by Colin Thomas | Sep 21, 2019 | Review
A furious artist once told me, “I don’t care about structure! I don’t want to hear about structure!” — or words to that effect. She should probably not read this review. In Hysteria, playwrights Jill Raymond and Lauren Martin take on a couple of enormous subjects:...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 20, 2019 | Review
Scott Thompson’s Après le Déluge is transgressive in that good, old-fashioned sense — by which I mean it’s mostly good and but also sometimes old-fashioned, in ways that are not so good. In Après le Déluge, which he wrote, Scott Thompson appears as Buddy Cole, his...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 19, 2019 | Review
Act 1 is so boring that friends who left at intermission expressed their condolences when I told them I was staying. In Ursula Rani Sarma’s script, which is based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel, a young Afghani woman named Laila finds herself trapped in a nightmare...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 14, 2019 | Review
With Mother of the Maid, Pacific Theatre offers a pedestrian interpretation of a superficial script. It’s not terrible, but it’s not rewarding. Playwright Jane Anderson focuses on Joan of Arc’s mother, a character she calls Isabelle Arc, although she was more...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
Canadian playwright Trina Davies’s The Trophy Hunt feels like an overly deliberate writing exercise in which she plays three variations on the theme of African big-game hunting. (Why Africa? Why not the Canadian North, which would bring things closer to home?)...