Theater
Benjamin Evett as Arthur and Erica Spyres as Guenevere turn in solid performances, dependable anchors for a cast that does the best that it can in a drab, bargain basement production.
Stand-up comic Colin Quinn has been giving a lot of thought to the Founding Fathers, their vision for the new nation and, well, how that turned out. The result is his sharp and funny one-man show.
With the 1% rapidly vacuuming up the resources of the upper and middle classes, A.R. Gurney’s comic vision of the tipsy idle rich, shorn of cares and criminality, floats completely free of reality.
“The Whore From Ohio” is a provocative reminder that the same creature that is born to eat, drink, copulate, rot, and die is also a creature that dreams, tells stories, contemplates its own existence, and attends the theater.
British dramatist Caryl Churchill proffers a valuable line of satiric attack on our delusions of doing good, so it is easy to forgive the dramatist her broad and scattershot comic approach.
Unfortunately, there are only flickers of Kurt Vonnegut’s dark and playful genius in “Make Up Your Mind.”
This remains a vision of a dystopian universe, but in the hands of these performers “Waiting for Godot”‘s angst exudes as much antic warmth as it does cold angst.
Refreshingly, playwright Marianna Salzmann manages to be political without being didactic. Her characters live (rather than preach) through history, grappling with the transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
Director Scott Edmiston’s carefully staged production generates sympathy chiefly because of some deft acting rather than the writing.
BTC’s experiment, while not without its faults, proffers an admirable model of the sort of creative thinking that more companies should emulate when placing Shakespearean drama in a contemporary American context.
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