Relationships between mothers and daughters are never simple. Whether they lean on each other, dominate each other, envy each other, criticize each other, reject each other, or seek each other out, mothers and daughters find themselves enmeshed throughout their lives. The dramatic possibilities in such attachments have not been lost…

On the surface, Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaption of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 An Enemy of the People seems theatrical proof of the French adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Set in a nineteenth-century Norwegian town, the drama’s subject matter mirrors headlines in the 1990s: poisoned…

Blaine Dunham began her career in theater down by the docks in Coconut Grove. Now 23 years old, the two-time Carbonell Award-nominated actress and artistic director of Lunatic Theatre Company arrived in Miami at the age of 6, making a dramatic entrance by sailing into the Grove’s Dinner Key Marina…

“Look at that woman,” muses Hattie, as she watches a contestant dressed in a chicken suit lose everything during a rerun of Let’s Make a Deal. “Disappointment is carved on her face.” Of course, Hattie (Meredith Marsuli), a character in James McLure’s one-act comedy Laundry & Bourbon, has already seen…

First came the innovative 1976 novel by the late Argentine writer Manuel Puig, followed by his 1981 stage adaption. Then came director Hector Babenco’s much-ballyhooed 1985 film. A musical rendition flopped when presented by New Musicals at SUNY Purchase in upstate New York in 1990; however, when resuscitated by the…

We live in an era of easy confession, a time in which stories of abuse and neglect make the rounds of talk shows, support groups, and the evening network news programs. Because we’ve grown accustomed to the public disclosure of personal trauma, the plays of Tennessee Williams, often structured around…

Imagine two straight upper-middle-class white couples on the deck of a Long Island beach house. Chloe Haddock pushes food on everyone, peppers her speech with badly pronounced French, and sings the wrong lyrics to show tunes. Her husband, John, completes the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink and lusts…

There’s a whole lot of ranting and raving going on these days over at Area Stage on Lincoln Road. Alan Bowne’s Beirut, an unnerving nightmare about a not-so-distant future in which HIV-positive people are quarantined in warehouses on the Lower East Side of New York City, plays in repertory with…

Remember letters? I don’t mean bills, sales flyers, or computer personalized sweepstakes packets. I mean envelopes addressed in ink, sealed with wax or scented, filled with news of family, tales of travel, or words of love. I mean savoring the written voice of a friend, hearing their inflection in your…

In 1989, Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road was an empty strip of vacant stores, a shell of the lively outdoor mall filled with elegant shops that thrived in the 1940s and 1950s. With serendipitous foresight, John and Maria Rodaz of Area Stage Company rented an affordable storefront there, then set about…

Like the school year, vacations, and marriages, theater seasons kick off with anticipation, fueled by promises of pleasure, fulfillment, and growth and driven by unarticulated fantasies that, in theatrical terms, look like this: An inspired melange of classic, contemporary, and cutting-edge work with tickets priced at the cost of an…

In the 400 years since Shakespeare entertained Elizabethan England with histories, tragedies, and comedies, his works have been updated, translated, elaborated, extemporized, bowdlerized, and set to music and dance. Macbeth went sci-fi. The Merry Wives of Windsor outwit Falstaff in 1950s suburbia. Women played Hamlet. And a Wild West version…

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie has evolved into an American classic since its debut on Broadway five decades ago. In addition to stage productions and film and television versions, the play has found its way into high school and college literature anthologies as a progenitor of contemporary American drama, with…

We can measure how far American culture has come since social satirist Lenny Bruce challenged the proprieties of the 1950s and 1960s by noting that New Times can print the word cocksucker and no one’s going to get hauled off to jail on an obscenity rap. Cocksucker. In October 1961,…

If a typical Elizabethan theatergoer time-traveled to an evening of contemporary American drama, she would find herself astonished at the passivity of the audience. Modern viewers have been trained to behave. We watch the proceedings on stage politely, applauding with enthusiasm if the production enthralls us, applauding out of obligation…

Few of us are strangers these days to the details of child abuse. Television, newspapers, and magazines inundate us with the grim particulars of this problem with increasing frequency. Harder to discern than the facts in such situations are the motivations behind hurting a child. And more important than understanding…

We take language for granted. Only when circumstances limit our use of it do we appreciate how it defines us. Think of the effort required to communicate basic needs when traveling in a foreign country. Or how it feels to sit among colleagues or friends who speak rapidly in a…

For skeptics who have been predicting the death of theater since the advent of film and television, the rise of virtual reality and the fall of public funding for the arts seem like nails in theater’s coffin. Certainly, South Florida experienced its share of attrition this past season: Miami Actor’s…

Like the veteran gambler who frequents the racetrack or the casino in the hope of this time hitting it big, seasoned theatergoers return to the theater faithfully anticipating a win. And every once in a while, among the duds, the disappointments, and the well-intended productions — even among the energetic,…

An hour north of Boston, in the northeast corner of Massachusetts, lies a mass of land jutting into the sea — Cape Ann. Lesser-known and considerably smaller than Cape Cod to the south, Cape Ann is home to the small city of Gloucester, the town of Rockport, and the village…

While Angel City, Sam Shepard’s slice of life at the Hotel California A that La Brea tar pit of decadence, megalomania, and self-destruction you can check out of but can never leave A isn’t one of the playwright’s better-known plays, and hardly constitutes the definitive take on the soul-sucking movie…

Does Mario Ernesto Sanchez ever sleep? During the 1994-95 theater season, the Cuban-born producing artistic director of Teatro Avante and the International Hispanic Theatre Festival (IHTF) presented two full-length dramas and three short plays at El Carrusel Theatre in Coral Gables, as well as traveling to the Festival de Teatro…