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…
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…
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…
