How can you not be leery of a play staged in an attic? The ominous mahogany furniture, the curled yellowed pages of old newspapers and photo albums, and the inevitable sepia-tone photos hark back to a time only remarkable to the people who own the clutter. Most attic settings are…
The small-town setting of The Laramie Project has been compared to Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners in the classic play Our Town, and rightfully so. Both plays forage the archetypal American town and uncover truths that are disturbing, moving, and in the case of the more recent work, brutal. The bare…
Buffalo soldier, dreadlock Rasta There was a buffalo soldier In the heart of America Stolen from Africa, brought to America Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival — Bob Marley Made famous by the Jamaican singing legend, “buffalo soldiers” was the name given to the African-American U.S. Army troops that patrolled…
As The Music Lesson opens, the houselights are dimmed, and a subtle illumination spotlights the hand of Irena (Jessica K. Peterson), a pianist and music teacher from Sarajevo. As she sits center stage on a white piano bench, her hand slowly begins to play an invisible keyboard one chord at…
When American poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “The personal is political,” she reminded us that political acts cannot be separated from the circumstances of individual lives. Too often drama that attempts to convey a political message does so by striving to be universal, at the expense of the characters’ discrete choices…
The word juggernaut means “an overpowering force,” and appropriately the artistic director of Juggerknot Theatre Company, Tanya Bravo, is tapping into the powerful force of theater by pushing limits — both artistic and geographic. On the 67th block of Biscayne Boulevard, there’s more than one craft being fine-tuned: The area…
In a starkly furnished Paris apartment, spectator Marc (Judd Hirsch) circles a white canvas with the wary step of a big-game hunter while Serge (Cotter Smith) looks on expectantly; we can’t help but wonder if it is the art, or his best friend, that Marc is about ready to attack…
Works that penetrate the façade of normalcy in marriage are nothing new to American theater audiences. In the 1938 classic Our Town, Thornton Wilder pioneered what we now call “relationship drama” when he placed a young couple on the altar and allowed the audience to listen in on their innermost…
Some would say it’s a guy thing: crushed cans of Schlitz strewn across the floor of a Motel 6 room, belching as an alternative to conversation, and the inevitable discussion about the undeniably rhetorical question, “How could you be my best friend and screw the love of my life?” Such…
Adapted for the stage by TG Cooper, the late founder of the M Ensemble Company, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Live! is a tribute to the black comedienne who broke the color lines and paved the way for other artists. Born Loretta Mary Aiken in the 1890s, Mabley is often called the…
Nilo Cruz’s A Park in Our House is a record of the human spirit when the human body exists in a totalitarian state and survives on a continuum not of belief but of disbelief. The romantic, the idealist, the realist, the repressed, the rebel, and the messiah — these are…
In a dingy sixth-floor room, two lonely souls join hands, seeking an escape from their solitude and isolation through the medium of dance. They shuffle across the floor, clumsily performing a waltz while chatting about their lives. If this scenario sounds as if it were penned by romance novelist Danielle…
Art is domination. It’s making people think for one moment in time, there’s only one art, one voice, and that’s yours,” declares opera star Maria Callas (Rosemary Prinz) in Master Class. Callas was not simply a talented singer and a beautiful woman; she was a diva. It is the ability…
We enjoy a classic whodunit in the same way we enjoy Christmas carolers: with a certain amused detachment. We are not seeking new insight into the human condition but instead are indulging in a bit of nostalgic escapism. Thus, if the revival of a genre piece like Ira Levin’s classic…
When you walk into the Miami Light Project’s theater space, you will find yourself momentarily onstage. The space is set up so the stage has its back to those entering; you have to walk through it to get to the chairs. There’s a sensation of getting lost backstage and accidentally…
Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-color taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…
Junior officers quickly become disoriented in the Orient,” navy wife Julia Anderson warns newly arrived officer “Sparky” Watts in A.R. Gurney’s play Far East. Indeed the New Theatre’s production of this work seems to offer a heady brew of scandal, sex, and unrequited love, promising to leave the audience pleasantly…
The literary canon is spinning, the hyphen that binds so-called multicultural fiction — Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American fiction — will not hold. Nor should it. Any thought-provoking work on ethnic identity must offer audiences a real look at the themes young playwrights are likely to undertake. In its inaugural performance, Miami’s…
The logistic, aesthetic, and emotional challenges of keeping a small arts organization afloat would flummox the savviest CEO. Why do artistic directors struggle to bring live theater to South Florida stages when they could spend half the energy and earn six figures directing deodorant commercials? In the second part of…
Live theater has never been a big draw in South Florida, an area not usually recognized as a center for first-class theatrical performances. Independent arts organizations in general have a hard time just staying afloat — witness the shuttering of the Alliance Cinema’s doors last week. Yet several nonprofit local…
You could say Shirley Richardson has a theatrical heritage. Growing up in Miami in the Fifties and Sixties, her entire family worked for the Coconut Grove Playhouse, either as domestic or manual laborers. Shirley would accompany her mother, Bennie Mae, who was a cleaning woman at the playhouse from 1954…
Paper elephants and donkeys; red, white, and blue banners; and two video screens — one posted in each of the far corners of the space — set the scene for George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, one of Broadway’s first political satires. We are quickly reminded that successful…
