by Colin Thomas | Oct 2, 2019 | Review
In What We’re Up Against, playwright Theresa Rebeck makes legitimate points, but the way she makes them is so boring! Eliza, who seems to be near the beginning of her career, has been at an architectural firm for five months. Rebeck quickly establishes that Eliza is a...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 27, 2019 | Review
I wish that more people who make theatre would pay closer attention to how plays are built. Herringbone (book by Tom Cone, music and lyrics by Skip Kennon and Ellen Fitzhugh respectively) has a lot of things going for it, but sturdy structure is not one of them. The...
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...
