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…
Supermarket tabloids have accomplished a clever, two-tiered assault on the privacy of Americans, simultaneously invading the personal lives of celebrities while disrupting the tranquillity of a working person’s trip to the grocery store, drugstore, or 7-Eleven. Who among us, for example, would not bring the shopping cart to a screeching…
For sheer escapism and the shiver of vicarious thrills, nothing satisfies in quite the same way as a psychological thriller or an intricately plotted murder mystery. Unfortunately, if you’ve never experienced the pleasures of the genre, don’t expect to be converted by the current production of Nick Hall’s Dead Wrong,…
Like the character Timothy in Neil’s Garden, an exceptionally well-acted, well-directed world premiere now at Area Stage on Miami Beach, I am not reasonable about death. Just the mention of it causes me to knock on wood. Death is not to be thought about now, but rather something to be…
Lily Tomlin has done it. John Leguizamo, Sherry Glaser, Danny Hoch, Eric Bogosian, Claudia Shear, and a host of other names I could drop may be doing it even as you read this: that is, presenting an evening of theater by embodying an array of characters. Currently in our own…
South Florida is not a region that takes many theatrical risks. A quick study of the current season’s lineup for theaters from Palm Beach to Miami makes one thing perfectly clear: Reluctant to strain audience loyalty by introducing what hasn’t passed a viewer test somewhere else, most artistic directors tend…
The Tennessee Williams-style Southern family, at its liquor-soaked, lust-ridden, and venal best, rises again in Kendall this month in a spirited production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Actors’ Playhouse presents Williams’s modern classic in all its comedic and Southern Gothic glory, 40 years after its Broadway debut. The…
Angels in America has been hailed as vast, miraculous, and sweeping, the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time. Whether such superlatives are justified or not remains to be determined, but one thing is certain — the two-part drama subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” has been…
The Pope Theatre Company’s production of Steven Dietz’s Lonely Planet took me by surprise. Partway through the two-character play I found myself squirming in my seat, consulting my watch, and wishing something A anything A would happen in the long-winded, overly anecdotal, and slow-moving drama. By the end, something does…
Akropolis Acting Company’s current production of Bent brings to mind a quote from writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Assaulted by indisputable horrors upon arriving at Auschwitz A skeletal prisoners, frightened screams, whips, dogs, guns, pits where children were being burned alive A Wiesel still did not believe that such…
Playwright Jeffrey Sweet gives a great lecture. I heard him speak when he was in town recently to lead a playwrighting workshop, and I filled my notebook with useful maxims and seasoned insights provided by this articulate theater professional. He poked holes in the assumption that one’s personal life provides…
Being a teenager is hard enough. What if you also happen to be gay and living in Middle America? If you have any survival instincts at all, you head for either coast as soon as you can. That’s exactly what happens with the characters in the monologues “Dream Man” and…
The late Joseph Papp, visionary impresario and driving force behind the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, once said, “There will never be another A Chorus Line.” Indeed. First produced by the Shakespeare festival, A Chorus Line was handed over to Broadway entrepreneurs, and the money generated by…
