Watching Deborah Zoe Laufer’s biting satire The Gulf of Westchester at Florida Stage is something akin to witnessing a hotshot skier hurtling down an icy slope. Laufer’s topical tale of suburbanites caught up in divisive political debate over the war in Iraq hurtles along with such passion and intensity, it’s…
Master Harold … and the boys: Athol Fugard’s modern classic has to do with the stormy relationship between a white teen and two black family workers in South Africa circa 1950. The fine GableStage production features assured, understated direction from Joseph Adler, which is well supported by some excellent, evocative…
If you’re looking for a quick trip to a faraway place, Joseph Adler and GableStage can arrange a 90-minute journey to an entirely different planet courtesy of their latest production, Master Harold … and the boys. Athol Fugard’s drama is set not only a half-century ago but in apartheid South…
A Picasso: Picture this: Bearlike Pablo Picasso sits in a dark stone cellar amid stacks of paintings, staring intently at his beautiful female model, who happens to be a Nazi official. As the woman begins to disrobe, Picasso sketches furiously, and despite the dank, dark surroundings, you can feel the…
There’s an adage in the writing business: “Write what you know.” Albert Ramsdell Gurney, Jr., known as A.R., certainly took that advice to heart. After studying playwriting at Yale in the 1950s, Gurney set out on a writing career based almost exclusively on his upper-crust family background, the clubby Northeastern…
A Picasso: Picture this: Bearlike Pablo Picasso sits in a dark stone cellar amid stacks of paintings, staring intently at his beautiful female model, who happens to be a Nazi official. As the woman disrobes, Picasso sketches, and despite the dank, dark surroundings, you can feel the temperature rise. That’s…
Picture this: Bearlike, charismatic Pablo Picasso (Peter Michael Goetz) sits in a dark stone cellar amid stacks of paintings, staring intently at his beautiful female model, who happens to be a Nazi official (Lucie Arnaz). As the woman begins to disrobe, Picasso sketches furiously and despite the dank, dark surroundings,…
This just in: White people have a lot of secret racial prejudice. J.T. Rogers hammers home this theme in White People, now playing at the New Theatre in Coral Gables. The three-character show is more poetry than drama, a series of interlaced monologues that centers on deep-buried anger in white…
A Picasso: Reviewed in this issue. Through May 2. Coconut Grove Playhouse, 3500 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove. 305-442-4000. Flyin’ West: Set in 1898, Flyin’ West follows three black sisters who’ve left the South and struck out on their own, settling in Nicodemus, Kansas. The hardships of freedom and independence are…
How far will one friend go for another? In Trembling Hands, Ivonne Azurdia’s grotesque, funny crime drama now in its world premiere by the Mad Cat Theatre Company, the answer is very, very far indeed. Following up on her splendid Tin Box Boomerang, a hit for Mad Cat last season,…
Catering to obsessed foodies who crave tasting menus, and battling boorish socialites who demand priority seating, Sam Peliczowski mans the telephone lines booking reservations at a wildly popular Manhattan restaurant. In Fully Committed we meet Sam, an actor for whom this is a pays-the-rent job, and a colorful cast of…
Flyin’ West: Set in 1898, Flyin’ West follows three black sisters who’ve left the South and struck out on their own, settling in Nicodemus, Kansas. The hardships of freedom and independence are compounded by their struggle to protect themselves from white speculators trying to buy their land and splinter their…
Be thankful for small theaters. While the larger companies in South Florida cater to conventional tastes, the tiny troupes fill out the menu with an array of riskier, challenging programming. Fort Lauderdale’s Sol Theatre has made risk-taking a fundamental company rule. Tony Priddy and Robert Hooker’s cheeky crew debuted in…
The Homestead Act of 1862 inspired large groups of former slaves to leave the South following the Civil War and create a number of all-black towns in America’s wide-open Midwest and West. Many of those settlers were unmarried or widowed women who operated their own farms and ranches. Set in…
A Picasso: Art and politics collide in this fictional drama set in Paris during the German occupation. The mysterious Miss Fischer is sent to interrogate the famed Pablo Picasso regarding the authenticity of three paintings left behind by their owners, who have fled the regime. April 13 through May 2…
If the traditional Broadway musical is your cup of tea, your cup runneth over with Fiddler on the Roof, now at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables. The beloved, well-known classic about a tradition-bound Jewish community caught up in the turbulent changes of prerevolutionary Russia is a huge undertaking, but…
This satire on life in America’s heartland may be suggestive of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, but it’s a sure bet its authors weren’t thinking of the poet when they created it. Greater Tuna began in 1982 as an impromptu party skit but ended up being one of the most…
Blind Date: Last year the New Theatre scored an incredible coup when it commissioned Nilo Cruz’s surprise Pulitzer winner Anna in the Tropics. This year lightning may have struck a second time as the New Theatre has delivered another masterpiece of a play. Mario Diament’s stunning, brilliant world premiere tracks…
Poet Louise Bogan writes, “True revolutions in Art restore more than they destroy.” The same could be said for the theater of ideas. Thomas Gibbons’s most recent stage examination of the great American race divide, Permanent Collection, promises to resuscitate audiences who have become catatonically content with theater whose fiction…
Lionel Goldstein’s Halpern & Johnson, now onstage at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, is the story of two men brought together by the death of a woman who was central to both their lives. Despite an engaging premise, Goldstein’s adaptation of his own 1983 HBO teleplay Mr. Halpern & Mr. Johnson…
Blind Date: Last year the New Theatre scored an incredible coup when it commissioned Nilo Cruz’s surprise Pulitzer winner Anna in the Tropics. This year lightning may have struck a second time as the New Theatre has delivered another masterpiece of a play. Mario Diament’s stunning, brilliant world premiere tracks…
The Caldwell Theatre’s new show, Iago, certainly offers the promise of blood-pumping drama. James McLure’s play is set backstage during a mid-twentieth-century production of Shakespeare’s Othello and takes its inspiration from the tempestuous real-life relationship between Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, and Leigh’s adulterous affair with the young Peter Finch…
