PRIMARY TRUST: LESS THAN PRIME
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...
WOMEN OF THE FUR TRADE: The Script Is Better Than the Production
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...
GRANDMA. GANGSTA. GUERRILLA.: AN UNEASY COMBINATION
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...
WONDERFUL JOE IS WONDERFUL
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,...
HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING: Intelligent, Complicated Theatre
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...
THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM: Let Me Do It Myself!
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...
THE THREE MUSKETEERS: I’M ENLISTING
Well, swash my buckles. That was a good time I didn’t see coming. The Three Musketeers, I thought. Yay. Swordfighting, glamourized murder, general yo-ho butchness: not my things. I feared this production would be superficial and boring. But, as it turns out it’s...
A SLEIGH RIDE CHRISTMAS CAROL: YES TO THE SLEIGH RIDE PART
The horses’ contributions are so much more impressive than the humans’. But the horses are great and so are their teamsters. So let’s start there. At the Caravan Farm Theatre’s winter shows, horse-drawn sleighs — or wagons, depending on how much snow there is — carry...
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET: LESS THAN MIRACULOUS
Perhaps the kindest way to start is to say that, artistically, Miracle on 34th Street is a tough sell in 2024. (And the realistic way to start is to say that this Arts Club production fails to sell it.) Miracle on 34th Street is thin, sentimental, and painfully...
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