Theater & the Arts
This witty, pointed, clever play, which opened on Broadway in 1947, was written by Martha Gellhorn, ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway, and by Virginia Cowles. Both were journalists who had met covering the Spanish Civil War and then chronicled the Nazi assaults in Europe and North Africa. Their alter-egos, Jane Mason (Angela Pierce) and Annabelle Jones (Heidi Armbruster) have arrived at an Allied press camp near Naples in February 1944 to cover the campaign against German forces in Italy.
Theater & the Arts
The original title of this play was to be “Sleeping Demon.” In the script, a preacher (Ron Cephas Jones) says, “Conscience is a sleeping demon.” In this third of John Patrick Shanley‘s trilogy called Church and State, which began with “Doubt” and “Defiance” about tough moral choices, he deals with the bankers who foreclose on mortgages and a local politician whose attempt to save a constituent‘s home is compromised by the fact his mother co-signed the mortgage and the bank CEO wants his approval for a $300-million shopping mall.
Theater & the Arts
Kenneth Lonergan‘s spoof historical drama is a weird, funny, outrageous cartoon commentary on the bloody cruelty and crudeness of the 14th century, with subtle suggestions that “plus Òa change….” The language of the characters – mercenaries, nobles, high-ranking clerics – shifts between the “thee, thou” we expect medievals to talk, to pretentious academic locutions to the modern vernacular, including teen-speak, and the vocabulary of beer-drinking men, except that the women use as many four-letter words.
Theater & the Arts
Curious how the sounds and sights of Elizabethan madrigals and forests of the turn of the 17th century work just fine with a country bluegrass touch. The rough and tumble of courtly wrestling is transplanted easily to a timbered stockade, and men chasing women in the woods exhibit quite the raw way to romance. Nor are family feuds unknown in either place.
Theater & the Arts
Maybe it’s because I expect religious music to be, well, religious that I enjoyed the moralistic, be a good person “Godspell,” loved the lively, jivey singing and dancing, and didn’t seriously notice till the final crucifixion scene that the parables belong to the Christian God story. Appealing Hunter Parrish, who plays Jesus with a cowlick, looks like one of the Beach Boys, and the motley crew he interacts with, representing ordinary folks, look like, well, ordinary folks, in all shapes, colors and sizes.
Theater & the Arts
Amy Herzog‘s play is a moody piece about connections between generations that sometimes has broken synapses but also lights up pathways that remind us of the value of family links. Of the sort you can depend on when everything else disintegrates.
For Leo (Gabriel Ebert), 21, most of his emotional connections are broken. He is estranged from his parents and his girlfriend. He‘s just been on a cross country bike trip where, we learn mid-way through, his biking buddy has died in a freak road accident. So apparently, faute de mieux, with nowhere else to turn, he ends up late one night at the West Village apartment of his grandmother, Vera Joseph (Mary Louise Wilson), an 80-something left-winger (pro-Cuba and pro-peace), whose sharp intelligence only occasionally runs into the potholes of the ravages of age.
Theater & the Arts
It‘s agitprop, and it‘s powerful. In Athol Fugard‘s tradition of very political plays, this theatrical metaphor about South African racism is first didactic, but then it takes off so that you think, well, yes, this is a rather obvious political statement, but it‘s also a dramatic truth.
Theater & the Arts
John Lithgow is perfectly cast as Joseph Alsop, the venomous, fanatically anti-communist newspaper columnist who built a career off his access and influence with U.S. presidents and politicians. But as David Auburn’s play shows, he was not a garden variety right-winger. Auburn (Proof) adds depth and subtlety to the character by highlighting his contradictions. He had the courage to oppose the vicious Senator Joseph McCarthy, though it’s not clear here why.
