Theater
“Becky’s New Car” turns out to be a ride worth taking, especially if we suspend our disbelief long enough to embrace the notion that malice is not necessarily aforethought even though our actions might be construed to suggest otherwise.
In her compelling deconstruct/rewrite of “Miss Julie,” set in South Africa 18 years after the end of apartheid, director/dramatist Yaël Farber doubles down on the elemental energies of Greek tragedy.
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.
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