by Colin Thomas | Feb 22, 2025 | Review
Primary Trust won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it’s not that good. A character named Kenneth is both the narrator and protagonist of Eboni Booth’s script. Orphaned in particularly traumatic circumstances when he was ten, Kenneth has invented an imaginary...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 14, 2025 | Review
Style is a tricky thing. There’s a bunch of it in playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade, but director Donna Spencer and her cast don’t always know what to do with it. In Women of the Fur Trade, it’s “eighteen hundred and something something” and we’re...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 8, 2025 | Review
It’s almost there in some ways and absolutely not there in others. In Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla., emerging playwright Abi Padilla interweaves three storylines. The core story is about Lola (Grandma) Basyang, who is succumbing to dementia. Her grandkids Nika and...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 8, 2025 | Review
Puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe makes about as much sense as a painting by Marc Chagall — by which I mean it makes so much associative, intuitive, emotional sense. And it’s beautiful to look at as it swirls around its themes of loneliness and inclusion,...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 2, 2025 | Review
See it. Playwright Will Arbery’s 2019 script Heroes of the Fourth Turning offers uniquely challenging perspectives and this strong mounting from Mitch and Murray Productions contains two downright stellar performances. The characters in Heroes of the Fourth Turning...
by Colin Thomas | Jan 25, 2025 | Review
It’s a beautiful play, slightly reduced in this production, but absolutely worth seeing. The Height of the Storm is set in an older couple’s home outside Paris. André, a renowned writer, has dementia. Although she appears, his wife Madeleine, the equally bright and...
