by Colin Thomas | Apr 5, 2024 | Review
Director Ron Reed’s production of The Trip To Bountiful is consistently tender and nuanced. It’s a thing of beauty. I encourage you to see it. In Horton Foote’s script, which premiered in 1953, Mrs. Carrie Watts engineers an escape from the cramped apartment in...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 1, 2024 | Review
Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet is primarily concerned with two things: anti-Black racism and acting styles in the nineteenth century, when the play is set. These things overlap. Ira Aldridge, the hero of Chakrabarti’s story, is a historical figure, a Black...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 25, 2024 | Review
There is so much to love in this production — and it left me strangely unmoved. The 1998 musical Parade is based on the real-life story of Leo Frank, the Jewish supervisor of a pencil-making factory in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1913, he was accused of murdering Mary...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 23, 2024 | Review
Young playwrights often need — and deserve — more help than they get. In playwright Lee Nisar’s Dil Ka, a 26-year-old Pakistani-Canadian woman named Zahra is preparing biryani for a proposal meeting, which means that she’s about to feed a potential groom and his...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 13, 2024 | Review
For me, sitting through this mounting of Mike Bartlett’s An Intervention was an endurance test. I started checking my watch half an hour into its 80-minute running time, and my chair got very hard. My primary beef is with the script, but I also suspect the direction...
