accent.

The story, set in 1958, has a prisoner as if in a much earlier-type jail consorting with crooked guards and police.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Unexploded Ordnances
La MaMa

The set for Unexploded Ordnances (produced by Split Britches at La MaMa) consists of seven tables arranged in a circle and three large video screens on the back wall. Several minutes into the show, one of the two actresses, Lois Weaver (who also directs), asks who in the audience was alive during World War II. The ten individuals who respond spend the rest of the show sitting at the tables with her as a sort of Council of Elders. It’s really cool.

Ms. Weaver represents the President—no particular president.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
How to Use a Knife
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

In his New York restaurant catering to business lunchers, self aggrandizing Michael is giving a second chance to George, a chef who was his boss and teacher. George will once again helm a kitchen, though at night when menu and clientele are very limited. A recovering alcoholic and druggie, George has charge of two Hispanic line cooks, a waiter, and a dishwashing mopper. How will he and those under him fare?

How to Use a Knife opens Florida Studio Theatre’s 2018 Stage III series of edgy dramas from the National New Play Network.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Morning After Grace
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

A third Asolo Rep entry into a program of “Staging Our World” reflects the predominant senior population of Sarasota. It does so as if a TV sitcom. With fine stage performers under Peter Amster’s famed direction of comedy, it almost manages to hold interest beyond usual television time. Initial male nudity grabs attention but promises more than what comes forth clothed in cliches and mild jokes.

The title is ambiguous. Action takes place the morning after a funeral and a coupling.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Undesirable Elements
New Victory Theater

There are seven performers in Ping Chong and Company’s play Undesirable Elements: Generation NYZ. They talk about their actual lives (what’s happened in the past) in the present tense, and what they talk about is the substance of growing up disadvantaged in New York City.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Panorama
La MaMa

In Panorama (presented by La MaMa) characters morph into one another in defiance of actuality or stage convention. The show begins with 17 video clips of actors introducing themselves, and as the play proceeds, we meet seven of them on stage. That upstage video projection is always active, and sometimes it’s the actor on stage whose image is projected—they're always being videoed onstage, and sometimes they take video selfies. They’re always talking directly to us, usually one at a time.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Brouhaha
Theater for the New City

What would we do without smart clown shows? “Smart clown show” describes Happenstance Theater’s show Brouhaha, appearing Off-off-Broadway at The Theater for the New City. The loose premise is that the six characters expect the world to end imminently (the script doesn’t explain why, and we don’t care). There are a couple of off-stage sort-of explosions that throw them on the floor, and then this brief exchange:
“Was that it?”
“Apparently not.”

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Small Mouth Sounds
The Broad Stage

Much of Small Mouth Sounds resembles a silent movie with its six characters communicating without dialogue by making exaggerated gestures and faces for nearly two hours (with no title cards to aid comprehension). The dumb show in Bess Wohl’s new play, a recent off-Broadway hit, takes place in a wellness center whose unseen leader preaches silence as a therapeutic cure for psychological stress and pain. The leader, voiced by Orville Mendoza, is a kind of New Age guru, uttering advice and instruction in a cloyingly sweet tone meant to soothe and inspire.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
For the Loyal
The Athenaeum

Exhortations to be "loyal, brave and true" are commonplace in songs designed to rally the troops—military, religious or athletic—but what happens when the actions spurred by these values come into conflict? This is the query posed in this Chicago premiere play by the prolific Lee Blessing.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Flamingo and Decatur
Theater Wit

Audiences whose notions of Las Vegas are restricted to tourist brochures may encounter difficulty accepting the concept of gambling as a career choice.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Manor, The: Murder and Madness at Greystone
Greystone Mansion

It has taken me sixteen years to catch up with The Manor, the fictionalized story of the rise and fall of the Doheny family. Edward Doheny, patriarch of the family, made a fortune in the oil business during the 1920s, much of which he spent on Greystone Mansion, a mammoth hilltop house in then-rural Beverly Hills. The Manor takes place in that very structure; and to reach it one must motor up Doheny Drive and enter what is now a city park.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Mountaintop, The
West Coast Black Theater Troupe

If The Mountaintop comes over better than its rather sketchy text deserves, it’s because its production director, like Chuck Smith at WBTT, unveils subtext. That makes possible deeper-than-surface portrayals by its two actors as its realism acquires now-fashionable magic. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. thus becomes a normal human being as well as a charismatic icon.

In Memphis’s gloomy Lorraine Motel, it’s the 1968 night before MLK’s April 4 assassination. That day he encouraged sanitation workers in their strike for higher wages.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Animal Farm
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is among the most famous political novels of all time, and Ian Wooldridge’s adaptation is a masterful work that smartly takes the book’s themes from page to stage. In the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s intriguing production, a cast of eight actors portray the entire community of Animal Farm – the animals as well as the hated, alcoholic owner, Farmer Jones, as well as various other humans.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Stories By Heart
American Airlines Theater

At the American Airlines Theater, we all settled down to watch him enliven a collection of colorful characters in his ebullient one-man show, John Lithgow: Stories by Heart. Why are stories generally so universally engaging? Lithgow asks and answers this question in a two-act Roundabout Theatre Company production.

So Lithgow begins to read to us. Actually, he reads a few lines from a well-worn book, and then puts it down and performs the stories. Except for the book, no props are necessary.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Constellations
Tenth Avenue Theater

Now in its third season, All In Productions seems fated to fill a hole in the local theatrical landscape. It stages (mostly obscure) musicals and dramas (and has seen more success with the musicals than the dramas). But its latest offering, Constellations is a drama – almost. It comes off more like an exercise in an acting class.

It brings together a man and a woman from completely different worlds: he’s a professional beekeeper, and she’s a Cambridge professor and researcher.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Shakespeare in Love
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Despite its length and prescription for elaborate production, the stage version of the movie “Shakespeare in Love” is like a student take-off on Shakespeare’s plays, especially Romeo and Juliet. Most of it’s a stretch for anyone who knows Will’s repertoire, Christopher Marlowe’s, and theater history. Yet enjoyment’s to be had in robust acting, elaborate costumes and apt lighting at Asolo Rep.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Motherfucker with the Hat, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Despite its laugh-raising verbal virtuosity and often over-the-top characterization, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play with the title that couldn’t be advertised is serious business. Everyone in it is seriously addicted, though comically expressing their inadequacies as they cope with them, or at least try to.

John Wilson Bennett’s head-in-the-clouds clod Jackie, on probation from a New York slammer and now dependent on AA, has won a job. On a high, he rushes with flowers and gifts to give Veronica.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Magic Parlour, The
Palmer House Hilton

When we speak of "fooling" people, the term is usually associated with manipulation in service of personal gain at the expense of innocents. ("Fool me once, shame on you" runs the adage.) The concept of deception as amusement has waned as our universe grows ever more complex and untrustworthy, reducing the spiritual security necessary to comfortably confront unexplainable events.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
It's My Penis
Pride Arts Buena

Don't be misled by the P-word. Even if our hero makes his entrance garbed only in his underwear (plain white cotton jockeys, for those who care about such details) to inform us that he used to be a woman, he has not come to talk about hormones or implants or rejecting one gender stereotype in order to embrace another. Instead, his goal is to question—having, he reminds us, viewed the arguments from both sides—why our culture makes it so difficult for men and women to be who they really are.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
My Father's a Cop
Lounge Theater

To watch Jerry Dean’s My Father’s a Cop is to take a walk on the wild side.

Dean, born in the West Village, the Irish-American son of a NYC cop and an alcoholic mother, tells his life story in the Los Angeles premiere of his solo play. And what a life it has been, shot through with darkness, violence, crime, drugs, insanity, and incarceration.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Waitress
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Waitress , the national tour starring Desi Oakley as an almost middle-age woman who creates amazingly delicious pies at the local diner, shouldn’t expect a generous tip from this critic.

The musical is hackneyed stuff, with the conclusions so easily guessed as the show progresses as to make them anti-climactic. Sara Bareilles’ songs are okay, but nothing that will leave you humming while exiting the theater. What makes them rise above the ordinary is Desi Oakley’s powerful singing.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2018
Parisian Woman, The
Hudson Theater

You'd expect that politics on Broadway would be an intriguing gift-wrapped star vehicle, what with all the elements of Washington's dashing, in-the-know style and back-stabbing, ambition and sly perfidy on all sides. Unfortunately, despite today's prodigious amount of news available, fake and real, Beau Willimon's The Parisian Woman at the Hudson Theater has the feel of a old-time parlor drama.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Children, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

The holiday season brings to Broadway a warning of catastrophe, an all-too-true cautionary tale of disaster brought about by impetuous human intrusion into the natural world. The Children, Lucy Kirkwood’s thoughtful drama at the Manhattan Theater Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theater, features no children on stage, yet the underlying theme considers children and what kind of world they will inherit. What responsibility do we owe the next generation?

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Altar Boyz
No Exit Cafe

It's said that God—or gods, for you polytheists—moves in mysterious ways, but since history records the sacred and profane often meeting in mutual accord, the phenomenon of Christian rock is no more mysterious than the revivalist wave of the 1970s following Andrew Lloyd Webber's pop-oratorio passion play. Indeed, the propensity of teenagers for embracing religious fervor as an escape from hormonal confusion can be observed in cultures throughout the world.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Bye, Bye, Liver
The Public House Theater

No bachelorette parties were in evidence the week before Christmas, but two birthdays were being celebrated at this outpost for entertainment focused on the consumption of alcoholic beverages—comedy sketches based in time-travel adventures tracing the same barroom pick-up line to Paleolithic cultures, or a visit from the spectral sorceress of Blackouts, along with games called "Drunken Karaoke" and "Name That Drink."

Has it really been more than 10 years since Byron Hatfield premiered his guzzle-and-guffaw concept as a BYO late-nite romp in Bucktown's now-defunct Gorilla

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2017
Shadowlands
Acorn Theater

Fellowship for Performing Arts produces theater from a Christian perspective. It’s currently touring with a solo show about C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert. Here in New York they’re presenting another play about Lewis, Shadowlands, Off-Broadway. It’s a larger production, with a cast of ten. Like The Reluctant Convert, it explores theology through the prism of Lewis’s life.

Shadowlands begins Lewis’ story from just before he meets the poet Joy Davidman — that is, Mrs.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
December 2017

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