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…
Take an Italian widow, angry at her daughter, and a Jewish widow, clinging to her daughter. Add an unassuming rabbi and a recent widower vigorously into the sauce. Throw them together in a South Florida condominium and shake them all up. What do you get? A silly bedroom farce that,…
The Pope Theatre Company’s saucy production of Eric Overmyer’s Dark Rapture begins with a killer scene that could turn the most hard-core devotee of movies and TV toward the pleasures of live theater. Two men collide at the edges of a cataclysmic fire in Northern California. Amid the slides, lights,…
Concurrent with Black History month, Florida Playwrights’ Theatre in Hollywood presents Sandra Fenichel Asher’s A Woman Called Truth, a staged biography of Sojourner Truth. Asher has fashioned an amalgam of dramatization, Sojourner’s own words, and period spirituals to tell the story of the inspirational nineteenth-century activist. The play opens at…
Men and women speak different languages. Many of us suspected this even before we read Deborah Tannen’s best seller You Just Don’t Understand, which documents the phenomenon. Even if her book brought no big surprises, it provided some comfort: Why hold ourselves responsible for a communication breakdown with the opposite…
Jean Genet is one of the bad boys of the Twentieth Century. Abandoned as an infant by his mother to the French public welfare system, he relished his position as a social outsider all his life and used his identities as homosexual, prostitute, thief, and prisoner as subject matter for…
Get out your leopard spandex and feather boas, your cigarette holders and gold lame, and go see Ruthless!, Joel Paley and Marvin Laird’s musical spoof at the Colony Theater that outcamps the campiest melodramas and show-biz films in the movie canon. But before you go, consider making a trip to…
The setting is a small impoverished town in Eastern Europe. The time is the middle of the Seventeenth Century. The heroine is a Jewish woman named Rachel: 28 years old, unattractive, and not prime marriage material. Not that she cares. With self-possession that would be the envy of a modern…
Wendy Wasserstein has been chronicling the female Zeitgeist for the American stage since the 1970s. From the gathering of college friends in Uncommon Women and Others through the tribulations of art historian Heidi Holland in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Heidi Chronicles, her signature has been intelligent heroines indulging in self-deprecating humor…
Among the many voices that weave in and out of Joe Pintauro’s stirring Men’s Lives, the drama now playing at the Pope Theatre Company in Manalapan, one in particular continues to haunt me. “Work can kill a man or keep him alive a hundred years,” says Walt, a fisherman on…
Exile is not simple. Both a physical reality and a psychological state, it can be imposed by governments or chosen as a means of survival. It breeds nostalgia and longing, shame and guilt. It can be a burden or a source of pride. But in all instances, it’s characterized by…
Reserve some time between September 21 and October 2, drive to the southernmost part of Florida, and experience the only significant gathering of new play productions, play readings, and theatrical workshops in this area. I’m referring, of course, to the Key West Theatre Festival. I could moan about the fact…
After successfully tackling the Bard in their first annual Shakespeare Festival, the plucky Florida Playwrights’ Theatre now presents something completely different, and does it almost as well. Graceland, by Ellen Byron, and Line, by Israel Horowitz, are two one-act plays that fit together perfectly and provide an evening of smart,…
In Bernard Slade’s mediocre Romantic Comedy — given a painfully slow rendition by the Hollywood Performing Arts Professional Repertory Theatre — Phoebe, one half of a playwriting duo, desperately tries to convince her partner, Jason, to continue working on the second act of their latest collaboration. “People still respond to…
The ability to select and produce a satisfying entertainment largely depends on knowing when a specific form is past its prime and when it’s gaining popularity. By presenting Sandra Deer’s dull and meandering So Long on Lonely Street the New River Repertory seems ignorant of the fact that knockoff southern…
In New Theatre’s nearly flawless production of Terrence McNally’s recent off-Broadway hit, A Perfect Ganesh, actor extraordinaire Bill Yule portrays Lord Ganesha, Hindu God of Happiness, both hideous (with his elephant’s head) and splendid (with his good humor). “I am in your kiss and in your cancer,” he says. “I…
Whether they were written by one person or many, by lord or commoner, there remains one undeniable truth about the plays attributed to William Shakespeare: They attain the highest possible goals of playwriting. No other author has produced a body of work so consistently excellent, so relevant, so poignant, so…
Regular readers of this column may have noticed I’ve been writing more about ideas and trends lately than reviewing specific plays. There’s a simple reason for this. Unlike the past two South Florida “off-season” seasons (which were packed with new and unusual work), this year’s torrid temperatures seem to have…
