THIS IS HOW WE GOT HERE: Indirectly

THIS IS HOW WE GOT HERE: Indirectly

I wasn’t very engaged — I checked my watch a couple of times — and then tears were streaming down my face. For me this production of Keith Barker’s This Is How We Got Here took a sharp U-turn at about the 60-minute mark of its 80-minute playing time. It takes a while...
PARIFAM: Come Back for Act 2

PARIFAM: Come Back for Act 2

A better play is trying to emerge here, but you’ll only know that if you stick around for Act 2. In Canadian-Iranian playwright Aki Yaghoubi’s debut script Parifam, the eponymous central character is an architect who’s building Iranian museums in major cities around...
TAKE THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL

TAKE THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL

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...
A Mixed Bag of RED VELVET

A Mixed Bag of RED VELVET

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...
PARADE: Impressive, Hard to Fully Access

PARADE: Impressive, Hard to Fully Access

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...