Jim Kates
Charles Morey’s new comedy focuses on the trials and tribulations of aging writers. Most of its humor revolves around the past, while its plot hinges on the present and future.
Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers wears surprising well after nearly half a century, with the help of minimal, subtle updating of topical references.
New translations of Soviet-era poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladislav Khodasevich ask us to restore them to their rightful places in Russian and international literature .
Each different personality and monologue tells essentially the same story under their varying details, a thrice-told tale of wifely loyalty in the face of political husbandry.
The pleasure of Talley’s Folly is in its details, the give-and-take of the dialogue, the smaller and larger revelations they tease out of each other, the characterization of the two human creatures dancing their dance.
Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is a comedy of total narcissism — belly-laugh jokes accompanied by a cold cruelty.
The current revival of Laughing Stock, directed again by the playwright, has softer edges than I remember in the earlier one, played with fluidity rather than crackle.
The Peterborough Players have put together a “Seagull” that floats elegantly on nineteenth-century Russian and twenty-first-century American wings, simultaneously bright and dark.
Some of the jokes in “2 Pianos 4 Hands” reach fairly deep into an understanding of how classical music works and is taught; other jokes will be recognizable to anyone who has taken piano lessons or raised a child to do so.
“Say Goodnight Gracie” revels in familiarity and age. It travels on creaky wheels of recognition rather than on rockets of revelation.
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